Last Rights

by Barbara Nadel

  I looked at her now and shrugged. I had, of course, suspected as much. However, what she said next was something I hadn’t even considered.

  ‘Except that he isn’t,’ Sister Teresa said. ‘Mum told him he was to get him to help her after she killed my father.’

  ‘But she must have, you know,’ I said, not quite knowing how to approach the subject of sex with a nun, ‘had “relations” with Blatt.’

  ‘Oh, yes. But he wasn’t Opal’s father, or so Mum said.’

  ‘And anyway,’ I said, ‘Neilson didn’t die until eight years after Opal was born. Did your mum carry on seeing Blatt during that time? How do you know this anyway?’

  ‘Mum told us.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘That night. The night of . . .’

  ‘So did you or your sisters know him?’

  ‘Ruby remembered him. But as you said, Mr Hancock, it had been over eight years before. Mum only saw him for a few months round about when she got, you know, in the family way with our Opal. There were other blokes too, including Neilson. It was her job.’

  ‘So how did she know that Blatt wasn’t Opal’s father?’ I said. ‘How could she know that for certain?’

  She took a swig from her cup before she replied. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe it was wishful thinking on her part. There was this other fellow, another Jewish geezer, at the same time. He was very young. Not beaten up and wounded by being in the Great War, like Blatt and the rest of them. I think he was a bit of a villain, really. But Mum liked him. It was him my dad hated because he believed that he, this bloke, was Opal’s father. Mum would sometimes tease him with it, you know, when he’d been a pig to her.’

  ‘And this is the secret you think this letter-writer knows?’ I said.

  She looked away briefly, then said, ‘Yes.’

  I reached across the table and picked up the paper once again. It said: ‘I know the secret you and your sisters keep. Meet me at the place you were when Neilson died. Come tomorrow 9 p.m.’ All the Reynolds sisters, apart from Opal, had been somewhere else when their mother killed Neilson. Where, I didn’t know. In fact, I didn’t know much about what had taken place that night. Had the girls come in and found their mother in a state of shock after what she’d done, Neilson’s body lying lifeless across their lino? Or had it been more cold-blooded than that? If Victorine had hatched a plan to get herself one of the best lawyers money could buy for free, then she had to have had some sort of grip on what was going on. This didn’t seem to square, to me, with the picture of a remorseful woman begging her dead lover’s forgiveness on the gallows, if indeed that wasn’t just a story. And, anyway, why had whoever it was telephoned Amber/Sister Teresa? If it was blackmail he had in mind, I wondered what form it could possibly take. The nun had no money, as far as I knew, and if the caller’s aim was to tell Blatt the truth, if money or information or whatever were not passed over, then what did he think that might achieve? There was no going back on what Blatt had done for Victorine and, being a professional, he was hardly likely to drop Pearl now. That would look bad, suspicious even. And what about what I’d overheard pass between Sister Teresa and Blatt in our parlour? Hadn’t they talked about someone ‘knowing’ something he or she shouldn’t? Well, that couldn’t possibly be this ‘secret’, could it? No, it had to be something else . . .

  ‘Do you know whether this Mr Blatt is married with children?’ I heard the Duchess say.

  ‘I know he’s got a wife,’ Sister Teresa said. ‘Most of Mum’s blokes usually had wives. That’s how that life works.’

  ‘So where were you and your sisters on the night your father died?’ I said.

  ‘We went to the park,’ the nun said. ‘Hyde Park. We often used to go there to play, shouting at courting couples on the Serpentine, running about, you know. Being silly.’

  ‘Wasn’t it evening?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, but it was summer. Why? Don’t you believe me? The police believed us.’

  ‘No, I—’

  ‘We went to the park, Ruby, Pearl and me, and when we come home, I dunno, just as it was getting dark, my dad was dead, my mum had killed him and Opal had slept through it all. End of story.’ She looked angry now and, in her anger, not a bit frightening too. All done up in black, her face looming out at me like a moon.

  ‘So do you think that this telephone call might have got anything to do with what has happened to your sisters?’ I said.

  She sighed. ‘I don’t know. Seems strange all these terrible things are happening to us all at the same time. Whoever rang me wants something from me at nine’ – she looked briefly at her watch – ‘tonight.’

  ‘In Hyde Park.’

  ‘Yeah, by the Serpentine,’ she said. ‘Must be. That’s where we were when my dad died. Everyone who knows anything knows that.’

  ‘OK.’ I asked the Duchess to leave then, which she did. Probably she’d be all right to listen to talk about men who love other men, but I couldn’t have stood the embarrassment. I told Sister Teresa about Kevin Dooley when we were on our own. ‘The way Kevin died, could have been coincidence,’ I said, even though I didn’t really believe that. ‘This could all be a coincidence.’

  ‘Yeah, but what about Ruby?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. And remembering the warning I’d had from the gruff-voiced bloke in Limehouse, I felt anxious about this all over again. ‘She shouldn’t have run like that after they found Shlomo Kaplan’s body.’

  Sister Teresa shot me a vicious glare. ‘You don’t know what it’s like,’ she said. ‘Your mum’s never killed no one.’

  We sat quietly with our own thoughts for a bit after that.

  Eventually, I said, because this was what I really had to know, ‘What do you want from me then, Sister? Do you want me to come with you?’

  ‘No!’ Again she looked almost fierce. ‘No. I have to go on me own. I want, I suppose, well, I wanted somewhere to stay when my train wouldn’t go no further and I’d also like it if you’d let the Sisters at Nazareth House know if anything should happen to me. I just want someone to know where I’ve gone.’

  ‘So you’ll go this evening,’ I said, ‘even though you’re afraid?’

  ‘What else can I do? There’s no one, is there? Like you said, it ain’t really your business.’

  ‘And Mr Blatt?’

  ‘Blatt ain’t to know!’ She moved in closer towards me and took one of my arms in what proved to be a powerful grasp. ‘Never! Opal’s got a good family, so I hear. Leave it be!’ She let go of my arm and said, ‘Just tell my Sisters in Christ I was doing what I felt to be right. They’ll understand. They know. And look out for Pearl’s kid if you can, if all that goes wrong for her. I know she’s got others but they’ve got family. Not like that poor kid.’

  ‘You speak as if you’re about to die,’ I said.

  ‘Who knows?’ She shrugged. ‘There’s been such wickedness in my family, Mr Hancock. Who knows who might want to hurt us? Maybe my dad’s stories about a son he had by some other woman are true. Maybe that man knows things – although I can’t imagine how. How anyone outside could know is – is beyond me.’

  ‘And yet, forgive me,’ I said, ‘there is still something I feel you’re not telling me, Sister. Mr Blatt knows some sort of secret about someone knowing something he shouldn’t. I overheard—’

  ‘That’s something else,’ she said shortly. ‘Nothing to bother about.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘It’s not got anything to do with this,’ she said. ‘It’s – that’s not important.’ And then she changed the subject rapidly by asking me for a fag.

  I let the nun have my bed for the few hours of darkness that remained. I couldn’t sleep anyway. The ‘something else’ that Blatt knew about was important. But whether or not it had any connection to Kevin Dooley or any of the other strange things that were happening around these women, I didn’t know. Whatever else, the nun believed herself to be in danger and in spite of what Blatt had said back
in his office about her brooding and fantasising, I wasn’t easy about that. Hyde Park is a big place and, after dark, like any big open space in a city, it appears quite creepy. I knew I wouldn’t want to be there on my own at night, much less if I knew I was going to be there with someone I felt possessed ill intent towards me.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Velma, poor little soul, couldn’t understand why her aunt didn’t want much to do with her any more than I could. But Sister Teresa seemed to have an aversion to the girl that had nothing to do with not liking children. After all, she did work with them. No, it was, I felt, more to do with the distance she and her sisters had maintained for all these years. That thing they did that was ‘for the best’.

  The kid stood at the back of the shop as I said goodbye reluctantly to her aunt.

  ‘I don’t like the idea of you going off on your own to meet this character,’ I said.

  ‘You’ve done enough already,’ Sister Teresa said. ‘Just look after the kid and . . .’

  ‘So where are you going now?’ I said, as I took the nun’s hand in mine.

  ‘I’ve things to do. I – I need to think.’

  ‘And later tonight,’ I said, ‘if anything should happen . . .’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Yes, but what if it all goes wrong? What if—’

  ‘If I disappear or worse? Then tell my Sisters in Christ that I’m sorry for causing them problems. You just keep on, as I said, looking after the kid,’ she said. ‘And, if you can, help our Pearl. She’s never killed her husband. She ain’t bad. Not all of us are.’

  ‘I know you’re not.’ And then I said, ‘But, look, what about the blackout? How can you meet someone you don’t know in the blackout?’

  She shrugged again.

  ‘I mean, where in the park will you go to?’

  ‘I’ll walk around the Serpentine,’ she said, vaguely waving a hand, as if pushing such details away. ‘Ruby, Pearl and me were playing there when it must’ve happened.’

  ‘And if there’s a raid—’

  ‘Well, I’ll be going, then.’ She cut me off dead. Matter-of-factly and without looking back once, she left the shop and pushed her way into the crowds trying to get a bit of shopping before the next raid. She went towards Canning Town, which meant that she was going west. But soon she’d disappeared. Velma left me too. I heard her tired footsteps clatter out into the yard.

  I stood at the door for a bit after that, thinking, but not thinking, troubled by what, if anything, I should do now. Not that there was too much choice because whatever I might be doing for Kevin, for Velma or anyone, I still had to make a living. I went upstairs to get a cuppa and a fag and found Jimmy Pepper sitting at the table with the Duchess. Nan was at the range, boiling a kettle for tea and frying some bread.

  ‘Smells like nectar, that, Nan,’ Jimmy said, as he closed his eyes the better to appreciate it. ‘Morning, Frank.’

  ‘Jim.’

  I got my baccy and papers off the dresser and sat down. Jimmy is my old oppo Georgie’s younger brother. Too little to be in the last lot, luckily for Georgie’s mum and dad. They lost three boys, including Georgie, as it was. A carpenter by trade, Jimmy makes our coffins for us with the help of Arthur and Walter who do the labouring. He’s not in every day, Jimmy, and hadn’t been about that much in recent times on account of his family being bombed out. Not that it had mattered too much with the kind of ‘trade’ we’d been getting. Taking measurements of a corpse is only something you do when you’ve got a whole body. But we had a few of those coming up so it was important they got the right boxes and not have to put up with whatever was left in one piece in the store.

  The Duchess, Nan, Jimmy and, when she came back inside, Velma had fried bread and tea. I just had tea and a fag. It’s my usual breakfast, although sometimes it’ll be a pipe rather than a fag. Life of variety! After breakfast, I took the horses out of the stable and began to walk them down towards Beckton. Jimmy said he’d give their stall a look-over while we were out and try to patch up the damage they’d done. I hadn’t got round to repairing it, but after the last raid, when they’d been particularly wild with their hoofs, something had to be done.

  There are a lot of horsemen over Beckton marshes. Most of them are gypsies or diddies. Some live in caravans, others in sheds; some still, like Horatio, live elsewhere in some unknown place. I’ve known Horatio for years. He’s a farrier by trade, a Romany, and shoes for all the other geezers down there as well as for the rag-and-bone men, and some other businesses, including mine. He also, for a small consideration, exercises horses. Whenever I need to give the boys a bit of a run I always go looking for Horatio. I like riding with him: he’s a real horseman.

  The fog was thick that morning – although whether it was just fog or clouds of dust from what had once been houses over Silvertown it was impossible to say. But it got a good cough going in me, Rama and Sita.

  ‘Mr Hancock.’ A face as sharp and dark as an ebony pin came out of the grey soup at me, one rough hand stroking its moustache.

  ‘Horatio,’ I said. ‘Fancy a little gallop?’

  The gypsy put out his hand to Rama and patted his muzzle. ‘Only if I can ride him,’ he said.

  ‘Done.’

  Rama is the more spirited of the two and, as a mount, is a bit more fun than his brother Sita. My horses were bred by Horatio’s brother, George Gordon. Gypsies often name their kids after military heroes and the like. Horatio is as in Nelson and George Gordon is after the general of the same name, the one who defended Khartoum against the ‘Mad’ Mahdi. Their names sit strangely with their dark faces and wild black hair.

  If anyone had been able to see us through the fog, we must’ve looked quite a sight, Horatio and me on our galloping black horses. Two refugees from some Oriental land where the sun shines all year long. The ground over the marshes is always wet, winter and summer, so every time Sita’s hoofs hit the earth it was in the middle of a spray of mud. I’d be filthy by the time I took them home, but I didn’t care. I needed this stretch in the stinking air almost as much as the horses did. I needed the silence of it too. Nothing save the sound of the hoofs on the ground – no sirens, no voices, no crumbling noise as yet another house or school or church collapsed in on itself. Only in such emptiness can my mind be truly still.

  We rode over to Gallions, which is a big pub at the end of the Albert Dock on the stretch of water that’s known as Gallions Reach. In the old days the lights of Gallions were often the last bright thing of England those going out to the colonies or being transported to Australia would see. It was the first thing my mother remarked on when she sailed down the Thames with my dad all those years ago. ‘That’s a frightening place,’ she’d said. And it can be, especially when it looms out of the fog at you, all dark and top heavy, a bit like pictures you see of the old hulks, the prison ships.

  Horatio and I stopped to catch our breath, the horses beneath us stamping and snorting in the cold. Thick white vapour rose from their hot bodies like clouds.

  ‘That’s haunted,’ Horatio said, as he pointed towards the grim old pile.

  ‘My grandad always used to say that,’ I said. Smugglers and pirates, according to Grandad, their spirits trapped on the earth by the killings and other evil deeds they’d committed, tormented for ever by the boozy scene of their crimes.

  ‘You have to let people go, Mr Hancock,’ Horatio said, ‘or you’ll get a haunting and that’s no good thing.’

  I don’t believe in ghosts – only the ones that live in people’s minds. But a lot of folk do believe, especially the gypsies. And sometimes what they say I can see some worth in.

  ‘Not that you can always see the ghost,’ Horatio said. ‘Sometimes it’s invisible, but it’s there.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said.

  Horatio took his pipe out of his pocket and put the stem between his dark brown front teeth. ‘Some people have a lot of misfortune in their lives,’ he said. ‘They try all sorts to get away
from it but they can’t. People like this, they smell of fear. Make folk want to get away from them. Haunted, see, just like this pub.’

  ‘So what do you have to do if you want to get rid of a ghost or stop being haunted or whatever?’

  ‘You have to let the spirit go,’ Horatio said simply. But then, just for a moment, his face became stern. ‘You have to be right with the spirit, though, else it’ll carry on hanging on to you. If you’ve wronged it or you owed it when it was alive then you must put that right with it. You must live a clean life and do no further evil.’

  ‘And if you don’t?’

  ‘Then it’ll be on your shoulder for the rest of your days and you’ll smell the fear, keep turning round to see if it’s there. Sometimes ghosts like this can live in families,’ he said. ‘Where things are not put right the ghost can seek vengeance by following that family around. I suppose you could say they inherit the evil.’

  The sins of the fathers – or mothers. All the Reynolds girls did that turning round Horatio had described. Not in reality, of course, but in the way they lived, hidden away in Ruby and Sister Teresa’s case and sort of in Pearl’s too – concealed among her great big family. And the way they reacted to their recent misfortunes, immediately, in their minds, pinning the blame on an event, and those round it, that had happened when they were all children. Even Sister Teresa’s initial denial that Pearl’s situation had nothing to do with their mother hadn’t rung true, as if she really believed it. Because she didn’t and she was going to meet someone who knew ‘something’ from her past to prove it.

  But for a ‘haunting’ of this size, across seemingly so many people, there had, surely, to be something else too. None of the girls had had any idea about who might be out to discredit them – if, indeed, that was the intention. They’d come up with vague ideas about relatives of Neilson, who might or might not exist, but Blatt, who must’ve known a thing or two about his client’s victim, didn’t seem to think that that had any reality to it at all. And as for Sister Teresa’s ‘secret’, that Blatt wasn’t Opal’s father – I couldn’t see how his knowing that now would make any difference. He hadn’t adopted the girl and whoever had, presumably loved her now and would love her whether she was his or not. Was it connected to the ‘something’ these women still weren’t telling me, the thing Blatt and the nun had alluded to up in my parlour? Was it, I wondered, some sort of deeper secret – more secret than anything I’d heard so far? Alone in the fog, I felt like one of Horatio’s unquiet ghosts waiting to be released some time. Because if life and particularly undertaking has taught me anything it is this: those who take secrets to the grave are few and far between. The haunted are generally tracked down in the end, often by other haunted types who recognise their plight. All spectres in the mist.