Without the Moon

by Cathi Unsworth

  Finally, the door to the Chief Inspector’s office opened and a man in dock-worker’s clothes came out, shuffling his cap between fidgeting fingers. Frances had never laid eyes on him before in her life, but this nervous tic, together with his hollow-eyed expression, told her that if he was also here because he had known her sister, then at least he must have cared for her.

  The telephone on the desk beside her jangled to life. The officer lifted the receiver and spoke a few words of confirmation. Frances watched the docker walk away with his eyes downcast. Under his arm he was carrying a rolled-up copy of the same Daily Herald she’d purchased as soon as she’d stepped off the bus yesterday.

  “Mrs Feld,” said the officer, “the Chief Inspector is ready for you now, if you’d kindly follow me.”

  If Frances thought the docker a large man, then DCI Greenaway stood a foot taller, with an abundance of thick dark hair, greased away from his forehead, and heavily lidded eyes. Frances found herself fretting at the handles of her bag, the way the docker had with his cap, as she took in her surroundings, her eyes drawn to a sketch of a man with wavy hair and staring, pale eyes that she recognised at once from the reports she had read in the paper as the face of the Blackout Ripper.

  “Mrs Feld,” Greenaway offered his hand, catching where her eyes rested, the same as Charlie Beattie’s had. “Do take a seat. My men been looking after you?”

  “Yes, thank you,” Frances said, taking the proffered hand and then lowering herself uneasily into her seat.

  “Glad to hear it. Now then,” Greenaway clasped his hands on the desk in front of him. Frances took in the nicotine stains, the bitten-down nails on his big, blunt fingertips. There was something curiously reassuring about those hands, she thought, they were indicative of honest toil. “You’ve got some information about the Waterloo Bridge woman, I believe?”

  “Yes,” Frances came straight out with it, “I believe she was my sister, Margaret McArthur.”

  “Oh?” said Greenaway, scanning the face in front of him. Frances Feld was a slender woman who sat ramrod straight in her smart navy coat and hat, clearly mindful of her appearance. Her face had an austere beauty, made more intense by the intelligence of her dark blue eyes and the curly, chestnut hair that surrounded it – the same colour tresses as the woman who had floated in the Thames. Though he couldn’t imagine a more outwardly different type of woman, the resemblance was clear.

  “That’s not the name she was going by,” he said. “Nor the name on the ration book we recovered from the deceased woman’s handbag. We have her down as Peggy Richards. Ever heard that one before?”

  “I’m sorry to say deceit was second nature to my sister.” Even now, Frances couldn’t stop the bitter words from tumbling out. “But the last time I saw her she did inform me that she was going by the name of Peggy.”

  “And when was that, Mrs Feld?” Greenaway picked up a pencil.

  “Last Saturday,” said Frances, and gave a little sigh. “Saint Valentine’s Day.”

  “Did you see a lot of your sister?” Greenaway asked.

  Frances shook her head. She was trying so hard to stay detached, to tell the policeman what he needed to know and not let her feelings get in the way. But it was much harder than she had anticipated. She felt as though she was sitting in front of a priest and must now make full confession.

  “I’m afraid I didn’t, no,” she said, looking down at the handbag in her lap, her shoulders slumping. “Saturday was the first time I’d seen Margaret for nearly five years, Chief Inspector. We had a falling out, a long time ago, and I told her I never wanted to see her again. Yet she’d track me down again every few years and attempt to make reconciliation. That’s what she was up to on Saturday, but I did what I always do and sent her away.”

  Greenaway could see her eyes begin to glitter. He resisted the urge to solve another mystery and ask her what they had fallen out over and instead watched her open up her handbag.

  “Then,” she went on, “when I saw the report in the Herald about the woman at Waterloo Bridge, the clothing matched the outfit Margaret had on last Saturday – a rabbit fur coat, red turban and purple shoes. The sketch that went with it,” she extracted a bundle from the depths of her bag, “matches the face you’ll see on these pictures. There’s some official paperwork here, too, what I have of it – certificates for passing our nurses’ exams at the London Hospital in 1930 with Margaret’s real name and my maiden name on them. I hope that’s proof enough for you.”

  Greenaway saw black-and-white photographs: two girls with long, wild hair playing in a stream under a mountain, turning into more sophisticated young women wearing cloche hats over their smart bobs, then starched and prim in their nurses’ uniforms. As far back in time as the pictures went, Frances looked aloof while there was something about Margaret’s smile that hinted that the sisters were already on divergent paths.

  “We came here from Dunfanaghy in 1928, to try and lead a better life than we could in Ireland,” said Frances. “There were enough of our brothers to look after the farm there. Nursing was the one way we had to better ourselves … Or so I thought.”

  Greenaway felt the weight of passing lives, the expectations and thwarted dreams that spoke from each item he had been given. All the proof that Frances could find of Margaret’s existence and their familial ties that she was willing to show to a stranger.

  “But,” she went on, “as you’ve no doubt gathered from your own investigations, once we got here, Margaret formed a different idea of what constitutes a better life than I did. Which is why we went our separate ways and how she would have come to be in such a place as she ended up. God rest her soul.”

  Greenaway looked from the young Frances in the photo to the woman sitting opposite. She was right, the arrest sheet he’d seen at Charing Cross station had illustrated precisely what had been occupying her sister for most of the ten years before she had met Charlie. The expired Irish passport completed as much of this picture as Greenaway needed to know. That families had their secrets, extreme differences of opinion that could cause rifts as wide as the former McArthur sisters’, was not news to him. He had no desire to intrude on Frances any further than the one onerous question he was now obliged to pose.

  “So, Mrs Feld,” he said, handing her memento mori back to her, “as her nearest next-of-kin, would you be prepared to identify Margaret’s body?”

  Frances felt a sudden sense of calm, as if she had passed this test and now God was giving her back the strength she needed to see it all through. “I would,” she said.

  – . –

  Still, she gripped her rosary tightly as Dr Spilsbury rolled back the sheet. Frances had seen death close up before and, with the carnage that the Blitz had wreaked upon East London, with more voracity than she could have believed possible when she first donned her uniform. She was well aware of the sort of injuries she would see on her sister, and how a body would appear after autopsy, stitched up like a rag doll. What she hadn’t been prepared for was the very waxy stillness of her, the total absence of life in one who had always been so full of it.

  She looked from Margaret’s empty, ruined face to the sad eyes of the detective.

  “This is her,” she said.

  Greenaway nodded and Spilsbury replaced the shroud, nodding respectfully.

  “I’m very sorry,” he said.

  Frances closed her eyes. “Thank you,” she replied, feeling her strength deserting her, leaving her as empty, cold and vulnerable as her sister’s corpse.

  “Can I run you home, Mrs Feld?” asked Greenaway.

  – . –

  As he stopped his car outside her door, Frances turned to look at the big detective. There was only one more question she wanted to ask him, the one thing that preoccupied her thoughts during their silent journey to Bethnal Green.

  “The man who you saw before me today. Was he a friend of my sister’s?” she said.

  Greenaway nodded. “He was a good friend, Mrs Feld,” he
said. “Someone who cared a lot for her.”

  “I thought so,” said Frances, nodding. “He looked as if he did. Did he tell you anything that bears repeating?”

  Greenaway thought about it. “Your sister loved poetry,” he said.

  “Well,” Frances’s irises widened, “so she did. When we were young, she could declaim books of it by heart. It was always the Romantics she liked best – Shelley and Wordsworth and Keats.” A sad smile crossed her face. “I suppose that speaks volumes, doesn’t it?”

  Greenaway thought of Muldoon, locked in the cells, awaiting his charge. “I will get justice for your sister, Mrs Feld,” he promised. “Poetic, or otherwise.”

  She nodded, turned away and let herself out of the passenger seat. He watched her make her way back into her small, terraced house, waited until the front door had closed behind her before he slowly drove on.

  Half of the street was in ruins. All about him were piles of bricks, jagged, shattered walls, the impromptu revealing of the insides of rooms where buildings had been blown in half, basements caved back into the ground, chimney pots above swaying at drunken angles. Though he knew precisely where he was going, Greenaway could no longer recognise large swathes of the route to Brick Lane; the war had changed the geography almost irrevocably. Except that, when he left his car to walk the remainder of the way, tucked behind the canopies of the market, the heady smells of rotting vegetables and the cries of the barrow boys, Soapy Larry’s barbershop was still exactly as it had always been.

  – . –

  “You see, you got the hang of it all right,” the Maestro nodded approvingly as Bobby picked the card he had chosen from the deck. “And you showed them that at school today, eh? Good lad.”

  Bobby recalled the look of amazement on Barney Newbiggin’s face, acknowledgement that he had finally managed to get one over on his bigger, tougher pal – the one highlight of a day racked with exhaustion and confusion.

  “Suppose you’ll be wanting me to show you another? Sit down then, lad, take a gander at this …” The Maestro began to reshuffle the deck. As Bobby watched, a question burst from the back of his mind straight out of his mouth.

  “You know you said you was half-kosher – I mean, that we was half-kosher? Well, which half of you is the kosher one? Is it from your mum or your dad?”

  Parnell raised his eyebrows. “It was my dad,” he said, “which means I can’t technically be called kosher at all. It’s supposed to come down your mother’s side to make you proper Jewish. But I’m the spitting image of my old man. He was Russian, with the black hair and dark eyes, like I got. He could sing and charm the birds down off the trees with his stories.” With a flourish, Parnell fanned the deck out in a horseshoe across the table. “Mind, he were a proper wandering Jew and all. Wandered off when I was seven with a fancy piece, left me at the mercy of me staunch Roman Catholic Ma. Sound familiar, does it?”

  Bobby shook his head and whistled. How could the Maestro know so much? He was about to ask something else when the bell over the door began to tinkle.

  The atmosphere in the barber’s changed as quickly as if a black cloud had blotted out the sun. Soapy froze, his razor poised in mid-air above Bluebell’s lathered face. Bear’s eyes narrowed to amber slits and a sneer lifted his top lip up to reveal short, pointed teeth. The Maestro’s smile drained away as he looked up at the figure that filled the doorway.

  Bobby had never seen him before. Though he was the same age and general appearance as the rest of them, in a long black coat and trilby that spoke of money to spare, he also wore a seriousness that marked him apart. He hadn’t come to lose his troubles here. He’d come to bring them.

  “Greenaway,” hissed Bear. “The fuck you want?”

  A thin smile crossed the lips of the man in the doorway as he took in the tableau in front of him. “Corrupting minors, are we, Parnell?” he said, hooking an index finger towards the Maestro. “Looks like I got here just in time.”

  He strode forwards into the room, eyes fixed on his prey. Bear moved his hand inside his jacket as he came nearer, but Greenaway ignored the gesture.

  “Forget about it, all of you,” he said. “This ain’t a social call. This is Murder Squad business.” He reached the table, put a hand on Bobby’s shoulder. “Out of the way, son,” he said softly, “I need to have a word with your friend here.” Petrified, Bobby shot from underneath him, not wanting to see or hear any more.

  – . –

  Walking towards the synagogue, Harry Feld had to stop in his tracks, wipe his glasses and put them back on before he could verify that the sight before him was real and had not sprung from the places where his troubled conscience had been taking him all day. Sitting on the steps, his arms wrapped around his knees, looking morosely up from beneath his thick wedge of fringe, was Bobby.

  “Dad!” the small figure uncurled to his full height and streaked towards him, flinging his arms around Harry’s waist in a show of affection that was as rare and unexpected as his presence here.

  “What’s all this?” said Harry, ruffling the boy’s hair, going over many possibilities in his mind and none of them good ones. “What are you doing here, Bobby? Has something happened at home?”

  “No,” said Bobby, burying his head in his father’s waistcoat, breathing in the reassuring smell of peppermint and tobacco and screwing up his eyes to stop the tears that threatened to spill. “I just wanted to see you, that’s all.”

  Harry put his arms about the boy and hugged him close, while a great wave of sadness broke over him. He wondered how much Bobby had heard Frances say last night, and what of it that he would have properly understood.

  “And you knew where to find me, huh?” he said.

  Bobby raised his head and nodded. “I want to hear the singing, Dad,” he said. “Is it all right to come in with you?”

  “Of course it is, my boy,” Harry said, wondering even as he said the words if there had ever been anything he could have done better for this stubborn, stray child that could have made him turn out more like one of his other siblings. Whether anything could ever really alter God’s plans.

  – . –

  Frances sat at the kitchen table, asleep and dreaming. She was back at the burn, underneath Muckish mountain, the smell of earth and water in her nostrils.

  “Oh, thank God,” she said, looking around her, taking in the fluffy white seed heads of the bog cotton and the star-shaped yellow flowers of the asphodel that told her it was finally summer. “I thought I’d never know that smell again.” The sun was warm on her face, sparkling off the surface of the burn, where Margaret crouched, bare feet planted on stones, skirt pulled up around her knees, staring intently into the water.

  “Shhh!” her sister murmured. “There’s one coming now. Ah, and he’s a beauty.”

  Frances watched Margaret slip her hands under the surface, while she ran her own fingers through the thick, fragrant grass, wanting to make sure that all this was real. “I never thought I could come here again,” she whispered to herself in wonder, “and that it would all be just the same as it was.”

  She looked back up at Margaret. She was young and thin, stray tendrils of her chestnut hair escaping from her attempts to corral them into a ponytail, rising and falling on the breeze. The rest of her was stock still, concentration etched all over her face, which was free from the pretence of make-up, free of the lines of care. Margaret had always been brilliant at tickling out the trout. In a silvery flash, her hands came up above the surface, grappling the twisting body she had brought up from the burn into the embrace of her arms. Frances rose to her feet, moved towards her to help, realising as she did that her own legs were bare, her skirt pulled up and tied to one side, so that she could wade into the cool slipstream beside her sister.

  Margaret turned to face her. “Look!” she said, happiness catching her face like the glow of the sun. “Did I not tell you he was a beauty?”

  Frances looked down into her sister’s arms. It wasn’t a f
ish that she held there, but a baby, the darkness of his thick black hair a stark contrast to the white swaddling in which he was wrapped, staring up at her with the bluest of blue eyes.

  “I want you to take him,” said Margaret, offering the bundle towards her. “Take him and look after him. Will you do that for me, Francie?”

  “But …” Frances began, wondering why it was so familiar, wondering how she knew that all of this had already happened before, but in another time and place.

  “Only—” Margaret looked round across her shoulder, back towards the mountain. A cloud was moving across the sun, sending a dark shadow travelling fast across the land towards them. “I can’t stay here much longer. Will you do it for me, Francie?”

  Frances took the baby in her arms, his blue eyes holding her gaze for a second’s worth of eternity, time enough for the shadow to fall across Margaret. When Frances looked back up, her sister was gone.

  “Margaret!” she said, tears in her eyes. Said it loud enough for the veil to lift between the world she had left and the world she was now in: suppertime in the London blackout, the smell of fish in her nostrils coming from the stove behind her, where supper bubbled in the oven. Blinking in the light that came from the electric bulb overhead, illuminating the pages of the book she had been reading while she waited for her husband to come home, a book of verse open on a page of Wordsworth:

  A slumber did my spirit seal

  I had no human fears

  She seemed a thing that could not feel