After the Mourning

by Barbara Nadel

  I went into that darkness in silence, but a voice brought me – I have to say reluctantly – back into the watery light of dawn.

  ‘Oh, my, he ain’t mullo—!’

  It was a woman’s voice and to me it was just nonsense. Only when I could see again did I think I knew what was going on.

  ‘Lily.’

  Lily Lee had come to greet me as I made my journey into the land of the dead. It just went to show that heaven was nonsense. I, an atheist, was there with Lily Lee, a girl who had, to some, mocked God, Jesus and the Holy Virgin.

  ‘No, ’tain’t Lily,’ the very Lily-like girl said. ‘I’m Beauty.’ And then she began to cry.

  I thought how appropriate that word was for her when I began to sink again. The last thing I heard was a man’s voice: ‘We must get him to drabalo Mary. Ain’t no time for crying.’

  As a rule I don’t get drunk. There’s quite enough going on in my head without adding booze to the mixture. But drunk was how I felt as I gazed up into the face of someone so old and dry they could have been either male or female. I even had the taste of booze on my tongue: brandy.

  The person said, ‘It’s going to hurt, gaujo. There’s nothing except the brandy that I can do about that.’

  And then it was as if my right-hand side melted into flames. In fact, there was a strong glow from firelight dancing on the roof of the tent I had somehow come to be in. And because this time I didn’t seem capable of passing out I soon saw other things in that dank little space. As I said, there was a fire and a person I could now see was a woman, but there was a man too, whom I recognised from Mr Lee’s fireside gatherings. I tried to speak to him, to tell him it wasn’t me who had killed his friends and neighbours, but he said, ‘You be quiet now and without worry. We’m know what you done and what you never.’

  My eyes were fixed on two big buckets of steaming hot water when the pain came again. I screamed.

  ‘Here, bite on that,’ the old woman said, as she wedged a large clothes peg into my mouth. ‘’Twon’t help with the pain but it’ll give you summat to do.’

  There wasn’t always anaesthetic available in the first lot. If supplies were low, our MOs would have to do things in what they called ‘the old-fashioned way’. If a bloke came in with his leg shattered or if a chap had taken a bullet, any surgery was done under booze if he was lucky, and nothing if he wasn’t. The woman the Gypsies called drabalo ‘doctor’ Mary had been kind enough to give me booze for which I will always be grateful. But not at the time. As she hooked that bullet out of me with what felt like red-hot tongs I called her every name under the sun. To be fair, she swore back, but it took her such a long time to free me from that evil metal plug it’s hardly surprising.

  Although I was screaming silently into my peg for most of the time, I was occasionally aware of other things outside myself. I knew, for instance, that the Lily-like girl called Beauty poked her head around the tent flap from time to time.

  ‘Yes, you look at the girl if it do make you feel better, my rais,’ Mary said, when she spied me staring at Beauty. ‘You look anywhere so long as it keep you living.’ And then she plunged something horrible inside my body and this time I did pass out.

  When I came to, I found myself looking up into Beauty’s, rather than Mary’s, face.

  ‘We have to get him to a gaujo doctor now,’ I heard Mary say, through her phlegm-heavy throat. ‘He’m need to have blood and gauje medicine.’

  In spite of the pain, I felt light and slow.

  Beauty smiled at me and I thought, I’m going to die. This lovely young girl is smiling at me with pity in her eyes because I’m going to die. I opened my mouth to speak, but found it impossible. But by that time someone else, another man, was at Beauty’s ear, and as soon as he had finished speaking, she jumped up and walked over to Mary.

  ‘His car’s been stopped,’ she said, as she tipped her head in my direction.

  I thought, rather than said, Hannah.

  ‘I’ll have our Joe take him to the hospital,’ I heard Mary growl.

  Beauty made as if to leave the tent, but Mary caught her with one of her thin, leaf-dry hands and said, ‘You be careful, girl. Don’t you go . . .’

  ‘I’ll do what I have to,’ the girl said, and left the tent without another word.

  Although light-headed, I knew that the blood I could smell was probably my own. If I looked down I could even see it – a great red blanket covering most of my shirt, right down my trousers to my boots. These days, I’m not as well off for suits as I used to be. Most of those I haven’t shrunk out of have been ripped by flying glass or, in one case, nibbled by the rats that have come out of the damaged sewers and into people’s houses. I began to ask Mary about the whereabouts of my jacket but she shushed me and said, ‘My boy Joe’s gonna take you down the hospital so you can get some blood. I can’t do no more for you now, my rais. Your jacket will be fine wherever it might be now.’

  And from then on it was as if a light was switched on and off by turns inside my head. My journey was fractured because I was dying. It is in the nature of what I do that I have some – second-hand admittedly – experience of what those around the dying have observed. Putting aside the stories old ladies tell about loved ones walking towards bright lights or Christ-like figures opening their arms in greeting, those near to death do seem to come into and go out of this world for quite some time. Loved ones are recognised one minute and forgotten the next, places, if my own experiences are anything to go by, have no real meaning, so how Joe, a young lad of no more than fourteen, took me to Whipps Cross I still do not know. All I was certain of at the time was that I was taken in a horse-cart in the middle of what seemed a dreadful commotion of people, horses and noise. That so many were destined to be off somewhere quite different from Joe and myself was only vaguely known to me then. Later I would remember more. But at that moment . . . I am told that by the time I reached the hospital I had stopped breathing altogether.

  Nobody woke me. Nobody pushed their face into mine to rouse me from my sleep. Coming back to the land of the living, in contrast to leaving it, was a gentle, slow affair that occasionally allowed me a view of a woman with very blonde hair. She sat in a chair beside my bed smoking a cigarette, and although I couldn’t make out her face in all its detail, I knew she was connected to me. There was that feeling you get when family and loved ones are close at hand.

  ‘Ag?’ From my dry throat it sounded like the caw of a crow.

  My sister stood up, smoothed her skirt and then, stroking my hair with one hand, leaned over to smile at me. ‘God help us, Frank,’ she said. ‘What have you been doing?’

  My throat was bad and I was far too tired to talk. I was in a bright, empty room, whose walls were painted green. The sheets I lay in were very, very white, and there was a metallic tray with a syringe and a glass of water on top of a cupboard beside the bed.

  ‘You’re in Whipps Cross hospital, Frank. They told me a Gypsy boy brought you in,’ Aggie said, and added, with confidence, ‘Charlie.’

  Even if I’d had a voice I wouldn’t have known where to begin.

  ‘It was Stella told us you’d took off with Charlie and some other Gyppo and, er, Miss Hannah Jacobs,’ Aggie said, stammering a little over Hannah’s name. Aggie knows what Hannah is, and although she never says anything, I know she doesn’t find it easy to bear. The mention of my girl’s name made my heart jump. Hannah. Last time I’d seen her she’d been pushed into my hearse by that MP Private – Private . . . I couldn’t remember his name! What had become of her?

  ‘Hannah?’ I croaked.

  Aggie looked across to where I now saw a man standing by a door. He was about forty and wore a long dark raincoat and a trilby hat. Even in the state I was in I could tell he was a copper. They have a way of standing, with their hands behind their backs and their feet turned out, that is unmistakable.

  ‘Frank, the coppers need to talk to you,’ Aggie said. ‘About all this, what you’ve been through. Th
is is Inspector Richards from Scotland Yard. He don’t want to talk now, though, you’re still sick and . . . But in a bit, you must . . .’

  I ignored her. ‘Hannah!’ I said, and attempted to push myself up in the bed, only to find that my whole right side was on fire again. There was a sharp pain in my right arm too. I slumped down again but as I did so I signalled to Aggie that I’d like her to give me the glass of water. Not that I could drink from it myself: Aggie had to hold it for me. The copper by the door watched with interest as I gazed at him over the rim. He didn’t look as if he was about to tell me anything awful – but, then, who does, these days? There’s only so many times a person can look genuinely distressed, and with people being blown to bits every day it becomes too ordinary for real emotion. Even I, with my mad brain, can’t be upset or enraged all the time. No one has the energy for that.

  With my throat now lubricated I said to the copper, ‘You want to talk to me?’

  I saw Aggie glance at him with strain on her face. ‘You’ve lost a lot of blood, Frank,’ she said. ‘Maybe talk to Inspector Richards later, eh?’

  It was obvious they were keeping something from me so I asked him outright. ‘Is Hannah Jacobs all right?’ I said. ‘It’s all I want to know.’

  ‘Mr Hancock . . .’

  ‘Frank, you have to hear the whole story or you won’t understand,’ Aggie said. ‘And you ain’t really able to do that yet, are you? You need to sleep.’ She stroked my head again, then said, ‘Mum and Nan’ll be up later.’

  I looked across at Inspector Richards with, I knew, tears in my eyes. I was weak, I was tired, but I knew I wouldn’t sleep without knowing what had happened to Hannah or passing on what I knew about Sarge, Jonesy and . . . and Hanson. Yes, that was the name of the other private, the one who had taken Hannah away from me.

  ‘I want to know now, Ag,’ I said. ‘I’ve things to say to this copper.’

  ‘Frank—’

  ‘No!’

  ‘If your brother is happy to speak to me, Mrs Groves, I’m very pleased to oblige,’ Richards said. He spoke stiffly but well, in that sort of accent some people who have come from the East End and moved out a bit, into Essex usually, tend to have. He also used my sister’s married name, which, for a moment, I didn’t recognise. In general, these days, except for official purposes, she’s gone back to being Agnes Hancock.

  Aggie went back to her chair. ‘Well, Frank,’ she said, ‘if you must, I can’t stop you but,’ she looked at Richards, ‘you’ll have to ask that matron before you carry on. If she says my brother can’t . . .’

  ‘Mrs Groves, if you’d like to leave the room now,’ the copper said, with what even I could see was a sudden, almost frightening coldness.

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘Mrs Groves!’

  He opened the door, and outside I could see a uniformed copper leaning against the corridor wall. Aggie sat for a moment finishing her fag. Then she stood up. ‘Frank, if you get tired you must say so,’ she said.

  I told her I would and then she made to leave. As she drew level with Richards she said, ‘You know, I will tell Matron, and when I get home I’ll tell Sergeant Hill up at Plaistow about this an’all.’

  Richards smiled. ‘You can do that, Mrs Groves.’

  ‘Yes, well, I will.’

  ‘I’m sure my guv’nors at the Yard will be very interested in what your Sergeant Hill might have to say to them.’

  ‘Yeah, well, they ought to be!’ Aggie said, with a lot of well-acted pride. ‘Ain’t right what you’re doing! Taking advantage of a sick man! He needs his rest, my brother does, not endless questions!’

  She marched out with her head held so high she was almost looking over her shoulder. Beyond Sergeant Hill, who is approachable for a policeman, Aggie has no love for coppers – not because she’s a bad girl, she just doesn’t like anyone in any sort of authority. In that she’s like most of our friends and neighbours in West Ham.

  Once Aggie had gone, Richards walked over and took her seat. ‘Okey-dokey, Mr Hancock,’ he said. ‘Let’s find out what’s been happening to you.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Richards told me little, except that no one answering the description of Hannah Jacobs had been involved in any trouble – as far as he knew. There had been, however, what he called an ‘incident’ involving my hearse.

  ‘At just after seven o’clock this morning,’ he said, ‘officers in Leytonstone were called to a fracas on the High Road. Your hearse was at the centre of it, Mr Hancock, and a right strange sight it was too,’ he said, with a piercing stare. ‘Four corpses was what greeted those officers who looked inside, all Military Policemen.’

  ‘There was no woman with them?’ I asked.

  Richards shook his head. ‘No. Just two young lads in the back, one more at the wheel and the other in a coffin. I can tell you, Mr Hancock, it was an eerie sight. But, then, it was the end of what had been a most funny morning.’

  I imagined that the corpse at the wheel must have been Sarge. I assumed he had driven off from the forest in my vehicle. I couldn’t think he’d’ve allowed anyone else to do that for him. But how had he and the others died? And then I remembered how Captain Mansard had died and felt very cold.

  ‘But then again I say that one of the corpses was at the wheel when what I should say is what was left of this poor character was at the wheel. He’d been torn to pieces by something.’

  I looked up into Richards’s thin slightly grey face and I heard him say, ‘Do you know anything about this, Mr Hancock?’

  I told him everything, which he wrote down in his notebook. It took a long time because I was exhausted. Once a large woman in a matron’s uniform came in and asked nervously how I was. Whatever Aggie had said hadn’t worked. Matron had been told to keep away. I wondered, even as I was telling Inspector Richards about Mansard and his boys, how much the coppers had known about the captain and his politics. Not that he commented on any of what I said. He just kept writing it all down grimly. Only when I came to talk about the Nail did he look up.

  ‘So you’re saying,’ he said, ‘that the Gypsies were hiding this Stojka fella to protect a nail s’posed to have been used to crucify Jesus?’

  That wasn’t exactly how the Nail’s history had been told to me, but I said, ‘Yes. Mansard wanted it to take to Hitler. That was where Mansard’s true sympathies lay.’

  Inspector Richards, although I could hardly blame him for it, was looking doubtful. ‘In Germany?’

  ‘Yes. He’d been a Blackshirt. My, er, Miss Jacobs remembered him from back in the thirties, with Mosley and his lads. She’s a Jewish lady, Miss Jacobs.’

  ‘This is the lady we’ve not come across yet? The one you say the MPs took?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And where does Miss Jacobs live?’

  I paused a little before I replied. For obvious reasons Hannah doesn’t like coppers knowing where she lives, but if she was missing I didn’t have any choice. ‘Rathbone Street, Canning Town,’ I said.

  Inspector Richards wrote down this, to me, notorious address without a flicker.

  ‘I don’t know where in the forest the Lees’ boy Charlie took us, so I can’t tell you where to look for the bodies of the Gypsies,’ I said.

  ‘We’ll find them,’ Richards said.

  I could, of course, tell him when Mansard had died. I also knew how many of the Lee family, Horatio and Stojka had met their ends. But I couldn’t explain how Mansard had died – I still can’t, if the truth be told. Stojka must have attacked him in the half-second, or whatever it was, when I looked away, but I can’t always convince myself that that is the case. Sometimes, even now, I imagine the Nail floating off and attacking him of its own accord. Clearly that’s rubbish, but it still crosses my mind. Richards, on the other hand, was more certain.

  ‘So this Gypsy Stojka attacked Mansard with the nail and pushed it into his eye?’

  ‘Yes . . . Well, I think so.’

  He nodded, paused brie
fly to light up a smoke, then continued, ‘So where did he, Stojka, go with this amazing nail after he’d attacked Captain Mansard with it?’

  ‘He was shot by one of the captain’s men,’ I said. ‘He didn’t have time to get the Nail back.’

  ‘So who took it out?’ Richards asked.

  ‘No one.’

  ‘Not Sarge or,’ he glanced at his notebook to remind himself of the relevant names, ‘or Privates Hanson or Jones?’

  ‘None of them would touch it,’ I said. ‘They were squeamish about it, as I was. But they were afraid too. Mr Lee, Lily Lee’s father, warned them not to touch it.’

  ‘Mmm. Mumbo-jumbo.’ Richards shook his head. ‘We’ve had quite enough of all that round here from those Gypsies, with their visions and virgins and God knows what.’

  I coughed. ‘It isn’t their fault that Hitler wants this thing,’ I said. ‘They—’

  ‘Well, anyway, there wasn’t any nail in Mansard’s face when we found him,’ Richards said, ‘so someone must have taken it. Maybe one of those barmy types who attacked your vehicle.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said.

  ‘We still don’t know who stopped your car, not for certain, but some people say it was a group of Gypsies. This was up here on the Whipps Cross Road. What happened we don’t know. When we got the call about your vehicle it was in Leytonstone High Road, up by the Underground station, with four corpses inside. It was surrounded by people who had recognised it as yours and were looking for the body of Lily Lee. Wanting to pay their respects, they said.’ He smiled. ‘Got a bit of a shock when they saw what was inside. We’ve got all those we could lay our hands on down the station. They all say the same thing. The hearse was parked by the station and rumour went round that the girl’s funeral was happening today. Where that rumour come from, especially at such an early hour of the morning, I don’t know and neither, apparently, does any of those involved. The hearse with your name on the side of it just appeared in the smog.’