After the Mourning

by Barbara Nadel

  Just before he left, Richards said, ‘Oh, we’ve taken a couple of male Gypsies in for questioning about the deaths of Mansard and the others. I’d like to find the Lees’ daughters but they’ve disappeared.’

  ‘Have they?’

  ‘Yes. If you hear anything you’ll let me know, won’t you?’

  ‘It’s not likely, with me stuck here, is it, Inspector?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mr Hancock,’ he said. ‘Maybe the Gypsies will come to you. It wouldn’t be the first time and, I believe, you still have the body of the girl Lily on your premises.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, keep me informed, won’t you? As yet, it’s still only you and Miss Jacobs who claim to have seen the miraculous nail. The Gypsies and the remaining MPs in Mansard’s company know nothing about it.’ He looked me straight in the eye but without even a hint of a smile. ‘In view of Miss Jacobs’s disappearance it would be better for you, Mr Hancock, if someone else could confirm your story about that night. The Lee girls, having lost their parents and brothers, have no need to conceal the truth, whatever it may be. We do need to find them.’

  I returned his very straight gaze with one of my own and said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Apart from anything else, I assume those girls will want some involvement in a funeral for their relatives,’ he continued. ‘If not, it’ll be parish dos, won’t it? Seems a shame to me that they could end up in paupers’ graves when the girls could have them buried decently.’

  I didn’t answer him. He had an entirely different view of what had happened to me from the version I believed. I resented having to prove myself, and what I’d been through, to him.

  Richards stood up, smiled, then almost immediately frowned. ‘By the way, Mr Hancock,’ he said, ‘you’ve a bad smell downstairs. Your drains damaged, are they?’

  Stella let him out, babbling on about how Horatio Smith ‘would’ve killed our Frank stone dead if it hadn’t been for me’, as she led him down the stairs and out into the yard. Later on, when she thought I was asleep, Stella came into the parlour and stared slack-jawed into my face. I didn’t know what she wanted and she didn’t utter a word. It was an unnerving, almost frightening experience.

  ‘Ernie,’ I said, as soon as he came into the parlour and settled himself beside me, ‘can I borrow your motor car?’

  Of course, I couldn’t drive myself – I still didn’t have my own car – so Ernie had to do that for me. I couldn’t after all, ask the police. After Richards’ visit I had some important reasons for wanting to speak to the Gypsies – if I could find them – without any help from any coppers. Ernie, too, had an interest in trying to find what remained of the Lee family.

  ‘If I’ve no information to the contrary, I’ll have to copy what I did for Rosie’s funeral. I won’t perform a pauper’s do – I’d rather pay for it all myself than that,’ he said, as he brought his car to a halt in front of Eagle Pond. ‘But I’d like to make it more personal if I can, with chosen hymns and whatever, and it would be so much better if Lily’s family could be there.’

  The sun was setting and a thick, almost smoggy mist had fallen across the trees. Nothing, as far as I could see, was moving in the thick undergrowth or around the pond. It was silent too, which is not something easily associated with groups of people. But as Ernie pulled me, in some pain, out of his car, I was not downhearted. I knew how easily the Gypsies could hide themselves in the forest. I also knew that once they’d spotted me they would want to talk to me too, in all probability, if only to ask me what I’d said about their fellows in police custody. And from my point of view there was another reason. The Gypsies, I hoped, might be able to tell me what Hannah had done after she’d escaped from the MPs’ car. By her own admission she’d gone back into the forest where they, or some of them, had been at the time.

  As Ernie and I inched forwards into the undergrowth around the pond, I told him that Hannah had disappeared.

  ‘Well, you know, Frank, that may not be such a bad thing,’ he said, as he slid an arm under my shoulder and helped me to step over a fallen log. ‘She’s a very nice woman, Miss Jacobs, but she is, well . . . I don’t have to tell you what she is, do I?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He had to know that Hannah was a Jew, but I’d thought he was ignorant of the other details of her life.

  ‘Well, what she does, her . . .’

  His words made me frown. I’d never looked on Ernie Sutton as a man to judge others. ‘Do you mean because she’s a Jew or because she’s a tom?’ I asked him, I admit harshly.

  ‘Frank,’ he said, ‘I’m a vicar. I have to say these things. Where would we be if we all married outside our own religion, eh?’

  ‘You forget, Ernie,’ I gasped, as the pain bit into my side, ‘I don’t have a religion.’

  He didn’t answer but made me sit on a tree-stump. Apparently even the small amount of light coming from the evening sky showed that my face was green.

  ‘Your Aggie was right,’ Ernie said, as he looked at me hard. ‘You shouldn’t be out. Your mum’ll have my guts for garters when she finds out I’ve taken you off into the wild blue yonder.’

  Aggie alone, as far as I was aware, had known I was going out and she hadn’t been happy about it. I told her I had to in order to sort out Lily Lee’s funeral with her family. She had replied that, given a choice between my health and Lily Lee’s funeral, she’d rather the poor girl stink the shop to the ground rather than me have one more second’s worth of pain. She hadn’t got her way and soon it would be dark. Being among the trees again brought back the feelings and fears I’d had when I’d last been in the forest – with Mansard and his men, the Lees and my Hannah. I felt my breathing go and not, for once, because a raid had begun. That particular horror was not uppermost in my mind. It would come much later.

  Standing over me, Ernie shook his head and was about to say something when a voice called from somewhere to me: ‘Mr Undertaker.’

  I cocked my head to one side, thinking that perhaps I hadn’t heard right. ‘What?’

  Ernie, too, was frowning now. ‘Did you hear that?’ he said. ‘It sounded like . . .’

  ‘It’s a woman’s voice,’ I said.

  ‘Yes . . .’

  We glanced around, our heads moving in the same direction. When we looked ahead of us again she was there with a couple of young lads, both about her own age. Beauty.

  Seeing her again was, for me, like an electric shock. I made noises rather than words.

  ‘Last time we saw each other you was nearly dead,’ she said to me. ‘Drabalo Mary saved your life.’

  ‘And you,’ I said, when I’d found my voice. ‘You came . . .’

  ‘I were there,’ Beauty said, nodding her head of thick black hair at me. ‘Me and old Danny Boy had gone up to see how the Gentleman was getting along and to take all of them up there some food. We saw them soldiers shoot everyone.’

  ‘Well, maybe you ought to tell the police. They don’t believe me,’ I said. She didn’t answer.

  A dart of pain hit me and I had to wait until it had subsided before I spoke again.

  ‘We’ve come to speak to Lily Lee’s family,’ I heard Ernie say. ‘Mr Hancock and I need to make arrangements with them for her burial. Where are what’s left of her family?’

  Beauty, I now realised – more than even the first time I’d seen her – deserved her name. She was short, nicely plump and with features not unlike those of Mary Pickford, but she was as dirty and ragged as the two frightened boys who stood to either side of her.

  Ignoring Ernie, Beauty said to me, ‘We’ll take you to drabalo Mary. She’ll be happy you’re alive.’

  If I’d thought that was all we were going to learn from this meeting or that Mary was the only person we were about to see, I would have protested. But I felt there was more to it than that. As Ernie helped me follow the Gypsies into the forest I noticed that Beauty was scanning around her, as if to check that we were not being followed. Then when
the sirens signalled the nightly raid her face reflected deep and abiding terror.

  ‘You wasn’t ready to die, I could tell,’ the old woman said to me, as she hung her kettle on the hook over her fire. This deep into the forest there was no one to enforce or even care about the blackout, or so it seemed. ‘But you needed the gauje medicine to help you on your way. I knew that.’

  ‘I – I owe my life to you,’ I said, panting as I spoke. We’d walked for what seemed like hours and I was done in.

  She dismissed my thanks with a tut and a wave of one thin, dark brown hand.

  ‘We’ve come to find what remains of the Lee family,’ I said, as I let Ernie help me down on to the ground beside the old woman’s fire. ‘We need to bury Lily, Mr Sutton and I.’

  Drabalo Mary narrowed her eyes. ‘You want money?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Her – her parents are dead. I just want to do what’s right for her. I – I want to know what her family, her sisters, want me to do. Her parents and her brothers’ bodies can wait, but Lily must be buried quickly now.’

  To the south of us came the distant flashes and bangs of the East End taking another hammering. I tried not to think about my family.

  ‘I – I also n-need,’ I said, ‘to know for myself whether you or anyone else from your camp saw my ladyfriend Miss Jacobs after all the shooting took place up at Woodford Wells.’

  The old woman gazed across the fire at Beauty, who, some time before, had come to sit silently with us, and a couple of very young girls, who were also sitting on the cold, hard ground. The boys who had escorted us to the camp with Beauty had disappeared. But there were other tents besides those of Mary and Beauty, and other Gypsies too, men, women and children many of whom I recognised from the original camp. But by the light of their several fires, Mary’s included, I could see that they were more nervous than before. Some of their number had died and more, according to Inspector Richards, had been taken away by the police. I was about to speak again, to plead with Mary to help me, when I heard a low animal growl from somewhere rather too close for my comfort. Ernie, who had also heard it, gripped one of my arms.

  Drabalo Mary smiled and said, ‘Don’t worry, my rais, it’s only Bruno the bear. Old Eli have him now but he’m not so happy since his real master passed away. Bears is intelligent beasts. They know when things happen.’

  ‘Yes . . . Mary . . . Look, about that night . . .’

  She smiled. ‘You know about the Fourth Nail, my rais. And I trust the Reverend as a man of God so we have to go right back to the beginning,’ she said.

  Ernie, frowning, said, ‘Fourth nail?’

  I hadn’t told him about the Nail. I hadn’t seen him for long enough to get into all that. To be honest, I’d had enough trouble telling the coppers and my family, in a much shorter version, about something that I knew had to be, in part, really just a story.

  ‘Oh, Reverend don’t know nothing?’

  ‘N-no.’

  So Mary told him. Had he been an ordinary Church of England vicar, I’m sure he would’ve laughed. If my understanding is right, they don’t approve of relics and suchlike. They think it popish. But Ernie’s church is what they call ‘high’, which means it’s practically Catholic, so he was, I could see, very interested. And I must confess that drabalo Mary’s telling of Martin Stojka’s story sent a shiver up my spine, even though I knew it from before. It was, I suppose, confirmation to me that everything I had told the police was real.

  The faces of old Gypsies frequently put me in mind of my own grandparents – the Duchess’s mum and dad. Lined and dry and tanned to the colour of old wood. And with the firelight and the flashes from the explosions peppering the docks illuminating her face, Mary had the look of a creature not just living in the forest but belonging to the trees.

  When she’d finished her story there was a moment of silence before Ernie said, ‘So what happened to this Fourth Nail, after the military policemen drove away with Captain Mansard’s body?’

  Drabalo Mary didn’t answer him. Instead she turned to me and said, ‘My boy Joe took you up the gauje hospital that night and he left you to them.’

  ‘Yes, I know. But Joe wasn’t the only one away from the camp that night, was he?’ I said.

  Mary exchanged another look with Beauty.

  ‘You’d seen what had happened to your Gentleman, the Lees and me, hadn’t you?’ I said to the girl. ‘I saw you go off with some others. I heard you talk about finding my car. What happened?’

  Beauty’s lovely face folded in on itself and she began to cry.

  ‘Victory and Betty Lee was her dad and mum and them boys was her brothers,’ Mary said. ‘With Rosie and Lily gone, she’s the oldest now so she had the right. Took no pleasure in it, mind, as you can see.’

  I’d thought that Beauty was a ghostly form of Lily when I’d first seen her. Now I understood. She was their sister. Now there was just her and, it seemed, the three almost identical little girls at her side.

  ‘What do you mean, “she had the right”?’ I asked. ‘The right to what?’

  Mary was rolling herself a fag now, totally involved in it. It made me want one so I put my hand into my pocket for my Woodbines. I was about to light up when Ernie nudged me and put his hand out. I gave him a fag and lit it for him while Beauty dried her eyes. Then, without any preamble, she said, ‘We killed them, the soldiers. They wouldn’t give us the Nail so we – I killed them.’

  I squinted at her, the better to appreciate her smallness. Sarge and his blokes had been big, armed men. ‘But you’re—’

  ‘I killed them,’ she repeated. ‘Coppers come and took away Danny Boy and Righteous and Job, but they never killed ’em. It was me.’

  I turned to a still-confused Ernie and said, ‘She’s saying she killed those three MPs found murdered in my hearse. They were bristling with guns.’ I turned back to Beauty. ‘It just isn’t possible that you did that alone. The sergeant, so the coppers told me, was torn to pieces! Did you do that?’

  Yet again Beauty and Mary exchanged a look.

  ‘That isn’t the whole truth, is it?’ I said. When they didn’t answer I decided to take a different tack. There was, after all, something of my own that I needed to know. ‘What about Hannah – Miss Jacobs? What was she doing while you were killing those men in my car?’

  ‘Job stopped your car,’ Beauty said. ‘Threw hisself on it, he did. Then the rest of us come, many of us, more’n the coppers will ever know.’

  ‘Yes, but they had guns!’ I said.

  ‘Yep, and Beauty, she had Bruno,’ Mary put in.

  The girl blanched. ‘Mary!’

  ‘He has to know, girl!’ the old woman said. ‘He ain’t no muskero.’

  ‘Could get us lelled! Bruno put down!’

  ‘Nah!’ Drabalo Mary looked at me and said, ‘You wouldn’t get old Bruno killed for what he done to them as took your lady, would you?’

  I didn’t answer. Sarge had been torn to shreds, according to Inspector Richards. I wondered whether the bear had somehow understood that his master had been killed or whether Beauty and the others had maddened him.

  ‘Danny Boy brung your lady back to camp,’ Beauty said. ‘She didn’t see no killing.’

  ‘And then? What did Miss Jacobs do after that?’ According to Hannah, she had done some ‘business’ in the forest after she had escaped from my hearse. But her version of what had happened and Beauty’s account were already different from each other.

  ‘She stayed here with us,’ Beauty said. ‘Till ’twas safe for her to go. She ask a lot of questions and we telled her the truth.’ Her big eyes narrowed. ‘Why you want to know what she done?’

  I looked at Ernie, who was gazing into the fire. Even without him and even though I knew he knew, I would’ve found it hard to talk about what Hannah does. But this time I had to. ‘She said she went with men in the forest.’ I spoke quickly and averted my eyes from everyone.

  ‘She telled you that?’

  ‘
Yes.’ I looked up into the girl’s face again. ‘Well?’

  ‘And the coppers? She telled them that too?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, thank you, Jesus!’ I heard drabalo Mary say. ‘My goodness, but you’ve certainly got a good woman there, my rais! She’m a proper friend to Romany people, that lady!’

  ‘Hannah lied.’ I felt a lot of tension leave me all in one go.

  ‘Course!’ Mary laughed. At that minute I didn’t find it funny. ‘She a Jewish lady so she know the evil that has come in Germany. Our Gentleman, Mr Stojka, he tells of Romany people being buried alive in the forests there, he talks of Jews beaten to blood and bone on the streets.’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘Us, we don’t matter, but the Nail, well, that is power, and Mr Hitler he shouldn’t be having any more of that, now, should he?’

  ‘By power,’ Ernie began, ‘what do you mean? Does it produce miracles?’

  I remembered the flash of light I’d seen as Stojka had taken the Nail out of his jacket and the suddenness with which it was embedded in Mansard’s eye. I shuddered.

  ‘The Nail gives power to those who have it,’ Mary said, ‘power of God, power over folk. But you shouldn’t use it if your heart is black. Then it will go bad and God and Jesus will be angry with you. It’s why the Stojka family always took care of the Nail. They was good folk, wanted nothing.’ She looked at me then. ‘Like your ladyfriend Miss Jacobs.’

  ‘Yes.’ I sighed. ‘But by not telling the police the truth about what happened to her that night, to protect you, I think she has become very frightened. She’s gone, the coppers say, to the country. She doesn’t know anyone outside London!’

  ‘No, but we do,’ Mary said. ‘And when the coppers let Danny Boy and the others go, she’ll get back home after a while. She didn’t like the coppers’ questions – or yours.’