A woman passing by on the balcony stopped to peer in at her. ‘Have you tried his work?’ she asked, not unfriendly. ‘You’ll find him down Southwark way, I think.’
Wearily Sadie nodded. ‘I know where he works, thanks. He ain’t there, though.’
The woman, who wore a square of coarse brown cloth tied around her head and a shapeless dress, whose muddy – coloured skirt had come apart from the bodice in places, stood and summed up Sadie’s plight. ‘You his girl?’ She seemed taken aback by the younger woman’s smart cream outfit and stylish appearance.
Again Sadie nodded. ‘You ain’t seen him this morning, then?’
‘I ain’t seen him all week,’ the woman replied. ‘You never know with him. I sometimes think what’s the use of having him as a neighbour, as a matter of fact. I never hardly see him.’
The words sank heavily on to Sadie’s shoulders as the woman went on her way. She’d never asked Richie about his life in the tenement, and he’d never volunteered any information. According to the woman, it seemed a rootless, detached sort of life. With time to kill, exhausted after the morning’s crisis, Sadie sat wondering what she’d let herself in for. After all, she’d left home and landed on Richie’s doorstep without even letting him know. At last, round about four in the afternoon, she heard footsteps come up the stairs.
Richie turned on to the landing and saw Sadie waiting there. He held his key in one hand, stone-cold sober despite a day-long binge at the pub to help him block out the morning’s events. He stared at the bag lying at her feet, then without saying a word he unlocked the door to his rooms and stepped inside.
Sadie lingered on the doorstep. Should she follow him in after all? This was a big move an her part and she waited to see how he would react. But Richie lifted her bag in silence, as if everything was understood and settled in that moment when he’d turned the corner and seen her there, smoothing down her Jacket, putting one hand up to her dark hair. He led her in and closed the door behind her.
There was one room for living in, with a window facing out on to the landing, overlooking the busy street. It had a sink, a table and one wooden chair. The other, darker room to the side of the block was for sleeping. Richie had a piece of faded red cloth pinned permanently across the narrow window, a mattress on the floor, and one coat hook on the back of the door. He watched Sadie’s face as she took a quick look around.
‘Not much, is it?’ he said.
‘It ain’t.’ She marvelled how he could live like this, wandering back into the living-room and peering out of the window into the street.
‘You can change your mind.’ His hunched shoulders and lowered head suggested he didn’t care if she did. Inside, he wanted to lock the door, throw away the key, keep her here for ever.
‘I can.’ Her own head went up. She flicked her hair out of her face and stood squarely facing him.
‘So will you stay?’ He gestured to her bag on the bare floorboards. That’s what you got planned, ain’t it?’
‘Are you asking me?’ she challenged. ‘Do you want me to?’
He leaned back against the crumbling wall and turned his head away. ‘Don’t play games with me, Sadie. I ain’t in the mood.’
Suddenly serious, she went up to him and put her arms around his neck. ‘I’m here, ain’t I? It took me all morning to find the place, for God’s sake!’ She kissed him on the lips.
He responded, held her close. ‘Stay, then.’
There was only the present as they embraced once more; no thought of the future or the consequences of what they were doing. They had a place to themselves, however poor. Sadie had made the break from home.
She and Richie made love for the first time, shy and tender. There were tears, which he kissed away. Then he kissed her neck and shoulders. If they thought they could beat him, they were mistaken. He had her now, in spite of them. He would love and care for her for ever.
May days lengthened into early June. Sadie left the tenement rooms in Mile End each morning, and travelled by tube to her job at Swan and Edgar. Richie took casual work wherever he could get it. Since neither wanted to accept help from Sadie’s family, they cleaned and painted the two rooms themselves. Sadie’s first purchases were another chair, some bedlinen and a tablecloth. Eventually she wrote to Hettie, telling her where she was, but saying she would prefer not to come over to the Duke to visit until Rob saw fit to apologize to Richie.
‘Never in a month of Sundays,’ Duke said sadly.
Hettie put the letter on the table with a shake of her head. ‘Let’s wait and see, Pa. Leastways, we know she’s safe and well.’ Sadie sounded happy. There was no disguising her enthusiasm as she wrote about her new set-up with Richie.
Duke didn’t like it, but Sadie was twenty-five years old and he had to get on with his own life as best he could. Summer nights brought more people out on to the streets to gossip and watch the children play. Some of them drifted into the pub for a drink before they went to bed. Trade improved slightly, though much of it went on late at night, well after hours, to Annie’s disgust. ‘What can I do?’ Duke shrugged. ‘We gotta earn a crust.’ When the doors of the pub finally closed, he fretted after Sadie. And the truth was, he’d rather have the place alive and full of people, than close early and sit at his hearth without Annie.
One rule he did intend to stick to was his ban on Willie Wiggin. ‘Ain’t no one here will give him a single drop to drink!’ he told Annie, and she would nod in satisfaction when she saw him keeping his promise. She was trying to dry the old drunk out, and largely succeeding. Though his liver was ruined, the doctor said he might not get rapidly worse as long as they kept him away from the drink. She kept her eagle eye on him, and gave orders to the tenement children to run no more errands for the lodger in number five.
But Wiggin sober was as much of a problem as Wiggin drunk. He turned to argument, accusing the O’Hagans of deliberately driving rats into his room, claiming that Annie came in to steal his money when he lay asleep, trudging up to the post office and claiming dole that he wasn’t owed. He was impossible to handle, mean and vicious, and still cunning in pursuit of drink.
On the first Saturday afternoon in June, Wiggin was seen making his way along Duke Street towards the public park. Katie O’Hagan, who ran Annie’s old haberdashery stall with all her predecessor’s verve for business, spotted him wandering back an hour or so later, obviously the worse for wear. She passed the word along, ‘Tell Annie, Wiggin is off the wagon!’ She saw it’d be a miracle if he didn’t get run over by a bus, the silly old sod. Katie wound five yards of white ric-rac braid on to a scrap of card, took threepence in payment and craned across the stall to watch Wiggih’s progress. When she saw his shambling figure stagger to a halt at the corner of the court, then drift crabwise towards the door of the Duke, she thought direct action was called for. ‘Watch my pitch!’ she yelled at Nora Brady on her nearby fish stall. Then she skipped down the busy street, eager to warn Annie personally.
She found her wending through the crowd from the other direction, her basket full of fruit and veg, taking her time and chatting in the evening sun. Annie turned to Katie’s call, but her smile vanished, when she saw the girl’s pointed little face looking serious and she heard the latest news. Quickly she went towards the pub, just too late to stop a confrontation between Duke and Wiggin.
‘I said, a pint of best bitter!’ Wiggin had to cling to the bar to make his demand. His head lolled from side to side, he had trouble shaping the words. He stood there unshaven, shouting his order.
Duke raised the wooden flap and came out from behind the bar. He took Wiggin by the elbow, feeling many eyes on them as he steered Annie’s old husband towards the door.
Arthur Ogden watched, then grunted into his glass. Joe O’Hagan wiped his mouth with his sleeve. They couldn’t help but make a comparison between the two men; Duke still sturdily built, wearing a crisp striped shirt under his dark waistcoat, vigour in his grasp. Wiggin, on the other hand, had never be
en much of a figure, even in his youth, and was now shrunken, bent and unkempt, his mind permanently fuddled by drink.
‘Come on now, Willie, let’s get you safely back home.’ Duke never raised his voice an these occasions. In fact, he managed to suggest he was doing a man a favour by refusing to serve him. Even with Wiggin he was considerate, steering him out on to the street.
‘You take your hands off me, filthy swine!’ Wiggin roared. He exploded into a writhing mass of fists and elbows. He kicked, he staggered, he spat and thumped. ‘I know you, Wilf Parsons! A man just has to come in for a little drink and you throw him out! Yes, I know you!’
Taken by surprise, Duke hesitated. Maybe Wiggin wasn’t as far gone as they imagined. Annie still said he didn’t know her, ranting and raving at her each time she went in to cook and clean. ‘You know me, do you, Willie?’ Duke turned him round to face him and stood him up straight.
Wiggin came out with a barrage of obscenities that made some of the nearby women shriek in mock horror. Rob left off talking to Tommy O’Hagan at his news stall to come to Duke’s assistance. If necessary, they’d lift Wiggin clean off his feet and cart him down the court between them.
‘That’s the way, Willie. Easy does it.’ Duke managed to swivel him in the right direction again. ‘Just get one thing clear, will you? You won’t get served a single drop in my pub, understand? Shouting and carrying on don’t make no difference. Just don’t come back and try it on no more.’ He was only sorry he’d not got rid of the old nuisance a minute or two sooner, as Annie came towards them, a worried frown on her face.
Wiggin put his fists up again. ‘Oh, you serve those you like, no bother! I seen you. Same old Duke Parsons, serving right through the night. I seen your light. It always shines, long after closing time. Ha!’ He raised a gnarled finger and pointed an inch away from Duke’s race.
‘Shut up!’ Annie stepped in to take over from Duke. She grabbed Willie’s elbow and shoved him on down the pavement. ‘You just shut your noise, you hear!’ God knew who was listening as he ranted on. ‘I told you lots of times,’ she muttered to Duke, ‘if someone like Willie blabs, we’re done for!’
Wiggin roared on down Paradise Court. ‘We all know you ain’t no angel, Wilf Parsons!’ Children laughed, women backed away, seeing in Wiggin the terrible shape of things to come, unless their old men cut down drastically on the drinking. ‘We know about you, Parsons! Refuse a man a drink at tea-time, and serve your pals right through the night!’
Annie bundled him down the street and into the tenement. She slammed the door behind them, worried to death about the after-hours serving. It just took one man, one enemy, to ruin Duke for good.
Back in the bar, the crowd of weekend drinkers closed over Wiggin’s interruption as if it had never happened. Only one or two paused to comment. Tommy O’Hagan turned to Bertie Hill and expressed his usual opinion that Wiggin was a man who’d outlived his usefulness. He was sick of hearing him clattering about in the room below theirs, and thought it a shame that the old wreck should come between Annie and Duke, who’d never done anyone any harm. Now he was even issuing drunken threats. ‘He belongs in the knacker’s yard if you ask me,’ Tommy said.
Hill raised his glass but said nothing.
Rob came in and leaned on the bar, winking at Ernie to bring him a pint. ‘I’ll knock his block off before too long,’ he promised. ‘He ain’t fit for nothing, and that’s a fact.’
‘People ain’t animals. You can’t cart them off to the knacker’s yard, however much you reel like it.’ Hill’s tone was infuriatingly reasonable. ‘It ain’t right.’
‘Oh, ain’t it?’ Rob replied. And, ‘Oh, can’t I? Well, we’ll just have to see about that.’ He admitted that he’d cheerfully strangle Wiggin if he thought it would solve anything. He swallowed down his beer in a couple of gulps and went on his way.
‘Joke!’ Tommy reminded Hill, recalling the landlord’s old police background and noticing his dark look. ‘Don’t take no notice of Rob.’
Hill shrugged and drank on in silence. The waters closed over the event.
‘Funny thing, that,’ Arthur remarked to Dolly when she called in later that evening. ‘Did you know, Duke had to chuck Wiggin out?’
Dolly gave a short laugh. ‘That’s life.’ She pondered the situation with an ironic smile.
‘Funny, though, when you think about it.’ Arthur saw that Annie had popped back to help behind the bar as usual. No one could have told from looking at her and old Duke what the pair of them must be going through. They handled it well, considering.
Two weeks later, Tommy and Rob had cause to tackle the subject over again.
If there’d been any warning, any suggestion that Wiggin could do real damage, Rob said, they’d have done things differently. ‘Only no one except Annie took him serious, see?’ He was just coming to terms with events. The letter from the magistrates’ court had arrived that morning, 20 June. ‘It hit Pa like a bombshell,’ Rob went on. ‘And I still feel a bit shaky myself.’
‘Are you sure Wiggin’s your man?’ Tommy could just make out from the official wording: on the letter Rob had handed him that the coppers planned to drop down hard on poor old Duke. He made out the words ‘summons’, ‘investigation’, ‘evidence’. There was no doubt, they were on to him with a vengeance.
‘You heard him. He might be a useless old drunk, but he knows enough to give us a real headache round here. God knows what Pa can do about it now.’
Tommy shoved the letter back to Rob and leaned both elbows on the bar. George Mann had taken over the serving, with Ernie there as usual to help with the clearing away. There was no sign of either Duke or Annie. Regulars dropped in every now and then for a quick word of commiseration, but they drifted off again when they found Duke was missing. ‘It’s hit him pretty hard,’ Dolly said to Charlie, who came in on his way to the Gem. ‘I ain’t never known him to leave the bar to George on a Friday night.’
‘Someone gave the game away,’ Rob was still insisting. ‘And who’s the first one that comes to mind?’
‘Wiggin,’ Charlie admitted. He didn’t like to see the Parsonses in more trouble over this. ‘What’ll happen now, Rob? What does the summons mean exactly?’
But Rob was taken up by his own train of thought. ‘You show me a pub in the whole of the East End that don’t serve after hours!’ He clenched his fist and smacked it down on the bar. ‘We’re forever getting warnings from the coppers and sticking them on the fire. Pa couldn’t make ends meet if he stuck to licensing hours, for God’s sake!’
Tommy, standing nearby, saw the light at last. He gave a faint whistle. ‘Bleeding hell, Rob. You mean to say your old man could lose his licence over this?’
It took Duke himself several hours for this realization to sink in. While Rob and his friends fretted in the bar, he sat upstairs with Annie, motionless in his chair by the empty fireside. Hettie would soon be back from the dress shop. He’d have to explain all over again.
‘Try looking on the bright side,’ Annie begged. ‘What if they can’t prove nothing? Who’d take Wiggin’s word in a court of law?’
‘We can’t be sure it was him.’ Unlike Rob, Duke didn’t want to jump to conclusions.
‘No, but let’s say Wiggin’s word don’t prove reliable, according to the magistrate . . .’
Duke shook his head. ‘The police don’t get up a summons without checking their facts,’ he insisted. ‘I reckon they already sent their men in for evidence. Someone we don’t know. You seen anyone, Annie?’
She searched her memory. ‘I can’t think of no one, Duke.’ She tried to build up his hopes because she knew the pub meant everything to him now. He’d already given up his marriage, Sadie had gone off with Richie Palmer, and now it was his home on the line! She couldn’t go down the court, leaving him to despair.
‘How long have I been here, Annie?’
‘Thirty-five years. I remember it, Duke. Jess was just a little baby.’
‘Well
, I’m too old to change my ways now,’ he sighed. ‘What is it they reckon? Three score and ten years? I had my fair share, when you look at it that way.’
‘Ain’t nothing wrong with you!’ she snapped. ‘You’ll go on for years yet!’ She raised herself and walked to the window, looking out at the market traders packing up for the day. ‘How long before we have to go to court exactly?’
‘Two weeks.’
‘Fourteen days to get something done,’ she promised.
But Duke got up to join her. ‘Ain’t you forgetting something, Annie?’
She turned to look up at him.
‘They caught me redhanded, remember?’
She threw her arms around his neck and held him tight. She willed him to fight back. She cursed Wiggin and their own carelessness.
Annie and Duke looked down together on the barrow boys trundling carts over the cobbles. They saw two of the youngest O’Hagan girls ducking in the gutter for bruised apples. A pianola tune drifted through the open window below, churning out a Viennese waltz above the hum of street life. She glanced up at his lined features, saw that his eyes were moist. She couldn’t bear it if he lost everything because of Wiggin; wife, home, occupation all gone.
Part Two
Suspicion
Chapter Eleven
June 1924
The whole of Paradise Court was up in arms when they heard what Wiggin had done.
‘You know what this means, don’t you?’ Arthur Ogden sat on an upturned orange-box among the rows of young cabbages and leeks on his allotment.
Dolly, bent double over the tender plants, gave a short reply. ‘Yes, it means no more drinking after hours. And a bleeding good thing too!’ She stood up to roll back her sleeves and fix her hair.
‘You don’t mean that. Think about it, if Duke does get chucked out over this and a new man comes in, and that new man happens to be a stickler for the rules, what then?’ Arthur groaned at the prospect of many early nights ahead.
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