Sure and Certain Death

Copyright © 2009 Barbara Nadel

The right of Barbara Nadel to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2011

Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

eISBN: 978 0 7553 8646 8

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Table of Contents

About the Author

Trained as an actress, Barbara Nadel used to work in mental health services. Born in the East End of London, she now writes full time. She received the Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger for her novel
Deadly Web
. She is also the author of the highly acclaimed Inspector İkmen series set in Turkey.

To all of those whose minds have been taken by war

Prologue

February 1941, Plaistow, East London

I came across what was left of Nellie Martin completely by accident. Not as I knew that great hunk of meat I saw in that house was Nellie Martin at the time. Neither me nor my young apprentice, Arthur, could tell whether what we saw was even human. But it stank, and as I tried to get closer to it to find out what it was, the shattered floorboards underneath the thing made it quiver like a piece of liver on a butcher’s chopping board. I felt sick. Poor Arthur
was
sick. In spite of my profession being what it is, I hadn’t expected anything like this. What even I do rarely brings with it such horror.

I’m an undertaker. My name is Francis Thomas Hancock and I’m forty-eight years old. A veteran of the Great War of 1914–18, I still find it difficult to take in the fact that we’re at war with the Germans once again now. I thought I’d seen everything out in the trenches of Flanders. But ever since the Luftwaffe have been trying to bomb our poor old London into surrender, my mind has been tortured all over again. Not that it ever really healed after the First Lot. I’m a man who isn’t ‘right’, a man whose brain is so broken it can’t always be trusted. I am a lunatic who sees and hears things that are not there. But not this time. This time when I went into what was left of that house in New City Road, Plaistow, I knew that the horror was real because Arthur was seeing it too.

‘What the . . .’ the boy started once he’d finished being sick. ‘Mr H, what the . . .’

‘I don’t know what it is, Arthur,’ I said as I carried on looking at the thing, unable to take my eyes off it.

We’d come to do a job, me and the boy. An old character called Herbert Wills had passed away in the house next door to the one we were in now, and we’d come to take his body back to my shop up on the Barking Road. But Herbert had been a big man, twenty stone at the very least, and so we’d decided to take his body out via the passage that runs along the back of the houses on New City Road. The reason we were in the house next door at all was because we were taking a short cut. After all, if a place is empty and in ruins and your motives are pure, as ours were, then why not?

‘Do you think it’s human?’

‘Yes, it’s my belief it is a person, Arthur,’ I said. The thing was on a chair, and dangling in a place where a leg would probably be in the normal course of events was a human foot. I looked at it hard just to make really sure, but it was definitely a foot.

‘This house was bombed out weeks ago and so this . . . person can’t have died in a raid,’ I said.

There hadn’t been a big raid on London for two weeks. The last really big one, on the 11th of January, had been the direct hit on Bank station. Before that we’d had the terrible 29th of December 1940 set-to. The night of the firestorm when St Paul’s Cathedral, and yours truly with it as it happened, was almost burnt to a crisp. People were saying that maybe because he failed to get the cathedral, Hitler was losing the will to keep on pounding at us. I didn’t trust that idea myself. I still don’t.

‘Died?’ Arthur, now just about able to look at the terrible thing on the chair, said, ‘What kind of thing can have made someone die like that?’

‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘it wasn’t some
thing
but some
one
.’

Arthur was about to turn eighteen at the time. Only a kid. He looked at me, struck. But then Arthur hadn’t seen active service, and unlike me, he hadn’t seen murder be it on or off the field of battle.

‘Get back up to the Barking Road and go to the police station,’ I told him. ‘Tell them we’ve found a body in a bombed-out house.’

He made to go without another word and with a lot of haste. I couldn’t blame him for that, but before he went I said, ‘And pop your head around the Willses’ door before you go. Tell them we’ve got a bit of a problem but we’ll be back round to pick up Herbert just as soon as we can.’

As he moved bits of shattered door and other unidentifiable pieces of wood out of his way, Arthur said, ‘All right. But Mr H, what will you . . .’

‘I’ll wait here,’ I said.

‘With . . .’

‘With some poor creature who met its end in what would seem to be a bad way,’ I replied. ‘We can’t leave it alone here in case it frightens others. And anyway, Arthur, getting the dead where they need to be is what we do, and this poor soul does not need to be here.’

Arthur pushed his way out of that crumbling house without another word. He knows my philosophy. Undertaking is about care. The dead, helpless as they are, need assistance to reach their final destination. It’s our job to make sure that they get there without undue molestation or just plain useless interference from the living. Between the living and the dead, the undertaker, in my opinion, is not wholly in one state or the other. That suits me fine.

I stood over that bleeding mound of what had once been human, the wrecked floor beneath my feet shifting and splintering in the wind and under the weight of the dying house that was threatening to crush it into the earth below. As time passed, I became accustomed to the sight of the body, just like I became accustomed to the possibility of the building falling and taking my own life from me.

Chapter One

I
t didn’t take long for the Plaistow gossip mill to grind into action. I’d said nothing to anyone, apart from the coppers and young Arthur of course, about what we had found in the house on New City Road. But although they may not look too countrified, a lot of London boroughs still have the souls of villages – with all the attention to gossip and rumour that goes with that. This is especially so in the East End, and very particularly in my borough of West Ham. Plaistow, which is in the middle of the borough, is a place where people know a lot about their neighbours. By people I mean, of course, women mainly, and by women I mean particularly women of an anxious turn of mind. Like my sister Nancy.

Two days after my and Arthur’s grim discovery, she came to me with an even more drawn and frightened-looking expression on her face than usual. Nancy is older than me; she’s a spinster, and in common with a lot of older single ladies, she worries. She listens to gossip with what could be viewed almost as relish, but she rarely hears news that doesn’t either outrage or frighten her. I was out in the shop yard grooming the horses when she came down from our flat and leaned against the water butt.

‘Why didn’t you tell me you found Nellie Martin dead up New City Road?’ she said. As usual, she got right to the point. Nancy is a very good-living and sincerely religious woman, but she doesn’t know very much about how to talk to people – not even her own brother.

‘It wasn’t my place to talk about such things,’ I replied. ‘I didn’t know what the coppers wanted said, if anything. And anyway, what’s it all to you?’

‘I was at school with Nellie is what it is!’ Nan responded aggressively. Her face, which like mine and like our mother’s is brown, was, I could see, flushed with the anger she felt inside.

‘Oh, Nan, I’m s—’

‘Never liked her,’ Nan continued as she folded her arms underneath her thin, almost nonexistent breasts. ‘She was one of them who called me names. But that ain’t the point. You should’ve told me!’

As kids we’d gone to different schools, Nan to New City Road School and me to the grammar. We’d both of course suffered our share of bullying. Only my younger sister, Aggie, had not come in for any of that. But then Aggie hasn’t taken on the darkness that Nan and I get from our Indian mother. Fair like our English father, Aggie is also a completely different character. She doesn’t take any nonsense from anyone. I’m not a pushover myself, but Nancy just goes into herself and broods when people are unkind to her. Ill equipped for the knocks and blows of life, she keeps herself to herself and spends most of her time looking after our widowed mother. Not that she isn’t bitter about being a woman alone. She feels her ‘misfortune’ acutely, and if Mum, or the Duchess as we all call her, on account of her very proper manners, were not so sick with her arthritis, I think that Nan could be a very bored and nasty busybody. As it is, she rarely has time to pass on what she hears from other bitter and twisted spinsters after Mass on Sunday or on the local grapevine. This time, however, she’d known the person the latest gossip was about.