Sure and Certain Death (16 page)

I saw Arthur smile, but Tilly didn’t so much as crack her mouth. Youngish, probably in her early thirties, she wasn’t an attractive woman. True, she had rather pretty long red hair, but as well as being a big woman, she was also a very flabby one, flabby, and by the look of her, bad-tempered too. From my point of view she didn’t look exactly approachable. She slammed the pints of bitter she drew down in front of my boys and then immediately walked away from them with a sour expression on her face. How I was going to talk to her about Fred Dickens I couldn’t imagine. How I was going to fool Terry Oldroyd into believing I could drink a half a pint of whisky and still stand up was another mystery I had to solve.

‘Drink up, Mr H!’ the landlord said as if reading the thoughts in my mind. ‘There’s more where that come from!’ He tapped the side of his nose conspiratorially. Not that black-market booze is any great secret in a place like Canning Town. But the landlord was drunk.

About half an hour passed before I asked Walter to go outside and check on the horses. He wasn’t keen to do this, but he unlocked the door of the snug and went to go out anyway. Unfortunately, as he left, someone else came in. Ronnie Arnold burst through the door as drunk as a lord and weeping.

‘Tilly!’ he shouted as he looked across the bar at the startled woman behind the beer pumps. ‘Tilly, Fred’s in prison! He done a terrible thing! A terrible fucking thing!’

‘Bloody hell!’ Terry Oldroyd got up off his bar stool and pushed his way through the crowds towards the man at the door. ‘Ronnie Arnold, how dare you come here!’ he roared. ‘My poor bleedin’ mother not a day under the earth and here you are, drunk as fuck!’

‘But Mr Oldroyd, Fred’s not gonna come for Tilly no more,’ Ronnie Arnold spluttered by way of a reply. ‘He done his missus and now he’s gonna hang!’

For once, Tilly’s face showed some emotion. It was horror and shock. ‘Fred . . .’

None of them obviously knew what I, and Ronnie Arnold, did – namely that Fred had been in police custody.

‘Fred Dickens killed his missus so he could be with Tilly!’ Ronnie Arnold said to what had now become a completely silent pub. People looked at each other; the landlord looked at me with a very puzzled expression on his face. But not a word was spoken until Terry Oldroyd took Ronnie by his collar and said, ‘Ronnie, you weren’t invited to this wake.’

‘Yes, but . . .’

‘My mother’s died, and coming here like this, it ain’t on,’ Oldroyd said. ‘I don’t care what Fred Dickens may or may not have done, this is my mother’s big day and you ain’t going to spoil it!’

He told one of his sons to open up the door to the snug once again and he threw Ronnie Arnold through it and into the street. The boy then locked the door behind the drunk and people began slowly to talk once again. No mention was made of the incident, until some time later I heard Mr Oldroyd call his barmaid over and say, ‘You know anything about Fred Dickens doing his missus in, do you?’

‘No, Mr Oldroyd,’ Tilly replied. ‘No, I don’t.’

‘Because I know you and he was close,’ Terry Oldroyd said to her with more than a little edge to his voice. ‘I never liked it, and if you ever get close to either him or that fucking Ronnie Arnold you can have your cards.’

Tilly looked down at the floor and didn’t say anything. I used the fact that Oldroyd was distracted to give my whisky to one of the Tidal Basin’s older residents, and then I went and talked to my sister. Although she hadn’t enjoyed doing Elsie Oldroyd’s funeral, she said that it had made her feel useful. I just hoped that she wasn’t mortifying herself too much.

The wake was breaking up, with Terry Oldroyd passed out in the public bar, by the time I had a chance to speak to Tilly. I leaned over the bar towards her as she washed up glasses in a bowl. I told her I knew all about Fred Dickens being in police custody.

Tilly looked at me with resentment on her joyless face and then she said, ‘I don’t know nothing about what Fred might have done.’

‘Ronnie is saying that Fred killed his wife in order to be with you,’ I said. ‘The police will come and want to speak to you.’

‘Well let them come, I ain’t got nothing to hide,’ Tilly said. ‘I ain’t done nothing wrong!’

‘Yes, but . . .’

‘Look,’ she said as she screwed her thick features up into a small, resentful ball, ‘me, Mr Dickens and Mr Arnold, we liked a drink together. All right? What either of them two might have thought about me is their business. But I just had the odd drop with them and that was that. If Mr Dickens did kill his missus to be with me, then I knew nothing about it.’

What Tilly was saying was probably true. If Fred Dickens had indeed been in love with her, it was possibly something she had never known. No one except Fred probably did know that. But when Ronnie Arnold had burst into the snug earlier, I’d caught him looking at Tilly and I’d definitely seen passion in his eyes.

Nancy, true to her word, went up to Claybury that afternoon to see Nathan Abrahams. While not really having the time to accompany her, I nevertheless asked her if she wanted me to go up there with her. But she said that she didn’t. The old man had been very keen to see her again, and only her, and both Nan and myself agreed that Nathan might be more likely to talk about his late daughter and her friends to one of those old comrades of Marie. She promised to be home before dark.

It was getting dusky by the time I left to go up to East Ham at half past five, and Nan still wasn’t home. I had a few people to see before I was due to visit Mrs Darling at seven. I wasn’t easy in my mind about my sister, but I went anyway. I went first to get some mantles for the gas lamps from Bedwells, and then walked next door to Plaistow police station. Fred Dickens was, according to Sergeant Hill, still in custody, and when I told him about my observation of Ronnie Arnold in the Tidal Basin he wasn’t surprised.

‘Fred has it that Ronnie’s taken with this Tilly and that Ronnie’s telling lies about him so that he can be with her,’ Sergeant Hill said. He took his helmet off and wiped some sweat away from his brow. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Are you going to bring Ronnie in?’ I asked.

The copper shrugged. ‘He’s made a statement,’ he said. ‘It’s up to Fred to be forthcoming about this barmaid.’

‘You think he is in love with Tilly?’

‘Oh, he admits that now,’ Sergeant Hill replied. ‘What we want to know at the moment is why he lied about it in the first place. I also do wonder, I must be honest, whether he did kill poor old Vi. I mean, her body was up in that attic for weeks. Skinned, seeping blood everywhere . . .’

‘Ronnie Arnold was in that house too,’ I said.

‘Yes, but what motive would Ronnie have had for killing Violet?’

‘To put the blame on Fred so he could be free to have his way with Tilly?’

Sergeant Hill shook his head and then just gently laughed. ‘These men are drunks, Mr H,’ he said. ‘They can barely string a sentence together for most of the time. I can’t see either of them thinking anything through, as it were.’

‘Yes, but if you’re saying that Fred killed Violet . . .’

‘On the spur of the moment, in a burst of violence . . .’

‘You don’t skin someone on the spur of the moment!’ I said.

Sergeant Hill looked down at the ground and then he said, ‘Mr Hancock, all we can do is look at each and every possibility as it arises. East Ham are looking into the death of Marie Abrahams and we’re doing what we can with Violet, Dolly O’Dowd and Nellie Martin. At the moment, with Violet, we have her husband in custody because he had a reason to want her dead.’

I wanted to go on about the other women and the connections that I had made between them, but I knew it was useless to even begin to point such things out. The police work as they work and they operate in very clearly defined and discrete divisions.

It was seven on the dot by the time I got to Margaret Darling’s house in East Ham. When I knocked on the door she answered it herself, lumbering slowly down the corridor like a wheezing horse. ‘It’s just me,’ she said as she led me through into her parlour. The table she used for her seances was pushed up against the back wall of the room this time and two comfortable chairs were drawn up in front of a small fire in the grate.

‘My husband’s fire-watching and everyone else went hours ago,’ she said as she offered me one of the chairs and then lowered herself slowly down into the other.

‘The note you sent me this morning, Mrs Darling,’ I said. ‘You wanted to talk to me.’

‘Yes.’ She offered me a cup of tea, but I declined. I wanted to find out what Mrs Darling wanted and then get home to see whether Nan had turned up back from Claybury or not.

‘Mr Hancock, I’m not a woman easily scared,’ Mrs Darling said. ‘But I am being watched and I don’t just have my own feelings to go by with that.’

‘Watched?’

‘If I’m honest, I had the feeling that someone was observing me well before you came here and we talked about all that White Feather business,’ she said. ‘I didn’t of course know that my being watched might be connected to that then. But when you told me just who had been killed and I realised that I’d known them girls in the Great War . . .’

‘Mrs Darling, you’re right to be cautious,’ I said, ‘but what I said about the White Feather girls is only my idea. I could be very wrong. The last thing I wanted to do was really frighten you.’

‘Mr Hancock, I am not imagining it,’ Mrs Darling continued. ‘Linnit told me I was being watched.’

‘Linnit?’

‘My spirit guide,’ she said. Then she added very matter-of-factly, ‘She passed over in the last century.’

‘Oh.’ I failed to keep the disbelief out of my voice, which she picked up on immediately.

‘I know how it sounds,’ she said. ‘But Mr Hancock, Linnit don’t get things wrong. Cissy’ll tell you, Esme Robinson’ll tell you, although I don’t suppose you’d be too pleased to see her and her husband again.’

I sighed. She was right, though. I had no desire to see that deluded war-glorying couple ever again. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t concerned for Esme. I was. I asked if Linnit had mentioned anyone else.

‘No, just me,’ Mrs Darling said. ‘She don’t know who’s watching or why, beyond saying that whoever it is means me harm.’

‘She said that?’

‘Yes.’

There was a pause then. I looked into the small fire in the grate struggling to come to life around three tiny coals, and then I said, ‘Mrs Darling, you said that you have, besides what Linnit has had to say, felt watched.’

She sighed. ‘I don’t know how to describe it to you, Mr Hancock,’ she said. ‘It’s just a feeling as if wherever I go and whatever I do, someone is watching me. I’ve been like it about three months now.’

‘And do you ever see anyone?’ I asked.

‘No.’ She shrugged. ‘If I had, I would’ve gone to the police. But I never see anyone. It’s just . . .’ She leaned towards me, her brow furrowed. ‘Everything I do is being noticed,’ she said. ‘When I’m indoors, when I’m out, when my old man goes to work and . . .’

‘Have you told your husband about this, Mrs Darling?’

She pulled a sour face. ‘He wouldn’t listen!’

‘Yes, but . . .’

‘Mr Hancock, my Frank goes out to get away from me and all my table-turning, as he calls it,’ she said. ‘You know, if my Linnit actually manifested in front of him he still wouldn’t believe in her.’

‘So why are you telling me this?’ I asked. ‘Might I not be as sceptical as your husband?’

‘You know about the White Feather girls,’ Mrs Darling said. ‘You made those connections before anyone. And besides . . .’ she fixed me with a gaze that was rather frighteningly intense, ‘you see things.’

I didn’t answer her, but I did frown. I felt cold now too. In spite of the little fire I was decidedly chilly.

‘Terrible things,’ Mrs Darling continued. ‘Heads and legs, spirits screaming and tormented from the Great War.’

I turned my head away, but even as I did so I spoke, I had to. ‘How do you know what I see?’ I said. I’m well known as a bloke not always in possession of his right mind, but very few people know what I see and hear when the terror comes upon me. In fact, only Hannah really knows what I go through, and Hannah, I knew, did not know this woman.

‘Linnit tells me what’s what,’ Mrs Darling said. ‘She can see what torments you, Mr Hancock.’

And I knew that according to her own lights, Mrs Darling wasn’t lying. Linnit, just as surely as she’d told the medium that she was being watched by someone, had also told Mrs Darling that I heard and saw terrible things from the Great War. But try as I might, I couldn’t talk to this woman about that. I just couldn’t.

‘So, Mrs Darling,’ I said, ‘what is to be done about your feelings of being watched? The threat you feel from that?’

‘Well I can’t go to the coppers with just the word of me and Linnit,’ the medium said. ‘They’d have me put away. No. I know that what I’m feeling is real, and I think you know that it’s real too, Mr Hancock. But I don’t know who is doing this or really why. What I do know is that I want someone to know that this is happening, in case something should occur.’

‘You mean . . .’

‘Mr Hancock, I ain’t afraid to die . . .’

‘But Mrs Darling, if that is how you feel, you must have someone to be with you. Talk to your husband! I’m sure that Cissy would . . .’

‘Alone as she is, Cissy has other things to do,’ Mrs Darling said. ‘She ain’t here now because she’s grave-tending. Her husband, her parents and her uncle Bob. He had a shop up the Broadway years ago. Cissy loved her uncle. But she’s still a home to run, and besides, I need some time on me own. Just me and Linnit and the other spirits. Mediums who surround themselves with the living all the time are no bloody good.’

‘Mrs Darling,’ I said, ‘I would hate it if something happened to you.’

She leaned forward and patted my hand, smiling. But she didn’t say anything more apart from reiterating her thanks. Uneasy still, I left shortly afterwards, determined that even if they laughed at me, I’d pass what Mrs Darling had said on to the police when I next got the chance. But then the sirens went and all rational thought left my mind. As I ran back on to East Ham High Street, I heard the screaming of men long since dead follow me into the darkness.