Sure and Certain Death (2 page)

I finished brushing Sita, the larger of our two geldings, before I turned to Nancy and said, ‘Look, even if I’d known you’d known her, I couldn’t have said anything. I didn’t know who she was myself until the coppers managed to identify her the following day. She didn’t live in that house, you know.’

‘No. Iniskilling Road. Her family all live there.’

There was a pause. Nan looked down at her feet and for a moment I thought that she might be crying.

I began to move towards her. ‘But if you didn’t like this woman . . .’

‘Don’t mean I can’t mourn her!’ Nan said as she very quickly pulled away from me. My older sister doesn’t take affection easily. ‘Frank, they say she was murdered, skinned alive!’

‘Well I don’t know about . . .’

‘My Uncle Woofie told my mum that a lot of the old people down our manor are saying that it’s Jack the Ripper come back again.’

The voice that had interrupted me was female, smoke-dried and came, unmistakably, from our office girl, Doris Rosen. Doris lives in Spitalfields, where the famous murderer Jack the Ripper had done his evil deeds back in Victorian times. No doubt some of the old people over there did remember those days. And given the state of Nellie Martin’s body when Arthur and myself found her, I could clearly see where the idea that the Ripper was on the loose again had come from. I hadn’t seen much beyond just a big piece of meat with a foot hanging from it at the time. That the body had been skinned hadn’t actually occurred to me. But that detail wasn’t just gossip; the coppers themselves had told me it had happened. Jack the Ripper, albeit only once, had skinned one of his prostitute victims, Mary Jane Kelly in 1888. I wondered what, if anything, Nellie Martin had done for a living. I also began to think about a lady close to me in that profession too.

‘Horrible!’ Doris dragged heavily on her fag and shook her head slowly.

‘I knew Nellie Martin from school,’ Nancy told her.

‘Oh!’ Doris was clearly shocked. ‘Oh, Miss Nancy, how horrible for you!’

‘Yes.’

I was on the point of mentioning the fact that Nan and this Nellie hadn’t actually been friends when my sister said, ‘She was a spiteful girl as I remember her, but it brings me no pleasure that she’s dead. She must’ve suffered. I wonder what she can have been doing in a bombed-out house on New City Road?’

‘Well it’s only about a minute away,’ I said. Iniskilling Road, Plaistow, crosses the top of Jedburgh Road, which is then cut in half by New City Road. It’s no distance at all. ‘Maybe she was looking for someone or something in there.’

‘And gets horribly murdered for her pains!’ Doris said. ‘Blimey! She have any family, did she, Miss Nancy?’

My sister frowned, visibly thinking it through. ‘She married,’ she said. ‘But I think her old man died. There’s a daughter somewhere or other.’

‘Oh. Shame.’

‘Her father had a greengrocer’s down Prince Regent Lane. The whole family always worked in there. Unless Nellie was on war work, of course . . .’

There
was
a greengrocer’s called Martin’s down Prince Regent Lane. Several tired-looking women worked there as I recalled. Had a woman brutalised and skinned until she died really once worked in such an ordinary place? But then if she had, why not? Extraordinarily bad things happen to very ordinary people. In fact more often than not the victims of strange and terrible crimes are very poor and very workaday folk. Nellie Martin had not, however, as far as I knew, and unlike the Ripper’s Mary Jane Kelly, been a prostitute. I was relieved about that.

Just because the Jerries had seemingly given up on destroying our city didn’t mean that Hancock and Co., Undertakers, were not busy. This is a poor manor. Even without the bombing, death comes sooner rather than later here. The Royal Docks, probably West Ham’s biggest place of work, takes a big toll. Loading goods on and off ships is hard work for men who also play hard in the pubs that line the streets down to the docksides of Canning Town, Silvertown and Custom House. Those not worked to death die in fights or just drink themselves into an early grave. An example of the latter was a bloke called Sidney Shiner. He’d just turned fifty when he keeled over in a pub called the Chandelier in Canning Town. No one noticed for quite a while because apparently he quite often fell unconscious in his local of an evening. It was, so local legend had it, the funny colour Sidney seemed to take on after a while that finally gave the game away. That had been the day before I’d been called. Now, just over twenty-four hours later, Sidney was about to be buried in East Ham Jewish Cemetery. Unlike Christians, like my family, the Jews put their dead away with utmost haste.

So then I had a lot to do to take my mind off what I’d found in that house in New City Road. Once I’d prepared the horses and the hearse, I made sure that my bearers, young Arthur and an old geezer called Walter Bridges, were as smart as these strange times allow. Time was, when my old dad was still alive, funerals even in West Ham were ornate affairs. We had a team of very elegant-looking young men bearing for us in those days, not to mention the mutes some of the wealthier families used to insist upon. But with all the men gone to the forces, we’re left with kids like Arthur, well-meaning if a bit dozy at times, and old men like Walter, whose love of a good pint can be a bone of contention between him and me. That said, we picked up Sidney Shiner from the boarding house he’d lived in in Canning Town and got over to East Ham just before the Reverend Ritblatt, the officiating rabbi.

Sidney Shiner had never married, and so the only family in attendance were a brother, a sister and their various children. Some of the blokes he’d worked with down the docks had taken the time to come and pay their respects. Apart from those, there was just one rather elegantly dressed middle-aged lady. When I saw her, slightly set apart from the family and the workmates, I went over to her. I did I confess have a frown on my face by this time.

‘What are you doing here, Hannah?’ I said as I sidled up to her and put one of my hands on her slim, black-clad shoulder.

She looked at me and smiled. ‘I knew him,’ she answered simply.

‘Sidney Shiner?’

‘Canning Town ain’t a big Jewish area,’ she said. ‘Me and Sidney, we . . .’

‘You didn’t . . .’

‘Give him one?’ Her face darkened as I looked around to make sure that no one was listening. But the Reverend Ritblatt had started his spiel and so everyone else was attending to that. ‘Sidney lived inside a booze bottle. He weren’t interested in anything I had on offer,’ Hannah continued angrily. ‘Jews know each other just like Italians, the Maltese, you lot . . . I’ve told you this, H, we’ve talked about it before.’

We had, and her rebuke made me hang my head. But it didn’t cure me. Nothing I don’t think ever will. I’ve been in love with Hannah Jacobs for years. In fact she is the only woman I’ve ever loved romantically, and although she was when I met her and continues to be a prostitute, I know that she loves me too. To Hannah, I am ‘H’, a wounded, mad and besotted old soldier. I am also the only constant person in her life. Nothing, however, comes for free, and so much as our time together is spent now as man and lady friend in the normal way of things, I know that there are other men she ‘sees’ for business purposes. I’d pay her rent for her, I’d marry her if she would only let me. But Hannah is an independent woman, and so I remain a very jealous man.

Once Sidney Shiner was in the ground and I’d offered my condolences to his family, I sent Arthur and Walter back to the shop with the hearse. Hannah hadn’t even tried to approach any of the Shiner family on account of her being very well known amongst the folk of Canning Town. She didn’t want to embarrass them, and so she just waited for me to come and see her, as she knew I would, outside the cemetery on Masterman Road. She’d worked out that despite the fact I’d sent the hearse on ahead, I probably couldn’t stay for very long. By that time it was already almost midday, and I had another funeral to do over at the East London Cemetery at half past two. But in spite of the bone-aching cold of that day, it was nice just to be out and about with her, even if it was only for a few minutes or so.

‘How have you been?’ she asked as she took my arm and began walking slowly with me towards East Ham High Street. ‘You been sleeping now the bombing’s eased off?’

Hannah isn’t the only one who asks after my health. Ever since I came back from the Great War with my mind in so many pieces, my body a shade of what it once had been, people have always asked me. But then even once my physical wounds had healed, my brain remained as it is to this day. Damaged, it makes me see and hear things that aren’t always real, vile things from that horror in the trenches. To be honest, had I not had Arthur with me when I found it, I would have been inclined to think that Nellie Martin’s body wasn’t real. What the trenches have also left me with is a fear of being buried alive. So when the sirens go off to let us know the Luftwaffe are on their way, I don’t go down to any shelter. I just run – anywhere, everywhere, as fast as I can. Sleep, therefore, over time, becomes a stranger to me, and my insanity grows accordingly.

‘I get the odd hour or so,’ I said as I pulled Hannah close in to my side. ‘Slightest noise still wakes me, but . . .’

‘Seeing what happened to that poor woman down New City Road probably didn’t help,’ Hannah said.

I stopped, turned towards her and looked into her strong, handsome face. ‘Who told you about that?’ I said. ‘God blimey, my own family have only just found out about that!’

Hannah shrugged. ‘Everyone knows about the skinned body.’

‘Yes, but me finding it and . . .’

‘Listen, with few bombs to talk about, people have to gossip about other things,’ Hannah said. ‘So we’d all heard the story but it was Bella who said she’d heard that it was an undertaker who’d found the body.’

‘So how did you know that it was me?’ I said.

Hannah gave me a slightly pitying look. ‘Now, H . . .’

I sighed. It’s stupid not to acknowledge it, but sometimes it is hard to accept I’m as instantly recognisable as I am. ‘So was it the colour of my skin or the way I behave?’

Hannah gave me another look. What my sister Nancy would call an old-fashioned look.

‘That mad wog undertaker, wasn’t it?’ I said.

Hannah didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. But then by the time the coppers had turned up to that bombed-out house in New City Road, I had been talking to myself. Or rather I’d been talking to what we now knew had been Nellie Martin. A man with hair the colour of coal and coffee-brown skin talking to a mutilated corpse. Even I can’t blame people for the fact they pass things like that on. By means of either the coppers, their families or young Arthur, word had reached Hannah’s mate Bella and probably all the rest of Canning Town too. We started walking again then, and Hannah, sort of, changed the subject.

‘The dead woman was in her fifties,’ she said.

‘Went to school with my sister,’ I replied. ‘Bullied her.’

‘Nancy?’

‘Yes.’

Hannah shook her head. ‘Still, terrible way to go. They say, so Bella told me, that she was a bit of a religious type.’

‘Was she?’ Nan hadn’t mentioned it and so it hadn’t occurred to me that Nellie Martin might be a churchy person.

‘Always in and out of some church on the Barking Road.’

‘There are lots of churches on the Barking Road, Hannah,’ I said.

‘I suppose there are,’ she replied. Then just before we got to East Ham High Street she said, ‘But you’re all right now? You’re over the shock of it, aren’t you?’

I smiled and said that yes, I was. But Hannah still looked worried and she was right to do so. I’ve a bit of a history of getting involved with the ins and outs of strange deaths that come my way. But I did feel all right at the time and I was quite sincere when I said that I was to Hannah.

Chapter Two

I didn’t find the body of Violet Dickens, but then it could be said that it didn’t need to be found. It sort of made itself apparent.

Three weeks before, her old man had reported her missing to the police. Not that they will or even can do much about people going missing these days. Nothing, according to the story that went about afterwards, happened until nearly a week after I found Nellie Martin’s mutilated corpse. There’d been a big raid on the night of the 29th, and it was after that that Violet’s husband noticed the smell. He thought at first it came from the lodger’s room upstairs. But it didn’t. It came from the attic. She was, so my sister Nancy informed me, in a ‘shocking state’ when she was found.