Sure and Certain Death (26 page)

I said, ‘Yes.’

All the rooms except the kitchen were blacked out. They were all dusty, damp and in the case of the bedroom at the front of the house, full up with cardboard boxes and wooden crates filled with God knew what. They’re big places, the workers’ houses on Abbey Lane, and so all three bedrooms were large. Only two, however, had beds in and only one, the one over the kitchen at the back, looked as if it could be in use.

‘Bit of a two an’ eight, ain’t it, Mr H?’ Walter said as he looked around the top floor with me. ‘And where’s the old girl anyway? That bloke I spoke to said that Mrs Hoskin was some sort of cripple.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe her daughter and Nancy took the old woman out in a wheelchair.’

But then I remembered that I’d seen one of those in the chaotic parlour downstairs. Everything felt bad and wrong and I found that now my heart was really pounding. We went back downstairs again, for want really of anything else to do. Back in the kitchen, it was Walter who put his hand on the side of the teapot and said, ‘’Ere, this is still warm!’

‘So whoever made the tea can’t be very far away,’ I said.

‘Don’t seem like it.’

We went to the four houses nearest to the Hoskins’ place to ask if anyone had seen Alice, but only one person, a bloke of about sixty, was in. He said he’d seen no one all day except the bloke we’d already spoken to.

‘Well they can’t have gone far, given that the teapot was still warm,’ I said to Walter as we walked down the path of the last house we visited.

‘There’s a lot of ground around here, Mr H,’ Walter replied gloomily. ‘Down by the Lee and around the back of the pumping station. People get lost over here. Gangsters, some say, get rid of the bodies of their rivals here.’

‘And some say, no doubt, that the last Tsar of Russia and his family are buried down by West Ham underground station,’ I responded crossly. ‘Walter, we are looking for my sister! I’m very concerned about her. If you can’t say anything helpful, then don’t say anything at all!’

A bit shamefaced now, Walter said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr H.’

I looked up and down Abbey Lane twice before I decided that we’d go left towards the pumping station. Just before the station there is a bridge over the road that carries the great pipes full of sewage from the city to the plant. On top of the bridge there is a little lane that I can remember playing about on with my mates as a kid. It always stank up there and was known very aptly as ‘the Sewer Bank’. This path stretches in fact as far as my home in Plaistow. It is of course at Abbey Mills that it is at its most pungent. I knew there was a staircase just before the bridge, which Walter and I headed for now. As we got there, a thin young woman in blue work trousers, her head covered with a green scarf wound into a turban, came down the steps towards us. Her face was made up, bright and red, like an American film star, and she smoked a fag with all the aplomb of the lovely Greta Garbo. She gave me a bit of an old-fashioned stare as she looked down on Walter and myself, which of course was because of what I was wearing.

‘Miss,’ I said, ‘have you seen a lady or maybe two ladies walking about up there or maybe down by the water?’

She frowned. ‘Why?’

‘One of them is my sister,’ I said. ‘And I need to speak to her urgently. She’s gone, I think, for a walk with a lady called Miss Hoskin.’

‘What, Cissy?’

‘Yes!’

‘Why?’

‘What?’

‘Cissy’s my neighbour, and she might be a funny old thing but I can’t just go giving out her whereabouts to two blokes I don’t know,’ the woman said. ‘I mean, you could be anyone, couldn’t you? You could be Nazis.’

I looked at Walter and said, ‘God almighty!’ I know that careless talk can cost lives, but government instructions together with natural East End suspicion were holding me up.

‘Now listen, love,’ Walter said, ‘we need to find these ladies as a matter of importance. Life and death.’

‘Yeah, well . . .’

‘Do I look like a fucking Nazi!’ I finally exploded. ‘Miss, I am an undertaker with skin the colour of tea. Nazis, you’ll find, won’t usually go around in hearses and will probably be blond. Now . . .’

‘Blimey, keep you bleedin’ hair on!’ she said. ‘As it happens I’ve just seen Cissy. Up on the bank picking dandelion leaves for tea, she said.’

Neither Walter nor myself said another word. We just ran past that woman and up those stairs as fast as our legs would carry us.

Chapter Twenty-Two

F
rom the Sewer Bank it’s possible to see the top of the pumping station. Even in the thick, smoggy afternoon light I could see that its decoration in blue, red and gold was still in large part intact. What I couldn’t see, for just a moment, was anyone about. It was actually Walter who first noticed the small figure crouching down apparently picking dandelion leaves from the side of the pathway.

‘Mr H, look!’

It was definitely Cissy. Wearing a limp floral dress several sizes too big for her, her thin hair hanging over her face as she pulled the plants up from the ground with long, skinny fingers. I went up to her and said, ‘Cissy?’

She put a hand on the bag she was apparently collecting dandelion into before she looked up at me and then smiled. ‘Mr Hancock!’

‘Cissy, where is my sister?’ I said. There was no point beating about the bush. ‘Where is Nancy?’

‘Your sister? I don’t know what you mean,’ she replied. ‘I’m here on my own.’

‘Where’s your mum, love?’ Walter put in as I stared at this woman I knew absolutely had to be lying.

‘My mum? She’s at home,’ Cissy said. ‘Tucked up in bed where I left her. Mother is an invalid.’

‘Yes, we know.’

‘We also know that your mum ain’t at your house,’ Walter said. ‘No one’s at your house, love.’

Although I would have said it was impossible before it happened, Cissy paled.

‘Well . . .’

‘Just take me to where Nancy is,’ I said. It wasn’t easy to control the anger that I could feel rising inside of me now.

Cissy stood up and pulled her bag close in towards her chest.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said. ‘I don’t know anyone by the name of Nancy.’

‘Yes, you do, you . . .’ I stepped towards her, but Walter, seeing that I was probably too full of anger to be reasonable, got in between us.

‘Now look, love,’ he said, ‘we ain’t asking here. Mr H knows that his sister come to see you. Now where is she? Don’t muck us about, love!’

Cissy put a trembling hand into her bag and said, ‘Don’t threaten me! How dare you threaten a woman on her own!’

‘We’re not . . .’

All I saw was a bright flash pass in front of my eyes. Walter flung an arm up as if to ward something off, and then with a rapidity not normally associated with Walter Bridges, he hit the ground like a sack, clinging on to his arm with his one free hand and screaming.

‘Bloody hell, she’s got a knife!’

Cissy, a large, bloody knife in her hand, began to run. I looked down at Walter, who was clutching his forearm while trying simultaneously to wrap it up in his neck muffler. ‘Get after her!’ he said. ‘Fucking mare stabbed me!’

I flung myself forwards. Cissy, the knife in her hand trailing a thin drool of blood behind her, was going hell for leather in front of me. It had been decades since I’d actually played on this stretch of the bank, and I didn’t have a clue as to where she might be going.

‘Walter!’ I called behind me, gasping as I did so. ‘Get down to the houses! Get help!’

I didn’t know whether he’d heard me, or even if it were possible for the poor old sod to move at all. I just kept on ploughing forwards, gaining just a little on the woman in front of me as my lungs began to burn and feel as if they were about to burst. It came as a huge shock to me when Cissy suddenly took a dive to the left, off the path and down the side of the bank towards one of the tributaries of the River Lee. When I did finally pull level with where she’d disappeared, I glanced down and found myself looking only at brackish, sewage-filled water.

There were bushes, brambles and lots of long grass on the way down to that sad little elbow of the River Lee. We hadn’t had that much rain, but all the fog and smog and drizzle we had suffered had taken its toll, and my way down was wet and muddy. By the time I hit the slush at the river’s edge, my work suit was filthy. Inwardly I cursed. I would have done so out loud if I hadn’t been worried about hopefully coming upon Cissy by surprise. But as it happened she was waiting for me, propped up against an old woody bush. There was a long, thin, black-clad figure draped across her lap. It had thick black hair, and when I got closer, I could see the very familiar face easily. Nan, it appeared, was sleeping, or so I hoped.

‘Laudanum,’ Cissy said as she held the knife still stained with Walter’s blood up to Nancy’s neck. It was a large and serious piece of equipment. I remember that at the time I thought it might be something used by a butcher or a slaughterman. ‘My mum had bottles and bottles of it for her arthritis.’

The Duchess had been prescribed laudanum for her pain years ago too. But she’d put a stop to it. She didn’t like being asleep so much.

‘Where is your mother, Cissy?’ I asked as I looked down at my sister to make sure that she was indeed still breathing. To my relief she was. But she was still in the hands of this murderous woman and I knew that if I was to have any chance of getting the knife away from Cissy I’d have to try and keep her talking. I also didn’t know whether Walter had managed to stand up to go and get help. ‘Where is your mother?’ I repeated.

Cissy’s face creased up and she said, ‘She’s dead.’

‘Your neighbours don’t think she’s dead,’ I said as I struggled to keep my balance on the steep slope underneath my feet.

‘The week after Albert,’ Cissy said.

‘Albert?’

She looked up at me with eyes just on the edge of tears and said, ‘My young man. He died.’

‘In Claybury Hospital.’

‘You know,’ she replied as a statement of fact.

If her mother had died a week after her sweetheart, then she must have been dead for about a year. It had to have been a terrible blow for Cissy to lose her mother and her sweetheart all in one go. But if that were so, and notwithstanding the fact that Mrs Darling believed both of Cissy’s parents to be dead, why did her neighbours not seem to know?

‘Is that what all this is about?’ I said to Cissy. ‘Your young man who died?’

She turned her head to one side. Nan, her throat just lightly creased by Cissy’s knife, coughed a little before settling down into silence once again.

‘It’s about all of it,’ Cissy said. She looked at me, and not understanding what she meant, I frowned.

‘Everyone around me goes away or dies,’ she said. ‘I lose everything!’ It was said with such passion. ‘Nobody loses everything like I do!’ she continued. ‘Not Nellie Martin, not Marie Abrahams, not Violet Dickens not even that stupid, stupid Dolly O’Dowd!’

I inched slightly forwards, but then stopped when I saw the terrible look that Cissy was giving me. If she had killed as frequently and as viciously as I thought she had, I knew she’d have no compunction about murdering me or my sister.

‘Because you know what, Mr Hancock? You know what your sister and her friends did in the Great War? You know the damage that they caused to men all over the East End of London?’

‘Nancy and her friends were White Feather girls,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know until just recently. I was away at the time, fighting in the trenches. Cissy, I don’t approve. Had I known, I would have put a stop to it, but . . .’

‘I’ve got no quarrel with you,’ Cissy said. ‘But those women have to pay for what they did to Albert.’ She looked up at me with eyes full of pain. ‘He wasn’t strong, he didn’t have to fight. And yet those girls, they went on and on and on at him every time they saw him! “Why aren’t you in uniform, young man?” “Don’t you want to fight for King and country?” “What kind of man is it who doesn’t want to defend his country’s honour?” He said they used to follow him. I told him not to take any notice.’

‘But he joined up anyway.’

‘He lost his mind out there in those trenches. He couldn’t do it! He couldn’t do what they wanted him to do, he wasn’t strong enough.’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘When first he came back, he didn’t know me! Then when he did, all he could do was say my name! We never spoke again after he went away. Not like you and me are speaking now – never!’

‘Cissy, I do understand . . .’

‘I visited him in Claybury every day,’ she said. ‘While I was doing that, although I was still angry, I could manage. But then one day Albert died. He got that dysentery so many of the patients get in that type of hospital, and he died. He should never have been there! If he hadn’t been in the asylum he would still be alive!’

‘And then your mum?’

Cissy was crying now. ‘They just died! Both of them! I didn’t know what to do!’

I moved slightly closer to her.

‘I lost the people I loved the most! I knew I’d lose the house too! We could only stay there as long as Mum was alive! I had to pretend. Day in and day out, I had to pretend – to everyone!’ Her face darkened again and she said, ‘They had to pay, those women! They had to know what it felt like to lose!’

‘Cissy . . .’

‘I will get them all eventually, you know,’ she said. ‘Even Rosemary out in Canada. I’ll get her too. I will.’

‘Cissy.’ I leaned down towards her, and in spite of myself I smiled. ‘Cissy, you can’t carry on like this, love,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t help. My sister Nancy was a silly girl when she was younger, but she knows now that she was in the wrong. It was nothing personal against you or Albert. I don’t think they knew either of you, did they? The soppy things just did what they did because they thought they were being patriotic.’

I saw Nancy’s eyelids flicker for a moment. But I tried to ignore her and concentrate on Cissy.