Sure and Certain Death (27 page)

‘They used to go down Custom House,’ Cissy said. ‘Albert lived there, on Garvary Road. I used to see Margaret Cousins, as she was then, and Marie Abrahams when they came into my Uncle Bob’s shop on East Ham Broadway. Waving their white feathers!’

‘Why didn’t you say anything?’ I said.

She looked at me now with hatred. ‘I’d only just lost my dad! I had to work at Uncle Bob’s to help make ends meet. I couldn’t go upsetting his customers. He wasn’t keen to have me working there anyway. He wanted a lad. He’d have thrown me out on my ear’ole!’

‘Frank?’ It was a little, very tired voice and it came from my sister, into whose bleary eyes I was now looking.

Cissy in response to this tightened her grip and shoved the knife even harder against Nancy’s throat.

‘Frank!’

I looked down at my sister and said, ‘Just keep still, Nan!’

‘I am going to kill her,’ Cissy said in a voice that was so cold it almost made me pull my jacket tighter about my shoulders.

‘And I am going to stop you,’ I said.

She frowned, and I saw the knuckles of her fingers holding the knife turn white.

I made a dive for her wrist but she was a lot stronger than I had imagined and so I grabbed what I could of the knife itself. God, it was sharp! The blade cut into my fingers with such ease it was almost as if they were made of butter not flesh.

‘Nan!’ I shouted as I tried to pull Cissy’s arm away from my sister’s neck. ‘Get out of it!’

But she was far too drugged to move. With the blood from my fingers dripping down on to Nancy’s face, I moved my one good hand away from Cissy’s wrist and then pulled my sister down towards the riverbank. I grabbed her skirt and just heaved. Luckily, what with her being so light and the ground so wet, Nancy just slithered down until her legs and body dangled into the filthy water of the creek. I was just aware of her coughing as I flung myself forwards on to Cissy.

‘Give me the knife!’ I said as I tried in vain to get a hold of the damn thing. But my hand was so badly cut that I couldn’t get any purchase, while my other, undamaged hand had to try and pin this now screaming woman to the ground. God almighty, if Walter wasn’t dead or dying, where the hell was he?

There was blood everywhere now and all of it was mine. Cissy’s face screwed up with effort as she tried with some success to push me away. But I used the weight of my body to pin her to the ground even as she turned the knife in my injured fingers and fought to get the end of the blade close to my face. I thought that she might even succeed too as I felt my head go light and dizzy with the effort. Not that failure was an option for me under these circumstances. But then it wasn’t an option for Cissy either.

‘You are not going to stop me!’ she shrieked.

I didn’t answer, I couldn’t. I managed to heave my head out of the way of the slashing blade beneath me but I knew that by this time I was fading. I couldn’t even spare any energy to abuse her and she knew it. I knew she knew it because she smiled. I thought at that point that I was as good as dead. But that shriek of hers, so I later learned, changed the direction of Walter and the little group of men who were looking for us up above on the bank. That shriek gave away where we were.

Seconds later someone pulled me off and away and two blokes I didn’t know from Adam wrestled the knife out of Cissy’s hand. I just heard Walter’s voice say, ‘Fucking hell, Mr H!’ before I passed out cold.

Chapter Twenty-Three

T
he men from the pumping station took Walter, Nancy and me to the nearest hospital, St Andrew’s at Bromley-by-Bow. Cissy they took to Plaistow police station, which wasn’t the closest. It was Walter who insisted they do that. The sooner Cissy got into the hands of Sergeant Hill and his boys, the sooner everyone could find out whether poor old Fred Dickens still needed to be in one of Plaistow’s cells or not.

The nurse who attended to both me and Walter was a sweet girl who looked to me to be just barely into her twenties. We did see a doctor briefly, but all he told us was that we’d both lost a lot of blood and that we’d have to rest. Neither of us could drive, but thankfully the ginger-haired neighbour of Cissy Hoskin we’d first met when we went to Abbey Lane, and who Walter had run to when the woman had attacked him, had taken us to the hospital. Now he volunteered to drive the Lancia and us home to Plaistow. Nancy was to be kept in St Andrew’s for the time being. Not because she was injured in any way but simply because it appeared she’d been given a very large amount of laudanum. She wasn’t used to it and the medical people wanted to keep an eye on her, for which I was grateful. Before we left St Andrew’s, however, I did just have to go and see her.

She was deathly pale. Lying in a narrow metal bed in a ward full of equally pale but also bloodied and injured women, she looked tiny, worn out and old. Not that the way she looked bothered me. And besides, as soon as I got close to her, she opened her eyes and smiled and she was my beautiful sister all over again.

‘Frank.’

I kissed one of her hands and then sat down on the chair beside her bed.

‘Frank, what . . .’ Her eyes suddenly widened and she said, ‘I was drinking tea! Drinking tea and then I felt odd and . . .’

‘Ssh, ssh, ssh!’ I put a finger from my one good hand up to her lips and said, ‘Don’t you worry yourself with anything. You’re all right now. They’ll look after you here tonight and then you can come home tomorrow.’

Nan frowned. ‘Tomorrow?’

‘Sunday,’ I said. ‘They just need to keep you in to . . .’

‘But I have to go to Mass!’ Panicked, she tried to sit up, but thankfully, for it wasn’t good for her to do so, she found that she couldn’t rise easily and so just slumped back helplessly on to her pillow once again.

‘You’ve had a shock,’ I said gently. ‘God’ll understand.’

‘Yes, but . . .’ And then her eyes narrowed and she said, ‘I was having tea with Alice. That’s right. She’d made some very nice cakes, although her house was ever so dirty. Ever so dirty.’

‘Nan, we can talk about this later,’ I said as I saw Walter and Mr Holland, the chap with the red hair, beckon me towards them. It was, so it seemed, time for me to go home.

I bent forward to kiss my sister on the cheek. But she didn’t notice, as she was already asleep again. As I stood up, I wiped a tear away from my eye and tried not to think about what would have happened had I not visited Mr Abrahams up at Claybury. Because Cissy Hoskin would have killed my sister, she would have mutilated her body and my mother would never have been able to kiss her oldest child goodbye.

Walter, who lives alone in a rooming house down by the Boleyn pub, stayed with us in the flat that night. The Duchess wouldn’t even entertain the idea of his going back to his digs.

‘Good gracious, no!’ she said when Walter tried to make an exit. ‘After you saved the lives of my son and my daughter? I should think not, Mr Bridges! You will stay and we will take care of you.’

Aggie was working and so still didn’t know. But Walter and me regaled my mother and cousin Stella with the story of our recent adventures. Stella, who is a great believer in the power of blood tonics and the like, went over to the Abbey Arms and brought us both back bottles of stout. ‘It’ll build you up,’ she said as she handed us pint glasses. ‘Good for making blood.’

Walter, who is more than partial to a drop, smiled. Later, and just before Aggie finally made it home from Tate and Lyle’s, Sergeant Hill came over and asked to speak to me. Walter was asleep in my bedroom by this time and so it was just the Duchess and me and the silence when Stella went down to answer the door.

‘Oh, I don’t know about seeing Frank yet, Sergeant Hill,’ I heard her say. ‘He’s been through a shocking time. Attacked he was! By a lady!’

‘Oh.’

I looked over at my mother, who had also heard the exchange, and I said, ‘Could you please go and sort Stella out, Duchess? And ask Sergeant Hill to come up, will you?’

‘Are you sure, Francis?’

‘Yes.’

After some protest from Stella, who felt that she was better placed to make decisions for me than anyone else, Sergeant Hill was shown up into the parlour. He asked, if at all possible, if he could talk to me on my own. The Duchess was tired anyway and so she went off to bed. Stella, after making both Sergeant Hill and myself cups of tea, went to the kitchen to be with Aggie, who had just that second got home. Once the parlour door was shut, Sergeant Hill said, ‘Well, Mr H, what a day, eh? You and Mr Bridges attacked by a madwoman who now it seems is almost struck dumb.’

I frowned.

‘Alice Hoskin says she’ll only talk to you,’ he continued. ‘We can hold on to her because she was found by the gents from the pumping station laying into you with a knife. I imagine you and Mr Bridges will want to press charges.’

‘Yes.’

‘But about the attack on your sister and the other ladies I understand you say she admitted to killing, she won’t say anything.’

When the pumping station workers had taken Cissy up to Plaistow, Walter and myself had told them what to say.

‘All she will say is that she’ll only talk if you are present. Says she owes it to you to provide an explanation,’ Sergeant Hill said. ‘Oh, and she wants to see a lady she’s given as her next of kin, a Mrs Darling . . .’

‘You mustn’t let her see Mrs Darling!’ I said. ‘She’s one of the women Cissy wants to kill!’

‘Oh, we haven’t let anyone see Miss Hoskin yet,’ Sergeant Hill replied. ‘Mrs Darling has been told where Miss Hoskin is but she’s not as yet been told why. Now, Mr Hancock . . .’

‘I’ll come,’ I said as I slowly and painfully began to rise to my feet. Sergeant Hill put a hand on my shoulder and pushed me gently back into my seat once again.

‘Tomorrow morning will do, Mr Hancock,’ he said. ‘You need to get some rest, you’ve been through quite an ordeal.’ He lowered his head, looking down into the depths of his copper’s helmet. ‘If you’re right about this Hoskin woman, then . . .’

‘She’s been killing the White Feather girls,’ I said. ‘They made her fiancé go to war and then he lost his mind and . . . I don’t know too many details, Sergeant Hill, but I do know that she named Violet Dickens.’

‘Did she actually admit to killing her?’

‘Well no, not exactly, but . . . Sergeant, I’ve never thought that Fred . . .’

‘We can’t let Fred Dickens go until this woman confesses to Violet’s murder,’ Sergeant Hill said.

‘So I’ll come . . .’

‘In the morning is good enough,’ Sergeant Hill said with a smile. ‘But if you can come early, Mr H . . .’

‘Of course,’ I said. Stella had already said that she’d go and pick up Nancy from the hospital, and Walter’s job for the following morning was to go and talk to Albert Cox up in Canning Town. Neither Walter nor myself could drive or lift on account of our injuries, ditto Nancy, so Walter needed to get another undertaking firm, Cox’s I hoped, to take over our work for a week or so.

‘Well, I’ll leave you to rest now,’ Sergeant Hill said as he stood up and put his helmet back on to his head.

I was exhausted and so I was grateful that I didn’t have to go into the police station right away, even if I did feel a little bit guilty about poor old Fred Dickens. There was something, however, that had puzzled me and continued to do so.

‘It’s the viciousness of it all that I can’t fathom,’ I said. ‘I mean, how one small woman could do such terrible things to her victims. Mutilation and . . .’

Sergeant Hill smiled. ‘I spoke to that Mrs Darling that Miss Hoskin named as her next of kin. She told me straight away that she wasn’t Alice’s real family, of course. Told me Alice’s family were all dead, and that included her Uncle Bob, who used to own a butcher’s shop on East Ham Broadway. Alice apparently used to work in Uncle Bob’s shop some years ago.’

Now that I knew what kind of shop Uncle Bob had had, some things about Cissy and what she’d done did make sense. Although quite how, angry and grieving or not, she could have done what she did was still absolutely beyond me. As Sergeant Hill left, so Aggie arrived.

For a few moments she didn’t say anything, she just looked at me. Then, as she languidly pushed herself away from the door frame, she said, ‘Oh Frank, what are we going to do with you?’

Before I could even begin to answer, she ran towards me and flung her arms around my shoulders. I felt rather than heard the tears of relief that she shed.

Chapter Twenty-Four

S
he looked very composed. She had, I imagined, spent a not entirely comfortable night down in one of Plaistow police station’s no doubt freezing cold cells. But Cissy Hoskin, I had to admit, looked none the worse for it. In fact she looked to me rather better than she had done ever since I’d first known her. There is a saying about the truth setting you free, and maybe that was why. Maybe by getting all of her crimes off her chest, Cissy was, as it were, coming back to life once again.

‘When Mum died, I didn’t know what to do,’ she said once Sergeant Hill and myself had sat down at the table opposite her. ‘I’d only just buried Albert and . . .’ She looked up into my face. ‘I couldn’t do that again. You understand, Mr Hancock, I’m sure. If there are too many funerals, well . . . The departed are too far away in cemeteries. They lie cold and alone in unfamiliar places.’

I wondered where she’d put the old woman. Sergeant Hill wrote down what Cissy said without either looking up or commenting. Cissy had said she’d only speak to me.

‘I buried Mum in the garden,’ she said. Her eyes filled with tears. ‘I had to do it at night, in a raid as it happened. I had to dig up all the cauliflowers to do it. No one saw. But then . . .’ She paused in order to scratch her face, then she said, ‘In the morning, because of the vibrations from the bombing, part of her had come up again and so I had to rebury her. I pretended to be digging up more caulis. But nothing else has grown there since Mum died, and nothing will.’ She looked up into my face. ‘That happened for several weeks – burying her, reburying her. Crying all the time and apologising to her for not getting it right! Couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat! No one came! No one!’