Sure and Certain Death (3 page)

‘Rotten,’ Nancy told me just before the Duchess came in to the kitchen to have her breakfast with us. ‘She was completely rotten. But then not enough, or so they say, that the coppers couldn’t see that all her insides was pulled out all over the attic floor.’

My younger sister Aggie took her fag out of her mouth and said, ‘If her insides had been all over the attic floor, her husband or the lodger or someone would’ve seen blood coming through the ceiling.’

‘Maybe,’ Nan said. Then after a short pause she added, ‘Maybe they did and never told no one. Maybe it was her old man as done away with her! You know what some of them are like down there.’

‘Down where?’ I asked. We still didn’t know anything much beyond the fact that some woman called Violet Dickens had been killed in the East End somewhere.

‘Freemasons Road,’ Nan said. ‘You can’t miss it, it’s one of the only houses still standing.’

She was right there. Ever since the bombing started back in September 1940, the area around the docks had taken the worst of the attacks. Manors like Custom House, where Freemasons Road was, had been almost razed to the ground.

‘Rough old handfuls down that way!’ Nan continued.

‘But human beings who have suffered very greatly,’ said my mother, who had now very slowly entered the kitchen.

‘Duchess.’ I put my fag out and then got up to help her. Her arthritis was bad before the war but now it’s even worse. Especially, as now, in the winter, it’s so bad it makes her joints swell up, which causes her terrible pain. But even in difficulty she waved me away. My mother doesn’t like to be dependent even though she knows, as I do, that it is just the way her life is now. She sat down slowly next to Aggie while Nan poured her out a cup of tea.

‘Well of course they have, they’ve had a shocking time down that way,’ Nan said as she put the Duchess’s cup and saucer down in front of her. ‘But Mum, you know as well as I do that down Freemasons they’re a rough lot.’

Aggie, who works by the docks at Tate and Lyle’s sugar factory in probably even rougher Silvertown, said, ‘Oh you think everybody’s rough!’

‘No I don’t!’

‘Yes you do!’ She gently patted the pile of bleached blonde hair that sat in loads of curls on top of her head. ‘All you lot always on your knees saying your rosary, you’re always so quick to call other people . . .’

‘Agnes!’

My mother doesn’t often lose her temper, but when she does it is usually because my sisters are arguing. Nan is over fifty, even young Aggie is nearly forty, and yet the two of them fight like cats. It’s always over, basically, the same thing, which boils down to the fact that Nan thinks that Aggie is common and ‘fast’ and Aggie finds all religion and religious people hypocritical.

‘Well, I get sick of it!’ Aggie said to the Duchess. ‘Her passing judgement on everybody!’ Then, in the absence of our mother saying anything more, she attacked Nancy once again. ‘Who do you think you are? The Pope?’

Nan, outraged by such blasphemy, was left speechless. The Duchess however said, ‘Now, Agnes, that isn’t a nice thing to say . . .’

‘Mum, I’m a married woman with two kids!’ Aggie said. ‘I can have my own opinions!’

‘Yes, but . . .’

‘You do what you like, it’s your soul!’ Nan, who had found her voice, now said bitterly. ‘But to take the name of the Holy Father in vain . . .’

It went on. I smoked and drank my tea and tried not to get involved. Like Aggie, I’m not religious, but I know that the church is all that Nancy really has. She believes, and that belief helps her. After what I saw in the Great War, as well as what’s been going on since the bombing started up here, I can’t see that any sort of loving God can exist. Aggie, whose husband left her for another woman, alone and unprovided for with their two kids to bring up, can’t take to that idea either. Her little ’uns are evacuated out in Essex and she makes the little money she does have working at Tate and Lyle’s sugar works down in Silvertown. On a Friday night she likes a drink or two in one of the local pubs. She even gets, and likes to get, some little attention from men from time to time. She’s an attractive girl who takes care of herself, and so I think, why not? But Nancy thinks it’s wrong, that Aggie is loose and sinful and that her immortal soul is in great danger. Poor Nan is jealous – there’s never been anyone special in her life – but she does genuinely care about her sister too. Not that Aggie appreciates it.

As usual the argument ended with Aggie storming off to go and put her face on up in her bedroom. After that came a tense silence. Knowing that I was probably the only person who could put a stop to it, I said, ‘Nan, you were telling us about the woman found dead on Freemasons Road . . .’

Nancy, as is very often her custom, acted as if she hadn’t heard until she was absolutely ready to speak again. I’d almost given up hope of a reply when she said, ‘People are saying that she was murdered.’

If, as Nan had told us, people said that Violet Dickens’s insides had been torn out, then murder was probably the most likely cause.

‘They’re saying it’s the Ripper again, like they did with Nellie Martin,’ Nan continued.

The Duchess, who hadn’t come to live in England since long after Jack the Ripper’s career had ended, but knew the story nevertheless, said, ‘But those murders took place in Whitechapel, Nancy. And many years ago now, before you were born. Jack the Ripper must be dead now, I think.’

‘Some people think that the Ripper weren’t human,’ Nan said with a gleam of superstitious fear in her eyes. That Jack the Ripper had been some sort of ghost or demon wasn’t a new story. When a crime remains unsolved, the mystery takes on a life of its own, and Nan, for one, was the sort who took on that kind of thing. But I didn’t want to put her down myself. She’d just had enough of that from Aggie.

‘Well, Ripper or not,’ I said, ‘there’s nothing to say the two women were killed by the same person.’

‘That’s very true, Francis,’ the Duchess agreed. Whether she actually believed what she was saying or not, I didn’t know. Like me, she was mainly interested in calming Nancy down.

‘And besides,’ I said, ‘much as you disliked her, Nan, Nellie Martin wasn’t a, well, a . . .’ I hesitated to use the word ‘prostitute’, ‘a loose woman, was she?’

‘No.’

‘And Violet Dickens?’

‘Don’t know about her,’ Nan said. ‘She was married but there was a lodger, and coming from down near the docks . . .’

‘But it’s unlikely,’ I said. ‘Nan, the Ripper’s victims were all ladies of easy virtue. There’s no connection.’

‘Mmm.’ Nan looked down at the floor while the Duchess stared anxiously across at me. My older sister is tortured by agitation about things like this.

‘These two poor ladies died horribly,’ I said as I got up from my chair and began to make my way towards the kitchen door. ‘But there’s nothing supernatural going on, Nancy. There’s no Ripper or . . . There’s some horrible people about, love. That’s all.’

And then I went off down to the shop to look at the diary for the coming week with Doris.

Nothing else happened in what had become the very quiet and almost calm streets of West Ham for another two days. Then, a Thursday night it was, I was just about to go to bed when there was a hammering on the front door of the shop. Looking down out of the parlour window, I saw a group of coppers standing outside the shop. When he heard the window open, one of them turned his head up to face me. I knew him.

Sergeant Hill from Plaistow police station isn’t exactly a friend, but I know him and he and I have quite a bit of time for each other. We’ve helped each other out in the past and there is a respect there in spite of both our various shortcomings. Basically he knows I’m not all I should be sometimes in my head and I know a few things about him he’d rather not talk about too. But this wasn’t a social call.

‘Mr H, I won’t beat about the bush,’ Sergeant Hill said after I let him and his lads into my shop. ‘We’ve got a body we want you to look after for us.’

I frowned. At the height of the bombing, I had taken bodies in from the police and from families bombed out of their houses who couldn’t have the deceased at home. There had been a lot of pressure on mortuary services, and so because I do have a small room where bodies can be stored, it was in constant use during that time. But since the bombing had stopped, the backlog was being dealt with. One of the consequences of this was that my little room was currently empty. I was however puzzled as to why the coppers should suddenly fetch up with a corpse when there was space in the mortuaries. Turning up at night didn’t seem normal either, and I said so.

‘I know it’s unusual, Mr H,’ Sergeant Hill replied, ‘and in the normal course of events I wouldn’t be doing it. But this body is . . . well, it’s . . . We think the lady has been murdered. She is to be honest in a bit of a state . . .’

‘Sarge, why don’t you just come out and tell him it’s the Ripper!’ Percy Adams was an old copper, a perpetual constable and a bloke incapable of keeping even the most innocent confidence. In peacetime he’d have had his cards years ago, but in these strange days people who do all sorts of jobs are simply the only people who happen to be available. Sergeant Hill shot the old geezer a furious look.

‘Constable, we don’t . . .’

‘All her insides ripped out of her body!’ Percy Adams looked at me and said, ‘That’s why you have to have her, Mr Hancock. Can’t be at home in the family parlour with half her body in a hessian sack, can she?’

‘She’s a shocking state!’ one other, slightly younger constable said while several of the others nodded in agreement.

‘Will you button it, Adams!’ Sergeant Hill roared. Then, waving an arm at his little group of coppers, he said, ‘Get out of it, the lot of you! Go on! Get out!’

They moved quickly for men whose average age was probably fifty. Once they had gone, I pulled the blackout curtain over the shop door once again and looked at Sergeant Hill.

‘So there’s been another of these Ripper murders, has there?’ I said as I took a packet of Park Drive fags out of my pocket and offered it to the sergeant.

He sighed before taking one of my smokes and lighting up. ‘Bloody Adams!’ he said, and then he sighed again. ‘But yes, the body is in a state, which is why the family can’t have her at home. I was going to tell you, Mr H, but in my own time and in my own way.’

We stood looking at each other in silence then, both of us smoking.

‘You can refuse, of course,’ Sergeant Hill continued. ‘I mean, it’s a sealed coffin but, well, it’s, er . . .’

‘Was she, whoever she is, murdered?’ I asked. ‘Was it, do you think, this, er, this Ripper as they call him?’

‘Well yes, the lady was murdered,’ Sergeant Hill said gravely. ‘And as bloody Percy Adams said, it was done in a very violent and blood-soaked fashion. Not that I go along with all this Jack-the-Ripper-come-back-to-life business.’

‘But someone is killing women.’

‘Middle-aged ladies, yes,’ Sergeant Hill said. ‘And he is most definitely carving them up a treat, as I know you know, Mr H.’

Nellie Martin, the skinned victim of New City Road, had not been a pretty, or for me, unfortunately, a forgettable sight. I’d seen quite enough unrecognisable lumps of flesh on the Somme. The nightly bombing had brought its horrors too. Although this war, though vile in every way, lacks the personal enmity that I saw in the First Lot, that all came back to me when I saw Nellie Martin. That, like the hand-to-hand combat on the Somme, was something deliberate, personal and venomous.

‘Part of the problem here,’ Sergeant Hill continued as he sucked heavily on his fag, ‘is that the lady this time was a spinster. Lived alone up on Green Street. No family to actually have the body at home except a married sister who lives up Ilford way. Nice house apparently she’s got. Husband works in the print. She don’t want her sister’s body messing up the place.’ He shot me a look of obvious disapproval. Even in wartime there are still those for whom unscratched lino is more important than life or death. ‘Post-mortem’s been done,’ he carried on. ‘Had her throat cut before all the mutilation went on, so the doctor reckoned. Thank God!’

‘Sergeant, I’ve heard nothing about this murder. When . . .’

‘Oh, it was a neighbour who found her,’ Sergeant Hill said. ‘A warden. Saw the back door of her place open yesterday morning, went in and . . .’ He shrugged. ‘Luckily because it was a warden we managed to keep it a bit hush-hush. Something like this . . . well . . .’

People panic. Whether this apparent halt in the bombing of London will hold or not, no one knows. But if Hitler has even temporarily given up, then Londoners should be able to enjoy a bit of a breather. No one wants that spoiled by a run of murders by one of our own – least of all the coppers. There’s not even much, by their own admission, they can do.

‘People know about the other two,’ I said. ‘Nellie Martin and Violet Dickens.’

‘And they’ll know about this one in time, too,’ Sergeant Hill said on yet another sigh. ‘But if we can keep it as low-key as possible . . .’

‘Did they know each other, the women?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Sergeant Hill replied. ‘Of course, living in the same area they probably saw one another and . . . But Nellie Martin was a widow, Violet Dickens a married lady, and now this spinster. All very different.’

‘Except in age.’

‘Oh, they’re all of an age,’ he said. ‘Early fifties.’

Like my sister. I told Sergeant Hill she’d been to school with Nellie Martin. I was, albeit without getting hysterical, a little worried.

‘But not with Violet Dickens?’

‘No.’

‘Oh well.’ He put his fag out then and looked up at me. ‘So, Mr H, can my boys bring the body round the back? We’ve got it in a van, and if you can unlock your yard . . . Of course, if you . . .’

‘Yes, bring her in,’ I said as I put my fag out and went to get the keys to the yard. ‘What’s her name, by the way?’