Sure and Certain Death (5 page)

Nan looked at me and said, ‘Frank, will you find Dolly’s killer?’

Rita Bentham, Dolly O’Dowd’s sister from Ilford, turned up at the shop just before midday. A smart, matter-of-fact woman in her mid-fifties, Rita knew all about the circumstances of her sister’s death and so she had no expectations about seeing Dolly in her coffin.

‘You’d think that in wartime we’d stop turning on each other, wouldn’t you?’ she said as she sat down with Doris to check on possible dates for her sister’s burial. ‘But the police say they’ll find who did it and so you have to trust in that, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Doris said. She’s very good at reassurance, Doris; she said it very warmly.

I was at the back of the shop while this was going on, behind the black curtain that divides where the public go from where they do not. Once Doris had made the arrangements I’d go and give Mrs Bentham my condolences. In the meantime I dusted down my hats and tried to shake some of the muck from my gloves. We had a funeral at the East London Cemetery at two, and the boys and myself needed to get ready. During the bombing it was almost impossible to look clean and presentable. Now it wasn’t quite so bad, but there was still dust and dirt everywhere from all the bomb sites and from the damage done to the existing buildings and the streets. Sometimes I find it difficult to remember how this manor looked before Hitler and the Luftwaffe started trying to flatten it. There are whole streets I can’t even bring to mind now.

‘Father Burton says he can do next Thursday,’ I heard Rita Bentham say.

There was a pause during which pages of the diary were turned. Then Doris said, ‘We can do next Thursday morning, Mrs Bentham.’

‘Good.’

‘At the East London?’

‘Yes.’

I went through the curtains and offered my hand to the lady.

‘Mrs Bentham,’ I said, ‘I am so sorry for your loss.’

‘Yes, well . . .’ she sighed. Dry-eyed, more inconvenienced than distraught, or so it appeared. Like her sister, Rita Bentham had once had very red hair which, unlike Dolly, she now dyed a sort of blondish ginger colour. Heavily made up, she was stylish rather than attractive and wore a large sombrero hat with a very brightly coloured feather curled around the brim. She took my hand but she didn’t get up.

‘As you know, Mrs Bentham,’ I said, ‘we have your sister here.’

‘The police have explained.’

‘Yes, well, of course,’ I continued. ‘But if you’d like the funeral to start at Green Street . . .’

‘Oh, that won’t be necessary,’ she said.

‘Oh. I just thought that because your sister had always lived there and your parents before . . .’ I shrugged. She didn’t respond. ‘For neighbours to pay their respects . . .’

Mrs Bentham rose to her feet. ‘My sister was a sad, lonely spinster, Mr Hancock,’ she said. ‘She didn’t see people.’

‘She was friends with
my
sister,’ I said.

She looked down at the floor and said, ‘Yes.’ It’s not often I’ve heard someone damn another with one such simple word. I wanted to ask her what she felt or imagined was wrong with my sister. But I didn’t. Doris looked over at me and widened her eyes.

‘I’d like the cortège to go from here,’ Rita Bentham said. ‘There won’t be many mourners.’ She waved a dismissive hand in the air. ‘Your sister can come if she wishes . . .’

‘I’m sure that Nancy would want to do that,’ I replied, careful not to actually thank her for her grudging invitation. She was older than even our Nancy, and so I hadn’t known Rita O’Dowd, as was, when we were children. But as an adult I knew I didn’t like her. I wasn’t alone.

Once she’d finished making arrangements for her sister’s funeral, Rita Bentham left and Doris spoke. ‘Blimey, she was a right cold fish!’ she said to me as she watched the woman walk eastwards down the Barking Road back towards Ilford way. ‘And what was all that being sniffy when you talked about Miss Nancy?’

‘I don’t know, Doris,’ I said. But I thought that maybe I did. Nancy is the darkest of the lot of us and it is Nancy, if anyone, who has to take any stick that’s going because of it. The Duchess, to be fair, doesn’t come in for much colour trouble. But then she is an Indian, she couldn’t be anything else. Anglo-Indians like my sisters and me are another matter. Some people, Rita Bentham maybe included, see us as tainted – Nancy much more than me and Aggie hardly at all. Blonde Anglos like her can get away with it.

Later, when Nan came back from the shops, I told her when Dolly’s funeral was going to take place. She took in what I was saying but it was obvious that she didn’t really want to talk about Dolly. Just before I left for the cemetery that afternoon, she did however speak to me one more time.

‘Frank, you asked me if I knew whether Violet Dickens went to me and Dolly’s church,’ she said.

She’d already told me that the first victim, Nellie Martin, had attended the Baptist church.

‘Yes?’

‘Violet Dickens never went to any church,’ Nan replied. ‘More comfortable in the pub, so it’s said. I asked around like you told me to.’

I looked at her and smiled. So thin and tired and unhappy. How could I not help her find out who had killed her best friend? ‘Thanks, Nan,’ I said as I put my top hat on and started walking towards the door out into the yard.

‘Thank you, Frank,’ my sister replied. ‘I think you’ll find who murdered Dolly. I really think you will.’

I did appreciate her confidence, even though I didn’t share it. Having said that, I had already made some little progress, because the churches the ladies had attended were maybe not what, for the murderer, connected them. At that moment the only thing that did that was their age. As I climbed up on to the hearse behind the horses, I looked down at my middle-aged sister and I frowned.

Chapter Four

B
lood, thick and scarlet red, ran down every wall inside the stable and then rushed, as if charging, towards the horses. I didn’t cry out because I knew what this was and I didn’t want to alarm the horses. But I shook, and when I saw that there was also a man’s head bleeding in the straw by the horses’ hooves, I had to push my fist into my mouth to stop myself from screaming. God alone knew what the horses, my geldings Rama and Sita, thought of me with my shaking, my sweating, my mad terrified eyes.

‘Mr H, you’ve got a visitor.’ Doris’s voice behind me only partially broke the spell that old visions from the trenches had temporarily cast over me.

‘Oh, er, Doris, er . . .’ I didn’t turn around even though I knew that Doris was quite accustomed to seeing me like this. I’ve been tormented in this way ever since I came home from France in 1918. But since the bombing began last year I have got worse. Doris and everyone else is well aware of this.

‘It’s Mr Cox,’ Doris said.

‘Oh . . . right.’ I turned briefly towards her, wiping the sweat away from my face as I did so. ‘Tell him I’ll er . . . I’ll be in in a mo.’

‘All right.’

She left. Albert Cox runs an undertaking business down in Canning Town. A few years younger than me, he too inherited his business from his old man. Like Hancock’s, Cox’s provides a full funeral service but to rather different people from those that we usually serve. Plaistow is a poor place where disease and hunger, even now, probably take the lives of more young children than the bombing. But we also get our share of local tradespeople, doctors and priests, men and women who’ve left good money for a good slap-up send-off. Canning Town, though, is real docklands. In other words it’s noisy, dirty and poor in a way I’ve been told my mother’s home city of Calcutta is. Although she was pregnant with me before she and my dad came back to England with Nan, I’ve never seen my mother’s country. But she talks about it often. She loves it, and when we were nippers, myself and the girls used to enjoy her stories about gentle elephants and brightly coloured temples. But there was another side too. There were beggars and lepers, people dying in the street from hunger or disease. Dad told me once in whispered tones about the number of young girls ‘on the street’ and how dead in the eyes they always looked to him. Hannah, my Canning Town girl, can look like that sometimes. In Canning Town there are women and girls on the street. The men who go to them come from all over the world, delivering goods that mean wealth for the Empire, which means, in reality, money for a very, very few. I’m no Commie, God knows, but when I look at the hungry faces of the women and kids round here, particularly in the docklands, it makes me want to hit someone. Half the men down there only have casual employment, and although since the war began rich and poor alike have pulled together to do their bit, it’s still those at the bottom who seem to do, and suffer, the most.

After securing the horses and then wiping my hands, I walked through the back room and into the shop. Albert, a short, fair-haired bloke, quite lined in the face, stood up and took my hand.

‘Hello, Frank,’ he said.

‘Albert.’

Doris, who was sitting at the back of the shop at our now battered-looking desk, said, ‘You and Mr Cox like a cuppa, would you, Mr H?’

‘That’d be lovely, Doris,’ Albert said cheerily as he took his fags out of his pocket and offered me one.

I said I’d like a cup of tea too, and so Doris left the shop and went upstairs to the kitchen.

‘So, Albert,’ I said, ‘to what do I owe the pleasure?’

The smile that Albert Cox had had on his face when I’d come in from the yard dropped.

‘Thought I’d better warn you,’ he said as he lit up his fag and mine and then threw the dead match into Doris’s ashtray, ‘there’s a nutter about, mate.’

‘A nutter?’ The word covered a multitude of mad people as far as I was concerned, including, even I had to admit, myself at times.

‘Just finished burying an old girl up the East London,’ Albert said. He looked around to make sure that no one was coming in either from out in the street or from the yard at the back. ‘While I was there I went over to see the grave of a woman I buried two days ago. There’d been quite a lot of flowers and I was checking they were still there. You know how people can be . . .’

I nodded in agreement. War or no war, the theft of flowers from cemeteries still, sadly, goes on.

Albert took a drag on his fag and said, ‘Well, I’m having a butcher’s, like, and the flowers are all still there, and then I see something new.’

‘Something new?’

‘A little posy it was. Pretty little thing. So I bends down to have a look and I sees that there’s a card with it. I read it.’ Albert let his breath out on a whistle and then he said, ‘Bloody horrible, Frank! No rest in peace or none of that!’ He lowered his voice. ‘Things like “evil slut”, “Nazi bitch” and “rot in hell”!’

‘Blimey.’ I’ve come across some less than complimentary last messages to the dead in the past, but never that sort of thing. ‘Was there anyone about? What did you do?’

‘No one, apart from my mourners and the priest, as far as I could see,’ Albert said. ‘Normally I would’ve asked around a bit, discreet like, but in this instance . . .’

I frowned.

‘It was on the grave of that woman what got murdered,’ Albert said. ‘Violet Dickens.’

‘Bloody hell!’

‘I took the whole shebang down the cop shop,’ Albert said. ‘Let them have a look at it. But it give me the creeps, Frank, as you can imagine. Then I thought of you burying that other woman, that spinster from Green Street, up there on Thursday, and I thought I’d better let you know. Just between us, though, and the coppers, as you know.’

‘What about Father Burton?’ I asked. ‘Does he know?’

‘Oh yes, I had to tell him,’ Albert said. ‘But shtum to everyone else, all right?’

I puffed on my fag and said, ‘Yes, Albert, I understand. Thank you, I appreciate that.’

Albert went on with other nutter stories while I came to grips with this information about one of the so-called Ripper victims. Someone had put something very personal on Violet Dickens’s grave. Whether or not it was the same person who had killed her, I didn’t know. But even beyond the grave, it seemed, Mrs Dickens had at least one enemy.

Doris came in then with our cups of tea, but almost immediately she went off to powder her nose. Once she’d gone I asked Albert a question.

‘What was Violet Dickens’s funeral like?’ I said. ‘Did it go all right or . . .’

‘Well attended. Luckily not by, I don’t think at least, too many of the ghoulish types who like to go to funerals of them who’ve been murdered. But like I said, a lot of flowers for these days,’ Albert said. ‘Not from the family, though.’ He leaned in close to me and lowered his voice. ‘Skint, the lot of them. Friend of the family paid me, the priest, the flowers, everything.’

I was shocked. Families, even of the poorest docker, usually pay for their own relatives’ funerals. If necessary they put their possessions in the pawn shop to do so.

‘A friend?’ I said. ‘It wasn’t the lodger they had, was it?’

‘Ronnie Arnold? No,’ Albert said. ‘He ain’t got a ha’penny to bless himself with. Like poor old Violet’s husband, Ronnie’s a drinker. That’s why he was living there.’ He moved in closer once again and said, ‘I know there’s been some talk about Ronnie and Violet maybe . . .’ He winked suggestively. ‘But there was none of that. It was Ronnie and Fred Dickens, Vi’s husband, what had interests in common, if you know what I mean.’

For a moment I wondered whether Violet Dickens’s husband and this Ronnie bloke had been involved in some sort of male love, something homosexual . . .

Seeing the look of nervousness on my face, Albert smiled and said, ‘No! They was never iron hoofs or nothing, Frank! No, Ron and Fred got drunk together! When they couldn’t get work down the docks they went down the pub while poor old Vi did whatever she could to earn a crust – taking washing, cleaning, you know.’

I did. Some say that the dockers’ women work harder than their men, and in lots of cases that is true.