Sure and Certain Death Read online

  Copyright © 2009 Barbara Nadel

  The right of Barbara Nadel to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2011

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  eISBN: 978 0 7553 8646 8

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  About the Author

  Trained as an actress, Barbara Nadel used to work in mental health services. Born in the East End of London, she now writes full time. She received the Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger for her novel Deadly Web. She is also the author of the highly acclaimed Inspector İkmen series set in Turkey.

  To all of those whose minds have been taken by war

  Prologue

  February 1941, Plaistow, East London

  Nellie knew she shouldn’t have taken that drink. She shouldn’t have taken any sort of alcohol at all. Dr Stansfield would have been appalled! What was she thinking?

  She was thinking that actually it was very nice. It was cold, she was cold and she was lonely. Her daughter was evacuated out to Essex, leaving Nellie with her mother and her sister and the endless droning of Dr Stansfield in the pulpit of their church every Sunday. Dr Stansfield didn’t believe in drink or fags or fun of any sort really. If the minister had had some time for the afterlife – as in finding out what it was really like – Nellie could have understood it. But there was no questioning the letter of scripture in any way at all. You died, and if you were good and loved Jesus you went to heaven; if you were bad or you didn’t love Jesus you went to hell. Quite where that left people like all the Jews she’d grown up around, Nellie didn’t know. According to Dr Stansfield, they were going to burn in hell! Not that that could be right. They were nice people. Nellie liked Jews, they were a laugh.

  When it was offered, Nellie took another swig of liquor, which made her glow inside. Feeling a bit wobbly too by this time, she just naturally followed on into the bombed-out house on New City Road. When the terrible pain first hit her, initially in her stomach, and then everywhere, and then the blood came, she was shocked. Shocked and then afraid and then terrified, and then, mercifully, Nellie fell to the floor and died.

  I came across what was left of Nellie Martin completely by accident. Not as I knew that great hunk of meat I saw in that house was Nellie Martin at the time. Neither me nor my young apprentice, Arthur, could tell whether what we saw was even human. But it stank, and as I tried to get closer to it to find out what it was, the shattered floorboards underneath the thing made it quiver like a piece of liver on a butcher’s chopping board. I felt sick. Poor Arthur was sick. In spite of my profession being what it is, I hadn’t expected anything like this. What even I do rarely brings with it such horror.

  I’m an undertaker. My name is Francis Thomas Hancock and I’m forty-eight years old. A veteran of the Great War of 1914–18, I still find it difficult to take in the fact that we’re at war with the Germans once again now. I thought I’d seen everything out in the trenches of Flanders. But ever since the Luftwaffe have been trying to bomb our poor old London into surrender, my mind has been tortured all over again. Not that it ever really healed after the First Lot. I’m a man who isn’t ‘right’, a man whose brain is so broken it can’t always be trusted. I am a lunatic who sees and hears things that are not there. But not this time. This time when I went into what was left of that house in New City Road, Plaistow, I knew that the horror was real because Arthur was seeing it too.

  ‘What the . . .’ the boy started once he’d finished being sick. ‘Mr H, what the . . .’

  ‘I don’t know what it is, Arthur,’ I said as I carried on looking at the thing, unable to take my eyes off it.

  We’d come to do a job, me and the boy. An old character called Herbert Wills had passed away in the house next door to the one we were in now, and we’d come to take his body back to my shop up on the Barking Road. But Herbert had been a big man, twenty stone at the very least, and so we’d decided to take his body out via the passage that runs along the back of the houses on New City Road. The reason we were in the house next door at all was because we were taking a short cut. After all, if a place is empty and in ruins and your motives are pure, as ours were, then why not?

  ‘Do you think it’s human?’

  ‘Yes, it’s my belief it is a person, Arthur,’ I said. The thing was on a chair, and dangling in a place where a leg would probably be in the normal course of events was a human foot. I looked at it hard just to make really sure, but it was definitely a foot.

  ‘This house was bombed out weeks ago and so this . . . person can’t have died in a raid,’ I said.

  There hadn’t been a big raid on London for two weeks. The last really big one, on the 11th of January, had been the direct hit on Bank station. Before that we’d had the terrible 29th of December 1940 set-to. The night of the firestorm when St Paul’s Cathedral, and yours truly with it as it happened, was almost burnt to a crisp. People were saying that maybe because he failed to get the cathedral, Hitler was losing the will to keep on pounding at us. I didn’t trust that idea myself. I still don’t.

  ‘Died?’ Arthur, now just about able to look at the terrible thing on the chair, said, ‘What kind of thing can have made someone die like that?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘it wasn’t something but someone.’

  Arthur was about to turn eighteen at the time. Only a kid. He looked at me, struck. But then Arthur hadn’t seen active service, and unlike me, he hadn’t seen murder be it on or off the field of battle.

  ‘Get back up to the Barking Road and go to the police station,’ I told him. ‘Tell them we’ve found a body in a bombed-out house.’

  He made to go without another word and with a lot of haste. I couldn’t blame him for that, but before he went I said, ‘And pop your head around the Willses’ door before you go. Tell them we’ve got a bit of a problem but we’ll be back round to pick up Herbert just as soon as we can.’

  As he moved bits of shattered door and other unidentifiable pieces of wood out of his way, Arthur said, ‘All right. But
Mr H, what will you . . .’

  ‘I’ll wait here,’ I said.

  ‘With . . .’

  ‘With some poor creature who met its end in what would seem to be a bad way,’ I replied. ‘We can’t leave it alone here in case it frightens others. And anyway, Arthur, getting the dead where they need to be is what we do, and this poor soul does not need to be here.’

  Arthur pushed his way out of that crumbling house without another word. He knows my philosophy. Undertaking is about care. The dead, helpless as they are, need assistance to reach their final destination. It’s our job to make sure that they get there without undue molestation or just plain useless interference from the living. Between the living and the dead, the undertaker, in my opinion, is not wholly in one state or the other. That suits me fine.

  I stood over that bleeding mound of what had once been human, the wrecked floor beneath my feet shifting and splintering in the wind and under the weight of the dying house that was threatening to crush it into the earth below. As time passed, I became accustomed to the sight of the body, just like I became accustomed to the possibility of the building falling and taking my own life from me.

  Chapter One

  It didn’t take long for the Plaistow gossip mill to grind into action. I’d said nothing to anyone, apart from the coppers and young Arthur of course, about what we had found in the house on New City Road. But although they may not look too countrified, a lot of London boroughs still have the souls of villages – with all the attention to gossip and rumour that goes with that. This is especially so in the East End, and very particularly in my borough of West Ham. Plaistow, which is in the middle of the borough, is a place where people know a lot about their neighbours. By people I mean, of course, women mainly, and by women I mean particularly women of an anxious turn of mind. Like my sister Nancy.

  Two days after my and Arthur’s grim discovery, she came to me with an even more drawn and frightened-looking expression on her face than usual. Nancy is older than me; she’s a spinster, and in common with a lot of older single ladies, she worries. She listens to gossip with what could be viewed almost as relish, but she rarely hears news that doesn’t either outrage or frighten her. I was out in the shop yard grooming the horses when she came down from our flat and leaned against the water butt.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me you found Nellie Martin dead up New City Road?’ she said. As usual, she got right to the point. Nancy is a very good-living and sincerely religious woman, but she doesn’t know very much about how to talk to people – not even her own brother.

  ‘It wasn’t my place to talk about such things,’ I replied. ‘I didn’t know what the coppers wanted said, if anything. And anyway, what’s it all to you?’

  ‘I was at school with Nellie is what it is!’ Nan responded aggressively. Her face, which like mine and like our mother’s is brown, was, I could see, flushed with the anger she felt inside.

  ‘Oh, Nan, I’m s—’

  ‘Never liked her,’ Nan continued as she folded her arms underneath her thin, almost nonexistent breasts. ‘She was one of them who called me names. But that ain’t the point. You should’ve told me!’

  As kids we’d gone to different schools, Nan to New City Road School and me to the grammar. We’d both of course suffered our share of bullying. Only my younger sister, Aggie, had not come in for any of that. But then Aggie hasn’t taken on the darkness that Nan and I get from our Indian mother. Fair like our English father, Aggie is also a completely different character. She doesn’t take any nonsense from anyone. I’m not a pushover myself, but Nancy just goes into herself and broods when people are unkind to her. Ill equipped for the knocks and blows of life, she keeps herself to herself and spends most of her time looking after our widowed mother. Not that she isn’t bitter about being a woman alone. She feels her ‘misfortune’ acutely, and if Mum, or the Duchess as we all call her, on account of her very proper manners, were not so sick with her arthritis, I think that Nan could be a very bored and nasty busybody. As it is, she rarely has time to pass on what she hears from other bitter and twisted spinsters after Mass on Sunday or on the local grapevine. This time, however, she’d known the person the latest gossip was about.

  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 late
r 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.