Sure and Certain Death Read online

  ‘What are you doing here, Hannah?’ I said as I sidled up to her and put one of my hands on her slim, black-clad shoulder.

  She looked at me and smiled. ‘I knew him,’ she answered simply.

  ‘Sidney Shiner?’

  ‘Canning Town ain’t a big Jewish area,’ she said. ‘Me and Sidney, we . . .’

  ‘You didn’t . . .’

  ‘Give him one?’ Her face darkened as I looked around to make sure that no one was listening. But the Reverend Ritblatt had started his spiel and so everyone else was attending to that. ‘Sidney lived inside a booze bottle. He weren’t interested in anything I had on offer,’ Hannah continued angrily. ‘Jews know each other just like Italians, the Maltese, you lot . . . I’ve told you this, H, we’ve talked about it before.’

  We had, and her rebuke made me hang my head. But it didn’t cure me. Nothing I don’t think ever will. I’ve been in love with Hannah Jacobs for years. In fact she is the only woman I’ve ever loved romantically, and although she was when I met her and continues to be a prostitute, I know that she loves me too. To Hannah, I am ‘H’, a wounded, mad and besotted old soldier. I am also the only constant person in her life. Nothing, however, comes for free, and so much as our time together is spent now as man and lady friend in the normal way of things, I know that there are other men she ‘sees’ for business purposes. I’d pay her rent for her, I’d marry her if she would only let me. But Hannah is an independent woman, and so I remain a very jealous man.

  Once Sidney Shiner was in the ground and I’d offered my condolences to his family, I sent Arthur and Walter back to the shop with the hearse. Hannah hadn’t even tried to approach any of the Shiner family on account of her being very well known amongst the folk of Canning Town. She didn’t want to embarrass them, and so she just waited for me to come and see her, as she knew I would, outside the cemetery on Masterman Road. She’d worked out that despite the fact I’d sent the hearse on ahead, I probably couldn’t stay for very long. By that time it was already almost midday, and I had another funeral to do over at the East London Cemetery at half past two. But in spite of the bone-aching cold of that day, it was nice just to be out and about with her, even if it was only for a few minutes or so.

  ‘How have you been?’ she asked as she took my arm and began walking slowly with me towards East Ham High Street. ‘You been sleeping now the bombing’s eased off?’

  Hannah isn’t the only one who asks after my health. Ever since I came back from the Great War with my mind in so many pieces, my body a shade of what it once had been, people have always asked me. But then even once my physical wounds had healed, my brain remained as it is to this day. Damaged, it makes me see and hear things that aren’t always real, vile things from that horror in the trenches. To be honest, had I not had Arthur with me when I found it, I would have been inclined to think that Nellie Martin’s body wasn’t real. What the trenches have also left me with is a fear of being buried alive. So when the sirens go off to let us know the Luftwaffe are on their way, I don’t go down to any shelter. I just run – anywhere, everywhere, as fast as I can. Sleep, therefore, over time, becomes a stranger to me, and my insanity grows accordingly.

  ‘I get the odd hour or so,’ I said as I pulled Hannah close in to my side. ‘Slightest noise still wakes me, but . . .’

  ‘Seeing what happened to that poor woman down New City Road probably didn’t help,’ Hannah said.

  I stopped, turned towards her and looked into her strong, handsome face. ‘Who told you about that?’ I said. ‘God blimey, my own family have only just found out about that!’

  Hannah shrugged. ‘Everyone knows about the skinned body.’

  ‘Yes, but me finding it and . . .’

  ‘Listen, with few bombs to talk about, people have to gossip about other things,’ Hannah said. ‘So we’d all heard the story but it was Bella who said she’d heard that it was an undertaker who’d found the body.’

  ‘So how did you know that it was me?’ I said.

  Hannah gave me a slightly pitying look. ‘Now, H . . .’

  I sighed. It’s stupid not to acknowledge it, but sometimes it is hard to accept I’m as instantly recognisable as I am. ‘So was it the colour of my skin or the way I behave?’

  Hannah gave me another look. What my sister Nancy would call an old-fashioned look.

  ‘That mad wog undertaker, wasn’t it?’ I said.

  Hannah didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. But then by the time the coppers had turned up to that bombed-out house in New City Road, I had been talking to myself. Or rather I’d been talking to what we now knew had been Nellie Martin. A man with hair the colour of coal and coffee-brown skin talking to a mutilated corpse. Even I can’t blame people for the fact they pass things like that on. By means of either the coppers, their families or young Arthur, word had reached Hannah’s mate Bella and probably all the rest of Canning Town too. We started walking again then, and Hannah, sort of, changed the subject.

  ‘The dead woman was in her fifties,’ she said.

  ‘Went to school with my sister,’ I replied. ‘Bullied her.’

  ‘Nancy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Hannah shook her head. ‘Still, terrible way to go. They say, so Bella told me, that she was a bit of a religious type.’

  ‘Was she?’ Nan hadn’t mentioned it and so it hadn’t occurred to me that Nellie Martin might be a churchy person.

  ‘Always in and out of some church on the Barking Road.’

  ‘There are lots of churches on the Barking Road, Hannah,’ I said.

  ‘I suppose there are,’ she replied. Then just before we got to East Ham High Street she said, ‘But you’re all right now? You’re over the shock of it, aren’t you?’

  I smiled and said that yes, I was. But Hannah still looked worried and she was right to do so. I’ve a bit of a history of getting involved with the ins and outs of strange deaths that come my way. But I did feel all right at the time and I was quite sincere when I said that I was to Hannah.

  Chapter Two

  She shouldn’t have said so much! Running off at the mouth like that! No one wanted to know about her concerns, especially not about such intimate things. And what if Nancy were to find out? She’d be hurt, and that would never do. Nancy was her friend!

  Fiddling in the handbag down by the side of her chair, she fumbled for her rosary. Maybe if she were quick she could get a couple of Hail Marys in, make some sort of penance before her guest came back from the privy. But instead she sipped some more tea and she waited. She’d had such a nice time, and really unexpected too. It had been a pity to spoil it with that sudden rush of bitterness about poor Nancy. Wringing her hands didn’t help either, but she did it anyway. Dear Queen of Heaven protect me, she thought. If I lose Nancy because of my silly mouth, I will die! Rita will kill me if I lose Nancy and I go into myself and she has to look after me! Sisters, as Rita had told her on the few occasions they did spend time together these days, were not supposed to look after each other once they were grown up.

  She looked up at the clock on the mantel and noticed that it was getting late. She noticed also that the face of the clock was somewhat blurry. Bad housekeeping, that! She got up from her chair with the full intention of going over to the mantel and wiping the face of the clock with a rag. But as she stood, she came over all funny in her head, and the next thing she knew she was lying on the floor. Embarrassed and really feeling quite peculiar by this time, she did try to get to her feet before her visitor returned from the privy. But she didn’t make it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she began as she tried to push herself up on to one of her elbows, ‘but—’

  The sharp slash of a knife across the bottom of her throat stopped any further words she might have had to say for ever.

  I didn’t find the body of Violet Dickens, but then it could be said that it didn’t need to be found. It sort of made itself apparent.

  Three weeks before, her old man had reported her missing to
the police. Not that they will or even can do much about people going missing these days. Nothing, according to the story that went about afterwards, happened until nearly a week after I found Nellie Martin’s mutilated corpse. There’d been a big raid on the night of the 29th, and it was after that that Violet’s husband noticed the smell. He thought at first it came from the lodger’s room upstairs. But it didn’t. It came from the attic. She was, so my sister Nancy informed me, in a ‘shocking state’ when she was found.

  ‘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 u
p 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?’