After the Mourning (16 page)

Once outside, Charlie said to me, ‘They think Sergeant Williams killed our Lily, do they?’

‘Well . . .’

‘He never,’ the boy said.

I held the passenger door of the hearse open for him, then went to the driver’s side and got in. ‘How do you know that, Charlie?’ I asked. ‘Do you know who did kill your sister?’

‘No. But it weren’t Sergeant Williams.’

I started the engine. ‘How do you know?’ I said.

‘I dunno.’ He shrugged. ‘Just don’t sit right.’

I didn’t know exactly what he meant. I couldn’t know precisely what was inside Charlie’s head. But something in what he’d said made me feel uneasy, so after I’d taken the body back to the shop and settled Charlie with a plate of Nan’s scrag-end stew, I went over to Plaistow police station. I didn’t know whether the boys over there would have any information about the investigation into Lily’s death, but it was worth asking and, besides, I still had my own business to follow up on too.

Chapter Eleven

‘
I
f we’d found so much as a finger you would’ve been the first to know,’ Sergeant Hill said, as he shook his head regretfully. ‘I’m sorry, Mr H, but I think your uncle Percy just disappeared. You know how it is.’

Yes, I did. As I had always believed, Percy had vaporised, split into a million million atoms and gone back into the earth and sky whence he had come.

‘Your Stella still in a two and eight about her old man, is she?’

‘Sort of,’ I said. ‘Although it’s different now. She reckons that the “miracle” up in Epping Forest means her dad might still be alive.’

Sergeant Hill sighed. ‘Poor old Stel,’ he said. ‘She must be disappointed about the turn of events up there.’

‘Yes.’ It was the perfect lead-in to what I’d really come to talk about.

I told him how I’d been called out by the Gypsies to Lily’s body and about what was likely to happen now. I also told him that when I’d returned to the shop with Charlie Lee I had tried to explain what was happening to my cousin but without success. ‘Stella just skips about with a soppy grin on her face,’ I said. ‘Shock’s a funny thing, isn’t it? So many people are going to have problems with this forest business.’

Although the station was quiet, which was a bit strange in itself, Sergeant Hill took my arm and led me through into one of the back offices. As he shut the door behind me he motioned me towards one of the chairs, then sat down. He offered me a Woodbine and took one for himself.

‘You know a lot of my fellows are up the forest, don’t you?’ he said, as he leaned in towards me. ‘There’s a lot of trouble.’

‘With the Gypsies?’

He looked over one shoulder, then the other. ‘Mr H, this is very hush-hush,’ he said. ‘People ain’t supposed to know about such things.’

‘About what?’ I asked.

He pulled his chair so close to me that I could almost have smoked his fag instead of my own. ‘Things bad for morale,’ Sergeant Hill whispered. ‘Since this girl died, there’s been violence up there, people wanting to know who killed her, people threatening to find who it was and do him in. Not the Gypsies, the bloody
gauje
! Walthamstow and Leyton divisions called on us for help to calm it all down! No matter what’s happened and who done what to who, the MPs have still got their job to do. We and, I’ve heard, some plainclothes from Scotland Yard have to make sure they can carry on doing it.’ He put a hand on my arm and said, ‘But this is hush-hush, remember. You can’t tell no one.’

I understood, all right. No one with an ounce of intelligence takes at face value everything the government does or doesn’t tell us. Like a lot of people round here I can remember the official silence back in September when South Hallsville School in Canning Town bought it. A direct hit, people killed, hundreds made homeless, but it was nothing – in the national news. Here, things were different. Here we watched the victims carrying on as usual, suffering in silence for the sake of their pride as well as the sake of their country. Such events, should they get out, would destroy morale, so it’s thought, and let the Nazis into people’s heads. I’d rather know the truth myself, but I’m a madman, which means my thoughts cannot be relied upon.

‘What went on up in the forest was a nice little miracle with a nice little Virgin keeping, thank Christ, schtum,’ Sergeant Hill continued.

‘Count your blessings that Lily’s Virgin didn’t predict the end of the war or the death of Hitler or anything, eh?’

‘Bloody right!’ the policeman said. ‘Imagine if she’d told all them up there to go and march on Downing Street or something! Don’t bear thinking about!’ He shivered. ‘But then again, all of them up in the forest left unsatisfied don’t sit that much better. They want to know why the Virgin come to the girl and what punishment heaven or whatever is going to pour down on humanity now that Lily Lee’s gone. Don’t you go telling too many people you’ve got the girl’s body up your place, will you? They’ll all be down camped outside if you’re not too careful!’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘Dr Craig up at Whipps Cross warned me about that. He’s going to recommend people are told the girl’s body is going back to the Gypsies.’

Sergeant Hill looked doubtful. ‘Could be trouble with that,’ he said. ‘Could have people trying to get into the Lees’
tan
– er, their tent.’

‘Could be trouble whatever’s done.’

‘That’s true.’ He cleared his throat, then asked me about the funeral and I said, quite honestly, that I didn’t have a clue about when it might take place. I hadn’t seen either of the girl’s parents about it yet and I could hardly ask young Charlie. The only thing I did know was that the service, in all probability, would be performed by Ernie Sutton.

‘Well, you let me know when it’s going to be, won’t you, Mr H?’ Sergeant Hill said, as he rose to indicate that our conversation was over. ‘Elaborate dos, Gypsy funerals. All sorts of traditions have to be kept. Anyway, we’ll need to be there to hold back the crowds we hope won’t turn up.’

‘I don’t think that the Lees will want people outside their group . . .’

‘They might not have much choice,’ Sergeant Hill replied. ‘Not if so much as one of them buggers up Epping gets wind of it. And they will. Things like this can never be secret, can they?’

He was right, of course: there are few real secrets in life. Most things unknown are simply suppressed. I expect that most of London knows about what happened at South Hallsville School, but I’d lay money that few ever talk about it. That would make it real, and a horrible event is much easier as a half-truth. To face the reality would be painful, and people have enough of that in their lives as it is. When you don’t have any coal to heat your home in winter and all your blankets are wet with damp, that’s enough for anyone.

I left the police station in a bit of a dream. I’d seen people leaving Epping Forest earlier and in what appeared to be good order. But if coppers had been called up to Epping from this far south, not to mention from Scotland Yard, then things up there had to be serious. Hysteria, this time not of a religious kind, was taking hold . . .

‘Watch where you’re going, for Gawd’s sake!’

I came to and found myself staring into a broad, heavily scarred female face. Mrs Hinton, a proper street-fighting woman if ever there was, and one of the ‘girls’ my sister Aggie worked with down at Tate & Lyle.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said, as she recovered herself and gave me what passes in Mrs Hinton for a smile. I’d buried her husband, Jack, back in ’39 and she’d shown her gratitude by trying to run me up her stairs to her bedroom before poor old Jack was even cold. Naturally I’d been nervous of Mrs Hinton ever since. Now here she was with one hand inside her green gabardine coat – at chest height. I prepared to close my eyes.

I raised my hat politely to her.

‘Hello, Mrs Hinton.’ ‘Hello, Frank Hancock.’ Her toothless old gums shone up at me like a row of pink limelights. Thankfully, she soon closed her gob, then looked quickly over both shoulders, like Sergeant Hill had back in the police station. There were scores of people going about their business before darkness and the Nazi bombers came. But this didn’t seem to deter Mrs Hinton, who just dug her hand deeper into the top of her coat.

Christ
, I thought,
I had enough of a look at what she had when she chased me up her stairs!

‘’Ere y’are,’ she said, as she pressed a small, still-warm chicken into my hands. ‘Get that in yer coat and don’t say nothing!’

Now it was my turn to look around wildly, mainly at the police station behind me.

‘Mrs Hinton! If this is knocked off . . .’

‘Quick! Put it away, you daft ha’porth,’ she said, as she bundled the brown-feathered chicken under my coat. ‘Course it’s knocked off. Who has a chicken for his dinner, these days?’

‘But . . . you . . .’

‘Oh, don’t worry about me,’ she said, with yet another of her horrible smiles. Then, pulling her coat to one side, she revealed three more chickens pressed to her heavily drooping and very bare right breast.

‘Bet you don’t see one of them every day, do ya?’ she said, as she scurried off down the Barking Road in the direction of Green Street.

You can call behaviour like hers madness, the result of a mind gone barmy from the bombing, but it’s also an act of great spirit. Europe is tearing itself apart at the behest of monsters like Hitler and Mussolini. A person could easily fall into despair. But while an elderly woman is prepared to hide knocked-off chickens against her bare chest, then give one to a man she fancies outside a police station, there has to be some hope. At least, that was how I saw it as I chuckled my way home under the eyes of an equally amused old constable who, on his way back to the station, had seen the whole barmy thing.

Even before I opened the door to the shop, I knew that something was different. In the hours of daylight it’s always noisy out in the street – women trying to get a bit of shopping before the next raid, newspaper sellers shouting their smoke-dried bark, encouraging people to buy papers that will tell them nothing, kids running about picking up whatever they can find to sell, pawn or eat. And in the shop, these days, it’s rarely silent, as it used to be in the more peaceful and respectful twenties and thirties. There’s far too much death, far too many people needed to help me, for that. But as I pushed open the shop door in what was becoming the half-light of dusk, all I could hear from within was silence and all I could see was Doris standing in front of the candle-lit desk gazing somewhere that I knew I had never seen her gaze before.

I took my hat off. ‘Doris?’

She said nothing. I approached her, but not too closely. I didn’t feel it would be right. ‘Doris, what’s happened?’

Still she didn’t answer.

‘Doris?’

And then, suddenly, her eyes met mine, so quickly it was almost as if she had snapped them into place. ‘My Alfie’s dead,’ she said baldly.

Although people die suddenly every day, I was stunned. Alfie was a mate. ‘Oh, Doris . . .’

‘Midday. There was an unexploded bomb at the end of our street. Some disposal boys come to blow it up, but it went off in their faces. They all died. My Alfie too. The blast was so close, it stopped his heart. He had a dodgy ticker, as you know.’ There wasn’t a tear in her eye, not a crease of grief upon her face. And yet she was suffering. She had loved her husband, Alfie. He had worshipped the ground she walked on. Doris tossed her head backwards and said, ‘He’s out the back, if you want to go and have a look. He ain’t got a mark on him.’

I put out a hand to touch her arm, but she flinched away from me. Alfie Rosen, her husband, had been a bus conductor. It was well known that he’d had a weak heart, which had been made worse when his father was interned. He’d found that time a tremendous strain. But for Alfie to die from the effects of bomb blast, even with his weakened heart, was still difficult to take in. Alfie had been a cheeky, cheerful soul, unlike me, very full of life. It wasn’t fair. It never is.

‘The Reverend Silverman says he can bury Alfie up the cemetery in West Ham tomorrow. Can you do tomorrow afternoon for my Alfie, Mr H?’

‘Doris . . .’ My eyes stung with tears for Alfie, for Doris and for this terrible manifestation of ice-cold grief she was suffering.

‘Half past three, the rabbi said,’ she continued. ‘I mean, I know I don’t have to tell you, Mr H, that Jewish people have to be buried quick, so I apologise for hurrying you up like this . . .’

‘Doris, of course I’ll conduct Alfie’s funeral!’ I said. ‘There’s nothing in this world that could be more important than—’

‘I’ll pay,’ she said, raising her small round face to mine. ‘And I’ll be back to work the day after—’

‘You will not,’ I said, as calmly as my rising panic would allow. I know what we used to call ‘shell-shock’ when I see it. ‘You will not pay me a farthing and you will only come back to work when you’re fit to do so. Doris . . .’

She backed away from me. ‘I don’t want no charity!’ she said. Only now did she seem close to tears. ‘I don’t want nothing!’

Behind her I could see my mother and Alfie’s father, Herschel Rosen, standing just inside the black curtains at the back of the shop. They looked first at Doris and then at me, their faces clouded with grief and concern.

‘Doris . . .’

‘No!’ She backed to within an inch of my mother’s arm. Then her face screwed up and she shrieked, ‘Alfie! I want my Alfie! That’s all I want! I don’t want no money or—Stuff it! Stuff you, Mr H, and your fucking free funeral and—’

Before she sank to the floor, Herschel and the Duchess caught her in their arms. The weeping and the weakness of grief had rendered Doris incapable and she sat on the floor in the arms of the old people at the end of all of her strength. She’s only a young woman, Doris, in her early thirties. Alfie, with whom she hadn’t had any nippers, had been her world.

As I bent down to Doris who was now begging my forgiveness for shouting at me, I put my hand on old Herschel Rosen’s shoulder and said, ‘I’m so sorry, Mr Rosen.’