Last Rights (11 page)

So, now Kevin’s wife and family were going to have to answer questions about what they were doing on the night he died. The
coppers took them down the station while I followed on with the sergeant and the dead man’s wife. I was interested in what
Pearl had had to say about Hannah’s landlady, Dot Harris, and her involvement in all this. I did begin to ask her about it
until Sergeant Hill put me right. ‘You have to let us take it from here, Mr Hancock,’ he said. ‘Thank you very much for your
help, sir.’ He then raised his helmet and, with one hand round Pearl’s thin arm, he led her away towards the cemetery gates.

As she went she turned briefly and gave me a look that might have been of either desperation or hatred. But,
then, if she did hate me, I could understand that. After all, I’d laid it all, whatever it turned out to be, open to the air.
In effect, I had put her in the back of that police car and on her way to the station for questioning and God alone knew where
after that. A woman already scorned by her in-laws, with no mother of her own for comfort. And what of her daughter? If she
hadn’t come to the funeral with her mother, where was Velma? All I could hope was that Pearl would tell the coppers so they
could look after her. But that had to depend upon what, indeed, Pearl and Velma had been doing on the night that Kevin died.

I rode back to the shop with Albert in his motor. Hearses are classed as ‘essential’ transport so he can, most of the time,
get the petrol he needs. Makes me wonder sometimes what I’m still doing with the horses. But as the Duchess always says, some
people prefer horses and the dung comes in useful for Walter’s allotment – something we all occasionally benefit from.

‘I reckon me and old Kevin’ll be back at the East London before the week’s out,’ Albert said. ‘Murder or no murder, the coppers
ain’t got nowhere to keep bodies now. Morgue situation just don’t get no better.’

‘No.’

‘You reckon she done it then, Pearl Dooley?’ Albert said.

I was looking out of the window at the time. It had begun to drizzle now. It made the houses out on Grange Road look even
more miserable than they usually do. Funny the way places around cemeteries always look like that. Even if the people who
live in them are happy types.

‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘She told me she loved him and I think that maybe she did in her way. And even if she did kill
him there has to be more than a chance that she was only protecting herself. Kevin Dooley was not, as you’ve said, Albert,
anyone’s angel.’

‘Bloody right. Vicious bastard. Mind you, if she did do it the same way as her mum, don’t ’arf give you the creeps, don’t
it?’

Yes, it did. People don’t like that sort of thing, in my experience. Murder in the blood. Puts you in mind of madness in the
family or disease or any other type of ill the average bloke can come up against. If something is passed on through the blood
it means people can’t have any control over it. And that is frightening.

I looked out of the window again and wondered where Pearl’s sister Ruby might be now. God forgive me, I also wondered whether
Shlomo Kaplan had had any other wounds apart from those to his head. After all, as far as I knew, the last person who could’ve
seen him alive before the air raid, apart from Ruby, was Bessie Stern when she went to get her neighbours into the shelter.
But Bessie had admitted she hadn’t seen him. Could the old man have been dead before the raid started? Could Ruby Reynolds
have killed him? If she had, not to take any money and, further, to return to the scene of her crime when the raid was over,
seemed stupid to me. And why, later, when the police were called, had she run away? If she were innocent, that had to be just
plain daft. All I could think of by way of a reason was her mother’s crime and the connections the police might make between
it
and Ruby. Back again to the idea that killing runs in the blood. But as I know only too well, people, even coppers, like to
think that lots of things exist in the blood. Frightening though it is, it’s easy to understand. It also helps ‘nice’ people
make the separation between themselves and all the ‘bad’ people. Rubbish! In my case, when I was a nipper, it was selling
carpets. We have a few of the Indian men selling carpets door to door around this manor – Johnny Boys, they’re called – the
Duchess has one in for tea sometimes, Mr Bhadwaj. Despite my dad and his business, that was what some of the kids at school
saw me doing when I grew up. I was brown, so carpet-selling had to be in my blood. It was worse at the grammar school, maybe
because more of the kids there had parents who could afford to buy carpets, of any sort, and look down their noses at the
Johnny Boys as they did so. Some years later, good, bad, black or white, we all fought and suffered in the Great War. You
would’ve thought that might have killed off ideas about things being in people’s blood, wouldn’t you?

‘Hannah!’

I’d already taken the Duchess down the shelter in anticipation of a raid when Hannah turned up at the shop door. Luckily for
me, both Nan and Aggie were down the Anderson too, or I would have had even more explaining to do. And with the tale of Kevin
Dooley’s strange fate still ringing in their ears, Mum and the girls probably had enough to gossip about as it was.

‘You’ve got a visitor,’ Hannah said, as she pushed a red-faced
and tear-stained Velma into the shop in front of her.

You never can tell when the siren’s going to go, so I took them both up to the kitchen for the time being. If the warning
went they’d have to go in with Duchess and the others anyway and God knew how I’d explain it, especially Hannah . . .

‘She turned up at Dot’s a couple of hours ago,’ Hannah said, as she took off her hat and sat down. ‘I never knew until I heard
Dot raving.’

‘Raving?’ I put the kettle on the range and lit the gas beneath it. ‘About what?’

‘I don’t know.’ Hannah shrugged. ‘But she was giving this one here a right going over.’

Velma, her head down, began to cry.

‘Dot was all for bunging her out in the street,’ Hannah said, ‘but she’s only a kid so I had to take her.’

‘Where?’

‘Down the pub first,’ Hannah said. ‘Dot wouldn’t have her in the house. Then she said she wanted to come here, speak to you.
It’s all I’ve been able to get out of her so far. All she’ll say about her mother is that she’s gone.’

I looked at Velma, a little guiltily I must confess, and said, ‘What you need’s a nice cup of tea, isn’t it, love?’

She didn’t smile, but her tears seemed to slow down after that.

While I poured the water into the pot, Hannah said, ‘Dot had the coppers round about half past three. I expect that was why
she—’

‘They come about my mum,’ Velma said. ‘She’s down
the police station now, Mum is!’ And then she turned to me. ‘You know, don’t you, Mr Hancock?’

I sat down opposite her and took one of her hands in mine. ‘Were you in the cemetery for your step-father’s funeral?’

‘Outside,’ the girl corrected. ‘Mum wanted me to go in but I wouldn’t, not for that pig.’

‘Your step-father?’

‘Yes. I hated him and I’m glad he’s dead! I couldn’t ever work out why Mum loved him, he done such bad things to her. Why
have the coppers taken my mum away, Mr Hancock? Does it have anything to do with her mum and her sister Ruby?’

I looked briefly at Hannah, who registered her surprise. ‘What do you know about that, Velma?’ I said.

‘I didn’t know nothing until Mum told me about it last night,’ the girl said. ‘Spent the night down Bethnal Green tube, we
did. It was horrible. Me and Mum couldn’t sleep. Then she began telling me all about it. Mum said I should know in case my
aunt, Ruby, got into the papers.’

‘Why does she think that your Aunt Ruby might get into the papers?’

‘Well, you was there,’ Velma said, ‘at that place in Spitalfields. Coppers think she done that old bloke in. Mum says they
have to know about my granny too and about what she done, which was murder, so Mum said. Mum says the coppers’ll say her sister
done it whether she did or not. Mum don’t trust coppers.’

‘Velma,’ I said, ‘what do you know about your grandmother?’

And then the sirens went.

I stood up as my speech went. ‘C-c-come on,’ I said, ‘you’ll have to c-c-come d-down our shelter.’

‘I’ll tell you all about it down there,’ Velma said.

I looked across at Hannah before I ran down the stairs. She knew I never went inside during a raid, but she followed me anyway.

Out in the yard it was pitch dark and raining. I opened the door to the Anderson and stood to one side. I heard the Duchess
greet Velma as an old friend when she went in.

‘What are you going to do, Mr H?’ Hannah said, as she stood underneath the pouring water from the sky.

‘I-I . . .’

‘Now you’ve got the girl talking . . .’

‘Er . . .’ I looked away from Hannah, into the shelter, my heart pounding at the sight of it. ‘V-Velma’s g-granny, this is
v-very important…’

‘Then you’ll have to come down, won’t you?’ Hannah said.

‘Francis, are you going to come in this time?’ I heard the Duchess say.

‘Who’s that with you?’ Nan asked.

‘M-M-M-Miss J-Jacobs,’ I said.

‘Who’s she?’

‘Never mind, there’s a raid on,’ I heard Aggie say. Then she came to the door of the shelter and ushered Hannah in. ‘Come
on, love, come in. Frank, you coming in here with this lady or not?’

‘Er . . .’

‘That kid wants to tell you about her granny, Mr H,’
Hannah said, as she walked past me into the shelter. ‘So if it’s that important . . .’

I swung myself through the door and pulled it closed behind me. Heart hammering, my breath coming short and shallow, I somehow
staggered over to one of the bunks at the back of the shelter and sat down.

Hannah’s a really bright woman. I often wish I could ask her to marry me. But there’s far too many ‘if’s – if she wasn’t Jewish,
if I wasn’t like I am . . .

She introduced herself to my family as a friend of Pearl and Velma Dooley. It was sort of true, after all. Not that Aggie
was fooled – I saw her face and she was obviously amused. But, then, I knew she knew about Hannah – how I don’t know. Maybe
she’d seen me leave her once, shaking hands on the doorstep of her boarding-house. But whatever Aggie did or didn’t know,
she didn’t let on to the Duchess or Nan. No one spoke about Pearl either – not yet, at least.

By this time, of course, I was speechless. There was nothing to hear then, save ordinary sounds like Nan pouring tea from
a Thermos for people and Aggie’s pen scratching across paper – writing a letter to her little ’uns. No bombers, not yet. But
I knew it wouldn’t be long. Germans and bombs, mud and limbs flying up in the air, yards not feet, then crashing down again,
on top of houses and factories, children and old women and me. Burying me alive. How many times had I watched blokes sink
into the mud of Flanders, folded into a tomb of muck, sinking into burial, alive and screaming. It was freezing down
there in our Anderson, but the sweat was dripping off me. The Duchess, I knew, wanted to put out a hand to comfort me, but
I also knew she understood what her action might do. Sometimes, when I’m like this, all it takes is a touch to make me scream.

Then, as that familiar drone throbbed through my chest from the hundreds of planes above, just as I thought I would surely
have a heart-attack, Hannah, sitting between me and Velma, began to speak. ‘You were going to tell us about your grandma,
Velma,’ she said.

The girl looked around at the Duchess and my sisters, her eyes full of fear.

The Duchess, who has a knack of saying the right thing at the right time, said, ‘If you’d rather just speak to Mr Hancock
and Miss Jacobs I promise you I won’t listen, my dear. I understand you have some trouble at the moment.’

‘Won’t be able to listen soon,’ Aggie put in. ‘Be bleedin’ deafened in a minute.’

Nan shot her a disgusted look – Nan doesn’t like swearing – and then did what the Duchess says she always does, which is sit
in a corner with her rosary. In the dark, squatting like that, she looked like one of those photographs you sometimes see
of poor people in Delhi or Calcutta.

‘Well?’ Hannah stroked Velma’s dirty wet hair.

‘My gran was called Victorine Reynolds,’ Velma said. ‘Mum said the papers called her the Bloody French Maid – ’cause she was
French originally, like.’

I’ve never taken a great deal of interest in what newspapers print so neither the name nor the nickname
rang any bells with me. But there was Reynolds and there was something distinctly foreign-sounding too. Victorine – I’d never
heard the like before.

The ground shook, and somewhere to the south there was the sound of first one and then about four explosions. The docks, getting
it again. Inside my head something awful gibbered and jabbered like the ravings of the madmen those evil trenches had pushed
out into the world.

Velma took a deep breath before she continued. She was a brave little kid, determined not to show her fear. She put me to
shame. ‘Victorine had this man,’ she said, ‘Neilson. He wasn’t Mum’s dad. I don’t know who he was. But he was like Kevin.’

‘What do you mean, love?’ Hannah asked.

‘He hit her.’

A thud, somewhat closer now. Aggie, an unlit fag in her mouth, looked up from her letter. ‘Feels like over the Greengate way,’
she said, measuring the seriousness of the situation by pub name.

Close. Getting closer. Then a massive explosion. My legs twitched, wanting to run. Stan Wheeler had been sitting when a German
Mills bomb landed beside him. ‘Jesus!’ he’d said, just before he disappeared into nothing. ‘Jesus!’ I could hear it as sure
as if he was still beside me. ‘Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!’

‘Then one night Mum and her sisters were out.’ Velma was speaking again and I made myself turn to look at her. ‘He went mad,
this Neilson, bashing Mum’s mum up. She had to stop him so she stabbed him with her hatpin . . .’

Aggie looked up at the word ‘hatpin’ then went back to her letter.

‘Oh, I see,’ Hannah said, looking at me as she did so. ‘Right, then, weren’t you?’