Last Rights (12 page)

I nodded. So now she knew – that I’d found out the truth about how Kevin Dooley had died and how the method of his death had
led everyone’s thoughts to Pearl.

‘He died,’ Velma hadn’t been listening to us and was seemingly in almost a trance, ‘and my gran went to prison. Mum and her
sisters went to an orphanage, or she and Ruby and Amber did. My gran had said they had to keep together, see. They’re all
named after jewels, my mum and her sisters.’ Briefly she smiled. It’s amazing how kids can be when they find something they
like. The world can be tearing itself apart but kids can still enjoy things like pretty names. ‘But the little sister, Opal,
she was just a baby at the time so she went somewhere else. Mum don’t know. No one told her anything. They hung Victorine
in the end and Mum didn’t know until it was over. Never said goodbye or nothing. Then Mum and her other sisters split up too.
Mum says she’s always been afraid that someone’ll find out who she is and try to make up stories about her. So when she heard
about Ruby she was scared.’ Velma looked down at her hands, her eyes heavy with sadness. ‘Do you think the police’ve got my
mum ’cause they think she’s done a murder? Do they think she murdered Kevin?’

‘I don’t know, love,’ Hannah said gently, as she stroked Velma’s hair.

I said nothing. With a raid in full swing, with the dust
from explosions maybe miles away creeping into the shelter, I wouldn’t have been able to put a sentence together anyway.

‘So why did you come to, er, to my place when your mum had gone?’ Hannah said, carefully avoiding owning up to where she lived
in front of my family.

‘I wanted to see Mr Hancock,’ Velma said.

‘Why didn’t you just come here?’

‘Because I saw him go across to the police car when the coppers took her away,’ she said. ‘I didn’t really know what had happened.
I come to see you, Miss, because you’re his friend. Mum said you was all Jews . . .’

‘Jews!’ Nan nearly dropped her rosary. ‘We ain’t no Jews!’

‘Oh, but my mum—’

‘Well, your mum thought wrong,’ Nan said. ‘We’re Christian us, English. Are you stupid or something?’

Given that all of us, except Aggie, were a damn sight darker than Hannah, Pearl’s assumption hadn’t been so daft. But no one
said anything to Nan about this.

‘No, it’s only me who’s Jewish,’ Hannah said to Velma. Then she changed the subject. ‘So you must’ve remembered where I live
from when Mr Hancock brought you over. Did you ask my landlady if you could see me?’

‘I never got the chance,’ Velma replied. ‘She went barmy when she see me. She said the coppers had already been round about
my mother and she didn’t want no more trouble. If you hadn’t come down, Miss, I don’t know what I’d’ve done.’

‘Do you know what the coppers were asking about your mum, Velma?’

There was a huge explosion, really close this time. As the dust and muck shot into the shelter we all ducked down and closed
our eyes. There was that smell too, the one I can’t easily describe, but it’s the smell you get when bricks burn. It’s disgusting.

‘Christ!’ I heard Aggie yell.

Nan, in contrast, clung to her beads. ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and at the time of our death. Holy Mary .
. .’

Up above, the roar of the bombers’ engines. Directly overhead. For seconds that could have been minutes, we held our breath.
Somehow I stifled the urge to scream, but I felt my face go white and it wasn’t until Hannah spoke again that I came back
to the world once more.

‘Velma?’

The girl shrugged, half a ton of grey dust from her shoulders falling on to the floor as she moved. ‘I don’t know. Maybe it
was about what Mum done the night Kevin died.’

Velma put her head down as if in shame. In spite of the way that I felt and everything that was going on I was interested
in this so I moved a bit closer the better to hear.

‘What did your mum do that night, Velma?’ Hannah asked.

‘She went to see Mrs Harris,’ Velma said. ‘I went with her. Me and Mum saw you that night, Miss,’ she smiled, ‘but you never
saw us so Mum said not to say nothing.’

Aggie, now given up on her letter, looked at me and
frowned. She’d perked up at the mention of Mrs Harris all right.

‘Why was your mum at Mrs Harris’s, Velma?’ Hannah asked.

Again the head went down and this time I had to get still closer to hear what she was mumbling.

‘Mum was ill,’ she whispered. ‘Mum said Mrs Harris can sometimes make people better. And she’s cheaper than a doctor, Mum
says. She was in her room for a long time. When she come out her face was white and there was . . . blood, on her, like her
slip and that . . . She said I wasn’t to tell no one about what she done, but because you know Mrs Harris, Miss . . . you
and Mr Hancock, you won’t tell no one else, will you?’

‘W
ho d’you think you are? Sherlock Holmes?’

‘If I’m being told the truth Pearl Dooley couldn’t have killed her husband,’ I said, and then, lowering my voice to a whisper,
‘She was having an abortion at the time. At Dot Harris’s. Her daughter told me about it last night.’

Talking about such things, even round the back of the police station with no one else about, you have to be careful. Not that
the coppers don’t know it goes on. They know all right, and who does it. But I sometimes think that a lot of people consider
talking about things almost worse than doing them. So much in life is about how things look to others. Like those women who
gave out white feathers to blokes they saw out of uniform during the Great War. I got one once, when I was home on leave.
Made me cry myself to sleep it did. I should have rammed it down her stupid throat with my bayonet.

‘Look,’ Fred Bryant glanced quickly over his shoulder and then came and stood very close to me, ‘I know all about
the so-called abortion.’ He mouthed rather than spoke the last, forbidden, word. ‘Pearl Dooley come out with that straight
away. But Dot Harris says she never done it.’

‘Well, she would. But Velma, Pearl’s daughter, she can identify Dot.’

‘I don’t doubt it. So can a lot of people,’ Fred said. ‘Anyway, Dot don’t deny knowing Pearl Dooley. Said she come to her
for a you-know-what last year. But told her she was out of that business now. Dot ain’t seen her since, and certainly not
on the night that Kevin Dooley died.’

‘Velma says her mother was in a bad way after the abortion. Someone must have noticed!’

‘Vi Dooley says Pearl was out with Velma the night Kevin died and when she come back in she was perfectly all right. All the
family were at home with the exception of Kevin, Pearl and Velma, so Vi says. So Pearl could’ve just as easy been with her
husband as she could’ve been at Dot’s.’

‘Velma says her mother had blood on her clothes.’

Fred shook his head. ‘Well, she’s on her own with that.’

‘You should get a doctor to examine Pearl,’ I said.

‘And what would that prove?’ Fred replied. ‘Doctor can’t tell when she had, you know, it done even if he does find something.
She could’ve had it the morning or the night before or even the next day. Can’t prove she had it done that night or that Dot
Harris done it, not unless someone turns up what saw her at Rathbone Street. But we’ve had no luck with that so far.’

‘So you going to charge her?’

‘You said yourself Dooley talked about a woman
stabbing him,’ the policeman said, ‘and, anyway, you know what his wife’s background is. Ain’t no such thing as a coincidence,
I don’t think, and,’ Fred lowered his voice, ‘Pearl had made threats against her husband, during arguments.’ And then as he
started walking back to the station he called back, ‘Go home, Mr H, there’s nothing you can do about it now.’

I relit what was left of my fag and started to walk. Although I knew in my heart that I’d done the right thing with regard
to Kevin Dooley, I couldn’t help feeling guilty. I couldn’t be certain, of course, that Pearl was innocent, but to use an
abortion as an alibi seemed strange to me. If it were legal, I could understand it, but it isn’t. Why use one crime, of a
type almost as serious as murder, to cover up for another? Besides, Pearl must have known Dot Harris would never back her
up. Also, Pearl had loved her thug of a husband for some reason. He beat her, gave her kids she couldn’t support, some she
maybe did want rid of, and yet she, like so many of the poor women around here, still cared. And then there was Velma. Again,
it was me who had brought her in to the police. But only because I thought that what she had to say was important. She was
in there with them now and, although Fred had told me to go home, I’d decided to wait for her as long as I could. I just hoped
the coppers didn’t take it into their heads to keep her in too.

Coming up from the Anderson that morning I’d met Ken passing the back gate. Ken’s straight as a die so when I told him about
what Velma had said about Pearl he gave me his honest opinion.

‘Well, you’ve got to try and help her if you think there’s a chance she might be innocent,’ he’d said. ‘Mind you, with her
background, it sounds to me as if the coppers have got her in the nick and hung already.’

I said something about not believing anything about murder being in the blood and Ken replied, ‘I dunno, pal. Sometimes I
wonder. After all, them as are fighting now are the kids of them in the first lot, ain’t they?’

‘Some,’ I said.

‘You’d think that what we saw would’ve taught them something, wouldn’t you? But they keep on sending their kids for King and
country. Maybe it is in the blood, mate. Who knows?’ He looked down sadly at his boots and said, ‘But there’s also the truth
– important to old soldiers like us, H, even if them in authority, right or wrong, always get to do what they want.’

He was right there. I only had to think about the so-called deserters we’d been ordered to shoot to know that. Men go mad
and then they lose their way, wander right off sometimes. There are reasons for desertion, good reasons, but in the eyes of
military law they’re in the wrong, and no matter what they’ve been through, those in power demand only one punishment for
such a crime: death at the hands of their fellows. Reasons, the truth itself, rarely mattered. Some of the officers used to
call it ‘making an example’ of a bloke. It was incidents like this that had helped to form Albert Cox’s rather ‘Commie’ style
of opinions. And I do agree with him in lots of ways. It’s simply that, for me, unjust death need not be political. For me
it’s about truth and justice for the dead.
Looking after them is what my life is all about. Without them I am nothing.

I waited around for a good hour, but then I had to go. As well as all the usual jobs that go with the business, I had to go
out with a coffin up to Plashet Grove again. As gently as I could I was going to place it round the shell with a baby called
William in it. The mother had been raving mad with grief when she’d come to the shop, which had been while I was out in Spitalfields.
Doris had done her best, but I wasn’t expecting an easy time either now or at the funeral, which would hopefully take place
some time in the next few days. Jerries permitting. We don’t charge for babies’ funerals, but that doesn’t mean we don’t hope
for decent conditions and all the usual niceties that should go with such a solemn occasion.

Velma, I imagined and hoped, would eventually return to the shop. If, that is, the police didn’t think she had been involved
in Kevin’s death.

As it happened, Velma gave a statement to the police supporting her mother. The coppers then asked her some questions and
later on they let her go. But she didn’t come back to us. Fred Bryant told me later that some of the Dooleys, Kevin’s brothers
and a sister-in-law, had been hanging around the station and shouted and swore at her as she left. So Velma just ran.

I asked Fred why he didn’t stop her and bring her over to us, but he just said, ‘Moved too quick for me, she did.’

‘Well, you could’ve told the Dooleys to leave her alone at least!’ I said. ‘What were they swearing and shouting at
a child for anyway? I know the old woman doesn’t like the girl and her mother but . . .’

But Fred just shrugged, as he does when he doesn’t know what to say. The truth was, of course, that having got what they wanted
out of Velma, the coppers weren’t concerned about what happened afterwards. If I hadn’t asked them to keep a look-out for
her, I don’t know if they would have bothered at all. ‘There is a war on, you know,’ is what they say. But eventually Fred
Bryant did say he’d look for her, which, for what it was worth, I think he did.

Where Velma did run to, however, was a mystery to me for some time. But even though it bothered me and it fretted the Duchess
something rotten, I accepted that there wasn’t much I could do about it for the time being. So I just waited to see what the
police decided about Pearl and got on with my work for the next two days. At that point, to be honest, I was feeling too guilty
about what I’d done to Pearl and Velma to want to think properly about it. In trying to get at the truth about what happened
to Kevin, had I done nothing more than just bring trouble to people who may not deserve it? I didn’t know, so I didn’t think
too much about it until Fred Bryant turned up with something that had once been a woman called Cherry Hazlitt.

‘It’s best the family don’t have her at home, not in that state,’ Fred said, as he and a couple of younger coppers put something
large and bloodied into the shell I’d prepared for it.

‘There’s not many undertakers as can have corpses on the premises, which is why I recommended you to the
mother,’ Fred went on. ‘Well, if I can put a bit of business your way . . .’

‘Yes, thank you, Fred.’

If he was expecting some sort of backhander from this, he was going to be sorely disappointed. But, then, perhaps what he
had in mind was more in the way of a discount on possible future services. After all, we none of us know what will happen
to us or our loved ones, these days, and Fred has a very big family.

‘We charged that Pearl Dooley,’ Fred said, once the younger policemen had gone.