Last Rights (19 page)

‘Telephone’s out again,’ Nan said, as I staggered in over the scullery step and into the back privy. My poor Rama and Sita
had been so terrified by their experiences of the previous night that I’d had a job first separating them from
the hearse and then getting them back into their stable. What the poor buggers really needed was a bloody good gallop over
the Beckton marshes, but I knew I wasn’t up to it. I was exhausted and worried after what had happened under the Limehouse
railway bridge and I needed to decide what I was going to do next.

As I walked out of the karzy, there was Nan waiting for me. ‘Did you hear what I said, Frank? About the telephone?’

‘Yes . . .’

‘Well?’

I shrugged. ‘If we need it we can ask Mr Deeks in the bank. I’m sure that if his line’s working he won’t mind us using it
for essential—’

‘’Cause you see, Frank,’ Nan butted in, ‘your idea about me taking that young Velma down Southend is stupid. The bleedin’
Germans are killing us! You know that redhead woman down Balaam Street, the young one with the baby? Mrs Woods. Well, some
German in his aeroplane tried to kill her and the baby last night. Come screaming down Balaam Street as she was on her way
back from her mum’s. Firing his guns at her he was, at her and the baby! God help us, Frank, what sort of a world—’ And then,
worn out by the great rush of words she’d just spilled out at me, she broke down into tears.

I went over to her and put my arm round her shoulders. Nan, who isn’t one normally for any sort of affection, buried her head
in the collar of my jacket.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to go to Southend. I’ll – I’ll think of something . . .’ After all, in view of my
experiences in Limehouse I needed now, probably more than before, to locate Amber Reynolds.

‘I thought that maybe me and Velma could phone the Nazareth sisters,’ Nan said, ‘but then when Mother said that the telephone
was out . . .’ She put one hand over her mouth as she began to sob once again. Nan is proper no-nonsense, carry-on-and-get-the-job-done
normally, but even she has her breaking point and it sounded like the story of the young mum and her baby had just about done
her in.

‘I’ll take Velma to the bank,’ I said. ‘I’m sure Mr Deeks won’t mind if we use his telephone. We’ll make do. Velma doesn’t
have to go to Southend. We’ll keep her safe here, eh?’

Nevertheless, I had to find Amber with or without Velma’s help and then I had somehow to find the time to get back to Princelet
Street to see Ruby. Provided, that was, my gruff-voiced geezer hadn’t ‘taken care’ of her already – whatever that meant.

I had to keep working around all of this too, so once I’d settled Nan down and made sure that the Duchess was all right, I
took Velma to the bank and asked to use the telephone.

My plan was to get through to one of the nuns in charge, then hand the telephone to Velma. Asking for information about one
of their old pupils had to be better coming from a relative. But somewhere along the line, the girl lost her nerve and I found
myself talking, on a very crackly line so I had to shout, to a nun called Sister Joseph. I couldn’t work out what she was
in the orphanage except
that she wasn’t the Sister Superior or whatever they call the top-dog nun.

I introduced myself, said where I was from and then I said I was looking for a girl who’d once lived at Nazareth House on
behalf of her sister who’d also been in the orphanage. I told Sister Joseph the approximate dates of Amber’s residence, and
she said that although it was quite a while ago now, she’d do what she could to help me.

‘We try to keep in touch with children we’ve helped after they’ve left,’ she said. ‘What was the girl’s name?’

‘Amber Reynolds,’ I said. ‘Her sisters, Pearl and Ruby, were also with you for a time.’

Even through the crackling on the line, I was aware of the silence blaring away at me from the other end.

‘Pearl needs to speak to Amber. She just wants to know that she’s all right, which is why we need to find her,’ I added. And
then, fearing that perhaps Sister Joseph might think I was some nosy reporter digging about for information on the children
of a murderess, I said, ‘I’ve got Pearl’s daughter Velma here, if you want to talk to her.’

‘No. That won’t be necessary.’

It was said coldly and with a finality I didn’t much like.

‘Sister Joseph—’

‘Mr Hancock, I don’t think we will be able to help you.’

‘Yes, but you said—’

‘I said that we try to keep in touch with those children we have helped,’ she said. ‘But sometimes we fail, as in this case.’

‘Yes, but you must have some sort of idea—’

‘The Reynolds girls were very troubled children, Mr
Hancock. I assume you know about their mother and the “unpleasantness”. When they left Nazareth House they went their own
separate ways and wished for no further contact with this institution.’

Normally, I thought, places like orphanages had to pass the kiddies on to someone else, an employer or a landlord or someone,
when they grew up. But maybe that only applied to ‘good’ children, kids who didn’t have a murderess for a mother. I’ve been
at odds with the Duchess and Nan over the Church for years, about how the priests and what-not only have an interest in people
who live the good Catholic life and to hell with murderers, prostitutes, madmen and the like. This conversation I was having
with Sister Joseph only served to confirm my beliefs.

‘Look, Sister,’ I said, ‘I need to get in touch with Amber Reynolds. It’s important. Her sister Pearl is in trouble and she
needs to know that Amber is all right.’

‘As I’ve told you before, Mr Hancock,’ she interrupted, ‘there’s no record of where Amber Reynolds went from here. The girl
just upped and disappeared.’

Then she put the telephone down on me and I had to stop myself saying a very bad word in front of Velma.

I was supposed to work that afternoon, but we had a daylight raid so I ran, walked and then, once the raid was over, got on
a bus up to Paddington.

Whatever might or might not have happened to Ruby Reynolds, I had promised her I’d have a go at locating that Phyllis Neilson,
which was what I turned my mind to now.
If I say I’m going to do a thing then I generally do it. I was also, I have to admit, intrigued now by the Reynoldses’ past.
I wanted to see where it had all started all those years ago with their mother. I’d far from forgotten about poor old Kevin
Dooley: it was just that other mysteries had now joined his demise in my head.

Paddington and that area just north of Hyde Park hasn’t taken the bashing we’ve had – nowhere has had as much punishment as
the East End. But they’ve had their share. The people look worn out, like ours, and there’s damage to be seen, here and there
though, rather than in great swathes of destruction, but it’s there.

Praed Street is where Paddington station is, and was, I should imagine, quite a grand thoroughfare at one time. They built
big and impressive back in the Victorian age, and although the handsome four-storey buildings on the south side of the street
are now mainly given over to shops, cafés and cheap flats, it’s still easy to see how they might once have been considered
smart. There’s even what I’d call an air of faded gentility about the place – as if it’s been something, now isn’t, but can’t
quite understand why. Maybe it’s to do with the superior attitude of the girls on the game in these parts – there are lots
of them in Paddington and, dressed up like bandboxes, they’re pretty obvious. Or maybe it’s the mixture of classes round the
station. Out in our manor, people are mostly working class. Even Mum’s priest comes from a docks family originally. But in
Paddington you can see clerks and surgeons, sailors and lords all briefly rubbing shoulders as they head either into or out
of our great city. There are also the Italians in
Paddington too – flat-nosed, slick-haired geezers who run boxing gyms, and little old blokes, like Tony of Tony’s Café, which
was on the ground floor of 125 Praed Street where the Reynolds girls grew up and where Harold Neilson met his bloody end.

Although difficult at first – he would keep trying discreetly to cross himself every time he looked at the veil on my top
hat – Tony eventually warmed to me. Maybe it was the five cups of tea I drank in his almost empty café, or maybe it was because
I introduced myself as a friend of someone whom Tony called ‘Little’ Ruby. Then again, perhaps he was just scared. Ever since
March when Mussolini joined forces with Hitler, Italian people and their businesses have taken a lot of abuse in London. In
some cases they’ve even been attacked. Someone with no accent, like me, could have been anyone – a copper, a spy, you name
it.

‘Used to knock Little Ruby about, that beast Neilson,’ Tony said, through and around the stub of an old cigar. ‘We live in
the flat behind the café, Vicky Reynolds and her girls in the one above that, one hundred and twenty-five B.’ He shook his
head sadly. ‘Sometimes my Pia and our boys, we hear what was going on. But I say to them, that’s their business. It wasn’t
for us to interfere.’

‘No.’

Tony leaned forward so that his thin brown cheeks nearly touched mine. ‘Of course, you know and we knew what Vicky Reynolds
was,’ he said. ‘But that never made no difference and that were no excuse for Harold and what he done.’

Suddenly he smiled, revealing just one top row of straight brown teeth. ‘So if you a friend of Ruby, Mr Hancock, what you
want here and why she don’t come to see us herself?’

Tony obviously hadn’t heard what had happened in Spitalfields and so, safe in the knowledge that there had obviously been
little love lost between himself and Neilson, I told him about Ruby, Shlomo Kaplan and what the police suspected. What I left
out was where Ruby was and what exactly I was doing.

The old Italian scoffed at the idea of murder. ‘Nah! Not Ruby! She wouldn’t hurt nobody. You know her, Mr Hancock.’ And then,
turning on me quickly, he said, ‘Where did you say you know Ruby from?’

I hadn’t mentioned exactly where I’d come from so I said I was a neighbour from Spitalfields. I could, after all, easily be
Jewish on first sight and this explanation seemed to satisfy Tony. But then, in my experience, people outside the East End,
whatever their origins, are never as close as those of us who live in the old Thames-side villages. Maybe we’re a bit too
close sometimes. Keeping together and close can sometimes lead to ignoring obvious truths, not doing proper justice to those
who’ve died among us – like Kevin Dooley, maybe.

Tony and I chatted and as we did I tried to work out how I might broach the subject of Harold Neilson’s sister, Phyllis.

‘Oh, they were lovely girls,’ Tony said enthusiastically. ‘Ruby – that quiet one, Amber, pretty little Pearl—’

‘The tiny one was a madam.’ I looked up into the big
dark eyes of Tony’s heavy-limbed missus. ‘Very pretty but a madam.’

‘Pia . . .’

‘She was spoiled,’ Pia’s accent was much stronger than Tony’s. ‘My ’usband ’e remembers nothing,’ she said to me. ‘’Arold
was very jealous of that little one.’

‘Opal?’

‘Yes. Vicky spoiled the child. When she ’ad ’er so all the trouble with ’arold and then that sister of his coming around causing
trouble upstairs, that all begun. Opal, she would show off what ’er mum would buy her, send ’arold crazy – his sister Phyllis
screaming about Vicky wasting all ’arold’s money on the child. Vicky made all the money as far as I could see. But she would
laugh, that child, at the man’s jealousy.’ Pia sighed heavily. ‘In the court Vicky said she killed ’arold because he try to
’urt Opal. But that child pushed him, you know.’

‘Pia!’

‘Neilson and his sister were evil people, God rest their souls,’ she crossed herself quickly, ‘but that child made you mad.
I looked after her – once. You remember, Tony?’

‘Well, yes . . .’ Tony put his head down in his shoulders and said, ‘But Mr Hancock don’t need to know nothing about that,
Pia. He’s a friend of Ruby.’

‘Oh. Oh, well, she always a nice girl. Decent.’ Pia’s big face broke into a smile, and then she left to serve the only other
customer they’d had in all the time I’d been there. What, I wondered, had little Opal done that had been so nasty?

However, now that I knew Phyllis Neilson was dead,
and now that it was starting to get dark outside, I could have gone home but I asked Tony for another cuppa instead. A couple
of rough-looking lads were hanging about outside, making comments about ‘wops’. Tony seemed a decent sort – not all Italians
can be like Mussolini after all – and I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of leaving him and Pia alone with them lurking.

‘Phyllis, she had the TB,’ Tony volunteered, as he put my cup down in front of me. ‘It was only a question of time. Maybe
ten years she’s been dead now.’

No danger to Ruby or anyone else from her, then. Whoever the sinister bloke who had told me he was ‘taking care’ of the Reynolds
girls was, it was unlikely he had anything to do with a woman ten years dead. And there wasn’t any reason, as far as I could
tell, to disbelieve Tony and his wife. They had, after all, been quite explicit about the family who had once lived above
them.

‘’Cause nobody wouldn’t live in Vicky’s flat for years,’ the Italian continued, as he sat down opposite me again and relit
his cigar. ‘Not that the old landlord cared. Let the place go to ruin. But Mr Hubbard and Mr Green, they’re the new owners,
they ain’t like that. Got some nice people here since they come. People with a bit of class.’

There was a nice middle-aged book-keeper on the top floor and a ‘very smart’ lady, some relative of the landlords, in the
Reynoldses’ old flat. As well as making the flats a bit better to attract a ‘nicer’ class of tenant, the new landlords had
also done some repair work on Tony and Pia’s flat. But they’d probably bought the properties so cheap they could afford to
keep the tenants happy. In
some parts of this city landlords are almost giving places away now, something of which Tony also was aware.

‘But if we get bombed by the Germans, what Mr Hubbard and Mr Green done won’t be worth nothing, will it?’ he said, as he led
me to the door while his wife pulled down the blackout curtains.