Last Rights (26 page)

‘Yes.’ He smiled, but he didn’t say any more than that or give any reasons for his opinion. ‘Don’t you?’

‘I don’t know, Mr Blatt,’ I said. ‘Really I don’t.’

I went on to tell him about what Gimpy Charlie had said. I didn’t mention the old bloke’s name, although I knew I could get
him to talk to Blatt easier than he would’ve done to the police, if need be. The lawyer was nothing short of ecstatic. In
fact, I thought at the time that it was almost as if he’d needed this piece of information to get back his own freedom. His
change in attitude towards me was nothing short of amazing.

Now he offered me a fag. ‘I’ll have to speak to this contact of yours myself,’ he said. ‘Just the fact that someone else was
present with Dooley, and involved in an immoral act, throws serious doubt on Pearl’s supposed guilt, whether she was having
an abortion or not.’

‘He didn’t actually see this iron bloke attacking Kevin, you know,’ I said. ‘And Kevin told me, as you know, that it was a
woman as stabbed him.’

‘Yes, yes, but Dooley had been drunk all day and he must have been out of his mind with shock . . .’

‘And I don’t know whether this – person,’ I said, as I lit up my fag, ‘will want to come to court.’

‘Well, he’ll have to,’ Blatt said. And then he got up, went over to the door and opened it. ‘Miss Atkinson, could you bring
me the Reynolds file, please?’

I heard the woman outside say, ‘Yes, Mr Blatt,’ followed by the sound of metal cabinet drawers opening and shutting.

‘I can’t thank you enough for this, you know, Hancock,’ he said, as the woman came in holding a thick cardboard file. ‘Pearl
will be delighted.’

That her husband had been an iron? I wasn’t so sure about that. But as it happened I didn’t get to find that out on this occasion
because only Blatt and Velma were allowed into Holloway to see Pearl. I don’t know what the arrangements for visiting prisons
were before the war, but these days I think they’re pretty strict. Nowadays there are all sorts in prisons – traitors, Communists,
who I know some see as traitors, and conchies. Conscientious objectors, ‘conchies’, refuse to fight or have anything to do
with the production of weapons. Some of them work in reserved occupations – which is what I am in strictly, as well as being
too bloody old to fight – on the ambulances and suchlike. I know a few and I like them, but most people don’t. They call them
‘cowards’ and ‘Nazis’ and sometimes the poor buggers get beaten up for their opinions. I can understand them only too well.
If I were of call-up age, I’d be one of them. I make no bones about that. For a bereaved person there is no suffering worse
than grief. For an unwilling killer there is nothing worse than living with the knowledge of what he’s done. I try to run
away from it. I sometimes think I might kill myself because of it. But it never goes away. In the end I’m always led back
to that same old condemned cell in my head. Can actual prison be any worse? In Holloway, it being a women’s prison, there
weren’t likely to be any conchies, but there would be Communists and pacifists and just the thought of them in there, innocent
of any actual crime, made me feel bad. I stood outside those grim grey walls while Blatt and Velma went inside and smoked
myself to a standstill.

A
ll the time Blatt and Velma were inside the prison I thought about Martine Dooley and her place in what I knew about Kevin’s
death so far. On the face of it, her story would seem to undermine Gimpy’s tale about Kevin being an iron. But on the other
hand, something had to have been going on so I told Blatt about Martine and about my own encounters with Johnny and his brothers
when he and Velma came out of the prison. He adopted a troubled expression at this, but thanked me and said that he’d try
to find out more about Kevin’s relationships. Pearl had not, apparently, told him about Martine. But maybe she hadn’t known.

I took Velma home, where we settled in to our normal routine of waiting and preparing for a possible raid. As usual, we sat
in the kitchen – the Duchess all in black, with her hair piled up in a thick bun on the top of her head – listening to the
Crazy Gang on the wireless, Nan wearing what looked like most of her clothes against the cold, knitting something or other,
while Velma flicked
through an old copy of
Picture Post
she’d found in the parlour. Disappointingly, she didn’t have much to say about her mother. From what I could gather, Mr Blatt
had done most of the talking. Aggie was at work. I smoked. To be honest, my mind was a blank by this time so smoking was all
that I did until I finally went to bed at just after ten.

I wake easily – I have done ever since the trenches – so I wasn’t worried about not hearing the sirens. But when I came to,
at what I later learned was just gone four in the morning, I was convinced that somehow I’d slept through it. And although
I couldn’t see even the dim glow of light you get through the blackout curtains when a raid’s going on outside, I could feel
the whole building shaking, which had to mean something. I lit the candle I keep at the side of my bed, then pulled on my
trousers. Somewhere above the shaking and the banging a voice was screaming.

I picked up the candle and ran out on to the landing. Strangely, for her, the Duchess was in her bedroom doorway, stock still,
her hair hanging loose down to where her knees should have been.

‘Nancy’s gone downstairs to see who it is,’ she said calmly.

‘What?’

‘Someone at the door, dear. Your sister has gone to find out.’

I ran down the stairs, my candle extinguishing as I did so. War or no war, who the hell went knocking on doors in the small
hours of the morning? Looters checking to see
whether folk were in or not was the first thing that sprang to mind.

‘Nan!’ I said, as I burst through the black curtains into the shop.

But the door was opened and shut again by the time I got there and who had been outside was now in. The sheer blackness of
her clothing told me immediately who she was.

‘I’ve had to walk from Dagenham,’ Sister Teresa said. ‘Train couldn’t go no further than that.’

In spite of being tired after all that walking, not to mention the energy she must have spent banging on my door and screaming,
Sister Teresa was anxious to talk. Nan, whose love of all things Catholic had been tested a bit by the Sister, went back to
bed, so it was the Duchess who made tea for the nun and me in the kitchen. Luckily Velma hadn’t woken. But she’d had a very
busy and emotional day for such a young kid. And although she hadn’t said much, it had been easy to tell that the prison and
the fact that her mum was in it had frightened her. Who wouldn’t it terrify?

‘I got a telephone call,’ Sister Teresa said, without preamble. ‘I wrote down what he said after, word for word.’ She pushed
a piece of paper over the table towards me.

I was still a bit shocked by her appearance, to tell the truth, so my hands shook somewhat when I took it from her. It didn’t
take long to read, just twenty-two words. After I’d finished reading I looked up and said, ‘What secret?’

The Duchess placed a cup and saucer in front of Sister Teresa just as she put her head down and said, ‘I can’t tell you.’

‘Do you know who it was on the phone?’ I said. ‘Did you recognise the voice?’

‘No. Only that it was a man.’

‘When did you get it? The call?’

‘This afternoon. I left straight away. I told Sister Emerita I had family business again. You know how the trains are – I
couldn’t risk leaving tomorrow, even in the morning. As it is, I’ve had a terrible time, on and off trains . . .’

‘So what do you want me to do?’ I said. I was still, frankly, needled by her outright refusal to talk about the ‘secret’ mentioned
on the paper.

‘Nothing, really,’ she said. ‘But after what’s happened to Pearl and Ruby, I’m afraid. It’s taken me hours to get here. I
just didn’t know where else to go.’

‘You should go to the police,’ I said as I threw the paper back across the table at her.

‘No!’

‘Why not? If you see some sort of threat in what this bloke said, which you must’ve done to bother to write it down, you should
get some help.’

She looked away. The Duchess, meantime, placed my cuppa on the table and sat down with us.

‘I’ve known there’s been something else, a “secret”, for a while,’ I said, ‘and to be truthful, Sister, it’s given me the
’ump.’

The nun turned back to me, her eyes a little wet round the edges.

‘Because,’ I continued, angrily now, ‘I was only ever really interested in Kevin Dooley. That I’ve done what I could for your
sisters along the way is lucky for you. But it’s not been easy for me. I’ve done it. My family have gladly looked after Velma—’

‘No! I can’t!’ She began to cry.

‘Oh, blimey!’ I said. ‘Don’t—’

‘No!’

‘Tell my son your secret, my dear.’ The Duchess reached out one twisted hand to the nun and smiled. ‘He can’t help you unless
you do. Why indeed should he?’

The two women looked at each other in silence. It was a private moment between them. The same as when a bloke comes across
two women gossiping and they stop and stare at him, he has to look away. I looked away now.

I heard the nun sigh and then she said, ‘Mr Blatt got Opal adopted to some family he knows, friends of his, because he’s her
father.’

I looked at her now and shrugged. I had, of course, suspected as much. However, what she said next was something I hadn’t
even considered.

‘Except that he isn’t,’ Sister Teresa said. ‘Mum told him he was to get him to help her after she killed my father.’

‘But she must have, you know,’ I said, not quite knowing how to approach the subject of sex with a nun, ‘had “relations” with
Blatt.’

‘Oh, yes. But he wasn’t Opal’s father, or so Mum said.’

‘And anyway,’ I said, ‘Neilson didn’t die until eight
years after Opal was born. Did your mum carry on seeing Blatt during that time? How do you know this anyway?’

‘Mum told us.’

‘When?’

‘That night. The night of . . .’

‘So did you or your sisters know him?’

‘Ruby remembered him. But as you said, Mr Hancock, it had been over eight years before. Mum only saw him for a few months
round about when she got, you know, in the family way with our Opal. There were other blokes too, including Neilson. It was
her job.’

‘So how did she know that Blatt wasn’t Opal’s father?’ I said. ‘How could she know that for certain?’

She took a swig from her cup before she replied. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe it was wishful thinking on her part. There
was this other fellow, another Jewish geezer, at the same time. He was very young. Not beaten up and wounded by being in the
Great War, like Blatt and the rest of them. I think he was a bit of a villain, really. But Mum liked him. It was him my dad
hated because he believed that he, this bloke, was Opal’s father. Mum would sometimes tease him with it, you know, when he’d
been a pig to her.’

‘And this is the secret you think this letter-writer knows?’ I said.

She looked away briefly, then said, ‘Yes.’

I reached across the table and picked up the paper once again. It said: ‘I know the secret you and your sisters keep. Meet
me at the place you were when Neilson died. Come
tomorrow 9 p.m.’ All the Reynolds sisters, apart from Opal, had been somewhere else when their mother killed Neilson. Where,
I didn’t know. In fact, I didn’t know much about what had taken place that night. Had the girls come in and found their mother
in a state of shock after what she’d done, Neilson’s body lying lifeless across their lino? Or had it been more cold-blooded
than that? If Victorine had hatched a plan to get herself one of the best lawyers money could buy for free, then she had to
have had some sort of grip on what was going on. This didn’t seem to square, to me, with the picture of a remorseful woman
begging her dead lover’s forgiveness on the gallows, if indeed that wasn’t just a story. And, anyway, why had whoever it was
telephoned Amber/Sister Teresa? If it was blackmail he had in mind, I wondered what form it could possibly take. The nun had
no money, as far as I knew, and if the caller’s aim was to tell Blatt the truth, if money or information or whatever were
not passed over, then what did he think that might achieve? There was no going back on what Blatt had done for Victorine and,
being a professional, he was hardly likely to drop Pearl now. That would look bad, suspicious even. And what about what I’d
overheard pass between Sister Teresa and Blatt in our parlour? Hadn’t they talked about someone ‘knowing’ something he or
she shouldn’t? Well, that couldn’t possibly be this ‘secret’, could it? No, it had to be something else . . .

‘Do you know whether this Mr Blatt is married with children?’ I heard the Duchess say.

‘I know he’s got a wife,’ Sister Teresa said. ‘Most of
Mum’s blokes usually had wives. That’s how that life works.’

‘So where were you and your sisters on the night your father died?’ I said.

‘We went to the park,’ the nun said. ‘Hyde Park. We often used to go there to play, shouting at courting couples on the Serpentine,
running about, you know. Being silly.’

‘Wasn’t it evening?’ I said.

‘Yes, but it was summer. Why? Don’t you believe me? The police believed us.’

‘No, I—’

‘We went to the park, Ruby, Pearl and me, and when we come home, I dunno, just as it was getting dark, my dad was dead, my
mum had killed him and Opal had slept through it all. End of story.’ She looked angry now and, in her anger, not a bit frightening
too. All done up in black, her face looming out at me like a moon.

‘So do you think that this telephone call might have got anything to do with what has happened to your sisters?’ I said.

She sighed. ‘I don’t know. Seems strange all these terrible things are happening to us all at the same time. Whoever rang
me wants something from me at nine’ – she looked briefly at her watch – ‘tonight.’

‘In Hyde Park.’

‘Yeah, by the Serpentine,’ she said. ‘Must be. That’s where we were when my dad died. Everyone who knows anything knows that.’