Last Rights (30 page)

Totally without bearings, I didn’t know whether to move to left or right, so I plumped for one and went left. I turned the
torch on a door as the first flash of light came from somewhere over in the east – the Jerries crucifying our manor again.
Number 95. I ran to the right and kept going until I thought I might be in the right place: 129 – next to a barber’s shop.
I’d overshot. I put my finger on the torch button and thought, To hell with bloody Jerry, as I swung the beam along the doorways
until I got to what I knew was 125, right next to Tony’s café.

I didn’t know Tony’s surname and so I just banged on the door shouting, ‘Tony!’ until he came.

By this time, of course, Jerry was in full swing so when Tony did answer the door, in complete blackness, the night was already
humming with Nazi bombers.

‘Who is it?’ the Italian said. ‘What do you want?’

I briefly shone my torch up into my face so that he could see me. ‘H-Hancock,’ I said. ‘Remember?’

‘Who?’

‘F-friend of L-L-Little Ruby,’ I said. ‘I’m – I’m an undertaker . . .’

Somewhere over the back of Praed Street, Christ knew how near or far, a bomber dropped its load and the earth shook so violently
it made me drop the torch on the ground.

‘Come in! Come in!’ Tony said, as he pulled me roughly inside. ‘Why you not in a shelter, Mister? What you doing here?’

The hall was enclosed so Tony pushed the Bakelite switch on the wall, bathing the narrow passageway in a yellowish, almost
orange light.

‘The – the – the R-R-Reynolds f-f-flat,’ I stuttered.

He thought I’d become a gibbering idiot, I could see it in his face. When I’d met him before I hadn’t stuttered like this.
But there’d been no action going on then.

‘Eh?’

‘The – the – the – Ruby’s old flat . . .’

‘Mr Berigliano?’

The voice was female, educated, and came from somewhere near the top of the steep, brown, lino-covered stairway. Looking up,
the Italian, frowning, said, ‘Miss Green, you not going down the Anderson?’

‘No. I’ve got company. One of my guests doesn’t like it down there.’

A pair of high-heeled shoes was what I saw first, black and shiny, then a pair of elegantly shaped legs, which the owner moved
with some grace.

‘I expect the East End will get it, as usual,’ she said. ‘Poor things.’

‘But there was a bomb over the back somewhere, Miss Green. Didn’t you hear it?’

She was a slim young woman, probably in her late twenties, stylishly attired in a sharkskin suit. She looked, and talked,
like one of those society girls you see in the
London Illustrated News
. Girls with thick hair and perfect skin who ‘come out’ at the beginning of the season all the upper crust seem to enjoy so
much.

‘Yes, I heard it,’ she said, and then, smiling a perfect smile, she turned to me. ‘Hello.’

I tried to speak, but nothing would come.

‘This gentleman know one of the poor girls used to live in your flat, Miss Green,’ Tony said. ‘You know, the ones I tell you
about.’

‘Oh, really? How interesting!’ Her eyes, which were very dark brown, opened wide.

‘I don’t know what he do here in a raid,’ Tony said, and then, looking at me, he continued, ‘You OK, Mister?’

‘I – I . . .’

‘I think he wants to maybe speak to you about the flat,’ Tony said, and then he shrugged.

The sound of anti-aircraft fire from one or more of the batteries across the city punched up into the death-filled sky.

Miss Green’s red lips smiled. ‘Well, you can’t very well go out again in all this,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a couple of people
over but if you’d like to come up for a cup of tea, I’m sure that would be fine. We all have to pull together, these days,
don’t we?’

‘Th-thank you.’

‘My pleasure,’ she said, then turned and began to walk back up the stairs, her shiny black hair, cut into a bob, sitting elegantly
on her slender white neck. ‘Goodnight, Mr Berigliano.’

‘Goodnight, Miss Green.’

Tony went back into his flat while I followed the woman upstairs. It seemed I had been wrong about finding anyone other than
her and her friends. But I was still compelled to go and look anyway.

‘So you know someone connected to that terrible murder, do you?’ Miss Green said, as she stopped on the dingy landing and
opened the door to her flat.

‘Y-yes,’ I said. ‘Ruby.’

‘Oh, one of the daughters of the murderess, I suppose.’

‘Y-yes.’

‘Come in.’

I followed her into a very white hall – white walls, carpet, ceiling. Half-way down she turned sharply to the left into what
was the kitchen saying, as she went, ‘The parlour is at the end on the right. Please go in, Mr Hancock. I’ll join you in a
moment.’

I thanked her and had started to do as she had asked when it occurred to me that she had used my name. How had she known it?

I turned back briefly and found myself looking at a very familiar face. And although I felt fear at the time, I knew that
I was also relieved. You always feel like that when you’ve been proved right about something.

‘What are you doing here?’ Sister Teresa whispered angrily, as she led me down the corridor towards where Miss Green had said
the parlour was.

‘I could ask the same of you,’ I replied.

She took me into a room lit by one dull gas lamp, then closed the door behind me.

Although the lighting was old-fashioned, like our own at home, the furniture was something else. Very smart in blacks and
whites, like the design of the Troxy Picture Palace in Limehouse. It’s called art deco, that style. I only know that because
Aggie had a wireless of that design when she was married. That was expensive too.

I didn’t sit down on any of the deep leather chairs. ‘I bet it wasn’t like this when your mother was here,’ I said.

‘No.’ In the silence between her denial and the sound of one or more fire crews over the back, I heard voices from the kitchen.
It was only then that I realised I was speaking without stuttering in a raid. I didn’t know why then any more than I do now.
Maybe it was because I had to. There were things I needed to know, reasons I wanted to understand.

‘I went over to the Serpentine earlier,’ I said, ‘but you weren’t there so I came here. Has he arrived yet, the bloke who
phoned you?’

‘You shouldn’t have followed me.’

‘I didn’t,’ I said. ‘I told you, I went to the park and
then
I came here, once I’d worked out what could’ve happened all those years ago. Because this was where he meant to meet you
all along, wasn’t it, Sister? Because this was where you were when your father died, wasn’t it?’

‘You were only supposed to tell my Sisters in Christ if I didn’t come back!’ she snapped.

‘I was afraid for you,’ I said. ‘And, I’ll be honest, I was curious.’

‘You shouldn’t be here, it isn’t safe,’ the nun said. She turned to face me, full on. Her features were even more drawn than
usual, which gave her a ghostly, almost deceased look. ‘I never dreamed that anything like this was happening. She should
never have gone down to you. She should have left you alone.’

‘Who?’

‘My sister,’ she said.

Between her religious Sisters and her blood relatives, things could get a bit confusing, but I assumed that she meant one
of the latter.

‘She was expecting Blatt,’ the nun said. ‘She telephoned him about an hour ago. That’s why she went down to you. She thought
you might be him.’

‘I don’t look a bit like Mr Blatt or sound—’

‘Yes, I know,’ she said. ‘But she knows you.’

‘Who?’

‘My sister,’ she said angrily. ‘My fucking little sister, you idiot!’

I heard the door open behind me but I didn’t look to see who was there.

‘Miss Green is your sister?’ I said. ‘Miss Green is expecting Mr Blatt? So she’s, er . . .’

I saw the nun draw breath to reply but before she could do so a voice behind me said, ‘That’s enough now, Amber. Don’t say
no more.’

I looked round at her, but I’d known it was Ruby as soon as I’d heard her speak. Not that it had been Ruby, of course, who
had opened the door to me. That had been a woman with far more status in life. A woman who had been raised with money.

‘So it must’ve been Opal who let me in,’ I began.

‘Is that what she told you?’

I looked from a grim-faced Ruby towards the nun, who averted her gaze once again.

‘You said your sister, Sister Teresa,’ I said. ‘You told me your sister opened the door to me. So, in the absence of Pearl,
I had to assume that that sister was Opal.’

With the exception of the noises from outside – the gushing of water from the fire hoses, men’s voices raised in fear and
desperation, the crackling of fires, there was nothing to hear in that room. Both Sister Teresa and Ruby looked down at the
floor.

After a bit, what with the yellow gas gloom all around and the thick, almost violent silence, I began to get nervous and I
said, ‘W-what’s going on h-here?’

‘It’s a family matter,’ Ruby said, staring all the time at her more frightened-looking sister. ‘You should go now, Mr Hancock.’

‘No, he shouldn’t!’ the nun said. ‘Or, rather, we should go with him, Rube. We need to get out of here. Tell people what she’s
done to you and—’

‘You think I’m still not trying to take it in meself?’ Ruby said roughly. ‘But Mr Hancock here, he don’t need to be involved.
We can do this ourselves. We always have.’

‘But then how will people know?’ the nun said.

‘There will be a way.’

‘How can there be? We can’t do nothing, can we? She won’t let us and we can’t anyway. But this is wrong!’ she said. ‘It always
has been! When Blatt gets here I’m gonna tell him!’

‘But he knows,’ her sister hissed. ‘He would never have bothered to help Mum if she hadn’t—’

‘No, but Blatt doesn’t know that Mum didn’t really believe Opal was his child, does he?’

‘No. And you’re not to tell him neither!’ Ruby moved forward as if to hit Sister Teresa and so, I must say bravely, I stepped
between them.

‘We don’t know what he’ll do if—’

‘She’s a killer!’ Sister Teresa said, as she backed away from both me and her sister.

‘Yeah, well, we’ve always known that,’ Ruby said. ‘And that includes Mr Blatt. We’ve known that for twenty-two bleedin’ years,
so don’t go getting all guilty about it now! We let her get away with it then and—’

‘She was a child
then
! Eight! Just a child!’

I felt my heart stop. Just for a moment. But in that moment the woman I’d been introduced to as Miss Green stepped lightly
into the open doorway and smiled. ‘I don’t think my father is coming,’ she said, in her very different, very educated accent.
Then looking, it felt like through me, to Sister Teresa, she said, ‘I told you I knew Mr Hancock, didn’t I?’

‘You’ve told us a lot of horrible things, Opal,’ the nun replied.

‘Oh, yes,’ Opal Reynolds said, with a smile. Then her
expression changed and her voice dropped, and even though I’d never seen the face of the person who had threatened me under
the railway bridge at Limehouse I recognised the tone of the voice I’d since thought of as that of the gruff geezer. Now the
smooth, cool hand ‘he’ had touched me with made sense. The person ‘looking after’ the Reynolds girls was their little sister.

‘Keep away from the Reynolds women,’ she wheezed. ‘I’m taking care of them.’

And then Opal, that exquisite, dark-haired woman who had so graciously greeted me and who, I could now see, was carrying a
pistol in her cool, smooth hands, laughed. ‘I always did enjoy dressing up,’ she said. ‘I’ve always been a show-off. I wasn’t
expecting you, Mr Hancock, but now that you’re here it’s a bit of a bonus, really.’

‘Opal . . .’

‘Oh, don’t be so wet, Sister bleeding-heart Teresa!’ she snapped at the nun, her face suddenly twisting with rage. ‘Thanks
to all of my lovely sisters he knows rather more than he should so it’s good that he’s here, where we can see him.’

She looked down at the gun in her hand and then she told me to sit.

‘Neilson made Opal do things, dirty things, to him,’ Ruby said to me. ‘He hated her because she was spoiled and she wasn’t
his. It was his way of punishing her for that.’

I’d taken up Opal’s ‘offer’ of a seat and was opposite the young woman, watching her gaze at her weapon with what looked like
dead eyes.

‘She was only a baby.’

‘That night, when my father died,’ Sister Teresa said, ‘he punched Mum in the chest. She couldn’t hardly breathe.’

‘It took us a good hour to get her right,’ Ruby continued, ‘by which time he’d been down the pub and had a skinful.’

‘You never were in Hyde Park around the Serpentine or otherwise, were you?’ I interrupted. ‘You all lied.’

‘Yes, we had to. We—’

‘We wanted her to hit him,’ the nun said. ‘He was like a sack so we knew it’d be easy. None of us realised she’d be able to
knock him down. But then she was angry, wild. She said she wanted to kill him.’

‘She said, yes—’

‘But once he was out for the count we all just left him,’ Sister Teresa said. ‘We thought that he’d probably forget about
Mum and her hitting him. His drinking had got a lot worse by then. We left him . . .’

‘Opal was eight, she was asleep.’

Both women looked towards their younger sister to continue the story. For a moment I wondered whether she’d even heard, but
then she spoke, in a dead, flat sort of way. It reflected the absent expression in her deep, dark eyes.

‘I took one of Mother’s hatpins from her bedroom and I pushed it into his chest several times,’ Opal said, more to the gun
than to anyone. ‘The hatpin is very useful to the prostitute. My mother had used it to threaten men more than once. But Neilson
was drunk. I understand, now, that
it is unlikely he could have felt anything.’

Her calm made me feel ill. It had been a long time ago but that didn’t take away any of the horror of what she had done –
not to me.

‘Neilson had made her do terrible things,’ Ruby said. ‘She was eight, younger when he started on her. He deserved no less.’