Last Rights (6 page)

Our conversation about Kevin, spiking and death was obviously at an end.

‘No, you’re all right,’ I said. ‘Although I could do with a cuddle.’

Hannah put her fag down and lay back on her bed. I went and lay beside her and she wrapped her arms round me. ‘You’re a good
man, Francis Hancock,’ she said.

‘You’re not so bad yourself.’

And then we both laughed. We laugh whenever we can. It wouldn’t do to get too serious. Things are as they are. I’m as I am
and she does what she has to. And, besides, even if things were different, she’s still a Jew so we could never be more than
we already are to each other.

I tried to see the Canning Town undertaker, Albert Cox, on my way back from Rathbone Street, but he was out. His wife said
he was working. I told her to ask him to ring me if the telephones were working or come over and see me when he got back.
Whatever had or hadn’t happened to Kevin Dooley, and I was still far from certain at that time, I’d have to get him moved
or I’d have his dragon of a mum on my back.

Walking back towards Plaistow along the Barking Road, I found myself thinking about Dooley’s wife. Like Hannah, young Mrs
Dooley had had great big eyes. Dark, though, black eyes and blonde hair. Hannah, as she is naturally, in reverse. If Kevin
had been going to Rathbone
girls with her at home, he must have wanted his head tested. But, then, who could know what was going on behind closed street
doors? Maybe the old girl had poisoned her son’s mind against his wife. Maybe the younger woman had chucked herself down the
stairs on purpose when she found out she was in the family way again. It’s not unheard-of, not in big families like that,
and especially not now. Feeding the nippers you’ve got gives most women a headache. Poor young Mrs Dooley, if she’d done it,
she had to have been desperate. But possibly not as desperate as she was now. I wondered if her mother-inlaw had made good
her threat and chucked her out already. If the old girl was paying for the funeral she probably had. I lit a fag and began
to consider whether I shouldn’t just forget about what might have happened to Kevin and think about more straightforward things,
like replacing some of the wood the horses had kicked out during the last raid.

‘Mr ’ancock?’

No grief in her voice, just stroppiness.

‘Yes, Mrs Dooley.’ I raised my hat to her.

‘My son ain’t at Cox’s, is he?’ Vi Dooley folded her arms under her bosom and clicked her false gnashers in irritation.

‘No, Mrs Dooley,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. Mr Cox has been busy . . .’

‘I’ve chucked her out, you know,’ she said, ‘that tart!’

‘Mrs Dooley!’

‘Oh, you can think what you like, Mr ’ancock!’ she said. ‘But she was a wrong ’un. Told him, my son, I did. Orphan
she was, then she gets herself married to some old bloke, that’s the basket’s father, and he dies. Tipped her cap at Kevin
she did and that was him under her thumb! I don’t want to see her mug or that basket’s round here again!’

‘But there’s nine other kiddies . . .’

‘What are my Kevin’s, yes,’ she said. ‘Me and mine’ll look after them much better than she ever could. Bring them up proper
we will. Her and her girl can go on the streets where they belong.’

‘I think that your daughter-in-law has a right to come to her husband’s funeral,’ I said.

‘Oh, do you?’ Vi Dooley’s downturned mouth sucked on its teeth as she looked at me with great distaste. ‘What? Even if she’s
a fallen woman?’ As she leaned in towards me I could see that she had on a stained apron underneath her coat. ‘That one was
on the game for years as a nipper,’ she whispered. ‘Up West, afore she married the old geezer. Don’t s’pose that girl’s even
’is!’

I didn’t know how to carry on, to be honest. It was all said with such spite.

‘Anyway, you get our Kevin over to Cox’s,’ she said, ‘so we can get on. I’ve got a wake to organise and it ain’t easy with
all his little ’uns, his wage gone and a war on.’

And with that she stomped off into Murkoff’s. No doubt soothing her soul with mint humbugs and Five Boys chocolate bars –
provided they had them, of course. She had the look of a person who ate her way out of misery.

I went back to the shop with a heavy heart. In three months’ time it would be Christmas. Still a way off, but
there was so much talk about how London could ‘take it’ these days. I wondered how we’d all shape up with half the borough
flat to the ground and all the food so ‘rotten’, as Aggie would say. Just keeping decent-looking was a problem for me. Climbing
over tons of bricks and mortar every time you leave the shop plays havoc with your boots and, war or no war, an undertaker
needs to be smart. The families expect it. And yet how much worse to be poor young Mrs Dooley! Out on her ear with a little
’un to look after, separated from her other kids with autumn upon us and soon to be winter. An orphan, she probably didn’t
have family, leastways not close. Even though I knew I couldn’t do anything I wondered where she was and hoped that she was
all right.

But then what if she had spiked her own husband? I didn’t know what Kevin Dooley had been like as a person. But if he’d been
anything like his mother he must’ve been difficult to live with. Maybe he’d been violent to her and then maybe she’d hit out
at him in the way she’d learned to do – or, rather, heard tell of if Hannah was to be believed – when she was on the game,
if indeed that was true. That fiery night Kevin had never said who ‘she’, his ‘whore’, was, only that she’d stabbed him.

‘Frank!’

I’d walked in and half-way up the stairs without even noticing. Nan, above me on the landing, burning candle in her hand,
looked like something out of that Bela Lugosi picture.

‘Nan!’ I put a hand on my chest. ‘Give me a turn!’

‘Where have you been?’ she said. Her face, lit from
beneath by the candle, looked even darker and more lined than it usually does.

‘I went down to Canning Town, to Albert Cox,’ I said. It was partly true. ‘Why? What’s the matter?’

‘Mum’s been took bad.’ Nan leaned forward and lowered her voice: ‘Dr O’Grady’s in with her.’

‘Oh.’

The Duchess always has pain, but from time to time it gets very bad. Then she can’t eat or sleep. All she does is push her
rosary beads through her crippled fingers, every ‘Hail Mary’ a dart of pain. There isn’t anything anyone can do, including
Dr O’Grady.

‘I’ve given her quinine,’ he said, when he finally came out into the parlour. ‘The stairs are a problem, Frank.’

‘I know.’ Every time there’s a raid she has to get down them to the shelter. Sometimes hours in there, cramped up, the damp
earth all round, and then out again, up the stairs back into her cold bedroom. I wish she’d have a fire in there sometimes,
like she used to, but she’s too worried now, like everyone else, about the coal running out.

Nan asked Dr O’Grady whether he wanted a cup of tea. He said he’d like that and so, while I paid him for his visit, she went
off to make it.

‘So how are things, then, Frank?’ Dr O’Grady asked, as he lit up his pipe. I can’t remember a time when he wasn’t our doctor.
Always straight round when Dad was taken bad with what he called his Indian fever. Malaria – horrible disease – but Dad, God
bless him, always said it was a small price to pay for meeting the Duchess, the love
of his life. It was the malaria that eventually killed the old man.

‘Can’t complain, Doctor,’ I said. ‘At least, no more nor less than anyone else. A fellow rarely gets bored in my line of work.’

Dr O’Grady laughed. Although he’s old now, he’s never lost his sense of humour. You need that in his business just like you
need it in mine. Sometimes it’s the only way to get through the day. Not that I was too full of it myself on this occasion.
The Duchess was bad, Nan was showing the strain of it and my head was still full of Kevin Dooley and what, for me, was building
up into something of a mystery.

Once Nan had been with the tea and gone, I asked him about what I had downstairs. Maybe as Aggie had suggested, when she’d
first seen Kevin’s body, the doctor was the best person to ask about it. Dr O’Grady readily agreed to ‘give him a look’.

‘He’s starting to get a little bit ripe, if you don’t mind my saying so, Frank,’ the doctor said, as he lifted the lid of
the shell and, wrinkling his nose a little, looked inside.

‘Yes. Sorry, Doctor.’

In the normal course of events, when somebody dies I’ll go out to the house with a shell, a flimsy wooden coffin, and measure
up the deceased for a proper box. On the day of the funeral my lads will slip the shell into the coffin and seal up. But Kevin
Dooley was, as I explained now to the doctor, strictly Cox’s so I’d just put him in a shell for transportation.

‘So what is it you want me to look at, Frank?’ the doctor said.

I pulled the deceased’s clothes aside and showed him the small raised pimple just below the ribs. ‘Do you think this could
be a stab wound, Doctor?’ I said. ‘From something long and thin, like a pin or whatever.’

Dr O’Grady looked down at the body for some time before he turned his gaze, squinting, to me. ‘By a pin, Frank, what do you—’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe a ladies’ hatpin or . . .’

‘Oh, well, now, there was a case many, many years ago,’ Dr O’Grady said. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully as he continued,
‘Not round here, but in London somewhere. Woman, prostitute, I think, stabbed a man with a hatpin, killed him.’

This sounded like the crime Hannah had spoken about. Obviously quite a famous case. Not that it had had any effect on me.
But, then, maybe if it had happened in the last lot or near it, the whole thing had simply passed me by.

‘What happened?’

Dr O’Grady shook his head. ‘I can’t remember. Murder or manslaughter? No, it’s gone. I don’t know. I’ve a feeling the woman
hanged but . . .’

‘So what do you think, Doctor? About this bloke and . . .’

‘I think he might possibly have been stabbed by something like a hatpin, yes,’ he said, ‘but I’d have to do a post-mortem
examination to be sure, and as a family doctor I’m no expert.’ He looked up at me, frowning. ‘Frank, besides this mark, do
you have any reason to suppose that this man might have been stabbed?’

I told him about the night of the bare-knuckle fight and of my strange and frightening encounter with an apparently wounded
Kevin Dooley. I also told him what Aggie had said about the girls down Rathbone and how they might sometimes protect themselves.

‘Well, I, personally, have never come across any of these so-called victims,’ Dr O’Grady said. But then he added, with a smile,
‘However, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Most men around here, Frank, as I’m sure you’ll agree, come to me only when
all earthly hope is lost. A little stabbing, unless it involves a vital organ, is something of an occupational hazard.’

‘Yes.’ We both looked down at the corpse for a moment. ‘So, Doctor, what do you think I should do?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t do anything alone, Frank,’ he said. ‘Maybe speak to Albert Cox when he comes to collect him. But as for
a post-mortem . . .’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Without his family’s involvement you’d be hard pressed to get a coroner to
take it on and I don’t suppose the police would be very interested, not if their doctor has already ascertained the cause
of death. I assume he was seen by Marcus Cockburn?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Why?’ There’d been something in Dr O’Grady’s tone that suggested to me he didn’t entirely like or trust Dr
Cockburn. But I’d heard more than a few stories involving the police doctor and heavy drinking sessions.

Dr O’Grady, however, didn’t take that particular bait and went back to the subject of Kevin: ‘Some people don’t hold it together
as well as others during raids,’ he said. ‘He
could have been raving when he talked about being stabbed.’

He could’ve been. Yes.

Dr O’Grady replaced the lid of the shell and took out his pipe again. ‘But I can see that you’re worried, Frank,’ he said,
‘and maybe with good reason. Perhaps this poor chap has been done to death by some woman he was seeing. But unless you or
Albert Cox want to take him up to the London then I can’t see how you can go any further with it. And, anyway, even if you
do go to the hospital with him, you won’t find anyone who will take any interest. He’s dead.’

He was right, of course. Not even the London Hospital was taking anything other than the most seriously ill now and even then
people only stayed there for as long as they couldn’t be moved. It wasn’t safe. Not that any of this helped me at all with
Kevin Dooley, who might or might not have been murdered.

Albert Cox turned up at near on six. He’s a lot shorter and fairer than I am, but we’re of an age, Albert and I, so we have
an understanding between us as well as professional respect. Cox’s undertakers haven’t been going for as long as our firm.
But they know what they’re doing and they’re a decent lot of lads.

‘I’ll take him round to the old girl’s in the morning,’ Albert said, after we’d loaded Kevin Dooley’s remains into the back
of his hearse. ‘With any luck the place’ll take a direct hit and I won’t have to bother with Kevin or his bleedin’ mother.’

I pointed out that this was hardly fair on Kevin’s children, which Albert did agree to, but he was unrepentant with regard
to the man and his mother. ‘Go to any pub in Canning Town, ask for Dooley and you’ll see what I mean,’ Albert said. ‘Been
slung out of every one.’

‘What for?’

Albert coughed, then lit up a fag. The mist was thick from the river that evening. ‘Scrapping,’ he said. ‘Kevin Dooley was
a scrapper. Man, woman or child – he didn’t care. Give one of my lads a black eye couple of years back in the Chandelier.
The mother’s no better and his brothers are animals.’

In view of what Albert’s opinions seemed to be about the Dooleys it didn’t seem worth launching into my story about Kevin
and his stab wound. He wouldn’t, I felt, have had a great deal of interest in what might or might not have occurred on that
mad, bomb-soaked night down in East Ham. Maybe I would just leave it alone, like Dr O’Grady had said. But I did tell Albert
about the man’s wife.