Liverpool Taffy (20 page)

‘Mebbe,’ Ellen said, still cautiously. ‘It’s difficult to know, ’cos I don’t know ’oo she’d tell.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Biddy said patiently. ‘What does matter is that we’ve probably got twelve hours’ grace before the police and so on start searching. Because someone must know he owns this flat and I suppose it’s an obvious place to look. Only not at once.’

‘My Gawd, d’you think the scuffers will come ’ere?’ Ellen said fearfully, standing her cup back on its saucer with a clatter. ‘Oh Bid, we’ve gorra gerrim out of ’ere by then!’

‘Yes. And we can’t take him far because it’ll be a carrying job and we’re neither of us that strong, but if we use my bicycle …’

‘Your
bike
? Biddy, ’ow are you goin’ to get ’im to stay on?’

‘We’re going to have to pretend he’s drunk and sort of lie him across the seat and the handlebars,’ Biddy
said, having made up her mind. ‘Then we can push him into the Wapping Goods station which is only a stone’s throw away, and somehow get him aboard a goods waggon. Then when he’s found he’ll be miles from here and it’ll probably take them ages to identify him. What about that, eh?’

‘It sounds all right,’ Ellen said, cheering up. ‘Oh Bid, it sounds foolproof! When do we start?’

‘When the pubs have closed,’ Biddy said. ‘Once the pubs close the streets are quiet and then is the sort of time a couple of girls might be pushing their drunken feller back to his own home. Yes, we’ll leave it until the pubs close.’

It had sounded easy enough in the well-lit kitchen, but the fact proved to be very much more difficult. Just getting Mr Bowker out of bed was awful and took their combined efforts, and getting him downstairs was worse.

‘Don’t bump him on the bannisters,’ Biddy implored her friend in a hissing whisper as they strove to line Mr Bowker up with the staircase. ‘If he’s bruised they’ll suspect foul play.’

‘Oh God … look, Biddy, let’s wrap ’im in somethin’, ’is poor fingers keep stickin’ out.’

They wrapped him in a blanket and this considerably eased their descent, though Biddy pointed out that there was no way they could push him through the streets disguised as an extremely large papoose.

‘Wharron earth’s a papoose?’ Ellen asked, pushing her hair off her hot, damp forehead.

‘It’s a Red Indian baby. They swaddle them up in blankets. Here, prop the bike up against the wall whilst I …’

They struggled silently for five minutes, sweat running down their faces, then Ellen leaned Mr Bowker against the banisters and scowled across at her friend.

‘He’s too stiff,’ she whispered. ‘He won’t bend, not natural, like.’

‘Don’t moan, get him on the bleedin’ bike,’ Biddy hissed back in a furious undertone. ‘It’s late, and dark, and there’s not likely to be many about, put your arms round him and hold him up whilst I move the bike.’

It took them twenty minutes to get Mr Bowker aboard and then they discovered other snags; his feet, for one. They would not stay on the pedals, but they kept getting thumped by them as the pedals revolved, and Biddy was deathly afraid of bruising. In the end they took the chain off – a black and messy business – and with Mr Bowker balanced stiffly and awkwardly between saddle and handlebars they unlocked the door and pushed the bicycle and its grisly burden into Shaw’s Alley and round the corner into Sparling Street.

There was, as Biddy had predicted, no one about, but to their dismay a considerable amount of sound was still coming from the direction of the goods station.

‘They must work all bloomin’ night,’ Ellen moaned. ‘What’ll we do now, our Biddy?’

She was clutching the corpse whilst Biddy handled the bicycle, which was acting rather like a horse would in similar circumstances, except, of course, that the bicycle had no excuse since it could not sense the nature of its burden the way a horse would. But perhaps because of Mr Bowker’s unnatural stiffness, or the height of him, or the weight, the bicycle veered from left to right and from right to left, looking far more drunk than either the girls or its passenger.

‘The dock … I’ll turn in a big circle and we’ll go over to Wapping Dock,’ Biddy gasped breathlessly. ‘Hang on, both of you.’

She managed to turn the bicycle rather neatly and then headed grimly down Sparling Road towards the brightly lit dock area. A quick glance at Mr Bowker did not exactly convince her that he looked like a live drunk, but she had often stepped over a man lying comatose in the gutter, drunk as a lord, and knew that drunkenness had many faces.

‘What’ll we do? Tip ’im in the ’oggin?’ Ellen wheezed. Being a shop assistant was not a good training for lugging corpses, Biddy realised. She herself, used to hefting heavy parcels and riding an elderly bicycle for hours at a time, was taking it far more in her stride.

‘No. We’ll prop him in a corner, a dark corner, and leave him,’ Biddy whispered. ‘Look, under the docker’s umbrella, that will be fine. Come on, not far now.’

It was not far. As they emerged from Sparling Street, however, they saw that they were not the only people abroad at this hour. A figure was huddled on the steps of the public house on the corner, singing softly in a cracked old voice.

‘Another bleedin’ drunk,’ Ellen hissed, as venomously as though poor Mr Bowker was indeed a drunken friend. ‘Just let’s ’ope ’e isn’t noticin’ us, that’s all.’

‘He’s not noticing anyone,’ Biddy said, as they passed the blackened, tramplike figure. ‘He’s too busy feeling sorry for himself.’

It was true that the tramp kept moaning beneath his breath whenever he stopped singing and as they passed, keeping well clear, it was obvious why.

‘Filthy ole bugger’s been sick as a dawg,’ Ellen said. ‘Ah, nearly there, queen.’

They pushed the bike the last couple of yards and collapsed against one of the pillars which supported the overhead railway. Biddy looked around, selected an appropriate spot, and pointed. Together, they heaved their passenger off the bicycle – which fell over with a clatter so loud that both girls froze where they stood, convinced that it would bring the Law down upon them – and somehow managed to drag him to the spot they had chosen against the pillar but out of the light of the gas lamps.

‘Prop him up,’ Biddy hissed. ‘That’s it … now scarper!’

She nearly forgot the bicycle, but remembered it in time and jumped aboard, forgetting they had disconnected the chain until her foot, on the pedal, went crashing to the ground.

‘Doesn’t matter, I can push it,’ she said, but she was speaking to empty air. Ellen was already across the road and turning into Sparling Street.

Pushing the bicycle, bruised and aching all over after that short but terrible journey, Biddy limped home.

To face, she thought grimly, whatever the morrow might bring.

For two whole days Biddy and Ellen waited to hear what would happen to them. At work, Ellen said there were grumbles about Mr Bowker not putting in an appearance but nothing more interesting was said. No one made any bones about assuming that his wife was ill again, and one or two said he was a ‘poor feller, wi’ a woman like that holdin’ the purse strings’, though so far as Ellen knew Mrs Bowker was not a rich woman. And if his wife telephoned to speak to other heads of department about her missing husband the information was not passed on to the staff.

By dinner-time on the second day, when Ellen had nipped out in her break to tell Biddy, just with a look, that nothing had happened, Biddy became secretly convinced that no one had noticed Mr Bowker and that, if she should chance to pass along Wapping later that day, she would see him, still propped against the pillar, gazing sightlessly ahead of him.

She voiced the thought to Ellen, who said she was a fool, and then said that she herself had wondered about body snatchers …

‘We’ve got to keep our nerve and wait it out,’ Biddy said that evening, as they prepared their meal. ‘Remember, there are heaps of drunks in Liverpool. Until they find out, he’s just another one.’

‘I keep tellin’ meself that,’ Ellen said miserably. ‘But if we don’t ’ear somethin’ soon I won’t ’ave any nerve to keep. I’m a nervous wreck, honest to God.’

‘Yes, I’m not what I was,’ Biddy agreed gloomily. ‘Did you bring the
Echo
in? Let’s have a read whilst the potatoes cook.’

She skimmed through the paper – then stopped, a finger marking her place. ‘Ellen,’ she said slowly. ‘It’s in here! I don’t know why I didn’t think of it, but it is in here, in the stop press. Shall I read it to you?’

‘No … let me look.’ Ellen grabbed the paper and the two heads, the fair and the dark, bent over it.

‘Man collapsed on Wapping Dock. A man aged between fifty and sixty was found dead on Wapping Dock earlier in the day by a docker on his way to work. He is believed to be Edward Alexander Bowker of Upper Hope Place. Mr Bowker is believed to have suffered a heart attack; foul play is not suspected. Mr Bowker leaves a wife but the couple were childless.’

‘We-ell!’ Biddy laid the paper down and blew out her cheeks in a long whistle. ‘It’s all right, Ellen, we’re going to be all right!’

‘We’re off the bleedin’ ’ook,’ Ellen said joyfully. ‘Oh Bid, I’m that glad, ’cos it were none of it nothin’ to do wi’ you. You were a real brick to me and I won’t ever forget. Gawd, let’s get our suppers on the go, I’m that starvin’!’

The next day at work there was a certain amount of oohing and aahing, but the fact that Mr Bowker had been well-liked actually cut down the discussion. Though the senior staff were all interested in who would take over his job, the junior staff had their own lives to lead.

‘It isn’t even a nine days wonder,’ Ellen said rather sadly to Biddy when she got home that night. ‘Most of ’em haven’t even mentioned it. ’Eads of Department don’t interest ’em unless the feller’s a real stinker, then they’d put the flags out. As it is, they’re just carryin’ on as usual.’

‘I wonder how long it’ll be before they twig that the rent isn’t being paid for this place? Or did he own it?’ Biddy said. She was making peppermint creams and the rather sickly smell pervaded every corner of the flat. ‘Either way, we’ll be kicked out soon enough.’

‘At least it’s summer; we can kip down in St John’s gardens or catch the over’ead railway out to Seaforth an’ sleep on the sands,’ Ellen said with a giggle.
‘We ought to start huntin’ for a place, though, Bid. Somewhere we can share.’

They knew they should search, but somehow they did not. Instead they continued to live in the flat and to go to the Acacia each Saturday night. Ellen flirted desultorily with the young men she danced with, but it seemed to Biddy that all the pleasure had gone out of it with Mr Bowker’s death. It was not that Ellen was sad any more, because she had got over that stage. She was just idly going through the days, seemingly content enough but not wanting another friendship to take the place of the first.

‘We’re marking time,’ Biddy said one fine evening in July, when they had walked down to the pierhead to watch the big ships steaming up the Mersey whilst they enjoyed the breeze and the sunshine. ‘It’s as though we can’t really get on with our lives until we know what’s going to happen about the flat. Still, it can’t be long now.’

It was not. They got back to the flat with fish and chips which they had bought from a shop on Park Lane and found a thin-faced gentleman waiting on the doorstep.

‘Mr Bowker? Is ’e in? Rent was due a fortnight since. ’E’s always been a regular payer, but …’

‘He had a heart-attack some while ago,’ Biddy said when Ellen seemed disinclined to answer. ‘Who paid the rent last month?’

‘Quarterly; it’s due quarterly,’ the man said. ‘Dead, you say?’

‘Yes, he’s dead. But in the past we paid our rent to him each week,’ Biddy said, thinking on her feet so to speak. ‘Will it be in order if we pay you direct in future?’

The man had been looking annoyed and aggressive, but he nodded quite pleasantly at her words, visibly relaxing.

‘Aye, that’ll suit. Can you pay me now?’

‘How much do you want?’ Ellen asked, speaking for the first time. ‘We don’t keep cash in the house, but I’m sure we can withdraw some money tomorrow.’

She was using her ‘posh’ voice, to Biddy’s amusement, but it seemed to do the trick.

‘I’ll want six pun’ ten shillin’,’ the man said in a businesslike voice. ‘It’s a good flat – self-contained.’

‘Right,’ Ellen said, as though pound notes grew on trees and she had a flourishing orchard. ‘What’s your address, Mr er …? I don’t think I caught the name?’

‘Mr Alderson. And your name, Miss? For me books, like.’

‘Oh … I’m … I’m Miss Sandwich and this is Miss … Miss Fisher,’ Ellen gabbled, clearly unprepared for the question. ‘Where’s your office, Mr Alderson? We’ll pop in tomorrow, if we may.’

‘I lives at Barter Street, not far from Prince’s Park,’ Mr Alderson said. He gave them a sharp look. ‘If me rent’s not paid by midday tomorrer, mind, I’ll re-let and you’re out.’

Ellen drew herself up and gave him a glare of well-simulated fury. ‘Mr Alderson, I’ve said we’ll see you tomorrow. Come, Miss Fish.’

She unlocked the door and pushed Biddy inside, then slammed and locked the door behind them. Biddy, giggling wildly, sank down upon the bottom stair.

‘Oh Ellen, you said I was Miss Fisher, not Miss Fish,’ she gasped out at last. ‘And … and why did you call yourself Miss Sandwich, for heaven’s sake? I don’t think it is a name at all!’

‘It is! Anyway, it don’t matter ’cos we’ll never see ’im again. Oh Biddy, gerroff them stairs an’ let’s go up and eat us chips! I’m always ’ungry these days.’

‘It’s because you’re still unhappy,’ Biddy said wisely, getting to her feet. ‘All right, we’ll go and eat.’

Later however, when the fish and chips had been washed down by a cup of good, hot tea, she returned to the subject. ‘Ellen, I know we couldn’t possibly afford six pounds a quarter, but there are other flats. Your sister Polly’s in work, if she came in with us, and one or two more, wouldn’t we be able to afford something? You don’t want to live at home with your Mam again, do you?’

‘No, I don’t. But … oh, Biddy, I may ’ave to! I ’aven’t said nothin’ before, but I think … I think …’

‘You think what? Don’t say they’re going to sack you from your lovely job!’