At the end of the Great War there were near enough two million what they called then ‘surplus’ women. These were ladies who would never marry due to lack of eligible men. Some had lost their sweethearts in the trenches; others, like my sister, had never and would never have a gentleman caller or a beau. Of course, not all women of Nan’s age were left on the shelf at the end of the war. Some, like Nellie Martin, married and had a normal life. But the women who did marry were of a much more sociable type than my sister. They were also, and there’s no getting away from it, far more obviously attractive than either Nancy or our cousin Stella. It is a fact of life that when men are in short supply, it is the pretty girls who will get them. Maybe my sister could have found comfort with a wounded man, but Nancy, for all her patience and care with the Duchess and her illness, is a squeamish soul. She could never have dressed a leg stump or taken a crippled man out to the privy – or so I’d always thought. I sat down beside her, feeling her cringe beside me as I did so.
‘Nancy,’ I said, ‘do you know where any of the other White Feather girls are?’
She looked up at me with huge, tear-filled eyes. ‘I told the coppers . . .’
‘Coppers are not going to have time to go and find these women,’ I said. ‘Nancy . . .’
‘You don’t care about them!’ she said bitterly. ‘They was what I was and you hate me!’
I looked down at the Turkey rug beneath my feet. The Duchess has always tried to have something nice on the floor of the parlour at the very least. Bloody Nancy! I didn’t hate her as such. I didn’t like her at that time and I told her honestly that I didn’t know when I’d be able to really like her again. I also told her that what I was doing, what she’d originally wanted me to do, was far more important than anyone’s feelings anyway.
‘Those twins you were friendly with and the others might be in danger,’ I said. I then added a little more softly, ‘You might be too, Nan, but then you have me to . . . I’ll take care of you . . .’
She looked over at me and then she said, ‘Frank, I only really kept in with Dolly. Through her I knew where Nellie was, and Violet I still saw about sometimes, although she and me never spoke. But we was all at school together. Marie, Fernanda and Margaret were outsiders to me and I didn’t know them well. But the Harper girls are Nellie Martin’s cousins. Nellie’s mum still has their greengrocer’s shop on Prince Regent Lane . . .’
I’d forgotten all about the fact that three of the girls had actually been related.
‘Mind you,’ Nan said, ‘Nellie’s mum don’t talk to that side of the family. Esme and Rosemary’s dad, Nellie’s mum’s brother, took everything for himself when Nellie’s grandad died, and he left their church too, apparently. Nellie’s mum and her sister got nothing and so they don’t speak to him.’
‘She may still know where they are.’
Nancy nodded slightly. ‘They come from Forest Gate.’
‘Do you know where?’
‘No. Esme I know got married.’ Nancy went very quiet for a few moments after that and then she said, ‘She was pretty, Esme. Like Nellie and Violet.’
Esme, Nellie and Violet had married. Nan herself, Dolly O’Dowd and Marie Abrahams most certainly had not. As for the others, it seemed that Nan at least didn’t know what had become of them. The White Feather group that she had belonged to hadn’t, like so many of them, survived the Great War. Existing friendships had carried on, but that fervour, that barmy soldier worship, had broken down underneath the reality of a world dominated by dead men.
The sirens went off then and I, for once, left my sister on her own to get herself down to the shelter. As soon as I’d settled the Duchess, I took off. Maybe consciously, maybe not, I headed down towards Prince Regent Lane that night. And even though I was terrified and the voices in my head were babbling and chattering fit to deafen me, I could see that the street was flat almost as far as the eye could see. Where Martin’s the greengrocer’s had once been there was just a shallow pile of bricks and wood and odd bits of torn-up newspaper.
Chapter Eight
‘
O
ur Nellie took her husband’s name when she got married,’ old Mrs Martin told me as she sat on the doorstep of her house in Iniskilling Road. ‘But then when he died she went back to Martin. ’Cause of the shop, see. She worked there.’ Then she frowned. ‘Not that there’s any such thing as a Martin’s shop since last Tuesday, but . . .’
Fortunately for the Martin family, no one had been in the shop or its shelter when it took the direct hit that obliterated it. But the fact that the shop had gone in such a dramatic fashion had left Mrs Martin with a deep distrust of any sort of shelter. Sitting on her doorstep was what she did during raids these days. I came across her just after the all-clear had sounded. She’d been where she was, so she told me, for hours.
‘It’s only me and our Sylvie now,’ she continued. Then, looking up at me, she said, ‘That’s Nellie’s younger sister. Our George got took with TB back in twenty-eight and my old Stan was called to the Lord on the last day of nineteen nineteen. Nellie’s daughter, our Linda, is evacuated out to Loughton.’
Although she had only just lost Nellie, Mrs Martin was dry-eyed in the face of her recent and past bereavements. But then she was evidently, as I had been told, a religious woman. Her loved ones had gone to the Lord and so were safe in His care. Nan hadn’t known exactly where on Iniskilling Road Nellie Martin had lived. But I knew I’d soon find out. Even when it’s freezing cold, people still live largely on their doorsteps when there isn’t a raid on around our manor. Some houses are half in ruins and so only one or two rooms are still fit to be lived in. Some of the streets only contain one or two families now, the rest of the population having been bombed out. Folk stay on their doorsteps so they can have someone to talk to. That Mrs Martin sat on hers irrespective of what was happening up above was fortunate for me.
But even after I’d found her, I didn’t know how I was going to find out where her nieces might be. I didn’t want to alarm the old woman. I’d come, after all, in good faith, as she, I hoped, could feel. As the brother of one of her late daughter’s old friends and as the person who had found Nellie’s body.
Mrs Martin looked up at me and smiled. ‘I do remember your sister,’ she said. ‘I don’t think Nellie was always very nice to her when they was at school together.’
I didn’t say anything but just kept on looking at her, smiling.
‘That poor Dolly should die in the same way as Nellie is a terrible thing,’ Mrs Martin said. ‘You know, Mr Hancock, that during the Great War, Nellie and my brother’s two girls used to go around with Dolly and your Nancy and some other girls. They were keen to encourage the young men to join the forces.’
She didn’t say the words ‘White Feather girl’, and to be fair to the old woman, I don’t think she probably even imagined that that was what Nellie and the others had been doing. What she said next, however, did shock me, because it meant that all of a sudden I could be open with her.
‘Do you think, Mr Hancock, that this person who killed my Nellie and then Violet and poor Dolly is murdering the girls in that old group of theirs for some reason?’ she said. ‘They only ever meant to do good, you know.’
I hunkered down so that I was on the same level as her and I said, ‘Mrs Martin, I don’t know and that’s the truth. But that thought has occurred to me, and so if you know where your nieces live . . .’
‘Canada,’ Mrs Martin said matter-of-factly. ‘Or rather that’s where my brother and Rosemary went.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘Terence, that’s my brother, he and me fell out. He gave up the church and . . . well, anyway, he went to live in Canada with his wife and with Rosemary back in the twenties. I don’t think she married, Rosemary.’
‘And . . .’
‘Esme? Well, she got married,’ Mrs Martin said. ‘Some fella from up north London somewhere, I believe it was.’
‘Do you know if Esme went to live in north London?’ I asked.
‘No.’ She shook her head slowly once again. ‘After I fell out with Terry . . .’ Then suddenly she frowned and said, ‘Mind you, I did hear a rumour that Esme and her husband had a flat over Leyton way just after she got married. But that has to be fifteen years ago. She could be anywhere now.’
But Leyton was something and so I asked her where in that manor Esme might have lived. But she didn’t know.
‘We’d all fallen out by the time Esme got married,’ she said to me as I made my way back down her little shattered front garden path once again. ‘When Terry took up with them unnatural types and then went and got June and the girls involved in it too . . .’
‘Unnatural types?’ I asked. ‘What . . .’
‘Them as raise the dead,’ Mrs Martin said with a visible shudder. ‘Spiritualists.’
‘Your brother joined the Spiritualist Church?’ I said.
Mrs Martin shuffled herself in an agitated fashion. ‘Church, they call it!’ she said. ‘More like a bunch of devil-worshippers if you ask me! I wouldn’t have nothing to do with it or Terry after he got involved with it.’
Violet Dickens had been interested in spiritualism. A woman calling herself a medium, a Mrs Darling, had been close enough to Violet to want to pay for her funeral. I knew that my Nancy would never get involved in anything so far away from the teachings of the Catholic Church, but what about the other White Feather girls?
‘What about Nellie?’ I asked. ‘Was she interested in spiritualism?’
‘My Nellie?’ Mrs Martin shook her head vigorously. ‘No, no, no, no, no! No, I told her it was the devil’s work and that to go anywhere near it was putting your soul in great danger.’
‘She believed you?’
‘Well of course she did! Dr Stansfield, that’s our minister, he told her too. Nellie weren’t taken in by their evil ways!’
But as I walked back to the shop, I wondered. Two of the White Feather girls, Violet and Esme, had apparently become spiritualists. How had that come about? And if Nellie Martin had been so convinced that talking to the dead was an evil, dangerous practice, why had the minister of her church had to tell her that as well as her mother? I was going to have to go and see the medium who had paid for Violet Dickens’s funeral, Mrs Darling.
Albert Cox shouldn’t strictly have given me the address of one of his customers. But once I’d explained what it was for, he was only too happy to help me out. Mrs Darling lived in a house at the end of a terrace on Keppel Road, East Ham.
Because it is that bit north of Plaistow and the docks, which are Hitler’s main targets, East Ham hasn’t been hit nearly as much. Life there, though by no means easy, is a bit more normal and quite a lot less dusty than it is down our way. Though not that much different in style from our houses in Plaistow – Victorian and Edwardian terraces most of them – the houses in East Ham were and always have been that little bit better. As I walked down Caulfield Road to get to Mrs Darling’s house, I saw that quite a few net curtains twitched as I passed. But then this was not Canning Town, where Lascars are common. You don’t often see people like me in East Ham. Not that it bothered me. I was too busy thinking about how I was going to approach Mrs Darling to be bothered with what people might think of me. I didn’t, after all, know the woman, and to ask her about the whereabouts of one of her sitters was something she might take very badly. But then I’d already decided to approach the subject of the remaining White Feather girls by referring back to Violet Dickens. Violet had definitely been a sitter and I was going to have to say that I’d discovered where Mrs Darling lived through the Dickens family. I don’t like lying, but I doubted very much whether Mrs Darling would ever see Fred Dickens again – if she did he’d probably be incoherent – and besides, I had to protect Albert Cox. I owed him.
I don’t know what I thought a medium’s house might be like. I think I had some sort of notion that it might look as if it were still stuck in the Victorian age. Not unlike my own flat, if I’m honest. But when the door that I knocked on opened, I saw that the hall inside, though dark in colour, was lit by what to me was a bright, modern electric light bulb. It looked clean, as did the woman who opened the door.
‘Yes?’
She could have been anything from forty to sixty. Slim and dressed quite dramatically in black, she was nevertheless a plain, fair woman who trembled just a little as I spoke to her.
‘Mrs Darling?’
‘Who wants to know?’ she asked in a voice that now it had taken on a challenging tone was a little rough around the edges in places.
‘Um, my name is . . .’ Then, realising that I wasn’t really comfortable not knowing who I was talking to, I said, ‘Are you Mrs Darling?’
The woman swallowed hard and then pulled herself up to her full height. ‘I help her out,’ she said. ‘I . . .’
‘I’d like to speak to Mrs Darling,’ I continued. ‘Would it be possible to . . .’
‘Who is it?’ A voice from deep inside the house rumbled out to me at the front door. ‘Cissy?’
The woman in front of me stared and then licked what were very dry lips. It was unnerving. She had the kind of ice-blue eyes that can look almost luminous in certain lights. Very pale, almost I’d say otherworldly. Good eyes for a medium, even though she quite clearly wasn’t
the
medium. She it was who was lumbering up the hall towards the front door now.
‘Cissy?’ she said to the pale-eyed woman once again. ‘Cissy, what’s going on?’
In the absence of anything so much as a squeak from Cissy, I said, ‘Are you Mrs Darling?’
The woman, who was twenty stone if she was an ounce, pushed past Cissy and stood in front of me, frowning. Almost as dark as me, she sported a massive black twist of hair on the top of her head which, just like the full-length dress she was wearing, was decorated with large emerald-green bows.
‘Yes, I am Mrs Darling,’ she said in a voice that was clearly trying not to sound too common. ‘Who are you?’