I took my hat off and smiled in a way I hoped was pleasant. ‘My name is Francis Hancock,’ I said.
‘Oh.’ Pale Cissy put a hand up to her mouth.
Mrs Darling looked at her and then she looked at me. ‘Hancock?’
‘He’s an undertaker,’ Cissy said in almost a whisper. There was real fear in her eyes, but then there wasn’t really anything strange about that. People are rarely pleased to see people in my profession.
‘Hancock?’ Mrs Darling furrowed her great ox-like brows and then said, ‘I used to know a Hancock years ago. A girl.’
‘Did you?’ I said. By the look of her Mrs Darling had to be at least in her fifties. She must have known Nan. ‘That’s probably my sister. It’s my sister, indirectly, I’ve come to see you about, Mrs Darling.’
Suddenly she lost her aggression and looked very obviously sympathetic. ‘Oh well, love,’ she said as she lost her battle with being posh and reverted to her real accent, ‘you’d better come in. If I can’t put you in touch with your sister then I don’t know who can.’
She obviously thought that Nan was dead. I didn’t disabuse her of this notion until we were alone in her parlour.
‘I’d like to say that Cissy has a gift, but in all truth, I can’t do that,’ Mrs Darling said after Cissy had brought our tea in and then left the room. ‘Bereaved six months ago – her husband. She come to me, like yourself, wanting to make contact. And, well, we’re getting there. But she wants more, God love her. Feels she has a gift . . .’
‘You don’t think that she has?’ I asked.
‘Love, the spirits choose, not us,’ Mrs Darling said. ‘And they ain’t chose Cissy Hoskin. Not yet. But she wants to be here and so . . .’ She shrugged her meaty shoulders. ‘But now you, my love, what can I do for you?’
I took a sip of my tea before I launched into my story. At first she was angry at what she saw, quite rightly really, as my having gained entry into her house by false means. That Nan wasn’t dead appeared to annoy her. But when I mentioned that why I’d really come was in connection with Violet Dickens, Mrs Darling calmed down.
‘Poor Vi,’ she said as she dabbed a moist eye. ‘Now the spirits absolutely loved her. I have to say, I have wondered whether that was why she was took.’ Then she looked hard at me again and said, ‘So what you got to do with Violet, then?’
I told her about the White Feather girls, then asked her about a lady called Esme who had been known by the name Harper before her marriage.
‘I don’t know what her surname is now or even really where she might live,’ I said as I watched Mrs Darling’s pallor turn very quickly to ash. ‘But it’s possible she started coming to you when Violet Dickens did. They were White Feather girls together, you . . .’
‘I know.’ Her great head nodded backwards and forwards.
‘You know.’
She looked across at me through dull black eyes. ‘You think this killer may be going after the girls in . . . in the White Feather group? From all that time ago?’
‘It’s the only thing that has connected all the victims so far,’ I said. ‘Nellie Martin, Violet Dickens, Dolly O’Dowd, Marie Abrahams . . .’
‘Marie Abrahams is dead?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Didn’t you know? It’s been all over the manor.’
She puffed her big cheeks out and then wiped a runnel of sweat from her brow. ‘When you live your life with spirit . . .’ She shrugged.
‘Mrs Darling, you said that you knew . . .’
‘Violet Dickens was a White Feather girl, as was Esme Harper as was,’ she said. ‘Nellie Martin was Esme and her twin Rosemary’s cousin. Caused all sorts of trouble with the Martin side of the family when Esme and her sister and parents started coming to sit here.’ She leaned forward and whispered, ‘Baptists! But Esme came, she still comes. Nellie Martin come once, just to see like. But she never carried on, not her.’
‘It’s because Esme lost contact with her family that I’m here, Mrs Darling,’ I said. ‘I don’t know any better than anyone else whether this killer really is singling out ex-White Feather girls. But it seems to me there could be a pattern. I’ll be honest, I’m worried for my sister. She was a White Feather girl with Esme, Violet and the others too.’
‘Well then why aren’t the coppers talking to me? Why are they doing nothing?’ Mrs Darling said.
‘Well, they’re looking into the murders, of course they are. But they’ve a lot of other things on their minds too, haven’t they? And anyway, I don’t
know
that the White Feather movement is the connection. But . . .’ I paused a little, trying to gauge what her reaction might be to what I was about to say. But I couldn’t and so I said it anyway. ‘A lot of men were upset by those girls in the Great War,’ I said. ‘I’ll be honest, Mrs Darling, I was and remain one of them. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not excusing murder, but if some poor chap who maybe lost an arm or an eye or maybe just his hope in the future because he got so badly wounded in the First Lot is doing this, I can understand it. A lot of men went out to the trenches who shouldn’t have been there. Men who were not A1 or men who were not right in their minds. We all suffered, but they suffered more than most. And all for nothing! If they hadn’t lied they could have missed the whole thing! And all for not wanting other people to call you a coward.’
She looked down at the floor and said, ‘I know.’
‘My own sister was one of them,’ I said. ‘My own sister! I’ve only just found that out, and Mrs Darling, I still feel shocked and horrified by it. And I will be honest with you and tell you that as much as I fear for these women, I also feel resentful of them too.’ I felt my eyes sting as I attempted to hold back tears of anger. ‘It’s cost me a lot to come here. A lot.’
It was some time before she answered, and then she said, ‘Esme Robinson, as she is now, comes to sit in the circle twice a week.’ She looked up. ‘She’s here this evening.’
‘So if I can . . .’
‘Oh, you’re welcome to come. Not to join in the circle unless you want to, but . . .’ She regarded me levelly and, I felt, with sadness in her eyes too. ‘I don’t see you as a man at peace with the world of spirit.’
I looked away. I didn’t want her to see either the disbelief or the madness in my eyes. Ghosts are something I don’t need to conjure. Ghosts live in my mind.
‘But you can come and speak to Esme. Speak to me too,’ she said.
I looked up at her and frowned.
‘Until I married, I was called Miss Margaret Cousins,’ she said.
For a moment I was literally speechless. Margaret Cousins had been one of the White Feather girls.
‘I was in the movement. Never got on with your Nancy, though, like I never got on with Nellie Martin.’
‘But I’ve spoken to Nellie’s mother,’ I said, ‘and she never mentioned that her nieces had got into spiritualism through you!’
Margaret Darling’s face darkened. ‘Well she wouldn’t, would she? Even if she knows!’ she said. ‘I’m the bloody devil incarnate to her! I only knew Nellie and your sister because of the White Feather movement. When it was over, that was that. They never even knew that I was married or that I took over my old mum’s house up here in East Ham. Leastways I never told them. I’ve not spoken to your sister in over twenty years.’
I sat for a moment then and scratched my head. Mrs Darling offered me a fag, one of her husband’s, apparently, which I took.
‘So, Mrs Darling,’ I said, ‘if you are Margaret Cousins, that only leaves two more White Feather girls apart from my sister and Esme Robinson.’
‘Yes,’ she said as she leaned over to give me a small Bakelite ashtray. ‘Rosemary Harper, but she went to Canada with her parents. Married a Canadian, I understand.’
‘There was a Fernanda somebody too,’ I said.
‘Fernanda Mascarenhas,’ Mrs Darling said. ‘But Gawd knows what become of her.’
‘Why?’
‘Fernanda, pretty as a picture as she was, come from a poor background,’ she said. ‘Oh, she could put on airs and graces, but there was always something desperate about her. I’ll be honest, I liked her a lot, but . . . There was something very hard about her too.’
‘Hard?’
Mrs Darling shook her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe it was just me. But whenever Fernanda gave a chap a feather, it was done without any emotion, almost I’d say without any belief. Sometimes I used to wonder why she, of all of us, did it.’
‘Well we’ll have to find her somehow,’ I said. ‘Like the rest of you, she could be in danger.’
Mrs Darling looked at me with level, sad eyes and said, ‘I paid for poor Violet’s funeral, you know. She never had nothing. I ain’t paying for no one else’s, mind!’
Chapter Nine
I
couldn’t get back to Keppel Road until just after five that evening. Because of the risk of raids, Mrs Darling had apparently been in the habit of starting her circles early.
‘Oh blimey, we’re just about to go in now!’ she said as she hustled me impatiently into her house. ‘I thought you was coming earlier to speak to Esme.’
‘I was,’ I said. ‘But I got caught up at work . . .’
An old girl on Haig Road had finally given in to the cancer that had caused her to scream her way from this world and into the next. I’d had to deal with the exhausted family left behind. Not any doctor. They hadn’t been able to pay for one of those. Me.
‘Well, Esme’s gone in now,’ Mrs Darling said as she waved a hand towards her blacked-out parlour. ‘I can’t break the ambience. You can talk to her afterwards. Now you can either join the circle or you can sit out here in the hall.’
I said I’d take the hall if it was all the same to her. As I sat down on one of the hardback chairs I looked into the room just before Mrs Darling disappeared. There wasn’t enough light to be able to see any details of who was in there, but in number there were probably five plus the medium, who made six. For quite a while after Mrs Darling closed the door on her circle there seemed to be no noise coming from that quarter at all. Although quite what I had been expecting, I hadn’t really known. I hadn’t, with the exception of Aggie, told my family where I was going. Neither the Duchess nor Nancy would have approved. Aggie, however, I knew had been to see a couple of mediums and such like in her time.
‘They don’t all go on about “is anybody there”,’ she’d told me just before I left the flat. ‘They’ve all got their own methods for contacting the dear departed. Some of them just sit in silence and let the spirits come to them. All Tommyrot, of course.’
‘If you didn’t believe it, why did you go?’ I asked her.
My younger sister isn’t given to tears, but I’d seen one start in her eye then. She’d swallowed hard. ‘I wanted to talk to Dad again,’ she said in her familiar matter-of-fact way. ‘I missed him. Still do.’
Then before I could get sentimental in any way, she’d pushed me out the door and told me to ‘get to your spooky meeting’. In the hall outside said spooky event, I thought about my old dad. I had no expectation that he might suddenly appear in front of me or anything like that. But what Aggie had said had made me think. I missed and miss him too. He had a keen sense of humour, Tom Hancock, or ‘the Morgue’, as some of the local ’erberts had it. He’d never minded. He could find the funny side of most things, old Tom Hancock. I thought about him sitting where I was, outside a seance, and I imagined how hard it would have been for him to keep a straight face. Just the thought of him busting to giggle made me want to laugh. But luckily I did manage to hold on to myself and not break into laughter even when, just over an hour and a couple of very noisy sighs later, a very odd collection of people came out of the seance room with Mrs Darling.
As well as pale Cissy there was an equally pale, if rather younger woman, called Miss Driver. A boy in a tight black suit was apparently a Mr Watkins, and then there were the Robinsons, Esme – Harper as was – and her husband, Neville.
I’ve always been of the opinion that opposites attract. But I know that isn’t always the case. When the very similar come together, however, it is odd. Esme and Neville, from the look of them, could have been brother and sister, both tall, thin and lugubrious of both speech and movement. Looking at those two standing side by side drinking tea out of Mrs Darling’s best china was a strange and disturbing thing. The medium had told everyone that I was there for a private reading I had booked for after the seance. The idea was that Mrs Darling would hold Esme Robinson back so I could talk to her once she’d shown all the others the door. But I doubted even the formidable Mrs Darling would be able to shake Neville off with any kind of ease.
And I was right. What I hadn’t, however, even thought about was the possibility that all of the sitters might want to stay on in the parlour almost indefinitely.
‘My late mother came through tonight,’ Mr Watkins said in a voice that was so put-on posh that I honestly wanted to thump him.
‘Oh.’
‘Her name was Gwyneth,’ he declaimed. ‘From a very good Welsh family. Very educated. Very tasteful.’
‘Mr Watkins’s mother was very chatty tonight.’
I looked down and saw that Cissy, carrying a plate of very few, very plain biscuits, had joined us.
‘Mother prefers to communicate via the planchette,’ Mr Watkins said as he first looked disgustedly down at and then rejected the biscuits.
The planchette as I understood it was like a pointer on casters that spelt out words with the aid of letters of the alphabet that were arranged around the outside edge of the seance table. Use of this device meant that the messages from the dead did not have to come via the medium’s mouth. Quite a relief, I imagined, for a large, weary-looking woman like Mrs Darling.
‘Well now, we really must break it up as I have to give this gentleman his time,’ Mrs Darling said as she addressed the room in general and smiled at me.
‘Oh, but of course!’ I heard the nervous voice of Esme Robinson say. ‘Oh, Margaret dear, we don’t want to hold you up.’
‘No indeed,’ Neville agreed.