Chapter Seventeen
‘
T
hey say the police have a man in custody for these Ripper murders. Down in your manor, Mr Hancock,’ Esme Robinson said to me as Cissy handed me a cup of tea and a very old water biscuit.
Mrs Darling, across the table from me, sitting next to the widow Robinson, said, ‘Cissy love, will you get the sugar bowl, please?’
Cissy smiled and went off to the kitchen. I’d come back, a little reluctantly it must be said, to the medium’s house because, true to her word, Mrs Darling had persuaded Esme Robinson to use our firm to perform Neville’s funeral. Because I had actively disliked Neville, this didn’t sit easily with me. But as my dad always said, ‘a job is a job’. Neville’s funeral was to take place at Manor Park Cemetery on the following Tuesday.
‘Well, Mrs Robinson,’ I said, ‘the man in question has admitted to the murder of his wife.’
‘Violet Dickens,’ Mrs Darling put in.
‘Oh, poor Vi!’ Esme Robinson’s eyes filled with tears. She looked, understandably, bad. She was pale and had clearly lost weight. Also, her face, although covered by a layer of tan-coloured powder, was covered with lots of angry red scratches. I wondered if in her grief she had done those herself.
‘But Fred Dickens can’t have killed your husband, Mrs Robinson,’ I said. ‘He was in police custody when Mr Robinson was killed. Personally, I don’t think that Fred killed anyone.’
‘Neither do I,’ Mrs Darling said. But she didn’t elaborate upon why. I assumed it had something to do with the feeling of being watched she had told me about. That or something the spirits were telling her.
‘Why do you think Vi’s husband might be innocent?’ Esme said. ‘Why would he own up to something he didn’t do?’
‘Well, Mr Dickens is a drinker . . .’
‘Coppers want an easy life, especially now,’ Mrs Darling said. ‘They have ways to force out confessions.’
Cissy came back into the room just as the medium was finishing what she was saying. She put the sugar bowl on the table and sat down. I left the sugar on this occasion myself and let the women have it. Conscious of the fact that I needed to get back to the shop for a funeral in the afternoon, I said, ‘Mrs Robinson, I will need to know where Neville is now.’
I knew his height and could gauge the size of coffin that I needed for him. But I needed to know where to take it before I either brought Neville back to the shop or left him wherever he was until the day of the funeral. I imagined, given the circumstances, he was in Whipps Cross Hospital.
‘Oh, he’s up at Claybury,’ she said. ‘They ran out of space at Whipps Cross.’
‘So . . .’
‘Oh, they said they’d keep him there until the funeral,’ Esme said. ‘But Mr Hancock, on the day, if it’s all right, I would like to go and pick him up with you and . . . I’ve got money. I can pay for a car as well as the hearse.’
Esme Robinson was now sole owner of a big house on the edge of Epping Forest.
‘You’ll come with me, won’t you, Margaret?’ she said to Mrs Darling. ‘And you, Cissy?’
As I wrote all this down in my notebook, I heard the medium say, ‘Yes, Esme love.’
‘So the cortège will start at Claybury Hospital?’ I said.
‘Yes.’
As soon as I’d finished my tea and we’d chatted over a few more details, I got up to go. Unusually it wasn’t Cissy who saw me out but Esme Robinson. She thanked me profusely for my help all the way to the front door. Then suddenly her face went very blank and she said, ‘I will do right by my Neville, Mr Hancock. A good send-off for a good man. What happens afterwards . . .’
She shut the door behind me, and in spite of the relative warmth of that day, I shuddered.
‘You so much as touch my sister again and I’ll knock your teeth out, you mare!’
Aggie in full flight was not a sight I’d imagined seeing when I got back to the shop. What I’d hoped to see was the hearse and the horses, along with the coffin containing the deceased, and my bearers, including Nancy, ready to go. And that was what I got. But I also got Aggie screaming at a very well-dressed and not terribly frightened-looking Fernanda Abrahams in the back yard. Nancy, I now noticed, had been crying.
‘Aggie?’
‘Oh, Mr Hancock,’ Fernanda Abrahams said calmly, ‘I didn’t know your younger sister was so pretty.’
Like Fernanda, fair as a lily, Aggie nevertheless had a temper that was far from pale.
‘This one,’ Aggie said pointing to Fernanda, ‘come here and started mouthing off! Threatening!’
‘It’s all right,’ I heard Nan say gently.
Aggie turned to look at her and said, ‘All right? No it ain’t, Nan. No one comes here and threatens us! Not on our own property. No one!’
She looked back at Fernanda again and narrowed her eyes for the next onslaught. I took a hand. Walking between Aggie and Fernanda I said, ‘Now, ladies, let’s have a bit of respect, shall we? This is hardly dignified as a start to the last journey for the late Mr Compton here, is it? Come on, let’s go inside and discuss this.’
Herbert Compton was due at the East London Cemetery in half an hour, and so I knew I was cutting it fine to delay our departure. But I had to get this thing with Fernanda Abrahams and my sisters sorted out.
Once we were all, including Nan, in the small room that leads out to the yard, I said, ‘Now what’s all this about?’
Aggie pointed to Fernanda and said, ‘Madam here threatening Nan!’
‘Threatening?’
‘No, it wasn’t threatening, Aggie,’ Nancy said as she looked down very pointedly at the floor.
‘Yes, it . . .’
‘No, Fernanda came to see me because she was upset,’ Nan said.
‘You were bawling your eyes out by the time I turned up,’ Aggie said. And then she turned to me and added, ‘All dressed up lovely for Mr Compton’s funeral, then tears all down her face, sobbing fit to break her heart!’
‘Aggie,’ I began, ‘will you . . .’
‘Mr Hancock!’ The imperious voice of Fernanda Abrahams broke through our family squabble and demanded attention – which it got. ‘Mr Hancock,’ she said, ‘I came to visit Nancy firstly because I was upset that she had just come up to my husband and me while we were visiting his uncle in Claybury and broke up what Edward hoped might be a nice reconciliation with the old bloke. As it was, Nancy turning up frightened the wits out of the old man, and then we had the screaming and such like.’
‘Mrs Abrahams,’ I said, ‘you told us only yesterday that Mr Nathan Abrahams reacted badly to you and your husband, not my sister. When I was with my sister and Mr Abrahams up at Claybury the other day, he took very well to Nancy.’
‘Yes, well,’ Fernanda said sulkily, ‘I couldn’t say nothing in front of your mother, could I? And anyway, raking up all that White Feather business, that upset my old man. Had a right hard time with him about it when we got home.’
‘I said I was sorry,’ I heard Nancy say.
Aggie looked daggers at her sister, probably because she felt that Nan was being weak. ‘Yeah,’ she said to Fernanda, ‘didn’t have to make her cry, though, did you? Didn’t have to say you never wanted to see her again.’
‘But I don’t want to see her again,’ Fernanda Abrahams said, yet again very calmly. ‘You’ve warned Ed and me that someone out there might want to harm me, so we can take care of ourselves now. Nancy and I were never friends. We don’t need each other.’
This did make me angry. ‘Now look here,’ I said, ‘my sister didn’t have to invite you and your husband back here yesterday. Although I think your husband was rather grateful after what happened up at Claybury. Mrs Abrahams, Nancy got you back here specifically so that I could warn you about the danger you may be in. She didn’t want any harm to come to you.’
‘Yes, well . . .’ She was still infuriatingly unconcerned.
I wanted to ask her straight out whether her dislike of Nancy was connected to the colour of my sister’s skin. I knew that it probably was, but I just couldn’t get myself together to say it. In the end, I didn’t have to.
‘You know, Fernanda,’ Nancy said gently, ‘just because when you look at me you see everything that you hate about yourself, that doesn’t mean I’m a bad person. As my brother said, I did what I did because I don’t want anything bad to happen to you.’
There was a long silence. Even Aggie shut up then. Aggie like me had tears in her eyes. Neither of us had ever seen Nan stand up for herself with anyone outside the family before. Again it was Nan who changed the atmosphere in that little room when she finally looked at me and said, ‘Frank, we must get on now. Mr Compton needs burying.’
Later, when Herbert Compton had finally been laid to rest, Nan said to me, ‘You know, of all of us it was Fernanda who was the least bothered about giving out white feathers. Not that I think she thought it was wrong at the time. Margaret I think did – not Fernanda, though. But the rest of us, though far from posh, came from much better-off families than she did. Just knowing she came from Canning Town told you that. I think she got in with us because she wanted to better herself. Which of course she did with Marie’s cousin Edward. Calculating is what Fernanda is. I never told anyone, but she always gave me a shudder.’
Mrs Darling had told me something not dissimilar to this when we’d first spoken about Fernanda. There was something about her that got people’s backs up.
Bella, one of the other old girls who lived with Hannah in Dot Harris’s house, had spent more time than she liked at Canning Town police station.
‘Some copper called Hartley,’ she said in her deep, smoke-dried voice. ‘Constable Hartley. He took me in. I said, “Get your sergeant here. I won’t talk to no one apart from him.” Mama! What a fuss! I said, “If you want me to talk about some man I may have entertained, then I need to talk to the organ-grinder, not the monkey!”’
Not a day under fifty, Bella is Italian on her father’s side and is therefore as expressive and expansive as those people do tend to be. I only know this, however, because Hannah has told me. Italian people don’t tend to draw attention to themselves these days.
I’d gone over to Hannah’s just to see her and had found my girl having tea with Bella in front of her range. The two women were talking about Neville Robinson and the fact that he had been one of Bella’s regulars. Neville had apparently been identified by his clothes, something Bella knew quite a bit about.
‘Tartan socks he always wore, I told Sergeant Raymond,’ she said. ‘Tartan socks, horrible dark green suspenders, and he always had a packet of du Maurier fags in his jacket – his old lady wouldn’t let him smoke in the house, can you imagine? There was always some saucy postcard he’d want me to look at too. Don’t know where he got those.’
Bella had known me for years, and so my presence and my questions were not any sort of problem for her.
‘’Course, it weren’t just his clothes what helped to identify him,’ Bella said as she picked a tiny piece of tobacco off her wrinkled red lips. ‘I always had to call him Nevvie. Weren’t hard to know what his real name was. Then when I told Sergeant Raymond that Nevvie liked to play at being a copper, well that clinched it!’
Neville Robinson had been a policeman in Islington in the First Lot. That, apparently, had left a lasting impression upon him, or rather on his intimate life.
‘Bella,’ I said as I took the cup of tea that Hannah gave me, ‘I know that Sergeant Raymond probably asked you this already, but did you see anyone about when Neville left the night that he died?’
‘What, on the street? No. Only girls out for business,’ Bella said.
‘Girls that you recognised?’
She shrugged. ‘I dunno, Frank. Girls!’ She shrugged again. ‘I was tired. Nevvie was hard work.’ She looked briefly over at Hannah, who said, ‘Bella, just tell him. It’s Frank! He knows what’s what.’
‘Nevvie hadn’t had anything intimate with his wife since just after they got married,’ Bella said. ‘She didn’t like it, apparently. But he did, ’cept he only liked it if he pretended he was arresting me. Like being in a fucking play, it was!’
‘Yes, but . . .’
‘As I said, Frank, it took it out of me!’ Bella said. ‘I’m not as young as I was.’
‘Who is?’ Hannah put in gloomily.
‘Once we’d finished, I took Nevvie down to the front door and waved him off as he walked in the direction of the Barking Road,’ Bella said. ‘There were some girls about but I didn’t look at any of them because I was tired and wanted to get some kip. Anyway, the youngsters out on the street don’t talk to us old-timers.’
‘Were they all young girls out on the street then, Bella?’ I asked.
‘Well I can’t swear to it because I never looked at them, Frank. But they usually are just bits of kids, ain’t they?’
Hannah nodded in agreement.
‘No men?’
‘Not that I could see, although men would have been about at some time because of the girls,’ Bella said. She lit up a fag and leaned towards me. ‘Frank, Nevvie always come to me once a week, same time, same day. Told his wife he went to some retired coppers affair.’
‘So he was very predictable,’ I said.
‘Nevvie,’ Bella said, ‘was always the same. Hard work, punctual to the second and probably the most boring bleeder in the world.’
I looked through the open hatch at the small fire inside Hannah’s range and thought about all the other victims and how no one in any of those cases had ever seen anything. I included the case of Violet Dickens in this because although her husband was, according to my mate Sergeant Hill, to be sent to trial for her murder, I didn’t believe that Fred was or could be guilty. Somehow whoever was killing these people was blending in with whatever was around the victim. People saw this person, but because of where he was or what was happening, no one really
saw
him. He had to be safe, not threatening in any way, to achieve what I was beginning to feel was a kind of invisibility. In my head I made a list – coppers, nuns,
women
. . . A copper in Rathbone Street would have stuck out like a sore thumb. But a woman? Aggie had seen nothing wrong with the idea of a woman killing and mutilating bodies. But I still drew back from it. After all, why would a woman want to kill a group of old White Feather girls? All that had happened a long time ago and no women, to my knowledge, had been harmed by it. In fact most women at the time, as I recalled now, had rather approved of what the White Feather movement had done.