Sure and Certain Death (6 page)

‘Violet liked a drop herself, don’t get me wrong,’ Albert said. ‘But she worked
and
had her Friday nights in the pub, if you know what I mean.’

‘So who paid, then?’ I asked. ‘For the funeral.’

‘A lady called Mrs Darling,’ Albert said, and then he pulled a strange, almost disgusted face. ‘Priest weren’t happy.’

‘Father Burton?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, she’s one of them spiritual mediums,’ Albert said.

‘Mrs Darling?’

‘Yes. Violet liked all that table-turning and talking to the dead, apparently,’ he said. ‘Been going to this Darling woman for years, so Fred said. Schlepping all the way up to East Ham twice a week.’

‘Oh, it’s not that far,’ I began.

But then Albert said, ‘It is if you’re a cripple, mate. Vi wore callipers all her life. Something wrong with her bones, they say. Staggering up East Ham twice a week must have taken it out of the poor cow. But anyway, all that’s by the by,’ he continued. ‘Main thing is, Frank, be on the lookout when you bury the Green Street woman. Maybe whoever is killing these ladies is leaving little messages for them in their flowers.’

Doris returned from powdering her nose then, and so Albert and I talked of other things.

Although our firm was the nearest one to the late Nellie Martin’s home on Iniskilling Road, I hadn’t actually buried the body that myself and Arthur had found. Nellie’s family, who I had discovered when I’d been asking around about the women’s various religions were devout Baptists, had insisted on using a family firm known for their affiliation to that faith, namely Haigh’s of Barking. There had been a service for Nellie up at the Memorial Baptist on the Barking Road followed by an interment at the City of London Cemetery in Manor Park. That
had
been a big affair, with lots of what Albert Cox calls ‘ghouls’ in attendance. But then whereas Violet Dickens’s family had been made up of basically poor drinkers, Nellie’s were business people. She herself had been a decent Baptist widow, and sympathy for her was high. There was, I felt, a little bit of a feeling that Violet Dickens, with her drunken husband and loud-mouthed lodger in tow, had somehow deserved what had happened to her. Not so Dolly O’Dowd, however, although her funeral, as Father Burton told me later on that day, was going to be small for other reasons.

‘The sister wants to keep it very quiet,’ he said. ‘People have only been invited by word of mouth.’

‘My Nancy’s going,’ I said as I followed him into his parlour and then sat down.

‘I should think so, they were good friends,’ Father Burton said. Thin and rather monk-like in appearance, I’ve always thought, Father Burton folded himself into the armchair in front of me and then steepled his fingers underneath his chin. ‘She was a good woman, Dolly O’Dowd. What she did to deserve such a fate, well . . .’

‘Do you think it might be the same person killing all these ladies?’ I asked him.

Father Burton shrugged. ‘I don’t know, Francis,’ he said. ‘It’s the police you’d have to ask about that. I’m just a priest.’ He took a sip from his teacup and then put it down on the table beside him. ‘But it seems odd to me that if the same person is killing these women he should choose such different victims.’

‘They’re all around about the same age.’

‘Yes, but a spinster, a respected widow and someone like Violet Dickens . . .’

He left what Violet Dickens was or had been like hanging in the air. Father Burton is not one who talks easily about what he generally expresses as ‘immorality’. Not that, from what Albert had said at least, Violet could have been considered exactly immoral. Although no churchgoer myself, I knew this priest well enough to know not to push him, and so I just waited for him to talk, which eventually he did.

‘Of course poor Violet had a cross to bear in the form of her husband,’ he said after a very long pause. ‘In a place of drinkers like Canning Town, it’s quite something to be known and almost made into a figure of myth for your drinking. But Frederick Dickens is such a man.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘When the police told me that the poor woman had been dead in the attic of that house for weeks and Frederick and that other creature completely unaware, I wasn’t surprised.’

‘You weren’t?’

‘Blind drunk the pair of them! God Almighty, Francis, I wouldn’t have been surprised if Violet had been dead since before the bombing started! All those men have done for years is drink. Not even sober at her funeral!’

‘I didn’t know they’d been . . .’

‘Oh, it was the woman who claims to speak to the dead who ran the funeral,’ Father Burton said. ‘God help us, Francis, that a Catholic woman like Violet should seek counsel from such people . . .’ He stopped briefly in order, I imagined, to collect himself once again. His normally colourless face was pink with fury. ‘Table-turning and ectoplasm and what have you! God help us!’

Albert had said Father Burton hadn’t approved of Mrs Darling. Not that I had really come to see him about her.

‘Father,’ I said, ‘I know that Albert Cox told you about the posy he found on Violet Dickens’s grave . . .’

‘During Mrs Salazar’s funeral, yes,’ Father Burton said. ‘A vile note! He gave it to the police, I believe.’

‘He told me about it because I’m doing Dolly’s funeral with you, Father, and Albert, well, he says we should be on the lookout maybe . . .’

‘For what? Deranged people carrying flowers with offensive cards attached? Why would anyone want to do such a thing to Dolly O’Dowd?’

‘Why would anyone do such a thing to Violet Dickens?’

‘Francis, she drank her drop too, you know. And it is well known that the first of her seven children was born only three months after her wedding . . .’

‘Father, whoever wrote that note called Violet a Nazi!’ I said. ‘That’s nothing to do with her love life or her drinking!’

‘No, but . . .’

‘Well, I’m sure she wasn’t a Nazi! But what if this horrible flower-sender sends something unpleasant to Dolly’s funeral?’

The priest looked down for a moment as if he was a little ashamed of what he had said about Violet Dickens. I didn’t think he was in reality, but I hoped that he’d taken my point anyway.

‘Albert told you, and me, so that we can keep an eye open,’ I said. ‘Mrs Bentham wants her sister’s funeral to be quiet and discreet, as do all of us.’

‘We don’t know when that ghastly posy was put on Violet’s grave,’ Father Burton said. ‘I don’t think it was at her actual funeral.’

‘I don’t suppose it was,’ I said. ‘But Father, if we see something suspicious . . . if it means that maybe we can catch someone in the act . . .’

‘Francis, that is a matter for the law, not us,’ Father Burton said coldly. ‘You commend the dead to the earth, I commend them to God. Neither of us can dispense justice.’ He fixed me with one of his not infrequent ‘you’re a mad person, Francis’ looks and said, ‘Especially not you, my son.’

I looked down at the floor of Father Burton’s parlour and noticed, calmly, that the rug was swimming in blood from Passchendaele.

The Duchess went to bed early that night, and with Aggie on the night shift down at Tate and Lyle’s it meant that I was left on my own with Nan. By this time, of course, she was in mourning for Dolly O’Dowd, and so even by her dark standards she was a deeply black presence in our flat. As night began to fall that afternoon I sat by the window in order to get the last of the daylight before we put up the blackout curtains. But soon the fog came down and there was nothing left to be seen and so I entombed us for the night while my sister cooked up a potato pie in the kitchen. Later, as I tried to read the
Evening News
by the light of a single candle, she came and stood next to me. So shrouded in black was she that I hardly knew she was there until she spoke.

‘Frank?’

‘F . . .’ I put a hand up to my chest and only just stopped myself from cursing. ‘Gawd above, Nan, what . . .’

‘Frank, have you found anything else out about poor Dolly yet?’ she asked. ‘Oh, and the other women who, er . . .’

I lit a fag up to calm my nerves and then I said, ‘No. Not really, love, I . . . Nan, this really is something for the coppers, love . . .’

‘Oh, what do they do?’ She sat down beside me and then shuffled her thin backside on the chair in an agitated fashion. ‘Terrible things go on all the time, but they don’t do nothing about it.’

‘Terrible things?’

‘Looting and all that what goes on down the public shelters.’ She gave me a significant look. ‘You know.’

Some say there’s been more kids conceived down the London public shelters in the last six months than in the whole of the country for the last year. Makes me smile, but to someone like Nan it’s an outrage.

‘Nan, love, murder’s a long way off from a soldier and his girl having a bit of a cuddle in the blackout.’

Even by the thin light of the candle I could see Nan blush with anger. ‘They ain’t doing nothing about murder and you know it!’ she said. ‘Frank, think about all the dear departed you’ve had to follow up on in the last year. Think about that bloke who got stabbed and only you knew!’

My old dad used to talk about the undertaker’s ‘third eye’. How to express that in words I don’t really know, beyond the notion that it is a feeling you get when a dead body isn’t right. When a person has met his or her end in a way that is premature or violent, a good undertaker, dedicated to the care of the dead, does know. At the height of the bombing back in 1940 I’d had such a feeling about a bloke who died apparently from the effects of bomb blast. I’d seen him by chance just minutes before he died and he told me he’d been stabbed. But there was no evidence that the police doctor could find of this, even though I knew the dying man hadn’t been lying. And I’d been right. He had been stabbed, but with a lady’s hatpin, which had left almost no mark on the outside of his body. The poor bloke had bled to death inside – a slow and apparently very painful death. That said, Dolly O’Dowd and the other women were known to have been murdered.

‘Nan, the police . . .’

‘Aggie was right. The coppers ain’t doing nothing, Frank, and well you know it!’

‘Do I?’ I lit up a Woodbine and said, ‘How do you know? Have you spoken to them? Sergeant Hill at Plaistow is a good bloke. I’m sure he’s doing his best.’

‘Yes, but you . . .’

‘I’m finding out what I can,’ I said. I wondered whether to tell Nan about the posy with the insulting card that had been placed on Violet Dickens’s grave and then thought better of it. Her low opinion of the dockers’ women in general would only make her dismiss that anyway. ‘And Nan, you must tell the coppers anything you might know about Dolly, and the others, too.’

She turned away slightly then and said, ‘I only really knew Dolly.’

‘You knew Nellie Martin,’ I said. Then, because all of the women were around about the same age and because I couldn’t remember anyway, I asked her, ‘Did you go to school with Dolly, Nan?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you went to school with Dolly O’Dowd and Nellie Martin?’

‘Yes.’ She was still turned away from me, into the darkness.

‘Violet Dickens? What about her?’

‘She lived down Canning Town,’ Nan said.

It wasn’t really an answer and so I said, ‘Yes, but Dolly lived almost in Upton Park, but she still went to New City Road School. Did . . .’

‘I dunno.’ She turned still further away from me, and she shrugged.

I got up then and moved around so that I could see my sister’s face. The old third eye was apparently working with the living at that moment and I knew that what Nan was telling me wasn’t right in some way.

‘Nan, I have looked for connections between these ladies and I haven’t found any yet,’ I said. ‘They differ on religion, on whether they’re married and have kids or not and on whether they’ve got any money. All they have in common is their age. Now, if they all went to the same school . . .’

‘I don’t know where Violet Dickens went to school!’ Nan said. Her face I could see now was screwed up with tension. She wasn’t telling the truth about something, either that or she was leaving something out of what she was saying. ‘Frank . . .’

‘Because if you do know something, then you’ve got to tell the coppers.’ I bent down to look more closely at her and added, ‘Because, Nan, if this killer is murdering middle-aged women who went to New City Road School forty years ago, then that could mean that you’re in danger.’

She looked up into my eyes and I swear I saw a bead of sweat form on her top lip.

I stood up straight again and said, ‘And I don’t want any harm to come to you, Nan. None of us do.’

‘I don’t know anything,’ she said as she got up from the chair and ran out of the parlour back to the kitchen. ‘Nothing!’

Just over an hour later the sirens went and Nan headed for our Anderson shelter. I went out in the street.

Chapter Five