After the Mourning (26 page)

For a while I racked my brains for any friends Hannah might have that I knew little about. But there was only the magician, David Green, and I was pretty sure she wouldn’t be with him. But, then, even if I had known where she was I couldn’t have gone after her in my condition. Every movement still gave me pain and I was very weak.

There was a knock then, and Arthur popped his smiling head around my door.

Chapter Eighteen

I
nspector Richards didn’t hang about. The following morning he was back on my doorstep, demanding that statement of his. He wasn’t unpleasant about it but Doris, who’d told me how impatient he’d been to see me on the previous day, wasn’t inclined to hurry him into the parlour, which was where I’d chosen to be that morning. With Nan and Walter’s help I’d got out of bed and was now talking to Arthur about his new temporary job as a fully fledged undertaker.

‘The important thing,’ I said to him, ‘is to maintain the dignity of the occasion. If you slip over or fall into a hole left by an incendiary, then that doesn’t matter and you just carry on as if nothing has happened. Letting go of the coffin, however, war or no war, is very bad. The deceased and his or her family don’t deserve that, so you watch what the bearers are doing and if they look as though they might be in trouble, you go and help them yourself.’

‘Yes, Mr H.’ Arthur has always looked like a stick of liquorice in his mourning suit and topper. But in the past, of course, he’s always been at the back of the cortège. Now he was about to be right at the front, all six foot God knows what of him, looking like an overgrown, badly dressed infant. Spots and boils are not what you usually associate with a funeral director but that was what the funeral of Queenie Ramm was going to be treated to and that was that. Or so I thought.

Aggie had slipped into the parlour without my noticing her. When I did, though, unusually, she was smiling. She also seemed to have something hidden behind her back.

‘Well, Arthur,’ she said, ‘what a day, eh? Conducting a funeral and you not even twenty-one.’

I saw the boy’s face whiten.

‘Younger than you were, Frank,’ she said to me, and she was right. I hadn’t conducted a funeral until I was into my thirties, when Dad’s malaria got too bad for him to carry on. ‘And so,’ Aggie continued, ‘because we love you and because my brother is a very superstitious man, I’ve come to give you this.’

She whipped one of her hands around and held up a long cane, topped with an ornate, familiar silver handle.

‘It’s your wand,’ she said, as she pressed it into my hands. ‘Well, it’s the top of it. Nan gave it to me. She said you was so upset and wondered if I knew anyone as could help. There’s this bloke down the Abbey Arms, owes me a favour . . .’

I grinned.

‘So give it over to Arthur, then,’ Aggie said, in the sharp way she’s always had with her. And then, smiling at the boy, she said, ‘You’ll be all right, Arthur, now you’ve got the wand.’

‘I know,’ he said, and in spite of his lack of belief in superstition I felt he meant it. Some things, whether you believe in their ‘power’ or not, are just important.

I gave Arthur my wand, then waved him off to his first shot at the ‘top job’. ‘I won’t let you down, Mr H,’ he said, as he left.

Once I was alone with my sister, I gave her a cuddle. ‘So, who’s this fella down the pub owes you a favour, then, Ag?’ I asked. I was curious to know who had fitted the handle of the old wand, which itself had been damaged in the blast, so well on to the new cane.

‘Someone with a girlfriend who has a sweet tooth,’ Aggie replied, with a wink. Working as she does at Tate & Lyle’s sugar factory, I knew not to ask any more. All sorts of deals are done in pubs, always have been, and our local is one of the only places Aggie can get any sort of relief from her long shifts at Tate’s and her not-always-happy time at home with the rest of us. She’s still quite young and pretty, in spite of the shortages we have to put up with – as well as the hard conditions down at Tate’s – and I’ve lived in hope for some time that she might meet a nice bloke who’d really look after her. But there’s been no luck on that score so far.

‘Frank.’ She came and sat down beside me, looking serious.

‘Yes?’

‘Look, I know you’re still not well enough to do much but . . . there’s a horrible smell out the back, in the room where . . . Frank, Lily Lee’s still down there and I don’t know what to do with her.’

My jaw dropped. I’d forgotten all about her. There had been so much death and I’d been so ill that she had entirely slipped my mind.

‘Oh, Christ, she needs burying,’ I said. ‘But her family . . .’

‘Well, that’s what I thought,’ Aggie said. ‘From what you’ve told us they’re dead, aren’t they?’

They were mostly, although I knew that when the parents had disappeared into the forest to escape from the MPs and aid Martin Stojka they had left their young daughters at the Eagle Pond camp. Lily still had family of sorts, and there was her sister Rosie’s grave, which could be reopened to take her.

‘Ag, are you doing anything?’ I asked. ‘Because if you’re not could you go and see Ernie Sutton and tell him I need to talk to him? I’d do it myself but . . .’

‘Oh, don’t be daft, the telephones are down. Of course I’ll do it,’ Aggie said. ‘Can’t have that stink, Frank, not for much longer.’

She stood as if to go. ‘There’s that copper of yours downstairs with Doris, the one who says he’s from Scotland Yard,’ she said. ‘Doris has kept him out so you could speak to Arthur, but I suppose you’d better talk to him now. He’s been downstairs so long he’s even started chatting to Stella.’

‘Yes . . .’ She’d talked of Richards oddly, I thought. ‘What do you mean he “says he’s from Scotland Yard”, Ag? He
is
from Scotland Yard.’

‘Yeah, I know, but he gives me the heebie-jeebies. I complained to Sergeant Hill at our station about him when you was in hospital. I was afraid all his questions’d make you ill, and they did. Anyway, I just don’t like him.’

‘What? Because he’s a proper copper? Not a sort of a mate like Sergeant Hill?’

‘Some mate!’ She laughed. Aggie has more than a few friends who buy and sell things they shouldn’t. ‘But you’re right – I probably don’t like Richards ’cause he’s “proper”.’

But she still seemed puzzled. I thought at the time that maybe she was angry with Richards – perhaps because he’d made a pass at her. A lot of blokes do and she’s rarely flattered by it. But when she showed him up, there didn’t seem to be any atmosphere between them so I just got on and gave him my account of what had happened in the forest again, this time in a formal statement. He told me that I could have the Lancia back the next day. I was pleased, but I’d already decided that, car or no car, I was going to get out of the shop sooner than that. I couldn’t take another night in that Anderson – it was a flipping leaky box just waiting to become my coffin. I hoped that Ernie Sutton would do as I was going to ask him.

Just before he left, Richards said, ‘Oh, we’ve taken a couple of male Gypsies in for questioning about the deaths of Mansard and the others. I’d like to find the Lees’ daughters but they’ve disappeared.’

‘Have they?’

‘Yes. If you hear anything you’ll let me know, won’t you?’

‘It’s not likely, with me stuck here, is it, Inspector?’

‘I don’t know, Mr Hancock,’ he said. ‘Maybe the Gypsies will come to you. It wouldn’t be the first time and, I believe, you still have the body of the girl Lily on your premises.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, keep me informed, won’t you? As yet, it’s still only you and Miss Jacobs who claim to have seen the miraculous nail. The Gypsies and the remaining MPs in Mansard’s company know nothing about it.’ He looked me straight in the eye but without even a hint of a smile. ‘In view of Miss Jacobs’s disappearance it would be better for you, Mr Hancock, if someone else could confirm your story about that night. The Lee girls, having lost their parents and brothers, have no need to conceal the truth, whatever it may be. We do need to find them.’

I returned his very straight gaze with one of my own and said, ‘Yes.’

‘Apart from anything else, I assume those girls will want some involvement in a funeral for their relatives,’ he continued. ‘If not, it’ll be parish dos, won’t it? Seems a shame to me that they could end up in paupers’ graves when the girls could have them buried decently.’

I didn’t answer him. He had an entirely different view of what had happened to me from the version I believed. I resented having to prove myself, and what I’d been through, to him.

Richards stood up, smiled, then almost immediately frowned. ‘By the way, Mr Hancock,’ he said, ‘you’ve a bad smell downstairs. Your drains damaged, are they?’

Stella let him out, babbling on about how Horatio Smith ‘would’ve killed our Frank stone dead if it hadn’t been for me’, as she led him down the stairs and out into the yard. Later on, when she thought I was asleep, Stella came into the parlour and stared slack-jawed into my face. I didn’t know what she wanted and she didn’t utter a word. It was an unnerving, almost frightening experience.

‘Ernie,’ I said, as soon as he came into the parlour and settled himself beside me, ‘can I borrow your motor car?’

Of course, I couldn’t drive myself – I still didn’t have my own car – so Ernie had to do that for me. I couldn’t after all, ask the police. After Richards’ visit I had some important reasons for wanting to speak to the Gypsies – if I could find them – without any help from any coppers. Ernie, too, had an interest in trying to find what remained of the Lee family.

‘If I’ve no information to the contrary, I’ll have to copy what I did for Rosie’s funeral. I won’t perform a pauper’s do – I’d rather pay for it all myself than that,’ he said, as he brought his car to a halt in front of Eagle Pond. ‘But I’d like to make it more personal if I can, with chosen hymns and whatever, and it would be so much better if Lily’s family could be there.’

The sun was setting and a thick, almost smoggy mist had fallen across the trees. Nothing, as far as I could see, was moving in the thick undergrowth or around the pond. It was silent too, which is not something easily associated with groups of people. But as Ernie pulled me, in some pain, out of his car, I was not downhearted. I knew how easily the Gypsies could hide themselves in the forest. I also knew that once they’d spotted me they would want to talk to me too, in all probability, if only to ask me what I’d said about their fellows in police custody. And from my point of view there was another reason. The Gypsies, I hoped, might be able to tell me what Hannah had done after she’d escaped from the MPs’ car. By her own admission she’d gone back into the forest where they, or some of them, had been at the time.

As Ernie and I inched forwards into the undergrowth around the pond, I told him that Hannah had disappeared.

‘Well, you know, Frank, that may not be such a bad thing,’ he said, as he slid an arm under my shoulder and helped me to step over a fallen log. ‘She’s a very nice woman, Miss Jacobs, but she is, well . . . I don’t have to tell you what she is, do I?’

‘What do you mean?’

He had to know that Hannah was a Jew, but I’d thought he was ignorant of the other details of her life.

‘Well, what she does, her . . .’

His words made me frown. I’d never looked on Ernie Sutton as a man to judge others. ‘Do you mean because she’s a Jew or because she’s a tom?’ I asked him, I admit harshly.

‘Frank,’ he said, ‘I’m a vicar. I have to say these things. Where would we be if we all married outside our own religion, eh?’

‘You forget, Ernie,’ I gasped, as the pain bit into my side, ‘I don’t have a religion.’

He didn’t answer but made me sit on a tree-stump. Apparently even the small amount of light coming from the evening sky showed that my face was green.

‘Your Aggie was right,’ Ernie said, as he looked at me hard. ‘You shouldn’t be out. Your mum’ll have my guts for garters when she finds out I’ve taken you off into the wild blue yonder.’

Aggie alone, as far as I was aware, had known I was going out and she hadn’t been happy about it. I told her I had to in order to sort out Lily Lee’s funeral with her family. She had replied that, given a choice between my health and Lily Lee’s funeral, she’d rather the poor girl stink the shop to the ground rather than me have one more second’s worth of pain. She hadn’t got her way and soon it would be dark. Being among the trees again brought back the feelings and fears I’d had when I’d last been in the forest – with Mansard and his men, the Lees and my Hannah. I felt my breathing go and not, for once, because a raid had begun. That particular horror was not uppermost in my mind. It would come much later.

Standing over me, Ernie shook his head and was about to say something when a voice called from somewhere to me: ‘Mr Undertaker.’

I cocked my head to one side, thinking that perhaps I hadn’t heard right. ‘What?’

Ernie, too, was frowning now. ‘Did you hear that?’ he said. ‘It sounded like . . .’

‘It’s a woman’s voice,’ I said.

‘Yes . . .’

We glanced around, our heads moving in the same direction. When we looked ahead of us again she was there with a couple of young lads, both about her own age. Beauty.

Seeing her again was, for me, like an electric shock. I made noises rather than words.

‘Last time we saw each other you was nearly dead,’ she said to me. ‘
Drabalo
Mary saved your life.’

‘And you,’ I said, when I’d found my voice. ‘You came . . .’

‘I were there,’ Beauty said, nodding her head of thick black hair at me. ‘Me and old Danny Boy had gone up to see how the Gentleman was getting along and to take all of them up there some food. We saw them soldiers shoot everyone.’

‘Well, maybe you ought to tell the police. They don’t believe me,’ I said. She didn’t answer.

A dart of pain hit me and I had to wait until it had subsided before I spoke again.