‘I’ve a cousin, Dave, who keeps me abreast of family matters,’ Edward Abrahams said. ‘Told me about poor Marie and Uncle Nathan.’
‘David never had a problem with our marriage, unlike everyone else,’ Fernanda said from a face as cold and unmoving as that of an idol. Faces like that I’d seen in my parents’ photographs of Calcutta’s many Hindu temples. But then India was or had been Fernanda’s country too.
‘As it happened, poor old Nathan found us suddenly fetching up out of the blue a bit too much,’ Edward Abrahams said as he offered me a fag and then took one for himself.
‘Old Mr Abrahams screamed the place down,’ Nan put in.
‘Screamed?’
‘He’s lost his wits,’ Fernanda said. ‘But then a parent don’t expect to lose its child, do it?’
She was also trying, I now noticed, to be posh. An affected accent together with ropy grammar is always a dead giveaway. But then for Fernanda Mascarenhas, as was, even Clapham North, where she and Edward lived in a flat ‘overlooking the Common’, was a step up from Canning Town. Even without asking, I knew she was not going to go back there. Plaistow was one thing, she’d tolerate our slightly better part of West Ham, but Canning Town was, I felt, a step too far.
‘Nancy was helping out on the ward, and when we come in the two girls recognised each other,’ Edward Abrahams said good-naturedly. ‘She’d just turned up and so had we, and so when Uncle Nathan was brought in we were all together. Nancy tried to introduce us, but . . .’
‘He just screamed, Frank,’ my sister said. Then, shaking her head at the memory of it, she added, ‘It was horrible.’
‘It must’ve been,’ I said as I puffed on the Passing Cloud that Edward had just given me.
‘Never screamed before,’ Nan said.
‘Oh, I expect it was the shock of seeing us,’ Fernanda said. ‘Me and Edward, we have that effect on members of his family.’ Turning to my mother, she added, ‘You must know that effect, Mrs Hancock, don’t you? When one marries out . . .’
The Duchess smiled. ‘My dear, I pay no heed to the silly opinions of others, whoever they may be.’
Fernanda Abrahams sniffed. She knew that what my mother had just said was by way of a put-down. But then the Duchess, for all her natural fine manners, has never had any time for those who appear to put such things on for the benefit of others. Quite where Nan stood, I didn’t know, but I had the feeling that both the Duchess and myself were well and truly put off by this woman.
Smiling, Edward said, ‘So when Nancy here offered us tea, Frank, we took her up on it straight away.’ He frowned. ‘Poor Uncle Nathan. Shook me right up, the state of him, I can tell you. But then for our Marie to die like that . . . Nancy says you’ve been trying to find us.’
I told them what I knew – about Marie and Mrs Darling, about the White Feather girls. As I spoke, Nan put her head down in what I could see was shame. But Fernanda Abrahams was unmoved. Not in the silly, giggly way that Esme Robinson had been unmoved – it was much more measured and profound than that. Fernanda Abrahams I felt just didn’t care. She had experienced far too much suffering herself, or so she felt, to be bothered with the pain of others. When I reached the end of the story as I knew it, Edward Abrahams said, ‘Well, Frank, that’s quite a tale you tell and I am obliged to you for telling it. Of course I knew that Fernanda was a White Feather girl when she was young; it was how she met Marie.’ He held a finger up to silence any protestation I might make about this. ‘I never approved, of course,’ he added. ‘I was on the Somme and, well . . .’ He looked at me with the eyes everyone who was in that carnage has.
‘I don’t know that whoever is killing these people is doing it because of the White Feather connection,’ I said.
‘Police don’t say much these days,’ Abrahams said as he slowly and sadly nodded his head.
‘The coppers are treating each death as a separate incident unless they happen in the same division,’ I said. ‘There’s a bloke here in Plaistow who’s owned up to one of the killings. But only one, and whether he’s telling the truth, no one seems to know.’
‘They keep quiet about such things now because of the war,’ the Duchess said.
I looked at Edward Abrahams and said, ‘All I wanted to do was to warn you. Keep your wife safe.’
‘Oh, you can be sure I’ll do that, mate!’ Abrahams winked at his wife as he said it. She turned aside in what looked like disgust. He was still besotted with her, but she was more in love with the clothes and make-up that he obviously had to work hard to get for her. Edward Abrahams, he told me just before they left, was a tailor. He’d learned his trade in the sweatshops of Spitalfields; now he had his own shop on the Clapham High Street. He also did his turn as a fire-watcher down in Clapham.
‘I have to go out at night,’ he said to me when we found ourselves alone at the shop door for the few moments just before they left. ‘There’s our daughter, Phillipa, but she works, driving ambulances.’
‘Mr Abrahams,’ I said, ‘I don’t know if your wife is really in danger.’
They left. I was glad that I’d managed to get to speak to them, even if Fernanda Abrahams was an unpleasant character. When we were back up in the parlour again, Nan said, ‘You know, Frank I nearly jumped out of my skin when I saw Fernanda at the hospital. She hadn’t changed a bit!’
‘What, the look of her or how she behaved?’ I said.
Nancy rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, she was always a madam,’ she said. She looked down at the floor and went on, ‘’Course she never wanted to be seen with me. Not standing next to me or nothing. She made a beeline for girls like Marie and the Harper twins because they was fair. You know, Frank, when I told Fernanda that Dolly had died, she never said a thing, not one thing. Blimey, I was so glad when I saw her and her husband up at Claybury! I was so relieved.’ She sighed. ‘Although why old Mr Abrahams screamed when he saw them I don’t know. He’d been quite calm when he talked to me about them. But then she was so cold, Fernanda, so very, very cold!’
That night the fog put paid to any designs Hitler might have had on us. But the fire-watchers went up as usual, on the roof of the bank next door. Mr Deeks the bank manager and his boys scanned the skies as they always do, while my mother, Nan and cousin Stella sat in the parlour knitting and mending. Once I’d stabled the horses for the night I stood down in the yard with Aggie, smoking. Aggie more than any of us gets out and about: to work, shopping and socially in pubs. I wanted to know if she’d heard anything.
‘About the murders? Yeah, plenty,’ she said as she rolled herself a fag from my tin of tobacco. ‘They can censor what they like, people will always talk. Especially round here. Not that you’ll want to hear any of it, Frank.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because all they ever talk about is the Ripper,’ Aggie said. ‘All the Jews up Brick Lane are quaking in their boots thinking he’s come back again. Bleedin’ ghosts!’
‘But Jack the Ripper never attacked any Jewish women,’ I said.
‘I know that! But a lot of people blamed the Jews, thought he was one of them at the time.’
‘Yes, but that was nonsense.’
‘Was it?’ Aggie pulled her chin back and gave me a very wry look indeed. ‘Who told you that, your lady friend? Frank, no one knows who the Ripper was or is. He could be Jewish, he could be Irish, Welsh or sky blue pink. He could even be a she.’
‘Aggie, Jack the Ripper cut women open and then pulled their innards out,’ I said.
‘Women can do that,’ Aggie replied.
My younger sister has become a very different person from the girl who married and had children years ago. It’s partly the war and the opportunities it has certainly given women to work that has changed her. But the humiliation she suffered at the hands of her faithless old man played its part too. He just left her and her children for another woman, just disappeared off the face of the earth.
‘I’d never let a bloke get close enough to cut me up,’ Aggie said
as she ground her fag butt into the mud beneath her feet.
‘But Aggie,’ I said, ‘don’t you want to feel . . .’
‘Frank, I go to the pub, I have a laugh and a sing-song, but that’s the finish of it as far as blokes are concerned,’ Aggie said. She crossed her arms over her chest and then muttered, ‘They can bloody sing for anything else.’
‘But Ag, everyone wants to be loved,’ I said.
‘Well you do because you’re as soft as butter!’ my sister said. ‘But you know, Frank, that when this war is over, things are going to be a lot different.’
‘Well, if Hitler . . .’
‘No, when, when we win, Frank, after that the world will change. Won’t be no more women doing as they’re told all the time. We’ve had some freedom and we like it! And you know what, too?’
‘What?’
‘There won’t be no more silly talk about ghosts and spirits when the war is over,’ Aggie said. ‘Because you know what? There’s no such things. No ghosts, no God, no Blessed Virgins and no resurrected Jack the Rippers!’
‘Well don’t let Nan hear you say that!’ I said.
Aggie’s face suddenly fell into something very serious. ‘You know that since Dolly’s death Nan’s been a different person too, Frank. Oh, she’s still devoted to God, the Virgin and all that, but she’s working for you and she’s putting her back into it. Time was when she’d barely leave the house. She’s changing, Frank. Even she’s changing.’
And I knew that Aggie was right. Nancy, albeit by degrees, was moving out into the world. Even a month before, I couldn’t have seen her grafting for me or doing good works up at a hospital, much less a hospital outside of West Ham. Maybe at last she was getting on top of the way she’d always felt about her colour and her looks. To be truthful, and as I had always known, deep down she was a strangely beautiful woman, especially when wearing the dark suit of our profession. Handsomer than Aggie in her way, Nancy was also, I thought, now somewhat more appealing than Fernanda Abrahams. Such chilliness in that woman! And yet she had a nice husband, a daughter who worked driving ambulances, a home – the Abrahams quite clearly had money.
But something rankled. A beautiful woman with beautiful white skin, she nevertheless knew where she came from, if no one else did. Both she and Edward had chosen to leave their pasts behind when they got together, and that included their families. But Edward, unlike Fernanda, had come from a white world. In spite of the fact that his family had disowned him, he was still a Jew, still who he had been before. But Fernanda . . . I didn’t know this for certain, but by the look of her I imagined that she lived her life as a white lady, as something she really was not. That had been her choice, but I wondered what she felt about it deep down inside. According to Nancy, Fernanda had always been a ‘madam’ and had avoided my sister because of the colour of her skin. But Fernanda’s parents and siblings had been brown, and however ambitious she might have been in the past, as the years went by she must have thought about them. Maybe it was a sense of being alone in the world, which she must have felt from time to time, that made her seem so hard and cold and without feeling? If indeed Fernanda Abrahams was really like that.
Chapter Seventeen
‘They 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 n
arrowed 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.’
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