Sure and Certain Death

by Barbara Nadel

I was exhausted and so I was grateful that I didn’t have to go into the police station right away, even if I did feel a little bit guilty about poor old Fred Dickens. There was something, however, that had puzzled me and continued to do so.

  ‘It’s the viciousness of it all that I can’t fathom,’ I said. ‘I mean, how one small woman could do such terrible things to her victims. Mutilation and . . .’

  Sergeant Hill smiled. ‘I spoke to that Mrs Darling that Miss Hoskin named as her next of kin. She told me straight away that she wasn’t Alice’s real family, of course. Told me Alice’s family were all dead, and that included her Uncle Bob, who used to own a butcher’s shop on East Ham Broadway. Alice apparently used to work in Uncle Bob’s shop some years ago.’

  Now that I knew what kind of shop Uncle Bob had had, some things about Cissy and what she’d done did make sense. Although quite how, angry and grieving or not, she could have done what she did was still absolutely beyond me. As Sergeant Hill left, so Aggie arrived.

  For a few moments she didn’t say anything, she just looked at me. Then, as she languidly pushed herself away from the door frame, she said, ‘Oh Frank, what are we going to do with you?’

  Before I could even begin to answer, she ran towards me and flung her arms around my shoulders. I felt rather than heard the tears of relief that she shed.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  She looked very composed. She had, I imagined, spent a not entirely comfortable night down in one of Plaistow police station’s no doubt freezing cold cells. But Cissy Hoskin, I had to admit, looked none the worse for it. In fact she looked to me rather better than she had done ever since I’d first known her. There is a saying about the truth setting you free, and maybe that was why. Maybe by getting all of her crimes off her chest, Cissy was, as it were, coming back to life once again.

  ‘When Mum died, I didn’t know what to do,’ she said once Sergeant Hill and myself had sat down at the table opposite her. ‘I’d only just buried Albert and . . .’ She looked up into my face. ‘I couldn’t do that again. You understand, Mr Hancock, I’m sure. If there are too many funerals, well . . . The departed are too far away in cemeteries. They lie cold and alone in unfamiliar places.’

  I wondered where she’d put the old woman. Sergeant Hill wrote down what Cissy said without either looking up or commenting. Cissy had said she’d only speak to me.

  ‘I buried Mum in the garden,’ she said. Her eyes filled with tears. ‘I had to do it at night, in a raid as it happened. I had to dig up all the cauliflowers to do it. No one saw. But then . . .’ She paused in order to scratch her face, then she said, ‘In the morning, because of the vibrations from the bombing, part of her had come up again and so I had to rebury her. I pretended to be digging up more caulis. But nothing else has grown there since Mum died, and nothing will.’ She looked up into my face. ‘That happened for several weeks – burying her, reburying her. Crying all the time and apologising to her for not getting it right! Couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat! No one came! No one!’

  ‘It must have been a terrible time,’ I said. And I really did feel sympathy with her in spite of what she’d done.

  ‘But I wasn’t angry then. That didn’t happen until after . . . Mum . . . After I finally got her into the ground.’ She cleared her throat. ‘I was in Canning Town, shopping. I saw a face from the past.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Marie Abrahams. Used to come into my uncle’s shop with her friend, Margaret Darling. She was talking to another woman, some little dried-up cripple she was, outside Murkoffs.’

  ‘Did you speak to Marie?’

  ‘No. But I heard some of their conversation. Marie called the woman Violet. There’d been a Violet in that group of White Feather girls Marie and Margaret had been in. I hadn’t known her, but I remembered the name. They used to talk about Violet, Nellie and Nancy, the Harper girls and Fernanda when they came into the shop. Used to ignore me. My blood boiled then. If it hadn’t been for those girls, I’d’ve had my Albert to comfort me through my poor mother’s death! I would’ve been able to let Mum go in the normal way and get on with my life. Maybe I would even have had children!’ Cissy swallowed hard, her skinny throat shaking and pulsing with emotion. ‘It was like a dream when I followed that Violet home to her place on Freemasons Road. Walking through the smoking ruins of other people’s lives . . .’ She looked up again. ‘She lived with two men, Violet. Two!’ she said. ‘And when I got there, she took a bottle of something out of her shopping bag and the three of them got drunk. I watched them falling around outside the street door, drinking and laughing and enjoying themselves!’

  There was a pause during which I looked hard into Cissy Hoskin’s impassive face.

  ‘Why didn’t you follow Marie?’ I said. ‘You remembered her.’

  Cissy shrugged. ‘Yes, but I knew where Marie lived,’ she said. ‘And Margaret. That Violet I didn’t know, not until that day.’

  ‘Seeing her with her husband and their lodger made you angry?’

  ‘Yes.’ Her face reddened with fury. ‘I thought, “My life’s in ruins because of people like you!” I hated her, with her husband and her drink and the way she laughed all the time! I began to watch her, see what she did. One time she went to where I remembered Margaret Cousins used to live. She was still there. Holding seances. I thought about that a lot then.’

  ‘About the seances?’

  ‘I decided that I’d go too,’ Cissy said. ‘That way I could see that Violet and Margaret Cousins as well. I could decide what I wanted to do with them.’

  ‘Do with them?’

  ‘To punish them,’ she said. ‘I had to find a way of punishing them for what they’d done to Albert and me.’

  Cissy stared ahead for a few seconds, and when she began to talk again it was in a whisper. ‘Margaret remembered me from Uncle Bob’s shop. I said that my husband had passed and so she offered to contact him for me. As if she could contact anyone on the other side! She’s a fraud! But her circles allowed me to meet the Robinsons. Esme. I didn’t remember her as such, but that Neville talked very freely about where his wife had first met Margaret. Boasting he was. Said she was a Harper. And so then I knew.’

  ‘And did you get friendly with Violet Dickens?’

  ‘No, just on acquaintance terms,’ she said. ‘But I watched her for weeks. I got to know when her husband and the lodger went out. Violet didn’t always go with them, especially if she’d already had a skinful.’

  ‘You killed her . . .’

  ‘Shut up,’ she snapped at Sergeant Hill. ‘I’ll talk to Mr Hancock and only to him!’ She folded her arms across her thin chest as a furious expression crossed her face.

  Sergeant Hill looked over at me, then at Cissy, and then he said, ‘I apologise, Miss Hoskin.’

  Cissy leaned forward in her seat, her eyes fixed upon Sergeant Hill and said, ‘If you interrupt again, I’m not saying another word, understand?’

  Sergeant Hill is a copper, a person accustomed to ordering others about, and so it wasn’t easy, I knew, for him to say what he did, which was, ‘Of course, Miss Hoskin. I won’t do it again.’

  ‘Good.’ Then she turned back to me and said, ‘I went to see Violet. I went with one of Uncle Bob’s old knives, prepared if you like. She was drunk. Of course she recognised me from Margaret’s circles. I told her I’d been a White Feather girl too. I said I remembered her.’

  ‘And did she believe you?’

  ‘Like I say, she was drunk, she’d’ve believed it if I’d told her I was Winnie himself! We talked, she gave me a drink. Then she said she thought she had some old photographs from her White Feather days up in the attic. I said I’d go up with her, to help, like – her being crippled.’ Cissy gulped.

  ‘And?’

  She looked deeply into my eyes. ‘We sat on the floor up there. Violet had a torch. She pointed out girls whose names I didn’t know or ones maybe I’d forgotten. Nellie Martin – she apparently worked in her family’s shop on Prince Reg
ent Lane. A widow, but she was coping so Violet said. Then there was Dolly O’Dowd. A spinster. I thought I might feel some sympathy for her. I thought I might find some sort of connection between her and me. But then Violet said that she had the church and good works and the friendship of another old White Feather girl. Your sister.’ She licked her dry lips with her dry tongue and said, ‘Violet asked where I was in those photographs. I said I wasn’t in them. I think Violet was afraid then, but I was very quick after that and she couldn’t move too sharpish even when she was sober. I cut her throat and she died very quickly. Too quickly.’

  She looked down at the floor and I let her be for a few moments before I asked, ‘Is that why you cut her body up, Cissy? Were you angry that she died so quickly?’

  ‘Partly,’ she said. ‘A bit. But mainly because I just wanted her gone. Alive or dead, I just wanted her to be unrecognisable.’

  ‘But there must have been blood . . .’

  ‘Oh, there was a lot at first,’ Cissy said. ‘I had to move out of the way quick. But you know that once a creature is dead you can cut it up without much more mess. Uncle Bob taught me that. “If you kill a chicken then leave it for a few minutes so the blood stops pumping, you can have its legs off and its gizzard out without hardly dirtying your hands,” he used to say.’

  ‘So you waited until her blood had stopped pumping.’

  ‘Yes.’ She sat back in her chair and cleared her throat. ‘She wasn’t human. What she done to me . . . Just a piece of meat. I took her photographs, left her up in the attic, closed the door behind me and went. No one notices a woman with a bit of blood on her clothes these days, do they?’

  She was right about that. Sergeant Hill tapped me on the elbow and then pointed down to a word on the paper he was writing on. It said, Confession?

  I looked up at Cissy and said, ‘So, Cissy, are you confessing to the murder of Violet Dickens, then?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. She looked at Sergeant Hill and added, ‘You can let her husband go. I killed Violet, not him. I don’t know why he confessed to something he didn’t do. Unless of course you lot knocked him about. Oh, and I put flowers on her grave too, horrible flowers with a horrible message. Violet died too quickly, you see, far too quickly. I felt she wasn’t finished somehow, her and Dolly.’

  Sergeant Hill, true to his earlier promise, said nothing. But Cissy looked straight at him as she said, ‘I confess to the other killings too. Nellie Martin. I followed her home from her family’s shop in the blackout. It was so cold! We got talking and I offered her a nip of brandy from my hip flask. She was guilty because of how religious she was, but she took it anyway. It was the first time I used Mum’s laudanum. It worked ever so well. I don’t think Nellie really knew very much about what happened to her after I pushed her into that bombed-out house on New City Road. Dolly O’Dowd I engaged in conversation about her church and how I was alone and unhappy and wanted to join. She invited me into her house for tea. While she could talk, she spoke about your sister, Mr Hancock. Did you know that Dolly was jealous of Nancy? Thought her hair was lovely, envied your family. Jealous cat.’ Jealous cat had been written on the card attached to those violets Cissy had obviously sent to poor Dolly’s funeral. She stared glassily at the table in front of her before continuing. ‘Marie Abrahams knew me a little bit, when I reminded her of who I was. I said we should meet up sometime and so we did. We had tea as well. But her dad saw me, which was a shame. I suppose I should’ve sorted him out too at the time. But old Nathan is a bit simple and so I just told him that Marie had gone to bed. He never knew no different until the morning. Neville Robinson? Esme never went out on her own, never opened the door if she was alone. But her Neville was very easy to find. He’d just had his way with a prostitute, but he was still up for some more when I found him. Even though he knew me, because of where we were he still propositioned me in the street. How wrong can you be about someone! Neville I didn’t drug, though. I smashed him over the head with a hammer when he turned away to lead me into that empty house. Such an animal! My Albert would never have done such a thing! Never!’

  She looked mad, whatever mad looks like. Obsessed and triumphant. I left it a moment before I spoke again.

  ‘Did you know that Esme Robinson would kill herself if her husband died?’ I asked.

  ‘No. I just wanted her to suffer, as I had,’ Cissy said as she looked back at me once again. ‘I knew she’d take it hard even though Neville was a faithless, useless article.’

  ‘So you didn’t want Esme Robinson to die?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh yes, eventually,’ Cissy said. ‘And I would have done her in. But Mr Hancock, while Neville was alive it was almost impossible. I didn’t want to get caught, did I? Not before I’d done for the lot of them! I was always careful not to be noticed.’ She looked up at me and frowned. ‘Not that I had to work too hard at it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. Although by that time I felt I knew anyway. I wasn’t wrong.

  ‘A single middle-aged woman doesn’t attract a lot of comment,’ Cissy said bitterly. ‘Especially if we’re out visiting other women. No one looks, no one cares. There were millions of us at the end of the Great War. Women who had lost their men in battle, women who’d never had anyone and now never would, women like me who cared for men who’d lost their youth, their health and their minds out in Flanders.’

  Of course this was familiar. Nan had never met anyone before the Great War, and by the time it was over, she had missed the boat. Whether her friend Dolly would ever have found anyone whatever the circumstances of her life I had always doubted. But probably the Great War and what had happened after it hadn’t helped her.

  ‘People pity us or call us queer,’ Cissy continued. ‘We’re a nuisance and an embarrassment. I’ve got cousins and aunts over Bow way who I know would’ve taken me in if I’d asked after Mum died. But what would I have been to them, eh? A poor, sad spinster who would’ve done all the housework to show how grateful she was. That or I’d’ve had to get a job somewhere and live in lodgings with other single women, paying extra on my rent every week for the privilege of one cold bath and a kettle of boiling water to wash out my smalls. I didn’t bury Mum in the garden just because I wanted her close; I didn’t want to lose my house either. I didn’t want to become some mousy little thing in the corner of someone else’s parlour that everyone pities! I didn’t want to become invisible!’

  I thought about Nan again, but mostly I thought about cousin Stella. I hoped she didn’t see her life like that. Annoying though she often is, I hoped she knew that she was also loved.

  ‘You weren’t invisible to everyone, though, were you, Cissy?’

  There was a moment during which I thought she might leap across the table and go for me, so hate-filled did her eyes become. Even if I hadn’t seen her in action, as it were, down behind the pumping station, I would have known without any doubt in that moment that she was a killer. But somehow Cissy took hold of herself and said, ‘Mr Abrahams was my only mistake.’

  ‘It was you who made him afraid up at Claybury,’ I said. ‘He recognised you, made the connection between his daughter’s death and your face.’

  ‘I should never have stayed on there after Albert died! But when Mum passed away, what was I to do?’ As she spoke, she shook with emotion. ‘Marie’s dad was known all over for being silly! He didn’t know who I was! Didn’t know my name! But then his nephew came and that . . . that woman . . .’

  ‘Fernanda Mascarenhas.’

  ‘Swanning about with Margaret and Marie and the others as if she was one of them! People said she was white but she wasn’t. I could tell! Albert knew the family, he knew she was a darkie! Like your sister she was,’ she said as she looked up at me. ‘Neither one thing nor the other. I remembered them two faces immediately when Violet showed me her pictures.’

  Cissy crossed her arms over her chest in what looked to me a gesture of satisfaction – at her own powers of deduction, at her lack of sympathy for
‘the other’. I suddenly felt wild with fury and I was sure that my cheeks, if only momentarily, flushed.

  ‘I should’ve given up visiting the hospital,’ Cissy continued. ‘I was going less often once I started going to Margaret’s. But I didn’t like being with that faker! I went to the hospital to do my bit!’

  ‘You think that Mrs Darling is a fake?’ I asked.

  I knew what I believed but I was interested to know what Cissy really thought and why. Not that this I felt went down too well with Sergeant Hill, who cleared his throat in a very obvious way. Cissy, interpreting what the copper did in exactly the same way as myself, said, ‘Well of course she is! The dead don’t talk to her! You have to have loved them who’ve passed over for them to talk to you. She tried to talk to my mother once but Mum wouldn’t speak to her! Mum talks to me.’

  I saw the frown pass over Sergeant Hill’s face as soon as she’d finished speaking and I said, ‘Cissy, how often does your mother speak to you?’

  She looked at me as if I was mad and said, ‘Well, all the time!’

  ‘What, even when you kill . . .’

  ‘All the time! All the time.’ And then she smiled and looked over at Sergeant Hill. ‘Got enough yet to hang me, have you?’

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Although Mrs Darling was both surprised and horrified by what Cissy had done, she did admit that some things about Cissy only now made sense.

  ‘Her mother was completely mute when I tried to contact her,’ she said, referring to her efforts to raise Cissy’s dead relative.

  ‘Cissy said that that was because her mother was too busy talking to her,’ I said.

  Once Sergeant Hill had called a halt to my meeting with Cissy, I’d gone outside, where I’d found Mrs Darling waiting to see me. The coppers now had the confession they wanted, and so my part in all that was over. Not that I didn’t still have some questions of my own.

  ‘Well I don’t know about that,’ Mrs Darling said, ‘but in that muteness, that silence around her mother, there was a terrible malevolence, Mr Hancock. Terrible.’