Last Rights

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘I was afraid for you,’ I said. ‘And, I’ll be honest, I was curious.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be here, it isn’t safe,’ the nun said. She turned to face me, full on. Her features were even more drawn than usual, which gave her a ghostly, almost deceased look. ‘I never dreamed that anything like this was happening. She should never have gone down to you. She should have left you alone.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My sister,’ she said.

  Between her religious Sisters and her blood relatives, things could get a bit confusing, but I assumed that she meant one of the latter.

  ‘She was expecting Blatt,’ the nun said. ‘She telephoned him about an hour ago. That’s why she went down to you. She thought you might be him.’

  ‘I don’t look a bit like Mr Blatt or sound—’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ she said. ‘But she knows you.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My sister,’ she said angrily. ‘My fucking little sister, you idiot!’

  I heard the door open behind me but I didn’t look to see who was there.

  ‘Miss Green is your sister?’ I said. ‘Miss Green is expecting Mr Blatt? So she’s, er . . .’

  I saw the nun draw breath to reply but before she could do so a voice behind me said, ‘That’s enough now, Amber. Don’t say no more.’

  I looked round at her, but I’d known it was Ruby as soon as I’d heard her speak. Not that it had been Ruby, of course, who had opened the door to me. That had been a woman with far more status in life. A woman who had been raised with money.

  ‘So it must’ve been Opal who let me in,’ I began.

  ‘Is that what she told you?’

  I looked from a grim-faced Ruby towards the nun, who averted her gaze once again.

  ‘You said your sister, Sister Teresa,’ I said. ‘You told me your sister opened the door to me. So, in the absence of Pearl, I had to assume that that sister was Opal.’

  With the exception of the noises from outside – the gushing of water from the fire hoses, men’s voices raised in fear and desperation, the crackling of fires, there was nothing to hear in that room. Both Sister Teresa and Ruby looked down at the floor.

  After a bit, what with the yellow gas gloom all around and the thick, almost violent silence, I began to get nervous and I said, ‘W-what’s going on h-here?’

  ‘It’s a family matter,’ Ruby said, staring all the time at her more frightened-looking sister. ‘You should go now, Mr Hancock.’

  ‘No, he shouldn’t!’ the nun said. ‘Or, rather, we should go with him, Rube. We need to get out of here. Tell people what she’s done to you and—’

  ‘You think I’m still not trying to take it in meself?’ Ruby said roughly. ‘But Mr Hancock here, he don’t need to be involved. We can do this ourselves. We always have.’

  ‘But then how will people know?’ the nun said.

  ‘There will be a way.’

  ‘How can there be? We can’t do nothing, can we? She won’t let us and we can’t anyway. But this is wrong!’ she said. ‘It always has been! When Blatt gets here I’m gonna tell him!’

  ‘But he knows,’ her sister hissed. ‘He would never have bothered to help Mum if she hadn’t—’

  ‘No, but Blatt doesn’t know that Mum didn’t really believe Opal was his child, does he?’

  ‘No. And you’re not to tell him neither!’ Ruby moved forward as if to hit Sister Teresa and so, I must say bravely, I stepped between them.

  ‘We don’t know what he’ll do if—’

  ‘She’s a killer!’ Sister Teresa said, as she backed away from both me and her sister.

  ‘Yeah, well, we’ve always known that,’ Ruby said. ‘And that includes Mr Blatt. We’ve known that for twenty-two bleedin’ years, so don’t go getting all guilty about it now! We let her get away with it then and—’

  ‘She was a child then! Eight! Just a child!’

  I felt my heart stop. Just for a moment. But in that moment the woman I’d been introduced to as Miss Green stepped lightly into the open doorway and smiled. ‘I don’t think my father is coming,’ she said, in her very different, very educated accent. Then looking, it felt like through me, to Sister Teresa, she said, ‘I told you I knew Mr Hancock, didn’t I?’

  ‘You’ve told us a lot of horrible things, Opal,’ the nun replied.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Opal Reynolds said, with a smile. Then her expression changed and her voice dropped, and even though I’d never seen the face of the person who had threatened me under the railway bridge at Limehouse I recognised the tone of the voice I’d since thought of as that of the gruff geezer. Now the smooth, cool hand ‘he’ had touched me with made sense. The person ‘looking after’ the Reynolds girls was their little sister.

  ‘Keep away from the Reynolds women,’ she wheezed. ‘I’m taking care of them.’

  And then Opal, that exquisite, dark-haired woman who had so graciously greeted me and who, I could now see, was carrying a pistol in her cool, smooth hands, laughed. ‘I always did enjoy dressing up,’ she said. ‘I’ve always been a show-off. I wasn’t expecting you, Mr Hancock, but now that you’re here it’s a bit of a bonus, really.’

  ‘Opal . . .’

  ‘Oh, don’t be so wet, Sister bleeding-heart Teresa!’ she snapped at the nun, her face suddenly twisting with rage. ‘Thanks to all of my lovely sisters he knows rather more than he should so it’s good that he’s here, where we can see him.’

  She looked down at the gun in her hand and then she told me to sit.

  ‘Neilson made Opal do things, dirty things, to him,’ Ruby said to me. ‘He hated her because she was spoiled and she wasn’t his. It was his way of punishing her for that.’

  I’d taken up Opal’s ‘offer’ of a seat and was opposite the young woman, watching her gaze at her weapon with what looked like dead eyes.

  ‘She was only a baby.’

  ‘That night, when my father died,’ Sister Teresa said, ‘he punched Mum in the chest. She couldn’t hardly breathe.’

  ‘It took us a good hour to get her right,’ Ruby continued, ‘by which time he’d been down the pub and had a skinful.’

  ‘You never were in Hyde Park around the Serpentine or otherwise, were you?’ I interrupted. ‘You all lied.’

  ‘Yes, we had to. We—’

  ‘We wanted her to hit him,’ the nun said. ‘He was like a sack so we knew it’d be easy. None of us realised she’d be able to knock him down. But then she was angry, wild. She said she wanted to kill him.’

  ‘She said, yes—’

  ‘But once he was out for the count we all just left him,’ Sister Teresa said. ‘We thought that he’d probably forget about Mum and her hitting him. His drinking had got a lot worse by then. We left him . . .’

  ‘Opal was eight, she was asleep.’

  Both women looked towards their younger sister to continue the story. For a moment I wondered whether she’d even heard, but then she spoke, in a dead, flat sort of way. It reflected the absent expression in her deep, dark eyes.

  ‘I took one of Mother’s hatpins from her bedroom and I pushed it into his chest several times,’ Opal said, more to the gun than to anyone. ‘The hatpin is very useful to the prostitute. My mother had used it to threaten men more than once. But Neilson was drunk. I understand, now, that it is unlikely he could have felt anything.’

  Her calm made me feel ill. It had been a long time ago but that didn’t take away any of the horror of what she had done – not to me.

  ‘Neilson had made her do terrible things,’ Ruby said. ‘She was eight, younger when he started on her. He deserved no less.’

  ‘But y-your mother . . .’ Just very briefly the stuttering had stopped. Now it was back again. Terror, of that madness outside and the threat from what I was coming to see was an unpredictable armed woman inside, was beginning to overwhelm me.

  ‘Mother wanted him dead, which is what I did. I obeyed,’ Opal said. ‘I gave her what she wanted. I continue to give her what she
wants to this day. I owe her that.’

  And then she looked up slowly at the two other women in the room, her sisters, and she smiled. ‘We’re nearly all here now. All except Pearl. But my father will fix that. It isn’t beyond repair, you know.’

  I saw that Sister Teresa was about to say something but then she appeared to change her mind and sat back, tense.

  ‘Have you worked it all out for yourself, Mr Hancock?’ Opal Reynolds said, as she lifted the pistol and pointed it at my head.

  Inside my brain everything rattled and throbbed and I felt my feet slip anxiously against the carpet as if they wanted to be on the move. Between all those feelings and a mouth as dry and dumb as a corpse’s I could only take things in. I was beyond reacting now.

  ‘I got us all back together again, Mr Hancock,’ she said, with another of her smiles, ‘the Reynolds sisters, just as my mother wanted. Here in our old home, which my father recommended my adoptive parents buy for me. A nice little flat in London. Every girl should have one, you know.’ And then, moving the pistol still closer to my head, she said, ‘Miss Green is such a respectable woman, isn’t she? Not even that dreadful old bitch Pia downstairs has made the connection between her and Opal. Miss Green wouldn’t even think about trying to pull on Pia’s son’s cock, would she? Only nasty, spoiled little Opal would think of doing something like that.’

  When everything disappeared I must’ve thought, inasmuch as I could think, that I’d either died or completely lost my reason. But I don’t remember anything much except that in a sense, I suppose, I entered a kind of hell for a while. Even now I’ve only impressions of what might have happened in the hours that followed. There were voices – not loud or unpleasant – urgent and, against all the thuds and bangs from outside, like a sort of soup of sound that swam sickeningly in my head. In fact, if I wasn’t sick, then I certainly felt as if I might be in that room of black and yellow where everything was diluted, bleeding into my brain. ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’ was all that kept on going inside my head. ‘It is really a hell of a long way to Tipperary.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  ‘He didn’t know you. You should never have let him in,’ Blatt said.

  His face, which was less than a foot from mine, appeared larger than I had remembered it.

  ‘You’ve got to get him out of here!’ The voice came from underneath my head, from the throat of the nun. ‘You’ve got to stop this.’

  I was lying, most strangely, across Sister Teresa’s chest. Half propped up, my eyes attempting to focus on first Blatt and then the really very pretty Opal.

  ‘Oh, Amber, don’t be such a silly!’ the latter said. ‘My dear old dad won’t do anything to stop me getting what I want.’

  ‘Mr Blatt,’ the nun began, only to be curtailed by the rough voice of her older sister.

  ‘Don’t!’ Ruby Reynolds said. ‘Whatever’s on your mind, just keep it!’

  Something muttered between Blatt and Opal passed me by, except that at the end of whatever it was he said, ‘Well, he’ll have to go now anyway.’

  ‘Yes,’ Opal said. ‘If he’s got this far, he has to. That was my intention at least.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I heard myself say. ‘What are you saying?’

  Now able to focus more or less normally I saw both Blatt and Opal in front of me. The solicitor turned. ‘It’s safe now, old chap,’ he said. ‘We can take you home soon.’

  Underneath my head I felt the nun’s heart beat faster. ‘The all-clear . . .’ Well, of course it must have gone. If it hadn’t I wouldn’t have been able to speak. Or would I? Nothing was certain in this place. But, then, if the all-clear had gone, Hannah could be leaving the station . . . I needed to get back to her – she’d be worried. I made as if to get up, but strong hands pushed me back into the nun’s lap.

  ‘You wait until we’re ready, Mr Hancock,’ Ruby Reynolds said. ‘Don’t you say nothing else now. You passed out, probably had all sorts of silly dreams, you did. Just let us take you home.’

  ‘I know the East End quite well now,’ Opal said, with a laugh in her voice. ‘I can find the places you all go to down there with my eyes shut.’

  For just a second I saw a glance of fear whizz, almost like a quickly passed Lucifer in the trenches, from Blatt to Ruby to Sister Teresa.

  I’d be lying if I said I’d never been so frightened in my life. Of course I had. What I’d never felt before was in the middle of something so unknown. I’d passed out and done God knows what besides, but at this point I remembered that Opal had said she’d killed Neilson. It was fantastic to me that a child should do such a thing, but that was what she had said. There was more too – although I wasn’t to understand all about that for a bit.

  I saw Ruby go to leave the room, only to be stopped by Blatt. ‘Just get your coat,’ he said. ‘We need to get this fellow home before his family start to worry.’

  Ruby picked up her coat and hat from the back of a chair and put them on. I watched intently as she secured the feathered hat to her thick black wig with a pin decorated with butterflies. The action made me feel quite queasy.

  I remember wondering whether Opal knew what she’d said to me. I wondered whether I’d just dreamed the whole bloody thing. Or maybe what was happening now was the dream. I don’t often think too much about what other people might be thinking and seeing but I did wish at this point that I wasn’t so alone. If only Hannah had been with me, or Ken. They would’ve known what was going on; they would have understood what was real.

  As it happened, reality – in other words that which was deliberate and thought out – was precisely what I missed. I was surrounded by them in the car, all talking at me, unravelling it in front of me. Why didn’t I try to jump out? Maybe it was because I was so mesmerised by it. I am, after all, an undertaker: death is my business. I have an interest.

  ‘You see, the important thing about me,’ Opal said, as she draped one arm across my shoulders, ‘is that I remember everything. I remember killing Harold Neilson, I remember Mum telling me and the rest of the girls never to tell anybody and I remember her saying that we must stick together. That was important.’ She looked across at Sister Teresa, who was sitting on the other side, on my left, her face pushed up against the car window, looking out into the darkened streets beyond. ‘That was the last thing she ever said to me,’ Opal said. ‘But my sisters chose . . .’

  ‘You went for adoption,’ the nun said, ‘to those Green people.’

  ‘Yes, but I knew who my family really were, didn’t I? I’ve never forgotten a thing. I knew about my sisters and my father. Mother and Father Green, my adoptive parents, Mr Hancock, are friends of my father. Dad would come over every week to see me – not with his wife. She is never to know. That is understood. Some secrets are really very good. It’s all right to be a different person with different people. I like that. I love my dad. He saved me. I think that people would not have understood what I did to Harold. It was best I didn’t go to court. I didn’t want that and my dad gives me everything I do want, you know.’

  Blatt, who was driving, turned briefly and smiled at her. Yes, he would give her everything, wouldn’t he? With no nippers from his wife, she was his only kid: he’d do anything for her. What would he do, I wondered, if Sister Teresa told him he might not be Opal’s dad? I felt, by instinct I suppose you’d say, that I didn’t want to find that out.

  I don’t know what kind of car we were in, only that it was big. When coppers and wardens stopped it periodically to tell Blatt about an obstruction or to direct him another way, they acted very respectfully, as if they either knew him or recognised that the car was quality. But someone like Blatt wouldn’t have driven anything cheap. Usually, or when I’d seen him before, he’d had a driver. That he didn’t have one now was something else that was setting off warning sirens in my head. It made me remember that Opal might well know where I lived – she certainly seemed, at least some of the time, to know where I went. Every muscle in my body was ri
gid and that included the ones of my throat. I couldn’t speak.

  ‘I helped Pearl and Ruby when I knew they were in trouble,’ Opal continued, ‘and to free them so we could all be together again. I worked very hard, planning my disguises, voices and hair to make that happen.’

  ‘Pearl’s in prison for something you did!’ Sister Teresa said. ‘You haven’t helped her at all! Or Ruby. And what about me? What surprises you got up your sleeve to make me grateful to you, to bring us all back together? Gonna burn Nazareth House to the ground, are you?’

  ‘Amber!’ Even in the early-morning gloom I could see that Ruby’s face was red with fury as she tipped her head in my direction. ‘Shut up, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘Oh, I think he’s worked it out now!’ the nun shouted back. Then, turning to me, she said, ‘But if you ain’t, Mr Hancock, we all lied to keep her secret all these years. Not for her but because Mum told us to. “She’s only a baby,” Mum said. “She didn’t know what she was doing. It’s wrong to put a kiddie up in court.” Stupid Mum! She knew all right! She killed Pearl’s husband and Ruby’s fellow.’

  ‘Oh, bleedin’ clever telling him!’ Ruby said.

  ‘Yeah? Like it fuckin’ matters now!’

  Blatt chimed in with something else at this point, and then Opal spoke, but I didn’t take much notice of either of them. I kept thinking, Opal killed Kevin Dooley and Shlomo Kaplan. How did she do that? Her reasons, to free her sisters so they could be with her, to fulfil some sort of obligation to her mother, I could understand if not appreciate. Barmy I may be, but I’m not that mad. But how had she killed Kevin Dooley during that night of fire and fights and sex? And then I remembered that voice she’d put on to warn me off and I began to feel cold.

  I cleared what I could from my throat and said, ‘So did you pretend to be, you know, a bloke, so you could, you know, Kevin Dooley . . .’

  ‘I dressed as a boy so no one would ever be able to identify me. I am a criminal. I naturally think about things like that and I’m good at changing my appearance,’ Opal said, with a smile. ‘Kevin wasn’t strictly homosexual, Mr Hancock, but I knew he wasn’t too fussy about who french-polished his cock either. That’s why he was so easy to get to know. He didn’t love Pearl. I observed him for some weeks and saw him with women and several boys who got on their knees in front of him for the price of a pint. I just did likewise.’