Last Rights

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘No, you.’

  And then the gun moved away from my head. For a while I lay, unable to move, locked in to Frederick and a fear of what I might find if I raised my head from his. But then I heard screaming so I had to move. But when I opened my eyes, I realised that Opal Reynolds had gone.

  Blatt was cradling his girl in his arms, her legs spread out almost obscenely across the grass. Clutching, clawing almost at her chest, Opal Reynolds’s movements reminded me of Kevin Dooley’s on his last night on this earth. Looking at me, or so I thought, she said, ‘I loved you.’

  ‘No, you never loved anyone. I loved Shlomo and you killed him. Showing off as usual, having a laugh with your dressing-up clothes. You killed the man I loved!’

  Ruby, one hand still clutching the butterfly hatpin she had thrust into her sister’s heart, put her other hand on my arm and asked me if I was all right.

  ‘We need to get a doctor,’ I said. ‘For her.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But . . .’

  Ruby Reynolds looked at me with fury in her eyes. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘my little sister came to look after me when she turned up at Princelet Street? Even talked about going out of London to hide me. Fed me some cock-and-bull story about how she found me. I was grateful – she was so sympathetic about Shlomo. Then, suddenly, there’s Amber, she’s got her too now, and she tells us both tonight about Shlomo and about Pearl’s husband. Said we had to face up to it together – like we did in the old days. Christ! She waited all those days to tell me! Knowing what she’d done to me! I thought she’d changed. I hoped, I kidded myself. But no more . . .’

  The gun was on the grass now and I suppose I could’ve picked it up and used it to underwrite my argument. But I didn’t because although Ruby Reynolds seemed content to watch her sister die slowly in front of her eyes she didn’t try to stop me when I started to go off in search of help. I began walking out of there, past the weeping nun, the man holding the dying young woman in his arms, bits of poor old Frederick trailing after me as I went.

  ‘You know, I should’ve done this twenty-two years ago,’ I heard Ruby say, ‘but you were a child then and I’m no natural killer, even of grown-up people. I’m a good person!’

  ‘I know – which was why I got rid of that man who was hurting you!’ I heard her sister gasp. ‘I did it to save you!’

  ‘Shlomo never hurt me. That was just a story,’ Ruby replied, ‘a lie his son spread because he didn’t want us marrying. You shouldn’t believe stories. But you wanted to believe it, didn’t you, Opal? It fitted in with what you wanted to do.’

  ‘Bring us all back tog—’

  ‘No! You wanted to bash his head in! Or did you try to stab him first but he got the better of you? You killed him knowing what the coppers would think about me because of that past we’ve all created together. You wanted me to be a murderer just like you!’

  I turned in time to see Ruby bend down and pick something up off the ground. I knew what it was and began to move back slowly towards the little group on the ground. Blatt, I knew, also had a gun.

  ‘No,’ Ruby said, as she held out the weapon in front of her, pointing it towards Opal’s chest. ‘No, it wasn’t about us or Mum or anything other than you. Killing Harold was fun, wasn’t it? I saw you, remember?’

  ‘Ruby!’

  ‘Please don’t kill my child!’ Blatt, his revolver nowhere in sight as far as I could see, wept pathetically. ‘Please, please, let us get a doctor.’

  ‘No!’

  Sister Teresa ran forward and attempted to grab hold of Ruby’s arm, but she threw her off on to the grass.

  ‘You’re dying, Opal. You’re too dangerous to live. Mum and all of us made a big mistake when we protected you. We killed Harold, too, in a way because of you. You’ve ruined our lives and now I will be a murderess just like you! So you get what you wanted, as usual. But I don’t care. We all died a long time ago – the night you killed Neilson.’

  ‘Well, why should I have to live with it all on my own?’ Although shaky, her words were loud and, by the light of the first streaks of dawn in the sky, I could see her face quite clearly. It looked much older than when I’d first seen it, white and spattered with mud and blood. ‘Nothing was going to happen to you or to Pearl,’ she said. ‘I just wanted to frighten you, to make you feel the way I had felt—’

  ‘You felt nothing!’ Ruby screamed.

  I looked around to see whether anyone else was about, but no one was so I began to edge a little closer to Ruby.

  ‘Mum took the gallows for you!’ Ruby carried on. ‘You ain’t suffered! You did it because you’re a spoiled, selfish little whore! Mum spoiled you, them people who adopted you spoiled you and you, ‘she pointed the gun at Blatt, ‘you who’ve kidded yourself you’re her father—’

  ‘Ruby!’

  ‘No, Amber,’ she said. ‘Mum told us she was never sure. It’s the truth and you know it! She could be anyone’s. She could’ve been Neilson’s. All we do know about her is that even when she was tiny she was selfish and vain and spoiled, and we all made excuses and protected her. But she’s a monster.’

  ‘Ruby,’ Blatt began, ‘please—’

  ‘I’ll hang for her.’ Ruby held out the gun straight in front of her and said, ‘And for you too, Mr Blatt.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘I loved Shlomo. I belonged in Spitalfields. But you ruined all that – you and that thing you call your daughter. You can go with her now – my present to you!’

  And then, before I could even think, fire exploded out of the end of the pistol. Ruby shot Opal and Blatt behind her too, three times in one go and then three more at closer range. The last time, she shot her sister straight in the face. I couldn’t move. Christ, I kept on thinking, Christ, please help me!

  But no one came. Not even Sister Teresa moved from where she was beside Ruby. She wasn’t crying any more, I noticed. Just like a statue, a nun with a lowered head – you see monuments like that on some Catholic graves. She looked down at the two corpses in front of her, totally and completely calm. It was so quiet that when dawn came I heard a little bit of birdsong. I hadn’t heard that for ages.

  ‘You should go and get a copper if you can, Mr Hancock,’ Ruby said, after we’d all been motionless for a while.

  ‘Er, um, er . . .’

  She smiled. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I won’t go nowhere now.’

  ‘Ah . . .’

  I looked her in the eyes and she added, ‘I meant what I said about being prepared to hang for her. I ain’t done nothing what didn’t need doing here.’

  ‘But I thought you loved her,’ I heard the nun say through what sounded like an almost closed throat. ‘Ruby?’

  ‘I did. I wanted to,’ Ruby said. ‘But as soon as she told me about Shlomo, after all that time I’d spent pouring my heart out to her for those few days, I hated her. My love for him was bigger than her, see. And at that moment I knew what I had to do. I just needed to wait for the right time. Are you going to get a copper, then, Mr Hancock?’

  ‘Oh, er, y-yes, I, er…’

  And so I left and about ten minutes later I returned with two coppers. Both the women were in exactly the same positions as I’d left them. Not a hair had moved in my absence.

  Even by wartime standards the coppers were horrified by what they saw in that churchyard, not to mention my own grisly appearance.

  ‘Blimey, H,’ said one of the older sergeants, Jack Webster, who knew me and the family a bit. ‘Fancy her trying to plant you! An undertaker! Bloody funny in a way, though, ain’t it?’

  And we laughed. Covered with bits of coffin plus stuff I didn’t want to think too hard about, stinking of the toilet, my own mirth was hysterical to say the least. But it was funny in the way that really horrible things are – after the event. Getting an undertaker to lie down in a grave! That Opal Reynolds had had some neck. The boys down at East Ham would be telling that one to frighten the new lads for years.

  Of cou
rse, both Sister Teresa and I had to give statements. Hers took longer than mine, she having more of a history with her sisters, but I waited for her anyway. After all, she’d need somewhere to stay for a few days while the coppers made, as Sergeant Webster had put it, ‘further enquiries’. One of the young constables went to the shop to let the Duchess and the girls know I was all right. I knew they’d probably be worried by then especially with the telephones down yet again. I thought about Hannah, too, and hoped that she’d got home from Paddington all right. She had to be worried about me. I’d have to go and see her when I could. I needed to see her.

  Once Sister Teresa was free to go, we were offered a lift home in one of the police cars. Looking and feeling the way I did, I had no choice but to accept. Not that I would’ve chosen to walk after what I’d been through.

  As soon as we were both in and settled, Sister Teresa said to me, ‘I’m so sorry, Mr Hancock. If I’d known it was Opal who telephoned me, putting on a voice, I would never have come to you and got you involved. I never dreamed it was her. I thought it was someone who’d found out what she’d done, what we all did that night Neilson died.’

  ‘You had to go to protect her?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. I knew whoever called meant to meet me at Praed Street. Anyone who thought us girls was in the park when Neilson died couldn’t know anything about who really killed him. I knew that if I went to the flat and there was no one there, everything was all right. That Opal killed Neilson is and always had been the only real secret here. But there she was and that was when she told me and Ruby what she’d done. I did think you might go to the park, Mr Hancock, but I never thought you’d come up to the flat. Why did you do that?’

  ‘Well, partly because the Serpentine is an ammunition dump,’ I said. Sister Teresa, obviously unaware of this fact, looked sheepish. ‘And partly because I had this idea you girls might have been there when your father died. I wasn’t sure, of course, but I knew that something wasn’t right because of the way you talked about that incident. You, Sister, were so keen for me to believe your version of events about Neilson’s death that in the end I just couldn’t. There was too much fear from you, Pearl and Ruby, too, and it was, strangely to me, centred around your mum and Neilson all the time. There had to be something amiss.’

  A really quite old-looking constable got into the driver’s seat and off we went.

  ‘So you went straight to the flat on Praed Street?’ I continued.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And Ruby was already there?’

  ‘Opal’d gone out to Spitalfields to get Ruby, as you know,’ Sister Teresa said. ‘Got her out using that note supposed to be from you. She was outside when Ruby left, all dressed up again. Thought she was a boy at first, Ruby did, in that get-up. Mr Blatt helped Opal all the way. Got her names, addresses, found out what Ruby and Pearl were like and what they were doing. She watched them and you.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘But I don’t think that Mr Blatt knew exactly what she was going to do with the information that he gave her, do you?’

  Sister Teresa shrugged. ‘No. But once she’d done it, of course, he must have twigged. Although whether he really knew or not beforehand, none of us’ll find out now. She was his only child.’

  ‘If she was.’

  ‘Who can tell?’ For the first time in ages, the nun smiled softly, then shook her head sadly and said, ‘So many stories, Mr Hancock. Who’s to know what might be true?’

  I looked at her, frowning.

  ‘Mum told some right whoppers,’ Sister Teresa said. ‘Girls on the game do, they have to. Blokes want to hear some things, don’t they? Begging your pardon, but men as go with such women like to hear they’re different and special and good,’ here she lowered her voice to little above a whisper, lest the constable should hear, ‘at “it”, you know. Girls get into the habit of lying to make men happy.’

  I tried to smile but I think it came out as a sort of frozen death-mask. Yes, I knew what the good Sister was talking about all right. I may not be typical, but I am a bloke. I know what goes on.

  ‘Blatt could’ve been Opal’s dad,’ Sister Teresa said. ‘But, then, her dad could’ve just as easily been that young Jewish bloke, that gangster Mum was going with, the one she really fancied. Or it could’ve been Neilson. That’s a bad thought, isn’t it? Meant she killed her own father. Meant he hated and abused his own daughter. I know she don’t – didn’t look like me, but . . . Then again Mum was on the game, it could’ve been anyone.’ She looked me hard in the eyes and said, ‘I like to think we don’t know and can’t tell who her father was.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Because I don’t want to know anyone whose child can stab a bloke and smile. There’s bad blood somewhere in there.’

  ‘Is that what Opal did?’ I said. ‘She smiled?’

  ‘When we found her, she was giggling,’ the nun said, her face now quite old-looking in the thin autumn light. ‘Sticking the hatpin in him, blood all over her, laughing.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘Oh, she knew what she was doing all right,’ Sister Teresa said. ‘You can say what you like about the unknowingness of kiddies but . . . I’ve only ever seen real evil once and it was on my sister’s eight-year-old face.’

  It was a minute or two before I took that in. For a nun to protect someone she knows, or claims to know, is evil seemed like a nonsense to me and I said so.

  ‘It comes back to stories again, I suppose,’ Sister Teresa said. ‘Opal was Mum’s little angel. We all lied for her. Mum died for her – we had to make her worthwhile if only for that. Her going to the Greens and having Blatt spend all his money on her was to make her as near to perfect as a person could get. And I didn’t take holy orders because I wanted to hide from the world, you know. Someone had to do penance for my sister. But you can’t make someone like that better whatever you do, can you?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You can’t.’

  The car pulled up outside the shop and Sister Teresa said, ‘You know, when we all split up it was so we’d never talk, not even among ourselves. Even when I knew that Pearl and Ruby might be in trouble, all I could think about was how we was going to keep Opal’s secret through it all. It’s why I never wanted to get to know Pearl’s kid. Didn’t want to let nothing slip, didn’t want to see something I might not like in her eyes. I mean, who knows where Opal got her character from? Maybe our mum . . .’

  A view obviously not shared by Pearl Dooley, who must have told Father Burton the truth about her sister Opal, I now realised. It seemed Pearl hadn’t believed that any bad blood had come down from her mother. And maybe that was true but Victorine, in pitting her man and her child against each other in the way that she had, hadn’t done either of them any favours. She hadn’t deserved to hang for what her daughter had done but she was guilty in part, I felt, all the same.

  ‘Velma is a very nice girl,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing bad about her.’

  ‘Maybe not.’

  I got out of the car as Doris came running out of the shop, shouting behind her, ‘It’s him, Mrs H! He’s here!’

  Closely followed by Nan, Doris said, looking at me properly, ‘God help us, Mr H, you look like a bleedin’ Guy! Christ, what a pong!’

  ‘I’ve had a bit of a night of it, one way or another, Doris,’ I said, and then I bent into the car to retrieve Sister Teresa from the back seat.

  ‘You know, I think that Mum knew all along in a way,’ she said, as she took my hand and swung her feet out on to the pavement, ‘about Opal. She loved jewels, Mum. It’s why we’re all called after them. But Opals are unlucky, aren’t they?’

  ‘So it’s said.’

  ‘Well, it’s right, then, ain’t it? Bad jewels for bad blood,’ she said, and smiled again. ‘Bloody silly superstition. Ain’t Christian, you know.’

  I choked up a small and very dry laugh.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Hannah was, I’d recently discovered, a dab hand at putt
ing on her makeup with only a candle and a fragment of mirror to judge the effect by. I had to hold the mirror while she put it on, mind, but that didn’t in any way detract from my admiration for her skill.

  ‘Can’t go out on a date looking like Gawd knows what, can I?’ she said, as she pinned her hair on to the top of her head in a big yellow roll.

  ‘No,’ I said, as I watched her study her face critically in the mirror.

  ‘Hold it up!’ she said, as she moved the mirror and my hands several inches higher. ‘There, that’s better.’

  It was two weeks now since the deaths of Opal Reynolds and Leonard Blatt. Of course, a lot of other people, some known some unknown, had also died in that time, but it was those two who had had the most impact on me and mine. Except to pick up instructions, I hadn’t been able to be indoors for the first week after it happened. I’d worked, of course, but if I wasn’t either conducting a funeral or out the back with the deceased or the horses I was pounding the streets and what was left of the open spaces of West Ham. Sometimes alone but sometimes with Ken, I walked and ran myself almost to a standstill that first week. As Hannah said at the end of it when I went to her, desperate, in the middle of one long, strangely silent night, ‘It wasn’t dying, it was burying alive that frightened you, wasn’t it? Like being back in the mud in Flanders.’

  I’d hugged her almost to the point of crushing the poor girl. She knew, of course she did. Our age group does. She’d had a brother out in Passchendaele. He’d loved her and written to her, in spite of their parents’ disapproval, mainly about the mud, and then nothing. So they had no children left now, Hannah’s parents. That glum old couple she’d taken me to see that night in Spitalfields. One really dead and the other as good as. How sad they’d let their beliefs kill their love. It’s so rare in this world.

  When she’d finished putting her face on, as she calls it, Hannah took the piece of mirror from me and said, ‘You know that when I come out of Paddington that night after the all-clear and you weren’t there I was convinced you had to be dead.’