Paradise Court

by Jenny Oldfield

  ‘Not at first, no. But you keep looking?’

  ‘Yes. And the rail with the dresses hanging, I see it move.’

  ‘How? Did it move much, Ernie?’

  ‘A bit. Not much. One of the dresses falls down. I have to pick it up.’

  ‘You go over.’

  ‘I pick it up. It’s caught. It’s soft and silky, but it’s caught.’ Ernie gasped. ‘I’m pulling it hard. There’s a noise.’

  ‘What noise?’

  ‘Someone hurting. A hurting noise. Behind the dresses. I have to kneel down to see. It’s dark behind the dresses.’

  Ernie paused again, but both Frances and Sewell stayed silent. They let him lead them on at his own pace now, through the terrible remembering.

  ‘I can feel something move, like a little animal moving. Something grabs my neck and pulls me down. My hat falls off. I lose my hat, Frances!’

  ‘It don’t matter, Ern. We’ll get you a new one.’ She thought her heart would break.

  Ernie went on. ‘It’s Daisy lying down there moaning. Daisy’s holding my neck and moaning. Her face is all white. She says something. Twice. I have to bend right down to listen. I see all the blood. I’m kneeling on the dress, getting it dirty. I lost my hat. There’s a knife. I have to get it out. I have to be careful. It hurts. I take it out, quick as I can. She’s not moving no more. She won’t get up. Oh, she won’t get up no more. I know it now.’

  Racked by sobs, Ernie’s head went down.

  ‘What next?’ Sewell held steady. He put a hand on the boy’s arm.

  ‘I have to go to meet Rob,’ Ernie said blankly. ‘I have to go, don’t I?’

  ‘You do. But before that, tell me one more thing, Ernie.’ The solicitor held on to his arm. ‘This is very important. What did Daisy say to you when you found her lying there?’ He was after a final incriminating detail; Daisy’s revelation of the murderer as she lay dying.

  Ernie stared down at the photograph. ‘She said it twice. She said “Ernie” twice.’ It broke him, the memory of Daisy whispering his own name as she died.

  They stayed a long time to comfort him, and the warder didn’t interfere. Frances told Ernie he was brave. Brave as Robert in the army. She said there was hope now. What he’d done had given them new hope. At last he sat quietly, his eyes full of trust.

  They left the prison at last, and went straight away to Sewell’s office. Frances allowed her own spirits to rise.

  ‘This is very good, ain’t it, Mr Sewell? Ernie would never make it up.’ She grew animated, standing up in his office and beginning to pace beneath the shelves of heavy, leather-bound law books. ‘They’ll grant us an appeal now, don’t you think?’

  The solicitor smiled and nodded. He too stood up. ‘I think we have a very good chance. You can go home and pass on the news. I’ll be in touch as soon as we have a date for the new hearing.’ He was more than pleased with the outcome.

  ‘Before Christmas?’

  He considered her eager expression. ‘I should say between Christmas and the New Year, Miss Parsons.’

  Her face fell.

  ‘Yes, I know. It must be a torture for you all.’ He came and shook her by the hand. ‘Never say die, Miss Parsons. We’re doing all we can, believe me. This time everything will depend on the medical men, and on Ernie. So keep up his spirits as best you can.’

  Frances promised and left the office. There was new energy in her stride as she walked past the clerk at his desk and the telephonist busy speaking into her mouthpiece. She took the first tram home and alighted outside Coopers’. Billy Wray stood selling the evening papers. He noticed her as she made a bee-line straight towards him.

  ‘Mr Sewell’s managed to get up an appeal, Billy!’ She was breathless. ‘He was marvellous with Ernie today. He got him to remember every single thing about the murder. We’re so glad you went and picked him out for us.’

  People threaded between them, around his stall, down the close, or waiting at the kerb to cross the street. He felt jolted out of his own dull misery, back into life. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I’ll finish up here and you slip home. Give them the good news. Then meet me at Henshaw’s and tell me all about it.’

  She nodded her agreement. The family must know as soon as possible. Then she’d come and share it with Billy.

  ‘We owe it all to him if Ernie gets off,’ she told Robert. ‘We got hold of Mr Sewell on his recommendation, and he’s the best there is.’

  Robert let his own hopes revive. ‘We ain’t beat yet,’ he agreed. He wanted to go along to the Scrubs with Duke to help give Ernie a boost. When the news had been entirely bleak, he could hardly face the ordeal of a visit. Before long, the whole pub was looking on the bright side, and Frances left them to it, to make her own way back to the coffee shop.

  Bea Henshaw had the news from Billy. She rushed to the doorway to greet Frances in a state of real pleasure, flustered but determined to have her say. She was a brisk, prim woman as a rule, but hopes for Ernie had given her a high colour and a breathless manner. ‘Oh, Frances, we heard! Such good news. Your pa must be thrilled. Oh, my dear, we pray for him every single day. We want Ernie back with us, believe me!’

  She led Frances, by now exhausted, to the table where Billy sat, Frances joined him, aware that circumstances had removed formalities and plunged them in the deep end again. Still, she stopped to ask about Ada’s funeral, and the arrangements he’d had to make. ‘You don’t think me selfish for not asking sooner, do you, Billy? I’ve got a lot on my mind.’

  Likewise, he told her. His mother-in-law had decamped and gone to live in Bermondsey with another daughter, to his secret relief. ‘But I must say it leaves the house feeling big and empty, so I’ve got a plan in mind to sell up and move into a room above the Institute. I want to give up the newspaper stand, all in good time, of course.’ He said the market life no longer suited him, and there was a chance to help the printer on some of the Workers’ Education Centre publications.

  ‘Lots of changes,’ Frances commented. ‘And now a new chance for Ernie.’ She tried in vain not to let her hopes fly too high. Billy understood more about the process of appeal in such cases, and pointed out the complications. ‘Still, we’re banking on Mr Sewell and the doctors,’ she told him. ‘And we’re grateful to you, Billy. We really are.’

  He nodded. Frances kept on upsetting his balance like this by giving him sympathy or gratitude when he wanted something else. He wished things weren’t so complicated by protocol, or by guilt and grief. Still, he offered her his arm and walked up the street with her. He was glad above all to have been of use.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The Christmas truce came in the trenches, when British Tommies listened in wonderment to the familiar strains of ‘Silent Night’ sung in a strange tongue across the battlefield, and emerged to shake hands with the enemy, so like themselves. It meant little to the Parsons family or to the inhabitants of Duke Street and Paradise Court.

  Local drama pushed national interests to one side as the day of Ernie’s execution drew near. They sat round their firesides late at night, connected by a taut wire of dread, talking endlessly about the progress of Sewell’s appeal. A hearing had been granted for New Year’s Eve.

  But on the morning of Christmas Eve, another, unexpected disaster struck. Edith Cooper travelled into town on the train and made her way to her husband’s department store. This was unusual in itself, and her pale face, her dazed manner alerted the shop-girls to expect bad news. She walked between the counters bright with Christmas gifts, decked out with red ribbon and glass baubles. She gave no response to polite greetings, so that word went up ahead to the office that Mrs Cooper was here and all was not well.

  Jack Cooper came to the top of the wide stairs to meet her, then led her into the privacy of the office. There could only be one reason for her being there.

  ‘I had to tell you face to face,’ she began.

  ‘It’s Teddy.’

  She nodded. ‘Oh, Jack, he’
s been shot down and killed.’

  The words sank in like a stain. In those seconds of disbelief, Cooper went and picked up an invoice from his desk to file it in a drawer. He saw the paper shake in his hand. He looked up at his wife. ‘They sure it was Teddy?’

  Edith took the telegram from her bag and handed it to him. ‘I read it over and over, Jack. There ain’t no mistake.’

  Jack Cooper sat at his desk and sank his big head into his hands. They’d snatched his boy, his only boy. He knew on the instant that he would have given his own life for Teddy’s, but no one had offered him the chance. He was old, Teddy had been young, with his whole life ahead of him. The world was turned upside down. ‘How? How could it happen? I thought he said them planes were safe.’

  Edith went and bent over her husband. ‘He wanted to fly them. It was his decision. We didn’t have any way of blowing the dangers; this is a terrible war, Jack.’

  He looked up. Shock had stunned him, but a strong idea already broke through mat Edith was to blame. She’d forced the issue and made Teddy sign up. Then he was struck by her own misery, as she no doubt took this blame on herself; a double burden of grief and guilt. So he reached out for her hand. They thought of bullets ripping through the fabric of moth-flimsy wings, the rattle of rifle fire against propeller blades, the man in his cockpit gripping the joystick, the sudden end.

  From the hosiery sweatshop in the basement to the hat workers in the attic, news of Teddy’s death swept through the building. There was no false sympathy for the man himself, but a sober awareness of the new family situation, bereft of son and heir. Most of the women felt quiet fellow feeling for the grieving mother. She’d always behaved well and done her best with her wayward son. Teddy himself might have turned out all right in the end. Hindsight already softened perception of his womanizing ways. A pity he’d had no real chance to prove himself in civilian life, they said. They craned at windows to watch Jack Cooper take his wife out to the car.

  ‘Stop whining, Lettie,’ Dora Kennedy snapped, as the women in the hatters’ workshop got back to work. ‘And don’t snivel over that bolt of best silk neither.’ She rolled back her sleeves and seized the hot iron. “We all know them’s crocodile tears.’ Tall, bony Dora would in fact miss Teddy’s bravado and quick wit more than most. She liked to watch him in action with the Amy Ogdens and the Lettie Harrises. But she wouldn’t let on that her world was a greyer place without him. There was no room for sentiment in her grim armoury.

  Lettie wiped the tears with the heels of her hands and sniffed loudly.

  ‘Here.’ Emmy handed her a grubby cotton rag. She knew that Lettie had got news yesterday that her older brother, Arnie, was missing in action. As it happened, most families had at least one worry of this kind; brothers injured or missing, sons killed. ‘Lay off, Dora,’ she warned, against the hiss of steam and the thump of the iron.

  All day they picked on Bert Buggies for being too mean to buy the girls a Christmas box of chocolates, for lounging in the corner with his racing tips, and for sloping off early when there were still orders to finish and pack. They clung to normality, while the war relentlessly robbed them of their menfolk.

  Down the court, Christmas came and went under leaden skies, amongst aching hearts. A few regular customers braved the swing doors of the Duke’s public bar, but they soon drifted out again. No holly decked the fine mirrors, no tunes played on the pianola. The place was like a morgue, they said.

  Two days before Ernie’s appeal, Robert sat quietly over a midday drink at the Duke with his friend and saviour, George Mann. George had himself received a shoulder wound bad enough to get sent home to recover. By now he was on the mend, almost ready to return to the war. But he looked in on Robert and was introduced to his family, bashful in the face of their immense gratitude.

  In his talk with Robert he took a different view of things. Losing a leg was bad, but not the end of the world. He’d seen poor bleeders with their faces shot away, unlucky enough to survive. These days you got the order to go over the top and you saw men running in the opposite direction. They were rounded up and shot like dogs. The end couldn’t come soon enough for George, yet he’d always reckoned on being strong-willed enough to withstand anything they threw at him. ‘It ain’t like it says in the papers, you and me both know mat, Rob. Some mornings you wake up and you think you’ve landed in hell.’

  Robert agreed. He appreciated the visit. Duke had taken to George, with his brawny, strapping figure and modest, level-headed way. He spoke out plain and simple; saving Rob from the battlefield was what any man would do for another.

  Duke offered open house to George as soon as the war was ended, when he hoped to return to his old job on the docks across the water. ‘Drop in any time, mate. You’ll always find a welcome here.’

  As George shook hands again and got up to go, a message came with Joe O’Hagan. Would Robert be kind enough to call in on Mrs Cooper at the shop? Or would it be more convenient if she came and visited him here?

  Robert sent back the message that he would find his own way there, and went up the street with George. There was a pea-souper of a fog, so acid and thick that it caught in their throats and enveloped the passing traffic, which roared and rattled past almost invisible. Swinging himself forward on his crutches, Robert welcomed the fog, for it hid his awkward, maimed figure. He parted with his comrade at Meredith Close. ‘Look after yourself.’ He freed one hand from the crutch by leaning heavily on the other.

  George shook him warmly by the hand. ‘Don’t worry, mate. They ain’t made the bullet yet that’s got my name written on it!’ He winked, nodded and walked off, smart and upright in his immaculate khaki uniform. The fog soon swallowed him, and Robert turned to go into the store.

  Edith felt she simply wanted to talk to someone who’d been in the war like Teddy, someone who knew the suddenness and randomness of death. She wanted to hear that her son’s end had been quick and sure.

  Robert explained the job of the Flying Corps pilots. It wasn’t quite as simple as flying overhead to determine enemy positions, for of course the enemy wanted to stop them and sent up his own planes to scare off the allies. They had gunners in the cockpits, sitting tight up behind the pilots, with machine-guns mounted on swivelling rests, and these gunners were highly trained and deadly. It depended on the skill of the pilots to dip and weave out of the line of enemy fire, but there was bombardment from below too. Robert had watched the dog fights in the air and counted himself lucky to be ankle deep in mud and filth, protected by sandbags and barbed wire.

  ‘I hear the Hun’s got hold of something new; a forward-mounted gun that fires between the propeller blades, specially timed to the split second. It means they can come straight at you, instead of sideways on.’

  Edith sighed and nodded. ‘Teddy never wrote and told us that.’ They were in her husband’s empty office. Robert looked uncomfortable, but he spoke calmly. She was grateful to him for putting himself out. How opposite to Teddy he was; dark and solid, very earnest.

  ‘He ain’t allowed to, it’s all very hush-hush. But we knew them boys took a terrible risk every time they set off. You’d see them go up in flames and drop like a stone, straight down. They got plenty of guts going up there on a wing and a prayer to get shot down.’

  Edith nodded again as tears welled up. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘No, I mean it. You wouldn’t get me up there in one of them things, I can tell you.’ He leaned forward. ‘Will you tell Mr Cooper we’re very sorry the way it happened. It ain’t easy.’

  She registered the pain the other family must be going through. She said she was glad there was an appeal for Ernie; it must surely succeed. They sat and looked at each other, caught between despair and hope, bitterness and nobility; the handsome, maimed young man and the gracious, grieving mother.

  Ernie appeared at the appeal looking thin and unwell. The flesh had fallen away from his face, giving the brown eyes a wide, startled look. Prison pallor had settled on him and his m
ovements were more stumbling than ever. Still, he put on a brave face for his family as he finally came on to the witness stand.

  His account of the discovery of Daisy’s body was consistent with the version he’d given to Sewell and Frances in prison. The memories were still painful; they were often broken by long pauses, to the obvious irritation of the judge. Many times the family longed to step in to save him his agony.

  Though fewer onlookers had gathered in the gallery, stalwarts like Annie, Florrie and Dolly remained. They’d nodded their heads wisely during the evidence offered by the eminent medical men, remarking that it had been obvious from the start. The poor bloke had been shocked out of his wits, anyone with an ounce of common sense could see that.

  Then came the vital summing up. Mayhew approached the jury as humane, decent men. They would recognize truth as it had been presented to them here. They would see that Ernie Parsons was sincere. ‘You cannot hold it against a man for caring too much, for holding Daisy O’Hagan so dear in his simple heart that the discovery of her murder led to a state of complete shock and amnesia lasting several weeks, until the impact of her death gradually serried in his confused mind. You will surely believe him now.’

  He walked along the row, appealing to each juryman in turn. His voice carried conviction and understanding. ‘Remember, gentlemen, the law tells us that to convict a man of murder you have to know! You have to know that a man is lying when he protests his innocence. More important still, you have to know that there is no other possible explanation, no other possible culprit.

  ‘New evidence has been brought to light here in this court today which shows us that there was indeed someone else present at the scene: a cry, a struggle, a frantic attempt to escape without being seen, and then a cold-blooded willingness to let another man hang for a crime he did not commit. All changes in an instant, does it not, gentlemen? And the horror of the guilty verdict rears up to confront us as our worst nightmare.’

  Characteristically, Mayhew lowered his voice as he came towards the end of his plea. He rested both hands on the lapels of his gown and stood full square before the jury. ‘Consider the condemned man for a final moment.’ The heads of the jurymen all swivelled at his bidding. They kept Ernie in their sights as they listened. ‘No pressure in the world could make this man confess to the murder of Daisy O’Hagan. No police interview, no energetic cross-examination by my learned friend here today has brought about the slightest deviation in his account. And this is not because you see before you an accomplished liar and a fraud. No, this is because your man is innocent,’ He paused. ‘I was going to say as innocent as the day he was born, because in this case it would not be inappropriate. In this country we do not hang a man as a scapegoat for the heinous crime of another. That is not justice, gentlemen. Consider him once more, and I beg of you, go off and grant his appeal against conviction.’