‘Oh, the Head was with her,’ Mr Lee said.
‘What? In her tent?’
‘Yes.’
‘So maybe the Head was, or could’ve been, the last person to see Lily alive. Have you told the police?’
Mr Lee shook his head. ‘The Head ain’t of this world.’
‘Yes, but if he, it . . .’ I took my fag out of my mouth and said, ‘Mr Lee, I don’t want to upset your beliefs but the Head isn’t real. It is, I know, an illusion.’
I spoke into silence. All of the Gypsies regarded me with hard, unforgiving eyes. Suddenly I felt very, very alone.
Mr Lee leaned towards my ear and said, ‘Gauje shouldn’t talk of what they don’t understand, undertaker. The Head is magic, special magic that came from far away and settled on my Lily. Now that she has gone, so has the Head. There is no point in trying to speak to something that is no longer here.’
I did wonder, and I could have asked, where the Head might have gone, but I didn’t. I couldn’t see anyone who looked like the Head I’d seen in Lily’s tent – I’d never seen anyone like that in the camp. Maybe the Head was magic, as they’d said, as the Arab’s head had been. But Lily had rested to one side of the Head, just as the trickster David Green had . . . I was trying to smile to myself about the barminess of all these thoughts when Captain Mansard came over to us and crouched next to me.
‘Dr Craig would like a word, Hancock,’ he said.
Mr Lee, who was sitting next to me, said, ‘What is it? What’s going on?’
‘Nothing yet,’ Mansard replied haughtily. ‘Hancock?’
‘I won’t be long,’ I said to Mr Lee.
I stood up and followed Mansard back to the clearing where Lily’s body had been discovered. The corpse was covered with a tarpaulin. The doctor from Whipps Cross, a short, red Scotsman, stood at its head.
‘The girl was certainly murdered,’ he said to me, without so much as an exchange of normal niceties. ‘I think she may have been violated and then killed, but I will need to confirm that. The indigent and those in entertainment were ever vulnerable to such outrages. I’ll have to take her body to the mortuary, if I can find some space for it. You can’t have her yet.’
‘You should tell her family,’ I said.
‘I will also have to take the body of Sergeant Williams,’ the doctor continued. ‘I have to see whether the wound to the girl’s throat could have been made by the knife in his hand.’
I turned to Mansard. ‘Do the Gypsies know about Williams?’ I certainly hadn’t said anything.
‘No,’ he replied, ‘and nor should they. Sergeant Williams was a good chap. I don’t want his reputation sullied at this stage. And, besides, if the Gyppos think one of my men might have been involved there could be trouble. We all know what these travelling types can be like.’
‘Do we?’ I said.
Mansard looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘Lazy, dishonest, superstitious and violent covers most of it. That girl duped thousands up here with her religious nonsense, and her people have got more than a few quid off it into the bargain. Williams didn’t kill her any more than some ghost did! If anyone did it was probably that brother-in-law of hers. By his own admission he’d slept with the girl. And he’s ignorant enough to expect us to believe in ghosts. Or maybe it was one of the “faithful” come to camp here from somewhere down your neck of the woods, Hancock.’
The implication that the killer had to be either an East-Ender or a Gypsy made me mad. ‘Sergeant Williams had a fancy for young Lily, you know!’
Mansard threw a hand dismissively into the air. ‘Absolute rot! Williams has a smashing girl in the WRNS.’
‘Be that as it may,’ I said. ‘But it isn’t just me as thinks he was sweet on Lily. Ask her father.’
Mansard moved slightly away from me and hooked one hand into the lanyard across his chest. ‘What kind of person are you, Hancock? A Jew?’
‘No.’ I didn’t say any more than that on the subject. I thought, Let the bastard guess. ‘I’m not against Sergeant Williams, Captain Mansard,’ I continued, ‘but someone wanted something from Lily she wasn’t prepared to give. Sergeant Williams was supposed to have been sweet on her, but maybe others had ideas of that nature too. That, or maybe there was another reason that none of us knows about.’
Mansard frowned. ‘What do you mean? What other reason?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. I didn’t. The brief conversation Hannah and I had overheard between Lily and some man had been too short and indistinct for me to form any judgement on its meaning. ‘But with so many people, including the Military Police, up here for all sorts of reasons, anything could have been going on.’
‘Well, it will all be checked out in the fullness of time,’ Dr Craig put in matter-of-factly. ‘Sergeant Ives?’
A middle-aged civilian copper, almost as thin as I am, came into the clearing and said, ‘Doctor?’
‘Your men can move this body and the other one now,’ Dr Craig said. ‘The sooner we get them to the hospital the better.’
I turned to Mansard. ‘We’ll have to tell the girl’s parents,’ I said. ‘Her mother at least will want to go with her.’
‘To the hospital?’ Mansard shook his head. ‘Impossible.’
‘It’s their custom,’ I replied, as calmly as I could. ‘They mount vigil once a loved one has passed on.’
‘Well, they can’t mount vigil in a hospital mortuary,’ Mansard said. ‘It won’t be allowed.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘There’s a war on, Mr Hancock. People can’t just do as they feel. Good God, man, by the time the doctor gets back to Whipps Cross we could have had another raid and the whole building might be in flames!’ He put his hand up to his cap and, despite the coldness of the night, wiped sweat off his brow. ‘Come daylight, somebody, probably me, is going to have to tell all of these nutcases looking for a miracle that the girl is dead. We might have riots up here, you know! And I’ve got to keep my eye on the Gypsies. So do please forgive me, Mr Hancock, if I do not unduly trouble myself with regard to the Gypsies’ customs. All of us have quite enough to do—’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ Dr Craig stood away from Lily’s body while the civilian coppers picked it up. ‘If a family member wants to come to the hospital and keep vigil, that will be fine,’ he said. ‘If it’s the mother, she will have to sit outside, but . . .’ He turned his hardened gaze on Mansard. ‘. . . vigils are important, Captain.’ Then he headed out of the clearing.
Mansard regarded me coldly before he took off after Dr Craig. This left me alone with Sergeant Ives and the other civilian coppers, who’d come from their station down in Walthamstow. One of them, a fat-faced elderly geezer, said to me, close and confidentially, ‘Comes from the Hebrides, see.’
I frowned.
‘Craig,’ the copper explained, ‘comes from the Hebrides Islands in Scotland.’
I didn’t understand what he meant by this comment so he said, ‘In them islands up there they go in for all that vigil business, sitting with the body and what-have-you.’ Then, by way of explanation, he added, ‘Me mum come from up there, Lewis. When me dad died some years ago she sat with him, talking for days. My sister wanted to call out the doctor but I said no, because I knew it was their way.’
Which, whether the copper was right about Craig’s background or not, was good for the Lee family. Whatever the reason, at least the doctor had understood – unlike Captain Mansard. But, then, as he had said himself he had a pile of trouble of his own round the corner, which would distract a man from the niceties of life and death. What would the great crowds who had come to see Lily after her sighting of the Virgin Mary make of her death? Would they take it as a sign that she lacked holiness or would they want to find and maybe harm whoever had taken Lily’s life? And what of Edward and his story that the love he and Lily shared had been approved by his dying wife? I remained with Mr Lee and the other men, including Edward, until well after sunrise when we – gauje, Gyp
sies and policemen – found out what those who had believed in Lily’s visions felt about it all.
Chapter Ten
‘Here, you can have this for your daughter,’ the young woman said, as she placed a red and gold scarf on the ground in front of Mr Lee. ‘Go lovely with that red dress Lily wore. She was such a pretty girl!’ She began to sob. ‘Whatever are we going to do without her?’
The Gypsy didn’t reply. The woman’s gentle reaction was so unusual.
When Mansard had announced to the crowd that Lily Lee had died, almost everyone leapt to the conclusion that she had been murdered. Many had seen her fit and apparently healthy the day before, and some had seen the coppers come and go in the early hours of the morning. When a rumble of fear or disbelief passes across a big group of people it is truly terrifying. I can remember hours and days in the trenches when the blokes around me were so strained their hands would go for their weapons if you so much as looked at them in the wrong way. Captain Mansard sweated heavily as he watched men and women approach the cordon around the Gypsy camp to find out more or at least say their bit. Shots, only in warning but shots nevertheless, were fired.
I heard only snatches of conversations:
‘Nazis in the forest done away with her. Them MPs, they’ve been looking for Jerries.’
‘Holy Mary, Mother of God . . .’
‘. . . can’t have seen the Virgin. If she had, why’d the Holy Mother let her die?’
‘We’ll die now, all of us.’
‘I still ain’t packing up and going back to Silvertown!’
‘If I find who done it I’ll . . .’
Not that this had anything to do with me. I was still where I was for Lily – the Gypsies wanted to give her into my care as they had done with her sister. But with the body, accompanied by the girl’s mother, at Whipps Cross there was little I could do so I made ready to take my leave of Mr Lee.
‘You off to the hospital?’ he asked, as I extended my hand to him.
‘Dr Craig will let me know when it’s time for Lily to come to my shop.’
Mr Lee took my hand and shook it. His palm was as dry and rough as sandpaper. ‘I think there’s going to be some trouble,’ he said.
‘You’ve got the Military Police to protect you,’ I replied.
He looked at me so knowingly that I was convinced someone had told him about Sergeant Williams. I was almost on the point of pressing him when I came to my senses and said, ‘Well, Mr Lee, shall I speak to the Reverend Sutton about the funeral or do you want to—’
‘Give her a good send-off.’ He gripped my arm tightly between his iron hard fingers. ‘You will.’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll speak to your wife. She’s welcome to stay as last time . . .’
Not that this was going to be easy. It hadn’t been easy the first time, with Rosie. But now we had Cousin Stella staying with us, deranged and demented Cousin Stella . . .
Mr Lee gave me another look, which, this time, was completely unknowable, then disappeared into his tent. I can honestly say that at that point I had no idea what he and his family were going to do next.
I left just before the first person, who was the bloke I’d met at Rosie’s wake, Nobby Clarke, tried to break through the cordon to get at the tree Lily had stared at when she had her visions. He’d wanted, he told the MP who wrestled him to the ground, a souvenir for his missus. I followed the gentle woman who’d given Mr Lee her scarf out of the camp and on to the Snaresbrook Road.
The Duchess had had a bad night with her arthritis and her cough, and was now confined to her bed. It can be damp down in Anderson shelters, which is another reason why I won’t have any truck with ours. That the blessed thing makes my mother feel more secure is not bad in itself, but what it’s doing, night after night, to her poor bones, not to mention her lungs, worries me a lot. But she was pleased to see me and I spent some time in her bedroom telling her something of what had gone on up in Epping Forest the previous night. The counterpane over her eiderdown was covered with a thin layer of brown dust. Sometimes when bombs go off close by, the vibrations from the explosions shake some of the distemper off the walls and on to whatever might be below.
‘That poor girl!’ she said, when I told her of Lily’s death. ‘And her poor mother! To bury two children . . . But, Francis, who would want to hurt a young girl like that?’
‘No one knows,’ I replied. It wasn’t a lie: Dr Craig hadn’t called or sent a message, which meant he was still examining the two bodies and trying to work out if or when they’d been together.
‘Oh, but the people!’ my mother continued. ‘The people who have come, for the miracle . . .’
‘I think they’ll have to go back to where they came from,’ I said. ‘You know, Duchess, Lily’s visions were—’
‘If you are going to say that what Lily saw was not real you can save your breath,’ she said, as she pointed a finger sternly at me. She coughed. ‘You don’t know that.’
‘No, I don’t. And I wasn’t about to say they weren’t real, Duchess,’ I said. ‘What I was going to say was that, now Lily is dead, the visions are quite unfathomable. I believe she saw something—’
‘She saw the Virgin Mary.’ I looked up and found myself staring into the face of my cousin Stella, for all the world a recovered woman. ‘Auntie Mary read the story to me from the Sketch,’ she said. ‘It’s a sign.’
I turned to my mother and said, ‘A sign?’
‘That Pop is alive!’ Stella said joyfully. ‘And that the war’s going to come to an end too, of course.’
The Duchess lowered her gaze, then said, ‘I read the story to Stella because I thought she might take comfort from it. I never dreamed it would do this . . .’
‘Oh, well,’ Stella said, ‘I’d better go off and make a pot of tea. You can have Ovaltine, if you like, Auntie Mary. Pop’ll have tea, of course, and he’ll have my guts for garters if he turns up and there’s no cuppa for him.’
And then, with a truly eerie giggle, she left.
‘Uncle Percy’s dead,’ I said, when I was certain that Stella was out of earshot. ‘I know there’s no body as yet, and as time goes by that becomes less and less likely, but Percy is dead for all that. He—’
‘Yes, I know you’ve said before about people vaporising,’ the Duchess cut in. ‘I’m so sorry, Francis, I never, ever . . . If I had known she would interpret Lily’s story as a sign her father was alive I would never have mentioned it to her.’
‘It’s all right,’ I took one of her hands and made myself smile. In truth, I was miffed at the way the Duchess had exposed Stella to what at best must have been some sort of mental condition in Lily and at worst a load of, well, God alone knew what. But, then, my mother is a religious woman so she’d seen no harm in any of it. ‘I’ll take a stroll up to the police station later and ask if they know any more about Uncle Percy. Maybe they’ve found something now,’ I said.
I wasn’t just talking for the sake of it. Sometimes bodies or parts of bodies don’t come to light for days. And although if a limb or a foot was discovered we could never be certain it had belonged to Uncle Percy, at least it’d give me something tangible to bury. Christ knows I’ve put less into a coffin and called it Harry, Mavis or Grace in my time. And if she had a coffin with Percy’s name on it, Stella would have to recognise that her father had passed away and mourn normally for him. If Lily’s visions had done this to her, when she had never ever been up to the forest or seen the girl and her miracles, what they had done to all of the people actually up round Eagle Pond was something I recognised as being very powerful. Now that they knew the Gypsy was dead many disappointed and unhappy people would soon be dragging their few possessions back to Canning Town, the Isle of Dogs and Silvertown. The war wasn’t ending for them any more than it was for heathens like me. But I could have told them that.
Just before I left her, the Duchess suddenly said, ‘Oh, Francis, you don’t know where I might buy
the herb called coltsfoot, do you?’
‘No.’ I frowned. ‘Why?’
The Duchess seemed a little sad. ‘Well, that young Lily did say that coltsfoot tea would do my cough good, remember? I never did take her advice, but perhaps I should.’
‘I’ll see if I fall over some of it on my travels,’ I said. ‘Maybe some of the other Gypsies might be able to help.’ But I didn’t think they would. I didn’t think I’d have the opportunity to ask them. I couldn’t, after all, talk about coltsfoot at Lily’s funeral, which, I believed then, would be the last time I saw the Lees and the rest of the group.
It was just after one when Dr Craig finally called.
‘Here, Mr H, it’s the telephone!’ Doris yelled, as she ran out into the yard to take me away from car cleaning. ‘Quick! Before the line goes! It’s a Dr Craig.’
I know that most people don’t have a telephone so I really shouldn’t moan, but the line being up one minute and down the next drives me crackers. You never know whether someone who said they’d ring you will be able to and even when you have a line you never know for how long. I ran inside and whipped the receiver out of Doris’s hands.
‘You can come and get Lily Lee now, Mr Hancock,’ Dr Craig said. ‘I’ve concluded my investigations into her death.’
‘Oh, thank you, Doctor,’ I said, not even thinking to ask what his conclusions might be – doctors never tell you. ‘I’ll be over to get her presently.’
‘Good.’ And then, unprompted and unexpectedly, he proved me wrong about his profession when he added, ‘The MP, Sergeant Williams, killed her in my opinion. But that is just for ourselves and the police. I’m not telling the Gypsies yet.’
‘No.’
‘That is the job of the police, God help them,’ he said. ‘You know, it’s chaos up in the forest as it is, Mr Hancock. People are demanding to know who is responsible for the death of the “elect of the Virgin” or standing in front of that confounded tree and shouting for Mary to come forth and save them. Wicked, idolatrous . . .’
After the Mourning Page 11