After the Mourning

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘Guv?’

  A group of coppers were carrying away Richards’s body.

  ‘Take it to the car,’ Berger said, to the tallest bloke. ‘Then come back here. You and me’ll need to have a chat about this Lovett bloke Richards was due to go and meet.’

  ‘Chances are if he fishes cockles, he’s from near Southend,’ the tall man replied.

  ‘We’ll have a little chat with Saville and some of them other charmers Richards had recruited in a bit,’ Berger said. The group carrying Richards’s body moved back into the undergrowth.

  I wondered who ‘high up’ at the Yard had been involved with Richards and, by extension, Mansard too. It was cold anyway and I was still quite ill that night, but the thought that one of our top coppers might be a traitor made me feel still colder. I hadn’t realised that so many people had leanings towards Hitler and the Nazis. But as Richards had said, where had I thought all of the thousands who had followed Mosley in the thirties had gone?

  ‘It all went wrong for Mansard on that night you got shot, Mr Hancock.’ Quite an understatement, but I nodded. ‘Richards, of course, was the obvious choice to investigate a very queer do, so that was what happened.’

  ‘When did you realise something wasn’t right?’

  ‘It happened bit by bit. The MPs being found dead in your hearse and you turning up alive at Whipps Cross sent Richards into a frenzy. The whole thing was queer, especially when it was discovered that Martin Stojka was one of the victims. We couldn’t work out how it had all gone so wrong for Mansard. We asked the Military Police for Mansard’s records. It was me who recognised the name back from his Mosley days. Called himself Mr Clive Gillespie in the thirties.’

  I told Berger about my Hannah and her experiences with Mansard/Gillespie.

  ‘It was Dr Craig at Whipps Cross hospital who really made some of us up the Yard, mainly Richards’s guv’nor, think about Richards in the way we did,’ Berger continued. ‘According to Richards, Mansard and his boys had only killed Stojka and the other Gypsies because they were defending theirselves. The Gypsies was the aggressors.’

  Drabalo Mary, who had been joined again by Beauty Lee, made a low, disgusted growl in her throat.

  ‘Dr Craig said that the way the Gypsies had been found showed that they had been executed. They were unarmed and they’d been executed,’ Berger said. ‘You, Mr Hancock, according to Richards, was either a traitor yourself or raving mad.’

  ‘Which was when the Yard got back to me,’ Sergeant Hill said. ‘I told them you was neither a traitor nor raving.’

  ‘Just mad?’

  Sergeant Hill shuffled his feet uneasily.

  ‘So I went down to Plaistow to see for myself,’ Inspector Berger said. ‘I talked to Sergeant Hill, who, I knew, had had doubts about Mansard from the off and who also had an . . . an “interest”, shall we say? Then when I come out of the station I took a little ball of chalk around your manor, Mr Hancock. Given the times we live in now, I was surprised to see so many of Richards’s young officers apparently looking at your gaff for no good reason. You was wounded, as far as I knew, and couldn’t be going anywhere. But Richards had to think that you was, so I had you watched meself. I told Sergeant Hill that if you did move he was to call the Yard and tell me. When the call came, I followed Sergeant Hill and his boys.’

  ‘Who followed Richards first and then us?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, Mr Hancock.’

  ‘Not really knowing what you were going to find.’

  ‘No, not really. Something was wrong but I couldn’t say for certain that Richards was a traitor until tonight. That’s why we held back for so long – so we could understand what was going on. The Nail, as far as we could tell, was missing, and we had to follow any person who might possibly lead us to it, same as Richards, really.’

  ‘Richards condemned himself out of his own mouth,’ Ernie said.

  ‘Yes, sir, he did.’

  ‘So how much of our conversing did you hear then?’ drabalo Mary, suddenly involved again, asked Berger.

  ‘All of it. From the moment Miss Lee met Mr Hancock and the Reverend here.’

  Mary looked at Beauty who said, ‘Oh, dordi!’

  ‘Lucky for us your Bruno was well chained down tonight, wasn’t it?’

  But it was more than just the bear’s life at stake now, if Berger really had heard all of our conversation. It was Beauty Lee too, and she knew it.

  ‘Can I give Mary here the Nail afore you take me away?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Give it to Sergeant Hill. Do it now.’ It was plain that he would brook no argument.

  Sergeant Hill extended his hand towards the girl and spoke at some length to her in pure Romany.

  Chapter Twenty

  For once I was just an ordinary mourner at a slightly unusual funeral. Arthur was conducting, and making a jolly good job of it. It wasn’t easy, with so many Gypsies jostling for position around the grave, but Arthur handled it all very calmly and with dignity, and I was proud of him. Lily Lee’s funeral had been organised in one single morning with most of the responsibility falling on to Arthur and Ernie Sutton’s shoulders. But it had needed to be like that, because poor Lily’s body wouldn’t wait any longer. I heaved a sigh of relief when Walter and Doris’s uncle Wolfie lowered her coffin on to her sister Rosie’s. As soon as the ropes were pulled out from under the coffin and the bearers had moved away, the Gypsies came with their offerings of coins and banknotes, which they threw on to the lid of the coffin. Lily’s sisters, Beauty included, howled to their two dead siblings below.

  ‘Won’t be long before you have to do this all over again, will it, Mr H?’ Sergeant Hill whispered to me, as we watched the Gypsies take part in the final drama of Lily Lee’s short life.

  ‘No, it won’t,’ I said. Only the night before we’d all been in the forest with Inspector Richards and his murderous gang of traitors. Now we were burying Lily, and the next day I was back at work again for the funerals of Mr and Mrs Lee, all their boys and Rosie’s husband Edward. Horatio Smith had already been buried by Albert Cox and his Canning Town firm, which left only the once mysterious Martin Stojka. But I knew nothing about how he was to be disposed of, beyond that Sergeant Hill – a man I now realised I didn’t truly know at all – was to arrange it.

  ‘Come on,’ Sergeant Hill said, to the small group of coppers, from Plaistow and Scotland Yard, who stood inside the cordon that many other coppers had thrown around these proceedings. ‘Take a stone each and place them round the grave. Be careful not to leave any gaps.’

  The Gypsies moved aside to let a very old custom with their people take place. Stones around a grave, they believe, can restrain the dangerous muló or spirit of the dead, should it wish to move among the living once again. The coppers involved, young and old, did their job with reverence.

  Inspector Berger was one of the Scotland Yard contingent, looking on, like me, with admiration. ‘I don’t know what we’d’ve done without Sergeant Hill,’ he said. ‘Only he knew the real importance of Martin Stojka and his family.’

  I’m used to it being obvious what a person is. Everyone can see what I am and I’ve never tried to pretend otherwise – I’ve never had to. Sergeant Hill, with his fair skin, blue eyes and military moustache, was a normal English bloke, as far as I’d known. And his father had been just that. His mother, though, had come originally from Budapest. Word in some quarters was that she was a Jewess. But she wasn’t. Still living right up to this day, Irene Hill is a Gypsy, who had taught her son all about the customs and beliefs of the European travelling people. So he knew what was expected of him at Lily Lee’s funeral.

  ‘God knows what Sergeant Hill and myself and maybe you, too, Mr Hancock, would have to endure in Hitler’s Germany,’ Berger said, as he watched Ernie Sutton bless the graves of the Lee sisters once more. ‘You know Hill speaks the Romany lingo, don’t you? Incredible.’

  I hadn’t known – or, rather, the few Romany words I had heard him say I
had either forgotten or dismissed. We use such a lot of words from all over the globe down in our manor – Yiddish, Hindi, Romany, Arabic. ‘Well, at least old Herr Hitler won’t be able to get his hands on the Nail now,’ I said.

  ‘No.’ Berger’s expression told me he thought all that sort of thing was so much tosh.

  ‘Did Sergeant Hill—’

  ‘I don’t know where he’s keeping the thing, only that it’s safe,’ Berger said, and held up a hand as if to bat away my question. ‘The Lee girls can have it back when this war’s over, if it ever is.’ Then, seeing that Sergeant Hill and his men had completed their circle of stones, he excused himself and set off in the direction of the cordon of uniformed officers who hid what we were doing from public gaze. In spite of her death and all the doubt that had been cast on her experiences by the arrest of Gypsies in her group, not to mention the subsequent deaths of her parents and brothers, there was still a lot of interest in and some reverence for Lily Lee. Not a few people had wanted to pay their respects when they’d seen a load of Gypsies on the move up to the East London cemetery. The coppers made them all stand behind the cordon until the ceremony was over. Now, for a short time, they would be let in to pay their respects. Women and girls, mainly, placed tiny bunches of half-dead flowers beside the hole the grave-diggers were now filling in. I saw that it was getting dark.

  ‘We’re having a wake for everyone tomorrow, after Mum and everyone else’s funeral,’ Beauty Lee said to me. ‘Will you come?’

  She’d appeared at my side, suddenly dry-eyed and calm.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. We both watched the gauje pass with their little offerings, their crosses and their tears. ‘Beauty, do you have any idea what Lily saw over by that tree?’

  ‘No. I know what I believe about it, though,’ she said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I think it were Rosie’s muló,’ she said, ‘but not come to do our Lily harm. Rosie and Lily loved each other and Rosie’s Edward. Rosie just didn’t want to go. Her muló were a good thing, I think. It were love.’

  The gauje crossed themselves, some even bowed to the grave before they moved on. But that was all right. The Virgin Mary, even if you don’t believe in her, like me, is a symbol of love and suffering. Lily and her ‘virgin’ Rosie had suffered in their own ways and so, to my mind, what these unknowing gauje were doing wasn’t wrong. For a short time, Lily Lee had given them the miracle all people at war want: a sign of some sort that we are right and also that we are not alone.

  I travelled home to the shop in Inspector Berger’s car – Arthur took the Lees back to their camp in the hearse. I was pleased to have the opportunity to talk to the Scotland Yard man away from the funeral proceedings. I still had a lot of questions from the previous night. He had not, after all, arrested Beauty Lee for the murders of the MPs she had committed in my hearse and, I now found, he had let the other Gypsies in police custody go too.

  ‘Beauty Lee killed men who were traitors. She’s a heroine,’ Berger said, as his car bounced up and down in the many potholes that scar almost every road now. ‘Not that she’s saying anything about it herself.’

  ‘Yes, I understand that,’ I said, ‘but how is the Yard going to explain all those deaths up in the forest and in Leyton?’

  He pulled the car into Bethell Avenue and brought it to a halt. ‘We’re not,’ he said, as he turned a pair of cold eyes on me.

  ‘But—’

  ‘Mansard and the others were killed in the line of duty, probably by gangsters they’d disturbed during the course of their investigations in the forest. There’s a lot of black-market activity in this part of town.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but that story isn’t true, is it?’

  Berger sighed. ‘Mr Hancock,’ he said, ‘we live at a time when a few people have to make big decisions for many. Mr Churchill is one and I, to a lesser degree, am another. What has to be true for the many is that the MPs, our boys, were killed by nasty criminal types and that the poor Gypsies also suffered their losses. Lily Lee indeed saw the Virgin Mary, which means that God is on our side and all’s right with the world.’ He pointed a finger into my face. ‘You say nothing, Mr Hancock. I can put you into Claybury if I feel so inclined.’

  I don’t like being threatened but even I am realistic enough to know when I’m well and truly beaten. I kept my trap shut.

  ‘Censorship is a useful thing,’ Berger said, as he started the engine of the car again. ‘It has its place.’

  I wanted to say that from what we’d heard Herr Hitler would probably agree with him on that score. But, again, I didn’t even think of opening my mouth.

  Then suddenly, as he turned into the Barking Road, he said, ‘Oh, I’ve sent a car to fetch your friend Miss Jacobs.’

  ‘Hannah!’

  ‘With an old bloke who makes them models of people and animals you see in fairgrounds, a Gyppo. Lives in a village up round Harlow called Matching Green. Right out in the sticks, apparently.’

  The Gypsies had said they’d hidden Hannah well.

  ‘We need to know the truth from her,’ Berger said.

  I had to say, ‘Why’s that?’

  He drew the car to a halt outside the shop and turned his ice cold eyes to me again. ‘Because if we do survive this war, one day, a long time into the future, people will be able to get into our files and they will deserve to know the truth. We found the cockle-fishing traitor Richards told you about at Leigh-on-Sea, in Essex, and he told us some interesting things about one of my guv’nors. He’ll leave the force, and for years no one will know what happened to him. Then they’ll open the files. But we’ll all be dead and gone by that time. Beyond any blame, you see.’

  ‘And that makes what you’re doing all right?’

  ‘Anything that means you and yours survive is all right in a war, Mr Hancock,’ Berger said, as I pulled myself slowly out of his car. ‘You were in the first lot, you should know that.’

  ‘The first lot went far beyond survival, Inspector Berger. Don’t talk to me about it.’

  I began to walk towards my battered, boarded-up shop, glad that Beauty Lee wasn’t going to prison but aware of how different things might have been under ‘normal’ circumstances. Outside this war, Beauty Lee, the Gypsy, would have hanged for what she did and no ‘excuses’ about avenging her parents or recovering any holy relic would have saved her. Not even Berger, the Jew, would have put in a good word. But, then, there are people who are not Christian, there are foreigners and then there are Gypsies . . . They are always at the bottom of everyone’s pile.

  ‘I’ll tell Miss Jacobs you want to see her, shall I?’ Berger called to me.

  I didn’t glance back at him, but I did say, ‘Yes.’

  ‘They don’t call this a wake, it’s a pomana,’ Sergeant Hill said, as he tucked into a large wedge of rabbit pie. ‘It’s a meal they hold just after a person’s death, and then at so many weeks and months until a year has passed. Only then, after that final meal, can the mourning stop.’

  It was funny seeing him sitting on the ground in his copper’s uniform. He didn’t seem comfortable, in spite of his Gypsy blood.

  ‘That’s the very old way that is,’ drabalo Mary said, with a big measure of admiration in her voice. But Sergeant Hill was going to be looking after the Gypsies’ most prized possession for the foreseeable future so it was encouraging that Mary and Beauty liked him. Not that they’d had much choice in the matter. Berger had told Beauty to hand over the Nail to Sergeant Hill and, once he’d spoken to her and she’d been told the Romany-speaking copper was himself a diddikai, part-Gypsy, she had done so. Compared to the alternative of her dragging it around the countryside with her, always afraid that it might be stolen, it made sense. If and when this war ends, Sergeant Hill will give the Nail back to Beauty whose ambition is to journey to Germany and find whatever might remain of the Stojka family. As the girl says, any Gypsy can have the Nail but it only belongs to someone with the name of Stojka.

  We
’d had to borrow three vehicles from other local firms to get all of the dead Lee family members to the cemetery. I’d been in charge for the first time since I’d been shot, and although I’d felt tired, I’d managed, with the help of my lads, Albert Cox and his boys from Canning Town and a couple of men from a firm in Bow, to get the Gypsies where they needed to be. Now, sitting on the ground beside my mother and Doris Rosen, both of whom had come to pay their respects to the Lees, I smoked in silence as others filled their faces from the Gypsies’ meagre larder. Still weak, I hardly noticed when Beauty Lee came to sit next to me.

  ‘We’re leaving tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Once we’ve dealt with Bruno.’

  I looked at her questioningly.

  ‘Mary give him summat to send him off gently this morning,’ Beauty said. ‘Old Eli was with him when he went.’

  I wondered if I’d heard her right. ‘You killed Bruno?’

  She pointed to where her little sisters were smashing plates against a tree. ‘We have to get rid of all the dead people’s things,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘Bruno was my dad’s bear.’

  ‘Yes, but when you told me that Bruno had,’ I lowered my voice to a whisper, ‘killed that sergeant, you were frightened I’d tell the coppers and get the bear destroyed.’

  ‘Couldn’t have the coppers kill him, no,’ Beauty said. ‘That’s wrong. They wouldn’t bury him right. Creatures have mulós too, you know. We’ll do him proper tonight with money and stones and a few old spells from drabalo Mary. Then we’m be off.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Travelling. Go up by old ’Zekiel’s first.’

  ‘Is that the—’

  ‘Now, Mr Hancock,’ the girl said, smiling now in spite of her sorrow, ‘if there was one thing you wanted what would that be?’

  ‘Why?’

  Beauty shrugged again. ‘Just askin’.’

  The Duchess, who had been listening to the last part of our conversation, said, ‘Well, for me it would have to be an end to this war.’