She dug in her heels. ‘Just a second, Billy. I want to take a proper look.’ In growing dismay she peeped inside, then as she stepped back, one of the new signs tipped sideways to reveal the words underneath. The blackboard was decorated in modern, straight letters in a style just corning in. Frances read the words out loud. Instead of The Duke of Wellington, it read The Prince of Wales.
‘They ain’t thinking of renaming the old place?’ Billy turned to George. ‘That can’t be right, surely?’
But George nodded. ‘You should hear what they say about it around here.’
‘Ain’t it going down too well?’
‘You could say that.’ George turned to Frances. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘the brewery says it’s more up-to-the-minute.’
Frances was stunned. The Duke was to be the Prince of Wales after Prince Edward, the dilettante young heir apparent. She stared at the new signs.
George thought it best to give the full picture. ‘They’re talking about new windows for downstairs. They ain’t sure yet.’
‘And does Pa know?’
‘He can’t hardly help it. Not after Dolly went down earlier and told them the worst. About the name, that is.’
Frances took a deep breath. ‘Let’s go and see how he’s taking it,’ she said to Billy, marching in high dudgeon down the court.
George looked at Billy. ‘They don’t like it, but there ain’t a thing they can do about it,’ he said sadly.
In one way, Duke felt there was nothing more they could do to harm him. If you lost everything, he said, why lose any more sleep over a couple of new signs?
When Frances and Billy showed up, full of fresh indignation, he was sitting in Annie’s back kitchen surrounded by family and friends. Rob stood smoking like a chimney by the back door, his face glowering. Dolly made cups of tea. Tommy swore he would never set foot inside the pub again.
‘Bleeding stupid.’ Dolly frowned. ‘What do you think, Frances?’ She thrust a full cup and saucer into her hands.
‘I know what I think,’ France said scornfully. ‘How are you, Pa?’ She took off her cotton gloves and put them in her bag. She sat down in Annie’s empty chair, opposite Duke.
‘Bearing up,’ he said as always.
‘But did you take a look on the inside?’ Dolly went over and made a lot of noise at the sink. ‘Stripped bare. And God knows what they plan putting up instead. Pictures of young girls half naked with their hair all over the place, I shouldn’t wonder.’ She grumbled about modern taste.
‘Pa?’ Frances touched his hand, urging a smile. ‘Have you been up to take a look?’
He shook his head. ‘It ain’t worth making a special trip for.’ ‘But ain’t you been out at all?’ Frances frowned. She sipped her tea.
‘It’s too hot.’
‘It ain’t that hot, Pa!’
‘Leave it, Frances,’ Rob said from the doorway. ‘If he don’t feel like going up on to Duke Street, he don’t have to.’
‘But a breath of fresh air, Pa. It’d do you good.’
‘Annie goes on at me just like you do,’ he told her. ‘Maybe tomorrow. I’ll see how I feel.’
‘Where is Annie?’
‘She’s up the court seeing to Wiggin. She ain’t roused him so far today.’
Frances only had time to grumble quietly about Annie doing too much, when heavy steps came running down the passage. Ernie burst in, white in the face. ‘Annie says come quick!’ he gasped. He seemed to stagger sideways and Tommy had to leap forward to catch him. By now he’d clamped his mouth tight shut, unwilling to say another word. Saying something out loud meant it had happened. If you kept quiet, it would go away. He shut his eyes to block out the misery of what he’d just seen.
‘Sit him down here!’ Frances sprang up to help Ernie to her seat.
Duke stood up too. ‘Look after him, Frances.’ He beckoned to his son. ‘Rob, you and me will go and take a look.’
‘But what is it? What happened?’ Dolly insisted. ‘What’s the matter with him? He ain’t going to faint, is he?’
‘Help me loosen his tie,’ Frances said. ‘And Billy, will you make sure Pa and Rob can manage?’ She sat Ernie forward in the chair, head between his knees.
Both Billy and Tommy made off after Duke and Rob. The four of them arrived at Eden House together. ‘This way!’ Tommy yelled. ‘Wiggin’s in the room under us, down the back.’
They ran down the dark hallway, footsteps ringing in the hollow, tall building. Annie waited for them at the door to Wiggin’s room.
Duke pushed his way to the front, relieved that she seemed to be unharmed. ‘Is it Wiggin?’
She showed him in. The room was empty and in a dreadful state, the stench of stale alcohol, urine and decay almost unbearable. Wiggin had ripped down Annie’s curtains and tried to block the light with old newspapers. His trunk was slewed across the room, the blankets on the bed slashed and torn. Broken bottles had been smashed across the bare floor, and as Duke advanced inside, he saw a dark stain seeping into the boards by the hearth.
‘Where is he?’ Rob snatched the blanket from the bed and looked wildly round. ‘He ain’t hit you again?’
Annie shook her head. ‘I ain’t got a clue where he is,’ she admitted. ‘I sent Ernie down for help. I think we’ll have to set off looking for him.’
Rob relaxed. ‘What’s Ernie getting so het up over?’ As far as he was concerned, if Wiggin had gone missing it was good riddance to bad rubbish.
Duke went over to the hearth. He stared down at the dark patch on the floorboards, still damp. He bent slowly and brushed a fingertip across it. ‘This.’ His finger was stained rusty red. ‘Blood. Ernie can’t stand the sight of it.’
‘Whose blood?’ Rob went to join Duke. ‘Wiggin’s?’
‘Who else do you think?’ Tommy kicked around amongst the broken glass. ‘There’s drops of the stuff over here and all.’
‘So where is he?’ Billy asked again. He turned to Annie. ‘Ain’t you seen him at all today?’
She shook her head. ‘I ain’t got no answer when I came up this morning. So this time I knocked and knocked, and when I got no answer I went to Bertie Hill for the key and let myself in. I thought he was still in here, asleep or dead drunk. I could smell it through the door. But I come in and he ain’t nowhere to be seen. I think maybe he’s made off up Duke Street on another binge.’
‘Maybe he has,’ Rob agreed. ‘He’ll be flat out on the park bench with the other old dossers.’
‘Except there’s this.’ Annie pointed to the bloodstain. ‘Ernie spotted it and it gave him a nasty turn. I had to send him down to you, Duke.’
‘And it’s time to get you back home and all,’ he told her, taking her by the arm.
‘But we gotta look for Wiggin, remember?’
‘Tommy and Billy will take a look, won’t you?’ Duke agreed to send them off to reassure Annie more than anything else. ‘He’ll most likely come staggering back of his own accord if we hang on long enough.’ He put an arm around her shoulder as they made they way out, ‘Rob will see to the mess here. Bring a brush and a bucket of hot water with a scrubbing-brush,’ he told him.
Rob went ahead with bad grace. ‘Anyone would think I ain’t got better things to do,’ he grumbled. But he agreed to clean the room, for Annie’s sake.
Back home, they calmed her with tea and sympathy. Ernie was upstairs resting, Frances said. ‘Billy and Tommy will find Wiggin,’ she promised Annie. ‘He ain’t gone far.’
‘It’s the blood.’ Annie looked up, pale and strained. ‘Look, Frances, I know he’s a bleeding old nuisance, I don’t say he ain’t. But he could be out there down some alley, down a siding, he could be dying!’
It was the River Thames that gave up the secret of Wiggin’s final journey.
He’d been in the water overnight, the police said. The current had taken him downstream and washed him up against a Norwegian fishing boat unloading for Billingsgate. A fisherman had heard th
e body knocking against the hull and spotted what he thought was a piece of flotsam. Only when he went for a pole to push it off, it bobbed and turned face up in the water, and he saw what it was. He called in the police. It took several days to track down Annie, Wiggin’s only living relative.
Since his disappearance, Annie had been forced to relive the nightmare of his first vanishing act all those years earlier. She went in on herself, refusing to admit that it would be better if he never came back, a constant caller for news at Union Street station. The discovery of the body came as a relief in the end. She and Duke went straight to the morgue and she calmly identified Wiggin, not flinching at the bruised and battered face.
‘Was it a drowning?’ she asked the attendant, imagining the old man, drunk and weak from loss of blood, toppling over a bridge to his death.
But the man covered the body and shook his head. ‘Bled to death. Looks like he was stabbed. Don’t ask me. I ain’t no expert.’
‘Stabbed?’Annie echoed.
Duke and Annie went to the police station to check. ‘They’re saying Wiggin didn’t drown after all?’ Duke asked.
The bulky desk sergeant wheezed over to check the file and nodded. ‘Vicious attack with sharp implement,’ he confirmed. ‘Dead before he hit the water.’
Annie’s relief turned to distress.
‘Weren’t hardly nothing to identify him by,’ the sergeant continued. He went to a cupboard. ‘Just a few old rags. You might as well take them while you’re here.’ He heaped Wiggin’s clothes on to the counter, including the old greatcoat that Annie had rescued from the pawnshop. ‘Or you can let us burn them if you like.’
Annie sniffed and nodded, unable to speak.
‘Go steady,’ Duke warned. ‘This ain’t easy.’
Ignoring him, the sergeant pushed the heap of clothes to the floor. ‘It was the old coat. It had Sally Army tickets in the pocket. We dried them out and went down and checked the numbers with the local spike. They took a look in their registers and came up with his name. They told us about his connection with you. Seems like you was his good Samaritan. Anyhow, that’s how we found you.’ He sounded proud of the policework behind it. ‘At least you can give the poor old blighter a proper funeral.’
Duke took Annie away once more. They stood in a queue for a bus back to Duke Street. Neither felt up to the walk.
‘He was stabbed, they say?’ Annie puzzled over this all the way home. ‘He’d been in the water overnight, but he ain’t drowned, he was stabbed?’
‘Let the coppers work it out,’ Duke advised gently. ‘You gotta try and forget it.’
But as they walked down Paradise Court together under a stormy sky, Annie insisted otherwise. ‘It ain’t right to forget about poor Wiggin,’ she said. ‘For a start, we gotta give him a send-off, Duke. We gotta put him away splendid, whatever happens.’
Chapter Fourteen
There was hardly a soul to mourn the violent death of Willie Wiggin. The sailor who’d dragged his battered corpse from the river spent one sleepless night, tossing and turning to rid himself of the old tramp’s staring, sightless eyes and the hollow knocking against the boat’s empty hull. The police wrote him down as one more dosser destined for a pauper’s grave until they turned up an ex-wife to claim his remains and take him off their hands. The unsentimental Tommy O’Hagan told his sister, Katie, that at least they’d get a good night’s sleep in future, without the old drunk clattering about below. Dolly Ogden even came out with it straight to Annie’s face: she was better off with Wiggin dead and buried, the whole street agreed on that.
Nevertheless, on the morning of 8 August Paradise Court did turn out to ‘put him away splendid’. They felt they owed it to Annie and Duke, who laid on a good spread in Annie’s front room. Not many bothered with the graveside ceremony, just Annie, Duke and a few family and friends. Mary O’Hagan stood silent in the background as the priest threw soil on the coffin. She said a prayer and remembered the day when the police came knocking on her door with similar news. Daisy too had been stabbed. Mary crossed herself and stood head bowed for Wiggin.
Hettie and Jess had discussed who should stay in charge of the shop, and it was Hettie who came over to the funeral for an hour. She met George on the corner of the court, under the pub’s new black and gold sign. He had on a smart jacket and cap, coming along at Hettie’s suggestion.
‘We’re meeting up with the others at the cemetery,’ she told him, taking his arm and walking briskly down the noisy street. ‘Then Annie’s asked us back to her place.’ She looked nice in a grey silky dress and a straw hat with a curling brim. George was proud to walk her along to the funeral.
By the graveside, Hettie sang ‘The Lord’s My Shepherd’ in a full, rich voice which soared into the still, blue sky. She sang of quiet waters with such purity that she brought tears to Annie’s eyes.
‘God rest his soul,’ Annie said to Duke as she turned away. Upright and steady in his dark suit, he walked by her side to the cemetery gate. ‘’Cos he ain’t had a happy time this side of the grave.’ She dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief.
Later, back at the house, she told Hettie that today would have been Wiggin’s sixty-seventh birthday.
Dolly and Arthur Ogden were among the first to turn out in neighbourly fashion, to go down the bottom of the court and give Annie a boost. It would be a shame if she’d gone to all that trouble over sandwiches and cold pies if no one showed up. Since it was a Friday morning affair, they dragged Charlie out of bed to get dressed and show his face. ‘Come and pay your respects,’ Dolly said.
‘Wiggin ain’t worth it,’ Charlie complained. He valued his lie-in after working late.
‘But Annie and Duke is!’ Dolly brooked no argument, as usual. The Ogdens would show up in force.
Rob dropped in, and Kane dragged Tommy off his paint and wallpaper stall to put in an appearance down the court. The hot, sunny day lent an odd festival air to the occasion; Annie’s door stood wide open, and mourners brought their food and drink outside on to the pavement to chat.
Billy Wray had come in Frances’s place. He talked politics with Joe O’Hagan, predicting more miners’ strikes during the coming winter. ‘Coal’s losing a million pounds a month,’ he said. ‘Pits are dosing all up and down the Welsh valleys, and the owners want to make another cut in wages.’ He supported the Federation slogan, ‘Not a penny off the pay, not a second on the day’.
Joe wondered where it would all lead. He himself cared less about the miners than the present newspaper outcry against one Patrick Mahon, murderous resident of Crumbles, near Pevensey in Sussex. ‘They say he chopped up the body,’ he told Billy, having steered the conversation towards the sensational case. Joe’s morbid interest in such things no doubt sprang from his own daughter’s death, for which Chalky White had eventually got the drop. He followed every detail of the current scandal. ‘Her name was Emily Kaye, and she was his mistress.’
‘I hope they string him up,’ Arthur put in. ‘Like they did that Edith Thompson a couple of years back.’
Billy retreated to the safety of Annie’s front room for more pork pie and tea from Hettie. ‘How’s Jess and family?’ he asked conversationally.
‘They’re fine, thanks. Mo and Grace ain’t at school for the summer holidays, so Jess is pretty busy.’ Hettie told him they were considering taking on help, both in the shop and at home.
He nodded, took his tea out into the court and, spying Joe and Arthur still hard at it, sought out the less lurid company of George Mann. The two men talked of more layoffs on the docks and a threatened strike on public transport. The TUC were heading towards a general strike, Billy felt sure.
‘Ramsay MacDonald’s against it,’ George pointed out.
‘But he’s sitting on his backside in Westminster, he ain’t the one being squeezed by the owners.’ Billy felt strongly on the point.
Tommy, pie in hand, had overheard. ‘That’s why I work from my own stalls,’ he put in. ‘Ain’t no one
breathing down my neck.’
‘Not till you get yourself hitched, Tommy, no!’ George nudged him. ‘Ain’t it about time you were looking round for a missus?’
But Tommy had no intention, he said. ‘Women is a thing I leave alone. It don’t pay to get hitched. Look at Annie!’
They spotted her small, slight figure dressed in a long black skirt and high white blouse, bustling around with replenishments.
Tommy struck a serious pose, thumb in waistcoat pocket, chewing as he spoke. ‘No, what I mean to say is, women is trouble. I’ve had my fling, I can tell you, but they always go screeching and carrying on before too long. Then, when they got you well and truly hooked, what do you get? A missus rowing, kids squalling, no coal in the grate and no food on the table. A missus only makes a man miserable. And kids? I won’t have them. Look at my ma when we was young, washing and scrubbing till all hours just to keep us fed, and the little ones always crying for bread. No, I’m happy as I am, with my stalls and my mates, and having a beer when I like, and no blessed missus to come home to, ta very much!’
Billy and George applauded Tommy’s long and eloquent speech. ‘Blimey!’ George winked at Joe. ‘I see you brought him up not to fall for the first pair of flashing eyes.’
But Dolly stood prepared to take Tommy on. ‘What makes you think any girl would fall for you?’ she demanded. ‘You ain’t exactly no prize catch, Tommy O’Hagan.’ She said women liked tall and muscular men like George, not skinny ones like Tommy, or Arthur for that matter. She squared up to him. ‘You may be a fast mover and a fast talker, Tommy, but you hain’t no Hadonis. You need beefing up with a bit of muscle, you do. And you won’t get far with just them big blue eyes neither!’
‘Oh, Dolly, ain’t I the one for you?’ Tommy cried, as if stricken. ‘And here’s me thinking I was God’s gift.’
‘Well, you ain’t, Tommy, believe me.’ It was her turn to wink at the older men then stroll off.
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