by Ned Beauman
Seven minutes later, a twenty-two-year-old girl ran into the laboratory.
18
OCTOBER 1936
To Evelyn Erskine, the ‘laws’ of probability were nothing but playground cant, as tiresome as all her brother’s theories of eugenics. Would she ever see Sinner again? The chances, Philip would probably say, were minuscule. Well, of course they were, but the chances were also minuscule that she should ever have met someone like Sinner in the first place, and it had still happened. So the problem was not simply that Sinner had vanished among the East End’s hundred thousand Jews. That was no real obstacle – there are a hundred thousand seconds in the day, almost, and any one of them might find her bumping into Sinner in the street. The problem was the sadness of those Jews: their children dead of typhoid, their parents at the mercy of some Nazi passport clerk, their lovers NO LONGER AT THIS ADDRESS nor at any other that anybody knew. There must be so many in the East End who had missed so many others so deeply for so long that, in some stern moral sense, it just didn’t seem to matter a jot that she, Evelyn Erskine, happened to miss somebody too: in this cauldron of tragedy her own little narrative took no precedence, and the reunion she desperately desired did not have the cheering inevitability of the really important things – like becoming a composer.
On top of all that, here was Mosley. When all those legions of anonymous poor were following the orders of history, of proper newspaper history that Evelyn could take no part in, it felt even more plausible that Sinner would just melt into this gigantic neighbouring world, and that the sheer earnest intensity of her desire to see him again wouldn’t be quite enough to make sure that it actually happened. In other words: while, to Philip Erskine, the fascist march through the East End was the first time since Claramore that he really thought he had a chance of finding the boy, to Evelyn Erskine it was the first time since Claramore that she really thought she had a chance of losing him. And yet, despite all that, her basic optimism might still have been enough to sustain her – if only it hadn’t been so badly mauled by what had happened at Claramore.
She’d grieved far more over her fiancé, eventually, than she ever would have expected. One may think one doesn’t care, but one always does – she realised that now. But at least death was final, whereas what Bruiseland and her father had done hadn’t ended with Morton, and might never truly end, because Tara was still in hiding.
Caroline Garlick had telephoned her only a few hours after Morton’s body had been discovered on that day in August. Tara hadn’t told Caroline very much, only that she needed Evelyn’s help, but Evelyn could guess at least part of it, so she told Caroline to give Tara some money and to tell nobody else. Morton’s funeral took place in London the following week, and after hours of begging Evelyn’s parents let her stay on with Caroline afterwards instead of going back to Claramore. So the next day, finally, she had a chance to visit Tara in the boarding-house where she was staying under a false name and to learn the whole story. It was even worse than she’d imagined.
Of course Evelyn wanted Bruiseland and her father to be punished for what they’d done – but she knew that if she went to the police and they didn’t believe her, she might only succeed in exposing Tara. With every hour that passed, justice seemed more impossible: it was as if Tara had her arm trapped between the gears of one of Claramore’s machines and was being pulled further and further in. And so all Evelyn could do was help Tara to lead as decent a life as possible, while inwardly feeling so guilty about her inaction that she could hardly sleep. They spent many of their days together, often joined by Caroline, who was an enthusiastic accomplice and had not yet married her Scotsman. That wasn’t too bad, but she didn’t know what they’d do in the long run. They had to be careful to avoid any acquaintances who might recognise the fugitive maid; once, in the street, a man did remember Tara’s face from a picture in the newspaper, but Evelyn just scolded him until he skulked away, convinced of his unspeakably rude mistake. At least in future, after all this practice, she expected she would have no trouble conducting a discreet infidelity.
So Tara was with her on the Sunday of the march, when Evelyn concluded, at last, that she really might never see Sinner again unless she asked Philip about him. She’d promised herself she’d never stoop that low, because she didn’t want her brother even to suspect how she felt, and it took her the whole weekend to work up the resolve to pick up the telephone. Infuriatingly, he didn’t answer, but she knew he never went out, so he was probably just preoccupied with his insects. Or could it even be that Sinner was living with him again, in secret? She decided to visit the flat in person that afternoon.
At five o’clock there was a smell of lemon peel in the Clerkenwell air, and everything seemed quiet until Evelyn caught sight of her brother’s painting, the one modelled on Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, lying on the pavement outside the flat, the frame cracked, shards of glass all around. She looked up and saw that one of the flat’s windows was smashed. Puzzled, she went inside, while Tara, who obviously could not be allowed to cross paths with her brother, waited in the taxi. Upstairs, she found the front door broken down and the table overturned. Assuming there must have been a burglary, wondering if it was safe, she took a few cautious steps into the flat. ‘Hello?’ she called out. And then, through the open door of the laboratory, she caught sight of a body sprawled beside a heap of soil like an exhausted gravedigger.
As she ran to it, her first wild thought was that Bruiseland had come here and murdered her brother, too. But then she saw it was Sinner wearing one of her brother’s shirts. His eyes were closed, and although his face looked pink and bloated he was almost as beautiful as before. She dropped to her knees and put a hand to his cheek. It was warm, but she couldn’t tell if he was breathing, so she slapped his face and shook his shoulders roughly, but that only made his head loll around. There was no blood on him, except on the tip of one of his fingers. The white shirt was half off one shoulder so that one of his small nipples was uncovered; she hadn’t seen him so naked even at Claramore, and some small brainless part of her felt almost embarrassed. With tears in her eyes she jumped up and sprinted out of the flat and down to the taxi, almost falling headlong down the stairs in her haste.
‘You’ve got to come upstairs,’ she said hoarsely to Tara.
‘I can’t.’
‘You’ve got to. You’ve got to. Philip’s not here.’ The driver watched them in his mirror, uninterested.
Tara got out and Evelyn led her upstairs and into the laboratory.
‘What’s happened?’ said Tara, seeing Sinner.
‘I don’t know. I can’t tell if he’s. …’
Tara knelt down and listened to Sinner’s chest, then tried to take his pulse. She turned sadly to Evelyn and shook her head.
‘Oh, Christ, can’t you do anything? Or we could get a doctor?’
‘It’s too late, love.’
‘But he just looks as if he’s passed out. What can have … ?’ Tara gestured sadly at the empty bottle of gin by Sinner’s right hand, and Evelyn felt as if rotten floorboards were giving way beneath her feet. ‘Oh no! No, no, no!’
Tara got up and held on tightly to Evelyn while she sobbed. After a few minutes Evelyn sniffed and said, ‘We’ve got to get him away from here.’
‘I’ll go. Then you can call the police.’
‘No. Not the police. We’ve got to get him away ourselves. Remember what he said to me. About my brother.’ Evelyn had told Tara every single detail of that night in the drawing room.
They carried Sinner downstairs, Tara taking his feet and Evelyn taking him under the armpits. ‘Our ridiculous friend’s got himself terribly drunk, I’m afraid,’ Evelyn shouted to the driver as they approached the taxi, just managing to keep her voice steady. ‘Will you help us, please?’ Grudgingly, the driver got out, opened the door for them, and helped them slide Sinner into the seat.
‘Where to?’ he said when they were all inside.
‘C
able Street,’ said Evelyn without thinking. It was the only street in the East End that she could name.
‘You know it’s that big march on today?’
‘Yes.’
‘You Blackshirts, then?’ joked the driver.
‘We’re undecided,’ said Evelyn.
By the time they got to the western end of Commercial Road, the streets were too choked with revellers to drive on any further.
‘Wait here,’ she said to the driver, and gave him some money in advance.
‘Where are you going?’ said Tara.
‘There must be someone who can help us.’
Feeling as if this was the bravest thing she had ever done, Evelyn got out of the cab, went up to the first man she saw and said, ‘Do you know Seth Roach?’
‘You looking for him?’ He leered, revealing brown teeth, and took her hand. ‘I just seen him round the corner. Come along and I’ll show you.’
She pulled her hand free and strode on. She wanted desperately to get back in the taxi and go home to Caroline’s, but she’d already failed Tara and she couldn’t fail Sinner too, so she tried three more passers-by, and finally found a man who said, ‘Yeah, I know him. Haven’t seen him, but if he’s anywhere he’s probably in Dabrowski’s.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Dabrowski’s pub. That’s where all the Premierland lads have gone.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Cannon Street Road,’ he said – and when it was obvious that she didn’t have any idea where that was, he gestured with his thumb and added, ‘Few streets down on the right.’
‘Thank you very much.’
After several minutes she found the pub, which had no sign. Dozens of people had overflowed into the street outside, and she endured several wolf-whistles and a pinch on the bottom as she made her way through; then, inside, there was no space to move, and a belligerent song was being sung in an interestingly atonal mode, so she had no choice but to stand where she was and shout at the top of her voice, ‘Does anyone know Seth Roach?’ After she’d shouted it three times the song diminished a little, and suddenly she felt as if every single person in the pub were staring at her. (She’d never been anywhere like this before, and as tremulous as she did feel, there was something exhilarating and libidinous about the crowdedness of the place, the sweat and beer and unforced jubilation all sloshing around under its low wooden ceiling. She thought of how commonplace her summer adventure with Sinner would probably seem to any of these men and women. And the bold, unruly, port-swilling boys her friends gossiped about at balls, the Wykehamists and Etonians who were ‘really wild, really too wild’: here, they wouldn’t last long enough to recite their middle names.) ‘Does anyone know Seth Roach?’ she said again, trying to keep her voice steady. Several people shouted back what she took to be some unintelligible expletive and all her confidence fled her, until she realised with relief that it was not an expletive but a name. ‘Frink? Frink?’ they were saying.
At last, Frink was produced from the back of the pub.
‘Yes, miss?’ He held a pint of beer in each hand.
‘You know Seth Roach.’
‘I knew him, indeed. But I ain’t seen him in over a year. You a friend of his?’
Evelyn was deeply grateful to this kind-looking man for asking that question without a hint of sarcasm or incredulity. ‘He’s dead,’ she said.
Frink’s face fell, but he didn’t look very surprised by the news. ‘Well. That’s a sorry thing to hear. I do thank you for coming to tell me.’
‘How old was he?’
‘Would have been eighteen, if I remember right. Does his mother know?’
Evelyn had never thought about Sinner having parents, any more than one thinks about a thunderstorm having parents. ‘No. But I need your help.’
‘With the funeral? I’ll put in what I can,’ said Frink, but a bit sceptically this time – Evelyn didn’t look poor.
‘It’s not that,’ said Evelyn, and she did her best to explain about Sinner’s terrible debt to her brother. He listened with a frown. ‘Is there anything you can do to help us?’ she finished. ‘To help him?’
‘You mean, bury a body so no one can find it?’ said Frink. ‘That’s not my line of work, miss. Never has been. I’m sorry.’
‘You must know somebody.’
‘It’s a dirty business.’
‘He hasn’t been murdered or anything like that.’ She recalled with shock that the word ‘murdered’ referred to something that was now actually within the range of her experience.
‘Still, it’s not just a matter of—’
‘Listen to me. I have him in a taxi at the end of the road.’
‘You what?’
‘If you don’t help us, then my friend and I will have to do it ourselves. And something will go wrong, and someone will find out, and I don’t know what will happen to the two of us, but more importantly my brother will get Sinner, and if only you knew how desperately Sinner didn’t want that to happen. …’
Frink stopped her. ‘All right. All right. I do know someone. And as luck would have it – pretty bad luck, I’d say – he’s here. But he’s not a bloke you want to get involved with. You understand me?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s on your own head.’
‘Yes.’
‘Come on, then.’
Frink led her through the crowd to the back room of the pub, which, having no bar of its own, was not quite as crowded. Inside, a buxom girl in a torn dress giggled as she danced a parody of a waltz with a stocky man in a suit. Frink tapped the man on the shoulder.
‘All right, Albert. There’s a lady here for you to meet.’
‘Happier words were never spoken,’ said Kölmel. After apologising with exaggerated politeness to the buxom girl, he turned to Evelyn. ‘What’s your name, precious?’ he said.
‘Evelyn Erskine.’ His gaze alone was ten times worse than the pinch on the bottom outside the pub. Even the most loathsome boys at Lady Molly’s dances merely looked at her as if they wanted her, but Kölmel looked at her as if she already belonged to him and he was proud of it. She imagined it must work on quite a lot of women.
‘Erskine?’ he repeated.
‘Yes.’
Kölmel smiled and started to say something, but then stopped, as if he’d decided to hold that particular information in reserve for the moment. Instead he said, ‘What can I do for you?’
Three hours later, she was climbing up the treacherous slope of the rubbish dump on Back Church Lane. Darkness had fallen, with not much of a moon, and she was almost glad that she couldn’t see where she was putting her feet. She carried a spade, and beside her, carrying a mallet, was Tara, and behind them, bearing Sinner’s body rolled up in a blanket, were Frink and Kölmel.
‘You serious about this place?’ said Frink, who had a scar, Evelyn had noticed earlier, on the palm of his right hand. ‘I thought we’d go out somewhere in the middle of nowhere. This is in the middle of … everything.’
‘Yes, I’m fucking serious,’ said Kölmel. ‘Don’t mean to be indiscreet, but I used to use this place all the time in the old days. You go out in the middle of nowhere, you usually get nicked on the way.’
‘Kids play here, you know.’
‘Don’t worry, I bury ’em deep. Kids shouldn’t be here, anyway. Unhygienic.’
Earlier, a handful of cash from Evelyn and a quiet word from Kölmel had been enough to make sure that the taxi driver wouldn’t tell anyone about the drunkard in his car who never seemed to snore or sober up. Now, with a combination of mallet and spade, Frink and Kölmel began to gouge a space out of the festering debris. Occasionally there would be a clang as they hit a bed frame or a bicycle or some other big skein of rusty metal, and they would have to put down their tools to haul it out of the way. The two men kept digging in this strange soil until their heads were level with Evelyn and Tara’s feet, and then for quite a while afterwards. Finally, when Kölmel was satisfied that the
hole was deep enough, they climbed up out of it, panting with exertion, and got ready to hoist Sinner’s body down into the stinking entropic unconscious of the city. Their trousers were splattered with some sort of poisonous black ichor.
‘No, please, wait,’ said Evelyn.
‘What’s the matter, precious?’ said Kölmel. ‘No use blubbing. You know the old Yid curse? “Vi tsu derleb ikh im shoyn tsu bagrobn.” “I hope I outlive you long enough to bury you.” That’s good sense.’
‘I just want to. …’ Evelyn knelt down beside Sinner and pulled the blanket aside. She checked his fingers for rings and his chest for a locket or a good-luck charm, but there was nothing, so she went through his pockets, praying for even the most trivial souvenir. All she found was a crumpled-up piece of paper, and it was too dark to make out what was written on it, so she stuffed it into her purse. If she could have taken a lock of hair without the others seeing, she thought, she would have. But then she felt pathetic, because the urge reminded her of Morton, who had saved a ribbon that had fallen from her hair the very first time they met, and had often reminisced about how it was obvious even then that they would fall in love, when in fact she knew perfectly well he had only started talking to her because he’d just been humiliated by a prettier girl whose name she couldn’t now remember, and had only picked up the lost ribbon because it was an easy way to start flirting. Suddenly, Evelyn felt desperate that her memories of Sinner should never get a squirt of disinfectant or a coat of paint; that in ten years’ time she should not think of their time together as any less trivial, their conversations any less stilted, their coupling any less clumsy, his sentiments any less obscure, his death any less contemptible, than they really were; that all those fascinating dissonances not be transmuted into bland harmonies; that she should never give in to time, which was not the great healer, as everyone said, but the great bowdleriser; that as one of only four people in the world who knew where Sinner would rest, she should not betray the jagged truth of his life by writing herself into a beautiful tragic romance.