‘What?’
‘The coppers have still got the motor car,’ Doris said. ‘They still don’t know who killed them boys.’
‘No?’ I hadn’t said anything to her about what had happened to me, but I imagined that the Duchess and the girls would have told her what they knew.
‘No.’ But she had no more need to discuss what had happened up in the forest than I did. ‘So that just leaves us with the horse-drawn,’ Doris continued. ‘But we managed with the horses until very recently, didn’t we?’
‘Yes.’ Except that until September 1940 death wasn’t as popular as it was by November, not even in this poor manor.
‘We’ll be all right,’ Doris said. ‘I’ll go and speak to Uncle Wolfie tonight, and if you have a word with Arthur we can do the funeral that’s down for eleven o’clock tomorrow morning. Look.’
She showed me the booking in her neat hand. It said, ‘Queenie Ramm, 11 a.m., Haig Road to East London C’try’. It didn’t look like a difficult job – I knew it wouldn’t be a big do. Queenie had died the previous week after a long struggle against TB. She’d been in her eighties and left only a widowed daughter, who was childless.
‘Well, all right, then,’ I said, after a bit. ‘Send Arthur up, and if you can speak to your uncle Wolfie . . .’
‘Smashing!’ She actually smiled. If nothing else came of this plan, it was all right by me if it made Doris smile. ‘I’ll go and tell him right now.’
She went to take off downstairs like a rocket but I managed to stop her. ‘Doris!’
She turned back, her face tense and grey again.
‘Nothing,’ I said, with a smile. ‘Thanks, Doris.’
‘Thank you, Mr H.’ And then she was gone. People react to tragedy in so many different ways it’s impossible to say what they will or will not do. Doris was dealing with her loss by throwing herself into her job. She didn’t want to be at home and she didn’t want to talk about Alfie. That I had wanted to speak to her about him was more to do with me than her, and I was glad now that I hadn’t.
I waited for Arthur to appear, all six foot odd of him, and lit up a Woodbine to pass the time. I still wondered about him. I looked into the little fire Nan had lit for me in my fireplace and found myself worrying again that I had no wand to give the boy. And this time it wasn’t a niggle as it had been before: it was a deep, superstitious worry that lack of the wand could only spell disaster for Hancocks. After all, ever since my grandfather, Francis, had started the business back in 1885, the wand had been with whoever had conducted. Just knowing it was no longer around made me feel naked. It was then that I began to think about the Nail the Gypsies prized and where it might have ended up. In a way the Nail and the wand were the same: relics with meaning and therefore power over those who believe in them. That the Nail had no significance for me didn’t mean I couldn’t feel something of it. I’d felt something when Lily had had her first vision; I’d felt terrible superstitious fear when Stojka had used his relic to murder Mansard. I just couldn’t connect any of that to God. Like my wand, such things should be free of any explanation or reason. That they just
are
is a mystery, and maybe that’s the whole point.
But I was far from at peace with what had happened to me, and the whole affair was not to be put completely to rest just yet. Even with a war on, our police still have a duty to solve murders, and the Epping Forest Business, as I believe the thing is called these days in copper circles, had brought them a lot of dead bodies, eleven in total, that had not been killed by bombs. They took it very seriously indeed and, as I was soon to see for myself, just because I’d been shot it didn’t mean they wouldn’t come back to me for further explanation.
It wasn’t Arthur who walked up our stairs after Doris had gone but Inspector Richards.
‘Well, Mr Hancock,’ Inspector Richards put his trilby hat on his lap as he sat down in the chair at the side of my bed, ‘what can I say?’
There was an edge to his manner that I didn’t remember him having when he’d seen me up at Whipps Cross. Maybe I was only noticing it now that I was so much better. Or maybe it was new, and if it was, what lay behind it?
‘Mr Richards?’
‘I have succeeded in discovering the bodies of the Gypsy Lee family, Horatio Smith and some other character no one seems to want to talk about,’ Richards said. ‘They were in an area of the forest known as Woodford Wells. Apparently, the Gypsies had already found them.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The Gypsies found me there. That’s why I’m alive.’
‘Yes, I know,’ he replied. ‘Some Gypsy kid brought you in to Whipps Cross. The Gypsies didn’t try to hide the site from us. Didn’t exactly tell us about it either, though.’
‘I’m sorry I wasn’t able to tell you in the hospital,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t think straight then and, anyway, I had no real idea about where I was at the time. Woodford Wells is news to me. But the Gypsies didn’t tell you?’
‘No, the poor bloody coppers had to work it out for theirselves yet again.’ He shook his head. ‘Gyppos – I’d already asked them to tell us what they knew and they’d shook their heads like they was all Mutt and Jeff. Then when the bodies were found, there are the selfsame Gyppos sitting around looking at them!’ His speech was much more London than it had been before. ‘Would you credit it?’
I explained, as far as I could, the Gypsies’ views about dead bodies and how greatly they feared them.
When I’d finished Richards said, ‘The Gyppos, they say, know nothing about what happened to the Lees and the others. I asked them about this Stojka fella you told me about and they all said they didn’t know what I was talking about.’
‘The unknown body is Stojka,’ I said. ‘The MPs were looking for him in the forest. Ask what’s left of Mansard’s group.’
‘Oh, I’ve already done that so I’m in no doubt that the body is Stojka’s. It was obvious the Gyppos were lying. But there are some other problems, Mr Hancock. I’d be telling an untruth to you if I said that there weren’t.’
He offered me a fag from his packet of Players Weights, which I took.
‘You see, you are the only person who’s said anything to us about this mysterious Nail of Christ article. You’re also one of only two people who survived whatever happened up there in the forest.’
‘Yes, Han—Miss Jacobs survived,’ I said.
‘Yes, and Miss Jacobs has told us how brave you were, Mr Hancock, in trying to stop Mansard and his men arresting Stojka. How you prevented the MPs keeping the Gypsies, who were hiding him, at bay. She didn’t put it like that, of course.’ He leaned towards me and said something that came as a shock to me, ‘Mansard was doing his duty. Stojka was a Nazi.’
‘No! No, he can’t have been! That’s not right.’
‘Sergeant Williams came and told you about Martin Stojka and why he was wanted by the authorities.’
‘Sergeant Williams was killed by Captain Mansard. That other sergeant of Mansard’s told me. Williams found out that Mansard and his sergeant were Nazi sympathisers and went to see Lily Lee to tell her to be on her guard and not let on about Stojka’s whereabouts to Mansard. Williams was going to come to you, the police, but before he could do that Mansard and his men killed Williams and Lily to silence them. Mansard put the knife into Williams’s dead hand to make it look as if he had killed Lily Lee.’
‘Did he? Dr Craig – I believe you’ve met him – has given his opinion that the killer of Lily Lee had to be Williams. He wanted relations with the girl, she wouldn’t have it, so he killed her. Then he killed himself.’
‘No . . . No. Dr Craig needs to look at his evidence again and in the light of what that sergeant told me.’
Richards shrugged. ‘Maybe he does, although the doctor is certain Williams killed the girl, Mr Hancock. That’s what’s written down in black and white for all to see. Dr Craig even thinks that Captain Mansard was trying to protect Sergeant Williams – or, rather, his memory. The captain himself seemed to think, or wanted to think, that one of the Gypsies had killed the girl.’
I was feeling shaky now, so as soon as I’d put out the fag he had given me, I immediately took one of my own. The story of what had happened in the forest, what had been said and believed, was changing in front of my eyes. It made me wonder whether I had got all my facts right, whether I had had
any
handle on what had been real and what hadn’t.
‘Mr Hancock, I think you’ve been taken in by these Gyppos,’ Richards said. ‘Miss Jacobs has told us there was a lot of talk about some superstitious rubbish between you and the Gypsies. She says you weren’t completely took in, in her opinion, and to your credit. She saw Stojka attack Mansard and one of his boys shoot the Gypsy in his defence.’
‘Mansard’s boys shot the Lees,’ I said. That absolutely was and had to be true. ‘They executed those people!’
Richards was beginning to give me the kind of look people gave our Stella just after her house was bombed out. ‘No, no, Mr Hancock,’ he said. ‘The Gypsies were threatening the Military Police. There was no execution. Dr Craig has inspected the site and the bodies, and he is convinced that the Gypsies were killed with just cause. The MPs had no choice.’
My heart was pounding. ‘It wasn’t like that,’ I said. ‘The Gypsies were unarmed! How could they have hurt anyone? I was there! Is Dr Craig mad or—’
‘Mr Hancock, Military Policemen have been murdered!’
‘Gypsies have been murdered!’
‘How many more times?’ he shouted. ‘The Gypsies were hiding a Nazi! These people killed our boys – some of them in your car!’
‘Does Miss Jacobs, who was in the car, after all, say that the Gypsies killed the MPs?’ I asked. Hannah had asked me not to talk about any Gypsies going out to pursue or intercept my car when I was back in the hospital. I wondered, with good reason, what she was saying about it now.
Richards was brought up short by this, or so it seemed. He paused for a moment, taking a deep breath. Then he said, ‘Well, no, no, she didn’t say anything about Gypsies. She ran away before anything happened. I think she knows it was wrong now.’
‘Why?’
‘The MPs were only trying to help her.’
‘No, they weren’t,’ I said. ‘I told you, they took her captive!’
‘We believe they took your car to go and get help for you.’
‘They tried to kill me. Miss Jacobs knows. Ask her!’
He didn’t answer. Whatever Hannah may or may not have said, I knew she had to have told the coppers she’d been taken against her will by the MPs.
‘They shot me, those “boys”,’ I said. ‘And that is something that can’t be argued with.’
‘Can’t it?’
I stopped breathing temporarily. Now I was frightened. I knew what he was going to say next and it terrified me.
‘You aren’t always aware of what’s going on, Mr Hancock,’ Inspector Richards said. ‘Not that I’m criticising. I was in the Great War myself and I saw a lot of men go through . . . what you go through. It’s . . .’
‘I’m not mad, Inspector Richards,’ I said, as calmly as I could. I was gazing at the statues of the saints on top of the tallboy in the corner of the room now to distract myself from the copper.
‘No one is saying you are, Mr Hancock,’ he replied. ‘But you know that accusing our boys of anything treasonable is a serious business. We have to be very sure.’
‘And you’re not sure, are you?’
I heard him sigh. ‘Mr Hancock, I am only anticipating what others will say. Your story, you have to admit, is fantastic, and that you and Miss Jacobs are telling it, well . . .’
A madman and a whore. No it didn’t look promising, and in our new world of censorship in the name of morale, I could see his point. After all, how reporters on the
Daily Sketch
would tell the country about Nazis in the King’s armed forces I didn’t know. But the point, of course, was that they wouldn’t, because they, like the rest of the country, would never know.
‘Don’t you want to find out who killed the four MPs?’ I asked.
‘Well, of course I do,’ Richards said. ‘I’m not giving up on those Gypsies, you know.’
‘But why would
they
kill the MPs, eh?’
‘Because, like it or not, we have to accept that one of the MPs, Williams, killed the Lee family’s daughter. And, anyway, we’ve witnesses saw some Gypsies in Whipps Cross Road.’
‘Yes, but Hannah said she
didn’t
see any Gypsies on Whipps Cross Road, didn’t she? And she was in my hearse.’
‘Well, either she’s lying or the Gypsies came along after she had gone. I’d ask her again if I knew where she was.’
Now I looked at him.
‘Miss Jacobs left her digs in Mrs Harris’s house in Canning Town yesterday afternoon,’ Richards said. ‘According to Mrs Harris, she left no forwarding address. We’re searching for her now.’
I felt as if I’d been kicked in the chest. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Why would I lie?’ he replied. ‘She paid all her rent up to yesterday, then left. She took a suitcase with her. She didn’t tell Mrs Harris where she was going, except that she was staying outside London.’
‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘No, that’s impossible.’ Hannah didn’t know anyone outside London. Beyond Dot Harris and the other ‘old girls’, as she calls them, in the house in Rathbone Street there was only myself and her family. But she didn’t get on with her parents so she couldn’t be with them. I was panicking now and couldn’t think straight to imagine where she might be.
‘You’ll have to give us a proper statement soon, you know, Mr Hancock, especially if Miss Jacobs doesn’t reappear, so I’d think carefully about what really happened that night,’ Richards said, as he rose to leave. ‘We all need to pull together for the good of the war effort, don’t we? Can’t have no frightening stories – might make people nervy. Anyway, I’d best let you rest now.’
He left, and I stared into the fire once again. I suppose I was looking for comfort. But I didn’t find any. Hannah had gone and I didn’t know why, not for certain. Gypsies had to be involved somewhere because she’d been so insistent that I fail to mention them to the coppers. They’d had a hand in the deaths of Sarge and the others, but not for the reason that Richards thought. The Gypsies were not Nazi sympathisers – that was ridiculous. Unless I was wrong. I did, I admit, begin to wonder about what I had seen and done in the forest. I know I don’t always see and hear what others do, yet the fact remained that Sarge and the others had talked about that Nail, they had shot me and taken my motor car. However much Richards wanted the ‘boys’ to be innocent, they weren’t. And as for making people ‘nervy’, surely if Nazis were active either in London or on the coast people needed to know. Well, I thought so anyway, even though I knew that the government view was probably quite different. What people know, even now, is laughable. It’s just like the first lot in that respect. ‘Careless talk costs lives’ but so does no talk at all. Not talking means not knowing and that can be very dangerous.