‘We’ve come to speak to Lily Lee’s family,’ I heard Ernie say. ‘Mr Hancock and I need to make arrangements with them for her burial. Where are what’s left of her family?’
Beauty, I now realised – more than even the first time I’d seen her – deserved her name. She was short, nicely plump and with features not unlike those of Mary Pickford, but she was as dirty and ragged as the two frightened boys who stood to either side of her.
Ignoring Ernie, Beauty said to me, ‘We’ll take you to
drabalo
Mary. She’ll be happy you’re alive.’
If I’d thought that was all we were going to learn from this meeting or that Mary was the only person we were about to see, I would have protested. But I felt there was more to it than that. As Ernie helped me follow the Gypsies into the forest I noticed that Beauty was scanning around her, as if to check that we were not being followed. Then when the sirens signalled the nightly raid her face reflected deep and abiding terror.
‘You wasn’t ready to die, I could tell,’ the old woman said to me, as she hung her kettle on the hook over her fire. This deep into the forest there was no one to enforce or even care about the blackout, or so it seemed. ‘But you needed the
gauje
medicine to help you on your way. I knew that.’
‘I – I owe my life to you,’ I said, panting as I spoke. We’d walked for what seemed like hours and I was done in.
She dismissed my thanks with a tut and a wave of one thin, dark brown hand.
‘We’ve come to find what remains of the Lee family,’ I said, as I let Ernie help me down on to the ground beside the old woman’s fire. ‘We need to bury Lily, Mr Sutton and I.’
Drabalo
Mary narrowed her eyes. ‘You want money?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Her – her parents are dead. I just want to do what’s right for her. I – I want to know what her family, her sisters, want me to do. Her parents and her brothers’ bodies can wait, but Lily must be buried quickly now.’
To the south of us came the distant flashes and bangs of the East End taking another hammering. I tried not to think about my family.
‘I – I also n-need,’ I said, ‘to know for myself whether you or anyone else from your camp saw my ladyfriend Miss Jacobs after all the shooting took place up at Woodford Wells.’
The old woman gazed across the fire at Beauty, who, some time before, had come to sit silently with us, and a couple of very young girls, who were also sitting on the cold, hard ground. The boys who had escorted us to the camp with Beauty had disappeared. But there were other tents besides those of Mary and Beauty, and other Gypsies too, men, women and children many of whom I recognised from the original camp. But by the light of their several fires, Mary’s included, I could see that they were more nervous than before. Some of their number had died and more, according to Inspector Richards, had been taken away by the police. I was about to speak again, to plead with Mary to help me, when I heard a low animal growl from somewhere rather too close for my comfort. Ernie, who had also heard it, gripped one of my arms.
Drabalo
Mary smiled and said, ‘Don’t worry, my
rais
, it’s only Bruno the bear. Old Eli have him now but he’m not so happy since his real master passed away. Bears is intelligent beasts. They know when things happen.’
‘Yes . . . Mary . . . Look, about that night . . .’
She smiled. ‘You know about the Fourth Nail, my
rais
. And I trust the Reverend as a man of God so we have to go right back to the beginning,’ she said.
Ernie, frowning, said, ‘Fourth nail?’
I hadn’t told him about the Nail. I hadn’t seen him for long enough to get into all that. To be honest, I’d had enough trouble telling the coppers and my family, in a much shorter version, about something that I knew had to be, in part, really just a story.
‘Oh, Reverend don’t know nothing?’
‘N-no.’
So Mary told him. Had he been an ordinary Church of England vicar, I’m sure he would’ve laughed. If my understanding is right, they don’t approve of relics and suchlike. They think it popish. But Ernie’s church is what they call ‘high’, which means it’s practically Catholic, so he was, I could see, very interested. And I must confess that
drabalo
Mary’s telling of Martin Stojka’s story sent a shiver up my spine, even though I knew it from before. It was, I suppose, confirmation to me that everything I had told the police was real.
The faces of old Gypsies frequently put me in mind of my own grandparents – the Duchess’s mum and dad. Lined and dry and tanned to the colour of old wood. And with the firelight and the flashes from the explosions peppering the docks illuminating her face, Mary had the look of a creature not just living in the forest but belonging to the trees.
When she’d finished her story there was a moment of silence before Ernie said, ‘So what happened to this Fourth Nail, after the military policemen drove away with Captain Mansard’s body?’
Drabalo
Mary didn’t answer him. Instead she turned to me and said, ‘My boy Joe took you up the
gauje
hospital that night and he left you to them.’
‘Yes, I know. But Joe wasn’t the only one away from the camp that night, was he?’ I said.
Mary exchanged another look with Beauty.
‘You’d seen what had happened to your Gentleman, the Lees and me, hadn’t you?’ I said to the girl. ‘I saw you go off with some others. I heard you talk about finding my car. What happened?’
Beauty’s lovely face folded in on itself and she began to cry.
‘Victory and Betty Lee was her dad and mum and them boys was her brothers,’ Mary said. ‘With Rosie and Lily gone, she’s the oldest now so she had the right. Took no pleasure in it, mind, as you can see.’
I’d thought that Beauty was a ghostly form of Lily when I’d first seen her. Now I understood. She was their sister. Now there was just her and, it seemed, the three almost identical little girls at her side.
‘What do you mean, “she had the right”?’ I asked. ‘The right to what?’
Mary was rolling herself a fag now, totally involved in it. It made me want one so I put my hand into my pocket for my Woodbines. I was about to light up when Ernie nudged me and put his hand out. I gave him a fag and lit it for him while Beauty dried her eyes. Then, without any preamble, she said, ‘We killed them, the soldiers. They wouldn’t give us the Nail so we – I killed them.’
I squinted at her, the better to appreciate her smallness. Sarge and his blokes had been big, armed men. ‘But you’re—’
‘I killed them,’ she repeated. ‘Coppers come and took away Danny Boy and Righteous and Job, but they never killed ’em. It was me.’
I turned to a still-confused Ernie and said, ‘She’s saying she killed those three MPs found murdered in my hearse. They were bristling with guns.’ I turned back to Beauty. ‘It just isn’t possible that you did that alone. The sergeant, so the coppers told me, was torn to pieces! Did you do that?’
Yet again Beauty and Mary exchanged a look.
‘That isn’t the whole truth, is it?’ I said. When they didn’t answer I decided to take a different tack. There was, after all, something of my own that I needed to know. ‘What about Hannah – Miss Jacobs? What was she doing while you were killing those men in my car?’
‘Job stopped your car,’ Beauty said. ‘Threw hisself on it, he did. Then the rest of us come, many of us, more’n the coppers will ever know.’
‘Yes, but they had guns!’ I said.
‘Yep, and Beauty, she had Bruno,’ Mary put in.
The girl blanched. ‘Mary!’
‘He has to know, girl!’ the old woman said. ‘He ain’t no
muskero
.’
‘Could get us
lelled
! Bruno put down!’
‘Nah!’
Drabalo
Mary looked at me and said, ‘You wouldn’t get old Bruno killed for what he done to them as took your lady, would you?’
I didn’t answer. Sarge had been torn to shreds, according to Inspector Richards. I wondered whether the bear had somehow understood that his master had been killed or whether Beauty and the others had maddened him.
‘Danny Boy brung your lady back to camp,’ Beauty said. ‘She didn’t see no killing.’
‘And then? What did Miss Jacobs do after that?’ According to Hannah, she had done some ‘business’ in the forest after she had escaped from my hearse. But her version of what had happened and Beauty’s account were already different from each other.
‘She stayed here with us,’ Beauty said. ‘Till ’twas safe for her to go. She ask a lot of questions and we telled her the truth.’ Her big eyes narrowed. ‘Why you want to know what she done?’
I looked at Ernie, who was gazing into the fire. Even without him and even though I knew he knew, I would’ve found it hard to talk about what Hannah does. But this time I had to. ‘She said she went with men in the forest.’ I spoke quickly and averted my eyes from everyone.
‘She telled you that?’
‘Yes.’ I looked up into the girl’s face again. ‘Well?’
‘And the coppers? She telled them that too?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, thank you, Jesus!’ I heard
drabalo
Mary say. ‘My goodness, but you’ve certainly got a good woman there, my
rais
! She’m a proper friend to Romany people, that lady!’
‘Hannah lied.’ I felt a lot of tension leave me all in one go.
‘Course!’ Mary laughed. At that minute I didn’t find it funny. ‘She a Jewish lady so she know the evil that has come in Germany. Our Gentleman, Mr Stojka, he tells of Romany people being buried alive in the forests there, he talks of Jews beaten to blood and bone on the streets.’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘Us, we don’t matter, but the Nail, well, that is power, and Mr Hitler he shouldn’t be having any more of that, now, should he?’
‘By power,’ Ernie began, ‘what do you mean? Does it produce miracles?’
I remembered the flash of light I’d seen as Stojka had taken the Nail out of his jacket and the suddenness with which it was embedded in Mansard’s eye. I shuddered.
‘The Nail gives power to those who have it,’ Mary said, ‘power of God, power over folk. But you shouldn’t use it if your heart is black. Then it will go bad and God and Jesus will be angry with you. It’s why the Stojka family always took care of the Nail. They was good folk, wanted nothing.’ She looked at me then. ‘Like your ladyfriend Miss Jacobs.’
‘Yes.’ I sighed. ‘But by not telling the police the truth about what happened to her that night, to protect you, I think she has become very frightened. She’s gone, the coppers say, to the country. She doesn’t know anyone outside London!’
‘No, but we do,’ Mary said. ‘And when the coppers let Danny Boy and the others go, she’ll get back home after a while. She didn’t like the coppers’ questions – or yours.’
‘So, you know where Hannah is?’ I said. I was open-mouthed with shock. ‘Why didn’t she tell me?’
‘Because she didn’t want you to have to lie,’ Mary said. ‘She’d asked you not to talk of Romany folk when you was in the hospital and she knew you didn’t like that. So she just trotted off from you without a word.’ She smiled. ‘She’s safe. She’s with travelling folk. The coppers really ain’t got nothing on our boys – who’ll never say a word – and they’ll have to let them free by and by. Then she’ll be home agin ’fore you know it.’
Many flashes in the sky were followed by the vibrations from those dropped bombs humming beneath us. For a moment the sky was almost as bright as daylight. If I’d had a full and unquestioning belief in their Holy Nail, then maybe I could have had an appreciation of how my life and the lives of many others had been either taken or turned upside-down because of it. Hitler was plainly very interested but, then, a madman like him would be. For me the Nail was something, like Lily’s visions, that I didn’t understand. Nevertheless I had to ask what I did next because I felt I deserved to know. ‘S-so where is the Nail now?’
Ernie stared eagerly at the two women.
‘Oh, it’s safe,’ Mary said. ‘Mr Hitler won’t get it now.’
‘But hasn’t the – the chain been b-broken?’ I said. ‘What I mean is, aren’t the Stojka family meant to look after the Nail? Without them, surely, it can’t be safe.’
Mary said nothing, watching only as what I knew, but until that moment had forgotten, dawned in my mind and showed itself on my face. As one of what Mr Lee had called Martin Stojka’s ‘own’, the Nail would let him, or presumably some other member of his family, look after it, as he’d said, ‘for a while’. And who among his family had survived the carnage at Woodford Wells? Who had been in the darkness of the forest when it happened?
‘You’re going to look after it until you can find a member of Stojka’s family, aren’t you?’ I said to Beauty Lee.
‘The Gentleman has brothers, dead now,’ the girl said, ‘but as for their
chavies,
we don’t know.’
‘There’s a sister too, Maria Stojka,’ Mary added. ‘Maybe when this war is over and that German devil and his generals are dead, Beauty and the girls and me, we can find that family again.’
‘And what if you can’t?’ I asked.
‘We will,’ Mary replied, with complete confidence in her voice.
‘What if we lose the war?’
‘That won’t happen,’ Mary said. ‘Ain’t the way the world works.’
I looked into the fire. The sky was dark again now and the drone of German bombers was moving out towards the east. Although the all-clear had yet to sound to let the city know the raid was officially over, I knew that it was. The bombers had come, done what they had to, and now they were going back to Germany again – for a little while. They, or others like them, would be back.
‘But we’re losing,’ I said. ‘We’re dying.’
‘Frank.’ I felt one of Ernie’s hands on my shoulder. ‘Frank, you have to believe . . .’
I gazed up into his clear blue eyes and I said, ‘I can’t.’
A movement across the other side of the fire caught my attention: Beauty putting one of her hands in her blouse. Normally I wouldn’t have noticed, but the girl leaned across the flames towards me and showed me something that lay in the palm of her hand.