After the Mourning (13 page)

Her eyes were grey, dry and dead, as if she herself had already gone beyond the normal state of living flesh. I had a cup of tea with her and she gave me a pilchard sandwich, just the one, that she had made especially for me. For the very poor, producing even a tiny piece of food is a source of pride so I had to eat it, even though I can’t stand tinned fish. Then she said, as I was leaving, ‘That girl up in Epping Forest supposed to have seen Mary – you seen that?’

I nodded.

‘More like the devil she’s seeing,’ Mrs Watts said, before she closed the door behind me. ‘It’ll end in tears, you mark my words.’

People say such things all the time and usually they mean nothing. But I got back to the shop and the feeling of doom increased when I found that my wand had been smashed to matchwood in the previous night’s raid. An undertaker’s wand, which to most laypeople is just a silver-tipped stick, is important to those in my line of work. Traditionally it was used as a weapon to keep ne’er-do-wells and grave robbers away from corpses. But there is an older interpretation: that the wand might be a magical implement designed to give spiritual as well as physical protection to the dear departed. I don’t believe that, but I inherited the wand from my father, who in turn had got it from his.

‘I remember Granddad saying he bought that from an old bloke who’d actually used it on Resurrection Men,’ Nan said, as she bent down to help me pick pieces of the shattered wand off the floor. ‘Beat them up he did as they tried to steal a corpse from its coffin for the doctors up the London Hospital.’

So-called Resurrection Men were rogues and toughs, who stole bodies for doctors to practise their anatomy skills on. Resurrection was rife in the nineteenth century, especially in the East End where there was a deluge of interesting deaths and diseases. The London Hospital at Whitechapel was always, unofficially, in the market for such corpses. Dad had told me that story about the wand and its history too. It fitted in well with my own beliefs about myself and my work. Only the dead can be innocent, in my opinion. The living kill, maim and torture their fellow creatures, and their inventiveness in this regard seems limitless. Not even the innocent dead are safe – I was in the trenches, and I know. But I have always done what I can to protect those I personally serve, and the wand had been a very important part of that.

‘What am I going to hold when I walk in front of a coffin?’ I asked Nan, as she folded bits of wood and silver into her full-length apron. ‘Dad would be shocked rigid. I’m going to look like anyone else.’

My sister Nan doesn’t smile or show affection very often, but this time she made an exception and put her hand on my shoulder. ‘Dad’s dead,’ she said softly, ‘so he don’t care. And as for you looking like anyone else, that just ain’t possible.’ She turned away then and later, when we talked again, it was of other things.

But the point had been made: who is like me around here? Some people say that I look like this or that Jewish actor, this or that Spanish or Italian boxer. But I don’t. I’m a tall version of the little Indian men who come selling carpets door-to-door, I’m like the Gypsies, Mr Lee, Horatio and his brother George Gordon. Jews are good at entertaining people, while Italians and Spaniards have a reputation for being romantic. I am none of those things. I’m an undertaker and now I was an undertaker without a wand. It made me want to cry.

I went out into the yard, where Arthur and Walter were cleaning the hearses.

‘Bad luck that is, Mr H,’ Walter said, with a sharp intake of breath when I told him about the shattered wand. ‘Very bad.’

‘Load of cobblers, more like,’ young Arthur countered.

‘Oi!’ The older man raised his hand to the youngster. ‘Bleedin’—’

‘Yes, Arthur, I don’t think you should talk to Walter like that,’ I said, as I pushed the older man’s hand down once again. ‘But I do hope you’re right and not him.’ I smiled. ‘What we need now is a spot of good luck, don’t we?’

But we, or rather I, didn’t get it. Later on that night, All Hallows Eve when the fearful dead walk abroad, Lily’s young brother Charlie came to take me to the forest where his sister’s body lay covered with blood. It was only after I’d seen Lily Lee in death that my story became for ever connected to that of the Epping Forest Gypsies.

I left the travellers with the body while I went off to find one of the Military Policemen. I was a bit surprised that they weren’t already clustered around Lily – they had seemed to be just about everywhere the previous day. But when I saw a large group of them staring downwards only a few hundred yards from where the Gypsy girl was lying, I learned the truth. If, however, they hadn’t told me that the body on the ground was that of Sergeant Williams, I would never have known. What lay there was little more than meat.

‘Made a terrible mess of himself,’ Captain Mansard said, with extreme distaste as he gazed down at the body, whose face had been shot clean off.

‘You think he killed himself?’ I asked. I was shocked: Sergeant Williams had seemed far too steady to do anything like that.

Mansard was a tall man, almost as large as me, but he still looked down his long, straight nose at a man in a top hat in the middle of a very dark night. ‘The .38 Smith and Wesson still in his hand may provide a clue,’ he responded harshly, as he waved the dull beam from his torch up and down Williams’s body. ‘Who the hell are you?’

I told him. I also told him that I hadn’t noticed the revolver in Williams’s right hand mainly because I was too busy looking at the Bowie knife in his left.

Mansard bent down to the knife, then called one of his men, a Private Jones, to come over.

‘You say this Lily girl is dead,’ Mansard said, as he watched Jones examine the knife in the hands of the corpse.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘From what I can see her throat was cut. I imagine whoever killed her used a knife.’

‘We mustn’t draw what could be incorrect conclusions, Mr Hancock,’ Mansard said. ‘There will have to be a proper investigation into these events.’

‘So the civilian police . . .’

‘One of my men is already on his way to the police station,’ Mansard said. ‘We can’t investigate Williams’s death ourselves. I expect the local constabulary will call in Scotland Yard. The death of a Military Policeman is not a thing to be taken lightly.’ He then asked to be taken to see Lily’s body. On the way, I explained to him what the Gypsies – or, rather, Lily’s brother-in-law, Edward, believed about her death: that it had been brought about by the angry spirit of her sister, Rosie. I also pointed out to him the significance of the date: All Hallows Eve.

‘Superstitious rot,’ Mansard said, as we pushed our way through heavy rain-soaked tree branches and cruel bushes already devoid of their foliage. ‘But given the girl’s new-found fame we will have to tread carefully. What the crowds of gawpers will do without their direct line to the Virgin Mary, I don’t know. Christ, what a mess!’

‘I done it. I killed her,’ Edward said, as soon as he saw Mansard. ‘I lied with Lily so Rosie’s
muló
killed her on the night when all spirits take their revenge.’ He wept bitterly and very loudly.

‘Don’t be so bloody stupid,’ the captain muttered, as he pushed roughly past the weeping Gypsy and made his way to the body. ‘The dead can’t get up and walk about, whatever the date may be, you stupid Aborigine!’

This annoyed me considerably, but I followed him anyway and, once he was hunkered down beside the corpse, I lowered my voice and said, ‘I think that someone might have interfered with her. You know, sexually . . .’ There was a lot of blood over her crudely exposed private parts. I remembered what I’d said to Hannah about her old mate David Green and how there was never any excuse for rape. There isn’t.

Mansard turned to me. Even by the thin light from his torch I could see that he was extremely pale. ‘We’ll wait and see what the civilian police say about that,’ he said. ‘It would be foolish to connect this – outrage with the death of my sergeant.’

‘Captain, the girl and Williams – he was attracted to her . . .’

‘Don’t tittle-tattle to me, Mr Hancock,’ Mansard hissed. ‘George Williams was a decent fellow. I won’t have gossip. Do you understand?’

I wanted to say something about the knife I’d seen in Williams’s dead hand, but I didn’t. He knew I’d seen it, and I imagined it wouldn’t occur to him to interfere with evidence. I was, in fact, proved wrong in this regard, but not in the way I had imagined.

I couldn’t take charge of Lily’s body until after the doctor the coppers had called had seen her. If he decided she’d been murdered I’d have to wait still longer. While the medic, who came from the local hospital at Whipps Cross, examined the body, I sat with Mr Lee, Edward and some of the other Gypsy men outside Mr Lee’s tent. From inside came frequent bouts of sobbing from Mrs Lee and Lily’s many younger brothers and sisters.

Although from time to time Edward tried to raise the subject of the ‘crime’ he had committed with Lily, and the possible appearance of Rosie’s unquiet spirit, Mr Lee cut him off: ‘What you and Lily done was wrong,’ he said, to the young man, ‘but even if Rosie’s
muló
did come it didn’t kill Lily – on All Hallows Eve or any other time. They loved one another. Rosie never killed Lily. If you’m telling the truth, Edward, Rosie let you lie with Lily when her illness meant she could not do so any more. Rosie’s
muló
could not be disquieted about what it already knew. No, the killing was done by a human hand. You foreigners, you’re that feared of the world unseen . . .’

‘But she, Lily, she saw Rosie’s
muló
! She told me, our little lady – it is what we, Lily and me, called Rosie, our lady, ours . . .’

‘Lily may have seen Rosie’s
muló
, but then maybe she did not,’ Mr Lee said, as he sucked hard at his blackened briar pipe. ‘A lot of people have ideas about what my Lily might have seen.’

But what Edward had said might make sense. Whatever Lily had seen, she might have interpreted as a ghost.

It was, I reckoned, about four a.m. by that time and, because winter was almost upon us, it was still very dark. But even through the gloom we could see people moving about beyond the MPs’ cordon. There had been a raid early in the evening on the previous day so it would have taken a lot of folk a long time to fall asleep. When Lily died it was possible that quite a number of people, apart from Williams, were up and about. As I watched various indistinct figures walk up and down in front of the Gypsy camp I wondered what those who had come to the forest for Lily’s visions would make of it once the whole of London knew that the girl was dead. Would it shake their faith in the Virgin Lily had seen? Would hundreds, maybe thousands, descend into despair now that the connection to the divine had gone?

‘Mr Lee,’ I said, as I lit up a smoke for myself, ‘have the coppers asked you what Lily was doing last night?’

‘Yes, and I told them, honestly,’ he replied. ‘We put her tent back up yesterday and after she’d eaten with us, she went back to it to sleep. She was alone, and that was the last time we saw her.’

From the space behind the tent I heard the low growl of Bruno, the bear, waking up. In the comparative silence of the grieving Gypsy camp it had a menacing edge.

‘What about the Head?’ I asked. It seemed barmy to ask in such a mystical way about something I knew had to be just another Gypsy bloke – albeit one I had never seen. But from past experience I knew that they all wanted to keep the illusion going – or, rather, I hoped they did. David Green, worthless as he was, had made me think with his story about the Arab in Alexandria and his ‘real’ disembodied head. The memory made me shudder with superstitious fear.

‘Oh, the Head was with her,’ Mr Lee said.

‘What? In her tent?’

‘Yes.’

‘So maybe the Head was, or could’ve been, the last person to see Lily alive. Have you told the police?’

Mr Lee shook his head. ‘The Head ain’t of this world.’

‘Yes, but if he, it . . .’ I took my fag out of my mouth and said, ‘Mr Lee, I don’t want to upset your beliefs but the Head isn’t real. It is, I know, an illusion.’

I spoke into silence. All of the Gypsies regarded me with hard, unforgiving eyes. Suddenly I felt very, very alone.

Mr Lee leaned towards my ear and said, ‘
Gauje
shouldn’t talk of what they don’t understand, undertaker. The Head is magic, special magic that came from far away and settled on my Lily. Now that she has gone, so has the Head. There is no point in trying to speak to something that is no longer here.’

I did wonder, and I could have asked, where the Head might have gone, but I didn’t. I couldn’t see anyone who looked like the Head I’d seen in Lily’s tent – I’d never seen anyone like that in the camp. Maybe the Head was magic, as they’d said, as the Arab’s head had been. But Lily had rested to one side of the Head, just as the trickster David Green had . . . I was trying to smile to myself about the barminess of all these thoughts when Captain Mansard came over to us and crouched next to me.

‘Dr Craig would like a word, Hancock,’ he said.

Mr Lee, who was sitting next to me, said, ‘What is it? What’s going on?’

‘Nothing yet,’ Mansard replied haughtily. ‘Hancock?’

‘I won’t be long,’ I said to Mr Lee.

I stood up and followed Mansard back to the clearing where Lily’s body had been discovered. The corpse was covered with a tarpaulin. The doctor from Whipps Cross, a short, red Scotsman, stood at its head.

‘The girl was certainly murdered,’ he said to me, without so much as an exchange of normal niceties. ‘I think she may have been violated and then killed, but I will need to confirm that. The indigent and those in entertainment were ever vulnerable to such outrages. I’ll have to take her body to the mortuary, if I can find some space for it. You can’t have her yet.’

‘You should tell her family,’ I said.

‘I will also have to take the body of Sergeant Williams,’ the doctor continued. ‘I have to see whether the wound to the girl’s throat could have been made by the knife in his hand.’