After the Mourning (22 page)

‘You don’t.’

‘No. So why don’t you take the nail yourself and—’

‘It’s in the Captain’s eye!’ The watery early-morning sun had risen considerably now and by its light I could clearly see Sarge cringe. ‘I ain’t pulling that out!’ He pointed to Mr Lee. ‘He can do it. Seems he wants to.’

‘And then have you take it off him and kill us all anyway? No, Mr Lee,’ I said, ‘don’t do it. Don’t—’

The muzzle of a pistol jammed against the side of your head will generally shut you up and Sarge’s weapon had the appropriate effect on me.

‘You ain’t giving the orders here, Mr Hancock,’ Sarge said. ‘That’s for me to do.’

‘Leave him alone!’ I heard Hannah squeak.

But no one took any notice of her. ‘Get the fuckin’ thing out of the captain’s face, Gyppo!’ Sarge said to Mr Lee. ‘Then lay it on the ground so I can pick it up meself.’

‘And if I won’t?’ Mr Lee was looking at me in a way that told me he had understood what I’d wanted him to do, which was to confound and confuse these already edgy men by playing on their squeamishness, and their distrust of him – another Gypsy with his hands on that nail.

‘Sarge, this is all going wrong!’ the lad called Jonesy said, panicking.

‘Shut up, Private! Let me think,’ Sarge said now, visibly sweating with the strain.

‘Jonesy’s right,’ Hanson chipped in, his voice shaking with what sounded to me like terror. ‘We can’t kill all these people and get away with it! Captain said all we had to do was get that nail thing for him and he’d give us money. No one said nothing about killing.’

‘Oh, don’t be such a bloody baby, Hanson! You knew that the Captain killed the girl and you weren’t too upset about that. You even knew about Williams.’

‘Ah, yes, Lily and Sergeant Williams,’ I said. Sarge’s gun was still jammed against my temple but I felt I had to carry on keeping him mentally off-balance. Also, I was curious. Mansard had never explained why he’d killed the Gypsy girl and his sergeant. ‘Why did the captain kill them?’

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘Why do you not want to tell me if you’re going to kill me anyway?’

Sarge wiped some sweat off his brow, then said, ‘Fair enough.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Williams found out the girl knew about Stojka, heard her talking about him to her brother-in-law. So, anyway, the girl, she fancied Williams a bit, talked to him and that. He was a good-looking bloke, he got close. He convinced her he was in love with her, playing her, like. You know how it is with red-blooded geezers.’

‘He was in love with her,’ I heard Mr Lee say. ‘He was.’

‘The girl liked him and told him Stojka was special, but she wouldn’t tell Williams where the German was. He told the captain as much as he’d found out – he trusted him then – and the captain told Williams to try and find out more. But then Williams heard me and the captain talking one day, about the nail and Hitler and the money we was going to make. Couldn’t hide how cold he was towards us after that, so we followed him. He went to see her first, Lily, to warn her. After that, we heard him say, he was going to the coppers. Left us with little choice. Captain killed the girl, I killed Williams, and then the captain put his knife in Williams’s hand. It weren’t difficult.’ He took the gun away from my head now and said to Private Jones, ‘Get that nail for us, will you?’

The boy didn’t answer, just stood there with a dead white face. A few birds were singing.

‘Christ!’ Sarge sighed, then reached into his battledress pocket for a fag. ‘Don’t you blokes want to make some ackers?’

Neither of the two privates, still with their guns trained on us, answered.

‘You’ll have to come with me, whatever we do,’ Sarge said. ‘So you might as well put your backs into it and help me make some money. You’ve just killed some people, for Christ’s sake! Now, let’s get this fucking thing Hitler wants and get out of here!’

I sensed, rather than saw, the two privates make up their minds to do as he asked, so I said, ‘But how are you going to get it to Hitler?’

‘Oh, don’t you worry about that,’ Sarge said, and gripped me hard around my throat. ‘Captain had that all arranged.’ He let go of me and said to his men, ‘All right, Jonesy, you drag the captain’s body into that hearse and we’ll deal with his eye later. Must be dead by now, mustn’t he.’ He looked back at me. ‘Handy coffin in the back we can put him in, ain’t there? You,’ he said to Horatio, ‘help Jonesy.’

Private Jones and Horatio picked up Captain Mansard’s body and loaded it into the shell in the back of my hearse. Sarge went on about how ‘handy’ it was to have my motor at his disposal, while Hannah, Mr Lee and I looked on with, in my case, mounting anxiety. As soon as Sarge and his blokes had put the captain away, the four of us would be of no use to him. Not a ruthless man in the way I think Mansard had been, but I recognised Sarge’s type of pitiless greed. He came, I imagined, from Canning Town or the Island or some other place where kids walk about in Salvation Army jumpers and the only uncle they know is the one who lives in the shop with the three brass balls over the door. Not that I think poverty can be an excuse for killing, it can’t, but it can and does explain some people, like Sarge.

Once Horatio was back with us again, we were all made to go and stand by Mr Lee, whose dead wife, children and son-in-law were on the ground behind his back.

‘Making a neat pile?’ I asked Sarge, as he and his two colleagues stood before us with their weapons at the ready.

‘It ain’t personal,’ he said, ‘but if you live we might not have time to get to the coast.’

I wanted to make some sharp comment about Sarge meeting Hitler in Brighton for a walk around the Pavilion and an ice-cream from the stop-me-and-buy-one man. But I knew that even if I did have to die, I could try to save Hannah. Sarge and Jonesy took aim.

I put one hand out in front to try to stop them. ‘Let Hannah live!’ I blurted. ‘Take her with you!’

‘H? No!’

‘If you get into difficulty with the police you could use her as a hostage,’ I said. And then, laughing hysterically at the madness of what for me was the last clutched straw, I added, ‘Take her with you. Use her . . . She . . . let her live . . .’

‘No!’ Hannah said. ‘Go with them? I’d rather die!’

I began to weep. ‘Hannah, this is nothing to do with you. You must live . . .’

‘I don’t want to!’ Her eyes were full of tears too, smudging what little remained of her carefully put-on funeral makeup. ‘Not without you!’

I saw in her eyes what I had always known anyway, but I wanted her to say it to me before one or both of us died.

I put out my arms to her. ‘Say it, Hannah, that you love me.’

‘I . . .’ She moved into my grasp but was violently jerked away from me. Private Hanson dragged her out of the firing line by her neck and pushed her toward an amazed Sarge. ‘I—’

‘Bloody hell, Hanson!’

‘I can’t kill a woman!’ the private said. He was little more than a boy, really. Then he just smiled weakly at Hannah.

‘You didn’t have a problem with that Gypsy!’ Sarge snapped back, referring, I imagined, to Hanson’s part in the death of Lily Lee.

‘No, I know, but . . . Well, that was a Gypsy and . . . Sarge, maybe the undertaker fella’s right about a hostage . . .’

As I’ve said before, Sarge wasn’t exactly an evil man, so I knew he didn’t take pleasure in killing us. I saw him think about what Hanson had said and then, perhaps in spite of his better judgement, I saw him shrug and say to Hanson, ‘Well, put her in the hearse, then. But if she gets lairy she’s all yours.’

‘You fucking—’ Hannah spat and cursed as the young boy dragged her towards the car. ‘H! H!’ I turned my face away from her now and sighed with something like contentment as I heard the two remaining MPs take aim at us. I knew this routine of old.

First Mr Lee dropped in an explosion of blood, followed by Horatio, who died in the selfsame way. Not a word or a look passed between any of us, not even an expression of friendship, comfort or goodbye. We were simply things to be slaughtered so others could get money. It wasn’t personal or cruel or even really that frightening. My only regret, as everything went black around me, was that I hadn’t heard Hannah say she loved me.

Chapter Fifteen

I
n all the time I’d spent in Flanders not once had I ever been shot. I was gassed, twice, and wounded with a bayonet to the left-hand side once, but until that moment in the middle of Epping Forest I had never taken a bullet.

It hurt. Once I’d come round from what must have been a faint, the pain smashed into me like a tank. I couldn’t scream, though. I couldn’t make any sound until the hearse had driven away, and for several endless seconds Sarge and his boys hung around. Although I thought of nothing at the time, I imagined later it was because whoever was driving had had to work out how to operate the Lancia before he took it on the road. But eventually it went, and when I was sure I couldn’t hear it any longer I let out a long, low growl.

In a way I was angry with whoever had shot me for not finishing me off. Surrounded only by the dead, I looked at the place where the pain was coming from, which was on my right-hand side, just under my ribs. It would match up with my left side now, I thought grimly, provided I survived, which didn’t look possible. I’d been shot in the stomach, the same as Horatio, who was clearly dead, and unlike Mr Lee who had obviously been shot in the head. Why the different methods, I neither knew nor cared. I just felt the pain, which had sent even all thought of Hannah from my mind. There was blood everywhere. If I’d tried to stand I would have slipped over in it. I remember that I looked at the hand with which I’d attempted to cover my own wound once and found that as soon as I took it away I could hear my blood leaving my body in a powerful stream. I felt dizzy and sick, and I knew, with a certainty I’d never experienced in the Great War, that I was going to die. There, on that leafy forest floor, surrounded by dead Gypsies. I wondered, as the lights went out in my head, what people would make of the scene and whether what had really happened there would ever be discovered.

I went into that darkness in silence, but a voice brought me – I have to say reluctantly – back into the watery light of dawn.

‘Oh, my, he ain’t
mullo
—!’

It was a woman’s voice and to me it was just nonsense. Only when I could see again did I think I knew what was going on.

‘Lily.’

Lily Lee had come to greet me as I made my journey into the land of the dead. It just went to show that heaven was nonsense. I, an atheist, was there with Lily Lee, a girl who had, to some, mocked God, Jesus and the Holy Virgin.

‘No, ’tain’t Lily,’ the very Lily-like girl said. ‘I’m Beauty.’ And then she began to cry.

I thought how appropriate that word was for her when I began to sink again. The last thing I heard was a man’s voice: ‘We must get him to
drabalo
Mary. Ain’t no time for crying.’

As a rule I don’t get drunk. There’s quite enough going on in my head without adding booze to the mixture. But drunk was how I felt as I gazed up into the face of someone so old and dry they could have been either male or female. I even had the taste of booze on my tongue: brandy.

The person said, ‘It’s going to hurt,
gaujo
. There’s nothing except the brandy that I can do about that.’

And then it was as if my right-hand side melted into flames. In fact, there was a strong glow from firelight dancing on the roof of the tent I had somehow come to be in. And because this time I didn’t seem capable of passing out I soon saw other things in that dank little space. As I said, there was a fire and a person I could now see was a woman, but there was a man too, whom I recognised from Mr Lee’s fireside gatherings. I tried to speak to him, to tell him it wasn’t me who had killed his friends and neighbours, but he said, ‘You be quiet now and without worry. We’m know what you done and what you never.’

My eyes were fixed on two big buckets of steaming hot water when the pain came again. I screamed.

‘Here, bite on that,’ the old woman said, as she wedged a large clothes peg into my mouth. ‘’Twon’t help with the pain but it’ll give you summat to do.’

There wasn’t always anaesthetic available in the first lot. If supplies were low, our MOs would have to do things in what they called ‘the old-fashioned way’. If a bloke came in with his leg shattered or if a chap had taken a bullet, any surgery was done under booze if he was lucky, and nothing if he wasn’t. The woman the Gypsies called
drabalo
‘doctor’ Mary had been kind enough to give me booze for which I will always be grateful. But not at the time. As she hooked that bullet out of me with what felt like red-hot tongs I called her every name under the sun. To be fair, she swore back, but it took her such a long time to free me from that evil metal plug it’s hardly surprising.

Although I was screaming silently into my peg for most of the time, I was occasionally aware of other things outside myself. I knew, for instance, that the Lily-like girl called Beauty poked her head around the tent flap from time to time.

‘Yes, you look at the girl if it do make you feel better, my
rais
,’ Mary said, when she spied me staring at Beauty. ‘You look anywhere so long as it keep you living.’ And then she plunged something horrible inside my body and this time I did pass out.

When I came to, I found myself looking up into Beauty’s, rather than Mary’s, face.

‘We have to get him to a
gaujo
doctor now,’ I heard Mary say, through her phlegm-heavy throat. ‘He’m need to have blood and
gauje
medicine.’

In spite of the pain, I felt light and slow.

Beauty smiled at me and I thought,
I’m going to die
. This lovely young girl is smiling at me with pity in her eyes because I’m going to die. I opened my mouth to speak, but found it impossible. But by that time someone else, another man, was at Beauty’s ear, and as soon as he had finished speaking, she jumped up and walked over to Mary.