Paradise Court Page 18

  ‘Not a dicky bird, sir.’ The sergeant stared at the blank wall above Ernie’s head. ‘He’s all yours.’

  The inspector took a mottled blue fountain pen from his top pocket, preparing to make notes for the duration of the interview. ‘Does he know the charge?’

  The sergeant blinked. ‘No, sir. His sister says you have to take it slow. He ain’t all that bright.’

  ‘Oh my gawd.’ The inspector stared narrowly at Ernie. ‘He don’t look that bad to me. Come quietly, did he?’ The youth looked strong enough to cause trouble if so inclined. They were charging him with a nasty business; stabbing the girl at least ten or a dozen times and leaving her to bleed to death.

  ‘Like a lamb, sir. Better tell him the charge and get it over with.’

  ‘Easy does it. Now listen, son, you know why we brought you down here?’

  Ernie stared back. He shook his head. ‘I ain’t done nothing wrong.’

  ‘That’s for us to say. But you know about the girl what got killed at the music hall, don’t you? Daisy O’Hagan; she lived down your street.’

  Slowly Ernie nodded. Pain at the memory of Daisy creased his forehead into a frown.

  ‘And you was at the music hall yourself that night, wasn’t you?’ The inspector leaned across the table towards him. ‘You was seen, mate, so you gotta tell us exactly what happened. Take your time, no rush.’ He eased back in his seat and held his pen poised over the paper.

  The man’s voice sounded gentle. Ernie looked at him in surprise. ‘Rob took me to see Ett and Daisy again,’ he explained. ‘We went to meet up with them after the show, but I lost Rob. I never saw where he went.’

  The inspector glanced at the sergeant. ‘Robert Parsons, older brother, just gone and joined up,’ the uniformed man informed him.

  ‘Oh, very handy!’ The inspector raised his close-knit eyebrows. ‘Maybe we’d have got more sense out of him. Never mind. And what happened to you after you lost Rob, Ernie?’ he asked. ‘You’re on your way backstage to see Ett and Daisy, remember?’

  Ernie nodded, ‘Ett’s my sister,’ he offered obligingly.

  ‘Good, we’re getting somewhere, then. But I want you to tell me what happened next. You lose your big brother. Now what?’

  Ernie had begun to tremble. ‘I never saw him out in the street neither. There was people all around, but I never let them put me off. I just had to go and meet Ett and Daisy like we always do. That’s what Rob says, and then we walk home with them!’ For a moment his face cleared.

  The inspector sighed. ‘Very nice, son. But it ain’t like that on this particular night, is it? What happens when you finally get to the stage door? That’s the bit we’re interested in.’

  Drawn back to that moment, Ernie’s hands shook more violently against the bare table top. ‘I’m too late. They all gone home. Rob ain’t there. It’s dark and empty.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The alley. I got held up by all those crowds, see. I was late.’

  ‘Steady on, don’t panic. What d’you do then, Ern?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t remember.’ Ernie’s voice fell to a low whisper. ‘Rob won’t go home without me, I know that. He’s gotta be somewhere.’ He swallowed hard. ‘Rob gets mad with me when I get lost.’ He stopped, suddenly unable to go on.

  ‘So what did you do next, Ernie?’ The inspector concentrated on the boy’s face. The confession had hit a brick wall. Their suspect had gone blank on the crucial part. He glanced down to bring his notes up to date. ‘Go ahead, son, tell us.’

  ‘I don’t remember.’ Ernie’s blank face searched the room for clues.

  The inspector frowned. ‘You don’t expect us to buy that, do you, son?’

  Ernie raised his tethered hands to his forehead. ‘I know I’m in the right place to wait for Rob. But something’s not right. I don’t know. I’m looking everywhere, but Rob ain’t there. What am I gonna do now?’ He stood up, reliving the incident. ‘Then I don’t know what happens. Everything’s gone wrong. I don’t know!’

  ‘Easy, son, easy. What happened after you’d waited for a bit? Did you go inside? Who did you see?’

  ‘No! I don’t know!’

  ‘Did you go inside and find Rob? Or Daisy? Did you find her?’

  Ernie stood up and came to appeal to the inspector. ‘It ain’t right. Rob shouldn’t ’ve gone off, should he?’

  ‘Hang on a bit.’ The inspector’s voice hardened and he motioned the sergeant to come forward with a brown envelope. The sergeant tipped it and emptied a kitchen knife on to the table, then stood back. ‘Try thinking about this instead. Did you have this in your pocket that night, Ernie?’ He looked keenly at the suspect, devoid of sympathy. They’d reached the crux of the matter.

  Ernie shook his head.

  ‘I want you to think this through carefully, Ernie.’

  He nodded, anxious to play the scene through to its conclusion and get it off his chest. ‘It ain’t my fault, is it? Rob should never ’ve gone off. I was waiting for him, like he said.’ He paused. When he took up again, his voice was strangled and faint. He shook his head. ‘I never meant to do it!’ Ernie caught hold of the policeman. ‘Tell Rob I never meant to!’

  ‘All right, all right, ease off!’ The inspector pulled away as Ernie seized his jacket sleeve. ‘That’ll do for now. Have him taken down, Sergeant,’ he said abruptly. He pulled his cuff straight and stood up as the constables came in to lead Ernie off to the cells. The heavy door shut behind them on to a long silence.

  ‘What d’you reckon?’ the sergeant asked at last.

  The inspector looked up at the ceiling and scratched his neck. ‘I think it’s in the bag. He’s got a touch of convenient amnesia around the actual stabbing, but I don’t think the jury will wear that one. Maybe we’ll never get it all out of him. He‘ll stay clammed up in court, if you want my opinion, but it won’t make no difference. The rest is staring them in the face; he was there, his cap was there. This knife here is the murder weapon, and you can buy it from the ironmonger’s opposite his house. Powells’, ain’t it?’ He flicked the blade with his fingernail and made the knife spin under the glare of the electric light. ‘Very neat.’

  ‘No blood on him?’ the sergeant asked.

  ‘Too late to find out. Maybe he had someone who cleaned him up? That’d be worth checking. You can trot back to the pub and ferret around,’ he suggested. Then he shrugged, picked up the knife and put it back in the envelope. ‘You happy with what we got so far, Sergeant?’

  The other man nodded. ‘He ain’t put up much of a defence, has he? Losing your memory don’t convince no one that you’re innocent.’

  ‘What above a motive? That’s what the jury will be asking.’

  ‘Maybe he found her with another bloke,’ the sergeant surmised. ‘The sister back at the pub reckons he worshipped the girl. The way he sees things in black and white I reckon he’d go barmy if he caught her with someone else, which she was more than likely to do by all accounts.’

  The inspector nodded. ‘How about the older brother? That would account for him making himself scarce with a sudden attack of patriotism. Joining up is a surefire way of staying out of bother; he must know that. Anyhow, it looks to me like it’ll hang together in front of a jury. Better get him properly charged. Ain’t much more we can do now.’ He sat to do the paperwork; suspect arrested at half-past seven on the 14th of September 1914. Ernest Parsons, aged eighteen, of the Duke of Wellington public house, Duke Street, Southwark.

  Ernie’s arrest shattered Duke. Men had died at his side in the army, and he’d watched his poor wife fade away under his own eyes. In the early days at the Duke, an unemployed scaffolder from one of the tenements had collapsed on his doorstep. They’d found the wife and three-year-old daughter dead of starvation at home. Horror stories of rats gnawing babies to death in Riddington’s Yard, and anarchists shot dead by police in the Sydney Street siege were part and parcel of life in the East End, and now the war against Germany broug
ht news of families who’d lost sons or fathers, or had them sent home wounded and broken. But nothing had robbed Duke of his will to battle on like this latest blow. They’d taken Ernie off in a police car, and life hollowed out to blank horizons, a slow stumble towards nothing.

  ‘Don’t take on,’ Annie parted his hand. ‘They got the wrong man, we know that. Soon as they ask him a few questions, they’ll see they got it wrong.’ She couldn’t bear to see the strong man reduced to this empty shell. She looked up at Jess, tears in her eyes. ‘Tell him not to take on, Jess. We need him to be thinking straight when the others get back home.’

  But Jess’s own thoughts ran riot. She’d wiped blood off Ernie’s boots and burnt the evidence. She’d washed her hands clean and asked no questions. Even when news of the murder ran through the streets, she’d kept quiet. What a fool she’d been, thinking that by cleaning the boots she could keep Ernie out of trouble. ‘I done wrong,’ she wept on Annie’s shoulder. ‘I never asked Ernie about his boots. I could’ve got the truth out of him, but I never. I left it! I done wrong over it. Poor Ern!’

  ‘Don’t you take on neither.’ Annie put her arms round Jess. ‘You got enough on your plate looking after little Grace. Now you go up and pull yourself together, girl. I’ll look after your old man, and Joxer here will get the place straight.’

  The wreckage of Robert’s send-off celebrations still littered the bar, only bringing home to Duke the tact that he’d lost both his sons at one stroke. He sat in a daze as Joxer cleared off the glasses and swept the floors. Annie sat quiet and held his hand, watching the minutes tick by. She stared at his face; saw the lined cheeks, the jutting forehead and hooked nose, watching for signs of revival. But Duke sat on, scarcely blinking, trying to imagine what was happening to Ernie right that minute up at Union Street station. ‘He ain’t never been away from home before,’ he told Annie. ‘He ain’t never slept in no other bed.’

  Frances, Sadie and Hettie came back from Victoria by underground train and tram. Their effort to stay cheerful for Rob’s send-off had worn them into a subdued silence on their return journey, and their memories of the uniformed hordes all making their farewells held an uneasy sadness. How many of those bright young men would return on stretchers like the ones carried along the side platform? How many would never come back at all?

  ‘Chin up,’ Frances said as they stood on the tram platform, ready to alight. ‘Robert made his own choice. No need to ruin Pa’s day by looking so down in the mouth about it now.’ The tram rattled on while the sisters turned into Duke Street and walked the final stretch.

  They wondered at everyone standing, arms folded and staring, as they drew near home. The pub doors were shut. Hettie grasped Sadie’s hand and followed Frances along the pavement, then across the street. She noticed people withdraw inside their open doors to avoid them as they passed close by. ‘Oh gawd, I hope Pa’s not been took ill by it all!’ she gasped. Frances pushed the ornate brass door handle, familiar to her as the back of her own hand.

  Jess stood at the top of the stairs holding Grace in her arms. The bar-room door stood wedged open. Joxer was there, leaning on his broom, staring at them. Duke sat at a table, unmarked by illness or accident, and only the mystery of the staring neighbours, the closed pub doors remained. Their father was well, at any rate.

  ‘What is it? What’s wrong, Pa?’ Frances hurried ahead again, picking at the fingers of her gloves, bag tucked under her arm, Sadie raised her arms to remove her hat. Hettie smiled up at Jess.

  ‘It’s Ernie,’ Annie Wiggin rushed forward to intercept them. ‘Your pa’s had a shock, that’s all. You’d best sit down.’

  Hettie’s smile turned to a look of alarm. She went and grabbed Annie by the arm. ‘What’s up with Ernie? Is that why we’re all closed up here? Oh gawd, he’s had an accident, ain’t he? Is it bad?’

  ‘Sit down, Ett.’ Frances drew her on to a chair. ‘And you too, Sadie. Come and sit close by me.’ She stared at the bowed figure of her father. ‘Go ahead, Annie, you tell us what happened.’ She felt sure Ernie must be dead; she just wanted someone to tell them the news.

  ‘The coppers came.’ Annie wrung her hands. She stood beside Duke. ‘They think Ernie killed Daisy O’Hagan. They took him away.’

  Sadie cried out loud; the long, protesting cry of a young child, her mouth hanging wide. Frances stood up and walked to the window to stare out. Hettie hung her head. ‘It ain’t possible,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t they know he couldn’t hurt a fly?’

  ‘They wouldn’t listen. It’s hit your pa very hard, Ett. We can’t get a word out of him hardly!’ Annie gabbled. Now that the news was broken, she darted round the room from one to another. ‘We gotta think straight, Frances. You got your head screwed on, girl. Think what we gotta do next!’

  ‘Why on earth would they want to charge Ernie?’ Frances asked. Across the street she saw the net curtains twitch. A group of women stood out on the street by the post-box, heads tilted into the middle of their circle, glancing every now and then towards the Duke. ‘What evidence did they have?’

  Annie shook her head. ‘His cap. They say they found Ernie’s cap by Daisy’s body. But that don’t prove nothing!’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Union Street station.’

  ‘Then that’s where I have to go.’ Frances flinched at the idea of facing the gossips again, but she had to try and see Ernie, and the sooner the better. God only knew what words the police would put into his mouth. They could get someone like Ernie to put his name to anything they wanted. ‘He can’t even read his statement!’ she realized. ‘He’ll be confessing to everything up there, just to get back home. Ett, Sadie, you two stay and help look after things here. We gotta pull round. Try and rouse Pa. Tell him we’ll put up a fight for Ernie. Ain’t no way the police can get away with this!’

  Dusk fell down Paradise Court, and not one inhabitant remained ignorant of Ernie Parsons’s arrest. The murder had been bad enough. It was a terrible thing when a girl’s life was snuffed out and her family left wondering why in God’s name it had to happen to them. The neighbours had rallied round. This last week the little O’Hagan kids had actually looked better and been better fed than in their whole lives before, thanks mainly to Hettie Parsons. Joe O’Hagan had turned up for the girl’s funeral in a halfway decent suit. There was talk of him getting work in a Tooley Street factory making cardboard boxes, to help the family back on its feet. Mary O’Hagan looked beaten by it all, but that was only to be expected.

  Now they’d caught poor Daisy’s killer, and it turned out to be someone else living right under their noses; none other than Ernie Parsons. He had a thing about Daisy, anyone could see that. He was always making up to her in his own, simple way. And Daisy was none too careful about leading him on. Everyone had seen problems there; at the very least, heartbreak for Ernie. You just had to think how she’d been seen carrying on with that weasel, Chalky White, to know she’d not got the sense she was born with. Now if it had been that young man who’d gone and got himself arrested, that would have been no surprise. But Chalky had been laid low by Robert Parsons that very afternoon. He’d kept to his bed to lick his wounds. No, all the best bets had been on Teddy Cooper, the boss’s son. But Ernie Parsons had been thought of as harmless. It just went to show, you never could tell.

  The mild evening kept folk out on their doorsteps until long after the moon rose over the dull slate roots. By the time Annie Wiggin made her sorrowful way out of the Duke down to the end of the court, Ernie was established as a deep one, a youth with thwarted dreams who’d turned to violence when his love was spurned. It was a crime of passion, a tragedy for all concerned. Imagination came colourful in the drab East End.

  Annie trudged on down the street. ‘How’s he taking it?’ Nora Brady called from her doorstep. ‘How’s Duke?’

  ‘Bad.’

  ‘Have they sent Robert the news yet?’ someone asked.

  Annie shook her head, too weary to look round. But so
mething about the situation roused her. By the time she reached the Ogden place her mettle was up. She looked Dolly straight in the eye. ‘He ain’t guilty, y’know!’

  ‘I never said he was.’ Dolly backed off. Annie’s vehemence surprised her. Anyway, she’d been no great subscriber to the Ernie Parsons theory, preferring her own old judgement against the boss’s son. ‘As a matter of fact, didn’t I just say the poor boy was innocent as the day?’ she claimed.

  In the background, Amy nodded.

  ‘Yes, and don’t no one go round saying nothing different, you hear!’ Annie’s voice rose like a soap-box orator’s. She shook her fist at them all. ‘We lived alongside that boy for nearly twenty years, some of us. We watched him grow up, we looked out for him up and down this street. Ernie ain’t the brightest of lads, we all know that. But he ain’t no murderer neither. Anyone who says different will have me to answer to!’

  She stormed on her way, a small, slight figure, very ferocious. Her speech had turned the whole thing round. Opinion swayed after her; ‘Fancy carting poor Ernie Parsons off. They must be barmy. What the bleeding hell they up to over at that police station?’ And so on, from doorstep to doorstep.

  Annie closed her own door tight shut and sank into a chair. Only then did she give way to her feelings. In the privacy of her own front room, behind the aspidistra, she began to cry her eyes out for Duke and his family, and for the poor boy locked up in a cold prison cell.

  Late that night Mary O’Hagan came up the court. She waited until lights were beginning to go out in upstairs rooms before she reached for her shawl and told Cathleen to mind the little ones. It was a quiet, pale figure that trod the pavement to see Hettie. ‘I must speak to her,’ she told the rough cellarman. ‘Will you please go and fetch her?’

  Joxer told her to wait in the corridor leading to the slope down into the cellar, but Hettie soon appeared on the stairs and said she must come up. Mary had never ventured inside the pub before. She trembled as Hettie came and grasped her hand and drew her upstairs. On the landing Mary resisted. ‘It’s you I must speak with,’ she whispered. The attractive Irish brogue belied her haggard face and the clothes hanging almost in rags from her thin frame.