‘Ray?’ Nelly screwed up her face as she searched her memory. ‘Thirteen, fourteen …? I couldn’t say for sure. A couple of years older than Alfie, anyway.’
‘You’re telling me Jonah Meeks was afraid of a fourteen-year-old boy?’ Madden shook his head in wonder.
‘All I’m telling you is what his mum told me. Mind you, if you’d met that boy you might think different. Sometimes he’d come over from Romford when Jonah was away; when he was off working on the coal barges, which was the closest thing he ever had to a job. I was there once or twice when Ray turned up — by then he was older, sixteen maybe — and I remember how he’d sit in Vera’s kitchen, not saying a word while she kept chattering on; smiling to himself as if there was some joke only he could see. Thinking his own thoughts. He had this way of staring at you, staring through you, like you weren’t there. It gave me the shivers.’
‘Would Alfie have been present?’
‘Oh, yes. He was there, looking at Ray with these big eyes. I reckon Ray was who he wanted to be himself. Someone who wasn’t afraid. Not of Jonah, not of anything.’
‘He hero-worshipped him? Is that what you thought?’
‘Maybe.’ Nelly shrugged. ‘But what he couldn’t see was that Ray didn’t care for him one bit. He didn’t care for anyone. Not even his own mum. She knew it, Vera did, poor soul. I reckon it broke her heart.’
Nelly shuddered involuntarily. Clasping her elbows, she hugged herself tight.
‘Still, if Ray had suddenly turned up now, after all these years, Alfie might have been pleased to see him?’
‘He might.’ Again she shrugged. ‘Like I said, he never understood the sort of bloke Ray was. Mind you, he’d have been surprised. We all thought he was dead.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, he went off to the war, didn’t he, like all the other lads?’ Nelly gestured with her hands. ‘That was the last I heard of him. Mind you, by then Vera had moved away — she went to live with her sister in Romford after Jonah copped it — so we didn’t know for sure what had happened to Ray. Only that he never came back.’
‘What about Alfie? What became of him?’
‘Vera took him with her, but he got into trouble quickly, ended up in a borstal, I heard. By then Bob and I had left Bethnal Green, we’d come south of the river, and I didn’t hear any more about them, except that Vera had caught the flu soon after the war and died. After what she’d been through, I reckon it was a blessing.’
In the silence that followed, Madden heard the faint sound of a clock striking in the distance. He counted seven chimes.
‘Tell me about Jonah,’ he said. ‘What happened that night? How did he die?’
Nelly ran a hand across her brow.
‘I don’t know nothing for sure. All we heard was a story. Bloke who told it to us — and this was a while afterwards, maybe a year later — was a pal of Bob’s, someone he’d known since they were boys. He’d heard Bob was back ashore for a spell and he dropped in to see him.’ She laughed shortly. ‘You probably remember him. Feller by the name of Charlie Mort.’
‘Charlie Mort, the burglar? I helped send him up.’
‘Not for long, you didn’t, because he was fresh out of stir when he came to see us. Him and Bob had been lads together and Bob always liked him, though he thought he was a fool for doing what he did and told him so often enough. Not that it made any difference. Anyway they went down the pub, the two of them, and when they came back Charlie had had a few and he told us about Jonah. What he’d heard. He’d got the story from a bloke he knew in stir, he said.’
Nelly paused. A crease had appeared in her forehead.
‘Now you’ll also know who I mean by Seamus Slattery?’
Madden nodded. ‘That Irish thug. He was responsible for most of the crime in the borough. He and his gang. They went in for thieving mostly, and extortion. But they had a tie to one of the big race-course mobs, I remember. They’d go down to Newmarket to lend a hand whenever there was a fight in prospect.’
‘That was them, and they reckoned Bethnal Green was their patch. Their manor. No one was allowed to take liberties.’ Nelly laughed. ‘Except they forgot to tell Jonah, or maybe he wasn’t listening. He’d worked for them early on; Seamus had him as his bodyguard for a while. But it didn’t last. Jonah never took orders from anyone and when he got drunk he was a holy terror. He’d been inside twice for assault, and that’s not counting all the other times he got into fights. Nor the time Seamus sent two of his boys round to a bookie who hadn’t paid his insurance and they found Jonah there and for some reason, or maybe no reason at all, he took against them and gave one of them a cracked skull and threw the other out of a window. Lucky it was only the second floor, but the bloke still ended up with a broken leg.’
‘I remember that …’ Madden nodded his head in recollection. ‘We heard about it. But there were no charges pressed.’
‘Well, you wouldn’t expect any, would you, not with Seamus Slattery. But you can imagine how it looked. There was him saying it was his manor and nobody was allowed to step out of line, and there was Jonah tossing his blokes out of windows. It couldn’t be allowed to go on.’
Nelly bit her lip.
‘Course, what would have happened normally was he would have sent some of his fellers round with orders to make a right mess of Jonah. But they’d already tried that, and each time he was given a seeing to he’d find the blokes who’d done it later on and give it back to them, only worse. So Seamus decided enough was enough and one night when they were all at the old Ship’s Bell, which was the pub they used, he laid a hundred quid in notes on the table and said it was for whoever got rid of Jonah for him.’
‘He wanted him killed?’
‘He never used the word, according to Charlie — though Charlie wasn’t there — but everyone understood what he meant. And it seems the news got out. I didn’t hear it, but some must have, because by Charlie’s account there were bookies taking bets on how long Jonah would last, while others were offering odds on him turning the tables on Seamus and topping him. But less than a week later, while people were still thinking about it, Jonah’s body turned up in that tank.’
Madden grunted. ‘I was there that morning. At the soap factory. We’d heard about him getting drunk the night before and staggering off home. The detectives were already thinking it was most likely an accident. What really happened?’
Nelly gave a sigh.
‘What happened was that Seamus and his lot were sitting in the back room of the Ship’s Bell around lunchtime drinking toasts or what have you to the news when Vera’s Ray shows up and says he’s come to claim his hundred quid. Well, of course they just laugh at him, but then he tells them he’s got proof, and before they know it he’s pulled out a set of false teeth with a nick in one of them from his pocket and dropped it on the table in front of Seamus. “There you are,” he says. “That’s your proof.”’
‘Jonah’s missing bridge?’ Madden shook his head. ‘We noticed it was gone. We thought it must have fallen out of his mouth and sunk to the bottom of the tank. And I remember now — one of the teeth was chipped.’
‘You’d run into him, had you?’ Nelly was curious.
‘Several times. Twice to break up disturbances in pubs.’ Madden laughed. ‘I used to look at him and hope to heaven he wouldn’t take it into his head to have a go at me. He was a big brute and he had hands like shovels. All of which makes me wonder …’
‘Wonder what?’
‘How that boy got the better of him. Did Charlie tell you that?’
Nelly nodded. She paused to refill their cups.
‘The bloke he’d got the story from had been in the Ship’s Bell that day and had heard what Ray had to say for himself. Seems he’d learned about the hundred quid and come over from Romford. Either he knew where Jonah would be drinking or he followed him to the pub, and he must have guessed what route he’d take home because he was waiting for him in the soap factory. Right by the tank, in fact. It was the only way through the yard; you had to walk past it.’
‘I remember it well. The path narrowed at that point. There was a wall running alongside it.’
‘There was and all.’ Nelly bared her teeth in a grin. ‘And guess who was up on top of it when Jonah came by. With a bleeding great rock in his hands.’
