‘Vera-?’
‘His step-mum. Jonah used to beat her too. I’d see her down the high street often enough with a black eye or a cut lip. Once he broke her arm. It all came back to me when I heard about Alfie and that business at Wapping. I couldn’t understand what he was doing there. A bloke who never amounted to nothing. Scared of his own shadow, he was. Mixing with the likes of Benny Costa. It didn’t make sense.’
She brought the teapot over to the table and sat down. Madden waited while she filled their cups.
‘The police thought the same,’ he said. ‘They’ve been wondering how Alfie came to be there. Who got him involved.’
He was watching her expression closely. But she seemed to take no special note of what he’d said.
‘And what about you, then?’ she asked. ‘What are you doing down here? You still haven’t said.’ She peered at him over the rim of her teacup. ‘Did the Old Bill ask you to come and talk to me? If so, you’re wasting your time. Like I said, I told that other copper everything I know. I hadn’t seen Alfie for years till he turned up at the market that day. I’d forgotten he even existed.’
Madden sipped his tea. He hesitated, choosing his words.
‘I came on my own account, Nelly. I wanted to talk to you. But not about Alfie. Not directly, anyway.’
‘Oh …?’ She sounded wary. ‘What then?’
‘I’ve got a question for you. It’s about something that happened thirty years ago, and I’m not even sure you know the answer. But if you do you’re going to have to decide …’
‘Decide what?’ She paused with her cup at her lips.
‘Whether or not to tell me.’
He met her gaze with his own steady glance.
‘Go on then,’ she said.
‘Who was it cracked Jonah Meeks’s skull and pushed him into that tank? That’s what I want to know. Who murdered Alfie’s father?’
‘Crikey!’
She stared at him.
‘You’re asking me that?’
Madden nodded.
‘Now? After all this time?’ She seemed bemused. ‘Why?’
‘There’s a killer loose in London. He’s murdered several people: not just Alfie and those others at Wapping. Two women besides. I think it may be the same man.’
‘Same bloke as murdered Jonah?’
‘So you know about that?’
‘I didn’t say so.’
Nelly scowled and Madden saw he’d caught her off balance. She sat staring at the cup which was clutched in her fingers. He spoke again:
‘Nelly, I think you know the answer.’ He paused. ‘Won’t you tell me?’
She kept her eyes from his, refusing to meet his gaze.
‘I seem to recall the law saying it was an accident,’ she muttered.
‘That was how it looked at the time. But I’ve begun to wonder. And remember …’
‘Remember what?’
‘How the people down there behaved afterwards, some of them. Ones I talked to. Oh, they didn’t say anything, but I saw it in their faces.’
‘Saw what?’
‘Satisfaction. Only I didn’t know then what it meant. I thought they were just pleased to have seen the last of Jonah. But now I’m not so sure. I think they knew something. Or they’d heard it … a story maybe …?’
Madden cocked his head to peer at her.
‘A story …?’ She laughed harshly. ‘Well, you hear plenty of those.’
‘Yes, but did you hear the one about Jonah?’
There was a long pause. Then at last she looked up.
‘I might have …’
Madden warmed his hands on his teacup. He saw from her face that she was still undecided and he waited patiently.
‘This feller … the one you say topped Jonah. What makes you think it’s the same bloke as killed Alfie?’
Her flinty gaze had hardened; she challenged him to reply.
‘We know Alfie was working for someone; that’s why he quit his stall at the market. He had money in his pocket when the police found his body and with no explanation of how it had got there. Even before he went down to Wapping that night he was in deep, and that could only have happened through someone he was familiar with. Someone he trusted, perhaps. Someone who was also a killer.’
‘Which didn’t leave too many possibilities. Is that what you’re saying?’ Her voice was toneless and Madden nodded.
‘There’s nothing in Alfie’s record to suggest he’d ever mixed with violent criminals; that he was acquainted with anyone like that. You said yourself he was a nobody. So it had to be someone from his past … his childhood even.’
‘Someone who only had to lift a finger for him to come running? Is that what you mean?’ She looked at him bleakly
‘I suppose so.’ Madden shrugged, and as he did so saw a shadow pass across her rugged features.
‘Someone like his brother?’
‘Alfie Meeks had a brother?’
Madden was thunderstruck.
‘Not really, no.’ Nelly grimaced. ‘Not a proper brother. He was Vera’s son by some other bloke. She had him before she married Jonah.’
‘So he was Alfie’s stepbrother?’
‘I suppose …’ She shrugged. ‘But he only lived with them, with Jonah and her, for a little while. Then Vera had to send him away. She parked him with a sister of hers who lived out Romford way.’
‘What was his name?’
‘Raymond. Ray, Vera called him.’
‘Ray …?’ Madden scowled. ‘I don’t recall ever hearing that name.’
‘No reason you should have.’ Nelly smiled bleakly. ‘Especially after Jonah copped it. Anyone who knew what had happened wasn’t going to breathe a word. Like you said, they was all that pleased to see the last of him.’
Still shaken by the revelation, Madden paused for a moment to order his thoughts.
‘You said Vera had to send him away. Why? Jonah must have known she had a child when he married her.’
‘Oh, he knew, all right. I told you: at first Ray lived with them. Alfie’s mum had died a year or so before — pneumonia it was — and Vera took care of them both. But it didn’t last. After a few months she had to send Ray away. Vera told me herself. It was when I had that fish-and-chip shop. She used to come in of an evening to get their supper. She said those two — Ray and Jonah — they couldn’t live under the same roof. Jonah had started out trying to treat him the way he treated Alfie; knocking him about when he felt like it; clipping him round the ear. But that soon stopped. Ray wasn’t the sort you could do that to. Once when Jonah hit him he grabbed a kitchen knife and went for him, Vera said. Jonah threatened to wring his neck, but that was just bluff, she reckoned. The fact was he was scared and so was she. She was afraid Ray would take a knife to Jonah one night when he was asleep. Cut his throat maybe. That’s what she told me.’
‘Good God!’ Madden was appalled. ‘How old was he then?’
‘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?’