Last Rights Read Online Free PDF Page A

judge.
    ‘Christ, Mr H, you ain’t ’arf gone pale,’ he said. ‘Look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
    ‘You could say that,’ I said, as I closed the man’s eyes and covered his angry features once again. Then I told Fred about
     my strange encounter with this man and his apparently barmy belief that he’d been stabbed.
    ‘He ain’t been stabbed,’ Fred said dismissively. ‘Got a bit of blood on him, but who ain’t these days?’ He laughed. ‘No, it’s
     blast what killed him, Mr H. Look at the shock on his face. I’ve seen it before. Blast takes all the wind out of their bodies,
     stops their hearts dead, it does. Heart failure’s what the doc’s put on his certificate so there’s no arguing with that. Bloody
     blast!’
    Fred was probably right. I’d seen a few who’d died from blast myself and they were generally as he’d described. Of course
     there were stories about blast that had to be ridiculous – like the one about the bloke whose clothes had been ripped off
     his body, or the other bloke who, apparently, had been blown up his own chimney. But deaths like this were not and still aren’t
     uncommon so I left the body out in the back room and took Fred through into the shop. By this time, Doris had been reunited
     with her Alfie so I had to clear my throat as I went into the office – they had been really worried about each other and were
     enjoying a good kiss.
    ‘Mind getting me and Fred a cuppa, Doris?’ I said.
    ‘Can I make my Alfie one too?’ she said.
    ‘Course you can.’
    When she’d gone, that left the three of us. Fred offered round the fags, a bit reluctantly to Alfie, I noticed. Alfie was
     born and bred, like Doris, in Spitalfields, but his parents had come from Germany originally. Poor Jews they were, who came
     to England to get a better life. But Alfie’s old dad was put in an internment camp as soon as war broke out. Six months and
     him nearly eighty and a Jew. It’s well known Hitler doesn’t like Jews, so why Herschel Rosen was interned is beyond me. But
     Fred, maybe because he is a policeman and is paid, especially in these times, to be suspicious wasn’t happy in ‘German’ Alfie’s
     company.
    ‘I’ll give him a bit of a clean-up in a while,’ I said, more than anything else to break the silence.
    ‘Who?’
    ‘The deceased,’ I said, tipping my head back in the direction we’d just come from.
    ‘Oh.’
    He’d lost interest, too busy looking at Alfie sucking at a Woodbine. When Doris came back with the tea, the mood got a bit
     better. Tea can always do that, tea and the fact that Fred has always liked Doris. Only a couple of days before he’d said
     to our Nan, ‘I like that Doris Mankiewicz, as was, she’s a good, straight girl.’ If he’d added ‘for a Jew’, I wouldn’t have
     been surprised, but Nan never reported any more than what was said. Both Doris and Alfie are in their thirties. He’s on the
     buses on account of his age and not being fit enough for the forces. There’s some sort of heart problem. Not that it was,
     according to Doris, that much of a problem until his dad was sent away.
    ‘We’ve got Florrie Starr at ten, Mr H,’ Doris said, as she sat down and rolled herself a fag. ‘Do you want my Alfie to stick
     around?’
    ‘Yes, please.’
    Florrie Starr had lived with her daughter in a flat in Plaistow, Inniskilling Road. A wife and mother who took in a bit of
     washing, Florrie had been perfectly ordinary in every way – except her size. She was what Dad would have called a ‘whopper’.
     Florrie had to have been over twenty stone. And with only Arthur and Walter, with me conducting, we needed all the help we
     could get.
    Fred left soon after that. I had to organise a suit for Alfie and get the other two lads in order and then we were off. I
     didn’t have time to think much about the man out the back until well after Florrie’d been interred. In fact, I waited until
     I was on my own that night before I