Sure and Certain Death Read Online Free PDF Page A

then, seeing the probably very pale colour I had taken on, he frowned and said, ‘You feeling all right, are you, Mr H?’

Chapter Three
    I didn’t get a wink of sleep that night. Not that I often do have what most would call proper shut-eye. But even my poor brain doesn’t usually boil over all the time like it did that night. Dolly O’Dowd was one of Nancy’s best friends! Two old spinsters together, they went to Mass every Sunday and took part in every sort of church social and good-works thing that was going. My Hannah had said that Nellie Martin had been churchy too. Nan and Dolly O’Dowd went, I knew, to St Margaret’s in Canning Town, which was on the Barking Road like, it was said, Nellie Martin’s church. Had Nellie attended that church too, and if so, was that what was connecting these women?
    Of course I couldn’t find out anything in the middle of the night. The Duchess and my sisters had seemingly slept through the coppers delivering Dolly O’Dowd’s body through the back of the shop. The coffin lid was nailed right down and there was nothing to indicate who might be inside. But that didn’t mean I was off the hook about telling the family. They would want to know who was in there, why the coffin was closed and why it had turned up in the middle of the night. Also, as far as Nan was concerned, I had a duty. Dolly, funny old character that she’d been, had been her friend and now she was gone. Nan was going to be upset even though I knew that she was unlikely to show it. My older sister keeps most things in, it’s her way.
    Because I couldn’t sleep, I sat up in bed and lit a fag. There’s a gas-lamp bracket over my bed which works when there’s gas to power it, but mostly we use candles in our bedrooms. Thin, dusty candles that give off a light the colour of old lemons. Most of the time it’s not worth having, especially if you’re trying to read, and so I just lay in the darkness, puffing, trying not to peer too hard into the total blackness around me. Like most people’s bedrooms, mine is cold, damp and filled with heavy Victorian furniture. At night, made pitch dark by the blackout curtains, it’s a place where all sorts of horrors can rise up in the mind. I made to push them out of the way by thinking in what I hoped was a logical manner.
    Dolly O’Dowd had been very obviously religious. Wherever she’d gone, she’d taken a handbag full of religious stuff along with her. Rosaries, religious pictures, crucifixes and holy medals – it wouldn’t have surprised me if she’d had a bottle of holy water in there too. As I remembered her, she’d been religious as a kid, one of those girls always wanting to become a nun. But then her mum had died when she was still at school and she’d stayed home to look after her dad from then on. Quite when he’d died I didn’t know, but it had been some years back. Her sister, Rita I think she was called, had obviously hopped off to Ilford and her printer at some point in the proceedings. Dolly, alone in the house on Green Street, had said her rosary, knitted for the annual church fete and tried to ignore the fact that her only great beauty, her once flaming red hair, had faded to the colour of dust. Apart from her friendship with my dark and very foreign-looking sister, there was nothing that hadn’t been totally conventional about Dolly O’Dowd. So why would anyone want to kill such a quiet and inoffensive woman in such a wild and violent fashion? Was it that the murderer didn’t like little spinster women, or that he didn’t maybe like Catholics? Neither of the other two victims had been spinsters, and I didn’t know, as yet, what if any religion they had followed. But I determined then to find out. Assuming that the killer of Dolly O’Dowd was one and the same as the killer of the other two women, there had to be some sort of connection between the three of them. If that wasn’t the case, then it was possible that more than one murderer