Last Rights by Barbara Nadel

looked inside it, just to make certain.
    On the corner of Brick Lane and Fournier Street,Hannah stopped and turned back towards us. ‘You wait here,’ she said. ‘I’m going to see if I can talk to someone.’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘I used to talk to an old bloke done paper and string when I was a kid. But he won’t take kindly to strangers.’
    And then she walked off down Fournier Street, quickly disappearing into the blackout. Long after I’d lost sight of her I could
     hear her heels clicking on the pavement. When that noise finally faded there was nothing save for some faint, strange music
     coming from somewhere nearby. I looked down at Pearl and Velma as they huddled together in front of a door with a big knocker
     in the shape of a lion’s head. I knew we were all thinking alike. Now it was dark the raid could come at any time and, far
     from home, God alone knew where we’d be able to find shelter. Velma especially looked all done in so the thought of walking
     all the way back to Plaistow with her in tow wasn’t one that I wanted to consider. I knew the Duchess had said they could
     both stay, but the reality of that was going to be short rations and giving over to them the bed Aggie’s kids had shared in
     her room. I just hoped we could find this sister of Pearl’s, and soon. Quite why that thought, if it did, led on to my realising
     I didn’t know what Kevin Dooley had been doing the night he died, I don’t know. But I asked his widow, who said, ‘He was down
     the pub.’
    ‘Which one?’ I asked. I was curious to know whether it had been one of the East Ham boozers.
    But Pearl didn’t know. ‘Me and Velma was out that night too,’ she said.
    ‘Oh. Where?’
    I didn’t see her face, but I knew she had to have been doing something she shouldn’t because she turned it away from me. ‘Oh,
     well, er, we was with friends,’ Pearl said. ‘For the evening, like.’
    ‘Ah.’ I smiled, and she bit her lip. I thought about asking her who these friends were but I decided against it. Maybe I’d
     heard wrong or something but I seemed to recall that the Dooleys, including Pearl, didn’t really have any friends. Only family
     and ‘victims’ was the impression I’d got from Pearl. But, then, maybe that night she’d gone somewhere she didn’t want anyone
     to know about. Maybe she’d gone off to another bloke. Given what little, admittedly, I knew about Kevin, I couldn’t have blamed
     her if she had.
    A few minutes later I got my tobacco and papers out and rolled myself a fag. We hadn’t seen any ARP warden since we entered
     the district, but I jumped into the doorway just in case someone told me to ‘Put that light out!’ when I sparked up. It was
     getting colder all the time and when it began to rain, drizzle, really, Velma put her head on her mother’s shoulder and sobbed.
     Pearl, embarrassed, forced a smile at me. ‘Come on, love,’ she said to her daughter. ‘It’ll be all right, you’ll see.’
    I find it difficult to judge a person’s age, especially now that everyone’s so tired, but I now revised my estimate of Pearl
     Dooley’s age up a bit. She was, I thought, probably in her middle thirties. She was very thin for a woman with so many nippers.
     She had false teeth too, which added to the gaunt set of her face. Very like some of the young women I get through, sadly,
     professionally. Still lovely,poor things, but in the terrible, ghostly way of having too many kids, doing too much work and maybe in her case having secrets.
     It was a problem, I was finding, for me to take her story about being out with ‘friends’ seriously. I was almost hypnotised
     looking at her when Hannah appeared at my side. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We’ve got to go and see a woman called Bessie Stern,
     lives at number five Princelet Street.’
    ‘Who’s Bessie Stern?’ I said.
    ‘She’s a matchmaker and a right gossip,’ Hannah replied. ‘She lives next door to Shlomo Kaplan, the man