Sure and Certain Death by Barbara Nadel

her shopping on Green Street and became her friend. The Harper twins were cousins of Nellie Martin, and Margaret Cousins had worked with Violet Dickens when they’d been in service together in a house up in Woodford.
    ‘Violet’s maiden name was Watts,’ Nancy told me. ‘One of the Harper girls, Esme I think it was, got married after the Great War, but I don’t know what her name became. Marie became very close with Margaret and later with Fernanda too.’
    ‘What about this Fernanda woman?’ I asked.
    Nancy frowned. ‘I think she was a friend of Margaret’s first off,’ she said. ‘I expect Margaret got married in the end. She had a sweetheart in the forces.’
    ‘Do you know what his name was?’
    She smiled. ‘Same as yours. Frank.’
    ‘Frank what?’
    Nancy shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Can’t remember.’
    I sighed. ‘Nan,’ I said, ‘you’re going to have to tell the coppers all of this.’
    Her face turned white. ‘What, that I was a . . .’
    ‘Sergeant Hill knows you and so it’ll be . . . well, it’ll be all right,’ I said. A lot of the old coppers had been in the Great War and most of them felt much the same as I did about the White Feather girls. Even with Sergeant Hill over at Plaistow, who was basically a friend, Nancy wasn’t going to have an easy time of it.
    ‘Will you come with me, Frank?’ she asked.
    I only made a pretence of thinking about it before I said, ‘All right.’
    As much as people in general don’t like conchies, there isn’t the complete lack of understanding of those who don’t care to fight and kill as there was back in the First Lot. Now if a man is unfit to fight he’ll be found something else to do to aid the war effort. And there’s no shame in that, amongst normal sensible people. But the attitudes we have now are as a result of what happened between 1914 and 1918 and the aftermath of that war. I am lucky. I don’t always know what is and isn’t real but I can do a job of work and feed my family. How can you do that with no legs, or no face, or if indeed you’re stone dead in some blood-sodden field in Flanders? Girls still worship soldiers now, but they do that at the back of public shelters and in shop doorways in the blackout. They don’t hang around in gangs and make blokes out of uniform want to take their own lives. Maybe it’s because not so many girls now are as pure and untouched as they were back in those days. Maybe they’re not so frustrated any more. I watched Nan put her coat on as we both got ready to go to the police station and I found that my face was still set into a sneer of disapproval.
    ‘Never had time for White Feather girls meself but I can’t see why anyone’d want to kill middle-aged ladies who were misguided in their youth,’ Sergeant Hill said as he and I settled down to a smoke and a cuppa after Nancy had gone back to the shop.
    ‘I can,’ I said, which I could see from the expression on Sergeant Hill’s face shocked him. ‘I hated those bloody women,’ I carried on. ‘If I’d known my own sister was part of all that . . .’
    ‘That she kept it dark for so long shows that she knew she’d done wrong,’ Sergeant Hill said.
    ‘Our dad would’ve gone mad if he’d found out,’ I said.
    Sergeant Hill cleared his throat. ‘But you know, Mr H, much as it’s always useful to find out as much as we can about murder victims, I’m not sure that this white feather connection between these women will come to anything. I mean, the Great War finished over twenty years ago.’ His face dropped then into a frown. ‘The world’s moved on, not for the better, but . . . Why, if someone had problems with these women, would he leave it until now to take his revenge? I mean, I’m assuming we have to be talking about some poor chap who had a bad time out in the trenches.’
    ‘If these women pushed this bloke to go to war when he wasn’t really up to it and he perhaps lost a leg or in some way couldn’t