The King's Justice

by Susan Elia MacNeal

  “Lord have mercy.” She’d read the papers. “Don’t touch!” She shivered, not from the cold. “Let’s go, Lew. I baked some nice scones this morning and they’re waiting for our tea. And we can pick up those sausages.”

  But Lewis was already dragging the suitcase from the shore to higher ground. He opened the lid, then looked up, face pale. “Bones,” he called over the wind.

  “Jesus Christ,” Martha muttered, making her way over, nearly tripping on a broken bicycle wheel. “Don’t touch.” Unheeding, Lewis began to search through the bones for anything more. “I said, don’t touch!” She grabbed his hands and smacked them.

  He looked ashamed. “Sorry, Grannie.”

  “Close that thing up and let’s find us a copper,” she told him in gentler tones. “He’ll take care of the bones and take the case to the boys at Scotland Yard. They’ll know what to do.”

  She grabbed at her head scarf, coming loose in the wind. “I hope.”

  Chapter One

  Tuesday, December 8, 1942

  Four months previous

  “I thought Justice was supposed to be blind,” murmured Maggie Hope, looking up through the taxi window to the golden statue atop the dome of the Old Bailey. Above the gilded figure, the heavy gray clouds were swollen with threatened rain.

  Maggie leaned forward, feeling the pulse tick in her neck, fighting off the beginnings of panic. As the bells of nearby St. Paul’s Cathedral tolled nine times, she gazed at the figure of the slim woman, standing tall against the sky. Lady Justice wore a spiked crown atop her head, her arms stretched wide, the sword of retribution in one hand and the scales of justice in the other. Her uncovered eyes gazed impassively over London.

  As the black taxi drove on, Maggie remained transfixed by the figure, turning her head to stare until it dropped out of sight. “Doesn’t Justice need a blindfold? Or is that not done on this side of the pond?” Wrapped in a dark wool coat, her coppery hair pulled back in a tightly coiled bun and topped with a black velvet hat, she looked younger than her twenty-seven years.

  Detective Chief Inspector James Durgin reached for her gloved hand; Maggie found his earnest, grave expression charming. There was something sagacious about his eyes, even though he was only seven years older. “I’ve heard it said with this particular statue, Justice’s ‘maidenly form’ is supposed to guarantee her impartiality,” he replied in his thick Glaswegian burr.

  “Hmm.” She turned to face him and tried to smile as the cab sped by the courthouse and kept going—the Old Bailey had been bombed in 1941, and until it could be repaired all criminal trials had been moved to the Law Courts.

  “You do look handsome, I’ll say that for today,” she said, inhaling his comforting scent of wool, peppermints, and tea. Durgin, whose long, lean frame folded into the cab’s backseat with difficulty, usually favored thick-soled shoes, dark suits, and a long trench coat, but today he sported the dark blue dress uniform of the Metropolitan Police. His thick brown hair was white at the temples, and the diagonals of his widow’s peak emphasized his sharp cheekbones.

  “With or without a blindfold,” Durgin assured her, “Justice will prevail today. And then we can put this case behind us, once and for all.” He intertwined his fingers with hers. “And we can move on with our lives.”

  But rage at Nicholas Reitter, and sorrow for all the lives he’d destroyed, coursed hot in her veins, raw and profane. Will I ever truly be able to put the Blackout Beast behind me? she wondered.

  The taxi skidded on the icy road as it turned onto Fleet Street, and Maggie’s and Durgin’s clasped hands broke apart as they struggled to keep their balance. The vehicle nearly crashed into a newsstand. Just before they swerved, as if in slow motion, Maggie caught the morning’s headline: SOVIETS CUT NAZI LINES WEST OF STALINGRAD.

  “Dangerous driving today,” the driver offered by way of apology as he drove on. “ ‘Black ice,’ they call it—on top of the usual bomb damage.” He was a gray-haired man with a long, sloping nose, a checked wool cap, and a bumpy hand-knit muffler. As they passed a sign reading DANGER UXB, he snorted. “Bloody unexploded bombs.” He took their measure in the rearview mirror and his watery eyes sparked with recognition. “Wait a minute,” he said, his breath making white clouds in the cold air. “Are you—?”

  “Yes,” Durgin said. “Thank you.”

  But the driver’s enthusiasm was undeterred. “You’re DCI Durgin and Margaret ’Ope! You two must be on your way to the sentencing of—what’s ’is name?—the ‘Blackout Beast.’ ”

  “Nicholas Reitter,” Durgin corrected. “The murderer’s name is Nicholas Reitter.” Maggie knew Durgin hated the press’s nickname for Reitter, but the “Blackout Beast” moniker had stuck. She and Durgin had tracked Reitter the previous spring, when he’d gone on a savage killing spree. He murdered five young women in the manner of Jack the Ripper before they apprehended him in a shootout that claimed six additional lives from the Metropolitan Police force.

  “We don’t have to be there in person, you know,” Durgin said in a low voice to Maggie. “We can go home and listen for the sentence on the wireless. I’ll even make the tea.”

  Despite her shallow breathing and prickling skin, Maggie smiled—Durgin did love his tea. “And miss seeing all those pale old men with powdery wigs and long silky gowns pontificate? Perish the thought.”

  “I’m worried about you,” he said. “You’re…different since you returned from Scotland.”

  She folded her hands and pressed them together, fingers laced tightly, so their shaking wouldn’t betray her. “I need to see this through. To the very end. Whatever it may be.”

  * * *

  —

  The Royal Courts of Justice were better known as the Law Courts, a massive Gothic building on Fleet Street. The driver pulled the cab over to the curb, near a pile of dirty, melting snow, and stopped. As he touched one hand to his cap, Durgin searched his pockets for coins and Maggie pulled her hat’s black fishnet veil over her face like a mask.

  The driver pocketed the fare. “Wait until I tell the missus I had you and the Detective Chief Inspector with me! She won’t believe it!”

  Maggie gritted her teeth as she wrestled with the jammed door handle. “Please give her my best.” Finally, she forced the door open, the sight of the courthouse making her breath stop.

  “I just wish you’d shot the Beast dead when you’d had the chance,” the driver continued. “Then we wouldn’t have had to go through this mess of a trial. War’s bad enough—but sequential murderers, too? Killing our own girls?”

  Serial killers, Maggie thought. She had fought to change the name, but had been overruled. The term Serienmörder, or serial murderer, was in use by the Berlin police. But Durgin had been firm. “It was our job to bring him in,” Maggie replied as she stepped out, struggling to keep her hands from shaking. “Now it’s the court’s job to mete out justice. Good day, sir.” She closed the door, careful not to slam it.

  The driver leaned out the window and spat into the gutter. “ ’E’s a cold-blooded killer is what ’e is,” he called out the window to both of them as he pulled away. “I ’ope ’e ’angs!”

  He’s right, she thought. Anger swirled in Maggie’s chest, stark and combustible, before she managed to force it back down, compressing it, until she could almost convince herself it didn’t exist. Durgin caught up, and together they made their way over the slick, icy pavement to the courthouse, with its pointed arches, detailed finials, and long lancet windows hung with daggerlike icicles. When Maggie skidded on a slippery patch, Durgin reached out to steady her.

  Recovering, she moved her lips in the outline of a smile. As they neared the courthouse, she squared her shoulders. Protesters holding signs swarmed the sidewalks. Some red-faced picketers chanted slogans, while others recited the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi.

  Even though she’
d been born and raised in the United States, Maggie knew the issue of the abolition of capital punishment had been brought before Parliament in 1938—and an experimental five-year suspension of the death penalty had been declared. However, when war broke out the following year, the bill had been postponed. In Great Britain, death was still legal punishment in cases of murder and treason, and a number of German spies and saboteurs had been prosecuted and executed under the Treachery Act, including the Nazi agent Jakob Meier.

  For Maggie, the death penalty—in both theory and application—was all too personal. She had, only a year earlier, witnessed the case of a young man wrongly accused of murder and sentenced to death in Virginia. She had been to the execution chamber and had seen the electric chair firsthand. She knew innocent people could, and did, die in the hands of the court system.

  But in this case, there was no doubt Reitter was a killer. There was no question of the wrong man being sentenced. Nicholas Reitter was guilty of horrific crimes. He was guilty and now there was only a decision: life imprisonment or execution. And about this inmate, Maggie had no feelings beyond blinding rage, which tasted like iron on her tongue. Jack the Ripper may never have been apprehended, tried, and sentenced, Maggie thought, but Nicholas Reitter will face justice.

  Even with her face hidden by the veil, Maggie was an easy mark for the press. One photographer caught sight of her, calling, “Miss Hope! Miss Hope!” There was a resulting explosion of flashbulbs. She winced behind the curtain of netting.

  The rest of the pack turned toward her, shouting, “Miss Hope, how do you feel today?” “Miss Hope, just a minute of your time…” “Can we see your face?” “How do you feel?”

  “Easy, boys—keep your distance,” Durgin warned.

  The reporters’ voices ran together, but Maggie could still pick out a few questions: “Think he’ll dangle for his crimes?” “Are you in favor of capital punishment?” And then, always the reminder: “You were almost one of his victims. Wish you’d finished the job yourself?”

  I do wish I’d had better aim that night. Maggie had shot Reitter in the face, taking out his cheekbone and one eye. Then he’d been captured alive. A few inches one way or the other and we’d be spared all this.

  One hunch-shouldered man in a black trilby stepped in front of her, blocking her path. She recognized Boris Jones’s pale moon face and round black-framed glasses from the trial; once a respected journalist, he now worked for one of London’s worst tabloids. “Have you seen this morning’s paper?” he asked in his high-pitched, nasal voice. He held up a fresh copy of The Daily Enquirer, forcing her to read: BLACKOUT BEAST PUT DOWN? Nicholas Reitter, Sequential Murderer in the Style of Jack the Ripper, to Be Sentenced Today. “What do you hope the judge decides, Miss Hope?”

  Is it even a question? Maggie wondered. But before she could move on, a petite figure in herringbone tweed inserted herself between Maggie and the reporter. “Shoo!” the woman admonished, as if the bulky man were nothing more than a wayward puppy. When Jones stood his ground, she waved her walking stick at him; it was topped with a silver British bulldog. He swallowed and took a step back.

  Even at age eighty-four Vera Baines was a force to be reckoned with. “Mrs. Baines!” Maggie exclaimed, with the first genuine smile of the morning. Vera had found one of the Blackout Beast’s first victims on her shift as an ARP warden and had remained involved in the case. When Maggie had returned to London, they’d become acquainted during the trial, and then Maggie had joined Vera’s book club.

  “Miss Hope,” Vera replied, taking Maggie’s arm. Together, they made their way through the crowd of shouting journalists and photographers, flashbulbs detonating.

  “Despite the circumstances, it’s good to see you again,” Vera said, keeping the crowd back with her walking stick as she steered the younger woman through. She called back, “And you, too, Detective Chief Inspector.” Durgin nodded and tipped his cap.

  They approached the courthouse’s arched doors. Maggie flinched as Jones caught up to her once again. “Miss Hope,” he said, panting, “what do you think should be the fate of the Blackout Beast?”

  Maggie had had enough. She stopped and looked him square in the face. “Everything today seems to be about Nicholas Reitter. But I’m thinking about the victims—Joanna Metcalf, Doreen Leighton, Gladys Chorley, Olivia Sutherland, and Bronwyn Parry. Let’s not forget their names today. They, as well as the brave men of the Met Police—Cyril Page, Alan Dailey, Douglas Gage, William Lekkie, Anthony O’Leary, and Stanley Vincent—are dead. I’m here to represent them and make sure they’re not forgotten.”

  Once again, Vera brandished her walking stick. “We’re done, sir. Good day!”

  * * *

  —

  Photographers weren’t allowed inside the courts, and as they passed through the doors, Maggie breathed a sigh of relief. The lobby was hushed, full of pale men in dark suits and ties and a few women with drawn faces.

  The trio walked through the hall under the soaring arched ceilings, Maggie’s boots tapping on the marble mosaic floor. A few paces in front of them, the scent of roses wafted off a woman in a pink hat trimmed in pink silk flowers and circles of ribbons. The heavy floral scent made Maggie feel faint, but Vera only grasped her arm tighter. “Stiff upper lip, my girl, stiff upper lip.”

  They reached courtroom number 13; a sign in block lettering in front of the door read, R V REITTER. Vera raised her chin. “We must be brave little soldiers now,” she admonished. Maggie didn’t know if Vera was saying it to her, or to Durgin, or to herself. Perhaps to all of us, she thought as Vera pushed the doors open.

  The high-ceilinged chamber was colder than the hall and loud with echoing nervous chatter. Maggie and Durgin followed Vera to one of the few still-empty leather-upholstered benches at the back of the gallery. Maggie had been in the same courtroom with Durgin once before, on the day she testified against Reitter. Once again, Maggie spotted the woman in the pink hat nearer the defendant’s dock; she looked away when the woman caught her glance with an unsettling stare.

  Above the bench was yet another iteration of Justice. “She doesn’t seem to need a blindfold, either,” Maggie said to Durgin. She slipped out of her coat, revealing a black dress from before the war. It was clean and neat, the cuffs mended and the collar replaced. She flipped back her veil and took a seat.

  “Licorice?” Vera had opened her handbag and taken out a box of red, green, and white Torpedo candies.

  “No, thank you.” In truth, Maggie was feeling queasy.

  Vera popped one into her mouth. “Suit yourself.”

  Maggie knew Reitter would be brought up soon. She’d once again be in the same room with a man who’d killed so many, so brutally. Who’d tried to kill her. She swallowed hard and fought down the panic threatening to break the surface. She closed her eyes and, drawing on her training as a mathematician, began silently reciting the decimal places of the irrational number pi: three point one four one five nine two six five….But the math of grief was sad—loss was not simple subtraction but exponential pain.

  Over the cacophony of gossip and speculation, Maggie could hear a jag of low, ragged coughing. Glancing around the courtroom, she spotted Mrs. Arwen Parry, Bronwyn Parry’s mother. Brynn had been the last of Reitter’s victims to die. Maggie had met the young woman through Special Operations Executive; she’d been a bright and promising agent candidate from Wales who’d given up everything to join the SOE, a group of secret agents told by Churchill to “set Europe ablaze.”

  She’d excelled at her training in Scotland, completed her preparation at Beaulieu, the SOE’s so-called finishing school, and was set to parachute into occupied France before she was murdered. Maggie swallowed hard and nodded to Mrs. Parry, who acknowledged her with a raised kerchief.

  Maggie held her palms out on her lap like Lady Justice, then clenched them into fists. She scanned the rest of the
courtroom to distract herself and saw Peter Frain, Director General of the Imperial Security Intelligence Service, better known as MI-5, standing in the back. Frain was tall and trim, with impeccable posture, wearing his dress uniform. Catching sight of her, he nodded.

  A spy himself during the Great War, Frain had become head of MI-5 when Winston Churchill became Prime Minister in May 1940. Maggie had met him while she assisted in taking down an IRA agent scheming to blow up St. Paul’s Cathedral. He’d then recommended her for the SOE.

  Frain was also the man who had arranged for Maggie to assist Durgin on the Blackout Beast case, because of her insider knowledge of the women of SOE, once it became clear Reitter was targeting them. The women’s murders were deeply personal to her; they were agents she’d either trained beside or trained herself. They were all in their late teens to early thirties, from every corner of Britain, from every social class, with a common goal: to “do their bit” and make a difference in the war. And now they were dead.

  The crowd hushed as the double doors were closed and a guard announced, “Court is in session!” Latecomers resigned themselves to lining the back wall. “Mr. Justice Langstaff presiding,” the guard continued. “All rise!”

  The families, the visitors, the barristers, the court clerk, the stenographer, and the usher stood. Maggie rose as well, swaying slightly, and felt Durgin touch her back. She was grateful for the human contact. Next to her, Vera’s clear blue eyes never wavered from the Royal Coat of Arms.

  The judge’s door opened, and Justice Leo Langstaff walked forward with a pronounced limp, followed by an aide and a priest. Langstaff was a tall, gaunt man. He wore the traditional long white wig, official red robes with a tippet over one shoulder, a white lace jabot, and long cuffs. He took his seat at the magistrate’s bench and eyed the crowd. “Bring up the prisoner,” he instructed the guards in a thin, papery voice.