The King's Justice

by Susan Elia MacNeal

  Even the courtroom seemed to hold its breath as the door clanged open from below, then the tread of footsteps could be heard on a metal stairway. Finally, Nicholas Reitter, the Blackout Beast himself, emerged from beneath the courtroom, flanked by two guards, to join his lawyer, Alban Skynner.

  Maggie’s jaw was tight and her mouth dry as she looked at Reitter in profile. Pressure wound around her forehead. Once merely a slight man, Reitter now appeared emaciated. The right half of his face was still bandaged and his hands were cuffed behind him. He looked down at his feet as the sentinels kept watch. Maggie noticed his brown hair had been cut short, revealing the shape of his skull. Her breath caught in her throat, but she stood tall, staring without blinking as he turned to face the judge.

  “You may be seated,” the guard called out, and the observers took their seats with the sounds of foot shuffling and wet coughs. Someone in the front blew his nose. “The case of The Crown versus Nicholas Reitter!”

  The stenographer, a woman with a gunmetal-gray chignon and waxy red lipstick, began typing. Maggie, who’d often taken dictation straight from Winston Churchill with a silent typewriter, found her fingers twitching unconsciously, as though over imaginary keys. Durgin noticed and grasped one of her hands. Maggie wasn’t able to look at him, but she did squeeze back in response.

  “The defendant will rise,” intoned Justice Langstaff, reaching into the breast pocket of his robes to pull out a pair of gold-framed spectacles and settling them on his nose. “Please state your name, for the record.”

  “Nicholas Reitter, my lord,” the prisoner replied quietly.

  A hiss emanated from somewhere in the back. With a glare over the rims of his glasses, the judge silenced the room. “Do you have anything to say for yourself, Mr. Reitter?”

  Reitter remained silent, eyes cast down.

  “Very well. Nicholas Reitter, you have been found guilty of eleven counts of murder in the first degree. You tortured and killed five women, patriotic women, serving their King and country in wartime. You defiled their bodies. You killed six men of the Metropolitan Police as they attempted to capture you. You attempted to kill yet another woman.” That’s me, thought Maggie, swallowing hard. “And you also tried to defeat the ends of justice by attempting to cover up your actions and plead innocent, thereby wasting this court’s precious time.”

  Maggie pressed Durgin’s hand.

  “The crimes,” the judge continued, “all described in the testimony, are savage, frenzied, bestial, and utterly unprovoked attacks. In my view, no evidence of any motive has been put before me throughout the trial to explain the ferocity of these attacks, except a misguided obsession with the murderer known as Jack the Ripper.”

  Throats cut and bodies mutilated, Maggie remembered, teeth clenched. He hurt them, he made them suffer—and then he killed them. Somewhere in the courtroom was the sound of a woman’s wail; Maggie knew without even looking it came from Brynn’s mother.

  “My lord.” Reitter’s attorney rose. “May I be permitted to make a few observations before the sentence is passed?”

  “Yes, Mr. Skynner.”

  “My lord, I will say nothing to attempt to diminish the severity of my client’s crimes and their effect on the victims and their bereaved families—indeed on the very fabric of our society, tenuous as it is in wartime. My client has been found guilty. He must be punished. I question not his guilt, but the law itself—which allows as punishment the penalty of death.

  “Before the war began, capital punishment and its place in a civilized society were being debated. Does the death penalty brutalize the law? The State? Are we worse off as a country when we carry out the death penalty? It is, after all, the dullest of blunt instruments. It removes the individual’s humanity and, with it, any chance of rehabilitation and service to society. And I believe it removes our humanity as well. I stand before you, my lord, to argue against the death penalty for Nicholas Reitter. Not for his soul. But for ours.”

  There was silence in the courtroom. “Thank you, Mr. Skynner.” The judge nodded. “What Mr. Skynner says is true—the death penalty does, in fact, threaten to brutalize us all as well. And yet I see no legal obstacle—and no moral one, either—due to the heinous nature of these particular crimes.”

  The judge turned his gaze back to Reitter. “Your actions were reprehensible. It is impossible to comprehend how a young man—engaged to be married, beginning a successful career in engineering and architecture—could be capable of such horrific acts of violence. In regard to the murder charges, in view of the vicious and cruel nature of the attacks, there is only one sentence I can impose—”

  Maggie held her breath as the judge paused. The assembled onlookers quieted, while outside a siren droned. The judge’s aide came forward, holding a square of black silk. There were gasps throughout the courtroom as he placed it on top of the judge’s white-wigged head, one of the corners pointing forward. Maggie turned to Durgin. They both knew exactly what the black cap meant: black, the traditional color of death and mourning, covering the judge’s head to signify his humility before God.

  “—and that is to suffer death in the manner authorized by the law.” Reitter faltered, his knees buckling; the guards held him up.

  Maggie went cold, the word death echoing in her brain.

  The judge removed his glasses. “Mr. Reitter, I hope as you spend the last days of your life in prison, you reflect on your acts of violence and cruelty. I want you to think about the agony you caused these women—and their families. And I pray, if it is at all possible, you find some empathy in your heart for them and ask for forgiveness. From Christ, if not from their families.” He tucked the glasses in the front pocket of his robes. “May God have mercy on your soul.”

  “Amen,” said the priest, his eyes downcast.

  As the aide removed the black cloth from the judge’s head, there were a few claps. But most in the chamber remained still and silent, taking in the enormity of the sentence. The judge stood, and everyone else did as well. “God save the King,” intoned the clerk. The judge exited.

  The room broke into nervous chatter, and the clerk glowered at the crowd. “I must ask for silence!” He nodded at the guards. “Take Mr. Reitter away.” There was again the sound of steps and then the clang of a metal door.

  Maggie saw the woman in the black hat with pink trim rise and make her way up the aisle. As she passed, Maggie noticed on the lapel of her coat was a silver circle pin, tarnished around the edges. She tried to catch her eye this time, but the woman looked away, her face stone. The attorneys gathered their papers, and Durgin pronounced, “And now it’s finally over.”

  Is it, though? Maggie wondered. Will it ever be over? For any of us? She stood. She now felt cold and numb, a block of ice where her heart used to be. “Not quite,” she managed. There was still the execution.

  “I’m a man of the law,” Durgin said, as if reading Maggie’s thoughts. “If the judge in this case sees fit to sentence Reitter to death, so be it.”

  Maggie turned to Vera. “What do you think?”

  “It makes no sense to me,” Vera said, shaking her head. “I believe in the Bible and I believe in forgiveness. Punish him with a true life sentence. We can’t teach people not to kill people by killing them ourselves.” She righted her hat. “Still, it’s hard to find sympathy for the young man. As the judge said, God have mercy on his soul.”

  They left. Maggie saw Brynn’s mother in the hall outside, surrounded by friends and family, dabbing at her eyes. As the trio passed, Maggie overheard Mrs. Parry say: “Maybe I’ll finally sleep when he’s dead.”

  “There can be no more appeals?” Maggie asked. The DCI shook his head.

  “Only the King could save him now,” Vera added.

  “The King?”

  “ ‘The Royal Prerogative of Mercy,’ ” Vera said. “Or ‘Royal Pardon,’ some
call it. In other words—the King’s Justice.”

  “Has the King ever used it?” Maggie asked.

  “There was a German refugee named Irene Brann, who escaped to London in 1937,” Vera told her. “She married an Englishman and got a British passport so she could bring her mother here. They were terrified the Nazis would invade Britain. And so they made a pact to take their own lives.

  “Her mother died, but Irene lived,” Vera continued. “Since suicide is against the law, and helping someone else to commit suicide is considered murder, Irene was taken to the Old Bailey, where she was found guilty of murder and sentenced to hang. She wrote a letter from the condemned cell to King George, who commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment. But within three months the authorities relented further and Irene was set free.”

  Maggie felt tentacles of fear wind through her. “But surely there’s no way he would do that for…” She hated having the name in her mouth. “Him?”

  “No, no,” Durgin reassured her as they made their way out. “Now we count down the days until his execution.”

  In the lobby, Vera stopped and turned to Maggie. “Even though this was a stern day, I’m glad to see you again, Miss Hope. May I ask if you’ll be at the next book club meeting?”

  “Wouldn’t think of missing it, Mrs. Baines.”

  “Our next novel is Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.”

  “Thank you.”

  “We don’t have many copies of the book, so we’ll be passing mine around.” As Vera took her leave, Maggie saw Frain bearing down on them. He and Durgin shook hands. “Maggie,” he said in greeting.

  “Peter,” she replied, offering her hand, which he pressed. It always felt odd to use the Christian name of the head of MI-5, but he’d insisted years ago.

  “Glad to see this matter wrapped up finally,” he said. “But I hear rumors that after your adventure in Scotland, you’ll be taking a break from SOE?”

  Adventure. That’s one way to put my false imprisonment and near death. She made sure her expression was vacant, neutral, unthreatening. “Yes, I’m taking a break.” After learning some of the agents had deliberately been given misinformation about the place of the Allied invasion—and then sent on missions where there was a high likelihood of capture and torture to convincingly convey false information to the enemy—Maggie had cut her ties with SOE.

  “But what are you going to do?” Durgin asked. “If you’re not working for SOE and you’re not working with MI-Five…”

  Even though she felt numb inside, anesthetized, Maggie smiled, then squared her shoulders. “You know me—I always find something.”

  Chapter Two

  Monday, March 1, 1943

  Three months since the trial

  Nine days until Nicholas Reitter’s execution

  At the bottom of a deep pit, Maggie listened through the earpiece as she pressed a probe against the side of an unexploded bomb. Her face was covered by a mask of sweat and dirt, her hair pulled back into a tightly braided circle. “If you hold your breath, you can hear the ticking,” she said.

  She looked up and grinned to show she was joking, but her trainee only looked nauseated. As a part of the 107th Tunneling Company of the Royal Engineers, their job was to defuse unexploded bombs left in London by the Luftwaffe during the Blitz in 1940. The sapper team, using picks and buckets, had already dug around the dank bomb crater—nine feet down into cold soil and flint. Thanks to their efforts, the UXB was now fully exposed and ready for defusing.

  The 107th was part of the Royal Engineers and the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, which could trace its lineage back nine hundred years to the military engineers who arrived in England with William the Conqueror in 1066. With the advent of the war, however, it had come to be known as the “Suicide Squad.” Starved of resources, given little respect, its members were a ragtag troop of conscientious objectors, or COs—and, now, one woman—who defused and dismantled the unexploded Nazi bombs.

  Even though bombs no longer fell from the skies nightly as they had during the Blitz, the city was still a battleground, with strained nerves running like fuse wires. It was estimated that over thirty thousand unexploded German bombs still remained in London—likely to detonate if moved, touched, or “just because.” In January, an unexploded bomb had discharged unexpectedly, killing thirty-eight children and six teachers at a school in South East London’s Catford district. DANGER UXB signs were now sights as familiar in the city as red telephone booths.

  Maggie’s and Milo’s thick-soled boots sank into the cold mud, their khaki uniforms splattered and stained. While Milo was trying his best not to be sick, Maggie felt exhilarated—alive—despite her dry throat and hummingbird heartbeat. Adrenaline coursed through her veins, addictive as cocaine. When she was dismantling a UXB, time stopped and nothing else mattered—it was just her and the bomb. All her worries and troubles fell away. And that divine detachment felt like freedom.

  But she was also there to teach. “Can you identify this bomb?” she asked Milo.

  “Sprengbombe Cylindrisch One Thousand,” he replied, in what Maggie had come to suspect might be a cockney accent but with richly rolled r’s. “A large, general-purpose, thin-cased ’igh-explosive demolition bomb. About two thousand pounds, I’d say.”

  “Excellent.”

  “I read the manual,” he told her shyly.

  “And what’s this bomb’s nickname?”

  “ ‘The ’Ermann’—for that fat Nazi, ’Ermann Göring.”

  Maggie nodded. “Good.” Of course, it doesn’t matter if he knows the name of the bomb if it goes off, she thought. But it’s an excellent distraction. The air down in the hole was bitter and smelled of loam. It was almost silent there, below the city streets, the usual hum of London muffled by the densely packed earth.

  Maggie put down the probe, then took off her leather gloves and cleaned off the cold metal fuse with her bare hands; her fingers were scarred and her fingernails black with dirt. At least this Hermann was relatively straightforward. As she picked away soil, she sang under her breath, “Every morning, every evening, ain’t we got fun?”

  Milo watched intently as Maggie worked. He was only eighteen, with large dark eyes and olive skin. Like her, he was dripping with sweat, despite the cold. His glossy black hair stuck straight up at a sharp angle—from brilliantine or fear, Maggie couldn’t tell. While his physique was slight and wiry, his face still had the roundness of childhood. But he had none of youth’s lightness of heart; even back at headquarters, Maggie had noticed Milo’s demeanor: serious to the point of somber, full lips pressed into a thin, narrow line, always looking askance, as if he’d be ordered to leave at any moment.

  As Maggie chipped off the last of the dirt with her nails, she remembered her own teacher, a lanky fellow with thick blond hair and a matching mustache, saying, “A bomb’s still. It’s cold. But never for a moment forget a single wrong move might send you to eternity. It’s difficult for civilians to understand what it’s like down a hole with a UXB—one minute you’re there, the next you could be ‘pink mist.’ But you need to know. And you need to be prepared.”

  From the thick afternoon light and the rumbling in her stomach, Maggie guessed it was sometime around three. When she finished cleaning the dirt from the fuse, Maggie picked up the universal key, using it to loosen the locking ring. “Have you ever been this close to a live bomb before, Milo?” she asked gently, noticing his pronounced pallor.

  “I’ve, er, seen a demo, Miss ’Ope,” he said, blinking snowflakes from his thick eyelashes.

  “Just Maggie,” she chided. “Especially down here.” She was technically not a “miss,” but a major in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the Army known as ATS, but her rank was a cover for her work with SOE, all of which she’d decided to leave behind. “And don’t forget to breathe,” she reminded him.


  Best to keep him occupied, she thought, turning her attention back to the deadly device. “Hand me the extractor, will you?”

  “Er, which one is that?”

  “Fuse Extractor Number One. The one we call ‘Freddie’ for short.” He fumbled through the tools with sweaty hands, finally choosing one, handing it to her gingerly.

  “Excellent,” she told him. He tried to smile, but it never quite reached his eyes. Using the extractor, Maggie began to work slowly and carefully; her movements were precise, even though her hands were red and numb. “I’m making sure the extractor is in line with the eyebolt,” she explained in a level voice. “You see here?” She pointed. “It must match perfectly.”

  Milo swallowed. “ ’Ow—’ow long does this usually take?”

  “Each bomb has a life of its own.” Maggie continued to work. “We could be down here anywhere from twenty minutes to twenty hours.”

  “Maybe…” His voice cracked bit. “Maybe the ’Ermann’s a dud?”

  Well, wouldn’t that be lovely. “Possible, although I’m afraid odds are it’s not. The Germans had lots of practice perfecting their bombs during the Spanish Civil War. They learned the ones that didn’t explode on impact could cause more trouble—especially near schools, hospitals, railways, and the like. They build them so they don’t all go off at once. On purpose.” Maggie sniffed and wiped her nose on her sleeve. “So, I’m assuming you know all about gaines and picric and tumblers? The technicalities of removing the fuse from the bomb casing?”

  “Yes, miss.”

  When she looked up at Milo and saw him sway slightly, she felt a stab of pity. He looks so innocent, she thought, so young and untried. And the poor bugger doesn’t know one end of an extractor from the other.

  She turned back to the fuse, eyeing the ring of the exploder tube. Like Milo’s, her only preparation had consisted of reading the Royal Engineers’ Manual of Bomb Disposal cover to cover a few times and watching various officers wrestle with bombs, picking up technique on the job. All the top brass cared about when it came to hiring was Are you unmarried? Are you a good sprinter?