The King's Justice

by Susan Elia MacNeal

  “No more murders,” she stated, dropping her arms. “Honestly, I—I just can’t.”

  “No more murders, yes. But how can you refuse”—he paused for dramatic effect—“ ‘The Case of the Stolen Violin’?”

  Maggie quirked one eyebrow. “Sounds positively Sherlockian.”

  “Holmesian. And the violin in question is what they call a Cremona Stradivarius.”

  Maggie’s eyes widened. “A Stradivarius?”

  “Does that mean something to you?”

  “Well, yes,” she said. “It’s a very, very special violin—due to the physics of its acoustics. It’s supposed to create the most gorgeous sound. They’re legendary.”

  “Right—you’re a violin player.” He smiled. “See, I remember things.”

  “Viola, actually. And not anywhere in the same league as someone who plays a Strad.” Maggie had once played in a string quartet with some Wellesley and Harvard students. She’d loved it, especially performing Bach. “Whoever lost it must be heartbroken.”

  “Giacomo Genovese, first violinist with the London Philharmonic.”

  Maggie nodded. “I’ve heard of him. Reputed to be a virtuoso—and quite handsome, too. ‘The Valentino of the Violin’ they call him.”

  “ ‘Vaselino of the Violin,’ ” Durgin corrected.

  “Yes, I read that in one of the tabloids—because he uses brilliantine in his hair? Or because he’s Britalian?” She shook her head. “Poor man. He must be gutted by the loss.”

  “Just read the file,” Durgin told her.

  “You didn’t give me one.”

  “I left it in the kitchen.”

  “Cheeky.”

  “See you tomorrow evening, right?”

  “What are we doing again?”

  He waggled a finger at her. “It’s a surprise.”

  “Do you really have to work tonight?” she said, leaning into his chest. “I’m still rather, well, wound up from working on yet another bomb today.” Her cheeks burned, but she didn’t back down.

  His arms tightened around her. “Afraid so. But tomorrow,” he reassured her. “Tomorrow is our night.”

  “Promise?”

  “I do,” he said. “Believe me, Maggie Hope,” he said, kissing her forehead. “Tomorrow will make up for everything.” He smiled, his lips curving up, the lines around his eyes crinkling. And Maggie, more than a bit tipsy, decided to believe him.

  Chapter Six

  “Durgin couldn’t stay?” David asked when Maggie returned, carrying a fresh glass of pink gin.

  “He’s working,” she told him, covering her disappointment. “The Jimmy Greenteeth case—plus something about a stolen Stradivarius.” Maggie knew she was drinking too much, but she didn’t feel drunk. She told herself she needed just one more—she craved the gentle, blurry, buzzy way things appeared after a few drinks, the softened edges. Your father died from complications from alcoholism, a tiny voice inside her head warned. Shut up, she thought, pushing the consideration away. I’m nothing like him.

  “And…” David’s eyes narrowed. “Will you be working with him on one of the cases? Both?”

  “Neither. My career with the Met Police is over. I’ve hung up my deerstalker hat.” Maggie tried to laugh it off, but the shadow cast by the Blackout Beast was too dark and too long. She felt chilled and took another sip.

  “Good. I think you have enough stress and strain with those bombs as it is.” As Milo went off in hunt of sausage rolls, David leaned closer to Maggie. “I do like your James. Got to know him pretty well, searching for you and then going back and forth to Arisaig. But I still can’t say I see you together.”

  Where’s this coming from? “Why on earth not?”

  “Well—not long-term, anyway.”

  “He’s smart, he’s funny. I enjoy spending time with him.”

  “He’s married to his job. And I don’t like the fact he’s divorced. Or a recovering alcoholic.”

  “We’re all human, David. We all have a past. And not only is there a war on, but there’s another serial killer on the loose.”

  “I just always hoped you and John—”

  “Ancient history,” Maggie replied. Pretending it didn’t still hurt to speak of her ex-fiancé, she opened the drawer of an end table and pulled out a cigarette case. Smoking provided the same protection as drinking. And drinking and smoking were even better together. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, she thought, realizing she was moving from tipsy to drunk. She plucked a cigarette out, and one of the pilots lit it for her.

  “Thank you,” she said as David frowned. Maggie challenged him with a raised eyebrow, but this time he didn’t say anything. She inhaled like a movie star, causing the tip to glow, then pasting on a bright smile as she exhaled.

  “Are you all right?” David asked, suddenly serious.

  “Right as rain, old thing.”

  “I’m serious—at any moment, I expect you to laugh the laugh of the mad.”

  “I’m fine—really.” Fine, yes—happy to take all of my emotions and bury them down, Maggie thought. It’s the English way, after all—deflecting from the screaming void inside my heart.

  David didn’t look convinced but let it go. “So where are Nigel and Chuck? I haven’t even seen the happy couple!”

  “I think they’re still upstairs.” Maggie raised her eyebrows suggestively.

  “Then who’s with Griffin?”

  Maggie heard a low, almost raspy voice and turned. “Auntie Sarah is with Master Griffin.”

  “Sarah!” Maggie said, embracing her friend, who smelled of clove cigarettes.

  “Hello, kittens!” she replied. Sarah Sanderson was dark-haired and pale-skinned, tall and slender—now almost gaunt—with the perfect posture of a dancer. Sarah had been friends with John and David, and Maggie had met her during the summer of 1940. Since then, the women had become roommates and close friends, further bound by the fact they’d served as SOE agents in Paris together.

  Maggie cooed over the toddler in Sarah’s arms, who was gumming the ear of a fuzzy brown Chiltern teddy bear. Griffin was a beautiful child, with dark curls and rounded apple-slice cheeks.

  “Gee!” he said to Maggie, holding out his bear with sticky fingers. “Gee-gee!”

  “Yes, it’s Auntie Gee-gee,” Maggie replied, kissing the soft hair on his head, inhaling his scent of sugar and milk. “And how is Mr. Bear tonight?”

  “Bay!” He laughed.

  A few more guests arrived and the volume of the room increased, as did the cloud of blue cigarette smoke. “I’ll go and help with the food,” Maggie told them. She’d made potato fingers from the previous night’s leftover mashed potatoes and they needed only a quick bake. “Be right back.”

  Cigarette in one hand, glass in the other, Maggie made her way to the kitchen. The rest of the house had been updated after the bombing, but the kitchen remained unchanged from the time Maggie had first arrived. The floor was tiled with a chessboard of black and white squares, and blackout curtains protected the windows. It had been in this very room Maggie had first begun to feel at home in London, after moving from Wellesley, Massachusetts, where she’d lived with her Aunt Edith, a chemistry professor at Wellesley College.

  The oven already had another pan of sausage rolls ready to come out, but Maggie couldn’t find any pot holders. She put down her gin, crushed out her cigarette in the sink, then ducked into the small pantry to search. She’d just turned on the bare bulb overhead when she heard Chuck and Nigel enter. She froze in front of a box of the Ministry of Food’s powdered milk.

  “I don’t even know what happened,” Maggie heard Nigel say.

  Chuck’s voice was less distinct through the heavy oak door. “It doesn’t matter, darling…,” she said with her musical Irish accent. The pot holders, crocheted with p
ink roses—stained but still serviceable—were hanging on a hook by the shelves. Maggie took them. But should I go out?

  “But it does!” Nigel continued. “And I have no memory of doing anything! I just—black out.”

  There was a silence. “You do drink.”

  “Because it’s the only way I can get through the day!”

  Should I go out now? But Maggie had already heard too much. Or wait?

  Nigel’s voice sounded again, softer this time. “You have no idea what it’s like there. In the Med. It’s hell.”

  “You’re home now, darling.” Chuck’s voice was soft.

  “But I’m not—when I close my eyes, all I can see is the sand. The sun—it’s so bright and hot. All I can feel is danger, chaos, mayhem. It takes at least a bottle of whiskey these days to sleep! I don’t even feel it anymore.”

  There was the sound of breaking glass, and Nigel shouted a string of profanities.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Chuck said in soothing tones. “Why don’t you go upstairs and take a bath? Then come back down and join the party when you’re feeling more yourself?”

  Nigel replied something indistinct; when he’d left, Maggie opened the pantry door and entered the kitchen to find Chuck leaning against the counter, looking defeated. “I—I was looking for pot holders,” she said, holding them up. “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to eavesdrop.”

  Chuck was wearing a party dress, violet with white circles, a silver heart dangling between her rounded breasts. Her long chestnut hair was rolled and in the new half-up, half-down style, her cheeks bloodless, lips coated with fire-engine-red lipstick. She waved one hand, then let it drop.

  Embarrassed, Maggie walked to the oven and pulled out the tray of sausage rolls, now blackened. “Oh, blast,” she said, putting the tray down on the burners, and then stabbing at them with a knife to see if they were burned all the way through.

  “I’m sorry you had to hear all that.”

  The rolls would be salvageable with the tops scraped off. Maggie put the tray on the windowsill to cool. “I didn’t hear—”

  “Of course you did. And goodness knows what else you’ve heard since Nigel’s returned.”

  “I’ve been…working,” Maggie said by way of an explanation. She wasn’t sure what was going on, but she wanted to help, without being intrusive. “Let me make you some tea.”

  “No, no tea.” Chuck took the pink gin Maggie had left on the counter. “This will do nicely.” She took a slug, then set down the glass. “Heavens, now I’m acting just like him.”

  Maggie moved closer to her friend. “Chuck, what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know! You know I was counting down the minutes until Nigel’s leave, waiting for him to come home. But now that he’s here, it’s hard…and we argue. We just don’t know each other anymore at all.” Chuck’s eyes filled with tears, but she blinked them away.

  “He needs to adjust,” Maggie said. “He’s been to war.”

  “Well, I’ve been to war! We’ve all been to war—or rather the war has come to all of us!” Chuck spluttered. “Hitler and his cronies have brought the war to us civilians—we could be bombed again at any moment! I’ve gone through the war as a single mum—terrified and alone—and then our flat exploded in a gas main leak! You don’t have to serve in the armed forces to feel the effects of the bloody war!”

  “I know.” Maggie reached for her friend’s hand. “But maybe give him more time.”

  “We don’t have time. He’ll be shipping out again, in two days.”

  “Back to the Mideast?” In the pause that followed, Maggie noticed the faucet was dripping, a steady plonk-plonk of water.

  “No, he’ll be flying missions to Germany now. Air Chief Arthur Harris has ordered more nighttime bombings on German cities. Cities with civilians. Like Berlin. Now they’ll know how it feels.”

  Maggie tried to close off the faucet, but the leak continued. “I’ll ring the plumber tomorrow,” she said.

  Chuck sniffled, then gestured to the door. “How’s the party?”

  “Lots of people—Nigel’s friends, I think—they seem to be having fun,” Maggie assured her. “Sarah’s with Griffin, and David and Freddie are here. I’ve brought along a new boy from the Hundred and Seventh, Milo Tucci. No, no—not like that,” she said, noting Chuck’s expression. “Get your mind out of the gutter! He’s a lovely young man, and I’m happy to take him under my wing. And your friends from the hospital all seem to be having fun.”

  “How’s my face? Is my lipstick all right?”

  Maggie appraised her friend’s creamy skin, dotted with freckles. “You’re beautiful.”

  Chuck sipped the gin. “Of course it’s going to be hard for Nigel when he comes home on leave,” she said, trying to convince herself.

  K, Maggie’s cat, had pushed open the kitchen door and went straight to Chuck, winding around her legs. “He knows,” Maggie said. “Look—he’s trying to cheer you up.”

  “He wants to be fed.” But Chuck smiled and reached down to pet the marmalade tabby with the raggedy ears, souvenirs of a hardscrabble life in western Scotland. She picked him up to cuddle and he began to knead her bosom. “It’s only because you’re adorable,” she scolded him, “that I let you get away with this.”

  “Meh!” he meowed in his odd way, then leaned toward Maggie. She scooped him up and stroked his velvety head. He began to purr even louder, then bumped her forehead with his and rubbed his cheek on her face. She cuddled him close, feeling a fleeting moment of safety and peace in his presence, as comforting as any lullaby.

  When he’d had enough, he jumped down, making his way to his food dish. Maggie’s arms were empty, leaving behind an aching sense of loss. “Why don’t I scrape the burned bits off the sausage rolls, put in my potato fingers, and then, when you’re feeling a bit better, we’ll go and pass out the food?”

  “And by then, Nigel will have had his bath and joined us. It’s all going to be fine,” Chuck insisted. “It’s all going to be just fine. Fine.”

  Maggie nodded, recognizing what Chuck was doing. “Of course. Tickety-boo.”

  But the word rang false in her ears, even as she refilled her glass, even as she rejoined the party. She talked, she laughed, she even danced. But at a certain point, she staggered upstairs, to her bedroom. There was nothing she wanted more than to fall asleep, be unconscious again.

  Maybe it was Durgin talking about Jimmy Greenteeth, or maybe it was overhearing Nigel’s outburst, but Maggie felt raw, her soul abraded. She stared up at the ceiling, tears running down her face. There’s a hole in my chest, she thought absently. But that’s normal, yes? That’s what happens when we grow up?

  As K jumped up to wedge his furry body next to hers, she gave him a pet. “It’s all tickety-boo, Fur Face. It’s all tickety-boo.”

  * * *

  —

  The first thing Durgin noticed when he returned to the office at Scotland Yard that night was that the framed Time magazine cover was back up. A younger, rounder-faced Durgin peered back at him, one eye enormous behind a magnifying glass. The headline read, HIS MAJESTY’S GOVERNMENT’S REAL-LIFE SHERLOCK HOLMES and the caption: Detective James Durgin is far more human than the great fictional sleuth, and the cases he handles are of a bloodier nature.

  Putting up the picture was a game of sorts with the other detectives. Durgin would take it down and hide it; they would find it and rehang it. “I told you to get rid of this thing, Staunton,” Durgin said, unhooking the framed cover and putting it, face inward, against the wall.

  At the desk closest to Durgin’s, George Staunton was also working late. He looked over, smirking. He was broad as he was tall, with carroty orange hair streaked with white. “Never!”

  Durgin sat down. His wooden desk was practically monastic: no personal effects, no books, no framed photos. Only h
is nameplate and an old postcard of Simberg’s Wounded Angel on the wall marked the space as his. The desk itself was surrounded by boxes of files, each marked EVIDENCE.

  Staunton cleared his throat. “So…how’s Miss Hope?”

  “Fine.” Durgin’s tone did not invite further questions.

  Staunton didn’t seem to notice. “Considering how I helped you through your divorce all those years ago, you might see fit to fill me in with more than ‘fine.’ I like that young woman,” Staunton added. “And not just because she has lovely red hair like me.”

  “Your hair’s orange, not red. And speaking of Miss Hope,” Durgin said, “when I went to her house for the party tonight, I met a friend of hers who’d been given a white feather.”

  “Conchie?”

  “A conscientious objector, yes. Works with her defusing UXBs.”

  “You think he’s at risk?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Is Miss Hope going to be working with us on this case?”

  “Afraid not. She wants nothing more to do with murders. I don’t blame her.”

  “Did you tell her about the violin? The what-do-you-call-it?”

  “The Stradivarius. Yes, I mentioned it, but she didn’t bite.”

  “Maybe that’s not such a bad thing, you know,” Staunton said. “Keeping your work and personal life separate.”

  “Keeping everything separate is what doomed my marriage,” Durgin said, going through papers.

  “You really want to take your best girl along to murder scenes?”

  “Well, no, but I do love the way she thinks. She has a gift. She just needs a bit more experience and training.”

  “A woman? Working with the Met Police?”

  “Well, not officially, of course…” He sighed and shook his head.

  “Maybe you should start with dinner and the cinema. Flowers. Sweets. I hear ladies like that sort of thing. More than murders.” Durgin only glared. “A white feather, you say?”

  The DCI nodded. “Seems the Order of the White Feather girls are back—tracking them down’s a good place to start. With this so-called Jimmy Greenteeth. The pub’s the Rose and Crown in Marylebone. Tomorrow, why don’t you go and have a look around—see if they know the girls giving out the white feathers. They’ve been spotted in Regent’s Park, too. And at a café, in Clerkenwell, Café Mela Rossa. I’ll go by there myself.” He leaned back in his desk chair, tipping it at a dangerous angle. “Where does one get white feathers these days?”