The King's Justice

by Susan Elia MacNeal

  Giacomo raised a hand in greeting. “Peter the Second, of Yugoslavia,” he explained to Maggie. “King George of Greece is here, too, signed in under the name ‘Mr. Brown.’ ” He gave her a rakish grin. “When someone calls the front desk asking for ‘the King,’ they’re obliged to ask, ‘Which one?’ And then there’s Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands.” He shook his head. “This war has driven everyone who could to come to London.”

  “Will you keep the violin in the hotel safe?” Maggie asked as the waiter poured her tea.

  “I will have her with me always. At night, she will sleep in bed with me, on her own silk pillow.” Again he raised his hand in greeting, and Maggie recognized Alfred Hitchcock’s unmistakable rotund profile across the bar. She tried not to stare. “Hitch has been living here—filming Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache,” Giacomo explained. He took a sip of champagne. “Of course Claridge’s is all quite convivial and glamorous now, but no one speaks of the afternoon in the summer of 1940 when the Italian waiters were taken away to the camps.”

  “What?” Maggie hadn’t heard this. She picked up her teacup.

  “Regulation Eighteen-B,” Giacomo explained. “Under which Britons of Italian background were reclassified as enemy aliens.”

  “Are they—are they in Scotland?”

  “Most have been released, like my friend Lorenzo here.” He pointed to an elegant gentleman at a nearby table, pouring a martini with a slight tremble in his hand. “Some are still in the camps. I like to come here and say hello to those who have returned.”

  “I understand.”

  “And so I can forgive my Aunt Silvana for taking the Strad. She thought it would save a life. My cousin’s.” He raised one eyebrow. “I won’t leave her alone with my violin ever again, of course—but I do understand.”

  “Francesco,” Maggie remembered. “Frankie Genovese. Is he—?” Is he one of the dead?

  “Frankie is fine, Miss Hope. My aunt only made the payment to that horrible woman. But he never went to her flat. At the last minute, he decided to give himself up instead. They let him enlist. He’s in the RAF now.”

  He came so close…She swallowed. “Well, thank goodness.”

  “Not only did you save my violin,” he said, “but you saved lives. Again, I thank you.” He reached for Maggie’s hand and took it. His grasp was gentle but insisting, promising. “May I call you Maggie?”

  “Of course.”

  “And you must call me Giacomo.”

  Maggie reluctantly pulled her hand away and took a sip of tea. “And where is Mrs. Genovese?”

  “The violin is Mrs. Genovese!” He grinned like a naughty schoolboy. “And she doesn’t mind, I swear.”

  It’s tempting, Maggie admitted to herself. A night of fun with a handsome man, no strings attached. But still. “I have a beau—DCI Durgin.” She wasn’t sure where things stood between them, but she owed it to Durgin to speak with him face-to-face.

  “Ah.” Giacomo’s tone was dismissive. “You deserve better than him. And where is he now, your detective?”

  “He’s at work—wrapping up the details of the Jenny Greenteeth case.” To change the subject, she asked, “Where are you off to next? I read somewhere you’re doing a tour?”

  He let go of her hand. “Yes, performing for the troops. All over England, Scotland, and Wales. It will be six months, at least.” He took another sip.

  Maggie stood. “I wish you well, Giacomo. You’re a brilliant musician and seem like a lovely man.”

  “Mille grazie for returning my bella to me.” He stood. “You are going back to your detective now?” he asked, sounding like a dejected little boy.

  “Home. It’s been a long day.” Maggie knew she only had to say the word and she could spend the night with him. And yet she said, “Goodbye, Giacomo,” then turned and left.

  Chapter Thirty

  Wednesday, March 17, 1943

  One week later

  In addition to giving up her motorbike, cigarettes, and all but the rare cocktail, Maggie had begun swimming again. She couldn’t swim outside like she used to, at the Hampstead Heath Ladies’ Pond, because her body wasn’t acclimated to the cold. But she went to the Dulwich Public Baths in South London, one of her favorite indoor pools still open.

  Many pools had closed when war was declared. They had been drained and floors laid over them so the space could be used as first aid posts. But the Auxiliary Fire Service specifically asked for the Dulwich pool to be kept full. The service had equipped it with Fire Brigade pumps for a good supply of water when dealing with air-raid fires. Now that the raids were over, the council had decided to keep it open.

  The pool was housed in a humid and chlorine-perfumed Victorian structure. The skylights and high, white-painted steel arches reminded Maggie of a cathedral. She dove into the sunlit, turquoise water and felt its coolness envelop her. She finally felt clean. Reborn. The noise in her head stopped. She swam through the liquid gold of the sunlight, focused on her breathing. Everything—the world, the war, all her pain—fell away. As she moved her arms and legs in rhythm, a poem by Christina Rossetti sprang, unbidden, to her mind.

  My life is like a faded leaf,

  My harvest dwindled to a husk:

  Truly my life is void and brief

  And tedious in the barren dusk;

  My life is like a frozen thing,

  No bud nor greenness can I see:

  Yet rise it shall—the sap of Spring;

  O Jesus, rise in me.

  When she had swum to the point of exhaustion, muscles flooded with lactic acid, she floated on her back, stretching out and looking up at the brilliantly blue sky through the glass. It’s spring, she realized, and the very thought filled her with pleasure as she paddled over to the ladder to climb out. The Red Sox must be in spring training now. Opening Day is just around the corner. Someday, it will be summer.

  * * *

  —

  Maggie arrived by Tube at the Monument stop a bit early, so she went to a café. It was a beautiful day, warm in the sunshine, cool in the shadows, and she sat by the taped windows enjoying the warm light on her skin. On the tables were pots with yellow daffodil blooms.

  “What would you like, dearie?” the waitress asked. She was a sensible-looking woman, with broad, strong-looking shoulders, wearing a white apron and flat shoes.

  “Tea please. And a Bath bun.”

  “Right away, love.”

  At the table next to her was a white-haired man in a blue seersucker suit. “I know it’s not really the season,” he said, indicating the suit. “But spring is always precarious.” He chortled. “And who knows if we’ll even make it to summer?”

  “Who knows, indeed,” Maggie said. “But you look quite handsome. And we’ve made it this far.” She herself was wearing a new dress, with iridescent white flowers against a pale blue background, purchased with ration coupons. Her hair was down, in loose curls.

  She looked out the bottle-glass windows, watching the last of the clouds float past, leaving the sky clear, golden light filtering through budding branches. Even if it’s just for today, it’s lovely to look up at the sky without bracing for an explosion.

  While she waited for her tea, Maggie picked up an abandoned newspaper. Nicholas Reitter and Nicolette Quinn remained front-page news, including in The Daily Enquirer.

  The headline read: THE BLACKOUT BEAST AND JENNY GREENTEETH: ARE MONSTERS BORN OR CREATED? Maggie checked the byline: Boris Jones. As he had promised—threatened—he was piecing together the history of Nicholas Reitter and Nicolette Quinn. He was writing an exposé on both, publishing in serial fashion to capitalize on the momentum of the public’s interest in the murderous mother-son duo.

  A TALE OF TWO MURDERERS:

  JENNY GREENTEETH IS

  BLACKOUT BEAST’S MUM

&n
bsp; Imelda Reitter, a.k.a. Nicolette Quinn,

  Killed Hundreds in the Course of Her Nursing Career

  and Killed More to Protect Son Nicholas Reitter

  on Death Row

  BY BORIS JONES

  LONDON, ENGLAND, 17 March—Suspected for the death of over six persons, Ward Sister Nicolette Quinn, also known as Imelda Lynch, immortalized by the press as “Jenny Greenteeth,” was killed by an unknown assailant in Clerkenwell, fleeing the scene of one of her horrific crimes. Her latest intended victim, Milo Tucci, was found in her Clerkenwell flat, chained to a radiator in a cellar smelling of blood, surrounded by Quinn’s tools of torture and dismemberment. He is currently in stable condition at Fitzroy Square Hospital in Fitzrovia.

  Maggie poured tea from the pot into her cup, but left it untouched.

  But how did this Angel of Death escape detection for so many years?

  Nicolette Quinn was born Imelda Lynch in 1885 in London’s East End. Her mother, Bridget Lynch, was in and out of hospitals before dying of tuberculosis. Her father, Kevin Lynch, a tailor, was often jailed for minor acts of violence. Her older sister, Ann, died in Bedlam Asylum.

  After her parents’ and sister’s deaths, Imelda was sent to St. Vincent’s Orphanage in Marylebone, a home for indigent children. From that point on, it seems she lived a nomadic existence, shuffling between an orphanage, foster homes, and different distant relatives. Ultimately, she was taken in as an indentured servant by a Mrs. Moira Quinn. Both Mrs. Quinn and her daughter, Rebecca Quinn, died in unexplained circumstances. Scotland Yard is currently investigating their suspicious deaths. It was during this time that Imelda Lynch took on the name Nicolette Quinn.

  Maggie swallowed hard and read on.

  Quinn attended the Florence Nightingale Training School at King’s College in London. Her fellow students remembered her as a gregarious and cheerful person—but also someone who gossiped and spread rumors about student nurses she didn’t like; she even implicated several students in infractions they didn’t commit, resulting in their dismissal. “I remember sometimes Nicolette would take us all out to celebrate when someone she didn’t like got the boot,” recalled Irene Barkley, one of Quinn’s fellow students. “We never knew where she got the money for the tab, either.”

  Public records show Nicolette Quinn married Miles Reitter, aged thirty-two, and became Nicolette Reitter. She gave birth to son Nicholas Reitter a scant two months after the wedding. Nicholas Reitter, of course, grew up to become the infamous Blackout Beast, who held London in terror as he reenacted the murders of his idol, Jack the Ripper. He was brought in by the Metropolitan Police and sentenced to death on December 8, 1942. He committed suicide on March 10, hanging himself with shoelaces in his cell at the Tower of London before the execution was to begin.

  Miles Reitter, who was a handyman in and out of jail on charges of public drunkenness and debauchery, perished of what was deemed a heart attack. The Metropolitan Police are now reinvestigating that death also.

  During this time, a boarder was taking care of young Nicholas Reitter, a woman named Nellie Bowles, who had served jail time for solicitation and prostitution. School records indicated Nicholas had often showed up with bruises, unexplained sprains, and broken bones, which were always dismissed as clumsiness and accidents. Bowles was arrested for running a house of ill repute and died in mysterious circumstances in prison.

  Did she force Nicholas to prostitute himself? Maggie wondered, a hand rising to cover her mouth.

  Nicolette Reitter served as a nurse during the Great War and, afterward, was hired by the London Hospital in the East End. From the beginning of her tenure, there was an unusually high death rate among her patients, and many items, including cash and jewelry, were reported missing from patients in her care. She was fired, but no charges were brought against her. She then accepted a job at Fitzroy Square Hospital in Fitzrovia, changing her name to Nicolette Quinn.

  It was unclear how many patients Quinn murdered during her period as a student nurse, hospital nurse, and Ward Sister, and investigations are still ongoing. However, so far, thirty-two bodies have been exhumed, and traces of lethal amounts of poison have been found in the bodies, implicating Quinn in their deaths.

  In addition, a macabre scrapbook has been found at Quinn’s flat in Clerkenwell, including newspaper articles chronicling deaths and disappearances in London—all of which are being investigated as a possible catalog of her dark misdeeds, from her time in nursing school to the present day.

  Quinn had recently cut and pasted articles about Nicholas Reitter’s arrest and trial, as well as a picture of Margaret Hope, who was his last victim and the only woman who survived. From the notes made, it looks as though Quinn held Miss Hope personally responsible for her son’s injury, arrest, imprisonment, and death sentence.

  Quinn set herself up as “Jimmy Greenteeth” in order to overshadow her son’s murders—thereby trying to blackmail His Majesty King George VI to use his pardon for Nicholas Reitter in order to stop the killing. She enticed conscientious objectors of Italian descent to escape from a possible roundup, such as the one in 1940, and told them that, for a considerable payment, she could get them to South America. She took a hefty fee, plus their valuables. And then she drugged and killed them.

  After dismembering the bodies with surgical equipment stolen from the hospital and feeding their flesh to her pigs, she boiled the bones, put the skeletons in suitcases, then dropped them into the Thames. All the valises were found with white feathers, symbols of cowardice and given to conscientious objectors in the Great War.

  In this guise, she became known as “Jimmy Greenteeth,” seemly set on dethroning Nicholas Reitter, the so-called Blackout Beast. And she used what power she had over a baffled Metropolitan Police to negotiate for her son’s pardon.

  However, our brave King stood firm and rejected the appeal for a pardon. An anonymous source at Buckingham Palace says, “His Majesty thought the court system and Judge had already given a sentence and he did not want to disrupt the course of Justice.”

  Quinn was shot by what a witness describes as a masked Carnevale reveler. We will be following up, dear reader, with this aspect of the story, as it seems there’s more than the Metropolitan Police are telling us at this time—the same Metropolitan Police who, under the direction of DCI James Durgin, withheld important information about the white feathers from the public.

  Maggie grimaced.

  And here, gentle readers, is something to make you shiver next time you, or someone you love, is in hospital: after Quinn’s death, when the police went through her flat, detectives found numerous textbooks, many of them showing extra wear and detailed notes on the pages about poisons and dangerous drugs—particularly morphine and arsenic.

  Maggie pushed away the plate, bun untouched, and took a sip of cold tea. The article ended with one of the pictures she’d seen in Nicolette’s flat—of her and a very young boy. According to the caption, the boy was Nicholas, at approximately age three.

  Nicolette had undoubtedly been abused. She might have abused her son, or allowed Nellie Bowles—or someone, one of her “clients”—to abuse him. Nicholas then, in turn, abused young women who reminded him of his mother, the woman who, in his mind, betrayed him. If the person is able to do to others what he fears will be done to him, Maggie thought, she—and he—might no longer be afraid. And then the circle went around again—Nicolette Quinn abusing—killing—to try to save her son. She was a woman who loved her son. A woman whose motherly instinct twisted. A woman who wanted ultimate control.

  “Anything else, love?” the waitress asked, breaking Maggie’s reverie.

  She looked at her watch; it was three, almost time to meet David. She looked up at the woman and smiled. “Just the bill, thank you.”

  On her way out, she noticed the man in the seersucker suit fold back his
newspaper: MAESTRO GIACOMO GENOVESE, REUNITED WITH STRADIVARIUS VIOLIN, PLAYS CONCERT FOR WOUNDED VETERANS AT FITZROY SQUARE HOSPITAL. She smiled.

  * * *

  —

  Maggie climbed the twisting circular steps to the top of the Monument to the Great Fire of London, cursing David for asking her to meet him there. The Monument was a fluted Doric column of Portland stone. Designed by Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke, it stood near the spot where the Great Fire started, on September 2, 1666. And it had been built on the site of St. Margaret’s, the first church destroyed by the fire.

  She reached the final few steps. The muscles of her legs burned and shuddered from both the swim and the stairs. On the viewing platform, she saw David, standing at the railing, his hat at a rakish angle. Maggie joined him, struggling to breathe, her face framed in the golden sunlight. “Better view up here than from the bottom of a bomb pit,” she managed.

  “You’re out of shape,” he observed.

  “Getting fitter, though. Back to swimming. And no more cigarettes. I quit.”

  He slung an arm around her shoulders and hugged her briefly. “Thank Holy Hygeia.”

  From the top of the monument, they had an unobstructed view of the city—Tower Bridge, the Thames, St. Paul’s Cathedral—underneath a dazzling blue sky. Below, life pulsed as people went about their business, gardens verdant with fresh grass and yellow leaves.

  “It’s good to have some perspective on things sometimes. Did you know it’s two hundred and two feet high and two hundred and two feet from the starting point of the Great Fire?” David asked her.

  Maggie looked up; the monument was topped with a gilt-bronze urn of flames. “I don’t know how you got us up here.” During the Blitz, the monument had been closed to the public. Now, although it was scarred with damage from bomb fragments, it remained standing—and off-limits.