The Queen's Accomplice

by Susan Elia MacNeal

  He rocked back and forth in pain, pinching the bridge of his nose to stanch the flow of blood. “You’re all for sale, all of you bitches…” he moaned. “You let me buy you whiskey, you smiled at me, you liked it….”

  “I was merely being polite. My mistake.” Lord, good manners just might get women raped—or worse. Giving him one last look of disgust, she ran off into the darkness.

  —

  Lungs burning, heart thudding, Maggie opened the front door to her house with a heavy iron key.

  “Hello?” she called, pushing the door in with trembling hands. She slammed the door behind her, then bolted it. “Chuck? Mr. K?” She heard padding footsteps and then felt soft fur swirling around her shins. “Ah, there you are, K,” she exclaimed, reaching down to rub his head. “And how’s our Home Guard doing this evening?”

  Somewhere upstairs, a light was on. “Chuck?” she called, instantly wary. Her heart lurched with fear. Had the doors all been locked? Could anyone have gotten in? Could Max have gotten here first—he knows where I live, after all….“Chuck, are you all right?”

  Maggie took the stairs two at a time in the chill air, K behind her. Chuck’s door was ajar, with light spilling out onto the hall’s rug. “Chuck?” Maggie called, heart racing, rapping at the door. “Are you there?”

  There was the sound of footsteps, then Chuck stepped out into the hall, closing the door firmly behind her. “Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ, girl!” she whispered. “I just got His Nibs to sleep and now you come in yelling and pounding on doors….All right, it is your house and all, but—”

  “No, no—I’m sorry,” Maggie countered, laying a hand on her friend’s arm. “Not used to babies, I’m afraid. And I was worried. This place has quite a history—plus with what’s going on out there…”

  “Let’s go to your room so we can talk.”

  Maggie led the way, pulling the blackout curtains closed, then turning on a bedside lamp. K had followed closely at her heels. She went into the bathroom and turned on the water in the tub. “It’s been a long day,” she called out to Chuck. “A very, very long day.”

  “How was tea with the Queen?”

  “Lovely,” Maggie answered, coming back to the doorway. “The palace is…ornate.”

  “How was the food? Were there lots of delicious things to eat?”

  “Alas, no—the Royal Family believes in keeping to the same strict rations as the rest of us. But it was well presented—served on the very best china.”

  “Well, that’s no fun.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Chuck looked at her closely. “No offense, Mags, but you look like shite.”

  “As I said, long day.”

  Chuck walked to Maggie and turned her around. “Bloody hell, woman! What happened to your throat?”

  “A man—he got a bit frisky.”

  “Frisky? Frisky?” Chuck, a pediatric nurse before she’d had Griffin, began to do a cursory examination. “If that’s frisky, I’ll eat my garters. No,” she said, her fingers cold but gentle on Maggie’s bruised neck. “That’s evil, is what it is.”

  “A bad date is all,” Maggie said, turning and changing out of her borrowed finery, then slipping on her robe.

  “I’ll let you take your bath, but after you finish, come downstairs so I can take a better look at your neck and put some ice on it.”

  “Fine,” Maggie agreed wearily. “Thank you. You’re a lifesaver.”

  “Are you going to report him to the police?”

  “No, I don’t think that’s necessary.” Maggie remembered the blood dripping from Max’s nose and the lost tooth. “He’s learned his lesson.”

  Chuck shook her head in disapproval. “I’d have him hanged by his pretentious university scarf. Oh, and I’m so sorry to have to tell you this, but there’s no hot water.”

  “What?”

  “I took the liberty of checking the furnace today. We’re completely out of coal. And while there’s some coke left, it’s not enough to last us to the next delivery. So—if it’s all right with you—we’re doing hot water on an alternating-day basis. This happens to be a ‘cold’ day, but I found some hot water bottles and left you one on your bed. We can boil water in the kettle and fill them up tonight.”

  Bloody hell. Bloody, bloody hell.

  “I’ll heat you up something for supper,” Chuck continued. “I made a veggie mash—all right, it’s mostly all turnips and cauliflower with margarine and some bread crumbs, but it’s not half bad, really….” She left the room, heading for the stairs.

  “Sounds perfect.” She’d postpone the bath for another day. One with hot water. “I’m just going to wash up at the sink and come downstairs. And then you can tell me about your day.”

  “And I can treat your neck!” she called from the stairwell. “I don’t like the look of those bruises!”

  K was still winding around her ankles, and as Maggie washed her face, trying to rinse off the horrible evening, he jumped up on the closed lid of the toilet to keep watch. “Bold little thing, aren’t you?” she scolded, and he gave her slow blinks. Her hands went to her neck as she peered at it in the mirror. The marks were red and growing darker.

  K began to purr.

  Maggie met her own eyes in the mirror. You were afraid, she realized. But not afraid of him—afraid of being rude. Rude! Afraid of trusting your gut. How many women are raped and worse because they’ve—we’ve—been taught to be pleasant, to be a good girl, to keep the men happy?

  She gave her reflection a grim parody of a smile. Never again, she vowed, splashing cold water on her face and darkening bruises. “I do solemnly swear I will trust my instincts—my ‘gut’—from now on,” she told the cat. “No matter how unscientific it may seem.”

  —

  It was slightly warmer down in the kitchen and smelled of mashed potatoes; the wireless was on, playing “Chattanooga Choo Choo.”

  “Well, your breathing’s fine, your eyes are fine, and your voice is fine,” Chuck reported once she’d examined Maggie. “Here,” she said, going to the icebox. “I got some snow and wrapped it in a tea towel. Wrap that around your neck. It will take down the swelling.”

  Maggie did as she was told, then began eating the vegetable mash Chuck put in front of her. It was plain, but hot. And she was unexpectedly starving.

  Chuck pulled down the bottle of Jameson whiskey David had procured for her the night of the party. “Saving it for a special occasion—but I think this might be it.” She poured both Maggie and herself a glass. “What the devil’s this world coming to?” She pointed to the newspaper. “You probably haven’t had time to read the paper yet—what with tea with the Queen and the attempted strangulation and all that—but there’s more news from the East about the Jewish camps.”

  “Heaven help us,” Maggie said, taking a sip.

  “We don’t have the details yet, but whatever’s going on over there, it’s evil incarnate,” Chuck said, taking a swig of her whiskey. “Look—‘Extinction Feared by Jews in Poland’—Henry Shoskes says the monthly average of those dying is ten thousand. Ongoing! I’m a nurse and I’ve seen dead bodies. Then I try to imagine one body times ten thousand—and that’s just a month—and my mind simply can’t do it.”

  Maggie tipped her head back and gulped the remains of her whiskey.

  Chuck looked to her friend. “Sorry. I know you’ve had a bad day.”

  “Mr. Churchill once gave a speech and he changed ‘dark times’ to ‘stern times,’ ” Maggie said softly. “But sometimes I think he should have left it that way—these really are dark times, aren’t they, Chuck?”

  “More whiskey?”

  “Yes.” Maggie held out her glass, trying to hold back thoughts of Brynn, and Calm Doggie, and the dead women in the morgue. “Yes, please.”

  —

  Brynn slept on and off, increasingly disoriented and unaware of time, of day and night, of days passing. The only markers she had were the meal trays left while she was aslee
p, usually toast with margarine, and tea, and the occasional sandwich and small, wrinkled apple.

  Brynn was sure she was being drugged, but she couldn’t taste it in the food. Still, she ate sparingly, and drank the tea only to soothe her parched throat. Despite her precautions, her hands had tremors and she couldn’t shake the disoriented, foggy feeling that kept her in bed, or the waves of nausea rolling incessantly through her.

  What was most disturbing, however, was how someone had access to her room, someone was coming in and going out, and she was unconscious when it happened. It was more than disconcerting. It was terrifying.

  Still, she sat up and breathed, calming her heartbeat, giving her brain oxygen, clearing her mind. As she did, she became aware of a sound piercing through the heavy door and thick walls.

  It was faint, but still distinct.

  The sound of a woman screaming.

  Chapter Twelve

  The phone rang at five A.M.

  Maggie scrambled out of bed and ran down the hall to answer it, shaking off a headache. “Yes?” she said, disoriented and out of breath. “Hello?”

  “There’s been another murder,” Durgin stated without greeting or preamble.

  Maggie was instantly wide awake. Work. Yes, work is what I need. “I’ll meet you and Mark at the coroner’s.”

  “Just what I was thinking.” He hung up without saying goodbye.

  —

  DCI Durgin stood next to Mr. Collins, hands clasped behind his back, eyebrows drawn together, as he watched the autopsy. “The recent murder of Miss Olivia Sutherland is an exact reenactment of Jack the Ripper’s killing of noncanonical victim Emma Elizabeth Smith in 1887,” Durgin announced to Maggie as she walked in.

  “Good morning, Detective, Mr. Collins.” She had wrapped a flowered Liberty of London silk scarf around her bruised throat.

  She stopped short when she saw the body of the young woman. Oh God, poor Olivia Sutherland. She had a sudden urge to run out of there, run as fast as she could. Go back to bed, hide under the covers, and weep for Olivia—for all of them who’d ended up on a coroner’s table.

  But instead, she bit the inside of her cheek and then asked, “Where’s Mr. Standish?”

  “He called in sick.” Durgin looked disgusted. “Sick! Wouldn’t catch a Yard copper calling in sick. Ever. Not even with plague.”

  “Sick?” Maggie had never known Mark to take a day off. As Durgin shrugged and rolled his eyes heavenward, she said, “Never mind. Where was Miss Sutherland’s body found?”

  “Cross of Gloucester Road and York Street.”

  With a deep sigh, she pulled the map of London that Mark had given her from her handbag and marked off the newest location with a red X. The Xs were making a loose circle, a hangman’s noose. She bit her lip. If her theory was correct, it was growing ever tighter around the place the Blackout murderer was holding and killing his victims.

  “What’s that?” Durgin asked, approaching to peer over her shoulder.

  “It’s—it’s something I’m working on. A map of the places the bodies were found. I’m working on a mathematical formula—it’s an idea I had while I was watching a darts game last night—”

  “Oh, that reminds me—how was tea with the Queen?”

  At this, Collins looked up from the corpse and gave Maggie a sour glare.

  Maggie was in no mood to engage. “Her Majesty sends regards. Any witnesses?”

  Durgin turned back to the body. “My men are doing the usual appeal now. And we’ve had press sniffing around. Can’t let them get hold of it—or we’ll have a panic on our hands.”

  “Might not be the worst thing,” Collins interjected. “Maybe the young ladies will stay home at night for a change. They should all be under curfew—at least until this bastard’s been caught.”

  Maggie’s hand crept to her bruised neck and worried at her scarf. “And why should the young ladies have to stay at home and off the street, Mr. Collins?” she asked in a preternaturally calm voice. “They certainly haven’t done anything wrong. Perhaps it’s the men who should be under curfew—they’re the ones committing these horrible crimes, after all.” Then, “Is there any way to test if the women were given a calming medication, such as a tranquilizer?”

  Collins gave her a curious look, then frowned. “Unfortunately, no. Someday, I hope we’ll be able to test for what, if any, drugs are in the bloodstream, but for now, if it’s not in the stomach and recognizable, we don’t know.”

  “Find any fingerprints?” Maggie asked.

  “No.” Durgin was still staring at her. “Still nothing. You know, I’m considered to be rather an expert on fingerprinting—and the cheeky bastard’s not leaving any.”

  Maggie circled the woman’s body lying on the gurney. “In the original Jack the Ripper killings, the police examined the eyes of those killed—they believed the victims’ retinas might have somehow retained an image of the killer….”

  “I already checked her eyes,” Collins snapped. “You think I don’t know how to do me job? Of course I checked her eyes. I checked the eyes of all the girls.”

  Maggie had an odd feeling in her stomach. Could this be “the gut”? “No, no,” she clarified, “not the eyelids. The eyeballs.”

  “There’s no way in hell she could have fingerprints on her eyeballs! In all my days of working on the dead—”

  Maggie dug her fingernails into the palms of her hands.

  “Shut up, Collins,” Durgin interrupted. “Did you check?”

  “Well, no—”

  “Then, I’m going to dust her eyeballs for prints,” Durgin declared. He went to the metal counter and took out a feather brush and a glass jar filled with dark gray powder, as well as a small paper printed with the words ADHESIVE STRIPS and a blank leather-bound notebook. Dabbing the brush into the powder, he approached the corpse. “Would you do the honors?” he asked Collins.

  “Sir! Yes, sir!” Collins responded, still aggrieved. He went to the body and pried open the left eyelid, then gestured theatrically to the detective.

  Maggie’s stomach churned, and she was suddenly glad all she’d had that morning was tea.

  As Durgin gently brushed the powder over the exposed eyeball, an image began to appear. Maggie moved closer to watch, mourning the murdered woman, disgusted by the physicality, but also undeniably and irresistibly fascinated by the science.

  Durgin continued to move his wrist with delicate grace and guide the brush with his fingers. More and more lines began to emerge, like a photograph developing in its chemical bath. “The chemical composition of fingerprint powders can vary,” he murmured, “but they all basically work the same way. Latent prints are created by the natural secretion of sweat and oils from the skin that leave behind an outline of the ridges found on one’s fingers. A person’s fingerprints remain constant from womb to grave. Only damage to the skin of the finger can alter the print. So each print is wholly unique—even the prints of identical twins differ.”

  The Detective Chief Inspector tapped his brush back into the powder and began again. Faint swirls began to take shape on the eyeball.

  “My goodness,” Maggie breathed.

  “I’ll be damned,” Collins muttered. “The murdering devil did leave a print on her eyeball. Deliberate, I’d say. Like a bloody calling card.”

  Durgin selected an adhesive strip and placed it on the powdery eyeball. He waited, peeled the strip off, then pressed it to a blank white page in his notebook. There it was. A fingerprint, as distinctive as a snowflake.

  “Good job, Miss Hope. What I’m using,” Durgin told Maggie, “is Henry Faulds’s classic method of recovering prints from a crime scene.”

  Through a magnifying glass, he examined the print in the book. “It’s a good one,” he assured them. “So we can take it back to the Yard and see if we have a match.

  “You were right this time, Miss Tiger,” he said, straightening. “Good on you. But don’t get your hopes up. First of all, there are hundreds of thou
sands of prints and no way to match them, except going through all of them one by one. And we have limited manpower. And, even if we could go through all of them, there’s no guarantee there’ll be a match in our records. And, even if there is a match, a positive latent match doesn’t guarantee a conviction.”

  “Still, when we catch our Blackout Beast, we’ll have solid evidence for his arrest and conviction,” Maggie mused. “Detective, you did say serial killers—er, sequential murderers—have the same sorts of victims, the same ways of murder, and always a calling card? We thought the Ripper graffiti was his calling card—but here’s a far more personal one.”

  “Glad to see you’ve been paying attention,” Collins muttered.

  “Collins,” Durgin said. “You’ll check the eyeballs of the other Blackout Beast’s victims for prints, yes?” It was not a question.

  “Oh, the things I do for lurve…” the shorter man grumbled, but went to pull on gloves nonetheless.

  Durgin peeled off his, tossed them into a garbage bin, then scrubbed his hands with soap and water in the sink. “Good job, Miss Tiger.”

  Maggie tamped down her surge of pride—she didn’t want the men to see any emotion, good or bad, in her expression. No smiles. No reactions. To exist in a man’s world, you need a face like a poker player’s.

  Durgin dried his hands and picked up the notebook with the print. “And now let’s head to the Yard. Maybe we’ll get lucky and this devil’s print will match something in our books.”

  —

  The New Scotland Yard, on the Victoria Embankment, was housed in respectable-looking large red-brick Romanesque-style buildings, slashed by thick horizontal bands of white Portland stone. As Durgin led Maggie through a maze of poorly lit corridors inside, she couldn’t help but wonder: How many murders had he worked since the outbreak of war? Too many, probably—and how sad and ironic. How many air raids had the people survived? How many nights had they been dragged from the warmth of their beds by the wailing of sirens? To survive the Luftwaffe bombs—only to be murdered by a fellow Briton…She shuddered.