The Queen's Accomplice

by Susan Elia MacNeal

“The governing principle of forensic science, as laid down by Edmond Locard at the beginning of the last century, is ‘every contact leaves a trace.’ ” Durgin was speaking as swiftly as he walked. The peeling painted walls they passed bore posters: DO YOU KNOW THIS MAN? City of London Police—Murder of Police Officers—REWARD! And ENLIST NOW—YOUR KING NEEDS YOU. “There are eight basic fingerprint patterns of arches, loops, and whorls. And every human finger fits into one of these categories in its own unique way.”

  Maggie nodded, listening intently. This was a science she didn’t know—it was intriguing.

  They reached a door marked EVIDENCE ROOM. Durgin opened it and led them in. The room was large, with towering pigeonhole cabinets lining all four walls. “We have about ninety thousand finger- and thumbprints on file here,” Durgin said, going to a cabinet and pulling down binders. The middle of the room was stacked with boxes upon boxes, marked ROPE AND TWINE BINDINGS, TORN AND STAINED CLOTHING, and DEATHBED SHEETS. Maggie walked around them. Exactly what horrific tale had each box to tell, what mysteries could each solve—if only there were enough time and manpower to devote to them all?

  Durgin gestured for her to follow him. “Now we have to see if our Blackout Beast’s prints match any we have here.” They reached a large room of desks, and Durgin went to one by a large window overlooking the Thames. The river glimmered coppery green in the gray light, and curved like a snake. “Have a seat,” he said as he put down the books of prints. “I’ll get us some tea and then we’ll begin.”

  Tea? Made for me? Maggie tried not to smile as she took off her coat and sat opposite his desk. It was chilly in the vast room, despite a few portable radiators glowing orange dotting the perimeter, and she left her gloves on. Stacked around each desk were boxes and boxes of files, again marked EVIDENCE. It would take an army to get through them all in any sort of timely way, and even so, more and more cases were pouring in. The staggering amount of information, each box representing a dead person, made her head spin.

  “He doesn’t have to work these cases, you know.” At the desk next to Durgin’s, a broad man with carroty hair streaked with white looked over as Maggie arranged her scarf to make sure it covered her bruised neck. His nameplate read GEORGE STAUNTON. “He’s of senior rank, but he insists on working murder scenes himself.”

  “Really?” Maggie realized how little she knew of the DCI.

  “Oh, Durgin’s probably sent—let’s see now—hundreds of murderers to the gallows over the years. He’s too modest to say, but he’s our own Sherlock Holmes, he is. He hates that it’s on the wall, but you should read it.” Staunton jerked a thumb at a framed Time magazine cover that read HIS MAJESTY’S GOVERNMENT’S REAL-LIFE SHERLOCK HOLMES, with a picture of a younger Durgin with his magnifying glass.

  He was handsome, Maggie thought. Still is, really.

  She walked over to read the smaller print. The caption said: Detective James Durgin is far more human than the great fictional sleuth, and the cases he handles are of a bloodier nature.

  “I framed it for him, just to tick him off—he hates it. He hates any kind of publicity. But he’d be a fool not to take on the Beast,” the orange-haired Staunton continued. “It’s a career maker, it is. Did you see this morning’s latest?” He handed a newspaper to Maggie. The headline screamed, HUNT IS ON FOR THE BLACKOUT BEAST!

  The article described the gruesome slayings and Scotland Yard’s search for a maniac, written with lavish speculation and very little accuracy. Well, if our Blackout Beast is looking for attention, he’s certainly got it now, she thought grimly.

  Maggie looked over Durgin’s desk. No photographs. No books. Nothing personal at all, except for his nameplate and, tucked in one corner, a worn postcard of Simberg’s Wounded Angel.

  Durgin returned and set down the tea tray on the desk. “Grand, just grand,” he groaned, seeing the headline.

  “Do you want me to be mother?” Maggie asked, out of habit.

  “No, you’re our guest. I’ll pour.”

  Well, this is getting better and better.

  Durgin grimaced. “Afraid the milk’s powdered.”

  “I simply adore powdered milk. It’s what the Queen serves at Buckingham Palace, I’ll have you know.”

  Staunton glanced over. “I wouldn’t mind a cuppa, old man.”

  “Well, get your lazy arse up and get your own mug, you sorry blighter!”

  Maggie hid a giggle behind one hand.

  “Er, sorry, Miss Hope,” Durgin said. “We’re a bit informal here. Not used to ladies around.”

  “It’s fine. Comradely, in fact.”

  The DCI handed her a mug of steaming tea. “I’ll wager you’ve heard worse.”

  “Indeed.”

  Staunton passed a stack of messages to Durgin. “Questions from the press.”

  “Oh, my favorite part of the job.” Durgin rolled his eyes and began to flip through them.

  “They keep asking if the women are”—Staunton looked sideways at Maggie and lowered his voice to a stage whisper—“virgins.”

  “Oh, good grief.” Durgin ran a hand through his hair.

  “They want to know if the girls were, you know, good girls,” the other detective continued, “or if they, you know, got around.”

  Double standard. They would never ask that of a male victim….

  Durgin shook his head. “We’re telling them nothing.”

  “The press do like to divide women into virgins and whores, don’t they?” Maggie said. “And if the victim was a virgin, then it’s ‘oh, poor thing!’ and if she wasn’t, then there’s the insinuation ‘she got what she deserved.’ ”

  “It’s not relevant either way.” Durgin pushed the message slips away and picked up his mug.

  “Showed your Miss Hope the magazine cover,” Staunton teased.

  “Hate that damn thing!” The tips of Durgin’s ears turned pink. “Don’t believe a word of this malarkey,” he said to Maggie. “They only framed it to torture me.”

  “You’re quite the legend, Detective Durgin,” she declared, sipping her tea. “Mr. Frain told us a bit about you when we started, but certainly not the whole story.” She now appreciated the depth and breadth of Durgin’s experience—and understood his arrogance and impatience with outsiders. Forensics was a science, a complicated and relatively young one—she didn’t know the half of it. Yet.

  “So what’s your take on all of this?” she said, pointing to the Blackout Beast headline.

  Durgin gulped from his mug. “What makes our case unique, in my opinion, is the speed with which the murders are taking place.” He poured himself another cup. “In all my years, I’ve never seen a murderer repeatedly strike with such brutality in such a short span of time. Our Beast is going at it awfully fast. Something’s going on in his life—something’s troubling him, a catalyst. And killing—well, that relieves some of the pressure. But not enough. So he has to do it again. And again.”

  “Do you think it’s stress from the war?” Maggie asked. “He’s a veteran? Injuries to the brain? What they call ‘shell shock’?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. My gut still tells me he’s younger. Everything’s changed with the war, but, then again, lots of things are still the same. There are the same barroom brawls, petty thefts, rapes, assaults, and murders—maybe even more now. And we have new immigrants—the Poles, the Canadians, and now the Yanks—coming in and not always on their best behavior. Ironically, the Blitz has given the perfect cover for our own killers to hide their evidence—strangling or beating their victims, then hiding the bodies in the wreckage of a shattered building. Who knows how many people, allegedly victims of the Blitz, were actually murdered? The sheer number of bodies we’ve retrieved since this war’s started has made it impossible for us to autopsy all of them.”

  He shook his head. “But our Blackout Beast—he’s a narcissist. Cocky—which is why I’m hypothesizing he’s young. He’s far too brazen to hide his deeds in the mess left by the Germans. He wants us to f
ind them, he’s practically gift-wrapping the bodies. He has some nerve, he does. Still”—Durgin tapped at the side of his nose—“he’s not new at any of this—his work shows too much experience. Too much control. He’s not an amateur, but he still wants to show off. He must be loving the attention from the newspapers.”

  Staunton left, after muttering something about “getting my own damn tea,” and Maggie noted how much she liked being with Durgin, despite the circumstances that brought them together. She had never heard Durgin so loquacious and decided to press on, to try to learn something about the man himself. “Why did you become a detective?”

  “Books.”

  Maggie wasn’t about to be put off by his short answer. “Which books? The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes?”

  “No, actually.” He drained the last of his tea. “As a young lad, I was an aficionado of the literary adventures of Detective Sexton Blake by George Mann. Detective Blake’s the anti–Sherlock Holmes. Whereas Holmes pontificates and theorizes, Blake’s a man of action. Do you know, there were times as a boy where I’d go to my room to read Blake’s latest adventure, only to find the comic gone?”

  He laughed. “I’d conduct my own ‘investigation,’ which would always end at my father’s chair. And, underneath the seat cushion, I’d always find the missing magazine.” He sat back in his leather desk chair and grinned. “My father wouldn’t admit to reading such a thing, of course, so he’d say he was screening it to make sure it was appropriate for an impressionable young lad such as myself. Yes, as if I’d believe that!”

  “So, you always wanted to be a detective?”

  “I loved Sexton Blake, but I didn’t think detective work was something real people did. Police work, yes—detective work, no. But then I eventually left Glasgow for Oxford, I had what the doctors call a cervical rib”—he pointed to the right side of his rib cage—“a protrusion of bone from the seventh cervical vertebra, near the neck, pushed against a nerve, causing a lot of pain. I was admitted to hospital for surgery and, during recovery, my roommate happened to be a former officer of the Metropolitan Police Department. He’d been shot in the face, can you believe? While trying to apprehend a suspect, of course. He was in hospital to preserve the sight in one of his eyes. So I was bored, and he was bored, and pretty soon I had him talking about all of his adventures on the force—and it brought back the memory of all those Sexton Blake stories.”

  “How do you do it?” Maggie asked, sincerely. “Work as a detective? And keep on doing it?”

  Durgin refilled his mug. “Many, many cups of tea, obviously.”

  “No, really. How?”

  “You’re thinking about becoming a detective?”

  “I just want to do my bit to help win the war.”

  “Fair enough.” He rubbed his hands through his hair. “The men I hunt are evil. I believe in Satan. I believe in his power. I believe he can work through us if given half a chance. These men I pursue, like Satan, they target the weakest among us, usually women and children. I like nothing more than to catch them and throw them to the courts. It gives me immense satisfaction. There’s nothing like it.”

  Durgin took a breath. “It’s taken its toll, obviously—you can’t witness the mutilation of children and violent murder in its infinite forms without it corroding your soul. But I continue to fight. It’s all about the fight for good over evil, God over the Devil.” Then, as if realizing how much he’d said, “But enough about me—back to work!” He handed Maggie a book with cataloged fingerprints. “Let’s try to find ourselves a match, shall we?”

  She was glad to see the maniacal glee was back in his eyes.

  —

  In her feather bed at the Adlon, Elise had nightmares of Ravensbrück. In her dreams, she was on a witness stand in a cavernous courtroom, run by impassive judges with blank faces. She was asked to describe her experiences—and the words wouldn’t come. When they did, they came slowly, painfully, with gaps and long stretches of lost memory.

  She looked down at the defendant—a man made up of crawling black flies. She knew instantly he was Satan. She needed to bear witness against Satan.

  It’s important. Think.

  She woke up panicked and feeling powerless. Someday I will testify. She stretched her body, feeling for all the painful places. She pointed and flexed her feet. They were slowly healing.

  “Elise, are you awake? You have a delivery!” her father called.

  Elise rose and slipped into one of her father’s dressing gowns, which he had given her.

  The package on the dining room table was from the KaDeWe department store. Elise knew the luxury store well, from the days before the war.

  “Well, open it!”

  Inside, wrapped in lavender-scented tissue paper, were an abundance of clothes: tights, wool dresses, sweaters, underthings, nightgowns and bed jackets, fur-lined boots, and, yes, a wig. She gasped, then impulsively pulled it over her scalp. “What do you think?”

  Her father clapped and beamed. “A film star! Ingrid Bergman!”

  Elise stepped to the large mirror in the hall. She saw herself with long golden waves once again and repressed a gasp. Then she reached out a hand to touch the locks. It was hair, yes—real human hair—and she suddenly had a good idea of how it had come to be a wig. She blanched and ripped it off, throwing it on the floor.

  Still, it’s not his fault, she thought, struggling to control her breath. “Thank you, Papa,” she said, picking up the wig and giving her father a hug.

  “I wish I could take credit, but it’s not from me.”

  “Then who—?”

  “Perhaps there’s a card?”

  Left in the box was a heavy envelope with her name handwritten on it in old-fashioned Fraktur script.

  Dear Fräulein Hess,

  I have taken the liberty of asking my sister to put together some items a young lady might need at this time of year.

  Yours sincerely,

  Alexander Fausten

  “Completely inappropriate!” She backed away from the box as if it were a bomb. “Throw it out,” she declared. “Wait—give it to the poor. I won’t wear anything from him.”

  Hess’s eyes blazed. “Who? Who sent you these things?”

  “Captain Alexander Fausten. The man I met with yesterday at the Gestapo.”

  Hess’s demeanor changed from angry to beaten. “I didn’t want to ask you yesterday, because you looked so tired,” he ventured, “but how did it go? With”—he couldn’t say the words—“them?”

  Elise began to pace. “Captain Fausten wants me to sign a paper exonerating Dr. Brandt and incriminating Father Licht.”

  “How is Father Licht?”

  “Dead.”

  “They killed him?”

  “The official story is he suffered a heart attack on the train trip to Dachau.”

  “Ah.” Then, “If you sign this paper, what happens?”

  “Then I can stay here, in Berlin.”

  “And if not?”

  “I go back to Ravensbrück.”

  Elise’s father was silent for an agonizing moment. “How long do you have to decide?”

  “I must give them my answer next week.”

  Her father was silent. Then he placed his large, warm hand over hers, tears welling in his eyes. “Think carefully, my darling. Think very, very carefully.”

  —

  Mass at St. Hedwig’s was a somber affair, with Nazi banners hung from the soaring arches and a gold-framed picture of Hitler on the altar. When it was over, Elise waited in line to speak with the new priest, Father Ulrich Kappler.

  “Thank you for a wonderful mass, Father Kappler,” she said as the crowd dissipated.

  The priest took in her shorn head and scarf and took an involuntary step back. “Thank you, Fräulein,” he murmured, recovering. “May the peace of Christ be with you.”

  “And also with you, Father Kappler. It is I—Elise Hess. I worked closely with Father Licht—”

  The priest g
lanced around to make sure no one had overheard. “We do not speak his name here,” he whispered.

  “Why not? He was a good man. A great man. A great priest.” People were beginning to stare, and Elise ignored them. “We should be celebrating Father Licht’s life and raising our voices in protest against his death—”

  Father Kappler looked to a few Brownshirts at the church doors. At his glance and the sound of a rising voice, they began to walk over.

  But before they reached Elise, Captain Fausten appeared at her side. “Thank you, Father,” he stated, pulling Elise’s arm through his. “Fräulein Hess isn’t feeling well. I’m sure you’ll understand if I take her home now.”

  Father Kappler’s worried eyes took in his SS uniform and rank. “Of course, Captain. Heil Hitler!”

  “Heil Hitler!”

  —

  “Are you insane?” Fausten hissed as they walked down the front steps.

  “St. Hedwig’s is my church. My home. My sanctuary.” Where once tears would have flowed, now Elise’s eyes were dry. “Father Licht, my priest—my hero—is dead after being taken away to Dachau—and I’m not supposed to even acknowledge his existence? I’m not supposed to speak his name?”

  “No.” Fausten’s face was shuttered like a Wannssee villa closed for the winter. “He is now considered a traitor to the Reich, and the less you say about him—the less you think about him—the better.”

  “He will be sainted.”

  “Maybe.” Fausten exhaled. “Someday.”

  “Years from now, we will pray to Saint Licht. And the Father Kapplers of the world will be either reviled or forgotten.”

  “In the meantime, Fräulein, I strongly advise you to keep quiet.”

  As they walked down Behrenstrasse, their breath made white mist in the frigid air. The church bells rang, their silvery music cutting through the chill. But even though Elise was physically home, in the city where she grew up and lived all her life, she felt incredibly alone.

  Who are these people? What have they done with everything I’ve ever known and loved about my city—my country? And her heart was filled with longing. For kindness, for peace on earth, for goodwill toward man. Where has it gone? How did it disappear so fast? Will it ever return? She looked up to the cloudy gray sky, searching for some sort of answer. There was nothing.