The Queen's Accomplice

by Susan Elia MacNeal

  Maggie had the prickly déjà vu feeling of taking part in an age-old dance. She stood, stance wide.

  With a deep bellow, the Beast charged once more.

  She felt cold to the bone. She lifted the knife she’d pulled, then realized it was a gun.

  The kaleidoscope turned once again, and Nicholas Reitter stood in front of her, on the blood-spattered carpet of the library, a long stiletto in hand. He looked up at her, eyes glazed with hatred. She stared as his face changed from naked anger to a contemptuous smile.

  When she saw his lips lift in that parody of a smile, she felt nothing but overpowering fury. It would be easy, so easy, to shoot him, taunted a voice inside her. It would feel so good, so satisfying, to watch him die.

  She thought of all the dead bodies of women she’d seen, of Brynn’s lifeless face, of all the violence that the Beast had done. That Reitter had done. Rage and hatred coursed through her veins, making her want to hurt back. To kill. Just pull the trigger. Pull it. Get a bit of your own back—

  But no. She lowered the gun, hands shaking, and took a step away. No, she thought. No.

  He leered as he screamed, “Fucking whore.” Then he lunged.

  I will not let you kill me. Maggie aimed at his head and pulled the trigger. I will not die for you. The kick of the gun made her stagger backwards, hands smarting, as the roar of the explosion filled her ears, and the acrid smoke burned her lungs.

  Reitter fell backwards to the floor with a violent crash, legs and arms akimbo.

  Maggie stood over him, gazing down into what was left of his jaw. A pool of blood began to spread on the carpet.

  She stood there, the gun still hot in her hand, watching him bleed. Her mind was blank with shock, the thud of her heart like a drumbeat in her ears, the air of the library cold on her face.

  She’d struck a blow of revenge for Brynn. For all the murdered women. For herself. She wasn’t proud—but she wasn’t ashamed, either. It was kill or be killed. The hunter or the hunted. And she had made the decision to kill—in order to live.

  She stood over the body, gun still pointed down, breathing heavily.

  There was banging at the front door, then a deafening crash as the Metropolitan Police officers broke it down. Maggie looked up and saw Durgin in the lead, his own pistol drawn.

  “I shot him,” she told him, in a voice that sounded surprisingly normal. She could only watch as he and the officers took in the fallen body, the widening circle of red on the carpet, and then her own blood-flecked face.

  One of the men knelt down to take Reitter’s pulse. “He’s alive,” he told them. “We need to get him to hospital.”

  As the men carried Reitter out, Maggie reached up to wipe at a tear rolling down her face. But when her fingers came away red, she stared down at them, transfixed by the sight of Reitter’s blood.

  “You’re safe now,” Durgin said, putting an arm around her as they watched the men carrying Reitter leave. “You’re all right.”

  Somehow in that moment, Maggie knew exactly what to do. She took her fingers and smeared a line of blood across one cheek, then the other, then her forehead. She was now a hunter.

  Chapter Nineteen

  As early morning sunlight streamed through the windows, Sarah yawned and stretched in bed. “May I make you a cup of tea, darling?” she said in perfect French, tracing the line of his jaw with one finger.

  Hugh beamed. “Thank you, dearest. That would be lovely,” he replied, stroking her dark, silky hair.

  The leggy brunette slipped into her red silk robe and went down to the kitchen. “It’s a bit like playing house, isn’t it?” she called to Hugh, who’d followed behind. She began to rummage through the cupboards to find the tea things and bread and jam for breakfast.

  As the kettle began to whistle, Sarah turned off the gas and used a pot holder to pour the hot water into the teapot she’d prepared. She assembled everything on a tray and carried it to the table, which Hugh had set.

  Sitting down, she reached for the creamer to pour a splash into Hugh’s mug. “No!” he cried, reaching over to grab her wrist in midair. “Remember—in France it’s tea first, then milk, not the other way around! Something even as small as that could give us away to the Gestapo!”

  Sarah set the creamer down and picked up the teapot instead, realizing not only her error but what a mistake like that could cost them in France. “Sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

  Hugh released her hand, but kept his eyes on hers. “We’re a team now,” he reminded her. “Whatever comes, we’ll get through it together. I’ll cover for you—you’ll cover for me. But it’s best if we keep our wits about us.”

  The telephone rang and Hugh rose to answer it. “Yes,” he said, looking back at Sarah. “Yes, of course. We’ll come to the office right away.”

  —

  Next to the pristine white hospital bed, a pot of forced pink hyacinth blossoms on a table gave off a pungent sweet scent. Durgin slumped in the chair next to the bed, asleep, snoring softly.

  Maggie was already awake and sitting up in the white enamel bed, reading a tattered and dated issue of Vogue one of the nurses had given her. She couldn’t stop staring at an advert of an enraged man towering over a redheaded woman. The caption read: Is it always illegal to kill a woman? There was the company logo and then the response: Show her it’s a man’s world. She dropped the magazine and it fell to the floor.

  She tried to move again. She was bruised, yes, bloodied, a bit—but felt no serious damage beyond the remnants of a horrific headache. Then she thought back to the events of the last few days, yesterday, last night…to Brynn.

  Brynn. Brynn and all the other SOE women who’d been killed. Murdered. Gone, destroyed. What had Reitter said? It wasn’t fair. Well, Maggie was old enough, and had seen enough, to have given up any hope of life being fair long ago, but it seemed the women’s deaths had ripped a dreadful and forever unmendable hole in the fabric of life.

  Slowly, memories began to trickle back. The press conference. The desperate struggle in her house. Her visions of Brynn and the Minotaur. Shooting the Blackout Beast—Nicholas Reitter, May Frank’s fiancé. She reached up to touch the blood on her face, but someone had washed it off. Her fingers came away clean.

  Durgin opened his eyes. She’d always thought they were gray, but in this light, they looked forget-me-not blue. He sat up, surreptitiously wiping at his mouth to see if he’d drooled. “Morning,” he said. “How do you feel?”

  “I’ll live.”

  Maggie’s hands went to her head. It was covered in bandages, and she could feel a large and painful lump on the crown.

  “The visions I had…They were…insane.” Maggie pinched the bridge of her nose. “And now I have a god-awful headache.”

  “I’m not surprised.” Durgin reached out to clasp her hand. Their fingers interlaced. “You’d been given drugs and hit your head, hard.” He appraised her, then asked gently, “Do you remember anything?”

  “If you’re asking if I remember shooting Reitter, the answer is yes.”

  “The shot you fired missed his brain, but took off most of his jaw.” He poured water from a carafe into a glass and handed it to her. “He’s still alive, Maggie. It will take some time, but eventually we’ll put him on trial. Justice will prevail.” He brought her hand to his lips and kissed it. “But, darling,” he warned. “You need to be careful.”

  “I know, I know.” Maggie grimaced. “When you stare into the abyss—”

  “—the abyss stares back at you. Yes, believe it or not, this humble DCI has read Nietzsche, too.”

  They sat together in silence, then Maggie asked, “Who is he? Nicholas Reitter?”

  Durgin’s eyes narrowed. “My men put together a profile for me, earlier this morning. Reitter went to the Oxford College of Engineering, and studied architecture. Didn’t graduate, though. Despite the fact his professors all said he was one of the most gifted students they’d ever met, he apparently had problems with authority
figures—left the program. When the war broke out, he enlisted in the Army. And he was dismissed for what his records show were ‘issues with superior officers.’ ”

  “I see.”

  “Here’s something interesting—he interviewed for SOE after being discharged from the Army. He has a good command of French—and made it to the first round of training in Scotland.”

  “They do take all sorts.”

  “But he had authority issues there, as well—and he was asked to leave before making it any further in the program. He came to London and somehow met Dr. Frank, who owns a number of properties in the Marylebone area. Because he didn’t have a degree, he’d recently been drafted to—what he considered—a substandard post in the Middle East—that’s what we think the catalyst was for the murders—his terror at the idea of being shipped off.”

  “So—why re-create the Ripper murders?”

  “He’d been killing women in private, one every six months or so, and disposing of them in a large kiln in the basement of the Castle Hotel. But when he was called up, his anxiety increased. He wanted to do something more public, make a statement. The pace of his killings also increased, as his date of departure loomed.”

  Maggie chewed on her lip. “So, that’s where the anger and rage came from—the women of the SOE—who were succeeding where he’d failed.”

  “More than that, I’m afraid. We still have to connect the dots, but it seems he’d already started abducting and killing young women from St. Hilda’s at Oxford, even before the war. There’s no telling how many women he’s killed. We do know his mother abandoned him when he was three. According to police reports, his father was abusive—made him and his brother beat each other with belts for sport.”

  “He has a brother?”

  “The brother’s institutionalized now. And from what our psychologist said of Nicholas Reitter, working women remind him of his mother. And so, by murdering SOE women, he could be punishing his mother over and over again for leaving, for living a public life, for working. In his eyes, for abandoning him.”

  “How did he manage it?” Maggie felt a wave of nausea. “Did he have a contact at SOE?”

  “Thankfully, no. But he was engaged to the daughter of the hotel’s manager.”

  “May?” Maggie did remember the young blonde. Remembered how May had shown her to her room that night, must have shown Brynn to the same room…“May knew of the murders?”

  “Worse than that—May helped Nicholas set the women up to be captured and killed. She and Reitter met and fell in love when her father had to rebuild the hotel. She became his accomplice, leaving the cards for the Castle Hotel at the SOE offices—Reitter knew where they were, of course, because he’d interviewed there himself. She always asked women who arrived how they found out about the hotel, and if they said SOE, she was sure to put them in rooms fitted with gas pipes, then let Reitter know they were there. She helped him give food to the women, helped move the bodies, too.”

  Mind-boggling. “But why?”

  “We don’t know.” Durgin crossed himself. “Love, probably. Or, at least, what she thinks of as love. But she’s in custody as well, for her part.”

  “My God.” Maggie blinked. “A woman—a woman involved with all this…A woman helping to kill other women…” Then she startled. “Gas pipes?”

  “Yes, that’s how he—they—kept their victims quiet.”

  “Dr. Frank also owned the building in Pimlico that exploded. The newspaper said it had something to do with the gas pipe.” Maggie put the pieces together. “It’s probable Reitter had something to do with that, too, isn’t it?”

  Durgin gave a deep sigh. “You may be right. I’ll get my men on the connection—and all of Dr. Frank’s other properties, as well,” he said with a grim nod. “Look, I don’t want to push you—but you’re going to have to give your statement to the police.”

  “Well, you’re the police, aren’t you?” She tried to force the corners of her mouth up into a smile, but it hurt too much.

  “It’s a bit more formal than that. The infamous endless paperwork, I’m afraid.”

  “Yes, paperwork—I know how much you love paperwork.” She grimaced. “Just one more question—how did you know your men had been killed and I was alone there with him?”

  “The redoubtable Mrs. Baines. Thank goodness for her! She saw all the light pouring out from the window you’d opened and rang me. I knew then that something had gone terribly, terribly wrong.”

  “Well, remind me to thank Mrs. Baines.”

  “Last night you brought down evil, Maggie. Pure evil.”

  “Evil actually can’t be scientifically defined.” Maggie tried to fix the bandages on her head, then gave up. “Evil’s nothing more than an illusory moral concept linked to religion and mythology.”

  “I know evil,” Durgin insisted. “I’ve seen it. Fought it. And last night—that was the real thing.”

  “You should know now,” Maggie told him, “before we go out to dinner, that while I have a great respect and affection for many religions—and a particular affection for the Jesuits for reasons I can’t go into—I’m not a believer myself.”

  Durgin’s eyebrows shot up to his hairline. “You’re not?”

  “I’d rather concentrate on the here and now. I choose to act as though God does exist—and, who knows? It is possible. Even as a mathematician and scientist I’m aware there are mysteries we can’t begin to know. I take on many of the traditional morals not because of reward and punishment, but because I feel they help me live a better life and it’s the right thing to do. ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’—it’s quite beautiful—and common sense, really.”

  Durgin shook his head. “Nicholas Reitter—we found where he was keeping and killing the women, his victims. It looked like something out of the Inferno.”

  “Reitter was a man—but not a devil. And certainly not a beast.” She shuddered as a vague memory of something, something gigantic with knife-sharp horns, flashed through her mind. Then she dismissed it. “The belief in a supernatural source of evil isn’t at all necessary. Men alone are quite capable of it.” She took a sip of water. “It’s interesting Dr. Frank’s a psychoanalyst—maybe at some point they’ll be able to isolate what we think of as ‘evil’ and perhaps even cure it. But it might take a while—despite Freud’s writings on the unconscious and Jung’s on the shadow self.”

  Durgin shook his head. “I still believe evil is real. And a force to be reckoned with.”

  Maggie remembered her own hatred, standing over Reitter with her gun, his blood splattered on her face. Once again, she rubbed at her cheek. “But if we kill those who are evil—do we become evil ourselves?”

  “I think,” Durgin said, “that you did what you had to, in the line of duty. I think you saved the lives of countless women. And I think—while it’s always preferable to apprehend a suspect without bloodshed—that last night, the Blackout Beast got what he deserved.”

  —

  The day was cold but beautiful, with a dazzling blue sky and puffy white clouds. The air smelled of sun-warmed seaweed and mud from Hatchett Pond as Hugh and Sarah strolled hand in hand through the gardens of Beaulieu. “Spring is coming,” she announced, as a gentle breeze blew.

  “Technically, it’s still winter.”

  “Maybe according to the calendar, but spring’s in the air.” The grounds of the estate looked almost like the Garden of Eden with their apple trees, stone fruit orchards, and black earth dug up in anticipation of spring Victory Garden planting. At the edge of a field showing the first tips of green snowdrop shoots, an ancient oak towered over the land. It was gnarled and battered by the winter’s storms, but it held firm. England. Britain. What we’re fighting for, Sarah thought. Why we’re going to Paris.

  Hugh cocked his head. “If you look at that tree from the right angle, it rather looks like Churchill, don’t you think?”

  They entered the manor house. Miss Lynd was still using Kim Philby’s o
ffice, which had a view of bare treetops from wavy greenish glass windows. “You two will obviously be working at the Palais Garnier and the environs, reporting to ballet master Serge Lifar. Your contact at the Paris Opéra will provide housing for you. A radio contact has been established. You’ll receive that information after you arrive—”

  Kim Philby opened the door. “Hope I’m not interrupting.”

  “Not at all, Mr. Philby,” Miss Lynd replied. “We’re just wrapping up.” She looked to the duo.

  “The moon is full and we have good weather. We’d like you to go tonight. We have a plane in place,” Philby said.

  Miss Lynd gave a smile, a genuine one. “We’re taking you to the aerodrome before midnight.”

  “Midnight,” Sarah mused, her eyes locking with Hugh’s.

  “By the way, this telephone message was left for you.” Miss Lynd passed Sarah a note. It was from Maggie, asking her to return her call and saying that it was urgent she do so.

  “What is it?” Hugh asked her.

  Her jealousy was irrational, Sarah knew, but it was hot and strong nonetheless. She had no desire to bring up the topic of Maggie and no desire to return her call. “Nothing that can’t wait until we get back from France.”

  —

  Elise and her captors had made it to a safe house just outside Paris. The SOE agents took Elise inside with them and had her sit in a corner of a small old-fashioned kitchen while they spoke in rapid French to the men there, other SOE agents and Free French, she realized, translating in her head. It was a modest house, with a pump at the sink, a fireplace to one side. One of the men from the house gazed at Elise, then went upstairs to alert their radio operator the subject had arrived safely.

  “Are you hungry?” one asked, pulling out coarse bread and purple fig jam, and pouring steaming milk into cups.

  “We’ll untie you if you promise not to do anything stupid,” said another.

  “Why are you fighting us, anyway?” asked her original captor. “We’re all on the same side, you know.”