The London Blitz Murders d-5

by Max Allan Collins

  They’d had this conversation endlessly, since Max departed.

  And it ended as it always did: “We shall see, Stephen.”

  Then she told Stephen about her research project with Sir Bernard Spilsbury.

  “That sounds dangerous,” Stephen said skeptically.

  “Don’t be silly. I may be going to crime scenes, is all-the danger’s long over, by the time the pathologist arrives.”

  “Still… I don’t like it. I doubt Max would like it, either.”

  “He would have the same reaction as you, dear Stephen: a knee jerk of chauvinism; and then I would point out that Sir Bernard’s research is not unlike his own… digging into the past. And that my work, at least as I see it right now, requires a research effort of my own. And I would have Max’s blessing.”

  His dark eyes were tight beneath the dark eyebrows. “I don’t know, Agatha. Do please take care.”

  “Who’s to say anything will come of it? This ‘Ripper’ may never strike again; or the two murders may not really be connected.”

  Stephen shifted uncomfortably in the hard seat. “But if a new Jack the Ripper is stalking London, using the blackout as his fog… that’s inherently dangerous. You must reconsider.”

  “I tell you what, Stephen. Stay away from the likes of Janet Cummins, and I’ll consider… reconsidering.”

  “You’re a cruel woman, Mrs. Mallowan.”

  “Mrs. Mallowan!” The seeming echo was Irene calling over to her. “Agatha… a moment, please?”

  Agatha gave Stephen a scolding look, said, “Behave yourself while I’m gone,” and returned to the seat next to the director.

  “I hate to interrupt your social hour,” Irene said, teasing good humor mixed in with the bitchiness. “But have you had the opportunity to pay any attention to these auditions?”

  “I have indeed.”

  “I’m on the fence. There are three I’m considering.”

  “No, you’re not, Irene. You know very well the Ward girl is the best. The others are quite wretched. Miss Ward is the most attractive, and she speaks my lines well… or at any rate, well enough.”

  Irene sighed. “I hate to give a part to one of Bertie’s ‘discoveries.’ ”

  Agatha touched the director’s arm. “Bertie loves only you, Irene. Just as you love only the theater. Cast the best girl-which is to say, Miss Ward.”

  The next sigh was colossal. “Well… I’ll read her again, at least.”

  Nita Ward returned and by this time she and Larry Sullivan were old pals, laughing, touching each other. Agatha had never considered Larry to have a philandering bone in his body; but a fetching creature like Nita Ward, even if she had been around the block a few times, could probably locate that bone quite easily.

  “The same two scenes, please,” Irene called. “Larry, again, please read both parts.”

  And the theater filled itself with Agatha Christie’s lines, and Mrs. Mallowan was quite enchanted…

  … at least until she began to wonder if her ten little whimsical murders… her murders for fun… had a place in a world at war, and a city “stalked” (as Stephen had aptly if archly put it) by a Ripper.

  FEBRUARY 10, 1942

  The West E nd seemed rife with men in uniform these days, but not every bloke in khaki got respect, much less the perks of wartime enjoyed by so many. Still, Inspector First Class did sound impressive, didn’t it?

  And would have been, were Jack Rawlins a police officer, say, and not a reader of shilling-in-the-slot electrical meters for the light company.

  At thirty-six, an eighteen-year veteran among electrical “inspectors,” Rawlins had seen every bleeding thing in this business, from opulence to squalor, big fat women just stepped from the tub, lovely lithe ladies alighting from the shower (latter such instances were pressed in Rawlins’s mental memory book like flowers, while the former he strove to forget). Barking dogs, untended babies, passed-out drunks-what hadn’t he stumbled across in his duties for God, country and paycheck?

  And in spite of the lack of respect for his branch of the service, Rawlins experienced his share of hazardous duty on these Blitz-torn streets, stepping over fire hoses, skirting craters, veering to avoid UXBs. When a bomb disrupted normal electrical services, was it a soldier or sailor who charged into the breech? Hell no! It was the fearless likes of Jack Rawlins….

  You might think working the Soho district would be glamorous or at least interesting. But the “foreign” quarter of the West End-enclosed by Wardour Street, Shaftesbury Avenue, Charing Cross Road and Oxford Street-was as dull by day as it was provocative by night. Right about now, just before eight-thirty in the morning, the snow-flecked sidewalks were largely empty, the streetwalkers of Soho tucked in their wee beds, doing nothing at all spectacular, and the array of unique nightclubs and exotic restaurants wouldn’t be open for business till much later in the day.

  In fact, Rawlins made a point of doing the flats above first, as it was difficult finding anyone in the clubs and restaurants till late morning, when they were either open for lunch or cleaning up for the coming night (and didn’t those “unique” nightclubs and “exotic” restaurants look disappointedly drab and dirty by the light of day).

  The shops and businesses and such weren’t open yet, either, like this optician’s at 153 Wardour Street, which was next on his route. Rawlins headed up the narrow unlighted flight of stairs to a small landing and a quartet of doors to a trio of flats and a shared bathroom; a yellow hanging bulb threw a pool of light for him to stand in, as if he were on stage. He’d encountered the woman who lived alone there, now and then-a pleasant, pleasantly plumpish, and oh so pretty prostitute, name of Evelyn Oatley.

  Rawlins was a happily married man, however, and considered himself immune to Miss Oatley’s charms. Besides, what beauty offered to swap services with a meter reader to save a shilling? Not that he would have looked away, should he stumble onto the fetching fallen flower alighting from her bath….

  When he knocked, the door creaked open a few inches; he had not realized it was ajar.

  “Miss Oatley!” he called. “Here to read your meter, miss!”

  No answer.

  Shrugging to himself, Rawlins stepped inside.

  The small one-room apartment was quite dark, the curtains still drawn. He tried the light switch, but the slot meter’s money had run out and the light did not turn on; seemed he’d come ’round none too soon.

  With no one home, Rawlins probably should have backed out of the flat and gone about his business. But the nape of his neck was prickling-it was not like Miss Oatley to allow her electricity to run out like that. She kept a small neat flat and was pretty enough to make her illicit way in the world, easily.

  Rawlins took the small electric torch from his tool belt and switched it on, just to check things out a bit…

  … and the shaft of light fell immediately upon Miss Oatley.

  She lay sprawled on her back on her divan bed, head back and hanging over, clad only in a thin sheer nightgown, which was open to reveal her in nakedness, which might have been titillating to a red-blooded man like Rawlins.

  But it was not, though this sight would be pressed, involuntarily, into his mental memory book; and the electrician immediately realized he had not seen every bleeding thing, after all….

  Because the plumply pretty prostitute was quite dead, her throat slashed, the blood having run down to gather and coagulate into a terrible black pool.

  Heart in his throat, Jack Rawlins scurried out of the flat and down the steps onto the street, where he quickly found a bobby and reported what he’d discovered…

  … not feeling much at all like one man in uniform talking to another.

  FOUR

  DRESSED FOR MURDER

  It seemed to Agatha that Hampstead was quite the most rustic and sweetly antiquated of the suburban districts of Central London, blessedly free from major Blitz damage, with narrow lanes leading to sequestered spots so sheltered from the tumult
of town that one could close one’s eyes halfway and imagine being in a country village.

  Built in a haphazardly irregular fashion on the hill sloping up to the Heath, Hampstead would have been perhaps the most nightmarish place in the city for her symmetry-obsessed detective, Hercule Poirot. But spinster Jane Marple would have loved it-wide High Street with its old brick houses adapted to shops and businesses, an inviting maze of courtyards and passageways and byways, streets lined with elms shading country-style cottages with perfectly manicured front lawns.

  Even the modern blocks of two-story brick Bauhaus flats somehow suited the old-world atmosphere. Agatha’s apartment at 22 Lawn Road was like a small gabled house, and had been perfect and cozy when she and Max had shared it. Since her husband’s posting overseas, the place felt to Agatha large and cold, but that was half psychology and half the winter weather.

  The two-floor apartment that was the Mallowan portion of the connected Bauhaus flats had come furnished-just as well, as after the bombing at Sheffield Terrace, all their furniture had been stored in the new Winterbrook squash court in Wallingford. These accommodations pleased her-the neighbors were friendly but unobtrusive (nary a question about “Agatha Christie” since she’d moved in)-and the building included a small unpretentious restaurant where she took many of her meals. She loved to cook, but when provisions were so hard to come by, a decent close-at-hand restaurant like this one was a godsend.

  In the summer the Lawn Road Flats were most pleasant, with a garden ideal for little picnics; she was particularly taken with the bank of trees and shrubs behind the building, and in the spring, a big white cherry tree that rose to a pyramidal point presented itself, in all its blooming glory, just outside her second-floor bedroom window, encouraging her to rise with a smile even in wartime.

  The only furniture she’d imported were her basic office accoutrements: large firm table and typewriter and hard upright chair for writing, and her comfy old easy chair for thinking. She set herself up in the library-style study-whose empty shelves stared accusingly at her until, some months later, she’d half-filled them with reference works, mostly medical and chemistry tomes-where (as was her habit) she removed the phone.

  Oh, and one other thing: a spinet piano. She could not exist without a piano; life would not have been worth living. This she kept in the library as well, because intermissions of music between bouts of writing and thinking she found frankly therapeutic.

  Her only company-outside of Stephen Glanville popping in twice or thrice a week, from a few doors down-was the Sealyham terrier, James. He was a playful pup, beautifully housebroken (James, not Stephen), and excellent company when she walked to Hampstead Heath, four hundred and twenty acres of delightful grassy common, perfect for picnics and walks among the wooded groves and open spaces. What heaven it was to sit nibbling an apple, gazing out at rippling glassy lakes where young lovers rowed.

  But it was winter now, with snow on the common, and that left only work-work at the hospital by day (and occasional evenings), work by night in the library on her novels and stories and plays. Few would have guessed that for Agatha writing was a chore, as tedious as doing the dishes, as hard as chopping wood… harder-or that she would much rather have spent her time cooking or gardening or going on outings with (the absent) Max.

  Or better still, being out on a dig with Max, lovely sun beating down, pearls of well-earned perspiration gliding decoratively over her cheeks, as she assisted the man she loved in his truly important efforts (as opposed to the trivialities of her own “career”).

  And yet still, somehow, if not by nature then through the accumulation of time and effort, she had become a writer; and writing never left her. Even now, as she sat in the cheery, informal little Lawn Road Flats restaurant-Tuesday morning, a respectable-looking matron (A matron already! What a horror!) in sensible brown tweed and a cream silk blouse, remindful of a femininity she had not (yet) abandoned-she noodled on the plotting and characters of the next Poirot in a small black spiral notebook…

  … not unlike the notebooks in which Sir Bernard Spilsbury recorded the clues relating to his very real crimes.

  And that gave her a shudder of revulsive self-recognition, a shameful shiver of senselessness. Like Max, Sir Bernard did important work. His notebook entries dealt with real mysteries, not fanciful ones. Whatever useful purpose in this war-torn world might her work serve?

  The only response she could come up with was, perhaps, a self-serving rationalization; recalling that RAF cadet she’d met yesterday, that brave lad whose life would soon be on the line for his country, Agatha knew that her silly little novels gave that hero-to-be solace, distracted him briefly from the problems of his real, very unpleasant world.

  She wondered if that were justification enough.

  Sipping her coffee (that she preferred the brew to tea seemed somehow unpatriotic), Agatha had another mental flash, suddenly remembering a dream she’d had last night. Usually her dreams left her within seconds of rising; other times she could vividly recall them long enough for her to record them in one of her notebooks… you never knew what mental trifle might prove useful in the writing game.

  The reason this dream had come back to her in so whole a state (and she had no notion whatever what subconscious nudge had brought it suddenly to the surface) was simple enough: this was a recurring dream, a dream she’d had (variously revised) many, many times….

  The nightmare dated to childhood and centered upon a figure she had come to term “the Gunman,” a handsome French soldier with a powdered wig, three-cornered hat, and a musket, his eyes a haunting, piercing light blue. Oddly, the figure in her nocturnal fantasies had never done anything threatening, much less shoot the weapon at her: it was his very presence, specifically his incongruous presence, that frightened her.

  This dream figure of potential violence initially had turned up in a children’s party, where he would enter and ask to join the game. Later versions found him sitting at a tea table with an otherwise benign group of Agatha’s friends and relations; sometimes, in an eye-blink, her mother or sister or a chum would be replaced by the blue-eyed Gunman; other times she would be walking along the beach with a friend and then, suddenly, he and his weapon would be beside her, instead.

  Agatha felt strongly that there was no simplistically Freudian aspect to the dream-she had been very young when the Gunman dreams first began; and, anyway, she understood psychology well enough to know that if the figure had shot her or even threatened to shoot her, a sexual connotation might be drawn.

  But Sigmund himself had said it, hadn’t he? Sometimes a banana simply was a banana.

  Nor did she recall any storybook that she might have read as a child (or had read to her), whose vivid illustration of a soldier might have planted this seed of fright.

  The most disturbing of the dreams had been during her marriage to Archie. Even before their relationship had begun to deteriorate, she would dream of blue-eyed Archie-in his uniform of the Great War-metamorphosing into the blue-eyed Gunman. Chilling how little difference there was between the fantasy figure and the real Archie, how small a metamorphosis was required.

  Odd, wasn’t it? Even as a child she’d had an instinct that people were not always who or what they seemed, that even a friend or family member might become someone, something, sinister. Perhaps this was why she had been drawn to writing mysteries in which violence and menace lay beneath the humdrum surface of everyday living.

  “I hate to interrupt this reverie,” a familiar voice said.

  She looked up at her friend and neighbor, Stephen Glanville, a typically devilish grin on that Ronald Colmanesque, dimple-chinned face. Both dashing and professorial in a light gray tweed suit with dark gray bow tie, Stephen had some folded newspapers tucked under one arm, and was leaning on the chair opposite her at the small table.

  “Please join me, Stephen.”

  He did. “You looked perfectly glazed over, when I came in. I trust you’re lost in thought, dev
ising fiendish plot twists for our Egyptian mystery.”

  Archaeologists were, by nature, a persistent lot.

  “Actually, I’m fiddling with the new Poirot idea.”

  “I thought you despised the little bastard-if you’ll pardon my French. Or in this case, Belgian.”

  “Stephen-please. Whatever I may think of the little monster, he is popular with my readers, and their opinions count more than mine…. Shouldn’t you be at Whitehall?”

  He glanced at his watch. “I’m due at the ministry in half an hour. I have time for a cup and a quick hello.”

  A waitress brought Stephen tea, and he said to Agatha, “I’m glad I found you here.”

  “It’s nice to be appreciated…. Why?”

  “Then I trust you haven’t seen the press?” He folded open the newspapers, and a particularly vile tabloid was on top: the front page asked, LONDON PLAGUED BY NEW RIPPER?

  “I don’t read The News of the World,” Agatha said, with prim disgust.

  “Someone at the Yard must be on the payroll. Several someones, judging by the various stories.” The other papers had also picked up on the Maple Church and Evelyn Hamilton murders, Stephen showed her, though none as blatantly as the tabloid.

  “Typically irresponsible,” Agatha said. “Two murdered women does not a ‘new’ Ripper make.”

  “No, but some ‘confidential source’ has shared the fears of Inspector Greeno and your friend Sir Bernard that these killings may mean a Blackout Ripper is among us. Sells papers.”

  “And creates panic. Disgraceful.”

  “I know how you feel about the newspapers, Agatha….”

  She said nothing.

  She trusted Stephen knew not to enter forbidden territory. Even after all these years, the discomfort, the embarrassment of a certain newspaper campaign remained a palpable presence in her psyche. When she had fled her problems with Archie and his philandering, seeking sanctuary at a health resort, the press had treated her “disappearance” as major news, and then, when she had turned up alive and well (considering), had accused her of staging a publicity stunt.