The smiling blue-eyed Gunman of her childhood nightmares, who had come back to haunt… and perhaps warn… her in recent nights.
How like Archie he was.
“Oh, do forgive me,” Agatha said, turning her back to the bureau and beaming at her host. “I was driving home from the hospital, and I simply couldn’t sleep, and thought I’d run over and leave this here, to surprise you….”
She held out the copy of Evil Under the Sun for him to see, then placed it on the bureau top behind her.
“I still need to sign it, I’m afraid, but I wanted to thank you properly. I thought you were spending the night with Mrs. Cummins.”
He shut the door. The cadet remained near the door, but the bedroom was so small, so claustrophobic, that they still stood relatively close to one another.
“I thought when you got back,” she said, “that you would find the book in your bedroom and just be… pleasantly surprised. But then, you said you were pleasantly surprised, just now, didn’t you? And I hope that’s true.”
He said nothing. Still smiling. Twisting the hat around in his hands.
“Well… perhaps I should go,” she said. “I’m afraid I was misguided… invading your sanctum sanctorum, as I have.”
“No,” he said. “I’m pleased to see you…. The party broke up early. Everyone was too concerned about you, and the explosion at the theater, for the merriment to continue.”
“Ah.”
“Janet was upset, and suggested I go on back to my billet. No night for celebrating, really…. Do you suspect me?”
The bluntness of that struck her like a blow, but she did her best not to show it, saying quickly, “No. But I’m afraid the police do.”
He sat on the side of the bed, which hugged the wall lengthwise, opposite the bureau; his unblinking eyes stared into nothing. “But I’m innocent. I hope you believe me.”
“Oh, I do, Gordon. You’re my savior, after all. My knight.”
His eyes met hers and his smile turned into a crinkly thing, as if unsure whether or not to become a frown. “If they caught him… this Ripper… he wouldn’t be as famous as the other one, would he?”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“Well, the first one… Jack… they never caught him. He was too smart for them, they’ll say. But the truth is, he didn’t have Sir Bernard Spilsbury and these modern detectives up against him, did he? Fingerprints and things.”
“No. He didn’t. It was all quite crude then.”
“But if the new Jack were to kill someone famous, that would be different.”
“I’m afraid… afraid I don’t follow you, Gordon.”
He shrugged, the smile boyish as ever, charming. “Well, imagine if the Ripper killed you, Mrs. Mallowan. Mrs. Christie. What headlines that would make-the fiend who killed the mistress of murder. That would make history.”
“I suppose so. If you were guilty. But I don’t believe that you are.”
His eyes tightened and, finally, he blinked. “You don’t?”
She sat next to him on the bed and patted his hand reassuringly. “Certainly not. You’re a smart boy, Gordon. Would a smart boy like you leave such obvious clues just scattered about? These things on your bureau… worthless items, a toothless comb, a fountain pen, a cheap watch.”
He was frowning in thought. “Then you see it, don’t you? That I’ve been framed for this.”
She smiled and clasped her hands in a single clap. “Exactly. And I know who did and how it was done.”
Still frowning, nodding, he said, eagerly, “Do tell.”
“They’ve found a gas respirator, you know, the police have. With a service number that will likely lead to you, Gordon. I don’t see your mask anywhere here in your room, or on your person.”
“No. It was stolen several days ago.”
“I knew it!” She leaned forward conspiratorially. “These clues were planted, Gordon. And who was responsible?”
“Who?”
“I’ll tell you, though it pains me, it grieves me to my core.” She sighed heavily, lowered her head. “My ‘friend,’ your ‘benefactor’… Stephen Glanville. Who better, with his Air Ministry connections, to help himself to your personal items, to enter inconspicuously and plant these obvious clues?”
“Why Glanville?”
“He is a notorious ladies’ man, our Stephen. Though he denied knowing her, Stephen undoubtedly had an affair with Nita Ward. And he may… I hate to tell you this, as it may cause you pain, Gordon… he may have set his sights on your lovely wife.”
The cadet’s eyes flared. “Janet!”
“I’m afraid so. He has loitered around rehearsals, and his eyes have fallen upon her…. I don’t believe she has given him any cause for the unforgivable thoughts he’s clearly having regarding her, so I do beg you not to blame or reprove her. But with you out of the way…”
“He would have a clear field,” Cummins said, squinting in anger.
“Seeing your lovely wife,” Agatha said, “told me everything I needed to know about you, Gordon. With such a lovely, desirable creature in your life, you would have no need for the soiled flowers of the West End.”
“I love her. Janet is wonderful. I would never hurt her.”
She gripped his hand again. “Then you must cling to your innocence. And I will help you, Gordon. I will plead your case. Together, we will shatter this frightful frame, and restore your good name.”
He looked at her almost lovingly. “You’re wonderful, Mrs. Mallowan. You’re like… something from one of your own books.”
“As are you, Gordon. As are you.”
The door burst open and Inspector Greeno stood there with revolver in hand-such weapons were checked out only when an officer felt a vital need, and Greeno clearly felt it. His eyes widened at the sight of Agatha, then turned hard, as he leveled the weapon at the cadet, and behind him were two more plainclothes detectives, equally well armed.
“Stand up, Cummins,” the inspector said, “and put your hands on your head…. You’re nicked!”
The cadet’s eyes flew to Agatha’s. “Tell him, Mrs. Mallowan! Tell them I’m innocent.”
“I’ll give the inspector all the details,” she said gently. “Rest assured. Go quietly, dear, and it will speak well for you.”
The inspector and another detective squeezed into the room, and the assistant handcuffed the cadet as Greeno said more formally, “You’re under arrest for committing grievous bodily harm to Greta Heywood…. Take him away.”
The two plainclothes men did, Cummins calling to Agatha, “Be sure to tell him! Be sure!”
“I will,” she reassured him smilingly, “I will.”
When they were alone in the cubbyhole billet, the inspector asked, “What in hell are you doing here, and what in hell was that about, Agatha?”
Ignoring his first question, she answered the second. “Oh, I convinced him I believed in his innocence.” She showed the inspector the murder souvenirs on the bureau top. “I told him I believed that Stephen Glanville had framed him for these murders, planting these clues and others, like the respirator…. I assume the number on the mask led you here?”
“It did. That’s why we’ve arrested him only for assaulting that prostitute, Greta Heywood. We’ll get ’round to willful murder charges soon enough. Why Glanville?”
“Poor Stephen and his womanizing… he was a believable suspect. With his position at the Air Ministry, he might well have framed the boy.”
“That’s a load of rubbish!”
“Of course it is,” Agatha said pleasantly.
“Well, Cummins certainly knew Glanville didn’t do it! Why would telling him that story hold any weight?”
“What was important was that it seemed a credible defense to him… and his counselor may eventually try to utilize it. I needed him to believe I thought him innocent, and that I would defend him to the death…. You may not be aware of it, Ted, but that madman saved my life, earlier, at the theater
cave-in.”
The inspector nodded, sighing, “I did indeed hear that. He must have thought you owed him a debt.”
“I owe him no debt-he was considering killing me, as his last grand gesture. But I talked him out of it.”
“My Lord, how did you manage it?”
“Oh, really, Inspector-it was easy. The boy likes my work.” She gestured to the stacks of books. “He’s a fan…. May I show you something?”
She escorted the amazed inspector into the kitchen. “With his bedroom isolated as it is, and the fire escape leading off as it does, the testimony of any of his flatmates who might say they saw him go off to bed is irrelevant.”
“It is indeed,” the inspector said, taking in the fire escape view. “If we can just get past those damned billet books.”
She laughed, genuinely amused. “Oh, Inspector, that was my first real suspicion of our cadet. I was the wife of an RAF pilot, in the first war-I know all about billet books and men covering up for each other, as they sneak in and out to see their sweethearts and wives… not necessarily in that order.”
“Blimey, I never thought it-it’s bleedin’ obvious, if you’ll pardon me saying.”
“It’s a trick immemorial, in service camps, Inspector. Oh, they’ll fuss and moan, when you try to prove it-tell you you’ll blow the billet wide open, if you expose the practice. But take my word: that so-called passbook is a tissue of lies…. Do you have a pen, Inspector?”
“I believe so,” he said, and dug it out. Then, a grin splitting the bulldog face, he added, “Two pens, counting the one Cummins copped from the Jouannet flat.”
She sat at the little kitchen table-which was cluttered with the dishes of RAF cadets-and cleared a place. She signed the title page of Evil Under the Sun and then inscribed on the flyleaf: “To Gordon Cummins-a reader I will never forget. A.C., St. John’s Wood, 1942.”
With a smile, she handed the book to the flabbergasted inspector, saying, “See to it Mr. Cummins gets it, will you?”
AFTER…
Detective Chief Inspector Edward Greeno, Sir Bernard Spilsbury and Frederick Cherrill mounted an airtight case against Airman Gordon Frederick Cummins.
The items Agatha had found in the cadet’s billet were identified as belongings of murder victims Doris Jouannet and Nita Ward. The fingerprints on the candlestick and the tumbler of beer from the Lowe flat were Cummins’s. Greta Heywood and Phyllis O’Dwyer identified Cummins as their would-be assailant (they shared the tabloid reward money).
Sir Bernard Spilsbury matched sand, grit, and cement dust from the gas mask’s fabric to samples from the air-raid shelter where Evelyn Hamilton’s body had been found. Items belonging to Miss Hamilton were also found in the billet, and the two five-pound notes Phyllis O’Dwyer had turned in to Inspector Greeno were traced to Cummins, through RAF pay records.
As Agatha had predicted, the billet passbooks had been falsified, cadets covering up for cadets out on the town. But other RAF airmen were just as eager not to cover up for Cummins, whom they did not particularly like: the nicknames of the “Duke” and the “Count,” which Cummins claimed as his, had been seized upon derisively by fellow cadets offended by Cummins’s constant boasting about his “noble” birth. They said he often got dressed up in his best civilian clothes, affecting an upper-class accent, going out to impress prostitutes.
“And him with such a beauty for a missus,” one cadet had said, shaking his head.
Other cadets confirmed that they’d seen Cummins throwing money around, in his “Count” persona, shortly after Evelyn Hamilton’s murder. The Hamilton woman, of course, had been stripped not only of her life but of eighty pounds.
Throughout, Cummins maintained his innocence as well as a sunny, confident disposition. His wife, Janet, remained loyal and claimed to believe his story of having been framed by a “higher-up” at the Air Ministry. Janet even managed to mount a petition seeking a stay of execution until the “mystery man” who “switched gas masks” with poor Gordon could be found.
Despite this effort, shortly before eight a.m. on June 25, 1942, Gordon Cummins strolled, a smiling self-proclaimed innocent martyr, to the gallows. His wife wept; working girls, eager to return to the dimly lit streets behind Piccadilly in relative safety, cheered. The clatter of the falling trapdoor punctuated the distant thunder of explosions.
Luftwaffe planes were flying over London, on a rare daylight bombing raid.
Agatha’s new play received glowing reviews. It moved to the Cambridge Theatre for a long run, and opened in New York in June, 1944, under the sanitized title Ten Little Indians, where it ran for an impressive 426 performances.
The great tragedy of the war for Agatha was the death of her daughter’s husband; but Rosalind and Hubert’s son, Matthew, would be the love of Mrs. Mallowan’s later life.
Toward the end of the war, after a weekend visit in Wales with Rosalind and grandchild Matthew, Agatha returned to Lawn Road Flats. Exhausted and chilled to the bone, she switched on the heat and began to cook up some kippers, when Max came home, unexpectedly early, from his service in North Africa.
It was as if he’d only left yesterday-though he, too, was two stone heavier. He had eaten well, overseas, while potatoes and bread had taken their toll on Agatha, who was frankly relieved her husband had added girth, as well. The kippers had burned during the excitement of the homecoming, but they sat together and ate the oily things in glee and had the most wonderfully mundane evening of their married lives.
She never told Max about the Ripper affair, and their friend Stephen Glanville discreetly never mentioned it, either.
Sir Bernard, who was himself struggling with an on-again-off-again autobiography, said to her toward the end of the affair, “This will make an interesting tidbit for your autobiography.”
“I believe I’ll leave this bit out,” she told him, and she did.
She felt foolish about how she’d endangered herself, going to Cummins’s flat, and preferred Max not know of it; and she had resolved any misgivings she’d had about the inappropriateness of her fiction in the postwar world. Good and evil were a reality, and fiction that dealt with that subject, however escapist in intent, would always have a place.
One good thing had come of the episode, however: she never again had the Gunman dream.
Perhaps, at long last, her subconscious had banished the nightmare, out of her acceptance of one of the primary themes of her own work: that behind innocent eyes, evil often lurked. The thought wasn’t a frightening one, once you’d adapted it to your thinking.
At least not so frightening as to cause nightmares.
At the incessant urging of Stephen Glanville, Agatha indeed wrote an ancient-Egyptian mystery, Death Comes at the End, published in 1945; also, she dedicated the next Poirot, Five Little Pigs (1943), to her persistent friend. Glanville, after a distinguished career concluding with his position as Herbert Thompson Professor of Egyptology at Cambridge, died at age fifty-six, the premature death greatly grieving the Mallowans.
Agatha modeled the country home setting of The Hollow (1946) after that of actor Larry Sullivan and his wife Danae’s estate at Haselmere, Surrey, dedicating the novel to them with apologies.
With her husband home and the war winding down, Agatha left her position in the dispensary at University College Hospital. She and Sir Bernard Spilsbury remained friendly, but drifted apart.
In November 1945, she was sad to learn that another tragedy had befallen Sir Bernard, who had never really gotten over the death of his son Peter: another son, Alan, had fallen ill with galloping consumption, and soon died. She and Max attended the funeral, and later had a pleasant lunch with Bernard, but despite a superficial air of normality, the great man had clearly failed.
Spilsbury soon suffered several minor strokes, but Agatha understood he was continuing to work with his usual dedication, testifying in trials, conducting postmortems, endlessly filling little file cards with data and theories. On December 17, 1947, as fasti
diously dressed as ever, Sir Bernard Spilsbury turned on the gas in the little laboratory down the hall from the dispensary where Agatha had worked.
Inspector Greeno suffered no such melancholy. After thirty-eight years on the job, he retired from Scotland Yard in 1960. As head of the Yard’s number one district-covering the West End and Soho-he’d long been the “Guv’nor” to coppers and crooks alike.
The Daily Express said of Greeno’s retirement, “His record of successful murder investigation, including the notorious Blackout Ripper case, bears comparison with any police force in the world. One thing is certain: the underworld will be celebrating tonight.”
Agatha Christie Mallowan lived a long and happy and productive later life, with Max Mallowan at her side. Her play The Mousetrap outdid Ten Little Indians and became a West End institution.
Shortly before her death in 1976, Agatha allowed the publication of the Poirot novel she’d written during the Blitz, to best-selling results, the death of the Belgian sleuth rating a front-page obituary in the New York Times. Her Miss Marple novel, salted away at the same time, published shortly after the author’s passing, was similarly a best-seller.
While Agatha Christie is immortal, Gordon Cummins and his crimes have, like Mrs. Mallowan’s Gunman, gone the way of all nightmares-an unpleasantness forgotten upon waking.
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The London Blitz Murders d-5 Page 17
