The London Blitz Murders (13 page)

“You were prepared,” the inspector said slowly, “to hire… as an actress for your production… a woman you knew, or strongly suspected, to have had a relationship with your husband?”

“Relationship!” She gave out a single sharp laugh. “I am the only relationship in Bertie’s life. I am the love and light of his life. I am sure he’s feeling somewhat neglected these days, tied up with the production as I am, and a night with a Nita Ward would not surprise me.”

“How did you spend last evening?”

“Our flat is in Park Place—near where you lived for a while, Agatha… around the corner from the Ritz, directly opposite Boodles. That’s where we dined yesterday evening. Then we had a quiet evening at home. Drank some wine. Listened to dance music on the radio. Sat by the fire… terribly romantic.”

The inspector pressed. “Might your husband have gone out, later, last night? Perhaps after eleven, even after midnight? After you were asleep?”

“I was up quite late, actually. Probably until two. It was all Mrs. Mallowan’s fault.”

Agatha sat forward, touching her bosom. “My fault, Irene?”

Irene exhaled smoke through her nostrils and smiled regally, eyes sleepy. “Completely yours. I was reading your new one—
Evil Under the Sun
? You simply must tell me who you based the actress on, darling. I have my theories…. Is there anything else, Inspector?”

“No. Not at the moment…. Shoo Mrs. Cummins our way, would you, Mrs. Morris?”

“With pleasure.”

When the director had gone, Inspector Greeno turned to Agatha and asked, “Do you think she might be covering for her husband?”

Agatha asked, “Do you think he might be covering for his wife?”

He let out a weight-of-the-world sigh. “Morris says he just ‘bumped’ into Miss Ward in Piccadilly. Do you believe that?”

“I do.”

“As he said, show business is a small world. A family.”

“Yes. An incestuous one.”

The inspector’s eyes widened.

The brunette secretary/assistant, Janet Cummins, was highly cooperative, but had little to tell.

“I dealt with Miss Ward at the audition,” she said, her blue eyes large and rather naive behind the lenses of the black-rimmed glasses, “and spoke to her in that regard, probably half a dozen times.”

“But you’d never met her before?”

“No.”

“I understand it was your job to call her and inform her that she’d landed the understudy assignment.”

“That’s right. Before we left the theater evening last, Miss Irene told me she’d decided on the Ward woman. I was to give her a call, next morning. This morning, that is.”

“And did you?”

“Yes. About ten o’clock. A police officer answered. I said I had news for Miss Ward, and the officer said Miss Ward was indisposed.”

Nicely understated of the officer
, Agatha thought.

The inspector was asking, “Do you happen to know if your husband knew the Ward girl?”

“Gordon? I don’t imagine so. He certainly said nothing to me about it.”

The inspector flicked a look Agatha’s way, indicating he’d had the same thought she had: if the pilot did recognize the girl auditioning on stage, he’d be unlikely to say as much to his wife.

Agatha filled the awkward silence with a question: “Janet, are you able to spend many evenings with your husband? What with him stationed here in London.”

“Now and again, but lately, no. I’ve been so busy with the production, and the nights we haven’t worked all hours, I’ve been simply spent.”

The inspector asked, “How about last evening? Were you and your husband together?”

“No. We talked about it, but I was exhausted. The last days before opening night are punishing. We talked about going out tonight, too, but Gordie’s on fire duty.”

“What does that consist of?”

“Staying in his billet, keeping himself available, should he be needed.”

Agatha saw the wheels turning in the inspector’s eyes—he could go out and talk to Cadet Cummins tonight.

“Is there anything else, Inspector? I really should get back.”

“No, you’ve been very helpful, Mrs. Cummins. Thank you.”

When they were alone, the inspector asked, “What do you make of that, Agatha? Anything strike you strange about any of our interviewees?”

She shook her head. “I can’t say, really. How odd, to be faced with my friends and colleagues as if they were suspects in one of my fictions.”

“I’m not sure they are suspects. We have a spree killer here, a multiple murderer. What we’ve heard this afternoon might constitute the makings for suspicions were Nita Ward the only victim.”

Agatha nodded. “On the other hand, Ted, everyone we spoke to most certainly read at least some of the press coverage of the first two murders… the same ‘Ripper’ rabble-rousing rubbish we referred to earlier.”

“That’s true. But what strikes you as significant about that?”

“Well… I hesitate to say.”

“No, please!”

“It will sound foolish…. It’s a notion straight out of my books.”

“I like your books. Try me.”

“I was just thinking… if one wanted to commit a murder, and have it go undetected… what better way than to hide it among a series of killings by a madman?”

His eyes tightened and he began to nod, apparently taking her suggestion seriously, or at least pretending to. “The term the Americans use for that kind of thing is a ‘copycat’ killing.”

“Really?” she said brightly.

And Agatha wrote that down.

In Agatha’s tiny living room, the inspector sat on a comfortable chair while Agatha took a straightbacked one, with Stephen Glanville sitting on the sofa, arms outstretched along the cushions on either side of him, his legs crossed. He was the picture of casualness.

“With all due respect, Inspector,” Stephen said, with unhidden amusement, “this line of questioning indicates my good friend here has led you astray.”

Agatha sat up. “Whatever do you mean!”

Stephen chuckled. “She’s undoubtedly portrayed me as some overaged Casanova, constantly in pursuit of one romantic conquest after another.”

Frowning, the inspector said, “She’s done nothing of the kind….”

“Oh, I don’t mean to get your dander up, Inspector… or yours, for that matter, Agatha. But I am a married man, and I have had a few ill-advised affairs.”

Agatha rose. “Why don’t I step into the library, while you and Inspector Greeno continue…”

“Nonsense,” Stephen said, waving for her to sit back down, which she did. “I’m not going to embarrass anyone but myself… and I have a rather high embarrassment threshold, as you may have noticed.”

“I simply asked,” the inspector said, “if you had known Nita Ward.”

“And my point,” the handsome professor replied, “is that my occasional peccadilloes notwithstanding, I do not necessarily know every shop girl, chorine and streetwalker in the city of London…. No, I saw Miss Ward only once, when she auditioned yesterday. And barely took note of that.”

“And yesterday evening—”

“I was in my flat, reading up on the Eleventh Dynasty. Agatha, if you will take the time to read the Henanakhte Papers, I just
know
you’ll come around.”

The inspector flashed a look at Agatha, who sighed and said, “Stephen is twisting my arm about writing a mystery set in ancient Egypt.”

Brightly, Stephen said, “It’s a dreadful alibi, I know, Inspector. I was alone. The Windmill chorus line wasn’t available for a private function, last night, I’m afraid.”

The Inspector tried to sit straight up, but the comfortable armchair worked against him. “Sir, this is a serious matter. I can’t say I appreciate the frivolity of your attitude.”

Stephen’s smile faded. “I do apologize. I’ve had a long day, and—meaning no disrespect at all to the late Miss Ward—have been dealing with life and death matters relating to the war, and our young men who are so gravely at risk. That you would drag me into this, simply because of my ‘reputation,’ is the height of absurdity, and rather than be insulted about it, I decided to be amused.”

The inspector, who’d also had a long day, rose and nodded. “Point taken…. Did you have an opportunity to inquire about Cadet Cummins?”

Stephen rose. He withdrew a small folded piece of paper from his suitcoat’s inner pocket. “Here’s the address of Cummins’s billet, and the names of various superior officers. You might catch him tonight—he’s on fire picket.”

“His wife said as much. I’ll do that.”

Agatha had also risen. She stood between the two men, and placed a hand on their nearest arms, rather like a benign referee.

“I believe I’ll allow you to make that call by yourself, Inspector,” she said. “I’ve had quite enough detecting for one day, I’m afraid.”

“Understood, Mrs. Mallowan.”

Suddenly playing host, Stephen said, “I’ll see Inspector Greeno to his car, my dear,” and took the man by the elbow and walked him to the door and outside.

Poised in the doorway, she watched as—beyond the breast-high brick pillars bookending the wrought-iron gate—a quite serious Stephen Glanville conversed with Inspector Greeno, whose demeanor was equally somber, though this was a respectful exchange, not an argument.

When the inspector had driven off in his Austin, Stephen returned to the porch.

“Your behavior,” she said, “was quite despicable.”

“I had nothing to guide me—I’ve never been a murder suspect before.”

She could see in his face the wear and tear of his current life—the pressures of Whitehall, the complications of life away from his family—and knew how false the levity had been.

Suddenly she knew what he’d been speaking to Greeno about: once again, doubtless, Stephen had been pleading the case against Agatha’s involvement in this investigation.

“You
are
worried about me, aren’t you?” she said, and touched his sleeve.

A devilish half-smile flashed. “Careful—remember what a rogue I am with the ladies…. Shall we dine at the Lawn Flats restaurant, my dear? The off-the-rations special is baked cod and parsnip balls.”

She winced. “Hitler’s secret weapon,” she said.

But she got her coat and went with him.

FEBRUARY 11, 1942

A
ND SO, JOINING THE GLOOM-DRIVEN
hazards of the blackout, among the other strains and inconveniences of wartime, came this new and yet all too familiar terror
.

The press, the tabloids in particular, seemed to take bloodthirsty relish in having so traditional and homegrown a menace to share with their readers; it was as if the yellow journalists were relieved to be able to interrupt the continuing chronicle of international woe—Singapore falling, Rommel’s Afrika Corps advancing again in the Western Desert—with good old-fashioned British blood lust
.

Any respectable women—forced to walk alone down pitch-dark snowy streets, making their way to the safety of air-raid shelters—moved quickly, looking about them in bird-like anxiety, terrified that a lurking murderer might spring from the silence of a doorway or an alley’s mouth, to claim another victim. And was a shelter truly safe, when Monday’s victim had been discovered in one?

And what of the not-so-respectable women of London?

The first Jack the Ripper had terrorized the East End, notorious in its day for an abundance of ladies of the evening. The Blackout Ripper—as the tabloids had dubbed the unknown killer, who had instantly become a household name—sought his soiled-dove prey on the West End, which had become (in these war years particularly, and in the words of Superintendent Fabian of the Yard) “the Square Mile of Vice.”

Even before the blackout, the limited visibility of which made conditions virtually identical to Jack’s fog-shrouded atrocities, these narrow streets and shadowy pavements—Soho, particularly—echoed with the eerie footsteps of London’s long, proud, wicked criminal history. Here you could enjoy anything and everything, for a price—drugs, games of chance, blue movies (in “secret” cinemas); you could buy a diamond ring for two hundred and fifty pounds (only it would prove to be diamothyst, worth one-thirtieth of the price). You could be dominated by a woman with a whip, or defile a “virgin” (Catholic school girl costumes were a must, in the wardrobes of the higher-paid call girls)
.

By day and night, Piccadilly Circus was bustling, swarming with uniforms from many nations—Poles, Canadians, Free French, and of course the Americans, so many Americans. Sinful business was booming
….

So the women of the street, who were not seeking the relative safety of a shelter, put themselves at even greater risk than usual. Many stayed in, however, alone in their dingy flats—or confining their clientele to known and trusted “regulars”—too frightened to venture into their usual haunts. Unbeknownst to them, the ladies of the evening were joined by policewomen in plainclothes and too much makeup, under the watch of Yard men also in the disguise of ordinary clothing
.

This had been Detective Chief Inspector Ted Greeno’s doing, only one of a number of strategies he’d pursued, following the three murders. He was, after all, in charge of the biggest case of the war, the kind of murder case that could make a career
.