The London Blitz Murders (14 page)

Or break it
.

SIX

A QUIET MORNING

A
GATHA AWOKE WITH A START
, slightly after seven a.m. Typically, she had been sleeping with her head under a pillow.

This was a wartime habit for her, a precaution against flying broken glass, and to help dampen the shrill cry of air-raid sirens, which she ignored. Since the war had begun, during air raids, she and Max had always stayed in their bedroom, wherever they might be living, and did not follow the conventional wisdom of fleeing to the basement.

The futility of shelters had been proven beyond doubt to Agatha when Sheffield Terrace had been bombed, one weekend, while she and Max were away in London. A bomb hit across the way, taking out three houses, and what had been blown up at their own home? The basement! The ground and first floors had gone largely undamaged (although her precious Steinway had never been quite the same).

Even before that incident, she refused any suggestions that she ought to go to a shelter. Few things frightened Agatha Christie Mallowan, but the thought of being buried alive, of being trapped underground under dirt and rubble… well, she had decided to sleep only in her own bed, wherever she might be.

And Max had honored her preference, staying right with her throughout the nastiest and noisiest of bombings. By now she was so used to air raids on London that she hardly woke up for them, sleeping through the worst of it in 1940. When a siren or bomb did manage to wake her, she’d merely roll over, muttering, “Oh, dear, there they are again!” and would pull the pillow over her head, tighter.

What had woken her, this morning, was that nightmare again, that damned Gunman dream. She dreamed she was having lunch with Max in a large country house, surrounded by flower beds. Afterward, she and Max walked through the garden, vivid colors, wonderful fragrances, all around them, James on a leash at her side; and then she had glanced at Max and, suddenly, he was that blue-eyed Gunman, and rather than suffer any longer through the unpleasantness of it, she had forced herself awake. Right now!

Next to her bed, as was also her wartime habit, was a chair on which she kept her two most precious possessions: her fur coat; and her rubber hot-water bottle. Gold and silver came and went; but in this war, rubber, now that was valuable.

The fur coat and rubber hot-water bottle, she knew, would see her through all emergencies.

Outside her window, the world was an overcast gray, the sky the color of gunmetal and her beloved cherry tree a skeletal figure silhouetted against the sky like a surrendering prisoner. She had intended to sleep in, but once awake, she was awake….

She felt rather in a funk and did not care to dress straightaway, much less go down for breakfast in the little Lawn Road Flats restaurant. Even the most trivial passing conversation with a waitress or fellow resident of the Flats seemed quite more than she could bear to face. She was scheduled to work this evening
at the hospital, in the pharmacy, and so the day stretched out endlessly before her. Slipping into the lovely powder-blue Jaeger dressing gown Max had given her as a farewell present, she padded downstairs.

She did not bathe—she was restricting herself to twice a week, due to the water shortage—but allowed herself a sponge bath, using soap sparingly, as the ration was one tablet per person per month. (When she did bathe, she used only the allowed five inches of hot water; it was the least she could do, since King George VI was having his valet measure five inches thereof for the royal bath.) She put on no makeup, briefly frowning at the face of the old woman who glanced at her from the mirror.

After poaching herself an egg and making toast and coffee, and barely touching any of it, she wandered into the library and sat herself down. She began to cry. She wept for perhaps five minutes. This had happened before, and she kept a handkerchief handy in a pocket of the robe.

She was not sure why she was blue (“depressed” would have overstated it). Missing Max was a constant in her life, but on certain days, his absence hit her like a physical blow; she hurt from not having him here—she ached with the possibility of any harm coming to him. True, he was as safe as any military man might be, in his posting; but this was, nonetheless, war. People died.

She might die. A bomb might strike the Flats and her pillow wouldn’t do a bit of good and she and Max would never see each other again. She cried a little more.

James was curled beside the chair, but the terrier ran for cover when she dried her face, blew her nose, cleared her throat, rose with resolve, moved to her desk and began typing—the machine’s chatter always frightened the animal, though on the
last air raid, the dog had slept soundly through it, much as he did through thunderstorms.

She typed a letter to Max, not telling him anything of her true-crime research project with Sir Bernard Spilsbury. Max would probably have approved of the effort, had he been around; he was always supportive, and as a man whose calling in life was digging for truth, he would not likely echo Stephen Glanville’s rather chauvinistic concerns regarding a mere woman undertaking an endeavor at all dangerous.

But she did not want to burden Max with what she was up to, nor did she want to risk him reacting, well, like a normal husband… the distance between them, in these times already fraught with peril, might cause Max to revert to conventional male wisdom (if the latter two words weren’t a contradiction in terms).

Agatha did admit to her absent husband that she was “sad this morning, and had cried a bit.” She thanked him for his letters, his many loving letters, and admitted to him that receiving such tender missives “after all these years we have been married makes me feel that I have not been a failure in life—that at least I have succeeded as a wife.”

She paused, embarrassed. And then she said to herself:
He is your husband. You need not hide from him
.

And she went on: “What a change now, from the unhappy, forlorn person you met in Baghdad so many years ago. You have done
everything
for me, my love.”

She went on to tell him about the play, and how well rehearsals were going, and that she was dreading opening night, and yet there was something terribly brave of presenting a first night in Blitz-ravaged London. It seemed to her British in the best sense.

When she’d finished the letter (three typewritten pages) and prepared it for mailing, she moved to her comfortable chair, taking a sheaf of papers with her.

The galley proofs of her novel,
The Body in the Library
, had arrived yesterday from her publisher, William Collins & Sons. They had rebounded well, after their offices were bombed in December 1940, though the sorry state of their records had contributed to her current financial difficulties. The Collins book warehouse in Paternoster Row near St. Paul’s had been ravaged as well, and publishing remained dicey, what with paper allocations cut to a fraction of pre-war quantities.

So the rest of the morning was spent checking for punctuation and typographical problems in the latest Jane Marple mystery. She found herself liking Miss Marple and quite satisfied with the book—a rarity, as she was a harsh critic of her own work—and her mood brightened.

She did pause, at one point, to get up and go out to the kitchen for an apple. James followed her and she gave him half a biscuit (even dogs were on ration) and then she realized why she’d been so forlorn.

It hadn’t been Max, not entirely….

That crime scene yesterday—she had viewed it dispassionately, with the clinical perspective of a nurse, with the calloused attitude of a war correspondent. Not once had she felt ill or in any way uncomfortable. It had not been a pose; it had come naturally to her.

But now, as she settled back into her little flat where she’d been writing her homicidal confections—hiding away from the war and her absent husband—the loss of life represented by that woman’s brutal murder hung over her like a cloud, rumbling, dark, oppressive, with the promise of a storm.

For a moment she sat in her comfortable chair, James again curled beside her (now that the machine-gunning of the typewriter had been silenced), the loose pages of her latest mystery in her lap, and wondered if she should remove herself from the investigation. Already she had involved her friends and colleagues, and—while she of course knew her responsibility had been to aid the police in their efforts—she felt embarrassed by the inconvenience she had caused them.

The irony was, Agatha enjoyed the company of the theatrical crowd precisely because their existence was somehow disconnected from real life. She found it relaxing to associate with actors in wartime, because to these children—whose profession was acting out fantasies—the theatrical world
was
the real world. This ravaged London where the war was happening was an incomprehensible nightmare, a long, drawn-out inconvenience preventing them from going on with their own truly important lives.

All they spoke of was the theater—of fellow actors and directors and producers; the only momentous events taking place in the world were those happening in the theatrical world. The only war talk related to the Entertainments National Service Association.

She had found this wonderfully refreshing.

And now she had ruined everything by introducing a murder—a real murder—into the playacting.

This thought had barely passed through her mind when the telephone rang. She had a sudden chill that had nothing to do with the winter weather:
if that were Sir Bernard or Inspector Greeno, it would likely mean another young woman had been murdered
.

If so, would she politely withdraw from her association with the investigators? Or would she answer the call?

Well, she would answer this call, at least. She rose, pausing to pick up her spiral notebook and a pencil, and went to the phone on its stand by the stairs.

And it was indeed Inspector Greeno.

“Oh, Ted,” she said, “I hope there hasn’t been another killing.”

“There hasn’t,” the pleasantly gruff baritone voice responded. “At least, not that we know of. And I’ve practically jumped, all morning, every time the phone’s rung, dreading another such discovery.”

Somehow it was reassuring that she and the hard-boiled inspector had been thinking, and reacting, alike.

The inspector had called, “just checking in,” but with a good deal of new information for her. For one thing, he had a new telephone number for her reference.

He had set up his enquiry headquarters in an office at the Tottenham Court Road Police Station, out of which he was supervising a systematic scouring of Paddington and Soho. All of the “top resources of Scotland Yard” had been mobilized, and every available man from the wartime-depleted police force had moved into the West End. A circular with the description of Evelyn Oatley’s last gentleman caller, as provided by next-door neighbor Ivy Poole, had already been widely distributed.

“We’re talking to every known prostitute,” he said, “and asking each girl if she’s met a violent client in the blackout, of late, or if she knows of another girl who has.”

There was a small chair by the telephone stand; Agatha sat. “Has this proved fruitful?”

“To an extent, but so far everything falls into that latter category—girls who’ve heard stories from other girls. All quite secondhand.”

“Enough to go on, though, I would hope.”

“Two promising leads. We’ve heard complaints of a ‘rough customer’ who passes himself off as the illegitimate son of a member of the House of Lords. Speaks in an affected, imitation Oxford accent, and demands to be called the ‘Duke.’ ”

“Does he have a real name?”

“Not that he’s ever given to any of these good-time girls, and their descriptions are vague and inconsistent. He’s a good-looking fellow, that much they all agree on—but he’s been variously described as twenty-five and thirty-five and points in between. Very well-dressed, as befits his pretensions. Tosses money around. He’s blue-eyed and brown-eyed and, well, you can see the problem.”

“Could his story about a noble if illegitimate heritage be true?”

“Possibly, but more likely it’s simply a fantasy he’s hiring these girls to help him enact. That’s rather typical of working girls and their ‘mugs.’ ”

“You said ‘two promising leads.’ What’s the other?”

“Ah, well. A girl named Phyllis O’Dwyer is said to have had a ‘close call’ or a ‘scrape’ with a particularly wild customer. Three of her friends told us the same story.”

“What does Phyllis say?”

“Apparently, she’s holed up somewhere. Frightened out of her skin. We are looking for her.”

“That does sound promising.” Agatha was making notes. The inspector didn’t seem to mind answering her questions, so she pressed on. “Has Sir Bernard uncovered any significant evidence?”

“Well, he’s made his opinion official that no sexual assault was involved in any one of the three cases. And he passed along to Superintendent Cherrill various items for fingerprinting.”

Fred Cherrill was to fingerprinting what Sir Bernard Spilsbury was to forensics: the Yard was taking no chances on this case. Top resources, indeed.