The London Blitz Murders (16 page)

“Officer,” Mary Jane said, as the little dog licked her face eagerly, “would you mind terribly, going in and checking for me?”

“I was going to insist, miss,” the bobby said, holding up his hand as if conducting traffic. “So if you’ll just wait here….”

The constable had an oval face with dark eyes set too close together, and wasn’t much taller than Mary Jane, a fact amplified by the tin hat he wore in place of the traditional tall helmet. He couldn’t have been much older than twenty. But his voice was both kind and firm, and he had a commanding way about him
.

He entered the flat and Mary Jane saw him go to the bed and—though his back was to her, she could tell what he was doing—lifted up the black quilt. His head was bowed as he studied whatever it was on the bed; then he gently lowered the quilt and slowly—watching where he was going—came back out, his face very white
.

“Mary Jane,” the bobby said, his voice soft, kind, which oddly enough frightened her, “that’s your name, isn’t it? Mary Jane?”

“It is.”

“Mary Jane, could you wait next door, with your pup, for a few minutes?”

He looked toward the neighbor, who nodded her assent; Miss Wick was wearing a white and pink housedress now, but her platinum locks were still in pin curls
.

Then to the girl, the constable said, “There seems to be a problem in your mother’s flat.”

“What kind of a problem? What was under the quilt?”

The bobby turned to the blonde neighbor. “Do you have a phone, miss?”

“No.”

“I’ll use the box ’round the corner, then. Neither of you are to go into that flat. Is that understood?”

Miss Wick nodded
.

He repeated it to Mary Jane: “Is that understood, miss?”

“Yes, sir.”

Miss Wick slipped her arm around Mary Jane’s shoulder; the girl was cradling the terrier in her arms like a baby
.

The bobby’s footsteps were echoing down the stairwell as Mary Jane entered Miss Wick’s flat
.

“Everything will be all right, love,” Miss Wick said, again and again, as she paced and smoked and occasionally looked at the wall separating this flat from the next. Early on she asked Mary Jane if she wanted a glass of water—“It’s all I have that’s suitable, dear, I’m afraid”—and Mary Jane politely declined the offer
.

Sitting on the couch, playing with the terrier, Mary Jane pretended to herself that her mum would be showing up any time now, from work. From the bank
.

But at the same time the girl could not banish from her mind’s eye that bulging black quilt on her mother’s bed, and the terrible white face of the constable who’d seen what was under there
.

SEVEN

A WOMAN’S TOUCH

G
OSFIELD WAS A CLAUSTROPHOBIC SIDE
street whose chief attribute was not having been blown up in the war, as yet; a row of nondescript brick apartment buildings faced another, exchanging what struck Agatha as glaring expressions, as if each were slightly miffed its opposite would dare stand so close. Margaret Lowe’s flat was just around the corner from an intersection where a fish-and-chip stall and several pubs provided this dreary working-class neighborhood with fried nourishment and alcoholic relief.

The late afternoon was bleakly overcast, evening impatiently crowding in, with light, half-hearted snowfall, making intermittent appearances; it was just chilly enough to be a bother.

Agatha had worked a full day at the hospital, having requested that tomorrow, Friday, be free, so she could be unencumbered to prepare for and attend an event to which she looked forward almost as much as she dreaded it: the premiere of her new play.

She’d just been trading her white lab coat for her Glen Plaid, when Sir Bernard had leaned into the dispensary and said, “We have another. Would you like to accompany me?… I must warn you, my dear, I’m told our friend has outdone himself.”

She had of course accepted the invitation, and by now had become blithely blasé about the breakneck Spilsbury style of motoring, though James, in her lap, did seem rather alarmed, the terrier a seasoned passenger who usually insisted on sticking his head out the window. At the moment James’s snout was buried in her bosom.

On the way, Agatha posed a question she had been meaning to ask the pathologist for some time.

“These women,” she said. “How long does it take them to die at the strangler’s hands?”

“There’s a variable… and it would be no different for a man, suffering that fate.”

“And what is the variable?”

“Whether the victim is breathing in when the murderer’s grip tightens, squeezing off the air… or breathing out, at that moment.”

“What does the variable amount to?”

“Thirty seconds, if one happened to be breathing out—breathing in, fifteen.”

“Not terribly long.”

“No, my dear—terribly long indeed. It would seem, I should think, even at fifteen seconds… interminable.”

Sir Bernard parked behind Inspector Greeno’s Austin—although truth be told, the inspector could have walked to the crime scene, so close was it to his recently established special headquarters at the police station on nearby Tottenham Court Road. James waited in the Armstrong-Siddeley; an animal would hardly be welcome at a crime scene.

And that thought had barely passed through Agatha’s mind when an attractive teenaged girl exited the door up to the flat, with her arms filled by a Scottie terrier. Closed in behind the
window of the parked sedan, James began to bark furiously, and the other terrier enthusiastically responded to the call of the wild.

The teenaged girl—whose expression, Agatha thought, might best be described as “shell-shocked”—hugged the dog close to her. A uniformed policewoman, who had exited the building just behind the girl and dog, was at the child’s side now, guiding her by the arm, speaking to her softly, the words drowned out by the pair of yapping animals. With James muffled behind the rolled-up car window, his barks seemed echoes of the other terrier’s.

Agatha paused, watching the policewoman escort the girl—a dark-haired, long-stemmed budding beauty—into the front passenger seat of a waiting police car.

Sir Bernard—as usual, minus a topcoat, in an impeccably tailored black suit with red carnation—was at the door to the stairwell, holding it open with one hand, the oversize Gladstone bag in the other. He looked at her anxiously, almost cross. “Agatha… ?”

“That must be the dead woman’s child,” she said, hollowly.

“Most likely,” Sir Bernard said.

He had told her the basics of the affair on the ride over: the teenaged girl, home for a long weekend, her knocking unanswered, going to a neighbor, who fetched a bobby.

Agatha fell in line, Sir Bernard leading the way up a narrow poorly illuminated flight; this was hardly a “ladies first” situation.

The girl had instantly brought to mind the image of Agatha’s own daughter at that age, who had been similarly beautiful (and still was). Agatha could only hope this young woman was as free-spirited and independent as her Rosalind. Though she
knew her love for Rosalind was reciprocated, the mother felt sure that, when the day came, her daughter would not suffer the terrible emotional upheaval Agatha had suffered at the loss of her beloved Clara.

Three doors shared the landing, where Inspector Greeno and a uniformed constable waited. The center door was closed—the common loo, no doubt; the door at the right was filled by a harshly attractive blonde who looked thirty-odd but likely was still in her twenties.

The inspector was interviewing the woman, who stood in her doorway smoking a cigarette; she wore an improbably virginal white-and-pink floral housedress and her rather startling hair was in pin curls. This probable prostitute seemed genuinely sorrowful, and was clearly cooperating with the inspector without the sexual fencing in which Ivy Poole, at the previous crime scene, had indulged.

Inspector Greeno said, “Miss Wick, my pathologist and secretary have arrived… if you’ll excuse me.”

“Shall I wait inside my flat, ’spector?”

“No, I’ll be with you again, shortly.”

The landing was getting crowded and the inspector sent the constable down to street level, to keep any interested citizens, and particularly the press, away.

The third door, the one at left, was open, revealing the flat within, which, while a single room, took up a fairly large area, though perhaps the sparseness of the furnishings furthered that impression.

A single bed was against the facing wall, on which a black eiderdown covered a protuberance that likely was the victim’s corpse. On a small table at the head of the bed was a porcelain pitcher and basin and a few towels. On the floor,
at the foot of the bed, a scattering of female apparel included a green cloth coat with a rabbit-fur collar, a navy jumper, a frilly white blouse, a chemise, and a little blue pillbox hat with a gay red feather.

For such a frightful, seedy flat, these were surprisingly nice clothes, Agatha noted. Of course, they were the woman’s working garb. The spider, not the web, attracted, after all; but what terrible sort of fly had been summoned?

Depending on where one stood on the landing, the rest of the scantily furnished flat could be ascertained, for the most part. At the left was a small kitchen area with a table and counter with open shelving below with a few pots and pans; on the counter was a hot plate and a few stacked dishes and cups, but no cupboards above and no sink. At the right, a sitting area with two straightback chairs faced a small fireplace. The wooden floor had two drab threadbare rugs, one in the kitchen area, the other under the bed.

The tawdry little flat was more striking in what it hadn’t than in what it had: no bureau, no wardrobe, no sink with running water, no icebox.
Where did she keep her clothes?
Agatha wondered. Then she noticed the suitcases under the bed.

Inspector Greeno was saying to Sir Bernard, “I’m afraid I left the comforter in place, Doctor. Under no circumstances did I want to subject the victim’s daughter to the sight of her mother.”

“Who identified the deceased?”

From her doorway, Miss Wick chimed, “I did, dearie. He leaved her face alone, small favor.”

“Otherwise,” the inspector continued, “the constable did a nice job of not disturbing things. You certainly won’t find a shortage of evidence. The fiend used every damn thing he could lay hands on, on the poor wench…. Pardon my bluntness, ladies.”

“Not at all,” Miss Wick said, from her doorway.

Agatha said to the inspector, “Is there any doubt that this is the same assailant?”

But it was Sir Bernard who answered, “There’s always doubt. We make no assumptions before we’ve examined the evidence…. Ready for me in there, Inspector?”

“Photographers haven’t been here yet, Doctor. I wouldn’t remove anything, just yet.”

“Understood.”

And Sir Bernard and his massive medical bag of tricks entered the bleak flat. Carefully stepping around various items on the carpet near the bed, and avoiding the piled clothing, he knelt, opened the Gladstone bag wide, and withdrew his rubber gloves. He rose, put on the gloves like a surgeon preparing to operate, and was lifting the eiderdown gently off the corpse when Inspector Greeno stepped in front of Agatha and pulled the door shut to the flat.

Agatha looked with undisguised irritation at the inspector, but Greeno’s narrowed eyes and a gesture of the head indicated to her that this action was taken due to the presence of Miss Wick, and not herself.

Softly, almost whispering, the inspector said, “I’ll not deny you entry, Agatha, when Sir Bernard has completed his examination of the victim and the various evidence.”

“Thank you, Ted.”

“But I beg you to carefully consider whether you need expose yourself to such unpleasantness.”

“We’ve had this conversation before, Ted.”

“I know we have, Agatha. And I believe my respect for you has been made clear.” He nodded toward the closed door. “But that’s the work of a sexually deranged, homicidal maniac, in there. They pay me to have nightmares. You needn’t volunteer for this misery.”

Genuinely moved by his concern, Agatha touched the man’s sleeve. “Thank you, Ted. But I’m a big girl.”

A loud voice, nearby, interrupted the sotto voce conversation. “Excuse me, but I work evenings. If you don’t need me, ’spector, I could stand to get on with me life.”

Miss Wick’s sorrow had abated sufficiently for her to become annoyed by the inconvenience, it would seem.

“I do have a few questions,” the inspector said, turning to the attractive if harshly made-up blonde.

Both Inspector Greeno and Agatha took notes as the former asked several questions. Miss Wick again was cooperative and businesslike.

“The daughter didn’t know her mum was a working girl,” the woman said. “And I think Pearl turned to it, late in life… at least, late in hers, right?”

“I’m not sure I follow,” the inspector admitted.