The London Blitz Murders (2 page)

Not that the city allowed itself to be a dirty, dusty shambles—repairs were constant. On this typically overcast, coldly dreary Monday morning, the street and sidewalks dusted with snow, workmen were repairing potholes. The latter were not the fault of the Germans—the last major attack had been back in May, after all, on the tenth…

… a night no one living in London was likely to forget. The Thames at low ebb, the moon full, the Luftwaffe delivered the war’s worst raid thus far—Westminster Abbey damaged, the Mint, the Tower, the Law Courts, the British Museum hit, even Big Ben’s face had been scarred (though still tolling right on time), as fires raged… and more than three thousand Londoners lost their lives….

A shattered city had trembled, dreading the next attack; but nothing came, not for months, and even then nothing to compare to the tenth of May. And as days turned to weeks and weeks to months, the sense that the Blitz might be (dare one say it?) over provided a desperation-tinged hope
.

Not that the city was letting down. Small but punishing German raids did occasionally still occur, the all-too-familiar banshee warning again piercing the London air—particularly following an Allied raid, most particularly when the target had been Berlin
.

And, so, sandbags and rationing and propaganda posters and of course the blackout continued
.

But the shelters weren’t being so widely used, in this lull in the Blitz; and even when bombs were raining on London, many had preferred to stay home and take their chances, rather than crawl into a privately owned (usually ensconced in a garden) Anderson shelter, two corrugated sheets of steel bolted at the top, stuck three feet into the earth, with a sheet-metal door, and protected by an earthen embankment. With no drainage, these shelters for six were a nightmare; between the rain and certain human needs, one well might prefer the relative dignity of staying home and being blown to smithereens
.

Then there was the public standard shelter of brick-and-lime mortar walls, perched unsupported on a roadway, with a nine-inch reinforced concrete slab on top. The public had soon dubbed these sandwich shelters, because a blast could suck the shelter walls outward, turning the occupants into the meat between concrete and roadway slices
.

The “tubes” of the subway system were adapted into shelters as well, but mosquitoes and fierce winds (sometimes cold, sometimes hot) eventually relegated that option to the homeless. Little societies had developed down there, and even though they could be relocated, these ragged bands preferred their new underground world
.

A workman named Peter Rushing, age thirty-eight, lanky and hard-hewed, was running short on sand in his pothole-filling effort. He knew where to “borrow” some, easy enough
….

Brick shelters like this one had to be built in the streets; there was no room, was there, for a structure like this in Montague Place, in the Central London district of Marlyebone, whose long, straight streets and endless rows of stately buildings—occasionally disrupted by bombed-out patches, like absent teeth in an otherwise impressive smile—included scant room for gardens. This shelter—between Edgware Road and Baker Street (both of whose flats and high-class shops had largely been destroyed in 1940’s raids)—was but one of hundreds lining London’s streets, a spare cubicle with a seat built along one side. Nothing could be more ordinary
.

And yet Peter Rushing discovered something—someone—quite extraordinary, when he ducked into the stall intending to nick some sand from an already spilled-open sandbag
.

The woman was striking—what you would call handsome as opposed to beautiful, with short, dark, nicely coifed hair and good cheekbones. She was not seated on the bench; rather she lay sprawled on the roadway floor of the shelter, her clothing—white blouse, dark brown jacket, lighter brown skirt—disarrayed, up over long legs that had been darkened with a liquid product to give the impression of silk stockings
.

Her eyes were open and staring blankly. She had been gagged with a silk scarf, but was not otherwise bound, her arms and hands and legs splayed. No purse seemed present, but items apparently dumped from a purse were scattered nearby—lipstick, compact, handkerchief, and such. An electric torch—the woman’s presumably—lay a ways from the body, its dim beam casting a small yellow circle on the brick wall under the bench
.

And for the first time since the Blitz had begun, Peter Rushing was truly frightened. What he was viewing was not the impersonal carnage of war, rather the wanton destruction of one human’s life by another
.

“Freddie!” he called. “Come ’ere, lad!”

Freddie Sangster, a short chubby bloke of twenty-odd, did not move quickly; he had a game leg that had kept him doing roadwork during wartime. But when he got there, Freddie was quick to say, “Blimey,” and agree that one of them should stay with the corpse, and the other go for the coppers
.

And being the younger, Freddie got to stay and keep the woman company
.

The boy was sitting on the bench, hunched over, his hands folded, his eyes on the handsome quite dead woman, watching her carefully, as if to make sure she didn’t make a break for it
.

And in the meantime, Peter Rushing did make a break for it—rushing off to find the nearest telephone
.

ONE

SCANT SHELTER

D
ETECTIVE
C
HIEF
I
NSPECTOR
E
DWARD
G
REENO
, Criminal Investigation Division, Scotland Yard, answered the call.

Greeno was a tall, square-shouldered man with a bucket head and bulldog features, a ready all-knowing smile and small dark eyes that missed little. He was one of the hardest-nosed coppers in town, and knew it; an inveterate horseplayer, Greeno had been approached with more bribe offers than a good-looking dame got whistles.

But much to the consternation of London’s gangsters, Greeno was as straight as he was tough.

He stepped from the police Austin, allowing his driver to go park it, and strode toward the crime scene in snapbrim and raincoat, like any good detective; but what was a fashion statement for American dicks was a necessity for the likes of Greeno: the rain here was no joke, even though today it was a whispering of snow.

The inspector was a veteran of the legendary Flying Squad—sometimes called the Sweeney (short for Sweeney Todd, in cockney rhyming slang)—which “flew” to crime scenes and took literal pursuit of villains. He had earned countless commendations from judges and Scotland Yard commissioners, and
crime reporter Percy Hoskins had called him “the underworld’s public enemy number one.”

Now Greeno, with what he considered to be a rather burdensome reputation, was attached to the Murder Squad—as it was unofficially known—though, unlike many chief inspectors, he had not during his sergeant days assisted on murder investigations.

Accordingly, Ted Greeno had only been investigating murders for a little over a year, and in wartime London, murders had been few. Crime was down all over London, actually.

In Greeno’s view, there was nothing patriotic about it: a villain in peacetime was a villain in wartime. But with fewer motor cars around to nick, fewer got nicked; burglary was way down as well, since the blackout deterred crims, who had no way to know if a house or building was empty or not. Street violence, with an eye on robbery, was up, however—blackout bashing for cash seldom turned the corner into murder, though.

This was an apparent exception to that rule.

He had called for Sir Bernard Spilsbury to meet him at the scene of the crime. The renowned pathologist was on twenty-four hour call for the C.I.D., officially attached to the Home Office, although he worked not out of Scotland Yard but University College Hospital. The good doctor was not here as yet.

After he stepped through the narrow, doorless passageway in the high brick shelter walls, the inspector touched nothing. He did kneel over the dead woman and noted the state of her clothing’s disarray… and the absence of a handbag. The purple bruises made by fingers on her throat were obvious even in the dimness of the shelter.

Had some thief strangled this woman over the contents of her bag? Had a few shillings cost this handsome woman her life?

Oddly, a fairly expensive-looking gold watch remained on the woman’s wrist. Perhaps in the darkness the murderous thief had missed it.

Greeno would do little but wait until Sir Bernard was on hand. Confident as he might be about his skills as a police detective, Greeno knew that Spilsbury’s expertise—and his eventual ability to testify in court with clarity and convincingness—was worth waiting for.

But something tingled at the back of the detective’s neck—and in the pit of his stomach, a flutter of recognition. This corpse recalled another….

One of the relative handful of murders in recent months had been that of Maple Church, an attractive young woman found strangled and robbed in a wrecked building on Hampstead Road.

And this attractive woman had obviously been robbed; and strangled.

Greeno was standing outside the shelter, questioning the two workmen, when Sir Bernard drew up in his dark-green Armstrong-Siddeley saloon; characteristically, Spilsbury had driven himself. With the exception of the sedan itself—motor cars a relative rarity these days—the pathologist’s arrival was typically unobtrusive.

The man considered by many to be the first medical detective of modern times was accompanied by no retinue of assistants. His tall figure rather bent these days, his athletic leanness giving way to the plump spread of late middle age, Spilsbury—wearing no topcoat over a well-tailored dark suit with a carnation providing a bloodred splash in his otherwise somber attire—remained a striking, strikingly handsome figure.

Though his hair was silver now, and he was never seen without his wire-rimmed glasses, Sir Bernard Spilsbury had a
matinee idol’s chiseled features, highlighted by melancholy gray eyes that seemed to look at everything, but reluctantly, and a thin line of a mouth that with minimal change could suggest sorrow, disgust, reproach and even amusement.

The Crippen case—one of the century’s most notorious—had marked Spilsbury’s entry into the world of forensics; and over the intervening years no professional ups and downs had followed for Spilsbury, strictly what a wag had called “a steady climb to Papal infallibility.”

Still, like so many in Britain, Spilsbury had not been spared by the war; his son Peter, a surgeon, had died in 1940, at the height of the Blitz. Greeno had heard the whispers: on that day, Sir Bernard had begun to fail.

His work, however, remained impeccable. It was characteristic of Spilsbury to work alone in a politely preoccupied fashion. But his considerable charm, his dry wit, seemed to have evaporated. The touch of sadness in his eyes had spread to his solemn features.

“Doctor,” Greeno said.

Greeno knew not to call Spilsbury “Sir Bernard” here; the pathologist considered that out of place at a crime scene.

“Inspector,” Spilsbury said. He was lugging the almost comically oversize Gladstone bag that was his trademark. Then the pathologist raised one eyebrow and tilted his head toward the brick shelter.

Greeno nodded.

And this was the extent of the inspector briefing the pathologist.

Greeno followed Spilsbury through the narrow doorless doorway into the brick structure. The pathologist knelt beside the dead woman, as if he were praying; perhaps he
was—one could never be sure about what might be going on in Sir Bernard’s mind.

Then Spilsbury snapped the big bag; it yawned open gapingly to reveal various odd and old instruments, including probing forceps of his own invention, various jars and bottles (some empty, some full), and a supply of formalin. Also, he withdrew rubber gloves from somewhere within, which he snugged on.

Not all pathologists went the rubber-glove route. But Greeno knew Spilsbury—unlike many who should’ve known better—could be trusted to touch nothing at this crime scene other than the body, and even then with gloved fingertips. Any other evidence gathered by the pathologist would be preceded by a request to the detective in charge—in this case, Greeno.

The gloom of the shelter required Spilsbury to withdraw, from the seemingly bottomless bag, an electric torch, which he held in his right hand, using his left for other examinations. The pathologist was adeptly ambidextrous.

Never rising, Spilsbury started at the woman’s feet and, bathing her selectively in the torch’s yellow glow, closely looked at the clothed corpse as carefully as an actor studying his curtain speech. There was no rushing the doctor, although his methodical approach was diligent, not laggard.

It was Spilsbury, after all, who had taught Greeno that “clues can be destroyed through delay, and changes in the body after death… and the body’s removal from where it was found… can confuse the medical evidence.”