The London Blitz Murders (4 page)

The dispensary, where Mrs. Mallowan worked two full days, three half-days (often evenings) and alternate Saturday mornings, was untouched, and remained quite the orderly rabbit’s warren it had always been. Rather like the library of a country village, whose stacks were devoted to pills not books, the dispensary was home to four dispensers (two at a time) and one Sealyham terrier.

His white sausage-like form stretched out under the shelves, the terrier was a small, short-legged, longheaded, strong-jawed, whiskered white lamb of a dog called James who belonged to Mrs. Mallowan’s longtime secretary, Carlo Fisher. Sometimes Mrs. Mallowan thought she missed Carlo’s presence as much as that of Mr. Mallowan (a gross exaggeration) (she thought)
(she hoped), as Carlo was working in a munitions factory now and was unable to have James with him. So Mrs. Mallowan had adopted the dog for the duration.

James behaved impeccably at the hospital and there had been no complaints about his behavior, and he received occasional kind attentions from the charwoman, as well as from the several dispensers with whom Mrs. Mallowan shared these cramped quarters.

Of the dispensers, all five were female and of these Mrs. Mallowan was quite the senior, if in reality the least experienced, or at any rate the one who’d only recently qualified in the up-to-date medicines and tonics and ointments and such, prescribed nowadays. The chief dispenser, a serious slender woman, thirty-odd, with Harold Lloyd eyeglasses, often paused to make sure Mrs. Mallowan was “getting it right.”

Which was quite ridiculous, as on the whole, working in a dispensary was much easier these days than in Mrs. Mallowan’s younger ones. In a modern dispensary, so many pills, tablets, powders and things were already waiting in bottles or tubes or otherwise prepackaged, requiring little to none of the skill of measuring and mixing the profession once demanded; she really did seem a sort of librarian of medicines.

Mrs. Mallowan felt somewhat ill at ease, even self-conscious among these younger women. Though she would never have been so rude or bold to say so, the volunteer worker knew very well that, when she was their age, in her twenties, she would have put them to shame.

She had been a willowy young thing, a tall, slim blonde with thick, wavy, waist-long hair, delicate skin, sloping shoulders, and the half-lidded blue eyes, gently aquiline nose and oval face consistent with the Edwardian ideal of feminine beauty.

Even in her housewifely thirties (early thirties, at any rate), she could have held her own.

Now, in her white lab coat, she still struck a commanding figure, taller than these youngsters, and not yet… the word came slowly but inexorably… fat. Her waist had vanished, it was true, and she had one more chin than she felt really necessary, a formidable drooping bosom bequeathed her by her late beloved mother, and the sun-kissed fair hair had turned a gunmetal gray which she wore short, a cap of curls providing an unexceptional accompaniment to features no longer lovely (in her view), comprising what could only charitably be described as a “kind” face.

She was resigned to her new lot in life. At fifty-two she no longer viewed herself as “middle-aged”—not unless she would live to be a hundred and four, and she had no real desire of that—and yet the dreaded half-century mark had been a liberation of sorts. She had experienced a renewed verve for living, that heightened sense of awareness only years can bring; she found that she enjoyed going to picture shows, concerts and the opera with the same enthusiasm as when she’d been twenty or twenty-five.

Her marriage to Max—could it really be a dozen years ago?—had made the difference. The emotional turmoil of romantic personal relations had been replaced by the contentment of loving, harmonious companionship. With Max, she could enjoy her leisure time—travel to foreign places at the forefront, of course.

Not that the bedroom was a dull place with Max—encounters between the sheets remained a pleasure not a duty; this was one of the positive aspects of being married to a man fourteen years younger than yourself (though the weight she was putting on in his absence did trouble her).

And what a pleasure too that those infantile cat-and-mouse courtship games were ancient history (what a ghastly tedious disappointment it had been, after her first marriage had ended, to discover the courtship rituals for those in their thirties and forties differed so little from those in their teens and twenties).

Only now she and Max were separated by this war, this damned war. And here she was, back in a hospital dispensary, where she’d been in the last one. Not that history was repeating itself—the “war to end all wars” had been different, coming as it did as an incomprehensible shock, a cataclysm unlike anything in living memory, the impossible happening.

No, this conflict was quite different, even if it was the Germans again. This time the surprise came from how long the war took to really truly start. Like so many others, the Mallowans—who had heard the proclamation of war broadcast on the kitchen radio while the household help wept into the vegetables—had expected London to be bombed that first night; but nothing happened.

When nothing kept on happening, the country got itself organized, more or less, sitting waiting for disaster to inflict itself… which it refused to do. And so, with the war remaining a concept and not a reality, the country slipped back into individual pursuits, mundane daily life, interspersed with occasional wartime activities, such as when Max joined the comic opera that was the Brixham Home Guard, ten men passing around two rifles.

Embarrassed by such pointless activities, Max had gone off to London, to the Air Ministry, hoping to be sent abroad on a mission. Greenway—their newly acquired but much loved home on the river Dart, between Torquay and Dartmouth—had been requisitioned as a nursery for evacuated London children, though Mrs. Mallowan continued to live there for a time.

That was what had taken her back to the Torquay dispensary, where she’d picked up an on-the-job refresher course which had made her current University College posting possible.

When her first husband, Archie, was serving with the Royal Flying Corps, she had worked as a volunteer nurse and then as a hospital dispensing pharmacist. Nursing during the Great War had been a nasty bit of business—from the rigors of constantly cleaning the wards and scrubbing rubber sheets to attending to burn patients and assisting in the operating room, the job was not for the easily fatigued or the faint of heart.

Pampered ladies with romantic notions of soothing our brave boys’ fevered brows did not last long—not after tidying up following amputations and disposing severed limbs in the hospital furnace, they didn’t. Mrs. Mallowan had lasted fifteen months, and might have stayed longer, but a dose of flu instigated by overwork, and the attraction of more regular hours, had brought her to the dispensary.

There she found a calm seldom present in nursing; difficult at first, the dispensing job played well into her natural interest in, and facility with, mathematics. Codifying, classifying, listing, measuring, learning symbols and signs, mastering the appearance and properties of various substances… this was a kind of poetry to her.

And the dispensary was a life-and-death operation, no less than an operating room—she had seen a confident if careless pharmacist prepare a mixture based upon a calculation that was one decimal point off. Rather than embarrass the man (and kill some unwitting patient), she had spilled the mixture and endured censure for clumsiness….

Still, interesting as dispensing was, she found it rather monotonous—ointments, medicines, jar after jar of lotions to be
filled and refilled, day after day. She should never have cared for dispensing as a permanent job, and had her life gone a different way, she might have been happy to remain a professional nurse.

But it was in the pharmacy that Mrs. Mallowan had picked up a working knowledge of poisons, and this personal experience she used in the writing of her first mystery novel,
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
.

Ironically, the boring if sociable dispensary (she’d worked there with two good friends) set her mind to wandering, looking for escape from the anxiety of wartime in the form of daydreams that led to the notion of writing a mystery based upon a notably ingenious way to slip poison to a victim….

And now Agatha Christie Mallowan found herself back in a dispensary, with her mind running down a similar and yet distinctively different course. She was well aware that her mystery novels were of a polite, even cozy nature—superficially, at least—and even reflective of another era.

She did not like to think of herself as old-fashioned; and she had tried, in her work, to do things no writer of mysteries had ever dared—the narrator is the killer, all the suspects did it, a child, the love interest, even the detective himself might be the murderer. Puzzles, they called her stories, and she would smile and nod; but Agatha knew her tales of good and evil hinged on character.

In her way, Agatha was an innovator, and she had of late begun to wonder if the cataclysm of this war would result in a post-war world whose innocence was so lost that bodies in libraries and detectives exercising little gray cells would seem quaintly out of step and, well, just too ridiculous.

Her morning’s last customer (was it terrible to think of them that way?) was a tiny old Irish lady, remindful of Mother Riley
from the music hall, who handed over her prescription with one hand and pressed half a crown into Agatha’s palm with the other.

In a wrinkled leprechaun face, blue eyes twinkled, and then one of them winked. “Make it double strong, dearie, will you now? Plenty of peppermint, my darling girl—double strong!”

“We don’t accept bribes,” Agatha said priggishly, returning the half-crown.

A frown wrinkled the wizened face further. “I would never insult you that way, dearie. T’ink of it as a gratuity. A gift.”

“You will receive exactly the dosage your doctor prescribed,” Agatha said stiffly, but when she turned her back, the dispenser allowed the smile she’d been stifling to blossom. She mixed in an extra dollop of peppermint water for the old girl—it could not possibly do her any harm—and then pretended to be stern when she handed it over.

Her half-day ended at noon, at which time she hung up her lab coat, to reveal her off-white blouse and the dark gray skirt of her well-made, respectable Debenham and Freebody suit. Her stockings were black and warm, her shoes heavy and sensible. She slipped into the gray suitjacket, slung her well-lined Burberry over an arm, attached the leash to James’s collar, and she and the terrier made their familiar way to the small laboratory just down the hall from the dispensary.

Within this glorified cubbyhole—workbench beneath a window overlooking the courtyard, sink and rack of test tubes nearby, counter with bunsen burners beneath specimen-lined shelves—the greatest forensics scientist of the twentieth century kept solitary company with his investigations.

When Agatha had first heard that Sir Bernard Spilsbury was her neighbor at University College Hospital, a schoolgirl giddiness ran through her. She had read and heard much about
Sir Bernard, and the idea of meeting him, of discussing with him crime and murder and poisons and causes of death, frankly thrilled her.

But she had never made the journey down the hall to introduce herself. Agatha was not outgoing, at least not until she got to know a person; this reticence prevented her from making the immediate acquaintance of someone she had much admired, from afar.

She understood that Sir Bernard, too, was shy and unassuming, amazingly so for so well-known a public figure; like her, he was said to abhor attention, and despised having his picture taken. In the hallways of the hospital, she had observed him discreetly—he seemed distracted though never rude, preoccupied but nonetheless likable, displaying charm and even warmth when someone on the staff stopped to make conversation with him.

Certainly she needn’t fear offending him; and yet she could not bring herself to make an introduction—how silly she would feel, the author of homicidal confections presenting herself to the man who put Crippen away.

And yet she had longed to meet him. It was almost—but not quite—as if she were a schoolgirl with a crush. Certainly, even in his mid-sixties, Sir Bernard cut a handsome figure—always in a dark well-tailored suit with a fresh carnation, a tall figure understandably thickened at the middle, with the sharply chiseled features of a matinee idol, and eyes as gray as Poirot’s little brain cells.

Perhaps, with Max away, there was an element of propriety afoot as well. Agatha had not known how to approach this handsome, older man she so admired without fawning, even gushing, and perhaps giving him… the wrong idea.

Then, finally, he had introduced himself—not at the hospital, but inside Euston Station.

Euston Station, of course, was an undeniably shabby affair, inconvenient, shambling, with a cavernous entrance hall cutting the station in two and encouraging bedlam. She disliked crowds, hated being jammed up against people, and the loud sounds and the cigarette and cigar smoke all annoyed her; but wartime was wartime, wasn’t it? One did what one had to do.

And so Agatha—who so loved to eat, who so adored fine cooking, by herself and others—had been reduced to taking bangers and mash at a stall, sitting at a little wooden table whose secondary function seemed to be providing irony that a hospital worker should eat at so unsanitary a spot. James the terrier would curl up on the floor beside her, waiting for an occasional bite of banger to reward his good behavior.

She had noticed Sir Bernard taking an occasional lunch here, sitting engrossed in a book or writing in a journal; so it was not a surprise to see him approaching, typically natty in a dark suit, set off by a red carnation in the buttonhole, raincoat over his arm.

It was, however, a shock for him to stop and half-bow before her, even as she did her best to swallow a rather too-large bite of mashed potatoes.

“Pardon me, Mrs. Mallowan,” he had said, his voice a rich baritone, “I’m Bernard Spilsbury. Might I sit down for a moment?”