The London Blitz Murders d-5

by Max Allan Collins

  Spilsbury held the item up and Greeno leaned down.

  On the back of the timepiece was engraved: E.M. Hamilton.

  “It’s not a cheap watch,” Greeno said. “Odd our man left it behind, when he took her purse.”

  “Dark in here,” Spilsbury said, making the same assumption Greeno had earlier. “He may simply have missed it.”

  The doctor was placing the watch in a small jar; this he labeled with a pen. Greeno knew material evidence was safe and sound in Spilsbury’s keeping-whenever a case on which Spilsbury had worked came to court, the chain of possession of the evidence was flawless… only the great man himself and the laboratory analyst would have handled the stuff.

  “On such and such a date,” the familiar testimony went, “I was handed so many jars by Sir Bernard Spilsbury….”

  Spilsbury’s mournful, chiseled countenance looked up at Greeno. “Have you taken photographs?”

  “One of my men has, yes.”

  “Then I’m going to unbutton her blouse, and may need to remove or undo an undergarment. Please block the doorway so that we’re not interrupted.”

  Greeno did.

  Finally, Spilsbury sighed as he rose, taking off the rubber gloves. He indicated the corpse, whose rather full breasts were exposed, though the pathologist largely obstructed Greeno’s view. “I’d like more photographs, please.”

  Greeno made that happen, and briefly flashbulbs worked their lightning in the little space, strobing the corpse white.

  Then the inspector and the pathologist were again alone with the victim. With Greeno’s permission, Spilsbury took a sample of sand from a spilled sandbag, and placed individually the scattered items from the woman’s missing purse into small manila envelopes. All of these potential exhibits disappeared into the massive Gladstone bag.

  The pathologist took no notes. It was his practice not to impair the keenness of his senses with the distraction of note-taking, and would not do so until later, sometimes as much as days hence. Greeno was not disturbed by this: he knew Spilsbury wouldn’t forget a damned thing.

  “I’ll leave the silk scarf for you to collect, Inspector.”

  “All right.”

  “Do be sure you have a photograph of the knot before it’s undone.”

  “I will.”

  Spilsbury, who had tucked his rubber gloves away in that magician’s bag, now stood and ritualistically placed his hands in his pants pockets-as he always did, once his medical examination was finished at a crime scene.

  “Strangled, of course,” Spilsbury said. “But you knew that.”

  “I prefer hearing it from you, Doctor.”

  “From the marks on her throat…” Spilsbury removed his left hand from his pocket, and held it out in a choking manner, by way of demonstration. “… I believe her assailant was a left-handed man.”

  “You rule out a woman attacker?”

  “It’s unlikely. This is a powerful individual-much more likely a male. On the other hand, despite the disarray of her clothing, I see no sign of rape or sexual attack. The autopsy will tell, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  Spilsbury nodded down toward the corpse. “Note the bruises on her chest…. Come closer.”

  Greeno did and winced. “My God…”

  “He probably knelt on top of her, pinning her down, while he was strangling her.”

  The inspector shook his head. “It’s a right wicked world, Doctor.”

  “It is indeed…. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  Spilsbury had been at the Hampstead Road crime scene, as well.

  “… Dare we think that?” Greeno asked.

  “The other young woman, Maple Church,” Spilsbury said, and the older man’s ability to recall the name was no surprise to the younger one, “was also strangled and robbed. But, in that instance, there had been sexual activity.”

  “Not rape, though.”

  Spilsbury nodded. “No evidence of such, anyway. But sexual congress did occur, perhaps with the young woman’s consent.”

  Perhaps was an understatement, even for Spilsbury. Maple Church had been a prostitute in Soho. Several hours before her death, she’d been seen talking to potential mugs (as the London ladies called their clients) not far from where her body would shortly be found. Several servicemen had been on hand, among them American soldiers.

  “I don’t believe any suspects made themselves available,” Spilsbury said, drawing a fine line between tact and sarcasm.

  “We didn’t get anywhere on that one, no, sir. With so many servicemen in the city, it’s difficult to impossible, sometimes…. But if we would happen to have a boyo who’s preying upon prosties, this woman…” He nodded toward the austere-featured victim. “… would hardly seem to qualify. She’s handsome enough, but rather old for the game.”

  “This was a respectable woman,” Spilsbury said, agreeing but in a dismissive manner. “Her clothing attests that… but in a blackout, a woman walking the street… and she was, as you say, handsome….”

  “He could easily have mistaken her for a tart.”

  Spilsbury nodded curtly. “But two killings don’t a Ripper make.”

  “No. These could be isolated instances. Robberies gone out of hand.”

  “In hand, I should say,” Spilsbury said, repeating the choking gesture. “I would hate to think the fog of Whitechapel has a counterpart in our blackouts.”

  Greeno grunted a humorless laugh. “That’s where I started out, you know.”

  Spilsbury looked at Greeno directly, as if noticing his presence for the first time. “What’s that, Inspector?”

  “King David’s Lane, Shadwell-Whitechapel Division. That was my first post, back in ’20. Where the Ripper ripped.”

  “I pray we don’t have another.”

  “Second to that. And if we do… I pray he’s not American.”

  Spilsbury’s eyes and nostrils flared. “Oh-that would be all we’d need at this juncture.”

  The influx of American soldiers since the first of the year had been considerable… as was the tension between locals and the colonials. The phrase going around of late was “the Americans are over-paid, over-sexed and over here.” The Home Office, it was rumored, was developing a campaign to convince British citizens that the Americans were not pampered, gum-chewing, arrogant monsters.

  Somehow Greeno doubted an American Jack the Ripper would do much to advance that campaign.

  Spilsbury packed up-no one was allowed to touch his fabled “murder” bag, and in fact the pathologist would give a frighteningly reproving glare to any person who dared touch even his sleeve at a crime scene-and took his leave, the Armstrong-Siddeley disappearing into the snowy morning.

  And soon Greeno was out on the street, in front of the shelter.

  A plainclothes policeman-not a policeman in plainclothes (the latter received an extra 5s. a week for wear and tear)-came rushing up, holding a woman’s handbag.

  “Guv’nor!” the ruddy-cheeked cop called. “Take a gander!”

  “Goes nicely with your eyes, Albert.”

  Albert, who was a trifle heavyset, was breathing hard, his breath in fact smoking in the chill. “You won’t be pullin’ my leg when I tell you what this is, Guv.”

  “It’s our victim’s handbag.”

  “Right on the bleedin’ button, Guv. Found ’er on top of a trashbin in the alley, there, I did. I think we know who our unfortunate shelter sleeper is.”

  “Her last name’s Hamilton.”

  The copper’s eyes widened. “Sexton Blake’s got nothin’ on you, Guv. Evelyn Hamilton. There’s no wallet, but a receipt for a night’s lodging was tucked down in.”

  “Which gives us an address to check.”

  “It does.”

  The address took Greeno to Oxford Street; few major London thoroughfares had suffered as much damage as Oxford, with many buildings new and old turned to so much rubble. To the inspector perhaps the saddest loss of all was Buszard’s famo
us cake-shop, a landmark for a hundred years till a two-in-the-morning bomb destroyed the facade as well as the Palm Court where grand teas had not long ago been served. As he glided by the remains in his Austin, he savored sweet memories of sweets….

  The four-story lodging house was an ironically shabby survivor among distinguished casualties, and its landlady, a haggard hatchet-faced harridan in a faded housedress, stood leaning on a broom in a doorway giving Greeno chapter and verse. She had tiny eyes, Greeno thought; piss holes in the snow.

  “Not safe on these streets for a decent woman,” she said, in a voice reminiscent of an air-raid siren. “There’s blackout muggers on them streets I tell you, and what are you police doin’ about it? It’s them Yanks, y’know.”

  “Miss Hamilton was a decent woman, then?”

  “Salt of the earth. She was manager of a pharmacy till last week. She give notice. Are you afraid to haul these American blighters in? Make too many waves, will it?”

  “Do you know why Miss Hamilton gave notice? At the pharmacy?”

  “Well, she was a teacher, you see, and with so many schools closed now, she took that job at the chemist’s, out of necessity, don’t you know. But a teaching position opened up, up North-Grimsby way.”

  “Did she have gentleman friends?”

  “No, poor thing-she was a shy one. A regular spinster lady. Oh, she’d wear a touch of makeup, like to make herself presentable.”

  “Maybe she had one special gentleman, then?”

  “Not while she was stayin’ here. Spent most of her spare time alone in her room-reading them books on chemistry of hers, I’d wager.”

  “Does it seem to you likely she’d have allowed herself to be picked up by a strange man?”

  “Miss Hamilton! Not on your life. She never spoke to no one unless she was introduced…. Don’t you be blackening that good woman’s name, now! It’s one of them Americans what grabbed her-mark my word! If you were to have more coppers on the street during the blackout-”

  “Thank you ma’am. Can you think of anything else that might be pertinent?”

  Tiny eyes grew tinier. “Well-she had quite a sum of money on her.”

  Greeno frowned in interest. “Is that right?”

  “Oh, blimey, yes. She settled accounts with me, cash, just last evening-if you check her room, you’ll find her bags packed. She was to take the train to Grimsby today.”

  “And she was traveling with money?”

  “Eighty pounds, I’d say. I call that money. Small fortune, by me.”

  So Evelyn Hamilton hadn’t been killed for “a few shillings,” then. Eighty pounds in wartime London was a small fortune indeed.

  The inspector followed up with interviews at the pharmacy, manager and co-workers, which confirmed the landlady’s characterization of the dead woman. Interviews with acquaintances and others in the lodging house painted the same picture: the victim was a spinster schoolteacher, proper, reticent. One friend did say Miss Hamilton had dated a teacher at a school several years ago, and suspected she was joining her old beau up north at this new post.

  Greeno would check that.

  By late afternoon a Marlyebone seafood restaurant was confirmed as the last location where anyone (other than her killer) had seen Evelyn Margaret Hamilton alive. The cashier reported seeing the wad of pound notes in the woman’s purse.

  She’d been handsome enough to attract a sexual predator, Greeno thought; but that cash would have been attractive to most any villain.

  Greeno could see it in his mind’s eye: during the blackout, the attractive schoolteacher walks from the restaurant back to her lodgings; along the way, a man tries to grab the purse, and when she struggles, he drags her into the nearby air-raid shelter and silences her.

  Not a twentieth-century Jack the Ripper. Just a mugger who had let his crime get a little out of hand.

  And yet those disarrayed clothes, and that the crim had taken time to gag the woman indicated that he had intended, at least, to take his time… and perhaps have his way with the woman.

  Something had spooked the assailant, other folks out walking in the blackout most likely, and he had strangled the woman and taken her eighty pounds and left her there, lifeless, on the sandy floor of the shelter.

  And if the villain had been interrupted, when he’d meant to have his way with the schoolteacher… well, that troubled Inspector Ted Greeno most of all.

  Because villains liked to be satisfied.

  TWO

  PRESCRIPTION: MURDER

  The buildings of University College Hospital, on Gower Street in Bloomsbury, intersected in the form of a cross, but this had not discouraged the Germans from bombing it-perhaps it had only provided a better target. At any rate, several of the buildings had been badly damaged in the air raids of 1940, and there were flattened buildings all around; and yet the hospital itself was largely standing, clean-up long since complete, though reconstruction was going slowly.

  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.