The London Blitz Murders

by Max Allan Collins

  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.”

  “With your permission,” Spilsbury said, “I’m going to remove this watch.”

  “Please,” Greeno said.

  “I’ll hold on to it, if I might.”

  “Do.”

  “I will pass it along to Superintendent Cherrill for fingerprint analysis and other testings.”

  “Fine.”

  Carefully, the rubber gloves apparently causing him no problem, Spilsbury removed the watch from the dead woman’s wrist. He turned it over.

  “We may have just identified the poor woman,” Spilsbury said. “Take a look.”

  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, th
ough.”

  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 famous 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 thos
e 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.