The London Blitz Murders

by Max Allan Collins

  “You don’t believe me, do you, Guv?”

  “A thousand pounds would see you pretty, Greta, for a good long time.”

  One of the tabloids, The News of the World, had posted a thousand-pound reward for “information leading to the capture, arrest and conviction of the Blackout Ripper.” This had brought the doxies out of the woodwork, and Greeno was using four men in as many interview chambers to thin out the hordes of suddenly cooperative ladies of the evening.

  Greta’s story had been interesting enough to bring her to the attention of the inspector himself.

  She claimed that last night—about two hours after the latest victim, Doris Jouannet, had been slain—a young airman had approached her at the bar at the Trocadero. He struck up a conversation with her and bought her a drink and a sandwich. According to Greta, the airman flashed a wad of Treasury notes her way and made “an indecent suggestion.” When she declined this offer, and left to walk toward her apartment, he followed her and shoved her into a doorway and said, “At least let me kiss you good night,” and when she said no, he began to strangle her.

  “I struggled with ’im, kicked him in the family jewels, and he dropped something… his gas-respirator, I think… and I screamed bloody murder and he went runnin’ off, into the darkness, like a scared rat.”

  That was the story that Greeno was now reflecting upon. Finally he said to her, “How can I believe your story, Greta, when it’s riddled with lies?”

  “Did I do this to meself, then?” Greta Heywood asked, opening her pink silk blouse a button and indignantly gesturing to her bruises on her throat.

  “No, but your ponce might have done.”

  “I don’t work with no bleeding ponce!” she blurted. “I’m a one-woman business, I am.”

  This was an interesting outburst for two reasons.

  First, Greta had hitherto clearly avoided copping to any solicitation of prostitution with the phantom airman, weaving an incredible story of her “virtue” being challenged.

  Second, she had inadvertently led Greeno to a relevant realization: none of the working girls attacked, at least those who’d taken the Ripper to their flats, had fallen under the protection of a procurer, or “ponce,” as girls like Greta called them. In many cases, a ponce would have been watching from a distance (perhaps with cosh in hand to help liberate the mark of his loot). In other instances, a ponce might share the flat, lurking in an adjacent room or behind a blanket draped on a clothesline as a partition.

  So the Ripper had either been careful to avoid the procurers, or had been damned lucky.

  “Greta, you’ll not be charged with soliciting. Tell me what really happened.”

  “Well… it’s just what I said, or mostly was. I met this RAF bloke at the Troc. I already had a date I was waiting for, but this one was cute. So I told the bloke he could have a quickie, if he liked. So after we had a drink, we saunter across to that side street… by the Captain’s Table?”

  Greeno nodded. “Go on.”

  “I was leading the way with me torch. I snapped it off and we stepped in a doorway and he started in makin’ love to me. Kissing me. I don’t let just any steamer do such a personal thing as that…”

  A steamer was a client, a mug—cockney rhyming slang: steamtug, mug.

  “… but he was a pretty boy. Kind of sweet and shy…”

  Could she be telling the truth? That might have been young Cummins she was describing.

  “… sweet and shy, that is, till he started chokin’ me to death! Gor blimey, did I let him have it in the—”

  “The rest of your story is substantially true, then.”

  “ ’Course it is. What kind of girl do you take me for, Guv?”

  Greeno allowed that one to slide past. Then he asked, “Did he really drop his respirator?”

  “Swear on me mum’s grave, he did. I heard the clunk.”

  “All right. I’m going to send you over to the Trocadero with my sergeant. You show him how and where this all occurred.”

  The inspector put this in motion, then returned to the desk in the cluttered little office, where he lighted up one of his trademark cigars. A map of Central London with pins in the murder spots covered most of one wall, filing cabinets huddled along the other, and he sat facing a glass-and-wood wall looking out on the bullpen of constables and detectives as well as the receiving desk.

  It did sound like Cummins. The other flier in the case, that Canadian, the one who had argued with Margaret Lowe, was in the clear: he had shipped out the day after Miss Wick phoned in her noise complaint.

  But Cummins was the only one of the St. James Theatre suspects who had an ironclad alibi for the murders of Evelyn Hamilton, Evelyn Oatley, Margaret Lowe and Doris Jouannet: the cadet was in billets when each murder was committed! The billet passbook proved the times he came and went, and his roommates backed the passbook.

  And why, of all the airmen in London, should it be Cummins, anyway? The St. James Theatre was linked only to one of the crimes. Allowing Agatha Christie Mallowan to participate in this investigation had Greeno thinking like a bloody book writer, not the hard-nosed cop he was.

  Agatha’s detectives could gather a tidy group of suspects in the library to discuss the clues and reveal the villain, who would politely go along with the process, right down to presenting his hands for the cuffs. The reality of real policework, and Ted Greeno’s life, was that his only avenue of inquiry at the moment was a seemingly endless parade of streetwalkers. He had spoken with a hundred girls (some five hundred had passed through these portals), sometimes for a few minutes, other times (as with Greta) for a considerable spell.

  And having to depend on the unreliable likes of Greta for his leads did not give Greeno a good feeling—these girls were, after all, liars by trade, even without a tabloid offering a thousand pounds for the right story.

  The telephone shook him shrilly from this cynical reverie; and in his ear was the deceptively soothing baritone of Superintendent Fred Cherrill, the fingerprint expert.

  “I support Mrs. Christie’s observations about the fingerprints on the candlestick from the Lowe flat mantelpiece,” Cherrill said. “A right-handed person, in snatching the candle from the candlestick, would naturally place his left hand on the base, using his right to grasp the candle. The process would be reversed in the case of a left-handed person.”

  She had bleeding Cherrill thinking like a thriller writer now!

  “Actually, Fred,” Greeno said, between cigar puffs, “she prefers ‘Mrs. Mallowan.’ But she has a keen eye, under any name.”

  “Indeed. Those impressions in the dresser-top dust at the Jouannet flat may prove valuable. But so far the fingerprints from the Lowe flat aren’t, terribly.”

  “Why is that? Smudged again?”

  “No, they were beauties—textbook examples of the art; in addition to the candlestick, perfect prints showed up on the half-finished glass of beer, and on a hand mirror. We just don’t have any corresponding prints in our files.”

  “How is it possible that a vicious wrong ’un like our Ripper doesn’t have a previous criminal record?”

  “Well, he doesn’t. Perhaps he’s a late bloomer. Or an American G.I., like they say. But when you do find a good suspect, Ted, we’ll have excellent prints to check him against. Any other leads?”

  “Nothing from the Jouannet place, beyond what Mrs. Mallowan spotted. Oh, I did find a broad roll of Elastoplast in the drawer of that same dresser.”

  “Sticking plaster, hmmm. Anything significant about it?”

  “Probably not. But the adhesive tape had a small oblong piece cut out of it, recently I would say. If it was used to patch one of the stolen items… well, hope springs eternal.”

  “As does despair. Incidentally, no good fingerprints at the Jouannet pigsty—and I gathered and processed them personally, on the scene.”

  Greeno grunted. “Well, fingerprints or not, it was clearly the same man. These killings are quite specific in their savager
y.”

  “They are indeed—Spilsbury confirms the slashing and strangulation indicates a left-handed murderer, just as my fingerprint evidence does. We are, it would seem, close.”

  “And yet so far,” Greeno said, dryly. “Thanks, Fred.”

  “Cheerio, Ted.”

  Of the stories from the prostitutes, the most compelling concerned the urbane civilian client who called himself variously the Duke and the Count, whose smoothness disappeared when the actual sex came into play. He was rough. Some of the women claimed he “strangled” them during the act… as one wilted flower put it, “Playful-like, y’know?”

  Greeno was working double-shifts, so he’d had to decline Agatha’s generous offer of tickets to the opening night of her new play. The actors would be on the boards by now, he thought—it was mid-evening, after blackout—and he hoped his friend was enjoying herself, and that her fictional murders were being well-received. These thoughts, somewhat ironically, preceded the first real break of the case.

  Phyllis O’Dwyer—the prostitute whose friends spoke of an encounter between Phyllis and a “wild” customer who may have tried to kill her—finally turned up, under her own steam.

  Thirty-odd, another attractive woman whose features had hardened into soulless near-immobility, Phyllis O’Dwyer sat with her shapely silk-stockinged legs crossed as she smoked, blowing occasional rings. Her eyes were light blue and wide-set, another heart-shaped face with a fake beauty mark; her hair was a shade of red unknown to God but familiar to West End beauty shops. She wore a black suit with a startling red silk blouse, and was the kind of cheap that could prove expensive.

  “You’ve been looking for me, I hear,” she said. She had a ragged voice, having suffered too much drink, too much screaming, over the years… possibly too much drunken screaming. “I wasn’t hidin’ or nothin’. Couldn’t this bleedin’ big police department find one little redhead?”

  Phyllis was five-eight and weighed a well-shaped ten stone, easily.

  “It’s amazing,” Greeno admitted, lighting up a fresh cigar, “what turns up, when a thousand pounds is involved.”

  Her eyes flashed. “I ain’t here to lie, Guv. I had the life scared out of me, ain’t ashamed to say. Crikey, I thought I was a goner, sure.”

  Rocking back in his swivel chair, arms folded, Greeno said, “Why don’t you tell me your story, Phyllis.”

  “No call for that attitude, Guv. I come in here of my own free will, a good citizen doin’ you a good turn. No call for you callin’ me a liar.”

  “I never did.”

  “I can read between the lines. I’m a lot of things, but a fool ain’t one of them. I tell you, Inspector, it’s true, every blessed word of it. And if you don’t believe me, you can stick my story right in your… files.”

  “Go on, Phyllis. My ears are open and so is my mind.”

  “Cor. Well. You plan to charge me two pounds for this?”

  She meant was Greeno going to nick her for prostitution, if she copped to that; two pounds was the standard fine for solicitation.

  “No. It’s a free ride.”

  She smiled with casual lasciviousness. “No free rides in my trade, Guv…. Anyway, here you have it. I meet this airman outside Oddenino’s restaurant in Regent Street. Cadet, he was.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He was wearin’ a cadet’s white flash. Are you going to interrupt me, every whip stitch?”

  “No.”

  “So I take him home, see, and it was cold as hell, and my little flat was chilly, even with the gas fire, so I kept on a pair of boots. Some blokes like that anyway, it’s a bit of a kink, isn’t it? Also, just for show, I left on a necklace I’m partial to. Stones set off me eyes.”

  Risking Phyllis’s wrath, Greeno asked, “What sort of necklace?”

  “Big old thing. Costume jewelry. If them jewels was real, I wouldn’t be makin’ my livin’ on me back, would I now?”

  That seemed to be more or less a rhetorical question, so Greeno merely nodded politely.

  She was saying, “So he says to me, ‘Do you always wear a necklace in bed?’ He was lyin’ next to me. We’d already… done the deed. Sort of turning the center stone around in his fingers, like. And I say, ‘Sometimes. Some blokes like a little glamour.’ And I kinda kicked a foot in the air, showin’ off me boot. It was a joke. But I don’t think he liked it none, ’cause he grabbed hold of the necklace and started to twist it… you can see the bruisin’ on me neck.”

  “I can.”

  “So he’s got a whole handful of the necklace and was twistin’ it like mad. I was choking, bleedin’ chokin’, I tell you. And his eyes… kinda blue, they was, funny shade… they was blazing. Just like a madman’s.”

  “How did you survive it, Phyllis?”

  “Damn near didn’t. I was in agony. I was swearin’ at him, when I could spit anything out at all—and fightin’ to get the necklace loose off me throat… and in me bleeding death throes, I lash out my feet! God bless them boots. If I didn’t have them on, I… well, I think I got in a lucky kick, I must have done, turnabout’s fair play cause he had me jewels and I got him in his, and he screamed like a ninny, and fell off the bed, arse over teakettle.”

  “What did you do then, Phyllis?”

  “I yanked the necklace off and I say, ‘Hey, what the bloody hell’s up with you, Tarzan?’ I was breathin’ hard and wonderin’ what he would do next… but he was down on the floor, all quiet-like all of a sudden. Breathin’ hard his own self. Almost like he was cryin’. Very quiet, he says, ‘I’m sorry. Very sorry. I get carried away sometimes.’ I say, ‘I’ll carry you away to hell and gone!’ And he stands, and he’s diggin’ in his pockets… he already give me five pounds. Now he gives me another fiver, to show how sorry he was. I snatched it from him and told him to get the hell out. And he did.”

  Greeno studied her. Her eyes were wide and bright and the recollection of fear was palpable in her manner. She was not, in his view, lying.

  She began to dig in her little purse, and soon she came up with two crumpled fivers. “I stuck the notes away in a drawer. Didn’t spend ’em.”

  “Why not, Phyllis?”

  “I thought… with all this Ripper stuff in the papers, maybe they would be clues. You could trace ’em, like.”

  Tracing banknotes was always difficult, but as Greeno examined these, he noticed that they were two in a series, which would make matters much easier.

  “When did this happen, Phyllis?”

  “Tuesday night. Not long after dark.”

  That meant the Ripper likely had an unsuccessful go before he’d finally hooked up with Nita Ward.

  “Could you recognize him in an identification parade?”

  “Like he was bloomin’ Churchill.”

  The O’Dwyer woman refused to be taken into protective custody—“If you blokes couldn’t find me, not bloody likely that madman could do”—but left Greeno with a contact telephone number.

  Greeno sat in his office, in a blue cloud of self-created cigar smoke, smiling to himself, which was a relative rarity in this case.

  He believed her. Phyllis O’Dwyer had survived the madman’s attack—she could identify the bastard. This was their first real break….

  The second one came about fifteen minutes later, in the form of the plainclothes sergeant who had accompanied Greta Heywood to the Trocadero for a reconstruction of the attack she claimed to have survived.

  The sergeant, a hard-eyed round-faced veteran of the vice detail, held up a gas mask.

  “It was right where the girl said he dropped it,” the sergeant said. “Kind of out of sight, Guv, behind a trash bin.”

  Greeno reached across the desk and took the respirator; the masks had always struck him as otherworldly-looking things, straight out of H. G. Wells. The mask’s goggle eyes stared at him briefly, before the inspector turned the thing over and saw a beautiful row of numbers: 525987…

  … an airman’s service number.

&
nbsp; They could trace him now.

  Two living witnesses.

  They had him. Whether this was Cummins, or one of the thousands of other RAF fliers… they had him.

  The question now was, could they stop him before he made it five murders in six nights?

  NINE

  SMASHING SUCCESS

  FOR AGATHA, FIRST NIGHTS WERE misery.

  She attended the dreaded events for two reasons and two reasons only.

  First, after weeks of rehearsal and the building of sets and the gathering of props and costumes and the efforts of so many… the time had finally come; and the poor actors had to go through with it, didn’t they? And she, as the author, felt it only fair to share their misfortune, should things go awry. She was, after all, the instigator of the crime; and one should pay for one’s crimes.

  On the opening night of Alibi, for example, the script enjoined the forcing open of a door to reveal a murder victim; but the door had jumped its cue and swung open prematurely, revealing said victim in the act of lowering himself to the floor. Such agonies (and the anticipation thereof) were heightened on first nights and the playwright felt a responsibility to share the torture with her accomplices.

  The second reason was far less noble: the thing that killed the cat… curiosity.

  Even though she had attended a number of rehearsals, Agatha had only a disjointed sense of the play as performed. Even attending a dress rehearsal—which she had not, in this instance, sitting instead with Inspector Greeno at the Golden Lion, for the interviews that had followed Nita Ward’s murder—did not give an author the full sense of a play.

  An audience was required for that—an audience who might laugh in the right or wrong places, an audience who might respond well or in a lukewarm manner or even in sheer walk-out-of-the-damned-thing hostility.

  Right now she was just one of that audience, seated unobtrusively to one side, about ten rows from the orchestra. Aware of eyes upon her, and of murmurs of recognition (“There she is,” “That’s her”), she sat quietly with her invited guests on her either side—Sir Bernard Spilsbury and Stephen Glanville—waiting for the lights to go down, to provide her with the anonymity she so craved.