Lawrence Block - The Best American Mystery Stories 1999

Harry waited outside, unwilling to come in and face the scene again. Once I had taken in what had happened, I told him to fetch the police, the real police this time.

They came.

And they went.

One was a plainclothes officer, Detective Sergeant Longbottom, a dull-looking bruiser with a pronounced limp, who looked most annoyed at being called from his bed. He asked a few questions, sniffed around a bit, then got the ambulance men to take Maggie away on a stretcher.

One of the questions Sergeant Longbottom asked was the victim’s name. I told him that, apart from “Mad Maggie,” I had no idea. With a grunt, he rummaged around in the sideboard drawer and found her rent book. I was surprised to discover that she was called Rose Faversham, which I thought was actually quite a pretty name. Prettier than Mad Maggie, anyway. Sergeant Longbottom also asked if we’d had any strangers in the area. Apart from an army unit billeted near the park, where they were carrying out training exercises, and the Gypsy encampment in Silverhill Woods, we hadn’t.

“Ah, Gypsies,” he said, and wrote something in his little black notebook. “Is anything missing?”

I told him I didn’t know, as I had no idea what might have been here in the first place. That seemed to confuse him. For all I knew, I went on, the rumor might have been right, and she could have had a mattress stuffed with banknotes. Sergeant Longbottom checked upstairs and came back scratching his head. “Everything looks normal,” he said, then he poked around a bit more, noting the canteen of sterling silver cutlery, and guessed that Mad Maggie had probably interrupted the thief, who had killed her and fled the scene — probably back to the Gypsy encampment. I was on the point of telling him that I thought the Nazis were supposed to be persecuting Gypsies, not us, but I held my tongue. I knew it would do no good.

Of course, I told him how everyone in the neighborhood knew Mad Maggie paid no attention to air-raids, how she even seemed to enjoy them the way some people love thunderstorms, and how Tom Sellers, the ARP man, had remonstrated with her on many occasions, only to get a dismissive wave and the sight of her ramrod-stiff back walking away down the street. Maggie had also been fined more than once for blackout infringements, until she solved that one by keeping her heavy black curtains closed night and day.

I also told Longbottom that, in the blackout, anyone could have come and gone easily without being seen. I think that was what finally did it. He hummed and hawed, muttered “Gypsies” again, made noises about a continuing investigation, then put his little black notebook away, said he had pressing duties to attend to, and left.

We never saw him in our street again.

And there things would have remained had I not become curious. No doubt Mad Maggie would have been fast forgotten and some poor, innocent Gypsy would have been strung up from the gallows. But there was something about the serenity of Mad Maggie’s features in death that haunted me. She looked almost saintlike, as if she had sloughed off the skin of despair and madness that she had inhabited for so long and reverted to the loving, compassionate Christian woman she must have once been. She had a real name now, too: Rose Faversham . I was also provoked by Detective Sergeant Longbottom’s gruff manner and his obvious impatience with the whole matter. No doubt he had more important duties to get back to, such as the increased traffic in blackmarket onion substitutes.

I would like to say that the police searched Maggie’s house thoroughly, locked it up fast, and put a guard on the door, but they did nothing of the kind. They did lock the front door behind us, of course, but that was it. I imagined that, as soon as he found out, old Grasper, the landlord, would slither around, rubbing his hands and trying to rent the place out quickly again, for twice as much, before the army requisitioned it as a billet.

One thing I had neglected to tell Detective Sergeant Longbottom, I realized as I watched his car disappear around a pile of rubble at the street corner, was about Fingers Finnegan, our local black marketeer and petty thief. Human nature is boundlessly selfish and greedy, even in wartime, and air-raids provided the perfect cover for burglary and blackmarket deals. The only unofficial people on the streets during air-raids were either mad, like Maggie, or up to no good, like Fingers. We’d had a spate of burglaries when most decent, law-abiding people were in St. Mary’s church crypt, or at least in their damp and smelly back-yard Anderson shelters, and Fingers was my chief suspect. He could be elusive when he wanted to be, though, and I hadn’t seen him in a number of days.

Not since last Wednesday’s air-raid, in fact.

After the police had gone, Harry and I adjourned to my house, where, despite the early hour, I poured him a stiff brandy and offered him a Woodbine. I didn’t smoke, myself, because of that little bit of gas that had leaked through my mask at Ypres, but I had soon discovered that it was wise to keep cigarettes around when they were becoming scarce. Like some of the rationed items, they became a kind of currency. I also put the kettle on, for I hadn’t had my morning tea yet, and I’m never at my best before my morning tea. Perhaps that may be one reason I have never married; most of the women I have met chatter far too much in the morning.

“What a turn up,” Harry said, after taking a swig and coughing. “Mad Maggie, murdered. Who’d imagine it?”

“Her killer, I should think,” I said.

“Gypsies.”

I shook my head. “I doubt it. Oh, there’s no doubt they’re a shifty lot. I wouldn’t trust one of them as far as I could throw him. But killers? A defenseless woman like Maggie? I don’t think so. Besides, you saw her house. It hadn’t been touched.”

“But Sergeant Longbottom said she might have interrupted a burglar.”

I sniffed. “Sergeant Longbottom’s an idiot. There was no evidence at all that her killer was attempting to burgle the place.”

“Maybe she was one of them once — a Gypsy — and they came to take her back?”

I laughed. “I must say, Harry, you certainly don’t lack imagination, I’ll grant you that. But no, I rather fancy this is a different sort of matter altogether.”

Harry frowned. “You’re not off on one of your Sherlock Holmes kicks again, are you, Frank? Leave it be. Let the professionals deal with it. It’s what they’re paid for.”

“ Professionals! Hmph. You saw for yourself how interested our Detective Sergeant Longbottom was. Interested in crawling back in his bed, more like it. No, Harry, I think that’s the last we’ve seen of them. If we want to find out who killed poor Maggie, we’ll have to find out for ourselves.”

“Why not just let it be, Frank?” Harry pleaded. “We’re at war. People are getting killed every minute of the day and night.”

I gave him a hard look, and he cringed a little. “Because this is different, Harry. While I can’t say I approve of war as a solution to man’s problems, at least it’s socially sanctioned murder. If the government, in all its wisdom, decides that we’re at war with Germany and we should kill as many Germans as we can, then so be it. But nobody sanctioned the killing of Mad Maggie. When an individual kills someone like Maggie, he takes something he has no right to. Something he can’t even give back or replace, the way he could a diamond necklace. It’s an affront to us all, Harry, an insult to the community. And it’s up to us to see that retribution is made.” I’ll admit I sounded a little pompous, but Harry could be extremely obtuse on occasion, and his using the war as an excuse for so outrageous a deed as Rose Faversham’s murder brought out the worst in me.