Max Collins: The London Blitz Murders

And yet Peter Rushing discovered something-someone-quite extraordinary, when he ducked into the stall intending to nick some sand from an already spilled-open sandbag .

The woman was striking-what you would call handsome as opposed to beautiful, with short, dark, nicely coifed hair and good cheekbones. She was not seated on the bench; rather she lay sprawled on the roadway floor of the shelter, her clothing-white blouse, dark brown jacket, lighter brown skirt-disarrayed, up over long legs that had been darkened with a liquid product to give the impression of silk stockings .

Her eyes were open and staring blankly. She had been gagged with a silk scarf, but was not otherwise bound, her arms and hands and legs splayed. No purse seemed present, but items apparently dumped from a purse were scattered nearby-lipstick, compact, handkerchief, and such. An electric torch-the woman’s presumably-lay a ways from the body, its dim beam casting a small yellow circle on the brick wall under the bench .

And for the first time since the Blitz had begun, Peter Rushing was truly frightened. What he was viewing was not the impersonal carnage of war, rather the wanton destruction of one human’s life by another .

“Freddie!” he called. “Come ’ere, lad!”

Freddie Sangster, a short chubby bloke of twenty-odd, did not move quickly; he had a game leg that had kept him doing roadwork during wartime. But when he got there, Freddie was quick to say, “Blimey,” and agree that one of them should stay with the corpse, and the other go for the coppers .

And being the younger, Freddie got to stay and keep the woman company .

The boy was sitting on the bench, hunched over, his hands folded, his eyes on the handsome quite dead woman, watching her carefully, as if to make sure she didn’t make a break for it .

And in the meantime, Peter Rushing did make a break for it-rushing off to find the nearest telephone .

Detective Chief Inspector Edward Greeno, Criminal Investigation Division, Scotland Yard, answered the call.

Greeno was a tall, square-shouldered man with a bucket head and bulldog features, a ready all-knowing smile and small dark eyes that missed little. He was one of the hardest-nosed coppers in town, and knew it; an inveterate horseplayer, Greeno had been approached with more bribe offers than a good-looking dame got whistles.

But much to the consternation of London’s gangsters, Greeno was as straight as he was tough.

He stepped from the police Austin, allowing his driver to go park it, and strode toward the crime scene in snapbrim and raincoat, like any good detective; but what was a fashion statement for American dicks was a necessity for the likes of Greeno: the rain here was no joke, even though today it was a whispering of snow.

The inspector was a veteran of the legendary Flying Squad-sometimes called the Sweeney (short for Sweeney Todd, in cockney rhyming slang)-which “flew” to crime scenes and took literal pursuit of villains. He had earned countless commendations from judges and Scotland Yard commissioners, and crime reporter Percy Hoskins had called him “the underworld’s public enemy number one.”

Now Greeno, with what he considered to be a rather burdensome reputation, was attached to the Murder Squad-as it was unofficially known-though, unlike many chief inspectors, he had not during his sergeant days assisted on murder investigations.

Accordingly, Ted Greeno had only been investigating murders for a little over a year, and in wartime London, murders had been few. Crime was down all over London, actually.

In Greeno’s view, there was nothing patriotic about it: a villain in peacetime was a villain in wartime. But with fewer motor cars around to nick, fewer got nicked; burglary was way down as well, since the blackout deterred crims, who had no way to know if a house or building was empty or not. Street violence, with an eye on robbery, was up, however-blackout bashing for cash seldom turned the corner into murder, though.

This was an apparent exception to that rule.

He had called for Sir Bernard Spilsbury to meet him at the scene of the crime. The renowned pathologist was on twenty-four hour call for the C.I.D., officially attached to the Home Office, although he worked not out of Scotland Yard but University College Hospital. The good doctor was not here as yet.

After he stepped through the narrow, doorless passageway in the high brick shelter walls, the inspector touched nothing. He did kneel over the dead woman and noted the state of her clothing’s disarray… and the absence of a handbag. The purple bruises made by fingers on her throat were obvious even in the dimness of the shelter.

Had some thief strangled this woman over the contents of her bag? Had a few shillings cost this handsome woman her life?

Oddly, a fairly expensive-looking gold watch remained on the woman’s wrist. Perhaps in the darkness the murderous thief had missed it.

Greeno would do little but wait until Sir Bernard was on hand. Confident as he might be about his skills as a police detective, Greeno knew that Spilsbury’s expertise-and his eventual ability to testify in court with clarity and convincingness-was worth waiting for.

But something tingled at the back of the detective’s neck-and in the pit of his stomach, a flutter of recognition. This corpse recalled another….

One of the relative handful of murders in recent months had been that of Maple Church, an attractive young woman found strangled and robbed in a wrecked building on Hampstead Road.

And this attractive woman had obviously been robbed; and strangled.

Greeno was standing outside the shelter, questioning the two workmen, when Sir Bernard drew up in his dark-green Armstrong-Siddeley saloon; characteristically, Spilsbury had driven himself. With the exception of the sedan itself-motor cars a relative rarity these days-the pathologist’s arrival was typically unobtrusive.

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.