Max Collins - The London Blitz Murders

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 savagery.”

“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.”