Max Collins - The London Blitz Murders

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.

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?

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.