Max Collins: The London Blitz Murders

“King David’s Lane, Shadwell-Whitechapel Division. That was my first post, back in ’20. Where the Ripper ripped.”

“I pray we don’t have another.”

“Second to that. And if we do… I pray he’s not American.”

Spilsbury’s eyes and nostrils flared. “Oh-that would be all we’d need at this juncture.”

The influx of American soldiers since the first of the year had been considerable… as was the tension between locals and the colonials. The phrase going around of late was “the Americans are over-paid, over-sexed and over here.” The Home Office, it was rumored, was developing a campaign to convince British citizens that the Americans were not pampered, gum-chewing, arrogant monsters.

Somehow Greeno doubted an American Jack the Ripper would do much to advance that campaign.

Spilsbury packed up-no one was allowed to touch his fabled “murder” bag, and in fact the pathologist would give a frighteningly reproving glare to any person who dared touch even his sleeve at a crime scene-and took his leave, the Armstrong-Siddeley disappearing into the snowy morning.

And soon Greeno was out on the street, in front of the shelter.

A plainclothes policeman-not a policeman in plainclothes (the latter received an extra 5 s . a week for wear and tear)-came rushing up, holding a woman’s handbag.

“Guv’nor!” the ruddy-cheeked cop called. “Take a gander!”

“Goes nicely with your eyes, Albert.”

Albert, who was a trifle heavyset, was breathing hard, his breath in fact smoking in the chill. “You won’t be pullin’ my leg when I tell you what this is, Guv.”

“It’s our victim’s handbag.”

“Right on the bleedin’ button, Guv. Found ’er on top of a trashbin in the alley, there, I did. I think we know who our unfortunate shelter sleeper is.”

“Her last name’s Hamilton.”

The copper’s eyes widened. “Sexton Blake’s got nothin’ on you, Guv. Evelyn Hamilton. There’s no wallet, but a receipt for a night’s lodging was tucked down in.”

“Which gives us an address to check.”

“It does.”

The address took Greeno to Oxford Street; few major London thoroughfares had suffered as much damage as Oxford, with many buildings new and old turned to so much rubble. To the inspector perhaps the saddest loss of all was Buszard’s famous cake-shop, a landmark for a hundred years till a two-in-the-morning bomb destroyed the facade as well as the Palm Court where grand teas had not long ago been served. As he glided by the remains in his Austin, he savored sweet memories of sweets….

The four-story lodging house was an ironically shabby survivor among distinguished casualties, and its landlady, a haggard hatchet-faced harridan in a faded housedress, stood leaning on a broom in a doorway giving Greeno chapter and verse. She had tiny eyes, Greeno thought; piss holes in the snow.

“Not safe on these streets for a decent woman,” she said, in a voice reminiscent of an air-raid siren. “There’s blackout muggers on them streets I tell you, and what are you police doin’ about it? It’s them Yanks, y’know.”

“Miss Hamilton was a decent woman, then?”

“Salt of the earth. She was manager of a pharmacy till last week. She give notice. Are you afraid to haul these American blighters in? Make too many waves, will it?”

“Do you know why Miss Hamilton gave notice? At the pharmacy?”

“Well, she was a teacher, you see, and with so many schools closed now, she took that job at the chemist’s, out of necessity, don’t you know. But a teaching position opened up, up North-Grimsby way.”

“Did she have gentleman friends?”

“No, poor thing-she was a shy one. A regular spinster lady. Oh, she’d wear a touch of makeup, like to make herself presentable.”

“Maybe she had one special gentleman, then?”

“Not while she was stayin’ here. Spent most of her spare time alone in her room-reading them books on chemistry of hers, I’d wager.”

“Does it seem to you likely she’d have allowed herself to be picked up by a strange man?”

“Miss Hamilton! Not on your life. She never spoke to no one unless she was introduced…. Don’t you be blackening that good woman’s name, now! It’s one of them Americans what grabbed her-mark my word! If you were to have more coppers on the street during the blackout-”

“Thank you ma’am. Can you think of anything else that might be pertinent?”

Tiny eyes grew tinier. “Well-she had quite a sum of money on her.”

Greeno frowned in interest. “Is that right?”

“Oh, blimey, yes. She settled accounts with me, cash, just last evening-if you check her room, you’ll find her bags packed. She was to take the train to Grimsby today.”

“And she was traveling with money?”

“Eighty pounds, I’d say. I call that money. Small fortune, by me.”

So Evelyn Hamilton hadn’t been killed for “a few shillings,” then. Eighty pounds in wartime London was a small fortune indeed.

The inspector followed up with interviews at the pharmacy, manager and co-workers, which confirmed the landlady’s characterization of the dead woman. Interviews with acquaintances and others in the lodging house painted the same picture: the victim was a spinster schoolteacher, proper, reticent. One friend did say Miss Hamilton had dated a teacher at a school several years ago, and suspected she was joining her old beau up north at this new post.

Greeno would check that.

By late afternoon a Marlyebone seafood restaurant was confirmed as the last location where anyone (other than her killer) had seen Evelyn Margaret Hamilton alive. The cashier reported seeing the wad of pound notes in the woman’s purse.

She’d been handsome enough to attract a sexual predator, Greeno thought; but that cash would have been attractive to most any villain.

Greeno could see it in his mind’s eye: during the blackout, the attractive schoolteacher walks from the restaurant back to her lodgings; along the way, a man tries to grab the purse, and when she struggles, he drags her into the nearby air-raid shelter and silences her .

Not a twentieth-century Jack the Ripper. Just a mugger who had let his crime get a little out of hand.

And yet those disarrayed clothes, and that the crim had taken time to gag the woman indicated that he had intended, at least, to take his time… and perhaps have his way with the woman.

Something had spooked the assailant, other folks out walking in the blackout most likely, and he had strangled the woman and taken her eighty pounds and left her there, lifeless, on the sandy floor of the shelter.

And if the villain had been interrupted, when he’d meant to have his way with the schoolteacher… well, that troubled Inspector Ted Greeno most of all.

Because villains liked to be satisfied.

The buildings of University College Hospital, on Gower Street in Bloomsbury, intersected in the form of a cross, but this had not discouraged the Germans from bombing it-perhaps it had only provided a better target. At any rate, several of the buildings had been badly damaged in the air raids of 1940, and there were flattened buildings all around; and yet the hospital itself was largely standing, clean-up long since complete, though reconstruction was going slowly.

The dispensary, where Mrs. Mallowan worked two full days, three half-days (often evenings) and alternate Saturday mornings, was untouched, and remained quite the orderly rabbit’s warren it had always been. Rather like the library of a country village, whose stacks were devoted to pills not books, the dispensary was home to four dispensers (two at a time) and one Sealyham terrier.