Max Collins: The London Blitz Murders

His white sausage-like form stretched out under the shelves, the terrier was a small, short-legged, longheaded, strong-jawed, whiskered white lamb of a dog called James who belonged to Mrs. Mallowan’s longtime secretary, Carlo Fisher. Sometimes Mrs. Mallowan thought she missed Carlo’s presence as much as that of Mr. Mallowan (a gross exaggeration) (she thought) (she hoped), as Carlo was working in a munitions factory now and was unable to have James with him. So Mrs. Mallowan had adopted the dog for the duration.

James behaved impeccably at the hospital and there had been no complaints about his behavior, and he received occasional kind attentions from the charwoman, as well as from the several dispensers with whom Mrs. Mallowan shared these cramped quarters.

Of the dispensers, all five were female and of these Mrs. Mallowan was quite the senior, if in reality the least experienced, or at any rate the one who’d only recently qualified in the up-to-date medicines and tonics and ointments and such, prescribed nowadays. The chief dispenser, a serious slender woman, thirty-odd, with Harold Lloyd eyeglasses, often paused to make sure Mrs. Mallowan was “getting it right.”

Which was quite ridiculous, as on the whole, working in a dispensary was much easier these days than in Mrs. Mallowan’s younger ones. In a modern dispensary, so many pills, tablets, powders and things were already waiting in bottles or tubes or otherwise prepackaged, requiring little to none of the skill of measuring and mixing the profession once demanded; she really did seem a sort of librarian of medicines.

Mrs. Mallowan felt somewhat ill at ease, even self-conscious among these younger women. Though she would never have been so rude or bold to say so, the volunteer worker knew very well that, when she was their age, in her twenties, she would have put them to shame.

She had been a willowy young thing, a tall, slim blonde with thick, wavy, waist-long hair, delicate skin, sloping shoulders, and the half-lidded blue eyes, gently aquiline nose and oval face consistent with the Edwardian ideal of feminine beauty.

Even in her housewifely thirties (early thirties, at any rate), she could have held her own.

Now, in her white lab coat, she still struck a commanding figure, taller than these youngsters, and not yet… the word came slowly but inexorably… fat. Her waist had vanished, it was true, and she had one more chin than she felt really necessary, a formidable drooping bosom bequeathed her by her late beloved mother, and the sun-kissed fair hair had turned a gunmetal gray which she wore short, a cap of curls providing an unexceptional accompaniment to features no longer lovely (in her view), comprising what could only charitably be described as a “kind” face.

She was resigned to her new lot in life. At fifty-two she no longer viewed herself as “middle-aged”-not unless she would live to be a hundred and four, and she had no real desire of that-and yet the dreaded half-century mark had been a liberation of sorts. She had experienced a renewed verve for living, that heightened sense of awareness only years can bring; she found that she enjoyed going to picture shows, concerts and the opera with the same enthusiasm as when she’d been twenty or twenty-five.

Her marriage to Max-could it really be a dozen years ago? — had made the difference. The emotional turmoil of romantic personal relations had been replaced by the contentment of loving, harmonious companionship. With Max, she could enjoy her leisure time-travel to foreign places at the forefront, of course.

Not that the bedroom was a dull place with Max-encounters between the sheets remained a pleasure not a duty; this was one of the positive aspects of being married to a man fourteen years younger than yourself (though the weight she was putting on in his absence did trouble her).

And what a pleasure too that those infantile cat-and-mouse courtship games were ancient history (what a ghastly tedious disappointment it had been, after her first marriage had ended, to discover the courtship rituals for those in their thirties and forties differed so little from those in their teens and twenties).

Only now she and Max were separated by this war, this damned war. And here she was, back in a hospital dispensary, where she’d been in the last one. Not that history was repeating itself-the “war to end all wars” had been different, coming as it did as an incomprehensible shock, a cataclysm unlike anything in living memory, the impossible happening.

No, this conflict was quite different, even if it was the Germans again. This time the surprise came from how long the war took to really truly start. Like so many others, the Mallowans-who had heard the proclamation of war broadcast on the kitchen radio while the household help wept into the vegetables-had expected London to be bombed that first night; but nothing happened.

When nothing kept on happening, the country got itself organized, more or less, sitting waiting for disaster to inflict itself… which it refused to do. And so, with the war remaining a concept and not a reality, the country slipped back into individual pursuits, mundane daily life, interspersed with occasional wartime activities, such as when Max joined the comic opera that was the Brixham Home Guard, ten men passing around two rifles.

Embarrassed by such pointless activities, Max had gone off to London, to the Air Ministry, hoping to be sent abroad on a mission. Greenway-their newly acquired but much loved home on the river Dart, between Torquay and Dartmouth-had been requisitioned as a nursery for evacuated London children, though Mrs. Mallowan continued to live there for a time.

That was what had taken her back to the Torquay dispensary, where she’d picked up an on-the-job refresher course which had made her current University College posting possible.

When her first husband, Archie, was serving with the Royal Flying Corps, she had worked as a volunteer nurse and then as a hospital dispensing pharmacist. Nursing during the Great War had been a nasty bit of business-from the rigors of constantly cleaning the wards and scrubbing rubber sheets to attending to burn patients and assisting in the operating room, the job was not for the easily fatigued or the faint of heart.

Pampered ladies with romantic notions of soothing our brave boys’ fevered brows did not last long-not after tidying up following amputations and disposing severed limbs in the hospital furnace, they didn’t. Mrs. Mallowan had lasted fifteen months, and might have stayed longer, but a dose of flu instigated by overwork, and the attraction of more regular hours, had brought her to the dispensary.

There she found a calm seldom present in nursing; difficult at first, the dispensing job played well into her natural interest in, and facility with, mathematics. Codifying, classifying, listing, measuring, learning symbols and signs, mastering the appearance and properties of various substances… this was a kind of poetry to her.

And the dispensary was a life-and-death operation, no less than an operating room-she had seen a confident if careless pharmacist prepare a mixture based upon a calculation that was one decimal point off. Rather than embarrass the man (and kill some unwitting patient), she had spilled the mixture and endured censure for clumsiness….

Still, interesting as dispensing was, she found it rather monotonous-ointments, medicines, jar after jar of lotions to be filled and refilled, day after day. She should never have cared for dispensing as a permanent job, and had her life gone a different way, she might have been happy to remain a professional nurse.

But it was in the pharmacy that Mrs. Mallowan had picked up a working knowledge of poisons, and this personal experience she used in the writing of her first mystery novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles .