The London Blitz Murders - By Max Allan Collins Page 0,37

It seemed to her British in the best sense.

When she’d finished the letter (three typewritten pages) and prepared it for mailing, she moved to her comfortable chair, taking a sheaf of papers with her.

The galley proofs of her novel, The Body in the Library, had arrived yesterday from her publisher, William Collins & Sons. They had rebounded well, after their offices were bombed in December 1940, though the sorry state of their records had contributed to her current financial difficulties. The Collins book warehouse in Paternoster Row near St. Paul’s had been ravaged as well, and publishing remained dicey, what with paper allocations cut to a fraction of pre-war quantities.

So the rest of the morning was spent checking for punctuation and typographical problems in the latest Jane Marple mystery. She found herself liking Miss Marple and quite satisfied with the book—a rarity, as she was a harsh critic of her own work—and her mood brightened.

She did pause, at one point, to get up and go out to the kitchen for an apple. James followed her and she gave him half a biscuit (even dogs were on ration) and then she realized why she’d been so forlorn.

It hadn’t been Max, not entirely….

That crime scene yesterday—she had viewed it dispassionately, with the clinical perspective of a nurse, with the calloused attitude of a war correspondent. Not once had she felt ill or in any way uncomfortable. It had not been a pose; it had come naturally to her.

But now, as she settled back into her little flat where she’d been writing her homicidal confections—hiding away from the war and her absent husband—the loss of life represented by that woman’s brutal murder hung over her like a cloud, rumbling, dark, oppressive, with the promise of a storm.

For a moment she sat in her comfortable chair, James again curled beside her (now that the machine-gunning of the typewriter had been silenced), the loose pages of her latest mystery in her lap, and wondered if she should remove herself from the investigation. Already she had involved her friends and colleagues, and—while she of course knew her responsibility had been to aid the police in their efforts—she felt embarrassed by the inconvenience she had caused them.

The irony was, Agatha enjoyed the company of the theatrical crowd precisely because their existence was somehow disconnected from real life. She found it relaxing to associate with actors in wartime, because to these children—whose profession was acting out fantasies—the theatrical world was the real world. This ravaged London where the war was happening was an incomprehensible nightmare, a long, drawn-out inconvenience preventing them from going on with their own truly important lives.

All they spoke of was the theater—of fellow actors and directors and producers; the only momentous events taking place in the world were those happening in the theatrical world. The only war talk related to the Entertainments National Service Association.

She had found this wonderfully refreshing.

And now she had ruined everything by introducing a murder—a real murder—into the playacting.

This thought had barely passed through her mind when the telephone rang. She had a sudden chill that had nothing to do with the winter weather: if that were Sir Bernard or Inspector Greeno, it would likely mean another young woman had been murdered.

If so, would she politely withdraw from her association with the investigators? Or would she answer the call?

Well, she would answer this call, at least. She rose, pausing to pick up her spiral notebook and a pencil, and went to the phone on its stand by the stairs.

And it was indeed Inspector Greeno.

“Oh, Ted,” she said, “I hope there hasn’t been another killing.”

“There hasn’t,” the pleasantly gruff baritone voice responded. “At least, not that we know of. And I’ve practically jumped, all morning, every time the phone’s rung, dreading another such discovery.”

Somehow it was reassuring that she and the hard-boiled inspector had been thinking, and reacting, alike.

The inspector had called, “just checking in,” but with a good deal of new information for her. For one thing, he had a new telephone number for her reference.

He had set up his enquiry headquarters in an office at the Tottenham Court Road Police Station, out of which he was supervising a systematic scouring of Paddington and Soho. All of the “top resources of Scotland Yard” had been mobilized, and every available man from the wartime-depleted police force had moved into the West End. A circular with the description of Evelyn Oatley’s last gentleman caller, as provided by next-door neighbor Ivy Poole, had