The London Blitz Murders - By Max Allan Collins Page 0,42

stall and several pubs provided this dreary working-class neighborhood with fried nourishment and alcoholic relief.

The late afternoon was bleakly overcast, evening impatiently crowding in, with light, half-hearted snowfall, making intermittent appearances; it was just chilly enough to be a bother.

Agatha had worked a full day at the hospital, having requested that tomorrow, Friday, be free, so she could be unencumbered to prepare for and attend an event to which she looked forward almost as much as she dreaded it: the premiere of her new play.

She’d just been trading her white lab coat for her Glen Plaid, when Sir Bernard had leaned into the dispensary and said, “We have another. Would you like to accompany me?… I must warn you, my dear, I’m told our friend has outdone himself.”

She had of course accepted the invitation, and by now had become blithely blasé about the breakneck Spilsbury style of motoring, though James, in her lap, did seem rather alarmed, the terrier a seasoned passenger who usually insisted on sticking his head out the window. At the moment James’s snout was buried in her bosom.

On the way, Agatha posed a question she had been meaning to ask the pathologist for some time.

“These women,” she said. “How long does it take them to die at the strangler’s hands?”

“There’s a variable… and it would be no different for a man, suffering that fate.”

“And what is the variable?”

“Whether the victim is breathing in when the murderer’s grip tightens, squeezing off the air… or breathing out, at that moment.”

“What does the variable amount to?”

“Thirty seconds, if one happened to be breathing out—breathing in, fifteen.”

“Not terribly long.”

“No, my dear—terribly long indeed. It would seem, I should think, even at fifteen seconds… interminable.”

Sir Bernard parked behind Inspector Greeno’s Austin—although truth be told, the inspector could have walked to the crime scene, so close was it to his recently established special headquarters at the police station on nearby Tottenham Court Road. James waited in the Armstrong-Siddeley; an animal would hardly be welcome at a crime scene.

And that thought had barely passed through Agatha’s mind when an attractive teenaged girl exited the door up to the flat, with her arms filled by a Scottie terrier. Closed in behind the window of the parked sedan, James began to bark furiously, and the other terrier enthusiastically responded to the call of the wild.

The teenaged girl—whose expression, Agatha thought, might best be described as “shell-shocked”—hugged the dog close to her. A uniformed policewoman, who had exited the building just behind the girl and dog, was at the child’s side now, guiding her by the arm, speaking to her softly, the words drowned out by the pair of yapping animals. With James muffled behind the rolled-up car window, his barks seemed echoes of the other terrier’s.

Agatha paused, watching the policewoman escort the girl—a dark-haired, long-stemmed budding beauty—into the front passenger seat of a waiting police car.

Sir Bernard—as usual, minus a topcoat, in an impeccably tailored black suit with red carnation—was at the door to the stairwell, holding it open with one hand, the oversize Gladstone bag in the other. He looked at her anxiously, almost cross. “Agatha… ?”

“That must be the dead woman’s child,” she said, hollowly.

“Most likely,” Sir Bernard said.

He had told her the basics of the affair on the ride over: the teenaged girl, home for a long weekend, her knocking unanswered, going to a neighbor, who fetched a bobby.

Agatha fell in line, Sir Bernard leading the way up a narrow poorly illuminated flight; this was hardly a “ladies first” situation.

The girl had instantly brought to mind the image of Agatha’s own daughter at that age, who had been similarly beautiful (and still was). Agatha could only hope this young woman was as free-spirited and independent as her Rosalind. Though she knew her love for Rosalind was reciprocated, the mother felt sure that, when the day came, her daughter would not suffer the terrible emotional upheaval Agatha had suffered at the loss of her beloved Clara.

Three doors shared the landing, where Inspector Greeno and a uniformed constable waited. The center door was closed—the common loo, no doubt; the door at the right was filled by a harshly attractive blonde who looked thirty-odd but likely was still in her twenties.

The inspector was interviewing the woman, who stood in her doorway smoking a cigarette; she wore an improbably virginal white-and-pink floral housedress and her rather startling hair was in pin curls. This probable prostitute seemed genuinely sorrowful, and was clearly cooperating with the inspector without