family jewels, and he dropped something… his gas-respirator, I think… and I screamed bloody murder and he went runnin’ off, into the darkness, like a scared rat.”
That was the story that Greeno was now reflecting upon. Finally he said to her, “How can I believe your story, Greta, when it’s riddled with lies?”
“Did I do this to meself, then?” Greta Heywood asked, opening her pink silk blouse a button and indignantly gesturing to her bruises on her throat.
“No, but your ponce might have done.”
“I don’t work with no bleeding ponce!” she blurted. “I’m a one-woman business, I am.”
This was an interesting outburst for two reasons.
First, Greta had hitherto clearly avoided copping to any solicitation of prostitution with the phantom airman, weaving an incredible story of her “virtue” being challenged.
Second, she had inadvertently led Greeno to a relevant realization: none of the working girls attacked, at least those who’d taken the Ripper to their flats, had fallen under the protection of a procurer, or “ponce,” as girls like Greta called them. In many cases, a ponce would have been watching from a distance (perhaps with cosh in hand to help liberate the mark of his loot). In other instances, a ponce might share the flat, lurking in an adjacent room or behind a blanket draped on a clothesline as a partition.
So the Ripper had either been careful to avoid the procurers, or had been damned lucky.
“Greta, you’ll not be charged with soliciting. Tell me what really happened.”
“Well… it’s just what I said, or mostly was. I met this RAF bloke at the Troc. I already had a date I was waiting for, but this one was cute. So I told the bloke he could have a quickie, if he liked. So after we had a drink, we saunter across to that side street… by the Captain’s Table?”
Greeno nodded. “Go on.”
“I was leading the way with me torch. I snapped it off and we stepped in a doorway and he started in makin’ love to me. Kissing me. I don’t let just any steamer do such a personal thing as that…”
A steamer was a client, a mug—cockney rhyming slang: steamtug, mug.
“… but he was a pretty boy. Kind of sweet and shy…”
Could she be telling the truth? That might have been young Cummins she was describing.
“… sweet and shy, that is, till he started chokin’ me to death! Gor blimey, did I let him have it in the—”
“The rest of your story is substantially true, then.”
“ ’Course it is. What kind of girl do you take me for, Guv?”
Greeno allowed that one to slide past. Then he asked, “Did he really drop his respirator?”
“Swear on me mum’s grave, he did. I heard the clunk.”
“All right. I’m going to send you over to the Trocadero with my sergeant. You show him how and where this all occurred.”
The inspector put this in motion, then returned to the desk in the cluttered little office, where he lighted up one of his trademark cigars. A map of Central London with pins in the murder spots covered most of one wall, filing cabinets huddled along the other, and he sat facing a glass-and-wood wall looking out on the bullpen of constables and detectives as well as the receiving desk.
It did sound like Cummins. The other flier in the case, that Canadian, the one who had argued with Margaret Lowe, was in the clear: he had shipped out the day after Miss Wick phoned in her noise complaint.
But Cummins was the only one of the St. James Theatre suspects who had an ironclad alibi for the murders of Evelyn Hamilton, Evelyn Oatley, Margaret Lowe and Doris Jouannet: the cadet was in billets when each murder was committed! The billet passbook proved the times he came and went, and his roommates backed the passbook.
And why, of all the airmen in London, should it be Cummins, anyway? The St. James Theatre was linked only to one of the crimes. Allowing Agatha Christie Mallowan to participate in this investigation had Greeno thinking like a bloody book writer, not the hard-nosed cop he was.
Agatha’s detectives could gather a tidy group of suspects in the library to discuss the clues and reveal the villain, who would politely go along with the process, right down to presenting his hands for the cuffs. The reality of real policework, and Ted Greeno’s life, was that his only avenue of inquiry at the moment was a seemingly endless parade of streetwalkers. He had spoken with a hundred