The London Blitz Murders - By Max Allan Collins Page 0,6

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.

TWO

PRESCRIPTION: MURDER

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.

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