flew to Agatha’s. “Tell him, Mrs. Mallowan! Tell them I’m innocent.”
“I’ll give the inspector all the details,” she said gently. “Rest assured. Go quietly, dear, and it will speak well for you.”
The inspector and another detective squeezed into the room, and the assistant handcuffed the cadet as Greeno said more formally, “You’re under arrest for committing grievous bodily harm to Greta Heywood…. Take him away.”
The two plainclothes men did, Cummins calling to Agatha, “Be sure to tell him! Be sure!”
“I will,” she reassured him smilingly, “I will.”
When they were alone in the cubbyhole billet, the inspector asked, “What in hell are you doing here, and what in hell was that about, Agatha?”
Ignoring his first question, she answered the second. “Oh, I convinced him I believed in his innocence.” She showed the inspector the murder souvenirs on the bureau top. “I told him I believed that Stephen Glanville had framed him for these murders, planting these clues and others, like the respirator…. I assume the number on the mask led you here?”
“It did. That’s why we’ve arrested him only for assaulting that prostitute, Greta Heywood. We’ll get ’round to willful murder charges soon enough. Why Glanville?”
“Poor Stephen and his womanizing… he was a believable suspect. With his position at the Air Ministry, he might well have framed the boy.”
“That’s a load of rubbish!”
“Of course it is,” Agatha said pleasantly.
“Well, Cummins certainly knew Glanville didn’t do it! Why would telling him that story hold any weight?”
“What was important was that it seemed a credible defense to him… and his counselor may eventually try to utilize it. I needed him to believe I thought him innocent, and that I would defend him to the death…. You may not be aware of it, Ted, but that madman saved my life, earlier, at the theater cave-in.”
The inspector nodded, sighing, “I did indeed hear that. He must have thought you owed him a debt.”
“I owe him no debt—he was considering killing me, as his last grand gesture. But I talked him out of it.”
“My Lord, how did you manage it?”
“Oh, really, Inspector—it was easy. The boy likes my work.” She gestured to the stacks of books. “He’s a fan…. May I show you something?”
She escorted the amazed inspector into the kitchen. “With his bedroom isolated as it is, and the fire escape leading off as it does, the testimony of any of his flatmates who might say they saw him go off to bed is irrelevant.”
“It is indeed,” the inspector said, taking in the fire escape view. “If we can just get past those damned billet books.”
She laughed, genuinely amused. “Oh, Inspector, that was my first real suspicion of our cadet. I was the wife of an RAF pilot, in the first war—I know all about billet books and men covering up for each other, as they sneak in and out to see their sweethearts and wives… not necessarily in that order.”
“Blimey, I never thought it—it’s bleedin’ obvious, if you’ll pardon me saying.”
“It’s a trick immemorial, in service camps, Inspector. Oh, they’ll fuss and moan, when you try to prove it—tell you you’ll blow the billet wide open, if you expose the practice. But take my word: that so-called passbook is a tissue of lies…. Do you have a pen, Inspector?”
“I believe so,” he said, and dug it out. Then, a grin splitting the bulldog face, he added, “Two pens, counting the one Cummins copped from the Jouannet flat.”
She sat at the little kitchen table—which was cluttered with the dishes of RAF cadets—and cleared a place. She signed the title page of Evil Under the Sun and then inscribed on the flyleaf: “To Gordon Cummins—a reader I will never forget. A.C., St. John’s Wood, 1942.”
With a smile, she handed the book to the flabbergasted inspector, saying, “See to it Mr. Cummins gets it, will you?”
AFTER…
DETECTIVE CHIEF INSPECTOR EDWARD GREENO, Sir Bernard Spilsbury and Frederick Cherrill mounted an airtight case against Airman Gordon Frederick Cummins.
The items Agatha had found in the cadet’s billet were identified as belongings of murder victims Doris Jouannet and Nita Ward. The fingerprints on the candlestick and the tumbler of beer from the Lowe flat were Cummins’s. Greta Heywood and Phyllis O’Dwyer identified Cummins as their would-be assailant (they shared the tabloid reward money).
Sir Bernard Spilsbury matched sand, grit, and cement dust from the gas mask’s fabric to samples from the air-raid shelter where Evelyn Hamilton’s body had been found. Items belonging to Miss Hamilton were also found in the billet, and the