two five-pound notes Phyllis O’Dwyer had turned in to Inspector Greeno were traced to Cummins, through RAF pay records.
As Agatha had predicted, the billet passbooks had been falsified, cadets covering up for cadets out on the town. But other RAF airmen were just as eager not to cover up for Cummins, whom they did not particularly like: the nicknames of the “Duke” and the “Count,” which Cummins claimed as his, had been seized upon derisively by fellow cadets offended by Cummins’s constant boasting about his “noble” birth. They said he often got dressed up in his best civilian clothes, affecting an upper-class accent, going out to impress prostitutes.
“And him with such a beauty for a missus,” one cadet had said, shaking his head.
Other cadets confirmed that they’d seen Cummins throwing money around, in his “Count” persona, shortly after Evelyn Hamilton’s murder. The Hamilton woman, of course, had been stripped not only of her life but of eighty pounds.
Throughout, Cummins maintained his innocence as well as a sunny, confident disposition. His wife, Janet, remained loyal and claimed to believe his story of having been framed by a “higher-up” at the Air Ministry. Janet even managed to mount a petition seeking a stay of execution until the “mystery man” who “switched gas masks” with poor Gordon could be found.
Despite this effort, shortly before eight a.m. on June 25, 1942, Gordon Cummins strolled, a smiling self-proclaimed innocent martyr, to the gallows. His wife wept; working girls, eager to return to the dimly lit streets behind Piccadilly in relative safety, cheered. The clatter of the falling trapdoor punctuated the distant thunder of explosions.
Luftwaffe planes were flying over London, on a rare daylight bombing raid.
Agatha’s new play received glowing reviews. It moved to the Cambridge Theatre for a long run, and opened in New York in June, 1944, under the sanitized title Ten Little Indians, where it ran for an impressive 426 performances.
The great tragedy of the war for Agatha was the death of her daughter’s husband; but Rosalind and Hubert’s son, Matthew, would be the love of Mrs. Mallowan’s later life.
Toward the end of the war, after a weekend visit in Wales with Rosalind and grandchild Matthew, Agatha returned to Lawn Road Flats. Exhausted and chilled to the bone, she switched on the heat and began to cook up some kippers, when Max came home, unexpectedly early, from his service in North Africa.
It was as if he’d only left yesterday—though he, too, was two stone heavier. He had eaten well, overseas, while potatoes and bread had taken their toll on Agatha, who was frankly relieved her husband had added girth, as well. The kippers had burned during the excitement of the homecoming, but they sat together and ate the oily things in glee and had the most wonderfully mundane evening of their married lives.
She never told Max about the Ripper affair, and their friend Stephen Glanville discreetly never mentioned it, either.
Sir Bernard, who was himself struggling with an on-again-off-again autobiography, said to her toward the end of the affair, “This will make an interesting tidbit for your autobiography.”
“I believe I’ll leave this bit out,” she told him, and she did.
She felt foolish about how she’d endangered herself, going to Cummins’s flat, and preferred Max not know of it; and she had resolved any misgivings she’d had about the inappropriateness of her fiction in the postwar world. Good and evil were a reality, and fiction that dealt with that subject, however escapist in intent, would always have a place.
One good thing had come of the episode, however: she never again had the Gunman dream.
Perhaps, at long last, her subconscious had banished the nightmare, out of her acceptance of one of the primary themes of her own work: that behind innocent eyes, evil often lurked. The thought wasn’t a frightening one, once you’d adapted it to your thinking.
At least not so frightening as to cause nightmares.
At the incessant urging of Stephen Glanville, Agatha indeed wrote an ancient-Egyptian mystery, Death Comes at the End, published in 1945; also, she dedicated the next Poirot, Five Little Pigs (1943), to her persistent friend. Glanville, after a distinguished career concluding with his position as Herbert Thompson Professor of Egyptology at Cambridge, died at age fifty-six, the premature death greatly grieving the Mallowans.
Agatha modeled the country home setting of The Hollow (1946) after that of actor Larry Sullivan and his wife Danae’s estate at Haselmere, Surrey, dedicating the novel to them with apologies.
With her husband home and the war winding down,