The London Blitz Murders - By Max Allan Collins Page 0,9

stopped to make conversation with him.

Certainly she needn’t fear offending him; and yet she could not bring herself to make an introduction—how silly she would feel, the author of homicidal confections presenting herself to the man who put Crippen away.

And yet she had longed to meet him. It was almost—but not quite—as if she were a schoolgirl with a crush. Certainly, even in his mid-sixties, Sir Bernard cut a handsome figure—always in a dark well-tailored suit with a fresh carnation, a tall figure understandably thickened at the middle, with the sharply chiseled features of a matinee idol, and eyes as gray as Poirot’s little brain cells.

Perhaps, with Max away, there was an element of propriety afoot as well. Agatha had not known how to approach this handsome, older man she so admired without fawning, even gushing, and perhaps giving him… the wrong idea.

Then, finally, he had introduced himself—not at the hospital, but inside Euston Station.

Euston Station, of course, was an undeniably shabby affair, inconvenient, shambling, with a cavernous entrance hall cutting the station in two and encouraging bedlam. She disliked crowds, hated being jammed up against people, and the loud sounds and the cigarette and cigar smoke all annoyed her; but wartime was wartime, wasn’t it? One did what one had to do.

And so Agatha—who so loved to eat, who so adored fine cooking, by herself and others—had been reduced to taking bangers and mash at a stall, sitting at a little wooden table whose secondary function seemed to be providing irony that a hospital worker should eat at so unsanitary a spot. James the terrier would curl up on the floor beside her, waiting for an occasional bite of banger to reward his good behavior.

She had noticed Sir Bernard taking an occasional lunch here, sitting engrossed in a book or writing in a journal; so it was not a surprise to see him approaching, typically natty in a dark suit, set off by a red carnation in the buttonhole, raincoat over his arm.

It was, however, a shock for him to stop and half-bow before her, even as she did her best to swallow a rather too-large bite of mashed potatoes.

“Pardon me, Mrs. Mallowan,” he had said, his voice a rich baritone, “I’m Bernard Spilsbury. Might I sit down for a moment?”

“Please! Please do.”

He did. “Forgive my forwardness. I just recently learned that you were assisting in the University pharmacy, and I very much wanted to meet you.”

Suddenly Agatha felt a wave of disappointment: could the great forensics expert really just be another enthusiast? Another fan eager to meet “the mistress of mystery?”

Where most authors might be flattered, this was an embarrassment to Agatha, and caused in her an immediate diminishment of respect for Sir Bernard.

From the day she’d taken her post at the pharmacy, she had made it clear to all and sundry that she was “Mrs. Mallowan,” not “Agatha Christie,” not on those premises. That she was not to be bragged about or paraded around for the amusement of patients and/or doctors. She would be happy to sign a book for anyone in the pharmacy, should they so desire. But after that she preferred to disappear into her role: Mrs. Mallowan, assistant dispenser.

Sir Bernard was gazing over his wire-framed glasses at her; he seemed a little embarrassed himself as he worked his soft voice above the clangs of the trains and the clamor of the crowd. “You see, Mrs. Mallowan… I’m a great admirer…”

Here it comes, she thought, with the endless questions about where one gets one’s ideas, and how could a kind-looking woman like you devise such diabolical…

“… of your husband,” Sir Bernard was saying.

She rocked back, flushed with surprise and pleasure. “Really? Of Max?”

“Oh yes, Mrs. Mallowan.” The chiseled features were softened with admiration as he shook his head. “Archaeology is a hobby for which, necessarily, I’ve had less and less time as I’ve gotten older.”

“Archaeology,” Agatha said, beaming. “Oh yes. Isn’t it simply wonderful?”

He nodded. “My son Peter used to point out that archaeology rallied my detective’s instincts.”

“Ah.” She too nodded. “In pathology you must answer the same question posed in archaeology: ‘What happened in the past to leave evidence in the present?’ ”

Now Sir Bernard beamed. “Almost Peter’s words exactly.”

She wondered if Peter was the son she had heard Sir Bernard had lost, in the air raids of 1940.

“Mr. Mallowan’s excavations at Ur with Leonard Woolley,” Sir Bernard was saying, “are legendary. And then his digs in Ninevah, Iraq, Syria… how exciting. How terribly