She typed a letter to Max, not telling him anything of her true-crime research project with Sir Bernard Spilsbury. Max would probably have approved of the effort, had he been around; he was always supportive, and as a man whose calling in life was digging for truth, he would not likely echo Stephen Glanville’s rather chauvinistic concerns regarding a mere woman undertaking an endeavor at all dangerous.
But she did not want to burden Max with what she was up to, nor did she want to risk him reacting, well, like a normal husband… the distance between them, in these times already fraught with peril, might cause Max to revert to conventional male wisdom (if the latter two words weren’t a contradiction in terms).
Agatha did admit to her absent husband that she was “sad this morning, and had cried a bit.” She thanked him for his letters, his many loving letters, and admitted to him that receiving such tender missives “after all these years we have been married makes me feel that I have not been a failure in life-that at least I have succeeded as a wife.”
She paused, embarrassed. And then she said to herself: He is your husband. You need not hide from him.
And she went on: “What a change now, from the unhappy, forlorn person you met in Baghdad so many years ago. You have done everything for me, my love.”
She went on to tell him about the play, and how well rehearsals were going, and that she was dreading opening night, and yet there was something terribly brave of presenting a first night in Blitz-ravaged London. It seemed to her British in the best sense.
When she’d finished the letter (three typewritten pages) and prepared it for mailing, she moved to her comfortable chair, taking a sheaf of papers with her.
The galley proofs of her novel, The Body in the Library, had arrived yesterday from her publisher, William Collins amp; Sons. They had rebounded well, after their offices were bombed in December 1940, though the sorry state of their records had contributed to her current financial difficulties. The Collins book warehouse in Paternoster Row near St. Paul’s had been ravaged as well, and publishing remained dicey, what with paper allocations cut to a fraction of pre-war quantities.
So the rest of the morning was spent checking for punctuation and typographical problems in the latest Jane Marple mystery. She found herself liking Miss Marple and quite satisfied with the book-a rarity, as she was a harsh critic of her own work-and her mood brightened.
She did pause, at one point, to get up and go out to the kitchen for an apple. James followed her and she gave him half a biscuit (even dogs were on ration) and then she realized why she’d been so forlorn.
It hadn’t been Max, not entirely….
That crime scene yesterday-she had viewed it dispassionately, with the clinical perspective of a nurse, with the calloused attitude of a war correspondent. Not once had she felt ill or in any way uncomfortable. It had not been a pose; it had come naturally to her.
But now, as she settled back into her little flat where she’d been writing her homicidal confections-hiding away from the war and her absent husband-the loss of life represented by that woman’s brutal murder hung over her like a cloud, rumbling, dark, oppressive, with the promise of a storm.
For a moment she sat in her comfortable chair, James again curled beside her (now that the machine-gunning of the typewriter had been silenced), the loose pages of her latest mystery in her lap, and wondered if she should remove herself from the investigation. Already she had involved her friends and colleagues, and-while she of course knew her responsibility had been to aid the police in their efforts-she felt embarrassed by the inconvenience she had caused them.
The irony was, Agatha enjoyed the company of the theatrical crowd precisely because their existence was somehow disconnected from real life. She found it relaxing to associate with actors in wartime, because to these children-whose profession was acting out fantasies-the theatrical world was the real world. This ravaged London where the war was happening was an incomprehensible nightmare, a long, drawn-out inconvenience preventing them from going on with their own truly important lives.
All they spoke of was the theater-of fellow actors and directors and producers; the only momentous events taking place in the world were those happening in the theatrical world. The only war talk related to the Entertainments National Service Association.
She had found this wonderfully refreshing.
And now she had ruined everything by introducing a murder-a real murder-into the playacting.
This thought had barely passed through her mind when the telephone rang. She had a sudden chill that had nothing to do with the winter weather: if that were Sir Bernard or Inspector Greeno, it would likely mean another young woman had been murdered.
If so, would she politely withdraw from her association with the investigators? Or would she answer the call?
Well, she would answer this call, at least. She rose, pausing to pick up her spiral notebook and a pencil, and went to the phone on its stand by the stairs.
And it was indeed Inspector Greeno.
“Oh, Ted,” she said, “I hope there hasn’t been another killing.”
“There hasn’t,” the pleasantly gruff baritone voice responded. “At least, not that we know of. And I’ve practically jumped, all morning, every time the phone’s rung, dreading another such discovery.”
Somehow it was reassuring that she and the hard-boiled inspector had been thinking, and reacting, alike.
The inspector had called, “just checking in,” but with a good deal of new information for her. For one thing, he had a new telephone number for her reference.
He had set up his enquiry headquarters in an office at the Tottenham Court Road Police Station, out of which he was supervising a systematic scouring of Paddington and Soho. All of the “top resources of Scotland Yard” had been mobilized, and every available man from the wartime-depleted police force had moved into the West End. A circular with the description of Evelyn Oatley’s last gentleman caller, as provided by next-door neighbor Ivy Poole, had already been widely distributed.
“We’re talking to every known prostitute,” he said, “and asking each girl if she’s met a violent client in the blackout, of late, or if she knows of another girl who has.”
There was a small chair by the telephone stand; Agatha sat. “Has this proved fruitful?”
“To an extent, but so far everything falls into that latter category-girls who’ve heard stories from other girls. All quite secondhand.”
“Enough to go on, though, I would hope.”
“Two promising leads. We’ve heard complaints of a ‘rough customer’ who passes himself off as the illegitimate son of a member of the House of Lords. Speaks in an affected, imitation Oxford accent, and demands to be called the ‘Duke.’ ”
“Does he have a real name?”
“Not that he’s ever given to any of these good-time girls, and their descriptions are vague and inconsistent. He’s a good-looking fellow, that much they all agree on-but he’s been variously described as twenty-five and thirty-five and points in between. Very well-dressed, as befits his pretensions. Tosses money around. He’s blue-eyed and brown-eyed and, well, you can see the problem.”
“Could his story about a noble if illegitimate heritage be true?”
“Possibly, but more likely it’s simply a fantasy he’s hiring these girls to help him enact. That’s rather typical of working girls and their ‘mugs.’ ”
“You said ‘two promising leads.’ What’s the other?”
“Ah, well. A girl named Phyllis O’Dwyer is said to have had a ‘close call’ or a ‘scrape’ with a particularly wild customer. Three of her friends told us the same story.”
“What does Phyllis say?”
“Apparently, she’s holed up somewhere. Frightened out of her skin. We are looking for her.”