If the good-time factory and school girls momentarily outnumbered the street-hardened prostitutes on the West End, it was because the latter understood they were the preferred victims, and were too scared to venture out, knowing that the streets they usually haunted were haunted by another predator who utterly out-classed them. He would strike again, the new Ripper, that seemed certain-the lust of killing had him in its malicious grip.
Jack the Ripper murdered his eight or more victims over a period of well over a year.
But even Jack the Ripper had never murdered four women in five days.
EIGHT
The woman across the desk from Inspector Ted Greeno in his small temporary office at Tottenham Court Road Police Station sat with her shapely stained-tan legs crossed and her arms folded over her considerable bosom.
Ten years ago, the features of her heart-shaped face would have rivaled any budding film actress; but now, at perhaps thirty-five, those features had hardened into a kind of mask, emphasized of course by her heavy makeup, from her phony beauty mark to the scarlet gash of her generous mouth; in the harsh light of the station house, the caked makeup was obvious and settled unflatteringly in pockmarked patches along her rouged cheeks. Her dark blue eyes were hooded and her light blonde hair was due not to a bottle but her own Nordic heritage, and for all her hardness, it was not difficult for Ted Greeno to understand why a mug might part with a few bob for her favors.
“You don’t believe me, do you, Guv?”
“A thousand pounds would see you pretty, Greta, for a good long time.”
One of the tabloids, The News of the World, had posted a thousand-pound reward for “information leading to the capture, arrest and conviction of the Blackout Ripper.” This had brought the doxies out of the woodwork, and Greeno was using four men in as many interview chambers to thin out the hordes of suddenly cooperative ladies of the evening.
Greta’s story had been interesting enough to bring her to the attention of the inspector himself.
She claimed that last night-about two hours after the latest victim, Doris Jouannet, had been slain-a young airman had approached her at the bar at the Trocadero. He struck up a conversation with her and bought her a drink and a sandwich. According to Greta, the airman flashed a wad of Treasury notes her way and made “an indecent suggestion.” When she declined this offer, and left to walk toward her apartment, he followed her and shoved her into a doorway and said, “At least let me kiss you good night,” and when she said no, he began to strangle her.
“I struggled with ’im, kicked him in the family jewels, and he dropped something… his gas-respirator, I think… and I screamed bloody murder and he went runnin’ off, into the darkness, like a scared rat.”
That was the story that Greeno was now reflecting upon. Finally he said to her, “How can I believe your story, Greta, when it’s riddled with lies?”
“Did I do this to meself, then?” Greta Heywood asked, opening her pink silk blouse a button and indignantly gesturing to her bruises on her throat.
“No, but your ponce might have done.”
“I don’t work with no bleeding ponce!” she blurted. “I’m a one-woman business, I am.”
This was an interesting outburst for two reasons.
First, Greta had hitherto clearly avoided copping to any solicitation of prostitution with the phantom airman, weaving an incredible story of her “virtue” being challenged.
Second, she had inadvertently led Greeno to a relevant realization: none of the working girls attacked, at least those who’d taken the Ripper to their flats, had fallen under the protection of a procurer, or “ponce,” as girls like Greta called them. In many cases, a ponce would have been watching from a distance (perhaps with cosh in hand to help liberate the mark of his loot). In other instances, a ponce might share the flat, lurking in an adjacent room or behind a blanket draped on a clothesline as a partition.
So the Ripper had either been careful to avoid the procurers, or had been damned lucky.
“Greta, you’ll not be charged with soliciting. Tell me what really happened.”
“Well… it’s just what I said, or mostly was. I met this RAF bloke at the Troc. I already had a date I was waiting for, but this one was cute. So I told the bloke he could have a quickie, if he liked. So after we had a drink, we saunter across to that side street… by the Captain’s Table?”
Greeno nodded. “Go on.”
“I was leading the way with me torch. I snapped it off and we stepped in a doorway and he started in makin’ love to me. Kissing me. I don’t let just any steamer do such a personal thing as that…”
A steamer was a client, a mug-cockney rhyming slang: steamtug, mug.
“… but he was a pretty boy. Kind of sweet and shy…”
Could she be telling the truth? That might have been young Cummins she was describing.
“… sweet and shy, that is, till he started chokin’ me to death! Gor blimey, did I let him have it in the-”
“The rest of your story is substantially true, then.”
“ ’Course it is. What kind of girl do you take me for, Guv?”
Greeno allowed that one to slide past. Then he asked, “Did he really drop his respirator?”
“Swear on me mum’s grave, he did. I heard the clunk.”
“All right. I’m going to send you over to the Trocadero with my sergeant. You show him how and where this all occurred.”
The inspector put this in motion, then returned to the desk in the cluttered little office, where he lighted up one of his trademark cigars. A map of Central London with pins in the murder spots covered most of one wall, filing cabinets huddled along the other, and he sat facing a glass-and-wood wall looking out on the bullpen of constables and detectives as well as the receiving desk.
It did sound like Cummins. The other flier in the case, that Canadian, the one who had argued with Margaret Lowe, was in the clear: he had shipped out the day after Miss Wick phoned in her noise complaint.
But Cummins was the only one of the St. James Theatre suspects who had an ironclad alibi for the murders of Evelyn Hamilton, Evelyn Oatley, Margaret Lowe and Doris Jouannet: the cadet was in billets when each murder was committed! The billet passbook proved the times he came and went, and his roommates backed the passbook.
And why, of all the airmen in London, should it be Cummins, anyway? The St. James Theatre was linked only to one of the crimes. Allowing Agatha Christie Mallowan to participate in this investigation had Greeno thinking like a bloody book writer, not the hard-nosed cop he was.
Agatha’s detectives could gather a tidy group of suspects in the library to discuss the clues and reveal the villain, who would politely go along with the process, right down to presenting his hands for the cuffs. The reality of real policework, and Ted Greeno’s life, was that his only avenue of inquiry at the moment was a seemingly endless parade of streetwalkers. He had spoken with a hundred girls (some five hundred had passed through these portals), sometimes for a few minutes, other times (as with Greta) for a considerable spell.
And having to depend on the unreliable likes of Greta for his leads did not give Greeno a good feeling-these girls were, after all, liars by trade, even without a tabloid offering a thousand pounds for the right story.
The telephone shook him shrilly from this cynical reverie; and in his ear was the deceptively soothing baritone of Superintendent Fred Cherrill, the fingerprint expert.
“I support Mrs. Christie’s observations about the fingerprints on the candlestick from the Lowe flat mantelpiece,” Cherrill said. “A right-handed person, in snatching the candle from the candlestick, would naturally place his left hand on the base, using his right to grasp the candle. The process would be reversed in the case of a left-handed person.”