The address Cummins had given Agatha took her to Viceroy Court, between Edgmont and Townshend Streets, a particularly large example of the lusterless modern buildings that had invaded the district, a seven-story structure faced with yellow brick. Requisitioned for billets by the RAF, the building could not have dated back more than a few years and had a cold institutional quality that displeased Agatha.
Having left the Armstrong-Siddeley on the street, Agatha-a most unmilitary figure in her fur coat, copy of the new Poirot tucked under one arm-approached the building, which loomed monolithically in the moonlight. She entered to find the lobby a functional area of the same yellow brick with a few patriotic posters on several bulletin boards-“Let’s Go! Wings for Victory,” “Tell Nobody-Not Even Her!” and (irony again, she thought) “Hitler Will Send No Warning-Always Carry Your Gas Mask.”
A pair of guards in RAF uniform played cards at a small table near the door; looking painfully young to her, they looked up at Agatha curiously. Standing, one asked, “Help you, ma’am?”
“Just visiting my nephew,” she said.
“At this hour, ma’am?”
“I only just got in to town by motor-terrible delays. He said he’d be up late. Am I breaking a rule? After visitors’ hours, is it?”
“We don’t stand on ceremony around here, least not on the weekend. What’s his name, ma’am?”
“Gordon Cummins.”
“Oh,” the guard said with a smile. “The Count!”
Oh dear, she thought.
“Pardon?” she said.
“Nothing, ma’am, just a sort of nickname the blokes call your nephew…. I’m not sure LAC Cummins is in, ma’am. Hardly anybody is, y’know. Friday night. It’s an empty building, you’ve dropped by to.”
“I spoke to him on the telephone. I think he’s expecting me.”
“Do you know what billet, ma’am?”
“I do indeed. Room 405.”
“Go on up, ma’am.”
The guards returned to their cards-that new game, gin rummy, if she wasn’t mistaken-and she took the automatic lift to the fourth floor.
Flats faced each other across a central hall, in hotel fashion; the brick walls and the tile flooring again gave off an institutional air which seemed appropriate for the building’s commandeered use as a billets, but which must have been depressing for apartment living.
The guards were correct: the hallway was deserted. No Saturday night parties or card games could be discerned, no radios blared behind doors. The troops had no doubt descended upon Piccadilly.
She hoped she wouldn’t have to return to the lobby to request that one of those young guards unlock Cummins’s door for her-and she didn’t: after her knock went unheeded, she tried the knob and found it unlocked. Not surprising, in what was after all a glorified barracks.
The flat, drably modern, was a sitting room beyond which lay a small, separate kitchen and two small bedrooms, one of which was off the kitchen, the other off the sitting room, which also had an adjacent bathroom. Four cots had been erected in the sitting room and each cramped bedroom had a single cot. Those using the sitting room were apparently living out of small wooden RAF-issue trunks; but each tiny bedroom, glorified closets really, had bureaus-Viceroy Court had apparently provided furnished apartments to its prior tenants.
The small bedroom off the kitchen-with its easy access to the fire escape-was Cadet Cummins’s, or so she assumed. The reason for her deduction provided one more small irony: on the bureau were two stacks of popular inexpensive editions of her novels.
That much, at least, had been true: Gordon Cummins was a fan, a dedicated reader of hers.
She did not even have to open the drawers of the bureau to find what she’d been looking for: near one stack of her books, beside multiple sideways displays of her own name, were the apparent souvenirs of slaughter: a cheap comb missing teeth; a fountain pen; and a woman’s wristwatch.
Though it would take measurements and the forensics skills of Sir Bernard to confirm so, Agatha’s eyes told her these items mirrored the shapes she’d discovered in the dust at the Jouannet murder flat.
Leaning closer, narrowing her eyes, she thought she could make out something odd about that watch: it had something on the back of it….
She lifted the cheap watch and turned it over and saw the oddly cut piece of elastic tape, fitted there for the original (late) wearer’s comfort, again seeming to mirror the shape of the portion cut from the roll of sticking plaster Ted Greeno had found in a drawer of that dust-covered dresser in the Jouannet place.
Finally, an inexpensive silver-plated cigarette case, bearing the initials N.W., seemed to indicate the ghost of actress Nita Ward. A pack rat, this killer was; not a good thing to be, in that line of interest.
“What a pleasant surprise….”
Startled, she turned to see the owner, or at least the possessor, of these ghoulish keepsakes: the boyishly handsome RAF cadet, Gordon Cummins, standing with cap in hand, his smile sideways, his eyes a greenish unblinking blue.
And in a flash she recognized him, finally: the Gunman.
The smiling blue-eyed Gunman of her childhood nightmares, who had come back to haunt… and perhaps warn… her in recent nights.
How like Archie he was.
“Oh, do forgive me,” Agatha said, turning her back to the bureau and beaming at her host. “I was driving home from the hospital, and I simply couldn’t sleep, and thought I’d run over and leave this here, to surprise you….”
She held out the copy of Evil Under the Sun for him to see, then placed it on the bureau top behind her.
“I still need to sign it, I’m afraid, but I wanted to thank you properly. I thought you were spending the night with Mrs. Cummins.”
He shut the door. The cadet remained near the door, but the bedroom was so small, so claustrophobic, that they still stood relatively close to one another.
“I thought when you got back,” she said, “that you would find the book in your bedroom and just be… pleasantly surprised. But then, you said you were pleasantly surprised, just now, didn’t you? And I hope that’s true.”
He said nothing. Still smiling. Twisting the hat around in his hands.
“Well… perhaps I should go,” she said. “I’m afraid I was misguided… invading your sanctum sanctorum, as I have.”
“No,” he said. “I’m pleased to see you…. The party broke up early. Everyone was too concerned about you, and the explosion at the theater, for the merriment to continue.”
“Ah.”
“Janet was upset, and suggested I go on back to my billet. No night for celebrating, really…. Do you suspect me?”
The bluntness of that struck her like a blow, but she did her best not to show it, saying quickly, “No. But I’m afraid the police do.”
He sat on the side of the bed, which hugged the wall lengthwise, opposite the bureau; his unblinking eyes stared into nothing. “But I’m innocent. I hope you believe me.”
“Oh, I do, Gordon. You’re my savior, after all. My knight.”
His eyes met hers and his smile turned into a crinkly thing, as if unsure whether or not to become a frown. “If they caught him… this Ripper… he wouldn’t be as famous as the other one, would he?”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“Well, the first one… Jack… they never caught him. He was too smart for them, they’ll say. But the truth is, he didn’t have Sir Bernard Spilsbury and these modern detectives up against him, did he? Fingerprints and things.”
“No. He didn’t. It was all quite crude then.”
“But if the new Jack were to kill someone famous, that would be different.”
“I’m afraid… afraid I don’t follow you, Gordon.”
He shrugged, the smile boyish as ever, charming. “Well, imagine if the Ripper killed you, Mrs. Mallowan. Mrs. Christie. What headlines that would make-the fiend who killed the mistress of murder. That would make history.”