The London Blitz Murders Read Free

shillings cost this handsome woman her life?
    Oddly, a fairly expensive-looking gold watch remained on the woman’s wrist. Perhaps in the darkness the murderous thief had missed it.
    Greeno would do little but wait until Sir Bernard was on hand. Confident as he might be about his skills as a police detective, Greeno knew that Spilsbury’s expertise—and his eventual ability to testify in court with clarity and convincingness—was worth waiting for.
    But something tingled at the back of the detective’s neck—and in the pit of his stomach, a flutter of recognition. This corpse recalled another….
    One of the relative handful of murders in recent months had been that of Maple Church, an attractive young woman found strangled and robbed in a wrecked building on Hampstead Road.
    And this attractive woman had obviously been robbed; and strangled.
    Greeno was standing outside the shelter, questioning the two workmen, when Sir Bernard drew up in his dark-green Armstrong-Siddeley saloon; characteristically, Spilsbury had driven himself. With the exception of the sedan itself—motor cars a relative rarity these days—the pathologist’s arrival was typically unobtrusive.
    The man considered by many to be the first medical detective of modern times was accompanied by no retinue of assistants. His tall figure rather bent these days, his athletic leanness giving way to the plump spread of late middle age, Spilsbury—wearing no topcoat over a well-tailored dark suit with a carnation providing a bloodred splash in his otherwise somber attire—remained a striking, strikingly handsome figure.
    Though his hair was silver now, and he was never seen without his wire-rimmed glasses, Sir Bernard Spilsbury had amatinee idol’s chiseled features, highlighted by melancholy gray eyes that seemed to look at everything, but reluctantly, and a thin line of a mouth that with minimal change could suggest sorrow, disgust, reproach and even amusement.
    The Crippen case—one of the century’s most notorious—had marked Spilsbury’s entry into the world of forensics; and over the intervening years no professional ups and downs had followed for Spilsbury, strictly what a wag had called “a steady climb to Papal infallibility.”
    Still, like so many in Britain, Spilsbury had not been spared by the war; his son Peter, a surgeon, had died in 1940, at the height of the Blitz. Greeno had heard the whispers: on that day, Sir Bernard had begun to fail.
    His work, however, remained impeccable. It was characteristic of Spilsbury to work alone in a politely preoccupied fashion. But his considerable charm, his dry wit, seemed to have evaporated. The touch of sadness in his eyes had spread to his solemn features.
    “Doctor,” Greeno said.
    Greeno knew not to call Spilsbury “Sir Bernard” here; the pathologist considered that out of place at a crime scene.
    “Inspector,” Spilsbury said. He was lugging the almost comically oversize Gladstone bag that was his trademark. Then the pathologist raised one eyebrow and tilted his head toward the brick shelter.
    Greeno nodded.
    And this was the extent of the inspector briefing the pathologist.
    Greeno followed Spilsbury through the narrow doorless doorway into the brick structure. The pathologist knelt beside the dead woman, as if he were praying; perhaps hewas—one could never be sure about what might be going on in Sir Bernard’s mind.
    Then Spilsbury snapped the big bag; it yawned open gapingly to reveal various odd and old instruments, including probing forceps of his own invention, various jars and bottles (some empty, some full), and a supply of formalin. Also, he withdrew rubber gloves from somewhere within, which he snugged on.
    Not all pathologists went the rubber-glove route. But Greeno knew Spilsbury—unlike many who should’ve known better—could be trusted to touch nothing at this crime scene other than the body, and even then with gloved fingertips. Any other evidence gathered by the