The London Blitz Murders - By Max Allan Collins Page 0,1

Abbey damaged, the Mint, the Tower, the Law Courts, the British Museum hit, even Big Ben’s face had been scarred (though still tolling right on time), as fires raged… and more than three thousand Londoners lost their lives….

A shattered city had trembled, dreading the next attack; but nothing came, not for months, and even then nothing to compare to the tenth of May. And as days turned to weeks and weeks to months, the sense that the Blitz might be (dare one say it?) over provided a desperation-tinged hope.

Not that the city was letting down. Small but punishing German raids did occasionally still occur, the all-too-familiar banshee warning again piercing the London air—particularly following an Allied raid, most particularly when the target had been Berlin.

And, so, sandbags and rationing and propaganda posters and of course the blackout continued.

But the shelters weren’t being so widely used, in this lull in the Blitz; and even when bombs were raining on London, many had preferred to stay home and take their chances, rather than crawl into a privately owned (usually ensconced in a garden) Anderson shelter, two corrugated sheets of steel bolted at the top, stuck three feet into the earth, with a sheet-metal door, and protected by an earthen embankment. With no drainage, these shelters for six were a nightmare; between the rain and certain human needs, one well might prefer the relative dignity of staying home and being blown to smithereens.

Then there was the public standard shelter of brick-and-lime mortar walls, perched unsupported on a roadway, with a nine-inch reinforced concrete slab on top. The public had soon dubbed these sandwich shelters, because a blast could suck the shelter walls outward, turning the occupants into the meat between concrete and roadway slices.

The “tubes” of the subway system were adapted into shelters as well, but mosquitoes and fierce winds (sometimes cold, sometimes hot) eventually relegated that option to the homeless. Little societies had developed down there, and even though they could be relocated, these ragged bands preferred their new underground world.

A workman named Peter Rushing, age thirty-eight, lanky and hard-hewed, was running short on sand in his pothole-filling effort. He knew where to “borrow” some, easy enough….

Brick shelters like this one had to be built in the streets; there was no room, was there, for a structure like this in Montague Place, in the Central London district of Marlyebone, whose long, straight streets and endless rows of stately buildings—occasionally disrupted by bombed-out patches, like absent teeth in an otherwise impressive smile—included scant room for gardens. This shelter—between Edgware Road and Baker Street (both of whose flats and high-class shops had largely been destroyed in 1940’s raids)—was but one of hundreds lining London’s streets, a spare cubicle with a seat built along one side. Nothing could be more ordinary.

And yet Peter Rushing discovered something—someone—quite extraordinary, when he ducked into the stall intending to nick some sand from an already spilled-open sandbag.

The woman was striking—what you would call handsome as opposed to beautiful, with short, dark, nicely coifed hair and good cheekbones. She was not seated on the bench; rather she lay sprawled on the roadway floor of the shelter, her clothing—white blouse, dark brown jacket, lighter brown skirt—disarrayed, up over long legs that had been darkened with a liquid product to give the impression of silk stockings.

Her eyes were open and staring blankly. She had been gagged with a silk scarf, but was not otherwise bound, her arms and hands and legs splayed. No purse seemed present, but items apparently dumped from a purse were scattered nearby—lipstick, compact, handkerchief, and such. An electric torch—the woman’s presumably—lay a ways from the body, its dim beam casting a small yellow circle on the brick wall under the bench.

And for the first time since the Blitz had begun, Peter Rushing was truly frightened. What he was viewing was not the impersonal carnage of war, rather the wanton destruction of one human’s life by another.

“Freddie!” he called. “Come ’ere, lad!”

Freddie Sangster, a short chubby bloke of twenty-odd, did not move quickly; he had a game leg that had kept him doing roadwork during wartime. But when he got there, Freddie was quick to say, “Blimey,” and agree that one of them should stay with the corpse, and the other go for the coppers.

And being the younger, Freddie got to stay and keep the woman company.

The boy was sitting on the bench, hunched over, his hands folded, his eyes on the handsome quite dead woman, watching her carefully,