The London Blitz Murders Read Online Free PDF Page A

Home Guard, ten men passing around two rifles.
    Embarrassed by such pointless activities, Max had gone off to London, to the Air Ministry, hoping to be sent abroad on a mission. Greenway—their newly acquired but much loved home on the river Dart, between Torquay and Dartmouth—had been requisitioned as a nursery for evacuated London children, though Mrs. Mallowan continued to live there for a time.
    That was what had taken her back to the Torquay dispensary, where she’d picked up an on-the-job refresher course which had made her current University College posting possible.
    When her first husband, Archie, was serving with the Royal Flying Corps, she had worked as a volunteer nurse and then as a hospital dispensing pharmacist. Nursing during the Great War had been a nasty bit of business—from the rigors of constantly cleaning the wards and scrubbing rubber sheets to attending to burn patients and assisting in the operating room, the job was not for the easily fatigued or the faint of heart.
    Pampered ladies with romantic notions of soothing our brave boys’ fevered brows did not last long—not after tidying up following amputations and disposing severed limbs in the hospital furnace, they didn’t. Mrs. Mallowan had lasted fifteen months, and might have stayed longer, but a dose of flu instigated by overwork, and the attraction of more regular hours, had brought her to the dispensary.
    There she found a calm seldom present in nursing; difficult at first, the dispensing job played well into her natural interest in, and facility with, mathematics. Codifying, classifying, listing, measuring, learning symbols and signs, mastering the appearance and properties of various substances… this was a kind of poetry to her.
    And the dispensary was a life-and-death operation, no less than an operating room—she had seen a confident if careless pharmacist prepare a mixture based upon a calculation that was one decimal point off. Rather than embarrass the man (and kill some unwitting patient), she had spilled the mixture and endured censure for clumsiness….
    Still, interesting as dispensing was, she found it rather monotonous—ointments, medicines, jar after jar of lotions to befilled and refilled, day after day. She should never have cared for dispensing as a permanent job, and had her life gone a different way, she might have been happy to remain a professional nurse.
    But it was in the pharmacy that Mrs. Mallowan had picked up a working knowledge of poisons, and this personal experience she used in the writing of her first mystery novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles .
    Ironically, the boring if sociable dispensary (she’d worked there with two good friends) set her mind to wandering, looking for escape from the anxiety of wartime in the form of daydreams that led to the notion of writing a mystery based upon a notably ingenious way to slip poison to a victim….
    And now Agatha Christie Mallowan found herself back in a dispensary, with her mind running down a similar and yet distinctively different course. She was well aware that her mystery novels were of a polite, even cozy nature—superficially, at least—and even reflective of another era.
    She did not like to think of herself as old-fashioned; and she had tried, in her work, to do things no writer of mysteries had ever dared—the narrator is the killer, all the suspects did it, a child, the love interest, even the detective himself might be the murderer. Puzzles, they called her stories, and she would smile and nod; but Agatha knew her tales of good and evil hinged on character.
    In her way, Agatha was an innovator, and she had of late begun to wonder if the cataclysm of this war would result in a post-war world whose innocence was so lost that bodies in libraries and detectives exercising little gray cells would seem quaintly out of step and, well, just too ridiculous.
    Her morning’s last customer (was it terrible to think of them that way?) was a tiny old