The London Blitz Murders Read Online Free PDF

Irish lady, remindful of Mother Rileyfrom the music hall, who handed over her prescription with one hand and pressed half a crown into Agatha’s palm with the other.
    In a wrinkled leprechaun face, blue eyes twinkled, and then one of them winked. “Make it double strong, dearie, will you now? Plenty of peppermint, my darling girl—double strong!”
    “We don’t accept bribes,” Agatha said priggishly, returning the half-crown.
    A frown wrinkled the wizened face further. “I would never insult you that way, dearie. T’ink of it as a gratuity. A gift.”
    “You will receive exactly the dosage your doctor prescribed,” Agatha said stiffly, but when she turned her back, the dispenser allowed the smile she’d been stifling to blossom. She mixed in an extra dollop of peppermint water for the old girl—it could not possibly do her any harm—and then pretended to be stern when she handed it over.
    Her half-day ended at noon, at which time she hung up her lab coat, to reveal her off-white blouse and the dark gray skirt of her well-made, respectable Debenham and Freebody suit. Her stockings were black and warm, her shoes heavy and sensible. She slipped into the gray suitjacket, slung her well-lined Burberry over an arm, attached the leash to James’s collar, and she and the terrier made their familiar way to the small laboratory just down the hall from the dispensary.
    Within this glorified cubbyhole—workbench beneath a window overlooking the courtyard, sink and rack of test tubes nearby, counter with bunsen burners beneath specimen-lined shelves—the greatest forensics scientist of the twentieth century kept solitary company with his investigations.
    When Agatha had first heard that Sir Bernard Spilsbury was her neighbor at University College Hospital, a schoolgirl giddiness ran through her. She had read and heard much aboutSir Bernard, and the idea of meeting him, of discussing with him crime and murder and poisons and causes of death, frankly thrilled her.
    But she had never made the journey down the hall to introduce herself. Agatha was not outgoing, at least not until she got to know a person; this reticence prevented her from making the immediate acquaintance of someone she had much admired, from afar.
    She understood that Sir Bernard, too, was shy and unassuming, amazingly so for so well-known a public figure; like her, he was said to abhor attention, and despised having his picture taken. In the hallways of the hospital, she had observed him discreetly—he seemed distracted though never rude, preoccupied but nonetheless likable, displaying charm and even warmth when someone on the staff stopped to make conversation with him.
    Certainly she needn’t fear offending him; and yet she could not bring herself to make an introduction—how silly she would feel, the author of homicidal confections presenting herself to the man who put Crippen away.
    And yet she had longed to meet him. It was almost—but not quite—as if she were a schoolgirl with a crush. Certainly, even in his mid-sixties, Sir Bernard cut a handsome figure—always in a dark well-tailored suit with a fresh carnation, a tall figure understandably thickened at the middle, with the sharply chiseled features of a matinee idol, and eyes as gray as Poirot’s little brain cells.
    Perhaps, with Max away, there was an element of propriety afoot as well. Agatha had not known how to approach this handsome, older man she so admired without fawning, even gushing, and perhaps giving him… the wrong idea.
    Then, finally, he had introduced himself—not at the hospital, but inside Euston Station.
    Euston Station, of course, was an undeniably shabby affair, inconvenient, shambling, with a cavernous entrance hall cutting the station in two and encouraging bedlam. She disliked crowds, hated being jammed up against people, and the loud sounds and the cigarette and cigar smoke all annoyed her; but wartime was wartime, wasn’t it? One did what one had to do.
    And so