Durgin grimaced. “Afraid the milk’s powdered.”
“I simply adore powdered milk. It’s what the Queen serves at Buckingham Palace, I’ll have you know.”
Staunton glanced over. “I wouldn’t mind a cuppa, old man.”
“Well, get your lazy arse up and get your own mug, you sorry blighter!”
Maggie hid a giggle behind one hand.
“Er, sorry, Miss Hope,” Durgin said. “We’re a bit informal here. Not used to ladies around.”
“It’s fine. Comradely, in fact.”
The DCI handed her a mug of steaming tea. “I’ll wager you’ve heard worse.”
“Indeed.”
Staunton passed a stack of messages to Durgin. “Questions from the press.”
“Oh, my favorite part of the job.” Durgin rolled his eyes and began to flip through them.
“They keep asking if the women are”—Staunton looked sideways at Maggie and lowered his voice to a stage whisper—“virgins.”
“Oh, good grief.” Durgin ran a hand through his hair.
“They want to know if the girls were, you know, good girls,” the other detective continued, “or if they, you know, got around.”
Double standard. They would never ask that of a male victim….
Durgin shook his head. “We’re telling them nothing.”
“The press do like to divide women into virgins and whores, don’t they?” Maggie said. “And if the victim was a virgin, then it’s ‘oh, poor thing!’ and if she wasn’t, then there’s the insinuation ‘she got what she deserved.’?”
“It’s not relevant either way.” Durgin pushed the message slips away and picked up his mug.
“Showed your Miss Hope the magazine cover,” Staunton teased.
“Hate that damn thing!” The tips of Durgin’s ears turned pink. “Don’t believe a word of this malarkey,” he said to Maggie. “They only framed it to torture me.”
“You’re quite the legend, Detective Durgin,” she declared, sipping her tea. “Mr. Frain told us a bit about you when we started, but certainly not the whole story.” She now appreciated the depth and breadth of Durgin’s experience—and understood his arrogance and impatience with outsiders. Forensics was a science, a complicated and relatively young one—she didn’t know the half of it. Yet.
“So what’s your take on all of this?” she said, pointing to the Blackout Beast headline.
Durgin gulped from his mug. “What makes our case unique, in my opinion, is the speed with which the murders are taking place.” He poured himself another cup. “In all my years, I’ve never seen a murderer repeatedly strike with such brutality in such a short span of time. Our Beast is going at it awfully fast. Something’s going on in his life—something’s troubling him, a catalyst. And killing—well, that relieves some of the pressure. But not enough. So he has to do it again. And again.”
“Do you think it’s stress from the war?” Maggie asked. “He’s a veteran? Injuries to the brain? What they call ‘shell shock’?”
“Maybe, maybe not. My gut still tells me he’s younger. Everything’s changed with the war, but, then again, lots of things are still the same. There are the same barroom brawls, petty thefts, rapes, assaults, and murders—maybe even more now. And we have new immigrants—the Poles, the Canadians, and now the Yanks—coming in and not always on their best behavior. Ironically, the Blitz has given the perfect cover for our own killers to hide their evidence—strangling or beating their victims, then hiding the bodies in the wreckage of a shattered building. Who knows how many people, allegedly victims of the Blitz, were actually murdered? The sheer number of bodies we’ve retrieved since this war’s started has made it impossible for us to autopsy all of them.”
He shook his head. “But our Blackout Beast—he’s a narcissist. Cocky—which is why I’m hypothesizing he’s young. He’s far too brazen to hide his deeds in the mess left by the Germans. He wants us to find them, he’s practically gift-wrapping the bodies. He has some nerve, he does. Still”—Durgin tapped at the side of his nose—“he’s not new at any of this—his work shows too much experience. Too much control. He’s not an amateur, but he still wants to show off. He must be loving the attention from the newspapers.”
Staunton left, after muttering something about “getting my own damn tea,” and Maggie noted how much she liked being with Durgin, despite the circumstances that brought them together. She had never heard Durgin so loquacious and decided to press on, to try to learn something about the man himself. “Why did you become a detective?”
“Books.”
Maggie wasn’t about to be put off by his short answer. “Which books? The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes?”
“No, actually.” He drained the last of his tea. “As a young lad, I was an aficionado of the literary adventures of Detective Sexton Blake by George Mann. Detective Blake’s the anti–Sherlock Holmes. Whereas Holmes pontificates and theorizes, Blake’s a man of action. Do you know, there were times as a boy where I’d go to my room to read Blake’s latest adventure, only to find the comic gone?”
He laughed. “I’d conduct my own ‘investigation,’ which would always end at my father’s chair. And, underneath the seat cushion, I’d always find the missing magazine.” He sat back in his leather desk chair and grinned. “My father wouldn’t admit to reading such a thing, of course, so he’d say he was screening it to make sure it was appropriate for an impressionable young lad such as myself. Yes, as if I’d believe that!”
“So, you always wanted to be a detective?”
“I loved Sexton Blake, but I didn’t think detective work was something real people did. Police work, yes—detective work, no. But then I eventually left Glasgow for Oxford, I had what the doctors call a cervical rib”—he pointed to the right side of his rib cage—“a protrusion of bone from the seventh cervical vertebra, near the neck, pushed against a nerve, causing a lot of pain. I was admitted to hospital for surgery and, during recovery, my roommate happened to be a former officer of the Metropolitan Police Department. He’d been shot in the face, can you believe? While trying to apprehend a suspect, of course. He was in hospital to preserve the sight in one of his eyes. So I was bored, and he was bored, and pretty soon I had him talking about all of his adventures on the force—and it brought back the memory of all those Sexton Blake stories.”
“How do you do it?” Maggie asked, sincerely. “Work as a detective? And keep on doing it?”
Durgin refilled his mug. “Many, many cups of tea, obviously.”
“No, really. How?”
“You’re thinking about becoming a detective?”
“I just want to do my bit to help win the war.”
“Fair enough.” He rubbed his hands through his hair. “The men I hunt are evil. I believe in Satan. I believe in his power. I believe he can work through us if given half a chance. These men I pursue, like Satan, they target the weakest among us, usually women and children. I like nothing more than to catch them and throw them to the courts. It gives me immense satisfaction. There’s nothing like it.”
Durgin took a breath. “It’s taken its toll, obviously—you can’t witness the mutilation of children and violent murder in its infinite forms without it corroding your soul. But I continue to fight. It’s all about the fight for good over evil, God over the Devil.” Then, as if realizing how much he’d said, “But enough about me—back to work!” He handed Maggie a book with cataloged fingerprints. “Let’s try to find ourselves a match, shall we?”
She was glad to see the maniacal glee was back in his eyes.
—
In her feather bed at the Adlon, Elise had nightmares of Ravensbrück. In her dreams, she was on a witness stand in a cavernous courtroom, run by impassive judges with blank faces. She was asked to describe her experiences—and the words wouldn’t come. When they did, they came slowly, painfully, with gaps and long stretches of lost memory.
She looked down at the defendant—a man made up of crawling black flies. She knew instantly he was Satan. She needed to bear witness against Satan.