The Deadly Embrace (11 page)

“I’ll make some inquiries,” said Drummond. “We’ll interview her co-workers on Admiral Jellico’s staff. Perhaps one of them knew.”

Taggart walked over to the built-in bookshelf in the corner of the living room. Above the shelves, a large map of the world was fastened to the wall. There were multicolored pushpins all over it, each set denoting the relative positions of Allied and Axis forces in the many fighting theaters. Since the beginning of the war, he had seen similar maps in parlors and living rooms all over New York. In looking at the force dispositions, Taggart concluded that the pins had not been updated for at least a year.

The bookshelf under the map consisted of four shelves, each holding about a dozen volumes. Taggart scanned the titles on the top shelf. They were all war poets, including Wilfred Owen, Dorian Saint George Bond, and Vincent Mai. Taggart picked up the first one, by Rupert Brooke, and began thumbing through it.

“So how did you convince Colonel Gaines that Joss Dunbar was murdered?” he asked, putting back the book and picking up the next volume.

Drummond let out a wheezy sigh.

“He already suspected it,” he said, taking another swallow of brandy.

“Then why did he put us through that charade at the swimming pool?”

“Have you ever heard of the Duke of Clarence?” asked Drummond.

“Is he related to the Duke of Wayne?”

Drummond shook his head, wearily.

“Another attempt at Yank humor, I expect,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Well, the Duke of Clarence was actually Prince Albert Victor, the grandson of Queen Victoria. His father was King Edward the Seventh. They called the boy Prince Eddy.”

“So the kid had a lot of names—very impressive,” said Taggart, thumbing through the next book of poems. “So what?”

“So Prince Eddy was a principal suspect in our infamous ripper murders,” said Drummond.

Taggart stopped and stared at him. “Jack the Ripper?”

“The same.”

“Was there any proof?” asked Taggart.

“Rumors of there being some,” said Drummond, finishing his first glass of brandy and then pouring another measure. “If there ever was any, it was destroyed forty years ago. A predecessor of mine at the Yard once told me that he had seen papers written by Sir William Gull that claimed Prince Eddy was suffering from syphilis.”

“Who was Gull?” asked Taggart.

“The royal-family physician,” said Drummond. “According to his papers, Prince Eddy contracted the infection while carousing with a coterie of local whores aboard his yacht in the West Indies. When he finally learnt what he had contracted, his rage and dementia supposedly led him to commit the ripper murders. Later on, Sir William allegedly informed the king that Eddy was not only dying of syphilis but had admitted to being the ripper. Eddy was then taken away to a private sanitarium, where he was locked up until he died.”

“Do you believe it?” asked Taggart, moving on to the books on the next shelf.

“I wouldn’t disbelieve it.”

“What has that got to do with Colonel Gaines? And why would he try to cover up the murder of Jocelyn Dunbar? Isn’t she a member of the royal family?”

“I should think it would be obvious to you, Major Taggart: to protect another member of the royal family … perhaps more highly placed,” Drummond came right back.

“What about the other murders of young women here in London recently?” asked Taggart.

“We know of at least three.”

“Who were the victims?”

“All young women, single and attractive, but there was no other common thread between them. One was a shop girl, another just arrived from the country, the third a student nurse.”

“How were they killed?”

“They were all criminally assaulted. Two were strangled. The latest one was killed with a stab wound to the chest.”

“I doubt they’re connected to Joss Dunbar,” said Taggart.

“I agree with you,” said Drummond. “With so many foreign troops stationed in and around the city, these types of crimes are inevitable.”

“So what is your theory?” asked Taggart, picking up still another volume.

“I think Lady Dunbar was killed by someone who thought she could incriminate him in something,” said Drummond.

“Something?” repeated Taggart.

“That’s your department, isn’t it?”

Taggart was about to respond when his thumb suddenly found an extra space between two of the pages. Looking down at it, he saw a piece of cream-colored stationery folded into the bookbinding. Using his handkerchief, he nudged the paper from its resting place and carefully unfolded it. The handwriting at the top looked as if it had been written in rusty brown ink.

“‘My God, you shall pay for this,’” Taggart read aloud. “‘I’ll wring that obstinate little heart.’” It was signed, “Noel.”

Another passage was written below the first. Although it was also written in brown ink, the handwriting was definitely different. The letters were so small that Taggart couldn’t read them in the shadowy light. Holding the edge of the page with his handkerchief, he carried it over to the lamp next to Drummond’s chair.

“‘9 August’,” he continued reading aloud. “‘I asked you not to send blood but Yet do—because if it means love I will have it. I cut the hair too close & bled much more than you need—I pray that you put not the knife blade near where quei capelli grow.’”

In one of the fold lines, Taggart noticed what appeared to be sandy-colored hair cuttings. He pointed them out to Drummond, who put on his spectacles and took the page from him, still using the handkerchief to grasp it.

“What book did you find it in?” he asked, holding the page up to the light.

Taggart brought the book over from the shelf.

“Prometheus Unbound,”
he said, reading the title before starting carefully to leaf through the rest of the pages.

“Percy Shelley,” replied Drummond as he inspected the stationery under the lamp. “These are definitely hair clippings.”

Taggart opened the book to the flyleaf, and began going through it page by page, searching for any handwritten inscriptions.

“This isn’t brown ink. I believe that both these notes were written in blood,” said Drummond.

Taggart put down the book. “That notepaper could have been inside the book for years,” he said. “The words sound like they were written a hundred years ago. Hell, the book may not even have been hers.”

“I would assume it was,” said Drummond, rubbing his eyes.

“Yeah,” agreed Taggart. “We need to find out if she was ever close to someone named Noel.”

“Leave it to me,” said Drummond.

“After your lab boys examine it, I want Lieutenant Marantz to have a look at this, too.”

“The Jewish lass?” said Drummond.

“Yeah. You have a problem with her?”

“Only that I wish I was forty years younger and single,” he came back with a tired smile.

CHAPTER 10

L
iza’s office at SHAEF was still locked and sealed when she returned in the morning, accompanied by a crime-scene technician from the SHAEF military-police detachment. He was a fingerprint specialist, and Liza had him start with Joss’s desk.

After he had unpacked his leather kit bag and begun to dust, she carefully examined the broken lock on the right bank of drawers, where Joss kept all her confidential documents.

The top two drawers, which were usually crammed with hand-inscribed notes from Admiral Jellico, now stood empty. So was the drawer in which Liza knew that Joss kept her address book and personal items. Based on the tapered gouges around the keyed lock, she concluded that it had been forced open with a screwdriver or small pry bar. The same gouges surrounded the broken lock on Charlie’s desk. For some reason, the thief had not tampered with the lock on J.P.’s desk or her own. The lock bars on the file cabinets were also untouched.

As Liza was completing a search of her own confidential papers, J.P arrived. Without a greeting, she went straight to her desk, turned on the snake lamp, and pointed it directly toward herself. She wasn’t wearing makeup, and in the harsh light of the naked bulb her face looked haggard. Opening her handbag, she took out her hand mirror and an array of small cosmetic cases.

“Please don’t touch anything on the desk until the crime technician is finished over there,” said Liza.

“Sure,” said J.P., glancing over at her with a surprised look before beginning to apply foundation to her cheeks.

Liza wrote out a requisition order for Joss’s service record from the records unit, and called for a courier to run it upstairs to the file clerk’s office. She happened to glance up at one point, and found J.P. gazing at her with new curiosity.

“Are you a cop?” she asked, moistening the tip of an eyebrow pencil with her tongue.

“Something like that,” replied Liza. “Do you know yet whether anything is missing from your desk?”

“There isn’t,” said J.P. “I checked yesterday, when I saw that they had broken into Charlie’s desk, too.”

Her wording struck Liza as odd.

“Why did you say ‘they’?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” said J.P., darkening her eyebrows in contrast to her bleached blond hair. She stopped when she realized that Liza was still staring at her. “Really, I don’t.”

The crime technician was taking prints off every surface on which he found them, pausing only to photograph the two broken locks.

“Are your fingerprints on file upstairs?” asked Liza.

“Ummm … I’m not sure,” said J.P.

“Well, we need to have a set of yours, mine, and Charlie’s, to screen them out from any others the technician might find.”

“Fine,” she said.

“I also need to ask you some questions about Joss,” said Liza.

J.P.’s hand stopped in midair, a powder puff poised an inch from her chin.

“I really didn’t know her … outside the office,” she said.

“That’s all right,” said Liza. “One never knows what might be helpful. We need to find out everything we can—people who came to visit her, things like that.”

“I really don’t know anything,” said J.P. “She was a very quiet girl, as you know. We never went out to lunch or anything.”

Liza grabbed a steno pad and pencil from her desk and sat down in the chair next to J.P.’s desk.

“How long have you worked here?” she began with a reassuring smile.

“Umm … three months, I guess,” J.P. said nervously.

Within a few minutes, Liza knew that she was either badly frightened or hiding something. Her manner became uncooperative to the point of hostility, and her answers to the most innocuous questions were needlessly evasive. Liza wondered whether it might have something to do with her relationship with General Kilgore.

“I don’t know if I should be talking like this,” said J.P. finally, standing up from her chair.

“I am fully authorized to conduct this interview, Lieutenant,” replied Liza firmly.

“I know—I understand that,” said J.P. “Maybe it’s because it’s all happened so fast. It’s still hard for me to believe that Joss is really dead.”

Her face contorted for a moment, and tears started to flow, smudging the makeup she had applied.

“I think I should go home,” said J.P., picking up her purse and walking straight out the door.

Liza waited ten minutes to see if she would return, and then went upstairs to the records unit. Joss’s service record was waiting for her. She took the thick folder back to the office, opened it to the first page, and began to read.

The first five documents were a summary of Joss’s family background and education, obviously prepared as part of a background check by Naval Intelligence. Apparently, she had grown up shuttling between a London mansion, a country house in Devonshire, and a castle in Normandy.

Her father was a viscount, and her mother a Huguenot of both French and German extraction. At the age of seven, Joss had been sent to a boarding school in Switzerland, followed by two more in France. She was at the Sorbonne in Paris when Germany attacked Poland in 1939 and war was declared by England.

Looking up at the clock, she saw that it was already eleven, and Charlie had not yet checked in at the office. Concerned, she picked up the phone and called the security office, which monitored the schedules of the entire staff. After asking to be connected to Captain Wainwright, she was told that he was attending a conference at Field Marshal Montgomery’s office.

Calling up to the records unit, she found that copies of Charlie‘s, Joss’s, and J.P.’s fingerprints were already on file, along with her own. She asked to have them sent to her right away. When the crime technician was finished, she gave them to him. He told her that he would review all the prints and report back to her the following morning.

Having not taken time for breakfast, she was about to order lunch from the food trolley when Sam called to give her an update on his search of Joss’s apartment. He said that Drummond’s office would be sending over the handwritten note he had found after the hair clippings were forensically analyzed at Scotland Yard. Liza told him about the rifling of Charlie’s and J.P.’s desks, as well as her unsatisfactory interview with J.P. Sam said that he would schedule an appointment with General Kilgore as soon as possible.

“I also checked on what your friend Captain Wainwright does,” said Sam. “He is in code analysis.”

“You mean he’s a code-breaker?” she asked.

“No, analysis is different,” said Sam. “He’s an Oxford whiz kid, brains off the chart, with a degree in Germanic culture and civilization. He’s one of the people they bring in to flesh out the meaning of Kraut military traffic after it’s decoded.”

That explained why he would disappear for hours at a time, thought Liza. He only parked himself at his office desk with his chessboard when there was nothing important for him to do.

“You should know that he is one of a handful of people who have access to information requiring the highest security clearance we’ve got,” said Sam. “I can’t tell you any more than that, but he may be some kind of target in this whole thing. Try to keep a close eye on him.”

She knew he was talking about the highly secret intercepts that she had learned about after reading hundreds of privileged communications in her first week on the job. Obviously, Charlie was one of the people assigned to help interpret them.