She hunched her shoulders a little. Her teeth were lightly tapping together, like typewriter keys, but she was careful not to let him notice. “And how does he — is it always the same?”
“Always. Strangulation between the hands, with a thumb into the windpipe to keep them from crying out. They die in swift and sudden silence. And it must have been that way the first time too.”
“Isn’t there anything about him you know? At least, you do know he’s English?”
“No,” he said, “not even that. Hundreds of Americans have been living in London all during the war. Or for that matter, he could be any other nationality. It’s just that it was probably there that it happened.”
He ran his fingers through his hair, dislodging his hat a little.
“And here’s what’s so hopeless about it — what’s so dangerous about him. He’s insane, of course, but there’s only this one phase to his insanity. You probably think of him as some twisted, snarling, hunched-over thing, someone out of a Boris Karloff picture, prowling along glary-eyed, with his hands curved, so that you can spot him coming from a block away. He isn’t — or we would have caught him long ago. He’s probably perfectly normal in appearance and behavior. Maybe even clean-cut and rather likable looking. You could pass him on the street and never know. You could be around him for days at a time and never be any the wiser, never catch on that there was anything the matter with him. I bet many a time he’s brushed elbows with our own fellows, coming and going, and they never gave him a second look. But when the sirens hoot and the corner lamp-posts go out, the scene comes back to him. Then he sees someone vaguely like her in the dimness around him — or right afterward when the lights go on again. And that one defective wire in him is jangled and — pfft! — a short circuit!”
“Don’t the flowers tell you? They don’t grow wild on the city streets. He must get them from somewhere. Isn’t there some way of checking on who buys white roses, just before or during a blackout?”
“We’ve worked on that. No one buys flowers during a blackout. And he doesn’t buy them ahead, because he doesn’t know himself that it’s going to happen to him. We don’t know where he gets them. May as well admit it. He might never buy them the same way twice. Or he may always use the same method of getting them. He may steal them from some bush in some hot-house or conservatory that he knows of. Maybe he steps into a flower shop and buys some other kind of flower, and at the same time steals one of the white death-buds without being detected. Or he may have simply snatched one up from some street peddler, who sells so many of them one at a time all day long that he couldn’t be expected to remember. Or he may have done all these things alternately, one time one, next time another.”
“Terry, if you were the one to get him?”
“It would mean a citation and a promotion.”
“And all the things that stand between us — that you insist stand between us — would disappear?”
“Well, they’d become a lot slimmer.” He flung his cigarette down disgustedly. “But what chance have I? There isn’t one of us who hasn’t tried. We’ve all been working our heads off for weeks. And there isn’t one of us who hasn’t failed.”
“Maybe you’ve all tried in the wrong way. You’ve tried as the police, out to catch a criminal,” she said vaguely.
“What other way is there?”
She didn’t answer that. She was saying to herself: You haven’t tried as one of the girls whom he stalks and kills.
“Terry,” she said, “what were they like? You know — the ones he killed? What was it they all had that was the same. Give me kind of a composite picture of them, can you?”
He took out a little pocket notebook and turned the pages. “I told you about the age. They were all between nineteen and twenty-three. Their average height was pretty much the same, too. They were all tall girls, around five-six or seven.” He glanced at her. “About your height, maybe an inch taller. They were all dark-haired.”
“How did they wear their hair?”
“I haven’t got that down here. The death struggle disarranged it, of course, but I saw photographs of a couple of them. From what I can remember, they wore it sort of curly and loose, down their backs.”
He closed the notebook.
“That’s about as close as you get to a common denominator among them. I suppose each had a superficial resemblance, in the dim light or shadowy darkness where he came upon them, to that long-dead love of his own.”
“Where... where did it happen?”
“One took place a few blocks from a dance hall. He must have followed her away from there. Another worked late at night, in the business office of a taxi-company garage. He must have looked in through the window as he was passing and saw her alone in there. One was a girl from a small town upstate who came here looking for work. She was last seen at an employment agency where she registered to apply for a job. She was sent out to an address, and before she could get there a blackout occurred. She never reached the address. She was found halfway between the agency and her destination, where the blackout — and he — must have overtaken her.
“The last one worked in a department store. We think in that case he must have taken refuge in the store when the alert sounded outside. He evidently saw her there behind the counter and trailed her home at closing time. She was found right outside her own door, with her latchkey in one hand, ready to insert into the lock — and the white rose in the other.
“And that’s how the record stands as of tonight. We’re all waiting for it to happen again. We’re like a bunch of helpless amateurs.”
She didn’t say anything for a long time. Finally he turned and looked at her curiously. “Why are you sitting like that — so quiet? I guess I’ve frightened you by telling you all this.”
“Take me home,” she said absently, staring down at the counter before her.
He got up, threw down a coin, and escorted her toward the entrance.
“I shouldn’t have told you all that stuff. I’ve given you the creeps.”
She didn’t tell him so, but he hadn’t given her the creeps. He’d given her an idea.
The hollow-cheeked, gaunt-eyed Trowbridge butler, whose face bore a startling death-like look, stepped softly up behind Virginia Trowbridge’s chair, halfway through the dinner party. He whispered, “There’s a gentleman asking for you on the phone, Miss Ginny. He says he’s calling from some headquarters or other. I couldn’t quite get the name.”
She jumped up, nearly upsetting the chair in her hurry, and ran out of the room as if her life depended on it.
“This is Tom,” a man’s voice said when she had reached the phone. “I’m keeping my word to you, letting you know ahead...”
“Is there... is there going to be one tonight?” she asked in an excited undertone.
“I’m not supposed to tell you this. It’s a serious matter. But you know, Ginny, I can’t refuse you anything. And you promised me you wouldn’t let it go any further, if I did give you advance warning on each blackout.”
“I swear I won’t tell anyone else, Tom. I give you my word I won’t pass it on to another living soul. This is just for my own information. It’s... well, it’s hard to explain. It’s just a whim of mine.”
“I know I can depend on you to keep it to yourself. Well, the order’s just gone out. There’s going to be a complete city-wide blackout tonight.”