Free The London Blitz Murders by Max Allan Collins Page B

this war-torn world might her work serve?
    The only response she could come up with was, perhaps, a self-serving rationalization; recalling that RAF cadet she’d met yesterday, that brave lad whose life would soon be on the line for his country, Agatha knew that her silly little novels gave that hero-to-be solace, distracted him briefly from the problems of his real, very unpleasant world.
    She wondered if that were justification enough.
    Sipping her coffee (that she preferred the brew to tea seemed somehow unpatriotic), Agatha had another mental flash, suddenly remembering a dream she’d had last night. Usually her dreams left her within seconds of rising; other times she could vividly recall them long enough for her to record them in one of her notebooks… you never knew what mental trifle might prove useful in the writing game.
    The reason this dream had come back to her in so whole a state (and she had no notion whatever what subconscious nudge had brought it suddenly to the surface) was simple enough: this was a recurring dream, a dream she’d had (variously revised) many, many times….
    The nightmare dated to childhood and centered upon a figure she had come to term “the Gunman,” a handsome French soldier with a powdered wig, three-cornered hat, and a musket, his eyes a haunting, piercing light blue. Oddly, the figure in her nocturnal fantasies had never done anything threatening, muchless shoot the weapon at her: it was his very presence, specifically his incongruous presence, that frightened her.
    This dream figure of potential violence initially had turned up in a children’s party, where he would enter and ask to join the game. Later versions found him sitting at a tea table with an otherwise benign group of Agatha’s friends and relations; sometimes, in an eye-blink, her mother or sister or a chum would be replaced by the blue-eyed Gunman; other times she would be walking along the beach with a friend and then, suddenly, he and his weapon would be beside her, instead.
    Agatha felt strongly that there was no simplistically Freudian aspect to the dream—she had been very young when the Gunman dreams first began; and, anyway, she understood psychology well enough to know that if the figure had shot her or even threatened to shoot her, a sexual connotation might be drawn.
    But Sigmund himself had said it, hadn’t he? Sometimes a banana simply was a banana.
    Nor did she recall any storybook that she might have read as a child (or had read to her), whose vivid illustration of a soldier might have planted this seed of fright.
    The most disturbing of the dreams had been during her marriage to Archie. Even before their relationship had begun to deteriorate, she would dream of blue-eyed Archie—in his uniform of the Great War—metamorphosing into the blue-eyed Gunman. Chilling how little difference there was between the fantasy figure and the real Archie, how small a metamorphosis was required.
    Odd, wasn’t it? Even as a child she’d had an instinct that people were not always who or what they seemed, that even a friend or family member might become someone, something, sinister. Perhaps this was why she had been drawn to writingmysteries in which violence and menace lay beneath the humdrum surface of everyday living.
    “I hate to interrupt this reverie,” a familiar voice said.
    She looked up at her friend and neighbor, Stephen Glanville, a typically devilish grin on that Ronald Colmanesque, dimple-chinned face. Both dashing and professorial in a light gray tweed suit with dark gray bow tie, Stephen had some folded newspapers tucked under one arm, and was leaning on the chair opposite her at the small table.
    “Please join me, Stephen.”
    He did. “You looked perfectly glazed over, when I came in. I trust you’re lost in thought, devising fiendish plot twists for our Egyptian mystery.”
    Archaeologists were, by nature, a persistent lot.
    “Actually, I’m fiddling with the new Poirot idea.”
    “I