Needless to say, the local kids – at least those whose parents hadn’t packed them off to the countryside already – used to follow her down the street in gangs and chant, ‘Mad Maggie, Mad Maggie, she’s so mad, her brain’s all claggy…’ Children can be so cruel. Most of the time she ignored them, or seemed oblivious to their taunts, but once in a while she wheeled on them, eyes blazing, and started waving her arms around and yelling curses, usually in French. The children would squeal with exaggerated horror, then turn tail and run away.

Maggie never had any visitors; none of us had ever been inside her house; nobody in the community even knew what her real name was, where she had come from, or how she had got to be the way she was. We simply accepted her. There were rumours of course. Some gossip-mongers had it that she was an heiress cut off by her family because she went mad; others said she had never recovered from a tragic love affair; still others said she was a rich eccentric and kept thousands of pounds stuffed in her mattress.

Whoever and whatever Mad Maggie was, she managed to take care of life’s minutiae somehow; she paid her rent, she bought newspapers, and she handled her ration coupons just like the rest of us. She also kept herself clean, despite the restriction to only five inches of bath water. Perhaps her eccentricity was just an act, then, calculated to put people off befriending her for some reason? Perhaps she was shy or antisocial? All in all, she was known as Mad Maggie only because she never talked to anyone except herself, because of the old clothes she wore, because of her strange outbursts in French and because, as everyone knew, she never went to the shelters during air-raids, but would either stay indoors alone or walk the blacked-out streets muttering and arguing with herself, waving her arms at the skies as if inviting the bombs to come and get her.

When Harry called that Monday morning, I was lying in bed grappling with one of my frequent bouts of insomnia, waiting for the birds to sing me back to sleep. I couldn’t even tell if it was daylight or not because of the heavy blackout curtains. I had been dreaming, I remembered, and had woken at about half-past four, gasping for air, from my recurring nightmare about being sucked down into a quicksand.

I heard Harry banging at my door and calling my name, so I threw on some clothes and hurried downstairs. I thought at first that it might be something to do with Tommy, but when I saw his pale face, his wide eyes and the thin trickle of vomit at the corner of his mouth, I worried that he was having the heart attack he had been expecting daily for over twenty years.

He turned and pointed down the street. ‘Frank, please!’ he said. ‘You’ve got to come with me.’

I could hear the fear in his voice, so I followed him as quickly as I could to Maggie’s house. It was a fine October morning, with a hint of autumn’s nip in the air. He had left the door ajar. Slowly, I pushed it open and went inside. My first impression was more surprise at how clean and tidy the place was than shock at the bloody figure on the carpet. In my defence, lest I sound callous, I had fought in the first war and, by some miracle, survived the mustard gas with only a few blisters and a nasty coughing fit every now and then. But I had seen men blown apart; I had been spattered with the brains of my friends; I had crawled through trenches and not known whether the soft, warm, gelatinous stuff I was putting my hands in was mud or the entrails of my comrades. More recently, I had also helped dig more than one mangled or dismembered body from the ruins, so a little blood, a little death, never bothered me much. Besides, despite the pool of dried blood around her head, Mad Maggie looked relatively peaceful. More peaceful than I had ever seen her in life.

Funny, but it reminded me of that old Dracula film I saw at the Crown, the one with Bela Lugosi. The count’s victims always became serene after they had wooden stakes plunged through their hearts. Mad Maggie hadn’t been a vampire, and she didn’t have a stake through her heart, but a bloodstained posser lay by her side, the concave copper head and wooden handle both covered in blood. A quick glance in the kitchen showed only one puzzling item: an unopened bottle of milk. As far as I knew, Harry’s last round had been the morning of the air raid, last Wednesday. I doubted that Maggie would have been able to get more than her rations; besides, the bottle top bore the unmistakable mark of the dairy where Harry worked.

Harry waited outside, unwilling to come in and face the scene again. Once I had taken in what had happened, I told him to fetch the police, the real police this time.

They came.

And they went.

One was a plainclothes officer, Detective Sergeant Longbottom, a dull-looking bruiser with a pronounced limp, who looked most annoyed at being called from his bed. He asked a few questions, sniffed around a bit, then got the ambulance men to take Maggie away on a stretcher.

One of the questions Sergeant Longbottom asked was the victim’s name. I told him that, apart from ‘Mad Maggie’, I had no idea. With a grunt, he rummaged around in the sideboard drawer and found her rent book. I was surprised to discover that she was called Rose Faversham, which I thought was actually quite a pretty name. Prettier than Mad Maggie, anyway. Sergeant Longbottom also asked if we’d had any strangers in the area. Apart from an army unit billeted near the park where they were carrying out training exercises, and the gypsy encampment in Silverhill Woods, we hadn’t.

‘Ah, gypsies,’ he said, and wrote something in his little black notebook. ‘Is anything missing?’

I told him I didn’t know, as I had no idea what might have been here in the first place. That seemed to confuse him. For all I knew, I went on, the rumour might have been right, and she could have had a mattress stuffed with banknotes. Sergeant Longbottom checked upstairs and came back scratching his head. ‘Everything looks normal,’ he said, then he poked around a bit more, noting the canteen of sterling silver cutlery, and guessed that Mad Maggie had probably interrupted the thief, who had killed her and fled the scene – probably back to the gypsy encampment. I was on the point of telling him that I thought the Nazis were supposed to be persecuting gypsies, not us, but I held my tongue. I knew it would do no good.

Of course, I told him how everyone in the neighbourhood knew Mad Maggie paid no attention to air raids, how she even seemed to enjoy them the way some people love thunderstorms, and how Tom Sellers, the ARP man, had remonstrated with her on many occasions, only to get a dismissive wave and the sight of her ramrod-stiff back walking away down the street. Maggie had also been fined more than once for blackout infringements, until she solved that one by keeping her heavy black curtains closed night and day.

I also told Longbottom that, in the blackout, anyone could have come and gone easily without being seen. I think that was what finally did it. He hummed and hawed, muttered ‘Gypsies’ again, made noises about a continuing investigation, then put his little black notebook away, said he had pressing duties to attend to and left.

And there things would have remained had I not become curious. No doubt Mad Maggie would have been fast forgotten and some poor, innocent gypsy would have been strung up from the gallows. But there was something about the serenity of Mad Maggie’s features in death that haunted me. She looked almost saintlike, as if she had sloughed off the skin of despair and madness that she had inhabited for so long and reverted to the loving, compassionate Christian woman she must have once been. She had a real name now, too: Rose Faversham. I was also provoked by Detective Sergeant Longbottom’s gruff manner and his obvious impatience with the whole matter. No doubt he had more important duties to get back to, such as the increased traffic in black market onion substitutes.