As we finished our cups of tea, I said to the Bedford inspector, ‘So what happens now?’
‘I’ll have someone drive you home.’
So I’m off the hook.
‘What about the envelope?’ I asked.
‘Goes back to the Yard.’
‘And how long will they keep it?’
‘Probably until someone’s nicked and convicted. No use to you now, is it?’ The question was rhetorical. ‘Eventually it’ll be destroyed with tons of other rubbish.’
We returned to his office for him to make arrangements for a driver to ferry me home. ‘Wait there a minute,’ he said, as if an afterthought had suddenly occurred to him mid-stride. ‘I’m just going to make a private call. Won’t be a minute.’ Obviously it concerned something he was anxious for me not to hear.
‘I’ve just spoken with the Yard,’ he said, on his return. ‘They still want to speak with you direct. Not urgently. Nothing to worry about.
Oh, yeah!
‘If they were still taking this seriously, they’d have sent a posse down right away to collect you,’ he continued convivially, seeing my frown. ‘I’ve outlined the situation to them. They saw the funny side of it.’
But I hadn’t!
‘Then why do they still want to question me?’ I queried.
‘Just to officially sign it off, so to speak. To see that you really are the Michael Litchfield they know about. You know what they’re like up there; reckon we provincials are cowboys, with straw sticking from our ears.’
‘So why have they left it to you to interview me in the first place?’ I said logically, so I thought.
‘Because this is our turf,’ he replied protectively, as if talking about his garden or vegetable allotment.
I had already shown the inspector my Scotland Yard press card, but I could see that there was no future in further protests.
‘So what’s the arrangement?’ I wondered aloud.
‘You’re to report to Chelsea police station, at eleven on Monday morning.’
‘Chelsea police station?’ I double-checked, because this seemed strange. If not the Yard, I could fully understand Shepherd’s Bush, but Chelsea… Who was there who could possibly have a finger on the pulse of the ‘London Nudes’ investigation? I was soon to find out.
‘You should ask for Detective Superintendent Leonard Read. He’ll be expecting you.’
‘Nipper’ Read, the legend! He was one of the shrewdest detectives in the history of British policing, a real-life Sherlock Holmes, a cerebral cop who was making his name as a gangland-buster. He didn’t waste his time on the small-time racketeers. He went for the jugular of London’s most toxic and cut-throat criminals, in particular the infamous Kray brothers, who through bribery and every interpretation of corruption, including torture, had evaded justice for years. ‘Nipper’ was to prove their nemesis. However, unlike many Met detectives of that vibrant, heady period, he did it the honourable way; no planted evidence, no witnesses induced to perjure themselves and no ‘verballing’.
Interviews weren’t recorded electronically for some time to come and many defendants were said by the police to have confessed to a crime when that was a lie, hence the cry, ‘I’ve been verballed.’ Even Jimmy Evans, who was a career criminal, a specialist in safe-blowing, who also castrated the gangster George Foreman with a shotgun as revenge for bedding his wife, testified in his autobiography to ‘Nipper’s’ honesty. ‘A straight cop’, which was a very special commendation from a villain who wrote that he ‘hated every copper’ and as a breed they were ‘scum’.
My wife (we divorced several years later) was peeping around the net curtains in our living room when I scrambled as fast as possible out of the unmarked police car on my return from Bedford police station.
Before I was even halfway up the path to our house, she’d opened the front door and was hovering on the threshold to greet me with an outpouring of relief.
‘Thank God you’re back!’ she cooed. ‘You were gone so long, I was having kittens. I was getting frantic. I couldn’t call a solicitor because none of them are open on Saturdays. Any other day, including a Sunday, I could have phoned your office for help,’ she added.
I was pleased that she hadn’t been able to do either. Calling out a solicitor would have started to make the whole thing official and all informality would have been zapped. As for my news editor, Ken James, I wasn’t sure that I wanted him to know. It could have proved embarrassing for me, having disposed of the leaked, sensitive information in the careless way that I had. Better to allow it to run its course and see where it went. I’d lost all track of time and had no idea that I’d been entertained by the Bedford police for almost four hours. As hosts, they couldn’t be faulted.
Naturally Pearl was gagging to be regaled with the uncensored version of events. What was it all about? Was it a case of mistaken identity? Was I worried? Had I been treated fairly? Was it all sorted?
After I’d finished my account, which had been punctuated with a peppering of interruptions, she gasped in an uncontrived astonished tone, ‘They didn’t really believe you were that monster, surely?’
‘They feed on hope,’ I said,’ I said, trying to be blasé. ‘Sometimes that’s all they have for sustenance.’
Of course when I slipped in the little matter of having to see ‘Nipper’ Read in London on the Monday, she was horrified. ‘So you’re still a suspect? You’re not off the hook. You’re scaring me.’
‘It’s just protocol,’ I said breezily, endeavouring to keep any self-doubt camouflaged.
Pearl stood with her back to the gas fire, our wedding photograph on the simple mantelpiece, a shaky hand to her chin and our daughter nestling into her side, pestering to be cuddled. In reverie, she said absently, ‘I can’t get this out of my head: a wife somewhere might be standing just like I am, with her husband, perhaps chatting about what they can do for a bit of Saturday-night fun, and all he’s interested in is who he can next kill, when and where. Scary, isn’t it?’
What could I say? Nothing seemed appropriate, until she pondered aloud, ‘Do you think he’s married?’
I refrained from saying, ‘Just like me, you mean?’ Instead, I told her that Marchant had been counselling every species of shrink. ‘They all have their pet theories and you pays your money and takes your choice.’ There were those who believed that London’s new Jack was a prosaic husband and father, probably holding down a normal, regular job, though most likely a mundane one, but was a sexual deviant unfulfilled by sex with his wife. So he began frequenting brothels, where the prostitutes were prepared to indulge his outré taste and then one day he was infected with VD. Perhaps he passed it on to his wife, she accused him of whoring, banned him from her bed and the marriage disintegrated, for which he blamed not himself but the hookers, leading to a vendetta. That was a popular scenario trotted out over and over, just as much by pub-shrinks as qualified ones.
‘Reasonable,’ Pearl commented. ‘I don’t mean it’s reasonable what he’s doing, but the theory seems plausible.’
All the theories were plausible, but they wouldn’t help the police one jot until they had him in their headlights.
After more windmills of the mind and now cuddling Joanne, she asked, ‘And what are other shrinks saying?’
One popular storyline was that he was a loner, single, never been married, rejected by women, clumsy with his attempts at relationships, mocked in the workplace and couldn’t keep a decent job, of low intelligence but canny and vulpine, perhaps kicked about as a kid.
‘And suddenly he sees himself as all-powerful,’ she cottoned on.
The backers of this trend of thought argued that for the first time in his life he was the dominant one, seeing himself as the alpha of all alphas. He was in control. He gave the orders and dished out the punishment. He stalked the streets at night and alone decided who lived and who died. Such power was not only intoxicating but also orgasmic. The point stressed by these theorists was that this was more sexually gratifying for him than the climax, the killing, which was quite possibly a let-down, frustrating bathos. In this sense, he wasn’t a sex maniac. Sex wasn’t the driver. Any sexual satisfaction was a bi-product.
By the end of that eventful Saturday, I’d completely forgotten about the horse I’d backed. In fact, I never did learn about its fate. But I did remember its name: Surprise Packet.
***
‘Nipper’ Read greeted me as if we were inveterate drinking pals. Beaming from behind his desk, he said, as he shook hands with the vigour of a cocktail-barman at work with his shaker, ‘Good of you to drop by.’ Same patter as at Bedford; perhaps it’s in the training manual. Just as if I’d turned up to a charity coffee morning. ‘I hope I’m not keeping you from anything important,’ he continued apologetically. ‘I can’t imagine we’ll be long. Just a formality. Red tape. One of the admin nightmares of climbing the ladder. Oh, well…’
My instinctive reflex to it’s just a formality was to reinforce my guard and shore up my alertness. I had learned very quickly that nothing was ever a mere formality for the police during a multiple-murder inquiry. If it had indeed been a trivial matter, I wouldn’t have been sitting opposite ‘Nipper’, who was already a Scotland Yard grandee and the only detective in London to chill the hot blood of the murderous Kray brothers.
Despite his disarming chumminess, we’d never met before. Indeed, we were also destined never to cross paths again. The first impression he made on me, apart from his cheerfulness, came from his stature. For some inexplicable reason, I was expecting to be confronted by an intimidating colossus, armed at least with a thumbscrew. Of course, his nickname should have been clue enough. He appeared so strikingly diminutive, though that may have been exaggerated because he was slumped in his leather-padded chair, jacket slung over the back, and the sleeves of his spotlessly clean and starched white shirt rolled up. Nipper was also very dapper.
And there on his desk, taking centre stage, taunting me, was that ubiquitous evidence-bag containing the wretched envelope, the little demon that was haunting me like a fiendish leprechaun.
Nipper began by prodding the plastic bag and saying something to the effect that, ‘I bet you’ll never throw away another envelope on public transport.’ He was still all smiles and bonhomie. Not once was this unlaboured cordiality to diminish. ‘If you wrote about this, no one would believe you.’
‘Certainly it wouldn’t work in fiction,’ I said. ‘Not a chance of suspending disbelief.’
After some thought, he said, bonding seamlessly, a master craftsman, something I had to admire, ‘Funny old phrase that. ’Why can’t they just say unbelievable?’ The question was rhetorical and directed more at himself than me. ‘I guess unbelievable wouldn’t be sufficiently bookish.’
Finally, he returned to the relevant tramlines: ‘You’re obviously aware we’ve had a comprehensive report from our colleagues in Bedford. I hope they didn’t spoil your weekend.’
We were still circling one another metaphorically like animals sniffing for a sign of weakness, one cunningly predatory and the other hedgehog-defensive.
‘No, no,’ I said. ‘They were most hospitable. The tea was even drinkable.’
Suddenly he was effusive with an apology. ‘Good heavens, I haven’t offered you a coffee. You must think me rude. Can I get you one?’
I thanked him and we went through the customary social ritual of whether I preferred it black or white, sugar or no sugar, and if yes to sugar, then how much. This was truly surreal. If his ploy was to bamboozle me, then he was conclusively successful. It was all so polite and civilised that, instead of my being mellowed, I was anxiously expecting a trapdoor to snap open beneath my chair at any moment.
He was articulate and urbane, nothing remotely resembling the movie image of top gangbusters. I was soon to discover that many of the lodestars of the Yard confounded public perception. Flying Squad supremo Tommy Butler, for example, was another small man, though very different in character from Nipper. Despite his exalted public persona and the rollercoaster saga of his abortive attempts to extradite Great Train Robber and prison escapee Ronnie Biggs from Brazil, Butler had a reputation among London’s underworld for being a bigger villain than the civilian criminals. In Soho, it was common knowledge that Butler, known none too affectionately as the ‘Grey Fox’, regularly pocketed bribes from hitman Freddie Foreman, and £30,000-plus of the stash recovered from the Great Train Robbery was locked in his personal safe at the Yard and not added to the rest of the hot loot harvested from raids by honest officers. The money recouped was only ever a fraction of the original stolen two and a half million pounds at a time when a new house in the Home Counties could be bought for three grand.
Read and Butler will feature prominently throughout this narrative, so it is worth pausing at this point to grasp their significance and counterpoint personas.
After his retirement, Nipper Read wrote an autobiography, in which he was scathing of the ‘Grey Fox’, writing that ‘in one way’ Butler was ‘the worst detective I’ve ever come across.’ How about that for an uppercut to an ego? Read elaborated, ‘He was so secretive.’ Diluting the poison, but only marginally and momentarily, Nipper conceded that Butler was a ‘great investigator’, only to return to the arsenic with a withering assault on Tommy’s inability to inspire a rapport with his grafting worker-bees and that he was a hopeless team player:
‘Really opening up and having a conference, saying, “Listen, chaps, this is what it’s all about” would have been as alien as cutting his own throat. He was obsessed by security. He would never tell his men what was happening where or when.
‘Occasionally he would join his team for a drink, but it was only occasionally. He was a very private man and no one was ever really close to him. Unmarried, he lived with his mother, but home was really the CID office.’
These negative features of Butler were soon to luridly fire certain people’s susceptible and vindictive imaginations.
Read complained that Butler shut himself in his office upstairs in Paddington Green police station in the evenings and officers downstairs would hear him thumping his typewriter for hours, as if involved in a two-fingered punch-up. ‘Downstairs we could hear the tapping of the machine,’ Read recounted reproachfully. ‘No one knew what he was doing.’ The vision penned by Read was of an anti-social, obsessive maverick, devoid of any gregarious instinct or skills of social interaction.
Perhaps Butler was something of an elusive enigma, because Read softened his tone at one point, stressing the ‘enormous affection’ people had for Tommy ‘because on the face of it, he was such a lovely man.’ On the face of it was the prelude to more venom. He was really suggesting that Butler wasn’t all that he seemed; that he was a sham or, at best, a chameleon. ‘He had a good sense of humour and a nice attitude. The police and detection were his only obsessions.’
There are, of course, some inconsistencies in Read’s assessment of Butler, but clearly these two contemporary giants of the Yard were not of the same breed.
Some readers might be confused when I refer to officers like Nipper Read and Tommy Butler as Scotland Yard icons and then describe them working from a foreign police station, such as Paddington Green or Chelsea. In those swashbuckling, romantic days, the top guns were nomadic. They would ‘set up shop’ in any Met police station that was conveniently located for the investigation they were heading and they would handpick a team, possibly drawn from several divisions within the metropolis.
Likewise, the murder squad comprised detective superintendents and detective inspectors who were stationed throughout London. They would be assigned to homicides almost on a rota basis or where they happened to be camped at the time of a crime. There were no regional crime squads, so investigations into provincial murders would be sub-contracted to Scotland Yard and delegated to one of the murder squad doyens to take charge. Murder squad was an umbrella title for a whole circus of specialists, operating from many locations, who would come together when called upon. The lead detective, always deferred to as the Guv’nor, would cherry-pick his team from a vast pool of talent. Each lead detective would have his favourites for major roles; a parallel were the casting directors of Hollywood blockbusters, who would tend to favour professionals he/she had worked with successfully before and trusted implicitly.
Jack Slipper, another fabled Yard cop who dovetailed effectively with Butler in the worldwide dragnet for the Great Train Robbers, also had some harsh words in his blunt memoirs, Slipper of the Yard, for the ‘Grey Fox’. Like ‘Nipper’, he best remembered Butler as a secretive night owl who worked late hours and insisted on being left alone. ‘Night was his best time,’ he recalled. ‘He never came in early in the morning, but if he did it was best to keep out of his way. Often, if you passed him in the morning, he’d walk right by you, or he might just growl. He had quite a few odd habits, but one in particular was the way he used to go home at night. Late in the evening, he’d sometimes go down to the Red Lion, a pub just near the Yard, for a drink before going home. He wasn’t much of a drinker and, by Squad standards, you’d say he didn’t really drink at all! He didn’t smoke either [though he died from lung cancer, aged only fifty-seven] but he’d drop into the pub occasionally to be sociable. Then, if he’d sent his driver off earlier, he’d take a lift with whoever was last on duty. He was a single man and he lived with his mother in a little house in Washington Road, Barnes, near Hammersmith Bridge.’
Apparently, Butler would never allow the driver to drop him off outside his mother’s house. Neither would he ever invite another cop into his home, even if they had known one another for years and had worked countless investigations together. In fact, he went to extreme lengths to ensure that he was never seen in a police car near his neighbourhood. Whatever the weather – rain, hail, snow, ice or fog – he would order his late-night chauffeur to stop the car at least half a mile from where he lived. ‘Just here will do nicely,’ he’d say, said one retired detective sergeant. ‘We might even be a mile from his terraced place. I don’t reckon it was a case of his being ashamed of being a copper; quite the reverse, he was chuffed by his status in society and his achievements. It’s my opinion, and lots of people speculated over the years about his weird habits, that he was protecting his old mum.
‘I think he feared that if locals got to know who he was and how he earned his crust, his mum could become a target; even be kidnapped and held hostage as a bargaining tool, especially when he was rounding up those cowboys [the Great Train Robbers]. I mean, if any friend or relative of the gang got hold of the old girl and stashed her in a coal-cellar, say, somewhere in the East End, just imagine the leverage they’d reckon they had over Tommy. They would think they’d struck gold, an insurance policy that guaranteed their freedom. But it wouldn’t have been, you know. He’d have allowed the bastards to slit his old mum’s throat rather than let a villain get the better of him. I believe he feared his own response to anyone making off with his old ma, so he went to extremes to keep the risks to a minimum. No villain would ever be allowed to manipulate him, however high the stakes for potential personal loss.’ On that score, it appeared that this ex-cop’s loyalty and reverence to the ‘Grey Fox’ was misplaced.
The evidence is strong that Butler was milking money seized from the Great Train Robbers as and when they were captured to cushion and sweeten his retirement.
Shortly before his retirement, Butler was arrested in Juan-les-Pins, a swanky jet-set resort next to Antibes and between Nice and Cannes on the French Riviera. A female sunbather reported him to the police for ogling the hundreds of bikini-clad women – most of them socialites – through high-powered, military-issue binoculars and also taking reels of photographs. In other words, he was suspected of being a creepy Peeping Tom and a possible stalker threat to women. He had caught the attention of many people because he was ‘at it’ for four hours continuously, not even a break for a drink or a snack.
Of course he protested vociferously when two officers frogmarched him to their wagon and pitched him headfirst through the rear doors, landing at the feet of two snarling Alsatians, much to the appreciation and amusement of the aggrieved beach-beauties. Butler’s knowledge of the French language was limited to oui and s’il vous plaît, neither of which was appropriate, so the gendarmes hadn’t a clue what he was ranting about.
When he was asked by the chief of the local gendarmerie to explain his behaviour, Butler confidently produced his Scotland Yard warrant card and claimed to be on the trail of Bruce Reynolds, the mastermind of the Great Train Robbers, who was on the run. Butler had good reason to believe that Reynolds was high-rolling on the Riviera, funding his casino-gambling, champagne-guzzling and high-class whoring with his lion’s share of the stolen loot, equivalent to £45 million in 2016.
Although Juan-les-Pins was only a modestly sized resort, with a summer population of around seventy-five thousand, swollen by opulent tourists, the police chief was no simpleton and neither was he impressed, much to Butler’s chagrin, by the reputation of Scotland Yard; in fact, if anything, it was a red flag to a bull. The chief was particularly rattled by Butler’s insinuation that the two buffoons who had arrested him had probably allowed one of the world’s most ‘Wanted’ men to slip through the net yet again. Yet another blow to the etente cordiale!
For a start, the chief, whose English was adequate, was sniffy about the warrant-card, suggesting, quite legitimately, that it could easily be a forgery. He actually told Butler that he was a ‘funny-looking policeman,’ asking sardonically if his grey, rapidly receding hair was a disguise for undercover work.
Despite Nipper Read writing that Butler had a ‘good sense of humour’, on this occasion he wasn’t the least amused.
‘If you don’t believe who I am, call Scotland Yard,’ Butler said trenchantly.
The reply was a steady, ‘I intend to.’ Followed by, ‘And while I do, you can wait in one of the cells.’
Butler was incandescent. The great ‘Grey Fox’ locked in a grotty, foreign dungeon-style cell, suspected of being a beachcombing pervert! The UK was not yet in the Common Market, the precursor to the EC.
Butler’s version was that he was quickly put through on the phone to one of the commanders at the Yard and, after genial handshakes, a grovelling apology and salutations, he was shown the door, into the street, binoculars and camera returned. Only later did he discover that the film had been removed from the camera.
The cynics at the Yard weren’t conned by Butler’s story. First, he was on holiday. Before leaving, he hadn’t advised anyone of his plans and itinerary. True, whenever on leave in the UK, he was as restless as a flea without flesh on which to picnic. Work was Butler’s vocation and vacation. The Yard’s senior bureaucrats weren’t the least surprised to learn that Butler had used his leave to go robber-stalking on the Continent, leaving his mum to fend for herself…
There had been a plethora of anonymous reports that Reynolds had been spotted on the Riviera, a blonde in tow, which figured. Of course the Côte d’Azur covers a wide area; to say, ‘I saw Brucie boy living it up on the flippin’ Riviera’ was vastly different from alleging that he’d just been spotted in Soho. Because of Butler’s cagey modus operandi, only he knew the hotspots of the Reynolds supposed sightings. Saint Tropez, Antibes and Cannes would have been the obvious ones, so it could be logically assumed that Butler had been scouting in the most likely area, if indeed Reynolds was one of the big spenders among the new-moneyed playboys and girls in the ritzy South of France, once the preserve of international aristocrats.
The promenade in Juan-les-Pins was very similar to the one in Nice, and British in ambience. Once a fishing village, the resort had morphed dramatically into a pleasure playground for the idle, nouveau riche, vacationing Hollywood actors and starlets, voluptuous hookers, big-hitter thieves and more than a fair share of parvenus. Locals would picnic in the shade of the forest of pines, leaving the tourists to fry on the silky sand and the decks of garish yachts.
Butler was a pro-active predator. If there were no promising leads, he would follow his nose; writers would call it acting on a hunch, an impulse, which, make no mistake, had served him well in the past. Despite the vague and variable reports that placed Reynolds on the Riviera, it was Butler’s hooked nose that navigated him there.
To Butler, the Riviera was Bruce’s type of scene; it smelled right: glorious beaches, a night-life of sumptuous clubs and classy casinos, the mesmerising rattle of roulette wheels under glittering chandeliers, and underdressed women: a colony of shapely, bronzed bodies. Everyone there for enjoyment, exactly what the robbery was designed to finance.
Then there was the celebrated Hotel Le Provençal, of which Charlie Chaplin had been a patron. Yet more than all this, it was something else that Butler fancied would have been the irresistible magnet for Reynolds. The Grey Fox knew that Reynolds’s sobriquet in the London netherworld was ‘Napoleon’. Not too many professional British villains would have known that Napoleon Bonaparte had once resided on the coast between Antibes and Juan-les-Pins. Reynolds was by far the most intelligent of the Great Train Robbers and Butler doubtlessly surmised that the Napoleon of London’s gangland would be unable to resist the lure of following in the footsteps of his illustrious progenitor. Butler probably reasoned that Reynolds would be unable to resist the concept of returning as ‘Napoleon’ to Antibes, following in the Emperor’s footsteps; so delusional. Perhaps even a personal challenge to Butler to see if he could decode Reynolds’s movements and motives.
And Butler was right. Reynolds was there. On the beaches. Sauntering along the promenade with an arm embracing the bare flesh of a suntanned female. Impressing his escort with reckless wagers in the casinos. Sipping vintage champagne where once Charlie Chaplin had drunk. But here is the oddity: the chief of police in Juan-les-Pins had the films developed that had been confiscated from Butler and his long-lens camera and every shot was of a sunbathing female, many of them topless; there was not a single frame of a man.
The rolls of film were mailed to the Met Commissioner at Scotland Yard, while copies were retained. What was said in the missive to the Commissioner is not known to me, but probably the negatives were handed to Butler and that was the end of the matter. Naturally, there was much mirth among the senior ranks who were in the know. ‘Dirty old Peeping Tommy’ was the jibe by those mandarins at the Yard who disapproved of Butler’s methods. ‘A typical, hypocritical voyeur’ voiced one commander. ‘Tommy up to his old tricks!’ was the kinder locker-room expression of the few who hero-worshipped him. As for Butler, it was a storm in an empty teacup. Such was his standing, he could walk on water and not get his feet wet.
Just for the record, Reynolds had assumed the name of Keith Miller, living first in Mexico and Canada, before heading for the French Riviera, which was much too close for comfort. When Butler finally caught up with him, it was in respectable Torquay, known as the English Riviera, where Reynolds was the quiet and neighbourly Mr Keith Hiller. ‘Hello, Bruce, it’s been a long time [five years, to be exact],’ said the Grey Fox triumphantly. With a resigned shrug, Reynolds answered, ‘C’est la vie.’ Butler’s stunt on the real Riviera was history. Results were the only measure of a man – and increasingly women – in police forces. Reynolds had evaded detection overseas for so long, but like so many ex-pat criminals, especially cockneys for some reason, he was drawn to the womb of his homeland – and downfall.
Police protocol dictated that if investigators wanted to encroach on another force’s turf to follow leads, then there should be collaboration. It was simply a matter of common courtesy; you didn’t go plunging into someone else’s backyard to collect your ball without consulting the householder; the police principle was based on that basic premise. The French police, through Interpol, were well aware of the long-running hunt for Reynolds, yet Butler hadn’t informed any of the French law-enforcement agencies that he would be snooping around their south coast, which, if he had, would have spared him the embarrassment that occurred. Butler probably considered himself on a busman’s holiday and therefore etiquette didn’t apply. If he never told his own team what he was up to, why should anyone be surprised that he didn’t confide in the French?
When Butler retired, much of the media related the story of his pursuing Reynolds on the Continent while on holiday as an example of his dedication to duty; a copper to the core. Of course, they weren’t privy to the full story.
I have dwelt on Butler’s foibles because of their burgeoning relevance to the Nudes Murders as the considerable and bizarre twists and turns unfold.
***
During my encounter with Nipper Read at Chelsea police station, it was soon apparent that one of the reasons for having me there was to provide him with a natural opportunity to launch a fishing expedition to try to establish the identity of my mole. I cannot imagine that he ever really expected me to betray my source, but he was far more persistent and persuasive than the Bedford detective inspector. ‘It’ll just be between the two of us,’ he said, almost with hand-on-heart sincerity, the way a TV chat show presenter would jokingly say the phrase to a celebrity guest, with chuckles from the audience. ‘It won’t go any further than this room,’ he added, with the technique of a very smooth salesman. ‘I’m just intrigued.’
For all I knew, and indeed cared, he could have meant what he was saying; just cajoling something out of me to be stored in his own, private memory-file. Butler wasn’t the only Yard detective to squirrel away little secret nuggets about colleagues, information that could be traded for a future favour. My mole might have been useful to someone like Nipper in a different way, deploying him as a conduit for something he wanted making public, while at the same time distancing himself from the leak. If that was indeed why Nipper wanted me to finger my inside source, it would have worked to my advantage to have cooperated, but I couldn’t take the chance. Playing poker with Nipper wasn’t to be recommended.
Read’s attempt at camaraderie continued unabated until he finally ran out of steam, time and coffee. ‘Maybe we can do business together in the not too distant future,’ he said, with a sort of last throw of the dice. ‘I can understand why you’re so trusted by what’s his name?’ We both broke into laughter at his own Carry on Cops clumsy effort to con the name from me.
We parted cordially with a warm handshake and a matey slap on the back for me.
I was almost out of the door of his office when there was a comic Lieutenant Columbo, of TV fame, replicated sketch, but in reverse: ‘One last thing…’
I hovered on the threshold, door ajar.
‘I needed to see your face for myself; that was very necessary. This wasn’t a waste of time for me; I’m sorry, though, if it has been for you.’
He was already scribbling notes in a buff folder, head down, enigmatic as ever.
As I stepped into the murky street, my head was buzzing with the tantalising words, I needed to see your face for myself… what could he have meant? Was it some kind of warning? Or threat? Or could it have been a coded message?
I did not have long to wait for the answer.