Although Frances Brown had been removed from the streets of west London on Friday, 23 October and never returned to them, it was another eight days before her disappearance was made known to the police and even then she wasn’t reported as a missing person; more that she was a ruddy nuisance, a pain in the butt.
Her whereabouts seemed to be of complete indifference and insignificance to the man she’d been sharing her grotty life with, on and off (more off than on), Dublin-born Paul Quinn, a scaffolder by trade and layabout by nature, at 16a Southerton Road, Hammersmith. He was aggrieved at being left holding the baby – quite literally.
Very pertinent and illuminating was Quinn’s conversation at Hammersmith police station in the afternoon of Saturday, 31 October with a woman uniformed officer, Sergeant Elizabeth Neale. His reason for visiting the police station was the bundle in his arms and not, he stressed vehemently, to report his partner missing, to have someone take off his hands the baby, who peeped from a blanket, a dummy keeping him quiet. Naturally a statement was taken and this was later to find its way into the ever-swelling ‘Nudes’ murder file, still retained today in Scotland Yard’s archives.
In her report, Sergeant Neale wrote, ‘Mr Quinn appeared completely at ease and he did not express any concern regarding the well-being or whereabouts of Brown. His only concern appeared to be for the child. He emphatically denied being the child’s father, but stated that he had taken her (Brown) back and made a home for her and the baby because he thought that, with the added responsibility, she would settle down.’ This in itself alluded to the rollercoaster ride of both their toxic lives. All very laudable on his behalf, if not exactly plausible.
When pressed as to why he hadn’t already filed a missingperson’s report on Brown if they were indeed a couple, as he indicated, he brushed it off as ‘unnecessary’, a waste of his time and that of the police. According to Quinn’s unflattering account, particularly of himself, Brown would ‘take off for weeks on end’, eventually ‘crawling back all contrite and pitiful, and would take her beating like a woman should.’ Nice. Yet, from many anecdotes – mainly his, it has to be said – ‘all’ the women fell for his charm! Germane to this narrative is the fact that, in many respects, he was a Freddie Mills lookalike, with black curly hair, blue eyes, several false teeth, cauliflower ears, a boxer’s nose, and tattoos, one of a nude woman, on his arms and chest. Mills had been one of Britain’s post-war sporting heroes, winning the world light-heavyweight championship of the world. After retiring from the ring, he’d sustained his celebrity status as a TV personality and by making a movie debut. It wasn’t long, however, before his phone stopped ringing and show business moved on without him. We shall see later that he has a starring role to play in this book.
Alarm bells weren’t sounding in Neale’s head. Quinn’s Irish blarney was, apparently, superficially believable, if sordid. On her godforsaken patch, Neale was accustomed to hearing about convoluted and outré domestic situations and multiple relationships; they went with the territory, part of the peeling wallpaper and threadbare patchwork. What she didn’t know at this stage was that Quinn was married and Frances Brown was a professional prostitute. Add to the mix that Quinn had a police record and was already co-habiting with blonde Beryl Mahood, who had been with Brown on the night she vanished, and you had an imbroglio that was too tangled to begin to unravel, but I shall try.
Quinn gave the impression that he had been looking after the baby single-handedly like a saintly lone parent, but, in fact, all the nappy-changing and baby-feeding had been undertaken by Mahood, while still whoring at night. Nipping back to give the baby his milk, while she was swigging from a whisky bottle, then she’d be off again into the chilly night to milk the punters, with Quinn either in a pub or in the bedroom on top of someone else under his spell.
Mahood had been born Beryl Dickson in Portadown, Co. Armagh. By the age of sixteen, she was pregnant, so she married the father of her baby, Charles Mahood. Within six months of the wedding, the couple separated: he left her to go to prison. Without waiting more than a few hours, she hopped on a ferry to Liverpool and on to Blackburn in Lancashire, where she fell foul of the law, receiving two convictions for larceny. Down the road in Accrington, she was charged with fraud and given a conditional discharge. There was only one hope for survival, she decided. The bright lights of London shone before her defeated eyes. Streets paved with gold. Heard the story before in your childhood? Just insert Beryl for Dick. So she hitch-hiked south, making it safely to Slough, which didn’t look much like London to her and it wasn’t, of course, much to her dismay. Being homeless, she ‘slept around’ – make of that what you will – and soon had enough money to travel the final few miles by public transport to her perceived magic city (maybe that’s a bit strong). The Shepherd’s Bush Hotel was her final destination, where she was soon befriended by Frances Brown and Paul Quinn, who invited her to stay with them. Now she was properly on the game.
Remarkably, 23 October was only her second night on the streets with Brown. It was nothing more than a spin of the coin which of the two cars they chose. Is that what is meant by the lottery of life?
A chance meeting in the Kensington Park Hotel with his estranged wife, Maureen Quinn, led to more upheaval and complications. She was unaccompanied and, after a few drinks together, Paul proposed they tried a reconciliation, probably because he realised that he would require a more permanent and reliable babysitter than Mahood. His wife asked about Frances – there were few secrets on these loveless and forlorn streets – and Quinn explained simply that ‘she’d gone’. How true!
However, the entanglement was even more complex. Maureen was living with another man, but, after some cogitation, cajoling and more whisky, she declared, ‘Why not?’ Anyone who knew Quinn and his habits could have given a thousand reasons why not; no one more so than his own wife, who, of her own free will and accord, was prepared to re-enter the snake pit. ‘Let’s give it a go,’ she said, in a drunken whim and deserted her lover (maybe that’s too strong a label) for her husband, only to find Mahood a cuckoo in the nest.
Before Maureen could flounce out, Quinn promised to ‘sort it’ and promptly kicked out Mahood. As you might expect, the exchange of language was ripe and revengeful. Now it was Maureen’s turn to care for another woman’s child and that soon led to more emotional pyrotechnics and a quick renewal of their separation vows. Hence Quinn’s pained arrival at Hammersmith police station, pleading for assistance, sort of police protection, but for the child’s sake, not his, of course. Very noble. He had run out of nursemaids. Don’t forget, this was the 1960s when sexual liberation had gone to the nation’s head, addling the collective brain, especially in raunchy London town, but even by those dubious standards the bed-hopping merry-go-round of the ‘Quinn set’ was something extraordinary.
When Neale examined the baby, she was satisfied that the child hadn’t been physically neglected or harmed. One issue that continued to gnaw at her was the registered name of the child. Yet Paul Quinn continued adamantly to reject that he was the biological father. ‘I did it as a favour to her,’ he claimed, referring to Brown and his signature on the birth certificate. He was a Catholic, he explained, and it wasn’t right for a child to grow up without both parents’ name on the birth certificate. The baby was conceived when Brown had run off with ‘another fella’, he said, and she returned only so that he (Quinn) could serve as surrogate father to the boy. The moral maze was not for Neale to dwell on or unpick, thankfully for her, so she advised Quinn to consult a child welfare officer in the department’s local headquarters on Holland Park Avenue, which he duly did on the following Monday morning.
The welfare officer who interviewed Quinn was Joan Halfacree, to whom he repeated the story, virtually word for word, he had regaled to the female police officer on the Saturday. However, when questioned further, he spiced his story with more colour and incriminating revelations than in the police station. After accusing Brown of being ‘a lazy slag’, abdicating responsibility for her child, and constantly ‘absenting herself’ from their home, he confessed that whenever she did ‘crawl back with her tail between her legs’ he always ‘belted her’.
In her later statement to the police, the child welfare officer stated that Quinn boasted he would do so again if he had ‘the chance’. Quinn pressed the point that if he took any more time off work he would be fired, so the baby was taken into care and placed with a foster mother, which must have been the right course of action. But still there was no apparent thought of Brown. Quinn was taken at his word that she would frequently ‘get drunk and do a runner’ without consideration for anyone else, including her baby. ‘She’s a bad, worthless lot,’ he declared. ‘I wish to God I’d never got hooked up with her, but she’ll turn up like a bad penny.’ Correct. But not the way he meant.
The feckless image of Brown was undoubtedly true, but what inducement was there for Brown to return home, apart from her baby? Physical abuse was assured, perhaps a severe, drunken beating. Maybe she even feared for her life… Which was the more dangerous for her – on the streets or indoors, at home? This question had already been resolved, but only two people were privy to the answer. And only one of them was still alive and at large, in fact growing larger than life by the day.
It is not unreasonable to reason that someone in authority should have at least contacted Brown’s parents to see if they could shed any light on her whereabouts. After all, she might have run to them, with a very different yarn from Quinn’s. But they knew nothing of her latest vanishing escapade, a fact that would be confirmed only after Mr Sutton’s search for something else, mere trivia. And there were cruel people, pious and holier than thou, who sermonised that he had uncovered two items of trivia, the dustbin lid of more worth than the other rubbish.
And so the days passed. October slipped seamlessly into November. By the middle of the month, London was already gearing up for Christmas, with the festive mood tiptoeing into offices and stores. Oxford Street, Regent Street and Piccadilly were choking with big spenders. The neon lights were a dazzling shop window of so much gloss and glamour that hid a very different London down the road to the west and east, festering and fermenting neighbourhoods that were as much a disgrace to post-war London as the rookeries of St Giles had been in Victorian times.
Frances Brown was forgotten. She was history. Very much so; much more than anyone surmised because she was still, astonishingly, and I believe disgracefully, not an official missing person; someone just lost among the flotsam of the rootless modern nomads.
Meanwhile, Quinn was living life by the day. His landlord evicted him from the flat in Southerton Road after serious damage to the property during a ‘rave’. Quinn had to be out by 9 November and he went quietly enough; just another little hiccup along life’s undulating journey. There was always another woman, another bed, another source of income. Not a worry in the world, not for someone enriched with so much blarney.
As if fully aware he would never see Frances Brown again, he gave away all her clothes and binned anything else she had left behind. In his trade, he was known as a jobber, a freelance around building sites, and he heard on his network of mates that a builder was looking for experienced scaffolders in Maidstone, Kent, so off he went and was taken on. But it didn’t take him long to tire of living in lodgings and also he was missing his old haunts on his west London stamping ground, so as November began to fizzle out, he told his foreman to ‘stick’ his job. Easy come, easy go.
His last day in Maidstone was Friday, 27 November, when he collected his final pay packet and set sail, flushed, for the White Horse pub in nearby Headcorn, where he splashed out on farewell drinks for his work-gang. And that’s when he was shocked ‘to the core’ to suddenly be reunited with Frances Brown. Not the way he could have ever envisaged, though.
She was lighting a cigarette, seemingly very sophisticated and poised, short-cut thick black hair permed in boyish fashion, wearing a bling necklace, a smart cocktail dress, plenty of décolletage and bare arms, so that the unmistakable tattoos on her lower left arm were vividly visible. There was no mistaking that it was her. The constant runaway. The ‘unreliable little fucker’. Come back to haunt him from the front page of the Daily Express: ‘MURDERED: WARD CASE GIRL: Detectives Quiz Vice Trial Witnesses’.
Well I never, the little minx! Quinn mused, suddenly believing that he had something valuable to barter for substantial financial gain.
He had to hotfoot it back to the Smoke. The newspapers would pay ‘good money’ for his story. Of course he’d have to commiserate with her family, do a bit of that and get drunk with her street-pals.
Someone should have reminded him about the truism that liars need good memories because he let slip in the pub that he was the father of Brown’s son, a comment overheard by the landlord.
One small detail he forgot: the police in London would be keener to speak with him than even the press.