As soon as I saw the photograph circulated by Scotland Yard of the sixth victim, tagged Margaret McGowan, I knew instantly that it was Frances Brown. I went from the picture desk to my news editor, Ken James, and said, ‘The Yard’s trying to hoodwink us or at least buy some time.’
Ken, jacket off, the sleeves of his crisp white shirt rolled up, was in his black leather, executive swivel chair, at the centre of his frenetic and abrasive universe; loyal secretary Beth to his right, the foreign editor to her right, the picture editor to Ken’s left and the deputy picture editor further left, though not quite as far Left as the paper’s politics, though claiming to be independent now that it had morphed from the Daily Herald, the bellowing voice of the TUC.
Directly opposite Ken on the long metallic desk that seemed to occupy half the capacious newsroom, was the deputy news editor. Opposite the foreign editor was his deputy. Other factotums completed the court of King James. Throughout the building there seemed to be far more deputies than sheriffs.
‘What do you mean?’ he said, blinking, face blank, a very restless, insecure monarch.
‘This is Frances Brown,’ I said, prodding the black and white print I was holding. ‘McGowan is her mother’s maiden name. Her father is Francis Brown. They live in Glasgow, remember? Frances was a controversial witness in the Stephen Ward trial.’
Suddenly he was as switched-on as the neon advertisements of Piccadilly Circus. ‘You what!’ he exclaimed, eyes jumping like a pair of excited frogs, appreciating, like me, the potential ramifications if what I was saying were true.
‘This story’s going to run and run,’ I said foolishly, as if it hadn’t already. I was talking gibberish, drunk on adrenaline, a strong intoxicant. ‘There’s no telling where it’s going to lead us.’ That wasn’t true. I knew exactly where we were heading: into a completely new ball game.
‘Are you sure about this?’ he said, with his customary knack for irritating his staff. He wasn’t known as ‘Cautious Ken’ without due cause.
‘Ken, I interviewed her outside the Old Bailey last year after she’d testified,’ I said wearily. ‘She’d been one of Ward’s girls, a key defence witness. We have pics of her on file and in cuttings, of course, in the library.’ Computer-filing and stories and photographs stored on micro-film were components of science fiction, something that might be available on Mars, but not in Covent Garden in 1964.
‘Get out the cuttings,’ he said, as if making a decision to press the nuclear button, ‘while I have a word with Bob.’ Please wasn’t a word that had yet been introduced into news editors’ vocabulary.
Bob Traini was chief crime correspondent. I was another one of those deputies. Traini wasn’t very popular with other journalists. However, I rubbed along with him fine, mainly because we never met and hardly ever talked with one another. His unpopularity in Fleet Street stemmed from his wartime support of Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirt fascist fanatics. To Bob, a liberal was anyone to the Left of the Ku Klux Klan. The fact that he had been employed by the Daily Herald, the mouthpiece of the Labour Party, demonstrated just how eclectic was the national press. Naturally, he was an ardent supporter of the death penalty – and not just for murder – and believed that all those ‘Lefties’ vociferously lobbying for the end of capital punishment should be first in line for hanging, perhaps the reason why he enjoyed such a cosy rapport with top brass at the Yard.
Scotland Yard had a special press room for crime correspondents, but Traini often preferred to work from home. He’d ring around the inspectors and superintendents on his ‘call list’ and then inform me, via the news desk, of anything worth following up. In essence, I was his ‘leg-man’, a foot soldier on the frontline, doing the digging and chasing, occasionally being decorated but more often left biting the bullet.
One time I was floored in Luton on a quiet Sunday morning by a fifteen-year-old on his parents’ doorstep just for politely announcing who I was. I had a staff photographer with me and all he did was dart around snapping shots from different angles. He was delighted as I nursed a bloody nose and split lip on the drive back to Town, enthusing, ‘I got some great pics!’ The newsroom hacks thought it was hilarious. So did my wife!
The files in our library quickly established beyond all doubt that I was right. The new angle now was: could these murders be linked, however tenuously, to the Profumo/Keeler/Ward sex and spy scandal?
For benefit of the three and a third people in the Western world for whom John Profumo, Christine Keeler and Dr Stephen Ward remain anonymous nonentities, and as a refresher for others, I shall summarise synoptically. Profumo was the Secretary of State for War in Harold Macmillan’s ill-fated Conservative Government. Christine Keeler was a ‘good-time’ girl who has generally been cast in the press as a prostitute, although, in the strict sense, she wasn’t. But she was no street-hooker in the grubby image of Frances Brown and all the other hapless conquests of Jack the Stripper. Stephen Ward was an osteopath with a consulting suite in Wimpole Street and high-society clients, such as Lord Bill Astor. Profumo inherited a fortune just after becoming the Member of Parliament for Kettering in Northamptonshire. The most important part of his inheritance elevated him to the fifth baron of the Kingdom of Sardinia and third baron of the United Kingdom of Italy. However, he wisely decided that to exploit his title would be a political impediment.
Here I must divulge a personal connection. My father acted as Profumo’s campaign manager in the two parliamentary elections in the Kettering constituency: the first he won, the second he lost. Consequently, Profumo was constantly in and out of our house. On my birthdays, he would always present me with a card and a box of chocolates. Typical of the man, the card would always be a profile photograph of himself, which probably personifies him more than all the millions of words ever written about him and his tawdry life. On the reverse side of the card he would monotonously write, ‘Eat the chocolates and always vote Conservative.’ I always scoffed the chocolates.
It was alleged that Ward ran a stable of girls whom he leased to ‘men about town’; in other words, well-heeled and well-positioned (in society, politics and commerce) punters. No riff-raff. Profumo was married to the snooty British actress Valerie Hobson, who, in turn, was no nun-about-town. Profumo was introduced to Keeler one evening when she was gambolling naked around Lord Astor’s open-air swimming-pool in the grounds of his grand Thames-side estate at Cliveden, where Ward rented a cottage and was ‘entertaining’.
Ward would converse in code to those to whom he genuflected: ‘Oh, Jack, I’d like you to meet so and so, she’s French-educated and very knowledgeable about language.’ Translated: she’s damned good at oral sex and talking dirty.
Profumo had sex with Keeler at Ward’s London apartment. Ward was the conduit. He also brought together Mandy Rice-Davies, who was undoubtedly a whore but rather more astute than Keeler, with Peter Rachman, the lowest form of life in London at the time, worse than the millions of sewer rats partying beneath the streets. In the blink of an eye, Rachman had made his polluted pile through heaping misery on hundreds of the most desperately poor people in west London. He bought hundreds of shabby houses that were already divided into tatty flats and whose tenants’ residency was protected by law through statutory rent control. If they couldn’t be bribed with derisory inducements to vacate, he’d send in his bruisers with snarling, ill-tempered Alsatians. If that failed, he’d up the ante: rats would be released from sacks into young children’s bedrooms and roofs might be removed in the middle of the night, gas and electricity supplies severed. As soon as he’d secured vacant possession, he would re-let at four or times the old rent, particularly to prostitutes and their ponces, or sell. Naturally, he lived in a mansion in the most salubrious corner of leafy Hampstead.
I was interviewing one of his harassed tenants in her structurally unsound flat in the Notting Hill neighbourhood when two of Rachman’s rent-collectors came calling with a couple of anti-social dogs in tow. When I enquired how long it would be before their boss authorised improvements, one of them came up to me very close to say, ‘Little fellas with long noses and big mouths don’t last long around here.’ He even tried to imitate James Cagney, noted for his corny gangster movie roles. I felt sorry for the dogs because they had been trained to snarl on cue and were unnerved when someone laughed in their face.
Rachman was short, though fat, and didn’t last long. His heart went on strike at having to work in impossible, cramped conditions under so much ever-mounting blubber and the strenuous pumping in myriad bedrooms. One MP caused crime correspondents many squandered days and nights by declaring in the House of Commons that Rachman wasn’t really dead and his body had been switched in Edgware General Hospital’s mortuary. My assignment, of course, was to find Rachman, perhaps being sheltered by Ward, Keeler, Mandy-Rice Davies, or even Lord Astor. Why Astor? – heaven knows! The entire affair, with all its strands and tentacles, had become a grotesque circus. Fleet Street was open all hours to any conspiracy theory, the more outrageous, daft and improbable the bigger the bite and swallow. After a couple of weeks searching London, following false trails, for a porky ghost, even the ever-optimistic news editors had to accept the blindingly obvious: the Devil had Rachman tightly in its claws and had no intention of releasing him to the press. His legacy gave us one new word in the Oxford Dictionary: Rachmanism, which will assist in keeping his evil alive in the conscience of future generations.
Keeler was also having sex with Eugene Ivanov, a Russian spy, which allowed newspapers to use the potential national security risk as a fabricated pretext for publishing all the sexual gore. Profumo resigned from Parliament, not because of his moronic dalliance with Keeler, but for telling porkies on the floor of the House of Commons, denying newspaper allegations of impropriety, thus establishing just how half-witted he was as a politician.
Ward was charged with numerous absurd offences, including brothel-keeping, living off immoral earnings and procurement (ladies for gents), all trumped-up charges by a scoundrel detective inspector at Scotland Yard, Samuel Herbert, who was as bent as London Underground’s Circle Line. Some of the charges were dropped, but only after they had been made public and therefore had softened up potential jurors. Eventually, at the Old Bailey, Ward was found guilty of the lesser offences. However, by then he’d taken a massive overdose of barbiturates and died before he could be sentenced, undoubtedly to gaol in order to appease the baying Establishment, much to the chagrin of the scandalously biased judge, Sir Archie Marshall, a redneck from the Midlands circuit. Keeler was later gaoled for perjury in a different court case.
Ward’s show trial was meant to deflect the public gaze and press scrutiny from the political fallout: some chance! In effect, it naturally had the reverse impact and the Macmillan Government was fatally damaged and soon sank. What it demonstrated more than anything was the danger of political machinations affecting the atmosphere in which the police and the judiciary work. Legal experts have unanimously agreed that Ward would have had all convictions overturned on appeal, had he lived, because of the judge’s grossly distorted summing-up and misleading directions to the jury. However, in my opinion, that assumption is flawed. It is assuming that the Appeal Court judges would have been immune to the oppressive and overbearing political climate.
An amusing aside: at one juncture during this soap opera, long before the tragic denouement, Profumo went into hiding. Once again news editors were like the masters of hounds, sounding the bugle, crying, ‘Tally-ho, off we go! Sniff him out.’ Of course I was leader of our pack and I phoned my father, saying, ‘You’ve been inside his head as much as anyone, where might he go to ground, to feel safe and secure from the media at a time like this?’
There was a long, breathy pause, then, ‘You know he owns his own plane and he’s a qualified pilot. He’s probably out of the country. My hunch is that he’s flown to a remote part of Italy or Sardinia.’
Umm, I thought, Not much help to me. It wasn’t until months later that I learned Profumo had been standing beside my father at the time of my call. Even worse, he’d been sleeping in my bed in the bedroom that had been mine as a child and teenager. I can see the funny side now, but not then. What a scoop that could have been for me, but my father put Profumo before his ambitious son. That’s life and politics for you…
Profumo had smelled the hounds closing in and left my parents that day, driving the relatively short distance to Warwickshire, where he holed up with an old friend in the constituency he’d represented since 1950, Stratford-on-Avon, having lost Kettering after the 1945 Labour landslide.
When I next visited my parents for a weekend, my mother commented mischievously, ‘Oh, by the way, I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know that I’ve changed the bedding in your room.’
***
One thing struck me immediately: whoever murdered Brown had also killed all the other girls in the series, yet none of them, to my knowledge, had been involved, even obliquely, with Profumo, Ward, Ivanov, Keeler, Rachman or Mandy Rice-Davies. ‘Jack’, where are you? I need you. Is this for real or a red herring?
First step was to pull the file from the library, take it across the road to the Cross Keys pub, buy a pint and settle in a corner for a quiet catch-up browse. The most sacred rule of the library was that no file should ever be taken from the building. That rule was also the most abused of all the office dictums.
Brown had been called by Ward’s counsel during the Old Bailey trial to counter evidence for the prosecution provided by another prostitute, Vickie Barrett. Brown and Barrett had shared a flat in Shepherd’s Bush and were on the streets together soliciting when ‘picked up’ in the West End by Ward. Barrett told the jury on oath that Ward drove them in his ‘flashy’ white Jaguar to his home in Bryanston Mews West, where she was paid to cane another man, charging £1 a stroke, while the others watched.
Brown’s version was different. She said that Barrett, a slim, attractive blonde, had been paid to thrash Ward and not another man. Later, when it was too late and Ward was dead, Barrett had amended her story, admitting that Brown’s version was the correct one. So why had she perjured herself?
‘Under unbearable duress from Herbert,’ she’d claimed. Her excuse was that she related the truth to Herbert when originally questioned by him, but he wasn’t satisfied, aggressively suggesting that it would sound better if she said she’d been paid to beat another man, while Ward was a spectator. She was puzzled and asked what was the point of such a lie. If she can be believed – and there is no reason why she should be, considering her innate duplicity – Herbert answered to the effect that if she didn’t comply, he’d ensure that she ‘never dare show’ her ‘face again on the streets of Notting Hill’.
In addition to her convictions for soliciting, Barrett was a notorious liar. However, now that Brown had been murdered and Scotland Yard seemingly was looking at a possible tie-in with the Ward trial, I thought I should at least confirm that Barrett was still alive and in the process might even learn something new and true among the inevitable litany of lies.
The prostitutes of Notting Hill, Shepherd’s Bush and Paddington were a colony, tantamount to a large, dysfunctional family. I had an address for Barrett, but, inevitably, she’d moved, so tracing her entailed surfing the tide of her ebbing and flowing network of ‘sisters’. When I finally caught up with her, it was dark, she was living in a first-floor flat in a typical old house in the Rachmanised district of shabby and disintegrating west London. There were trees in the street, which qualified it as an avenue, I suppose, but contributed nothing towards genuine gentrification.
The front door was in a crumbling porch. There was a panel of doorbells, from which wires were hanging. There was no knocker, so it was a matter of fist against wood. No one came to the door, but I heard a window at the front being lifted open, followed by a female shouting for all the road to hear, ‘Who is it? What the fuck do you want?’
I backed along the path to the road so that I could see the woman. She had her head and most of her torso out of a first-floor window, with her hands gripping the sill for balance. Illuminated by the light in the room, I immediately recognised her as Vickie Barrett.
‘Good evening, Vickie,’ I called up to her.
‘I said what the fuck do you want?’ she repeated herself, still shouting, as if drugged or drunk, more than likely a combination of the two.
Before I’d finished introducing myself, she cut in, ‘Well you can fuck off. Anyhow, I’m not Vickie Barrett.’
‘Yes, you are,’ I contradicted her. ‘I saw you at the Old Bailey.’ Another young woman came to the window and joined the rant. ‘Are you calling my fiend a bleedin’ liar?’
‘Have you heard that Frances Brown’s been murdered?’ I said, sidestepping the confrontation as much as possible.
‘No surprise,’ yelled Barrett. ‘She was asking for it, the bitch!’
‘Why?’ I asked. Every question answered was a bonus.
‘’cus she was nuts, you know that, don’t you? Off ’er ’ead, she was. She’d drive any bloke to kill her.’
‘So you don’t think her death’s linked to Ward?’
‘Nah! Fiction, that is. She was nothing to any of them. What’s the point of topping a nuthead like her? She got her comeuppance for going in cars with blokes. You’d never catch me doing that, no car-jobs for me. That’s as low as you can get. No class with them lot.’
‘So you haven’t been threatened? You’re not afraid of being on someone’s hit list?’
‘Do me a favour, you daft bleeder. Anyone threatens me and they get a stiletto heel in their balls. And you don’t go fucking writing that you heard all this from Vickie Barrett because I ain’t her.’
‘No, she ain’t Vickie Barrett, you nosy sod!’ chimed the other alley cat. With that, the window crashed down like a guillotine. Fortunately, the two women had remembered to withdraw their heads.
By her criteria, Barrett was probably telling the truth about her name, denying that she was Vickie Barrett. Like all the others in her transient trade, she had her own dictionary of aliases. There was no telling by what moniker she was trading when we had that very public and serrated catechism.
Despite all the aggro and histrionics, I’d elicited more feedback than I’d hoped for and much of it gelled with my own preconceived overview.
These women were very different from Keeler’s crowd. I talked with Keeler only once and that was in her first-floor flat in Devonshire Street, when she was holed up with Paula Hamilton-Marshall, who was usually dressed smartly and conservatively, shrouded with an aura of class, whatever the reality. She had just hopped into a taxi for an address not far from the Palace of Westminster, leaving Keeler ‘gasping’ for a cigarette. From the other side of her door, she asked if I had a cigarette I could spare her. I didn’t, but offered to buy her a packet and she was grateful. I cannot recall the brand she smoked, but when I returned she unhooked the security chain and unbolted the door, allowing me to squeeze in, her jumpy eyes anxious to ensure I wasn’t the fugleman for the Fleet Street cavalry. I’m certain this would never have happened if she hadn’t been in such need of a nicotine infusion.
She was overtly overwrought and seized the opportunity to pump me about police activity. This was during the interim of Ward’s trial and death and the police assembling a case against Keeler for perjury. She was wearing a floppy white jumper, jeans and brown calfskin ankle boots; she wore virtually no makeup but her facial bone structure was perfect. For the duration, she was polite and well-spoken, though hyper-frightened; a cornered animal out of her depth, scared to venture out because of the predatory press gang poised to pounce and just waiting for the rattle of handcuffs outside her door.
I was frank with her, saying that I was as much ‘in the dark’ about police intentions as she was. It was impossible not to have sympathy for her because, in the context of her social standing and future prospects, she was on Death Row.
She’d had a wretched childhood, brought up in two converted railway carriages, where there was no piped water or electricity, but an overflow of lechery from her stepfather. After leaving home, she’d flitted between numerous jobs to escape seductive overtures from proprietors and managers. She’d never been given credit for her sincere endeavour to swim against the flow of effluence in her fledgeling days in the big, bad city. Eventually, she’d probably said to herself, Why bother? And there she was, a pitiful fly in a very large spider’s web.
The Establishment was determined to have its pound of flesh, even if it was equivalent to thrusting a bantamweight boxer into the ring with a heavyweight. For the police and press, it had become a game of cats tormenting a mouse, aided and abetted by the Government, a shameful episode in the Establishment’s ignominious history.
The morning after my cosy chat with Vickie Barrett, I took a call from ‘Jack’. ‘Thank God!’ were my first words, followed by,
‘I need you more than a whisky and chaser.’
‘I thought you might,’ he said dryly.
‘Can normal service be resumed?’ I hoped.
‘As long as we’re discreet.’
A rendezvous was arranged for noon in the Salisbury pub in St Martin’s Lane, which is situated near the west end of Long Acre, and so was within easy walking distance for me and close to Leicester Square Tube station. However, despite the geographic advantage for me, I thought the Salisbury was a strange choice of venue; an ornate establishment, with mini-chandeliers and brass fittings, it was a honeypot for luvvies, mostly out-of-work actors and actresses who, naturally, were ‘just resting between parts.’
This pub always did a roaring lunch-time trade and true to form it was heaving when I jostled my way to the bar, where ‘Jack’ had pitched his tent and no one was going to dislodge him.
‘Not your kind of haunt, is it?’ was the way I kicked off the long-overdue get-together.
He explained that he’d chosen it for the very reason that it wasn’t a ‘copper’s pub’ and neither could he imagine it frequented by journalists, which he was wrong about. Because of the regular clientele the Salisbury attracted, it was frequented by showbiz reporters; one in particular, from the Daily Mail, was a habitué, but I was anxious not to jeopardise the reopening of the pipeline, so I kept shtum.
Detectives knew better than most people that a crowd was the ideal environment in which to retain anonymity. Everyone was so engrossed in their own conversation and making themselves heard that they were oblivious to what was being discussed by others, even those pressed against them.
The issue I wanted to flush out was that of the Stephen Ward association with the ‘Nudes’ murders. Was it a ‘runner’ or a ‘decoy’?
‘The latter,’ he said economically.
‘But Brown was a player in the trial?’ I pushed, playing devil’s advocate.
‘Forget it. Hers was less than a cameo role.’ Good analogy for the Salisbury.
When I pointed out that the leak appeared to have been floated from the guv’nor, Marchant, he grinned slyly into his glass and wet his lips with froth. ‘It was tailor-made for you fellas,’ he said, a shade smugly. ‘Everyone knew you lot wouldn’t be able to resist it.’
For the sake of my own integrity I stood my ground and told him pithily that I’d pinpointed all the gaping holes to my news editor. The Yard wasn’t interested in disseminating the truth, but was more focused on deceiving Fleet Street, so that the hacks would be running away from the real action.
The danger for a crime correspondent in the thick of a serial-killer investigation is to play armchair detective. I say danger because the press are invariably in possession of half-truths – probably much less – and are always off-course with their crystal-ball gazing and guessing. Nevertheless, that’s what editors and readers appeared to want, so who could blame the feeding of that appetite if it helped bring about a positive result? If the smokescreen worked, the police were able to proceed at their own pace without reporters and photographers hampering them.
‘If the Ward trial connection is a hoax, is any progress being made?’ I asked, trying not to sound critical.
The breakthrough would come from forensics, he was confident. There were stained markings on several of the bodies that were more than similar; they were identical in chemical content. The paint marks were specific. Not just blobs that came from a domestic tin of paint, the sort used for decorating doors, bedrooms or window frames. ‘Industrial paint, with a unique metallic ingredient,’ he said, very conspiratorial now.
‘Used for what?’ was my next obvious question.
‘Spraying vehicles.’
‘So they’ve been killed or stored after death in a garage?’ Conjecture was taking over.
‘Or workshop.’
All the people known to socialise with Brown – men and women – were being interrogated, alibis and backgrounds checked and double-checked, though the murder squad detectives weren’t holding their breath over these lines of inquiry in respect of yielding the identification of the killer.
We discussed what Barrett had to say and he strongly advised me not to rely on a word she uttered, denouncing her as a ‘pathological liar’ who made tantalising statements, only to recant, with the regularity that she went on and off the streets. When I queried if she possibly had ‘anything in particular in mind when being scathing about Brown, spitefully calling her nuts,’ he nodded solemnly, saying that on the prostitutes’ grapevine she’d have been privy to much of Brown’s unsavoury history.
The ‘nuts’ insult undoubtedly alluded to the period Brown had spent in a psychiatric unit, having been sectioned for twenty-eight days in 1963. From ‘Jack’s’ bleak résumé, it was transparent that after the age of eleven Brown’s life had been a precipitous downward spiral, without a sliver of sunshine. Convicted of theft when just turned eleven, she was placed on probation.
In the same year that she finished her schooling, aged fifteen, she secured a job in a shop, only to be sent to an approved school a few months later. This was after Mrs Helen Brown had reported her own daughter as ‘beyond control’.
Within two years, Frances was pregnant, giving birth to a daughter, whom she named after her mother, perhaps a subliminal gesture for a reconciliation, reaching out in the hope of being embraced again in the womb of the family, but the father of her child promptly did a runner and so did Frances, though separately, heading for London and leaving mum holding the baby.
Later, after her daughter’s murder, Mrs Brown was to say in Glasgow, ‘I had a terrible time with her. She was staying out all night and I had no idea where she was. For her sake, I had to report her to the police, an awful step to have to take and I was in tears for days afterwards. I cannot believe what is going on. I won’t believe! I can’t accept she’s gone.’
On arriving in London, Frances Brown went straight on the streets and hooked up with Paul Quinn the following year, 1962. The introduction was made by Quinn’s wife, Maureen. Paul had served time in prison for theft and shop-breaking. Soon Frances had adopted Quinn’s surname. Meanwhile, the Scottish police were seeking her for neglecting her child and another probation order was imposed against her, this time in the Glasgow Sheriff Summary Court.
Soon pregnant again, she sank into depression and overdosed on a concoction of sleeping tablets and purple hearts (amphetamines); in other words, a cocktail of uppers and downers, creating a metabolic tug of war.
In Queen Charlotte Hospital in March 1963, she gave birth to a boy, but wasn’t discharged until June, astonishingly with a supply of tranquillisers and sleeping pills. Instead of misusing the medication, she tried gassing herself, but failed. In fact, everything she turned to was a failure, so, in desperation, she tried her hand at theft and attempted to steal a car, failing, of course. At Marylebone Magistrates’ Court, she was fined £10 or, alternatively, a month in Holloway Prison. She chose Holloway, but Quinn paid the fine so that she was immediately released.
However, having broken her Glasgow probation order, she was now sent to prison in Scotland for three months. Her son was taken into care by Smethwick Council, an adoption couple came forward, but Quinn wouldn’t sign the paperwork, arguing that it was against his Catholic faith. (He’d been adopted and didn’t find out until he was eighteen, when he immediately ran away from home, in anger and disbelief.) So the baby, born in April, 1964, was, in fact, Frances’s third child and she was still only twenty.
With that topic apparently exhausted, I fast-forwarded the subject to suspects: were there any promising ones? ‘Nope.’ All kerb-crawlers were being ‘looked into’ along with everyone who had served sentences for sexual offences. Theory had it that sex killers gravitated and graduated from lesser sexual crimes.
Could he ‘drop’ any names.
Not for publication, but a couple that might ‘whet’ my ‘appetite’ and could be ‘worth keeping an eye on’.
The first was Lord Longford, who was to make himself unpopular with the public for becoming a confidant of Moors murderer Myra Hindley and lobbying for her release, arguing that she was ‘riddled with remorse’, quietly pious with a nun’s religious devotion, and had embraced Roman Catholicism. Longford hadn’t been kerb-crawling in his car, but had been approaching prostitutes, much in the ‘manner of Gladstone’, a nineteenth-century prime minister who had befriended whores with the worthy intention of converting them and saving their souls. Well, that was Gladstone’s story, but it was lucky for him that there was no ‘War of the Tabloids’ raging then and no outlet for a whore to print her own money by selling a ‘kiss-and-tell’ steamy series to the highest bidder. Longford, apparently, had been advised in future to be more circumspect when doing God’s work and less conspicuous in the red-light districts in view of the tense and sensitive circumstances.
Another high-profile name that was thrown in the mix at that lunchtime rendezvous was the society portrait painter Vasco Lazzolo. ‘Don’t get too excited, though,’ ‘Jack’ warned, ‘but at least it’s someone with a racy track-record and you should have him on file.’ I vaguely recalled the name and ‘Jack’ assured me that it would be among the cuttings in my office library. ‘In abundance,’ he added.
More and more the brass were convinced that forensic evidence would finally nail the perpetrator. ‘Something like a speck of dust will lead us to his door.’
At that moment I was reminded of the fabled words of American Detective Sergeant Harry Hansen, who investigated the legendary Black Dahlia murder in Los Angeles in 1947, a crime that has spawned its own library of books, with countless movie spin-offs. Hansen, a cerebral, philosophical cop, said memorably, ‘Homicide is a union that never dies. Like marriage, murder is an irreversible act (divorce aside!). It can never be changed or the circumstances altered. The murderer and the victim are tied together in a bond that goes on into infinity. That’s why I say it’s sacred and every murder scene has its sacred ground which should not be touched.’
Finding something sacred in this demonic case was a hellish search.
As a footnote, the Black Dahlia sadist was never caught: he bisected Elizabeth Short’s body, cut off head and legs, and displayed the remains beside a main residential road like a broken and discarded mannequin. If Hansen had been leading this investigation, which was not a possibility, of course, I’m afraid his poetic approach to solving murders would have found this case devoid of rhyme and rhythm.