A mere twenty days after the murder of Irene Lockwood, another nude victim was waiting to be found, this time in a pile of rubbish and not beside the Thames. This grisly discovery was made by Clark May at seven-fifteen a.m. on Friday, 24 April in Brentford, west London. Mr May, who lived at 199 Boston Manor Road, had gone to dispose of domestic garbage at a dumpsite in adjoining Swyncombe Avenue.

‘Here we go again!’ was the melancholy mood around the police stations of west London that morning as the bleak news filtered through.

Demonstrating the Yard’s mounting impatience and a certain amount of unbridled frustration, the ‘heavy mob’ was deployed: Deputy Commander Ernest Millen, Detective Chief Superintendent Jack Manning and Detective Superintendent William Baldock, supported by a whole range of lowerranking detectives. This was equivalent to sending in the SAS on a do-or-die mission, with failure not an option.

Pathologist Dr Donald Teare was torn from his breakfast. The body was transported in a black coroner’s vehicle to Acton mortuary, where Teare undertook the post-mortem, in something of a dark, brooding mood. I was enlightened by ‘Jack’ that Teare enjoyed lingering over breakfast while mentally tussling with The Times crossword puzzle and wasn’t kindly disposed towards interruptions.

In purely clinical, professional terms this new corpse had promise. For a start, it hadn’t been immersed in water. Secondly, she’d been dead for no longer than three days, possibly even only twenty hours. Not only was this a great boost for the pathologist in determining cause of death, but also a bonus for the detectives because the trail should be fresh. Even though the unknown (not for long) victim was dead, the last hours of her life should still be very much alive.

Indicatively, she was missing four teeth, which didn’t seem to have been professionally extracted nor punched out of her mouth, even though half of a tooth was lodged in her throat. These findings were to become pivotal within a few months, but their significance was not readily recognised. Had she been in a fight? A fight for her life? There were marks and abrasions on her face and a slightly swollen cheek, but nothing to signify a brawl sufficient to result in the loss of four teeth, let alone her life.

Teare was also able to tell that the body hadn’t been stripped of underwear – pants and bra – until at least eight hours after death, due to imprints left. In all, she’d been on her back for at least twenty hours. She had not died where found; the Thames was within easy reach, but this time no wet ending. Another conundrum. No disfiguration of the vagina. Definitely no rape. Just murder. Apparently motiveless, although there was no such thing. However absurd and demented, the killer always had his own reason.

‘Jack’ called me at ten. He knew I was never in the office any earlier and I hadn’t even had time to collect a wake-up coffee when the red light on my phone was flashing.

‘Brentford’s the place to be for today’s action,’ he said, delighting in the subterfuge. Unknown to me, the news desk had already been tipped off about a huge police presence in Brentford and there being a large area cordoned off by a reader. Not yet apparent was the reason for the cop circus camping in dreary old Brentford.

‘What’s up?’ I asked.

‘Another one.’ All very cryptic, cloak-and-dagger, low-budget gangster-movie dialogue. Why couldn’t anyone speak plain English; no intrigue embedded in mundanity, I suppose.

‘Another what?’ My brain wasn’t in the right gear for circuitous teasers.

‘Nude,’ he replied starkly.

‘Oh, shit!’ That’s what he should have been exclaiming, not me. ‘Where? Who?’ Finally I was posing the right questions.

‘No ID yet.’

‘But where?’

‘Swyncombe Avenue, off Boston Manor Road, but you didn’t get that from me. Anyhow, it’ll soon be on the wires, but at least you’ll have a head start.’

‘Thanks.’

I was talking to myself.

After a staccato conversation with James, I was on my way to Brentford with a photographer in a chauffeur-driven office car; no expense spared in those heady days. The thrill of the chase was a drug that never ceased to accelerate the pulse. By the time we reached Brentford, not exactly one of London’s beauty spots, the body had been moved to Acton mortuary and was being dissected by Teare.

Death was due to asphyxiation, but the pathologist wasn’t able to say whether she’d been throttled by hands or strangled with a garment, such as one of her stockings, a possibility mentioned by Teare because there was no normal ligature mark around her neck, such as left by flex, string, tie or narrow belt. Swabs were taken and were ‘negative’, according to one report, and ‘inconclusive’ in another statement; it was all very vague and unsatisfactory. Something was known and being withheld within an exclusive cabal; well, that was my reading of the situation and I was to be proved right, fairly soon.

The small dump area where the corpse had mingled with the rubbish had been sealed off, allowing the forensic clue-pickers to work undisturbed. Any witnesses had already been collared by the police and taken away for interviewing and statement processing.

Now the main outstanding inevitable question was: who is she? If she was a prostitute, like the others, then almost certainly she’d have form and her fingerprints would be on file. In fact, the police probably already knew her identity, I reasoned, in view of the fact that the body had been so well preserved, apart from being rather dirty. While the photographer merrily snapped everything moveable and immoveable, I looked for a pub, not an exacting challenge in London.

Within minutes I was phoning ‘Jack’ from a coin box just inside the entrance to a pub that was as instantly forgettable as the rest of Brentford. Unsurprisingly, ‘Jack’ was out on an assignment but would I ‘like to leave a message?’ No, I didn’t like, but I was polite about it and promised to call later. ‘Can I help you?’ the desk-shackled officer pressed. ‘Sorry, it’s personal.’

My next call was to the office. ‘Any messages for me?’

‘Yes, that Jack fella called, said he’d be in touch later.’ That was all I needed to know. ‘On my way back,’ I said.

The snapper was still using up film.

Identification of the deceased was straightforward and, of course, it was to the benefit of the police to have the name broadcast as far and wide as possible in the public domain. Helene Barthelemy was the name. She rented a single, furnished room on the ground floor at 34 Talbot Road, Harlesden. But that was the end. Where was the beginning? What was her story? Did she begin life in the gutter or was it an inexorable gravitation? Having an excellent contact embedded in the core of the detection operation certainly cut a lot of corners for me in piecing together the jagged jigsaw of her truncated but turbulent life, which sizzled with more variety and adventure than all the lurid lives of the others sewn together.

She had been educated in a convent until the age of sixteen. Her mother and stepfather were devout Catholics and Helene attended church enthusiastically every Sunday from an early age, seemingly mesmerised by the Latin litany.

When she was fourteen, she even talked animatedly about becoming a nun, joining a silent order or perhaps in a teaching or nursing capacity. Within a year, however, she found boys and the prospect of a life of seclusion and celibacy began to wane. Her parents were quietly relieved because they believed she was capable of carving out a constructive, secular career for herself in a more conventional and worldly environment, and hoped one day they’d be doting grandparents.

What they weren’t prepared for was her taking off for Blackpool, when she was still just sixteen, to join a circus. According to her friends, she craved excitement. She was bored by the relative stability and predictability of provincial life. She always said that it was her father’s blood that fuelled her thirst for cliff-edge adventure. Her biological father, Maurice Barthelemy, had served with the Free French Navy during the Second World War, but had been deserted by his wife before D-Day. After divorce, Helene’s mother had married again, becoming Mrs Mary Thomson and living in Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire.

By the time Helene was fifteen, her quarrels with her stepdad became daily contests and stand-offs, neither conceding. Whenever he gave her advice, she dismissed him disdainfully as ‘dull’ and nothing like her real father and she couldn’t understand what her mother had ‘ever seen in such a dodo’. Of course this was designed to be hurtful and was unfounded because she’d never really known her biological father; he’d only come alive in her psyche from the spiced-up bedtime stories of her mum, which had generously been embellished to make him a hero to her daughter; it was, in effect, a backlash. Helene’s own vivid imagination enlarged her dad’s status in her life, while further belittling her stepdad and increasingly alienating the two. Mother had created her own monster.

In the circus, Helene was trained as a trapeze artiste; she had the figure and agility for it, slim, light-framed, dexterous, and she was fearless of heights. Fearless of anything; all the ingredients for someone who would be risking life and limb nightly, high in the dome of the Big Top, the magic arena for children and, indeed, their parents. She literally thrived on the gasps of the neck-craning audience a long way beneath her as she entrusted herself to ‘The Catcher’, who had to snatch her wrists as they swung towards one another in mid-air and she let go; the precision had to be split-second perfect or disaster. Here was yet another drug, as addictive as any on sale in seedy Soho.

Blackpool’s ‘Golden Mile’ was as seductive as Las Vegas’s neon ‘Strip’. In summer, it was teeming with hustlers. All had something to sell, especially dreams. Flattery, cajoling and some high-octane booze and pearly promises were enough to entice Helene away from the dazzle of the circus; a crack of fickleness was beginning to show in her character.

She was now a stripper, having lecherous men throw coins and notes at her feet, as provocatively she removed each item of scanty clothing to the slinky rhythm of appropriate music. Never before had she been such a focus of attention, except in the Big Top, but there she had heard the muffled applause but never seen the faces. This was different, so close up and personal; seduction and sex by proxy. Men queued to offer her literally the world in return for a date. And men were dated mechanically, as if on a factory assembly line.

The excitement evaporated when, aged nineteen, she gave birth to a son. Now the feckless ‘Golden Mile’ turned its back on her. So she became a waitress in a café. No disgrace in that, but it wasn’t what she’d left home for. There remained the option of returning home to Cleethorpes, but to someone as free-spirited as Helene that would have represented defeat and a complete climb down, doomed and damned for ever. If she ever had a motto, it was probably Ever Onwards, though that wasn’t the same as Ever Upwards.

Instead of seeking respectability in tune with her upbringing and education, she instead gravitated downwards in free fall: one-night stands rather than steady relationships and a gradual shift into really bad company, culminating with being charged with unlawful wounding and aggravated robbery. Her trial was held at Liverpool Assizes on 8 October 1962.

She pleaded not guilty, but the evidence against her illustrated the speed of her decline. The prosecution alleged that one evening, after dark, she lured a holidaymaker to a remote part of the beach, among sand dunes, where three thugs were waiting undercover to attack him. His face was slashed and he was repeatedly kicked. His wallet was stolen and his face wound required eighteen stitches.

Barthelemy vehemently denied the charges, although she’d been picked out by the victim in an identity parade. She did confess, however, to prostitution and owned up to having been fined for helping to run a brothel. So much for becoming a nun! Upon conviction, she was sentenced to four years in prison. The flame of her fighting spirit extinguished, she collapsed in the dock.

Helen Paul, Barthelemy’s landlady in Blackpool, couldn’t believe what she read in her local newspaper. ‘She was the most lovely girl you could ever wish to meet,’ she said. ‘So kind and full of life. She’d do anything for anybody.’ So she did! ‘I really do believe there must be a mistake and I hope and pray it’s quickly sorted out. Prison is no place for such a sensitive young woman from her background and breeding, and with such prospects. She was so bubbly and ablaze with ideas. Anyone should have been proud to have her as a daughter.’

Four months later, her prayers were answered. Helene was out on the streets again, bubbly and ablaze with ideas, no doubt, though it didn’t mean that she was innocent of the serious and callous charges, simply that the prosecution hadn’t done its homework or had wilfully deceived the jury. Her legal team had stumbled on an escape route for her. They exposed the ‘innocent victim’ of assault and robbery as an inveterate liar and pickpocket who had twice served substantial prison sentences. Accordingly, Barthelemy’s convictions were overturned on appeal.

She must have begun to feel that her life really was charmed. Fate could be so cruel with its devious and veiled acts of good fortune. If she hadn’t appealed against her sentence and won, she wouldn’t have been on the streets of west London in April 1964 and presumably it would have been another prostitute whose nude body made headlines. The reward for winning was to lose everything.

Six months after discharge from prison, Barthelemy had hit the streets of London running, a fully fledged whore by now, conducting her business in cars and prepared to do pretty much anything, if the price was right. Fellatio was her speciality and most probably contributed in no small measure to her death.

One of her common aliases was Helen Paul; obviously her landlady in Blackpool had made a lasting impact on her. Helene was to confide that Mrs Paul was the ‘only mother’ she’d ever really had, which was rather unfair because she had been loved and cared for in Cleethorpes. Neither was her stepfather the problem. The complication was his presence in their lives, which she resented. She wanted the dad of her dreams, the romantic Frenchman and freedom fighter, a dashing Pimpernel character, a figure of fiction, hatched by a well-meaning mum.

Detectives soon established that one of her favourite places for vehicle business was Duke’s Meadows, which fitted perfectly within the geographic pattern that had emerged. Nevertheless, it had no bearing on the perpetrator’s whereabouts; it related only to the prostitutes’ choice of venue for sex. The punters were directed to those sites by the girls. The detectives were learning almost everything about the prostitutes’ modus operandi but next to zilch about the killer.

Transparently evident was the fact that there was nothing one-dimensional about this latest victim. She merrily criss-crossed London to trade: the fashionable West End haunts, Bayswater Road, Queensway, Notting Hill, Shepherd’s Bush, Maida Vale, Kilburn and even Cricklewood Broadway, which was noted for its boisterous Irish colony. She avoided the East End (‘too rough’) and south of the river (‘too quiet and suburban’), regions of the capital that held no appeal to her.

It was an education for the police to see how a stranger to London could so quickly and uncannily hit on the hotspots for prostitution, as if she had some inbuilt navigational system or antenna that was on a special sexual high-frequency wavelength.

For entertainment, Helene was a habitué of The Roaring Twenties club in busy, throbbing Carnaby Street. This popular club among the demimonde, a basement joint for all kinds of mischief, especially the purchase of reefers and purple hearts; a place you could go on a ‘trip’ by merely inhaling the smoky fog. Every species of human cockroach gravitated there, from hoodlums to sneaky, shifty ponces, who counted living off the earnings of street girls as a career choice.

During her short period in London, Helene had several ‘boyfriends’, the last being in reality her ponce. All the men with whom she was known to be acquainted were interviewed at length. ‘Jack’s’ assessment to me was that the ‘whole load of excrement was a dead loss’ and couldn’t be ‘flushed down a bog fast enough’. Not a single statement tallied. They were all certain when they’d last seen Helene and they were all certainly wrong. Not lying necessarily, but just bombed out of their skulls by the daily mix of drugs and drink which they were on perpetually, a brain-blitzing cycle of self-destruction.

There was also an element of resignation by now creeping into the inquiries. The hierarchy kept returning to fundamentals: if there was a possible suspect in this solo killing, he would have to be eliminated unless he could be related to the crimes against the other ‘Nudes’. It was for this reason that the senior detectives increasingly theorised that the serial killer had to be a casual pick-up, someone almost certainly unknown to all the acquaintances of the victims. He was an outsider, someone unconnected with the circle except on death-nights. He could be a clergyman, a judge, barrister, doctor, salesman, TV personality or whatever, but not a ponce, pimp or vagabond. In other words, all their interviews so far amounted to nothing more than going through the motions, filling cabinets with crap. The statements were junk, not worth the paper…

The most the detectives could do for the time being was to get a fix on the last time Helene was seen alive by a reliable witness, a tall order. Helene’s neighbour at 34 Talbot Road, Harlesden, auxiliary nurse Nellie Manhertz, who rented a room next to Barthelemy on the ground floor, recalled seeing her at around seven-thirty p.m. on Monday, 20 April. Another tenant, Purgy Dennis, recounted seeing her the following day, when Helene was ambling between her room and the communal kitchen – just three days before being found and quite possibly her last day on earth.

Through a process of elimination of the clothes she was known to own, it was guessed that when meeting her killer she was wearing a black jumper, long sleeves, high neck, a thigh-hugging black skirt, a brown overcoat with a black leather collar and black leather calf-length boots. She was also likely to have been carrying a black or red leather purse.

Shortly after six a.m. on 24 April, a little more than an hour before the alarm was raised in Brentford, a Buckinghamshire farmer, Alfred Harrow, was driving his Bedford van along Boston Manor Road. He was on his way to Brentford Market, a round-journey he made regularly once a week. Visibility was adequate and the sun was breaking up the night sky. Just as he came to the junction with Swyncombe Avenue, a grey Hillman swung out in front of him from the side road. It had sped from Swyncombe Avenue so unexpectedly and without warning that Mr Harrow had to break sharply. Despite the early hour of the morning and with many residents probably still asleep, he was so angry that he sounded the horn for several seconds. The driver of the Hillman’s only response was to accelerate even faster, quickly drawing clear of Mr Harrow’s vehicle.

In a statement to the police, Mr Harrow said he’d juddered to an almost complete halt or there would have been a major collision. ‘This vehicle then carried on in the direction of the Bath Road, without even slowing or stopping. There was only one person in that vehicle, a man, but I could not identify him.’ The Hillman had been driven away so fast that he hadn’t managed to note a single letter or number of the registration plate.

Scotland Yard’s senior detectives calculated that the driver of the Hillman was ‘their man’. All they had to do was find the Hillman and the driver. Of course, the driver might not have been the owner of the car, but it was a breakthrough. Of sorts. Just a few thousand drivers and vehicles to locate before the next nude awakening!

And then, in a stroke, it was over. Closure as docile and undramatic as a thriller without a thrill.

‘Jack’s’ voice on the line: someone was going to be charged. A full confession had been made. Suddenly there was an air of bathos. The thrill of every chase inevitably had to end in anti-climax. Sometimes, though, an anti-climax could be premature. Occasionally, there could be more to come.