On Sunday, 21 March1965, the national newspapers ran a story intimating that the west London serial killer had almost certainly struck again. Scotland Yard named the probable victim as prostitute Susan ‘Goldie’ Smith, a twenty-five-year-old brunette.

Smith, who had been a close friend of Frances Brown (Margaret McGowan), had been missing from the streets of west London, her regular stamping ground, for seventeen days. If alive, how was she living and where? She was last seen leaving the Warwick Castle pub in the Portobello Road, Notting Hill. This, of course, was the pub where most of the geese (medieval English slang for whores) socialised during a boozy truce before going into cut-throat war on the streets.

My assignment was to take the story a stage further. Before leaving the office I unsuccessfully tried contacting ‘Jack’. The starting point, obviously, was the Warwick Castle. Sunday lunchtime trade was brisk. After buying a drink, I circulated. Of course it was far too early in the day for the geese to be up and about, preening themselves. As soon as I started flashing a photo of Goldie, the atmosphere darkened as the tipplers suspected me of being Old Bill.

‘Do I look like a cop?’ I asked plaintively.

‘’Course you do, you’re wearing a suit,’ said the joker in the pack. ‘Being a short-arse don’t fool anyone around here.’

Someone else chipped in, ‘Sneaky Old Bill even uses dwarfs from circuses to trick people into rabbiting too much.’

But as soon as I started buying them all drinks the mood changed. All suspicion blown away. ‘He can’t be Old Bill; no copper ever puts his hands in his own pocket.’ Laughter. I was in business, one of the muckers.

The drinkers at the bar began passing round the photo. ‘Yeah, that’s Goldie all right,’ said one. ‘Not been in lately, has she?’ None of them read newspapers so they weren’t aware of the public appeal from Scotland Yard.

‘She used to come in every evening, then stopped, as sudden as that,’ said the barman, snapping his fingers.

‘I reckon she must have gone to a monastery to repent.’

‘More likely to give them monks an evening service they’d never forget,’ the joker quipped.

Patience! Patience! Let them dictate the pace. There’s no rush. Deadline is hours away.

‘I saw her only last Wednesday.’ Silence. This sudden outburst of news came from a Jamaican who was at a table beside a frosted window. He was all smiles, dazzling white teeth and calypso carefree. I joined him, shook hands, then asked, ‘Where?’

‘In the Atlantic pub in Brixton High Street. She was sitting between two English men. One was about forty and the other forty-five.’ His friend, Reoy Vincent, said, ‘The police questioned me because they were told I knew Susan. My wife was sick with worry.’

Sheffield-born Susan was nicknamed ‘Goldie’ because of the gold-coloured dress she wore frequently.

The most useful information came from a man who, until that point, had remained silent. ‘If you really want to find Goldie, go to the Atlantic pub at nine tonight. She’s done a runner to Brixton with her fella, whatever you like to call him. None of my business. She carouses from nine till ten before wiggling her bum up and down the High Street. I’ve been with her a couple of times down there. She’s value for money, despite being bloody ugly.’ Raucous laughter. Naturally enough, he wouldn’t give me his name.

I returned to the office chuffed and went into a corner of the busy newsroom with Ken James, who seemed more hyper and stressed than ever. I confided that I had good reason to believe that Goldie hadn’t been murdered and I banked on finding her alive and well in Brixton, south London, that evening. I thought his frog eyes were going to jump out of their sockets. I believe his first words were framed as a question: ‘How did you get this drunk so early on a Sunday?’

After giving him a clinical rundown of the verbal stepping-stone gravitation towards Brixton, I still don’t think he harboured an abundance of confidence. How could I do it in a few hours if it was impossible for Scotland Yard with all their resources? The man’s delusional (that’s me). Despite his scepticism and reservations, he assigned me a car and photographer Len Blandford – I’d worked with him many times before and he was a gem of a professional, especially when it came to snatch-photography, snapping from the hip without the subject realising that the hanging camera was aimed at him/her and firing. Sneaky but an essential black art at times.

Before setting off to Brixton at around eight, I again tried to reach ‘Jack’, but without joy. No doubt he was on the Goldie hunt, too, I reasoned.

The evening was damp and cold. Very black. A starless canopy was over the capital like a chilly, wet flannel, slightly porous, allowing droplets of rain to slip through. Certainly there was no suggestion of spring in the air. I even believe Len thought this venture was an artifice of mine to escape the office, distancing ourselves from the typical crappy stories that tended to distinguish Sundays from the rest of the week.

‘Do we have a plan?’ he wondered, almost mockingly.

‘Yes, we settle ourselves in a warm pub, just drinking and waiting.’ This news cheered him no end. ‘I’ve no complaints about that. Any old pub or one in particular?’ Len was blessed with a wry sense of humour.

‘The Atlantic,’ I replied, leading the way. As soon as we were inside and had bought our drinks, which took some time because the place was heaving, I said, ‘She should be here at nine,’

‘Only time for one drink, then,’ he observed sadly.

Another wrong assumption. Metaphorically, the clock struck nine. Nine-fifteen, still no gold rush. Was there another bar? I carried out a recce. No, there wasn’t. ‘Let’s take a walk,’ I suggested.

With Len shouldering his heavy camera gear, fitted with flash and all cocked, ready to fire, we were sucked out into the soulless High Street by the wind. Brixton bore no resemblance to paradise even on warm, sunny evenings. The immediate question was which way to wander. Without a word of communication, we mutually turned left. We couldn’t have gone more than fifty yards when I saw a woman hurrying towards us, head down, windswept and with ridiculously high heels click-clacking along the pot-holed pavement. As her face became illuminated under an amber street lamp, I knew that this was murder victim Goldie.

‘Susan?’ I said, blocking her path.

Halting and surprised, she said, ‘Yes,’ looking from me to Len and then back to me. The yes carried the question, And who the hell are you and what do you want?

At that moment, as if scripted and synchronised, a car pulled up kerbside and out stepped none other than ‘Jack’.

Shit! I thought, visualising Goldie being carted off without a chance to interview her, scoop evaporating into the ether.

After holding his Scotland Yard ID card to Goldie’s pallid face, he ordered her not to move. Turning to me, he said, semi-seething, ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’

‘Same as you, it seems,’ I answered equably.

‘I don’t want you buggering up this whole thing.’

‘What’s the beef?’ I challenged. ‘We’ve found her safe. Isn’t that the issue, the good news for once and all that matters?’

‘No!’ he retorted, rattled. ‘I’m supposed to have rescued her.’

Ah! Now I began to see. ‘So this was a put-up job, a Yard PR exercise. You pretend she’s probably dead, then along comes the cavalry to the rescue and the press coverage is not only positive for a change but tinsel-wrapped with praise. The glory boys!’

‘OK,’ he said, cooling down, ‘let’s share the spoils. Jump in the back of my car, the pair of you’, meaning Len and myself.

Turning to Goldie, he said tersely, ‘I want you in the front’ (I bet she’d heard that more than a few times).

‘Where are you taking me?’ she enquired nervously.

‘Home,’ he said. ‘To your home.’

Without asking for her address, ‘Jack’ drove directly to a house in Kemerton Road, where she lived. Strange. If she was genuinely missing and Scotland Yard feared she’d been murdered and ‘Jack’ had only chanced upon her then, like us, how did he know her current address, without asking for directions? Another mystery within a mystery. Careless, ‘Jack’. Not like you to be so slipshod… ‘Slipshod’, there’s a Masonic term to ponder.

In the car, Goldie told me, ‘I haven’t read any of the newspapers today. I don’t know what all the fuss is about. I left Notting Hill on 4 March to stay with a friend in Brixton. If I’d known all about the anxiety I was causing, I would have gone straight to the police’ (of course you would have!). That’s what prostitutes do; find me a nice policeman. Really! Equivalent to saying, ‘If I’d known you were coming, I’d have baked a cake.’

‘I don’t think I have been in any danger,’ she went on. ‘But I’m glad you found me so this whole trouble can be cleared up.’ She didn’t look glad, more glum. She was probably counting the cost of losing a night’s earnings, thanks to us.

As we pulled up in Kemerton Road, I asked ‘Jack’, ‘What now?’

‘I’ll just take her inside, have a look around, see that everything’s hunky-dory, then take her to Brixton police station and get her to make a short statement. Do everything by the book, just for the record. Admin, admin, worse than Chinese water-drip torture.’

So this was doing everything by the book!

Len and I were left to hack it back to our car, but no complaints from us; it had been a positive day’s work. All wrapped up just in time to catch the first edition of Monday morning’s Sun. Yet the whole affair wreaked of a stunt, a set-up. Of course the murder squad were aware that Goldie had come to no harm and had simply changed address.

To ‘Big John’ du Rose it was simply another cynical, publicity-grabbing exercise, regardless of the distress caused to others. What he hadn’t planned for was ‘Goldie’ being found by a journalist and for the journalist’s newspaper to steal the kudos right from under the nose of his elite boys. Although he didn’t take kindly to being upstaged, he saw the advantages of having a journalist magpie to whom he could feed crumbs through a trusty conduit, ‘Jack’.

It takes a thief to catch a thief. But does it take a murderer to catch a murderer? There are some people, with knowledge, who would argue that such a proposition is not so outlandish as it may at first seem, but that’s a theme for another book, not this one.

Tuesday, 23 March, 10 a.m.

A reporter, holding up a phone in the newsroom, called to me, ‘It’s a Detective Sergeant Berry for you, Mike.’

The fact that ‘Jack’ had used his real name and rank warned me immediately that the call was either being electronically recorded or it was being listened to by others via some form of internal link.

‘Hello,’ I said neutrally.

‘Is that Mr Litchfield? This is Detective Sergeant Berry.’

‘So I understand,’ I said. ‘How are you today after your long night?’

‘Sidestepping my small talk, he said, ‘My boss [du Rose] wants to know what the blazes is going on?’

‘About what exactly?’ Returning serve on the volley.

‘About what’s on the front page of your newspaper.’

‘It’s self-explanatory,’ I said.

A hiatus. He was obviously taking instructions.

‘Look, there’s no problem this end, Mike.’ Now it was the chummy Mike approach, clearly decreed by Big John. ‘It’s just that we’re in the dark as how you came to be in Brixton with such perfect timing.’

‘I just did my job, Bob (if I was Mike, then it cut both ways). I spent time and money in the Warwick Castle at lunchtime.’

‘And someone knew her movements and whereabouts?’

‘Correct.’

‘Did he show a particular interest in the “Nudes” case?’

‘No.’

‘He didn’t fish around for more info on what you or we knew about the killer?’

‘No, not at all.’

‘Was he white?’

‘No. A Jamaican.’

‘Oh, well!’ He’d lost interest. At least I’d just learned that the police had reason to know that the killer was a Caucasian. ‘As I said, the boss isn’t upset by your story,’ – I contained my mirth – ‘but he wishes you’d operate through us so that we don’t go treading on each other’s toes. But we do want to keep you on board.’

Well, well, from suspect to honorary member of the murder squad. Some promotion! The objective, of course, was to keep me corralled. No chance!

‘Got it?’ ‘Jack’ said, the inflexion unmistakable.

I had got it. ‘Jack’ was coding me the message to stay in close contact with him. In the circumstances I couldn’t tell him I’d twice tried reaching him before setting off for Brixton the previous evening.

‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ I said, quickly adding, ‘Incidentally, what’s happened to Goldie?’

‘She was driven home in the early hours after being given an official warning about soliciting. We went through the motions. Waste of valuable breath, though. She’ll be out on the High Street tonight, like clockwork, tanked up on scotch or vodka. But with luck she’ll avoid the west London creeper.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Not yet. Soon, maybe.’

Call over.

‘Another complaint?’ James boomed from his squeaky leather throne, beaming with good cheer for a change.

‘No, just the Yard trying to pick my brains.’

‘No wonder the call was so short.’

Usual boring newsroom banter, reminiscent of my school playground – a cloistered quad – during morning milk break.

***

The Heron Trading Estate comprised thirty-five factories constructed around a sports ground for the workers. There was lots of waste ground and weedy undergrowth between the buildings, plus a network of private roads. Altogether more than seven thousand men and women were employed on this industrial estate in Acton. Also it was freely used day and night by the general public, sometimes as a shortcut but more often as a quiet place during darkness for sexual activity in cars or on the ground around the sports area.

Referring to the inch-by-inch search of this estate during many weeks, du Rose was to report, ‘Finally, and strangely enough, at the remotest end of the search area, we came up with the paint-pattern we were seeking. This was found a short distance from where Bridie O’Hara’s body had probably lain for two weeks before being moved. It appeared to have been hidden at the site of a transformer at the rear of a factory… It faced a paint-spray shop!’

He went on, ‘All the globules of paint matched and the substances that made up the dust on Bridie’s body were in the right proportions. When the area was tested, it was found that the spray-pattern became fainter as one moved further from this spot and eventually disappeared after a few hundred yards, so it was clear that the bodies on which the pattern was shown had been kept within close range of this particular paint shop.’

The police scientists were able to pinpoint the exact spot where O’Hara’s body had been kept, yet all this scientific data proved useless, as admitted by du Rose: ‘It transpired eventually that the paint shop was purely incidental to the killing. It did not lead us to the killer, although he must have had some association with the factory estate.’

Untrue. It was the other way round: the prostitutes had carnal knowledge of the estate: it was one of their regular haunts for enacting business and they directed clients there. This popular choice of venue among the demimonde was logical. Few people, if any, were around on the industrial site at night and the access road and sports ground were deserted.

However, the investigation did turn up one macabre and eerie coincidence. A former employee of the Heron Industrial Estate was the one-time Special Constable and serial killer John Christie, of that chilling address, 10 Rillington Place, the epicentre of numerous movies and books. His victims numbered at least eight, but he was not in the frame this time: he’d been hanged at Pentonville Prison on 15 July 1953, aged fifty-four.