Readers might reasonably ask how I can remember conversations of so long ago that weren’t recorded electronically or with contemporaneous notes. The answer to that is with the reverse question: How could I possibly forget? With a subject of this enormity, a rollercoaster saga of such staggering magnitude inexorably building to a climax that defies the laws of imagination and plausibility, it is inevitable that the zeitgeist of those times have crystallised in my memory, rather than dimming and withering. Of course I have been helped by police records and media microfilm, but the most illuminating elements of this narrative come from my own personal involvement and the dialogue in which I was a participant. Of course, some words and phrases will be inaccurately juxtaposed, but to paraphrase would squander the quality of characterisation; speech, for example, the argot of gangland London was very personified.

One mystery that remains is what happened to the tape-recording of a confession to John du Rose (shortly before he became Deputy Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard) by the serial killer, who was never charged, for reasons that will become clear. The reflex is to find his cover-up implausible. Surely the natural reaction would be for him to have revealed his historic coup in his autobiography and bathe in the kudos? Not so. The problem for devious du Rose was that the tape was a double-edged sword. He had a confession and had the man cornered – literally, in a Masonic bar, but instead of arresting him there and then, he struck a deal, with a special, trusting handshake. To have exposed the existence of that tape and to admit that he had allowed the serial killer to walk away, would have damned du Rose for ever, making him ‘The Idiot of the Yard’, rather than bathing him in glory. And he knew it, more than anybody. So I guess the recording was destroyed. In his favour, he would have been acutely aware, from an earlier disaster, that a confession on its own would not have been enough.

Nevertheless, instead of the real plural killer being named, blamed and shamed, du Rose fingered an innocent. A ‘disposable’ man, someone unable to fight back because carbon monoxide fumes from his car in a locked garage had silenced him, to du Rose’s cynical and sickening advantage.

 

MICHAEL LITCHFIELD