Read Handsome Brute: The True Story of a Ladykiller Online
Authors: Sean O'Connor
As he continued to elude the police, Scotland Yard began to receive dozens of ‘dud’ 999 calls with sightings of Heath from Worthing to Wales, from Birmingham to Bognor.
15
Spooner called midnight talks to work through the mounting number of clues and leads.
16
Letters from members of the public, many scrawled and anonymous, suggested motives for the murder – for instance that Heath was at the centre of a white slave ring, seducing and exploiting defenceless young women. In the golden age of Agatha Christie, hundreds of armchair sleuths claimed sightings of Heath all over the country.
On Wednesday evening June 26th, in a ‘bus’ queue in the Strand at about 6 p.m. (outside Woolworth’s) was a man who answered the description given in the newspapers . . . the man wore dark glasses which he took off on the bus . . . but the moral of this story is that if there were a picture of the man published, the writer of this letter might have known at once whether it was the wanted man or not.
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This concern about the lack of a photograph of Heath arose early in the investigation and was later proved to be valid.
During the night of 27 June a two-and-a-half-ton ‘Dodge’ truck was stolen from Rochester and found abandoned in Worthing the next day. The truck had been loaded with rolls of tarred paper but they had all been removed when it was found. In the cabin was a carton containing twenty-four jars of Brylcreem, a camera and twenty-four rolls of Kodak film. On the box of Brylcreem was a message:
The police thought they had got me but I am to clever for you, don’t you agree. I warn you there is going to be another murder before very long you see.
J. Heath.
P.S. The silly police have got to hurry if they want me.
Though the handwriting was neat, the spelling (‘to clever’) didn’t indicate a grammar-school education like Heath’s. DI Eagle in Worthing passed the information to Spooner at Notting Hill but the clue turned out to be a red herring. It was clear that the longer Heath was at large, the more intense was the speculation about the possibility of him committing another violent murder.
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One newspaper, adding fuel to the fire, speculated that Heath might be carrying a gun.
19
As well as questioning Heath’s acquaintances, the police continued to investigate Margery Gardner’s life and background. Her diary had been studied and copied and officers began to interview her friends and associates. It is at this point that the investigation into her death took a complex turn.
One witness, Trevethan Frampton, had known Margery for about six months. They were both regulars at the same bars and clubs. In his interview with the police, Frampton gave an insight into Margery’s character which offered an alternative interpretation of the circumstances surrounding her death.
On occasions Mrs Gardner told me that she liked people to be rough when making love to her and also that her husband was invariably rough with her. From this I gathered that she was a masochistic. I am not very interested in this subject and never questioned her on it. I did discover though that she enjoyed the sensation of being at a man’s mercy.
20
If Margery had left the Panama Club with Heath knowing what his sexual tastes were, had she allowed herself to be tied by him in order to be beaten, just as Pauline Brees had at the Strand Palace Hotel? Another witness who claimed to know Margery well, a Mrs Smith, also attributed masochistic tendencies to her, but Spooner thought Mrs Smith was ‘a borderline mental case’
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and that her statement was questionable.
Nearly seventy years on, the complexities of masochistic behaviour are better understood and the subject is less covert than it was in the mid-1940s. High-street chains like Ann Summers sell a vast array of whips, handcuffs and ties aimed at the female consumer and intended for the mutual exploration of sexual dominance and submission. Though extreme, none of the injuries that Margery had suffered would have killed her, but Heath would only have needed to hold her face down into the pillow for as little as thirty seconds in order to suffocate her. Keith Simpson confirmed that Margery’s face seemed to have been washed after she had died. Might this have resulted from Heath attempting to revive her by splashing water on her face from the washbasin in the corner of the room? Were the police looking at a sexual tryst that had got out of hand? And was this, therefore, a case of manslaughter rather than murder?
By the end of the first week of July, the investigation had been going on for sixteen days and despite several sightings, Heath had apparently disappeared. Maybe he was abroad by now or one of his women friends was hiding him somewhere in England? The police had drawn a blank.
On the evening of Saturday 7 July, Reg Spooner received a telephone call that was to accelerate the investigation, but was also to take it in an unexpected and harrowing direction. He was told that a man was being held at Bournemouth Police Station who was believed to be Neville Heath. This was the call that Spooner had been waiting for. He told the police in Bournemouth to keep the suspect at the station at any cost. He would be there as soon as possible.
Spooner instructed Detective Sergeant Frampton to fill a police car with petrol at Lambeth garage. Fuel still being rationed, Frampton drew three five-unit petrol coupons for the journey there and back.
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At 10.40 p.m. Spooner and Shelley Symes climbed into the back of the Wolseley and raced the hundred miles down to Bournemouth.
PART THREE
Group Captain Rupert Robert Brook
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Bournemouth
23 JUNE 1946
My learned friend quoted the great detective [Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes] who said that the curious thing about the dog in the night was that the dog did nothing in the night. Another great detective [G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown], known to my learned friend and possibly to you, once asked, ‘Where does a wise man hide a pebble?’ And the answer was, ‘On a beach.’ What better way of removing yourself from immediate notice at any rate, than to go and stay at a seaside place in the holiday season, taking on an identity and character which is not your own, and mingling with the seaside crowds, behaving as an hotel guest and an apparently ordinary person?
Mr E. Anthony Hawke, Counsel for the Crown
1
Bournemouth is one of the few English towns one can safely call ‘her’.
John Betjeman,
First and Last Loves
, 1952
T
he contemporary view of Bournemouth is very much of a place where one goes to die; a quiet place with a slower pace. But this polite and ordered town stretching towards the coast conceals a darker nature, perhaps even more sinister given the sharp contrast between its sunny, holiday face and the shadows haunting the villas and gardens that John Betjeman observed in the early 1950s. It is curious to find, for instance, that Mary Shelley, the creator of
Frankenstein
is buried in St Peter’s Church in Bournemouth, along with her husband’s heart, brought back from Italy after his death.
2
Robert Louis Stevenson settled in Bournemouth and in 1886 wrote one of his most famous novels here – the definitive tale of the dualities of the human personality,
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
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– strange though it may have seemed at the time that this polite English seaside resort should inspire such a tale of corruption and horror. It is also in Bournemouth – or Sandbourne as it is known in Hardy’s Wessex – that Tess kills her caddish seducer Alec D’Uberville at a ‘stylish lodging house’ called ‘The Herons’ (‘Tis all lodging houses here’),
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and where Mrs Brooks the landlady first notices D’Uberville’s blood ‘drip, drip, drip’ through the ceiling until the stain resembles ‘a gigantic ace of hearts’.
5
The position of Bournemouth, about 100 miles southwest of London, and its coastal situation had proved crucial to the town’s fortunes during the war. At the outbreak of hostilities the town had been quickly prepared for invasion. In 1940, Bournemouth and Boscombe piers had been closed, blown up and stripped of their planking to prevent enemy landings.
6
The sea front itself was closed to all but the military and the beach, now a minefield, bristled with barbed wire. Army vehicles had been positioned along the cliff tops to prevent possible invasion. Pillboxes, static water tanks and air raid shelters had been built throughout the town. All beach huts were removed and placed in their owners’ gardens for the duration. Anti-aircraft guns were positioned on the flat roofs of the beachside cafes which once had swarmed with holiday crowds.
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Because of its peacetime occupation as a holiday resort, Bournemouth also had a unique resource to offer the war effort: accommodation. The town boasted hundreds of hotels from five star luxury to basic bed and board. As well as becoming a reception area for evacuees, many businesses and government offices from London including the Ministries of Agriculture and Education, the Home Office and the Board of Trade were transferred to Bournemouth and established in the main hotels. Consequently the town was flooded with hundreds of civil servants, all of whom needed to be accommodated as well.
8
As the war progressed, the section of the coast both to the east and west of Bournemouth pier became crucial, not only as a defensive position, but as a practice area for military strategy. In February 1944, Studland Bay had been the scene of live ammunition beach rehearsals in preparation for the Normandy landings, supervised by Eisenhower and Field Marshall Montgomery. Nearby Poole Harbour was the departure point for many of the ships participating in D-Day itself. Thousands of service personnel from the Allied nations began to flood into the town in order to take part in these practice operations. At the same time, battle-weary survivors from the various theatres of war had been sent to Bournemouth on leave to recuperate.
9
Americans, Canadians, Czechs and – after D-Day – French servicemen were all billeted in Bournemouth’s requisitioned hotels and guesthouses. By 1944 an Area Defence ban was in force creating an exclusion zone within ten miles of the coast and very few civilians were allowed within it. Bournemouth had become a garrison town.
10
The large number of service personnel may well be one of the reasons that Bournemouth was bombed about fifty times throughout the war. It was targeted by 2,271 bombs, including incendiaries. Some 219 people were killed, 176 injured and 75 premises were completely destroyed. One of the most destructive raids took place on the night of 15–16 November 1940 when 53 people were killed and 2,321 properties were damaged. It is in this raid that Robert Louis Stevenson’s house, ‘Skerryvore’, at the top of Alum Chine had been hit and damaged. Despite a public campaign to try and preserve it as a building of historic interest, the house was demolished the following year and by 1946 nothing of it remained.
11
The most damaging attack on Bournemouth was a daring daylight ‘hit and run’ raid on Sunday 23 May 1943, when bombs were dropped in ten districts by Focke-Wulf 190s (known by the RAF as the ‘butcher bird’) and Messerschmitt 109s. These aircraft carried 500-kg high-explosive bombs and were light enough to fly above wave height, making them undetectable by British radar. Consequently, the town was not in a state of alert nor ready to defend itself when it prepared for lunch that Sunday. The Luftwaffe aircraft could fly so closely to their targets that survivors from the raid remember being able to look directly into the German pilots’ faces.
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Among 3,481 buildings damaged in the raid, the Central and Metropole hotels were both destroyed. Beales’ department store was completely demolished following a direct hit. Fortunately, this being Sunday, the shop was closed, but the hotel bars were busy with servicemen having drinks before lunch. In the Metropole Hotel alone seventy-seven people were killed. The attack took place exactly one week after the infamous ‘Dam Busters’ raid on the Mohne and Eder dams in Germany led by Guy Gibson and it may have been a revenge attack with the Metropole Hotel as a specific target, it being a Royal Canadian Air Force reception centre as well as a billet for Canadian, Australian and American personnel.
By the summer of 1946, many of the servicemen and women had left Bournemouth and a concerted effort was made to get the town ready to embrace its former identity as a holiday destination. German prisoners of war were assigned to remove barbed wire and landmines from the beach. The Russell-Cotes Art Gallery started to collect pictures that had been removed for safety from the various manor houses, rectories and churches to which they had been taken when war was declared. But the coastline around Bournemouth had deteriorated more than any other resort, due to heavy tides and coastal winds. The beach had almost disappeared leaving only a narrow strip of sand, so a great deal of intense work had to be done for the expected crowds in the summer. A gangplank was hastily laid across the skeleton of the derelict pier in order to give access to pleasure boats, but it was not to be fully restored until 1950.
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Many buildings and hotels were still requisitioned by the military. The Royal Bath Hotel remained as the WAAF officers’ mess until September 1946. The Burley Court Hotel had only recently been vacated by the Canadian Air Force in March, as had the High Cliff Hotel on the West Cliff.