Authors: Harold Robbins
“Why was he called Lord Haw-Haw?”
“I believe it had to do with the sneering manner of his speech.”
Dennis Nielsen, a butcher in the army, was sentenced to life imprisonment after killing fifteen times. Beginning in the late seventies, he picked up young men off the street, often for homosexual activities, and murdered them in his home. Before burying them in his garden, he often dressed the dead bodies up and had sex with them, including oral copulation.
Hall told her the Nielsen story apologetically, a proper Britisher who didn’t think a woman should hear about such things, Marlowe thought.
She noticed in his recital of Old Bailey horrors he omitted one of the most notorious, that of Fred and Rosemary West, who together tortured, raped, and murdered about a dozen young women, including their own daughters. She had read about the case. Like Nielsen, the Wests preferred burying the bodies in their own garden. Rosemary, not the nicest of mothers, held down her daughters for their father to rape them. She told her bound-and-gagged eight-year-old as her father raped her that they were only making sure that she would be able to satisfy a husband when she grew up. Another daughter, a teenager, was murdered after she complained to a friend that she was being raped.
Fred hanged himself in jail and Rosemary was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Back in the sixties, the Kray brothers, twins, one of whom was a homosexual, were the two most ruthless gangsters in the country. They were tried and convicted for two gangland killings in the longest murder trial in English history. They were sentenced to life imprisonment.
“Ruth Ellis, on the other hand, had one of the shortest murder trials,” Hall said.
Ruth gunned down her lover David Blakely on a London street. Jealous, humiliated by Blakely’s treatment after a lifetime of being beaten and betrayed by men, her system fired up from booze, Ruth grabbed a gun, left the house, found Blakely on a street in the Hampstead District, and opened fire, hitting him four or five times.
“I’m afraid that the jury didn’t find that Blakely deserved to die for love gone wrong. My best recollection is that the trial lasted only about a day and a half, including jury deliberation, which was all of about twenty minutes. She was hanged just a few weeks later. Justice moved astonishingly quick in the case—it was only about three months from the time she pulled the trigger to the rope around her neck.”
“Did her lawyer argue provocation, a heat of passion?”
“To no avail. And to much grumbling around the world. My hazy recollection is that her lawyers tried to argue that Ruth was so consumed by jealousy, she couldn’t premeditate. The judge refused the defense, properly so, but did instruct the jury on the difference between murder and manslaughter. It was about ten miles from where she grabbed her gun to where she pulled the trigger. The law then—and
now
”—he gave Marlowe a meaningful look—“is that the time it took her to get to the killing site negated the heat of passion.”
“I disagree, of course. I don’t believe people are capable of turning on and off their passions like a light switch.”
“Worse so, here in chilly old Britain, I’m afraid. As one French paper put it, unless it arises out of cricket or betting, passion to us British is regarded as a shameful disease. The case did, however, bring one good result. There was so much outcry over the execution, Ruth became the last woman hanged in England.”
“I’m sure she got great solace from that,” Marlowe said.
* * *
F
ROM THE STREET, THE
famed criminal courts building was impressive, a great, towering monument of gray, with a dome on top that gave the building the look of an American state capitol building, but was capped by a golden statue of Justice holding her scales and sword.
Marlowe wondered what the goddess thought about the way modern media turned celebrity trials into a feeding frenzy. Legions of the press—
a plague of locusts,
Marlowe thought—were waiting at the steps leading into the building. She took a deep breath before she went up the steps with Philip Hall at her side, smiling but not responding to the shouted questions. The police had a roped-off corridor up the steps for people with court business.
As they passed barristers, Marlowe asked, “Will I be expected to wear a wig and robe?”
“No, you are excused from the requirement. I know you must think it’s quite old-fashioned.”
“Actually, I think it’s quite dramatic—a lawyer often deals with life-and-death situations, usually arising from violence, great emotions, and even pathos. The garments emphasize the dramatic nature of their calling, just as a surgeon’s mask and smock emphasize medical drama.”
They paused at the doors. Hall raised his eyebrows. “You haven’t met one of the stars of your drama, yet.”
“The judge?”
“Oh, I think you’ll find the judge to be a typical character actor, definitely a supporting role, not center stage. The star I’m talking about is the prosecutor. Whether he is a hero or a villain depends upon where you sit in the courtroom.”
Dutton stood at the window of a second-floor office down the street from the courthouse and watched Marlowe and Hall exit the limo and march up the stairs to the courthouse. The office was a secretarial agency and Dutton had once dated the head stenographer, but like so many of his past romantic entanglements, the relationship had ended with bad feelings and a blood vengeance.
“I should shove you out that window,” she told Dutton.
“It’s okay, luv, I know you only say that because you are still pining for me. We should get together some night and talk about old times.”
“An old cock like you only has one thing on his mind when he wants to get together for old times.”
She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. He had less than twenty years on her. “Old cock? Do I strike you as an older man?”
“You strike me as the bastard who stole the notes I took in dictation from that Foreign Office chap and drugged me to get your stick up my dress.”
He glanced back at her. “I paid for the notes and you were happy enough to jack up your dress for a bonus.”
“That’s not what I told my husband.” She examined her fingernails. “He has a bad temper, if you get my meaning. Works all night as a bouncer for a club and has to put up with his wife being taken advantage of when he’s gone. If he runs into you, he’s going to put a cosh across your bone box.”
Dutton rubbed his lips. A cosh was a blackjack. A bone box was his mouth. She hadn’t been that good a poke to justify getting his teeth knocked out.
He looked back out the window and ignored the woman as she gave him graphic details of the harm her husband did to another man who had “drugged” her.
The more he saw of Marlowe James—and this time he got a bird’s-eye view of her in person instead of on the telly—the more he got a little tingling at the back of his neck that told him that she knew something he needed.
He paused by the stenographer’s desk on the way out. “I’m on a hot one, Megan. When I cash in on it, I’m going to send you and your hubby to the south of Spain for a whole month. Tell him that.”
“We can leave him home and you and I can go.”
Yeah, that would work,
Dutton thought, as he went out the door and down the corridor.
I’ll have to do that the next time I feel suicidal.
He called his unfaithful editor as soon as he hit the street and started walking, keeping an eye out for a taxi.
“There were parts from four bodies,” Cohn said, squealing with delight.
He sounded like an excited little girl, Dutton thought. The bigger the body count, the better. Tabloid editors and funeral directors were cut from the same mold.
“It’s all hush-hush, not a word can be printed, the Official Secrets Act has been invoked. But we got the inside dope from the coroner’s office. Don’t you have a personal contact in the office? Can you—”
“She died,” Dutton lied. He had never told Cohn he got his information from Howler because of the no-honor-among-thieves theory of tabloid publishing.
“Four bodies,” Dutton muttered, “all dressed up in costume. It’s insane.”
“It’s a signature, you know, the sort of thing that you serial killers use to mark your crimes.”
“What’d you say?”
“A signature—”
“‘You serial killers?’”
“Tony, Tony, you know I love you, but think of the story, you’re a professional, think of the story. Four bodies makes it a serial killer. Imagine for a moment that you were the killer, or at least that you didn’t deny being the killer for a while. You could be calling in, giving your old friend and editor a blow-by-blow account of your moments as you flee the police, your thoughts, fears, rages—imagine the reader’s concern. Will he kill again? Who will be next? It would make the Ripper—”
“I’ll give you an inside tip into a killer’s mind,” Dutton said. “You’re going to be next!” He hung up.
He cursed the phone, Cohn, and himself as he went down the street with long angry strides. He had screwed up. He could already see the next
Burn
headline:
Crazed Reporter Vows to Murder Editor
.
Parts from four bodies. Grisly stuff, not for the faint at heart, one had to kill four people and then select the parts. Some nutcase sewing together body parts—to create what?
An exhibit!
Of course, that’s what it was, it was a ghastly display piece put together by someone who was used to cutting human flesh and bone. Howler fit the bill nicely not only because of his medical skills, but there was showmanship here and his other source of money to support his drug habit came from Madame Tussauds, the wax museum.
He ducked into the Underground. He’d get there faster and cheaper by tube. Madame Tussauds was a short walk from the Baker Street tube station. It wasn’t a far stretch for a talented plastic surgeon like Howler to have done piecework reconstructing stiffs at the morgue and putting a human face on wax dummies for the museum. Madame Tussaud herself probably would have made a great plastic surgeon. And having a chamber of horrors would have come naturally to her—she lived in one during a period of her life.
Early in her life, Tussaud had learned in Paris the art of wax modeling from her uncle who had wax museums. During her thirties, she was an art tutor at Versailles to the king’s sister, Princess Elizabeth of France. Elizabeth, like both her English namesakes who became queens, was a woman of courage and loyalty, who refused to flee the country and leave her brother, Louis XVI, and his wife, Marie-Antoinette, to face the wrath of the revolution by themselves. The twenty-eight-year-old princess was imprisoned with her royal relatives by the revolutionaries and went bravely to the guillotine during the Reign of Terror.
Because of her unique skills at creating wax images, Madame Tussaud was given the gruesome job of making death masks from those who lost their heads at the guillotine—frequently, the masks were of her friends, including the tragic young princess.
Tussaud left France and came to England in the early 1800s, touring the country for several decades with her collection of wax models before she purchased a permanent home for them near the site of the present museum on Marylebone Road. Dutton hadn’t been in the museum since he was a kid, but he still remembered how awed he was at the “life” wax artists were able to put into historical figures.
Dutton avoided the long line of tourists at the museum entrance by showing his press ID. Inside he talked to Mary Rees, the woman who supervised the “reconstructive surgery” and frequently hired Howler to work his magic on faces, making them lifelike.
“Haven’t seen him,” Mary said, the words making their way out from a mouthful of ham sandwich.
Dutton followed her as she chewed and checked wax forms being readied for an exhibit that showed the Prince of Wales being shot by his wife at the masquerade party.
“When I see him, I’m going to carve my initials on his arse with one of his scalpels,” she said. “He’s a master at showing pain and shock—I needed him to put the emotion on the prince’s face when he first saw the gun and when the bullet struck him. I should have known he’d run out. He gave me a crazy laugh when I first told him about the job. I even stuck my neck out and got him an advance on the job.”
Big mistake, Dutton thought. Giving a drug addict an advance produced about the same result as flushing it down the loo. But the woman probably had no idea Howler was supporting a habit. He wondered what she’d say if he told her Howler was out of carving wax and into human flesh.
“Haven’t heard from him, eh?”
“Not a bleedin’ word, hasn’t even returned the costume.”
Dutton’s heart skipped a beat. “Costume?”
“Wanted to borrow it, claimed he needed it for a costume party.”
“An Elizabethan costume?”
“It was Henry VIII, it was.”
That put the nail on the identification of the Westminster exhibit. Dutton had been convincing himself that the secret to the Tudor costume was to be found in a Shakespeare play, but it was now a certainty that it was the old wife-killer himself.
Confirming the costume was old Henry gave a little hop to his step. He started massacring a Herman’s Hermits song as he headed for the door. “I’m Henry the Eighth, I am! Henry the Eighth I am!”
As he came out of the door to the museum, Inspector Bram Archer and Sergeant Lois Kramer were coming in.
Archer grinned at him. “This is my lucky day.” In a stage whisper he said, “Make a run for it, Dutton, I’ll shoot you in the back and you won’t have to stand trial.”
“My editor will have your—”
“Your editor says you’re a mad-dog killer on the loose.” Archer grabbed him by the front of his collar and jerked him close enough to smell the steak and kidney pie he’d had for lunch. “Resist, please, just give me one ounce of resistance.”
“Fuck you.”
Archer tapped him in the stomach, a little nudge, just enough to knock his wind out and urge the bangers he’d had for lunch to come back up. He fought down the urge to puke the sausages on Archer, out of the clear knowledge the police inspector would have ripped off his head if he had.