CHAPTER SEVEN
I wrote:
Britain has been rocked by revelations that a serial killer is stalking the streets of the capital.
At least two women, possibly more, have been killed and their bodies mutilated. Rumours are rife that a modern day Jack the Ripper is on the prowl, abducting women and brutally murdering them after raping them and disfiguring their bodies terribly. Ritualism is being talked about, though this may well be the product of over-imaginative minds.
But whatever the full truth of the matter, someone or more than one killer, is loose on the streets and this city is panicking.
So far I had no more to go on than anyone else in the media. You cannot hide convoys of police descending on a quiet part of the country like Gerrards Cross, close to the Ministry of Defence’s British Forces Broadcasting Service, and not have the press crawling all over the place asking questions in no time at all.
We knew a murder victim had been found, that it was a woman, that it had had no time to decompose, that it had been mutilated. And that it was not the first of its kind.
In an unusual development police sources have said that the body found was in a similar condition to another located in the Oxford area about three months ago.
They are trying to keep the case low key – not surprising given the public concern even at this stage and with so little accurate information being available – but rumours abound.
One of the most horrid suggests that the latest victim might have been mutilated before she was murdered. This probably gave rise to the reference to ritualism, a claim denied strenuously by New Scotland Yard.
The rest of my Hong Kong column was colour which added no material weight. Just more words to fill the space I was required to write each week.
My stories for the other publications I was UK correspondent for, in Toronto, Melbourne and Cape Town, were straighter, factual and therefore briefer in dealing with the killings themselves. They were not columns but regular news stories and I padded them out with comments from residents in the Gerrards Cross area, law and order activists, and Labour backbencher Tony Lawrence. He was a young Member of Parliament I knew personally and who had chosen law and order as one of his prime parliamentary interests.
The day after the story broke in the national press he caught the Speaker’s eye during Prime Minister’s Question Time in the Commons. It was a rowdy session as usual, most of the noise coming from the Prime Minister’s own side of the House as they waved their Order Papers in the air and taunted the Opposition at every opportunity.
“Will the Prime Minister,” Lawrence shouted over the clamour in the chamber, “Will the Prime Minister explain to this House what action he will take against the Junior Minister of the Home Office for creating unwarranted panic in the community with his claims of monsters roaming our streets, or if the junior Minister was in fact justified in his remarks that some evil killer is stalking citizens, will the Prime Minister please inform this House, and the general public at large, why we have not been warned by the police?”
The Prime Minister, uncharacteristically unsmiling, and handling a sheaf of papers at the dispatch box as he invariably did, adequately dealt with the question. He spoke in generalities, stressing that everything possible was being done to apprehend the person or persons responsible, and stating that there was no need for undue worry. The tabloid press, he said, should be more restrained in their banner headlines and not stir up unnecessary panic. Meanwhile the police would get on with their work in tracking down the murderer, a human murderer, not a fantasy beast.
The following two questions were dealt with easily and the Prime Minister’s renowned grin reappeared. Unease returned, however, when he was asked near the end of his thirty minute question session if the deaths of the two women found were unquestionably linked and in what way.
The Prime Minister confirmed the body discovered at Gerrards Cross was being linked with the other which reportedly had been found near Oxford. The common factors were that both were women, both were rather well-built, both had been disfigured and while he would not be drawn on details of the disfigurement he indicated there were enough similarities for the investigating authorities to draw certain conclusions.
Then came the next bombshell.
“Can the Prime Minister tell us how many bodies have been found, that is how many the police believe might be linked to the one killer?” asked another Opposition backbencher.
The Prime Minister slowly approached the dispatch box. For security reasons, he answered, it would be inappropriate to go into too much detail but there were more than two.
The chamber erupted. “How many? How many? How many?” was the demand from both sides.
Finally, he stood again. “Four,” he said firmly. “Four bodies have been found.” All were women, all mutilated. All were suspected of being victims of the same murderer.
The press had its story. A monster, real and not imagined, was indeed out there.