CHAPTER TWELVE
Detectives Rogers and Johnston had been watching the suspect for two days. Two long twenty-four hour shifts without a break. They were strung out.
Their man was a pop star of two decades ago, or to be accurate, he was almost a pop star in the late seventies who descended into depths of public humiliation and degradation in the eighties. And in the nineties he had made no efforts to rise above his low self crafted station.
His relative success at the beginning of his career had earned him the adoration of a reasonable band of impressionable youth. It had, he apparently considered, earned him the right to abuse that adoration.
His first arrest was for behaving in an indecent manner in a public toilet in St James’s Park after a performance at a Piccadilly club. The youth involved was only fourteen. It was for his sake and that of his family that the decision was taken not to prosecute, but it was the publicity surrounding this incident which put him on the downward slide to ruin. By the mid eighties he had been picked up more than a dozen times for offences involving young men. However, as they were all over the minimum age limit, and with the help of a lawyer of whom it was said he had a deep understanding of the mind of his client, he managed to escape jail. Then he slipped from sight. For more than five years nothing was heard of him. Nobody cared. Nobody enquired.
“This prick is the lowest of the low,” Rogers remarked to his partner. “I hope he is the one we want so I can bury my fist in his gut so far he’ll think he’s been cut in half.”
Johnston snorted as he rested his head on the back of the car seat, his eyes closed.
Try as he could, sleep would not come. It was his turn to rest while Rogers kept watch. But the last two days had been exhausting and he was now at that stage where nothing short of a bottle of whiskey would put him out. The best he could do was breath deeply and try to ignore the frequent comments by Rogers.
“You know he started out with young blokes.” Rogers was keeping his voice low but there was venom in his words. Part of the reason for his talking was to keep from nodding off himself and losing the subject. The rest was to remind himself of the type of person he was watching. “He got tired of them though and moved on to more interesting victims. A genuine prick I can tell you.”
*
When he resurfaced in London the one-time singer professed to be an international trader with close associates in Brussels and Sofia. It was never spelt out what he traded but it apparently was lucrative as he never seemed at a loss for money. He frequented the clubs of Soho and Mayfair. Always with women on his arms he had become brazenly heterosexual. But it was not long before rumours began of his relationships with the females he escorted. The dark glasses they invariably began wearing hid blackened eyes and it was said their clinging gowns were not always sufficient to conceal their bruised bodies.
It was late at night when the police station in Nottinghill Gate was treated to an amazing performance. Around twelve thirty the singer burst in through the front door and collapsed onto the bench against the wall sobbing. He was bleeding from the nose and the sleeves of his white silk shirt were drenched in blood. His trouser legs also were smeared and when the police examined him they found deep gashes along the insides of both arms and cuts down both calves.
Questioned, he stated that a female friend he had been entertaining at his home that night had in a frenzy, for no reason, launched herself at him with a kitchen knife screaming murder and mayhem. Slashing wildly she had almost killed him and the only reason he was alive was because he was able to wrestle the knife away from her and lock her in the bedroom.
As the police were preparing to race to the scene of the alleged confrontation, the woman herself crashed into the station. As he had told, she was screaming murder and mayhem. However, the murder she screamed was what the singer had tried to do to her and to support her claim she held up her right hand. Most of the little finger and pieces of all remaining fingers on the hand had been chopped off. The thumb dangled by a thread of bloody skin.
For the rest of the night and into the early hours of the morning the two protagonists screeched insults at each other, each accusing the other of vicious assault with intent to do much worse. It came to an end as quickly as it had begun, with the woman refusing to press charges and bawling at the singer “You fucking bastard!” as she staggered from the local hospital casualty and emergency floor clutching her heavily bandaged hand.
He too chose to proceed no further. But the background took on clearer meaning as he murmured to himself as he also left swathed in bandages “That’s the last time she’ll wank a strange prick.”
What also became clearer to the police over the following months, indeed years, was that he seemed to be drawn to situations where the women he was with managed to harm themselves. Some were accidentally stabbed. Others managed to cut themselves badly. A few went as far as actually mutilating their bodies by slicing off parts. They never preferred charges and he was never prosecuted. However the police did record each and every incident and entered his name into their special file category. The one-time pop singer Rocky James was listed as extremely dangerous to women. Someone who liked to cut them and cut them a lot.
*
Rogers heard the scream first and was out his side of the car in seconds.
Johnston shot upright, cracking his head on the lowered sun visor and upsetting a half empty cup of coffee on the dashboard. It splashed down his front as he too hurled open his car door.
The scream came again, louder and more hysterical, from the direction of the building they were watching where James occupied a large town house. The hall light behind the wooden doors was on and a shape or shapes could be seen through the bubble glass side panels leaping about.
As Rogers and Johnston ran across the street the doors crashed open and a naked woman tumbled down the steps to the pavement where she lay still. James stood legs astride at the top, the light at his back casting him as some dark apparition. In his hand he held a short tapering implement.
The officers knelt beside the body on the pavement and slowly turned her onto her back. As Johnston brought his knuckles to his mouth and bit down hard Rogers leapt up the steps and hurled himself at James.
“You bastard,” he cursed. “You fucking animal.”
The woman’s name was Gabriella Harris. She was forty-one-years-old. It would later be revealed that she had had the fingers and thumb of her right hand cut off. An ear had been severed. Her throat had been slashed and she had been stabbed three times. Miraculously she had survived each of these wounds in themselves but had died from a massive heart attack.
James was immediately charged with her murder and the police began making enquiries into his activities around the times of the disappearance of the other women who went missing and whose mutilated bodies were later found dumped at various locations.
It was only a very short time before the media put two and two together.
The monster which had terrified the streets of London for almost a year was at last under lock and key.