Handsome Brute: The True Story of a Ladykiller (12 page)

‘How much is that?’

‘One shilling and ninepence.’

With the precision of a very drunk man trying not to appear so, Heath slowly counted out 2s. and 2d. (a small tip), fumbling with his change under the meter light. Once he had paid the cab, Heath put his arm around Margery’s waist and the couple walked the fifty yards ahead towards the Pembridge Court Hotel, effectively holding each other up. Harter watched from his cab as they disappeared through the gate outside the hotel and up the steps to the porticoed entrance. This was the last time that Margery Gardner was seen alive by anyone other than the man who killed her.

Earlier that evening, back at her flat in Bramham Gardens, surrounded by her own artwork, Margery had left an exercise book in which she had been writing (in pencil – she had pawned her typewriter) the first few chapters of a novel about a girl called ‘Julie’, not unlike herself – or at least, Margery’s own vision of herself. Autobiographical in tone, the story poignantly articulated Margery’s hopes and disappointments.

Julie had not been with us more than a couple of weeks before she knew all the bars, all the cafes, all the clubs. She had green eyes and dark hair that fell on her neck and shoulders like a hood . . .

People really liked her to talk to. She was fresh and vital – different, amusing too, and she was innocent. She had girl friends, although she got on better with men. She was bold and reckless in those days, finding her feet and her own values – and her mistakes.

Always new places, new faces, for Julie was out to conquer the world. And she did conquer the world. At least she conquered one bitter bit of London. It was that bit of London by the river.

‘What are you doing with your life?’ She would open her eyes and say, ‘Enjoying yourself for the first time. Finding a dream that is real.’
¹⁹

But Margery Gardner’s dream wasn’t real. As with much in her life, the story was never finished and like her existence itself, brought to a tragic, abrupt end.

CHAPTER FIVE

Detective Inspector Spooner

A
t 3.15 p.m. on the afternoon of Friday 21 June, Divisional Detective Inspector Reginald Spooner was in his office at Hammersmith Police Station when he received a telephone call from one of his inspectors at Notting Hill, Shelley Symes. As soon as Spooner answered the telephone, the gravity of Symes’ voice made it clear they had a serious case on their hands.

‘Guvnor,’ said Symes quietly, ‘we’ve got one.’
¹

This call was to be the first step of a manhunt that was to extend the length and breadth of the country – even to ports and airfields – and which was to involve as many as 40,000 officers. Spooner’s character and his skill as a police investigator were to be tested in an emotionally gruelling and intellectually demanding investigation, the success of which was to rely on thousands of man-hours, but would also pivot on the most extraordinary coincidences that would seem the preserve of fiction. Ironically, the case would also result in both pursued and pursuer becoming famous, indeed infamous – Heath as one of the most vilified criminals of the twentieth century and Spooner as the most celebrated detective of his generation. Spooner’s superintendent, Nick Carter, later regarded him as ‘the greatest detective this force has ever known’.
²
Years later, when Spooner wrote his memoirs, he started by writing about Heath, the case that defined his career.

Though they came from similar backgrounds – the respectable but financially anxious middle class – Heath and Spooner couldn’t have been more different. The charismatic and seductive Heath was the antithesis of the cautious Spooner. Neville Heath was flamboyant and extravagant – a honey-tongued playboy spending his time and money in bars and nightclubs in the pursuit of pleasure and sex. Reginald Spooner (always ‘Reg’ to friends and colleagues) was a modest, precise workaholic who was extremely careful with money. In stark contrast to the womanizing Heath, Spooner dated only one other girl before becoming engaged to his future wife, Myra Newman, at the age of twenty-one.

Reg Spooner was a Londoner born in 1903 into the comfortable middle-class suburb of Upper Norwood and raised in Wood Green. He regarded himself very much as a cockney. His wife was ‘my old woman’, his boss always ‘Guv’nor’. He prided himself on his in-depth knowledge of London, its dark hidden places and its people.

Spooner’s early years were dominated by a series of personal crises that were to shape his attitudes in later life – particularly regarding money and security. These would preoccupy him throughout his working life and would ultimately guide him in his choice of career. His father, Jabez Spooner, worked for the family firm, a business transfer agency dealing with stocks and shares based in the Smithfield region of London. But Spooner’s grandfather Alfred, who headed the family business, was known for his ‘extravagant way of living’. Though successful in business, he had very little cash saved for emergencies. He never thought of the future. When he ran into a spell of bad luck on the markets, he realized he had nothing to keep the business or his family afloat; the business collapsed. In March 1904, Alfred was summoned to court over his mounting debts. He never turned up. Unable to cope with the shame of financial ruin, and the dire position into which he had placed both the family’s business and their homes, Alfred Spooner shot himself in the head. The coroner recorded that he had taken his own life whilst temporarily insane.

Alfred’s suicide left the family business – and Spooner’s parents, Jabez and Blanche – in a financial crisis that initiated a domestic one. The family home in Upper Norwood, south of the river, had to be sold and the Spooners moved to a smaller, more modest home in Hornsey, north London. But the family hadn’t seen the last of their worries. In 1911, at the age of thirty-four, Jabez became paralysed after having been involved in a fight. He died shortly afterwards, leaving his widow and her two young sons, Reg (8) and Rodney (6), without savings, insurance or security of any kind. As the widow of a professional man, Blanche didn’t qualify for a widow’s pension. Having neither skills nor training, and no means of income, Blanche was forced to sell the house in Hornsey and most of their possessions. Together with her sons, she moved to her parents’ house in Elmar Road in Wood Green. At the age of thirty-five, Blanche Spooner, once a comfortable suburban housewife, became an apprentice embroideress. It was a humiliating fall. She would never let her young sons forget the value of money and the sheer struggle of life without it.

The Spooner brothers were educated at the local Lordship Lane School in Ellenborough Road, just a half-hour walk from their home. Class sizes were large (often of forty or more) and each class contained three age groups, as was the norm during this period. In 1917 in the midst of the First World War, too young to be called up for active service, fourteen-year-old Reg left school without qualifications. His priority was to bring in some money to help the household so his working life began as an office boy for the Hearts of Oak Assurance Company, based on the Holborn Viaduct. His pay, though only a few shillings to start with, eased the financial burden on his mother. Every week he would hand her his pay packet – unopened – and she gave him back a shilling to spend for himself. By application and study, Spooner rose to the position of clerk by 1923.

In 1924, Spooner applied to become a police officer. Though his maternal grandfather had been a police sergeant in the nineteenth century, it appears that his desire to join the police force was inspired by a need for security, rather than a desire to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps. Even as a probationer, he would earn £3 10s. a week – 10s. more than he had been earning at the Assurance Company. But most importantly it offered a career with a regular income and a pension. Knowing that he would have to care for his future wife and family as well as his mother at some point in the future was critical in Spooner choosing the police as a career.

By the time he was twenty-one, Spooner was an athletic man, 6 feet 1 inch tall, with strong, handsome features and dark, thick, wavy hair. He was perfect force material. On 19 February 1924, he was summoned to Scotland Yard with sixty other candidates. Competition was fierce, with many ex-servicemen and guardsmen at the time also keen for the security of a police career and pension. By the end of the medical and academic tests, only nine candidates remained; Spooner was one of them. PC 475 ‘J’ started on probation in Victoria Park, east London, on 7 March 1924.

From the start, Spooner set his sights on joining the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) as a detective. After serving his time as a uniformed officer, which he disliked intensely (his girlfriend Myra never saw him in uniform once), he joined the CID in 1928, where he excelled. At the same time, Myra was training to be a Norland Nanny based at the Norland Training Centre in Hyde Park Gate. They were engaged on 9 March 1927 – Myra’s twenty-first birthday. A two-year engagement followed whilst Spooner saved enough money for the wedding. He wrote to Myra explaining the reasons for his caution:

It will be up to us during our engagement to save all we can so that we can meet all the initial expenses of our prospective home as soon as we get married. This will be much better than following the example of most other married couples who buy their homes a bit at a time.
³

He was not prepared to borrow money, nor to buy on HP (hire purchase). Going into debt was anathema to him – a clear indication of the ghosts that haunted him from his family’s past.

As a young detective, Spooner prospered and soon attracted the attention of his superior officers. He found that he had an amazing facility for remembering names, incidents and places; he became renowned for his ‘card index’ memory. He was a master of detail and took meticulous notes of everything, never throwing anything away. As his career continued he kept notebooks with newspaper clippings of every case he had been involved in. He was hugely industrious, putting in hours on the job beyond the call of duty (and these were already long – 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., 6 p.m. to 10 p.m.), much to the chagrin of his long-suffering wife. He had married Myra in 1929 and she had given birth to their daughter, Jean, a year later. With Spooner volunteering to work well into the night with only one day off, it was clear to Myra from the beginning of their marriage that family life would always come second. The landlady of his favourite pub in Limehouse, the Hole in the Wall, noted that Spooner ‘never seemed to go home. I thought if I were his wife I wouldn’t put up with a life like that.’ Essentially, Spooner was married to the job. He continued to impress his superiors and received several commendations, including one for his part in the investigation of the ‘Bow Cinema Murder’, his first murder case that resulted in a conviction.

In the early morning of Tuesday 7 August 1934, 35-year-old Dudley Hoard, the manager of the Palace Cinema in Bow Road, had answered the doorbell to his staff flat above the picture house. On opening the door, he was attacked by an assailant armed with an axe. The two men fought in the entrance to the cinema balcony and after fourteen blows to the head, Hoard was left for dead and the takings cleared from the previous bank holiday weekend. The police investigating the crime couldn’t work out how the intruder had gained entry to the cinema itself as it was protected by a locked iron grille. Despite the fact that the grille appeared to be securely locked, Spooner was convinced that this was the method of entry. He shook the grille until it came loose. It took a knack to open it. This, thought Spooner, together with the knowledge that the bank holiday takings remained on the premises, would only have been known to somebody who worked in the cinema. Spooner was led to nineteen-year-old John Frederick Stockwell, a cinema usher. Despite trying to cover his tracks with a suicide note, Stockwell was traced to Yarmouth where he was arrested. Despite an appeal, Stockwell was hanged, the first man Spooner was to send to the gallows. He would not be the last.

In November 1935 at the age of thirty-two, Spooner had been promoted as first class sergeant to ‘Central One’, commonly known as the ‘Murder Squad’, and transferred to Scotland Yard. Central One dealt not only with murders but crimes that involved several police divisions and government departments. Consequently Spooner gained a huge breadth of experience in a wealth of criminal activities including fraud, murder and assault. In 1938 he was appointed as Central One’s officer in charge of pornography and in November of that year, he was promoted to detective inspector at Marylebone Police Station.

A considered, careful man, Spooner was also a heavy drinker and chain-smoker.
⁴
Even in this period when drinking and smoking ‘on the job’ was both common and universally tolerated in the force, Spooner’s habits seem to have been extreme. Albert Pierrepoint, the public executioner during this period, became a friend of Spooner’s and remembered that he always had a cigarette in his mouth, both on duty and off. ‘There was always cigarette ash falling onto his waistcoat which he did not bother to brush off,’ he recalled. Even in the 1930s Spooner was renowned for his smoker’s cough.

When war broke out in 1939, Spooner and his family were on holiday on the Isle of Wight. They had barely settled in when a telegram arrived ordering his immediate return to London; all police leave had been cancelled. Spooner originally insisted that Myra and their nine-year-old daughter Jean should evacuate to the country, but Myra was reluctant for them to live apart for the duration, so they eventually settled in a house in Palmer’s Green, also offering a room to Spooner’s mother, Blanche, who was to remain with them for the next twenty-two years. Throughout the war, the correspondence between Spooner and his wife continued to be dominated by his anxieties about money, despite the fact that he was now earning a very healthy £11 a week. With a curious reticence, even up to his death in 1963, Spooner never told his wife how much money he earned.