The Peepshow

1

In the walls

In the evening of Tuesday 24 March 1953, Harry Procter, the star crime reporter of the Sunday Pictorial, drove over to a Victorian terrace in Notting Hill in which the bodies of three young women had been discovered. They were rumoured to have died accidentally, in botched back-street abortions, but Harry thought the story worth checking out anyway. He was used to working all hours, shuttling between his office in Fleet Street, crime scenes, pubs, courts and police stations. Over the past few years he had become known throughout Britain for his scoops and sensational exposés - 'Tell it to Harry Procter', people would say when they heard something outrageous. At thirty-six, after a decade and a half in Fleet Street, he looked like a weathered cherub. Harry drank, he smoked. He had tousled brown hair, pale skin, soft bags beneath his eyes.

Harry turned into Rillington Place, parked his car and switched off the headlights. The twenty small buildings in the cul-de-sac were lit by a single gas lamp, and the air was hazy with fog. Every few minutes, a Hammersmith & City Line train rumbled across a steel viaduct just out of sight above the roofs of the right-hand terrace. There were no railings outside the houses, no doorsteps, no plants, no trees. The chimney of a derelict factory rose over the high, blind wall that blocked the end of the street.

No 10 was the last building on the left, abutting the wall. Paint peeled from its sandstone portals, stains spread across its crumbling facade. A police constable stood guard at the front door, by a bay window hung with a dirty net curtain and a sagging sheet, while other officers moved in and out with tools and boxes. Neighbours peered from their windows, stepped from their houses to watch.

The police told Harry that the first body had been discovered that afternoon by a West Indian tenant who was cleaning the abandoned ground-floor kitchen. The lodger had torn a hole in the wallpaper as he tried to fix a shelf to the back wall, and in the shadows behind he saw what seemed to be the bare back of a white woman. He fetched a torch to make sure, then hurried with another tenant to a public telephone kiosk around the corner. The police came quickly. They ripped off the wallpaper, forced open a cracked piece of board that had been nailed to the wall and lifted out a body, only to find the corpse of another young woman beneath it, and behind that a third. The bodies at the back of the alcove were wrapped in cloth and smeared with earth and ashes.

The Criminal Investigation Department at New Scotland Yard despatched a squad of plainclothes detectives to North Kensington, and asked Dr Francis Camps, a well-known pathologist from the London Hospital in Whitechapel, to attend the crime scene. Camps was dining with the hospital's head of anatomy when he was summoned. In his dinner jacket and bow tie, he sped over to Rillington Place to inspect the bodies in the alcove, and then had them conveyed to Kensington mortuary, where he carried out post-mortems. Camps estimated that the women had been murdered within the past few weeks.

When the detectives searching the house pulled up the floorboards in the ground-floor front room, they discovered the corpse of a fourth woman. She was identified by a neighbour as Ethel Christie, a middle-aged housewife who had lived in the flat for fifteen years. Her husband, John Reginald Halliday Christie, had gone missing a few days earlier. Reg Christie was an accounts clerk and a former policeman, described by neighbours as the 'poshest' resident of the street. He immediately became the chief suspect in the murders.

Harry realised, with a shock, that he had not only been to 10 Rillington Place before, but had met the man the police were now seeking. Just over three years ago, as a reporter for the Daily Mail, he had been sent to interview Reg Christie when another tenant of the building was charged with the murders of his wife and child.

Back then, late one December evening in 1949, Harry had knocked at the front door of No 10. After a few minutes a balding, bespectacled figure opened the door a couple of inches and asked to see Harry's press card. The man peered at the card in the darkness, then gave a thin smile. 'I'm Mr Christie,' he said, holding out a clammy hand for Harry to shake. He led him down the communal hall and through a door into his kitchen. The walls of the house were thin, the floors uneven. There was no electricity in the property, so the rooms were lit with gas.

'Sit you down,' said Christie. He put a tin kettle on the stove. 'I know you reporters like something stronger,' he said, 'but I can only offer you tea.' He told Harry that his wife was asleep in the bedroom.

'You're a Yorkshireman, aren't you?' Christie asked, noticing Harry's accent. 'I was born in Yorkshire - many years ago, but you never forget the accent, do you?' There was no trace of the north in Christie's voice: he spoke with a genteel Cockney lilt.

Harry confirmed that he was from Leeds. Christie said that he had been born and brought up in Halifax, only twenty miles away.

Harry asked Christie about the murders of his neighbours. Christie said that he was happy to tell him what he had told the police. He and his wife had been friendly with the Evans family, who had rented the top-floor flat of No 10 for the past year. A few days ago, he had been horrified to learn that the bodies of Beryl Evans and her thirteen-month-old baby, Geraldine, had been found in a washhouse in the back yard, only a few feet away from where he and Harry were now sitting. Beryl's husband, Tim, had briefly accused Christie himself of killing her, but had since made a detailed confession to strangling both his wife and his daughter.

Christie told Harry that the upset had made him ill. He said that he hoped the killer would be punished.

He asked Harry: 'Who do you think murdered Mrs Evans and her baby?' He seemed nervy, Harry thought, almost ingratiating.

Harry saw Christie again a few weeks later, at Tim Evans's trial for murder at the Old Bailey. In court, Evans claimed that Reg had killed Beryl and Geraldine, but the jury did not believe him. There seemed no conceivable reason for Christie to have strangled another man's wife and child, nor for Evans to have made a false confession to their murders. Tim Evans, aged twenty-five, was convicted of murder and sentenced to death.

After the verdict, Harry found Christie in the lobby outside the courtroom, wiping tears from the lenses of his round, horn-rimmed spectacles. 'What a wicked man he is,' Christie had said to Harry, sadly.

The few crime reporters who attended the trial, recalled Harry, had considered it 'dull, sordid, unglamorous, dreary'. They dismissed Beryl and Geraldine Evans's killings as a 'fish and chippy' type of crime: a banal, vulgar, open-and-shut case of domestic violence that would quickly be forgotten.

But things looked different now. The latest discoveries at Rillington Place suggested that a serial killer of women was at large in London, and they also hinted at a terrible miscarriage of justice.

***

Harry had been inspired to become a reporter when, as a fifteen-year-old errand boy in a shoe shop in Leeds, he read Philip Gibbs's novel The Street of Adventure. He imagined newsmen racing for taxis as they investigated dastardly crimes, editors shouting into telephones, presses thundering in basements, vans speeding away with cargoes of crisply printed papers. He dreamed of working in Fleet Street.

One afternoon the shoe-shop manager caught him reading the book, for the umpteenth time, in the rat-ridden cellar that he was supposed to be sweeping. What did he think he was doing? his boss asked.

'I'm going to be an ace reporter,' declared Harry. 'One day you're going to see my name in big black letters across the front page of a national newspaper.'

Never before, the manager told him, had he had a lad in his shop whose head was filled with such rubbish. He fired him on the spot.

But Harry's mother encouraged his ambitions: she found the money to buy the youngest of her five children a typewriter and to sign him up for shorthand classes at night school. 'From now on you never go out without a pencil and some paper in your pocket,' she told Harry. 'Keep your eyes and ears open, write notes about everything you see. What interests you and me interests everybody, always remember that.'

Harry had only a basic education, but he was tenacious. He besieged local papers with stories, and then took to the road, sleeping in fields and hedgerows and hostels as he tried his luck as a reporter in different northern towns.

After a string of temporary jobs, Harry was hired back in Leeds by the Yorkshire Evening News. He learnt to work at speed, mentally composing a story as he investigated it so that he could dictate his copy straight down the line to the newspaper's typists: his mind, he said, was like a tape-recorder. And he was ruthless in getting a scoop. The novelist Keith Waterhouse, then working for the Evening News's rival, the Yorkshire Evening Post, remembered that Harry beat him to the phone when they were both covering an inquest. As Harry emerged from the kiosk, he ripped the handset out of its socket, and passed it to Waterhouse, saying: 'All yours.'

In 1935, Harry fell in love with Doreen Vater, a tiny young woman from a village east of Leeds. She was already pregnant when they married that winter. She gave birth to a son, Barrie, in the spring of 1936, and twin daughters, Phyllis and Patricia, the next year. Harry couldn't spend much time with his family - he would leave home after breakfast and return long after the children had gone to bed - but thanks to his success at the Evening News, he was able to rent and furnish a nice house for them in Leeds.

In 1939, Harry was offered a week's trial at the bestselling London tabloid, the Daily Mirror. In great excitement, he caught the train to King's Cross, rented a room above an Italian café in Bloomsbury and presented himself at the Mirror's offices off Fleet Street. His first story, about a watercress farmer who had taken his own life, did not impress the editor, but he was then sent to interview two very fat Australians on honeymoon in London. The photographer who accompanied him grumbled that they were on a fool's errand: there was no chance the editors would touch the story. But Harry was resolute. 'Not only will they touch it,' he said, 'they'll splash it.' His piece about the 'world's heaviest pair of newlyweds' filled that week's coveted centre spread. The Mirror offered Harry a permanent job, at nearly £10 a week, and he happily accepted.

By now the Procters had four children - the youngest, Valerie, was born in 1939 - and as soon as he could Harry moved the family down to a house in Beckenham, south-east of London. But Doreen suffered a stillbirth in 1940, when the neighbourhood was bombed by the Luftwaffe, and decided to move back to Leeds with the children. Harry rented a room for himself in Lincoln's Inn, a few minutes' walk from his office.