Handsome Brute: The True Story of a Ladykiller (11 page)

‘Will you be in the Nag’s Head tonight?’ asked Joyce. ‘Desmond and I are going.’

‘I might do,’ said Margery, then asked, ‘Do you know Jimmy’s surname?’

‘How could I? I only met him last night.’

‘Flying abroad. Exciting, isn’t it? His own plane as well.’

‘Margy. Do you have any money for this date tonight? How about I lend you £1?’

‘I’ll be fine.’

‘Take it. You said you spent your last shilling on the“Thawpit”.’

‘I’ll be all right once I meet my date tonight.’

Margery’s date was never identified, but she was very clear that he was nobody Joyce knew. In no way did she suggest that she would be meeting either Jimmy Heath or Peter Tilley Bailey. About a quarter past three, Margery stopped her drawing as time was getting on.

‘I want to get back to the flat. I have washing and ironing to do before tonight.’ Margery paused. ‘Joyce . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘I don’t suppose I
could
borrow a few pennies, could I?’

‘Of course you can.’

‘Just for my fare home.’

‘How much do you need?’

‘Fivepence?’

Joyce gave Margery the 5d. for her tube fare home to Bramham Gardens. She would never see her friend alive again.

The physical geography of the Earls Court and South Kensington areas that Margery lived and socialized in would have been very familiar to her today: terraces of tall, stuccoed buildings, graced with entrance pillars, and Edwardian red-brick town houses with leaded windows, all crouched in the shadow of the great cultural edifices on the Cromwell Road – the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Museum of Natural History. But the inhabitants of the area have changed dramatically since the mid-forties. Gone are the bedsits, boarding houses and bomb sites that Margery would have known, replaced by duplex apartments and day nurseries with clipped box hedging. Bramham Gardens itself is a shady garden square in Earls Court. The flat, at number 24, was in a slim, five-storey red-brick terrace. It is now part of a retirement home and retains an air of down-at-heel gentility; the brickwork dulled by years of soot and traffic, yellowing net curtains draped at windows permanently fastened by decades of paint.

Margery successfully managed to clean the stain from her skirt pocket with the ‘Thawpit’, as she wore the same outfit that evening. Leaving the flat, she put her door key in her brown leather handbag and walked out past the derelict house next door, uninhabitable since the Blitz, and made her way to the Nag’s Head.

Often hurriedly grabbed at the first sound of an air raid, Margery’s handbag offers a revealing and intimate snapshot of her life.
⁹
Amongst some pencils and a notebook bearing her name was a pair of imitation suede gloves. Her cigarette case contained eight cigarettes. Margery – not vain, but always trying to make the best of her appearance – wore glasses occasionally and in their red case, together with her spectacles, there was a cheque for £4, payable to her husband. She also had a pair of white-framed sunglasses for the sunny weather that June promised but never delivered that summer. As well as a powder compact, a powder puff, a box of eyeliner, two broken combs and a hair clip, Margery had another small make-up purse containing lipstick, cream and rouge. Knowing she was expecting her period soon she carried three Tampax sanitary towels just in case, as well as a tube of Gynomin tablets (‘the scientifically balanced, Antiseptic and Deodorant Contraceptive Tablet’).
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In a black leather wallet, she kept a large volume of letters from her family and a variety of male friends as well as some personal photographs, including one of her young daughter, Melody, now two years old. In her bag, she also kept her identity card, which would later help the police to identify her body – as well as an application for the replacement of some clothing coupons to buy the new clothes that she so desperately wanted.

Three pawn tickets spoke of the unstable fortunes that Margery had suffered in the preceding months. She had pawned an overcoat in February of 1945, one of the coldest months of that year, a possum fur cape in April of 1946 (which she must have redeemed as she was wearing it that night), and a typewriter. At the bottom of the bag was a single pink handkerchief, clean and folded – perhaps even washed and ironed by her that afternoon – and bearing the initials ‘M. A. B. Gardner’. In her purse Margery had a single silver sixpence and two coppers, a total of 8d. (a pint of Guinness cost 11d. at the time). Even as she stepped out of her door and into the streets of Earls Court, Margery’s options on the night of 20 June were extremely limited.

By 6.30 that evening, Margery was in the Nag’s Head, where she chatted to the landlady, Eva Cole.
¹¹
She told Mrs Cole that she was waiting for a telephone call, which finally came after she had been there about three-quarters of an hour. A few moments after she put the phone down she walked out of the pub, saying ‘Goodnight’ to Mrs Cole. She didn’t indicate who the call was from, but it may well have been her friend Trevethan Frampton, whom she then went on to meet. She walked to the nearby Trevor Arms, across the road from Knightsbridge tube station where she met Frampton, an art student with whom she had been friendly since the beginning of the year. They stayed together for about an hour and during this time were joined by a number of men, two or three of whom Margery had met before. One of these was Jimmy Heath.

Heath asked Margery if she would have dinner with him later that evening, but she told him that she had already arranged to have dinner with an army captain who was in the bar. Margery’s friend Frampton left at 8.30 p.m. to go back to his hotel for dinner. He told Margery that if she was free later, he would meet her at the Renaissance Club in Harrington Road. He would aim to get there himself for about 9.30 p.m. Margery said she’d most likely join him later, after she’d had dinner with her date.

However, the army captain that Margery had arranged to meet that night had met an old school friend at the bar and left the Trevor Arms with him, leaving her alone. All that Margery had in her purse was small change – not enough to buy a drink and certainly not enough to buy herself a proper meal. Catching sight of her alone, Heath went to the bar and brought her over to some of his RAF friends, introducing her as a ‘great little scout’. The four men and Margery drank on for a couple of hours during which some half-dozen further rounds were ordered. Seeing that Heath was apparently flush with cash, Margery saw an opportunity to salvage her evening – and her chances of dinner at somebody else’s expense. She wondered if she
could
take Heath up on his earlier offer? She would love to have dinner with him. Heath by now was spending his way through the £30 (an average month’s wages at the time) he had acquired earlier that day and seemed like he had money to burn. So it was that Margery, not wanting to be alone at the bar and not having enough money to buy her own drinks or dinner, effectively sealed her fate.

Heath and Margery then left the Trevor Arms and went to the Normandie Hotel for dinner. They left between 9.30 and 10 p.m. and popped in to the nearby Torch Club for a drink. They then decided to go to the Panama Club, which had a late licence, where Heath had entertained Yvonne Symonds only the weekend before. Heath signed the yellow Visitors’ Form ‘Lt. Col. Heath and friends’.

Heath and Margery went up to the main bar on the second floor, with Margery carrying her opossum coat over her arm. Almost immediately they bumped into Peter Tilley Bailey accompanied by 25-year-old Catherine Hardie, a nurse at Battersea General Hospital. Given that Peter had spent two of the previous four nights at her flat, Margery may well have been surprised to meet him so blatantly dating another woman. Margery and Peter curtly acknowledged each other, without introducing their companions. Margery said nothing, but there was certainly a frostiness at this meeting. When Catherine Hardie was later questioned about Margery’s movements that evening, she claimed that she deliberately ignored her: ‘When I am with a party of men, I don’t look around, especially as Peter Bailey had passed the time of day with her.’
¹²

Another of Tilley Bailey’s party that evening, Ronald Birch, was also a casual acquaintance of Margery’s. At one point, he noticed her in company with Heath at the bar. They were holding hands and though she seemed very attentive to Heath, he appeared ‘slightly indifferent’ to her. Birch later recalled: ‘All the time she stood at the bar she appeared to be trying to promote [Heath’s] interest, so rather obviously that I thought that she did it deliberately to annoy Peter Bailey.’
¹³

Margery then ran into another friend of hers, Iris Humphrey, a civil servant who lived in Earls Court Square. She had known Margery for about eight or nine years.
¹⁴
They had been very friendly before the war, but had lost touch during it when Iris had been evacuated to Bath. Since Iris had moved back to London in April 1946, the two women had met in various pubs around Earls Court. Iris was sitting in the club room by the dance floor with her friend John Le Mee Power when Margery entered with Heath. Margery called ‘hallo’ over to their table. When Iris and Le Mee Power got up to dance, Iris went over to the table that Margery had sat down at with her handsome companion.

‘Would you mind looking after my things whilst we have a dance?’

‘Of course,’ said Margery.

She took Iris’ handbag and copy of
Vogue
and put it on the table in front of her. Iris and Le Mee Power went off to the dance floor before Margery could introduce them to Heath. After a short while, Heath and Margery got up to dance themselves. Iris and Le Mee Power left the dance floor and went to collect her bag and magazine. For the next hour, Iris observed Margery and Heath sitting at their table, holding each other’s hands, smoking and drinking – with Heath rubbing his hand against Margery’s leg. At the time, Iris commented to Le Mee Power that she thought that Margery’s companion looked ‘dissipated’, with big bags under his eyes. She remarked, with terrible prescience, that ‘Margery was in for a bad time’ that night.
¹⁵

Phyllis, the waitress, first noticed Heath and Margery at about 11 p.m. when she checked to see that nobody was drinking alcohol without a meal, in accordance with their licence. Phyllis had seen both Heath and Margery at the club before, hanging around with what she called the ‘Chelsea Crowd’, led by Peter Tilley Bailey. Heath pulled at Phyllis’ apron string, which caused her apron to fall loose. Phyllis turned round and he said ‘Repeat the order’, so she went to get them some more drinks. When Phyllis arrived with the drinks, the couple were getting up to dance again and this time Margery told her ‘Repeat the order’. When Phyllis came back for the money (6s.), Heath said, ‘I owe you for the last one. Aren’t I honest?’
¹⁶
According to Phyllis, the couple sat on their own table all night and didn’t speak to anyone else. Iris Humphrey and Le Mee Power left about 11.30, leaving Margery at the club with Heath. The band stopped playing at midnight but members had twenty minutes drinking-up time. Peter Tilley Bailey and Catherine Hardie left the club about ten minutes after midnight, but couldn’t see Margery to say ‘goodbye’. Perhaps smarting from Peter’s date with a younger woman, at some point during the evening, Margery consented to go back to Heath’s hotel – possibly for a nightcap – just as he had suggested to Pauline Brees in February.

Outside the Panama Club, Harold Harter was driving his taxi eastwards along Old Brompton Road in the direction of South Kensington tube station.
¹⁷
About 12.20 a.m., Heath was leaving the entrance to the Panama Club, talking with Margery. He saw Harter’s cab and started to walk along the pavement to the corner of Thurloe Street, with his hand up, hailing it. Harter stopped on the opposite side of the obelisk in the middle of the road. The couple walked across the road, Heath holding Margery’s hand as she dragged slightly behind him.
¹⁸

According to Harter, Heath asked Margery where a particular address was, but she didn’t seem to know. She was currently living in Bramham Gardens in Earls Court, less than ten minutes’ walk away from the Panama Club down Old Brompton Road. Given the convenience of her flat they would have to be travelling for something specific to justify a taxi ride. Heath’s suitcase, of course, was at the Pembridge Court Hotel with everything it contained. Heath then directed Harter to Pembridge Gardens in Notting Hill, which was just under two miles away. Harter observed that Margery ‘seemed to be in a drunken stupor’ and when Heath opened the door of the cab for her to get in, she had walked to the other side of him ‘as if she didn’t know where she was’. Heath looked around for her asking, ‘Where the hell are you?’ Once they were safely in the cab, Harter noticed that Margery was lying back and Heath had his arm around her.

According to Peter Tilley Bailey, Margery had never spent a night away from her flat since they had been together, so this was the first time she was to do so. It was also the first time she had been observed in an extremely drunken state – this perhaps exacerbated by her feelings towards Tilley Bailey as well as the large amount of cash that Heath had been spending at the bar.

After about ten minutes, they arrived in Notting Hill and Harter turned his cab into Pembridge Gardens.

‘Whereabouts do you want?’

Heath told Harter, ‘This will do.’

Margery said nothing and ‘appeared not to notice what was going on and she did not seem to hear me’. Harter pulled up about fifty yards short of the Pembridge Court Hotel on the left-hand side. Heath got out of the cab first – his face illuminated by the light of the meter. He went to help Margery out of the cab. After about a minute, he got her out on the pavement where she stood ‘as though in a stupor and had no interest in anything’. Heath left her and turned to Harter.