Handsome Brute: The True Story of a Ladykiller (6 page)

Between the fireplace and the foot of the beds were two armchairs, positioned side-on to the fireplace, facing into the centre of the room. To the left of the chimneybreast was a chest of drawers and to the right a dressing table at an angle. Another table sat beneath the window in the right-hand wall. To the right of the window, in the corner, was a washbasin. After explaining about breakfast and guiding them through the facilities, Mrs Wyatt left Heath and his ‘wife’ to settle in.

That night, in Room 4 of the Pembridge Court Hotel, Yvonne surrendered her virginity to Heath. They had intercourse twice, which brought about some bloodstaining on the sheets of the bed nearest the door. Throughout their night together, according to her testimony, Heath was very gentle with Yvonne and treated her with nothing but kindness and sensitivity.

The next morning, Monday 17 June, Mrs Wyatt sent Rhoda Spooner, the hotel waitress, up to Room 4 with tea and toast. Rhoda didn’t usually serve meals in any of the guest rooms, but Mrs Wyatt had made an exception for the charming lieutenant colonel and his pretty young wife. When Rhoda entered the room with the tea, Heath and Yvonne were both in the bed nearest to the door. Rhoda went to open the curtains and left the tea tray. She noticed Heath’s large brown suitcase on the table near the window and a flying helmet with large goggles hanging on one of the chairs. At about 11 a.m. that morning, there was a knock on the door from Barbara Osborne, the chambermaid.
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Barbara generally cleaned and changed the beds between guest occupancies. By now, Yvonne was standing by the chest of drawers in her sky-blue dressing gown. Heath was sitting up in the bed nearest the window, wearing his red dressing gown.

‘Will you be long?’ asked Barbara, ‘I’m keen to get on with my work.’

‘I was just going to get up and come back later,’ said Heath.

He suggested to Yvonne that she should stay with him at the hotel for another day or two, but she’d promised her parents that she would return to Worthing that day. They had sex again that afternoon, then Heath saw her off on the 9.28 p.m. train from Victoria to Worthing. He promised to phone her and that he would come and see her later in the week. Yvonne gave Heath her address in Warren Road and her telephone number, Swandean 906.

Yvonne arrived home that evening after 11 p.m., full of her romantic weekend with her handsome pilot. She was engaged to Jimmy and couldn’t wait for her parents to meet him. He had said that he was coming down to Worthing that week anyway to attend the opening of the Shoreham Airport that was re-opening the following weekend. As he had promised, Heath telephoned Yvonne on the Tuesday, the Wednesday and then again on Thursday 20 June, like any ordinary, infatuated boyfriend who couldn’t keep himself from chatting to his fiancée every day. Such excitement had rarely intruded into Yvonne’s life before whilst growing up in one of the most archetypal of English seaside resorts.

In an age before foreign travel, Worthing was a hugely popular – if polite – holiday destination with none of the excesses and vulgarity of Blackpool, Margate or the ‘somewhat overgrown’ Brighton.
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The town styled itself very much as a middle-class resort. Only eighty-six minutes from Victoria by the electric train, it was also popular with businessmen who worked in the City of London and commuted home at night. Increasingly Worthing had promoted itself as a winter resort and it appealed – as it still does today – to an older clientele of the well-heeled retired. The
Ward Lock Guide
of the time observed that:

[. . .] perhaps the best evidence of a genial all-the-year climate is the large number of residences built in recent years at West Worthing and elsewhere in the borough by Anglo-Indians and others to whom sunshine is almost a necessity.
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In 1941 the threatened German invasion (‘Operation Sealion’) had seen a dramatic transformation along the beaches of the south coast from Lyme Regis in the west to Ramsgate in the east. Barbed wire and landmines took the place of buckets and spades as coastal defence had become a priority – especially during 1940–42 when the invasion of Britain seemed imminent. Consequently Worthing’s famous pier, one of the principle attractions of the resort that had stood since 1862, was partially demolished and closed in 1940. Six years on, it remained a prominent and silent scar at the centre of the town.

At Whitsuntide of 1946, the weekend of ‘V’ Day, the local council had hoped that they could draw holidaymakers back to the resort, but a planned Victory parade through the town had been aborted due to lack of interest. As a focus to reinvigorate the tourist trade, the council had organized the reopening of the pavilion and bandstand on the parade. The opening was hugely anticipated as a matter of local pride. But despite their best-laid plans, the opening was, literally, a wash-out, cursed like the rest of that summer by bad weather. The
Worthing Herald
reported that ‘June 1946 was the DULLEST for twenty-three years; the COLDEST for eighteen years; the WETTEST for thirteen years’.
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Inside from the pelting rain, Worthing’s repertory company offered a weekly changing programme at the Connaught Theatre. That week the Overture Repertory Players presented
Fear Walks Behind
by Sydney Horler and Norman Lee. The town’s four cinemas were packed. With such terrible weather and television still a novelty, 1946 was the peak of cinema attendance in Britain with some 1.6 billion attendances – 3 million cinema-goers a day. The cinema offerings at Worthing that summer were a mixture of long-forgotten titles and the occasional classic, the majority from Hollywood. The Rivoli played
She Wouldn’t Say Yes
and
Cornered
. At the Odeon, Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake starred in
The Blue Dahlia
. Lana Turner smouldered in a risque two-piece swimsuit in the screen version of James M. Cain’s amoral murder story,
The Postman Always Rings Twice
and Ingrid Bergman suffered beautifully in
Spellbound
, the poster asking boldly, ‘Will he kiss me or kill me?’
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On Friday 21 June, Yvonne was surprised but delighted when Jimmy telephoned her at about midday, telling her that he was actually in Worthing and couldn’t wait to see her. Yvonne quickly changed into her most flattering green dress and met Heath in the centre of town. When they met, he told her that he was planning to stay for about ten days so that he could see more of her and meet her parents. He was smartly dressed, out of uniform this time in a grey pin-striped suit, collar and tie, but no hat. He’d left his luggage at the railway station until he’d decided on a place to stay. But finding an hotel at the start of the most anticipated holiday season since the beginning of the war would be no easy feat.

That weekend, Worthing was to be overrun with holidaymakers, many taking their first holiday since 1939. Two thirds of the population were to take a holiday that summer and the south-coast seaside resorts braced themselves for the enormous demand. Trains, stations, hotels and boarding houses were packed with thousands of people. Mile-long queues formed at daybreak at London stations when the railways handled the biggest crowds they had seen for years. Some luggage-laden travellers waited throughout the night to catch early trains. At Paddington a ‘crocodile’ of people wound its way into the side streets as there was no more standing space in the station itself. Everybody, it seems, was in holiday mood and aiming for the seaside.

Yvonne and Heath had lunch and with her local knowledge she advised him about places to stay. In Heath’s
Daily Telegraph
for that day there was a prominent advertisement for the Ocean Hotel, right on the seafront.

WORTHING OCEAN HOTEL

‘A Sun Trap on the Sea Front’

Unrivalled Position.

45 Bedrooms ~ World-famous Cuisine

Completely Redecorated ~ Central Heating

Dancing to Bob Crowder and his band.
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That afternoon, Heath and Yvonne called at the hotel on Marine Parade, opposite the beach. At the reception, the couple met George Girdwood, the hotel manager. Heath said that he was looking for accommodation for himself for the next ten days.
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The hotel being full at the time, Girdwood suggested that Heath could be accommodated for a couple of days in the hotel annexe, round the corner at 11 West Buildings, after which they could accommodate him in the main hotel. Heath readily agreed to this. He said his name was Lieutenant Colonel Heath and signed the register accordingly. He gave his address – this time – as South Africa House in Trafalgar Square and his nationality as South African, but Yvonne didn’t seem to notice. She and her new fiancé then left together to pick up his luggage from Worthing Railway Station. They returned to the hotel shortly afterwards with one of Heath’s large brown suitcases. He went alone to the annexe to his room, but then returned to have tea with Yvonne in the hotel lounge.

At this point, Heath asked Yvonne what time the evening papers came from London. She told him that they were already out, so he bought two. Throughout tea he glanced through the pages of the newspapers and was reading them intently. Yvonne remarked to him about this, but he didn’t reply. After he had finished with the papers, Yvonne flicked through them herself, but saw nothing to interest her. She thought that Heath was rather quiet and that something might be worrying him. Was it something she’d done? Or said? Perhaps he was cooling towards her? Now that she had allowed him to sleep with her, perhaps he had lost interest? But Yvonne kept her insecurities to herself. Whatever Heath’s feelings, he too was unwilling to give voice to them. He said he would be all right tomorrow, and that he had been ‘up all Thursday night’. He then jokingly mentioned some shirts that needed washing. Yvonne, eager to please her new lover, was only too happy to say that she’d wash them through for him at home and would collect them from him later. After tea, they went out together, but returned to the hotel for dinner at about 7 p.m. They were not seen together again that night, but they could easily have gone back directly to the hotel annexe without being seen. They certainly had sex again at the hotel and this may well be the occasion on which it occurred.

The next day was Saturday 22 June. Before she left her parents’ house, Yvonne washed the shirts that she had taken from Heath the night before. As she was washing them, she noticed that one of the shirts had a number of small brown stains on the tail, but she wasn’t quite sure what they were. Once washed, she put them out to dry, intending to iron them the next day. She then headed into Worthing to meet her fiancé.

At about 12.15 p.m., Heath and Yvonne went to the Ship Hotel in South Street, which was a quirky character pub modelled on an old galleon.
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Again, Heath was wearing his ‘civvies’. He was delighted to bump into an old friend, Angus Bruce, and introduced him to Yvonne. Bruce was drinking there with his friend, Dick Hollis, and the foursome had a drink together. Bruce asked what his friend was doing in Worthing?
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Heath told him that he was staying ten days at the Ocean Hotel. He’d been demobbed and was about to start a business buying planes in England to sell abroad.

Bruce had known Heath for about two years. He had been manager of the South Western Hotel in Wimbledon where Heath had been a regular. They’d once had a night out on the town drinking at Oddenino’s and the Haymarket Club in Shaftesbury Avenue. But at that time, which wasn’t too long ago, Heath had been known as ‘Captain Armstrong’ of the South African Air Force. Heath explained that he had been demobbed with the rank of lieutenant colonel and had received a letter of pardon from the King for a previous indiscretion in the RAF. He was no longer known as ‘Armstrong’ but as ‘Heath’. This must have elicited some curiosity from Yvonne, who was witness to the conversation, but, as Jimmy had explained, he’d had a letter of pardon and besides, it was all in the past now.

Before they left the Ship, to celebrate their engagement, Bruce invited Heath and Yvonne to be his guests that evening to a dinner dance that was being held at the Blue Peter Club. The club was owned by his drinking companion Dick Hollis, who was Bruce’s boss, as he was now working there as catering manager. The club was in Angmering-on-Sea near Littlehampton, just a short drive from Worthing. The young couple said they’d be delighted.

Yvonne and Heath went back to eat at the Ocean Hotel. Over lunch, he wondered if Yvonne had heard anything about an incident that had taken place in the hotel they had stayed in the previous Sunday? Yvonne had heard nothing about it, but was curious to hear more. Heath went on. A woman, he said, had been killed – murdered – there during the week. But before Yvonne could ask any more, Heath reminded her that they had an appointment to get to. They were to meet her parents at Worthing Golf Club, just near the Symonds’ family home. He said that he would tell her all about the murder later on.

Arriving at the golf club, ‘Jimmy’ Heath was introduced to his future parents-in-law, John and Gertrude.
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John Charters Symonds (always known as Jack) was a civil engineer and had been a major in the RASC during the First World War. Either during or just after the end of the war, he had met and married Gertrude Werther in Belgium before bringing her back with him to England.
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Yvonne, their only child, had been born in 1925.

Heath explained that he was South African, though educated in England. Whilst at Cambridge, he had joined the University Flying Club, from which he obtained a commission in the South African Air Force. He told Major Symonds about his wartime experiences with the SAAF where he had seen active service in North Africa and El Alamein. He also claimed to be related to Lady Heath, the Irish aviatrix, who had been one of the most famous women in the world during the 1920s. Flying, Heath explained, was something of a family obsession – both his parents also being flyers themselves. His present job was buying and selling aircraft and he proposed to continue in this line for the next five years after which his father wanted him to give up flying and return to South Africa to join the family stockbroking business. The meeting went very well, with Heath expounding on life in South Africa and his time during the war. Finally, Major Symonds delightedly accepted Heath’s suit for his daughter’s hand in marriage.