Read Online Gangbuster by Peter Bleksley - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Peter Bleksley
Ads: Link
interested in finding out more about them.
I’d managed to get snippets of information from Tony. One was that he’d heard the word ‘Littlehampton’ mentioned. All the time you are looking for a trigger word that might fire the investigation down the right path. Tony said these two characters were enraptured by Margi, who did have a sort of intoxicating personality if you are into that sort of thing. He only knew their christian names – Barry and Bob. So that gave me three trigger words – Littlehampton, Barry and Bob. It had taken days to elicit this information but I knew I had something important to work on. Two people never mentioned by anyone else, who appeared to have been deliberately left out of the scene. I felt very excited at the development, and I felt at last we were getting somewhere. I then rang Littlehampton Police Station on a long shot, and this is how fate or luck can help you out. I spoke to a detective there and told him I was fishing in the dark but had two names, Bob and Barry, and did he know of any pair of oiks who hung around together who fitted the names? He said he wasn’t sure.
I told him this was a major murder inquiry with sexual links, deviancy and so on.
He said, ‘Fuck me, I’ve got a geezer called Barry on bail for allegedly interfering with a 13-year-old boy. Is that any use to you?’
I thought, Bingo. This is it.
My next move was to go down to Littlehampton and, with the help of the local CID boys, identified the two mystery suspects – Robert Causabon-Vincent, aged 41, and Barry Parsons, 45, two partners in crimewho fitted the bill exactly as the men who had been in Christine’s flat the night she’d been murdered. We staked out their houses for a night then went in and arrested them the next morning.
They were eventually convicted at the Old Bailey and jailed for life. Margi was found guilty of manslaughter and given seven years after the court heard that she had hired the two men to kill her lesbian lover. But she was later cleared on appeal as a result of the trial judge’s misdirection to the jury and freed from her sentence.
The Old Bailey jury sat through the most bizarre evidence and you could see that some of them were really uncomfortable with all the details about stormy lesbian passions, torture chambers and Margi’s beautiful baby being born into the middle of it all.
It seemed that the two of them had lived together for about seven or eight years with Offord being the older of the two and acting as ‘husband’ in the weird partnership. Offord, a posh sort who was educated at a leading girls’ school and divorced from her businessman husband, had persuded Margi to have the baby to cement the affair. But it only brought a load of grief with Christine objecting to Margi taking the little boy to her basement torture chamber while she worked. The two killers were petty crooks who carried out burglaries in London and on the south coast. Causabon-Vincent had visited Margi as a client, presumably for a good thrashing or something, and had become sexually obsessed with her. He introduced her to his pal, Parsons, a one-time builder who was nicknamed Psychopathic Barry after he told her he had killed more than 80 people. It was a load of bollocks, of course, but it led to them becominginvolved in killing Christine and putting her naked in the bath to make it look as if it had been just a sex game that had gone wrong and not a deliberate killing. They might easily have got away with it if I hadn’t had a lucky break.
Throughout all this, Margi, who was from the back streets of Liverpool with a pretty poor education, had denied any involvement in her lover’s death and said all along that she had adored her and hadn’t wanted any harm to come to her. She said Chrissie treated her better than most men treat their wives and their lifestyle certainly suggested that, with Chrissie heaping expensive presents like jewellery and clothes on Margi like a proud
I’d managed to get snippets of information from Tony. One was that he’d heard the word ‘Littlehampton’ mentioned. All the time you are looking for a trigger word that might fire the investigation down the right path. Tony said these two characters were enraptured by Margi, who did have a sort of intoxicating personality if you are into that sort of thing. He only knew their christian names – Barry and Bob. So that gave me three trigger words – Littlehampton, Barry and Bob. It had taken days to elicit this information but I knew I had something important to work on. Two people never mentioned by anyone else, who appeared to have been deliberately left out of the scene. I felt very excited at the development, and I felt at last we were getting somewhere. I then rang Littlehampton Police Station on a long shot, and this is how fate or luck can help you out. I spoke to a detective there and told him I was fishing in the dark but had two names, Bob and Barry, and did he know of any pair of oiks who hung around together who fitted the names? He said he wasn’t sure.
I told him this was a major murder inquiry with sexual links, deviancy and so on.
He said, ‘Fuck me, I’ve got a geezer called Barry on bail for allegedly interfering with a 13-year-old boy. Is that any use to you?’
I thought, Bingo. This is it.
My next move was to go down to Littlehampton and, with the help of the local CID boys, identified the two mystery suspects – Robert Causabon-Vincent, aged 41, and Barry Parsons, 45, two partners in crimewho fitted the bill exactly as the men who had been in Christine’s flat the night she’d been murdered. We staked out their houses for a night then went in and arrested them the next morning.
They were eventually convicted at the Old Bailey and jailed for life. Margi was found guilty of manslaughter and given seven years after the court heard that she had hired the two men to kill her lesbian lover. But she was later cleared on appeal as a result of the trial judge’s misdirection to the jury and freed from her sentence.
The Old Bailey jury sat through the most bizarre evidence and you could see that some of them were really uncomfortable with all the details about stormy lesbian passions, torture chambers and Margi’s beautiful baby being born into the middle of it all.
It seemed that the two of them had lived together for about seven or eight years with Offord being the older of the two and acting as ‘husband’ in the weird partnership. Offord, a posh sort who was educated at a leading girls’ school and divorced from her businessman husband, had persuded Margi to have the baby to cement the affair. But it only brought a load of grief with Christine objecting to Margi taking the little boy to her basement torture chamber while she worked. The two killers were petty crooks who carried out burglaries in London and on the south coast. Causabon-Vincent had visited Margi as a client, presumably for a good thrashing or something, and had become sexually obsessed with her. He introduced her to his pal, Parsons, a one-time builder who was nicknamed Psychopathic Barry after he told her he had killed more than 80 people. It was a load of bollocks, of course, but it led to them becominginvolved in killing Christine and putting her naked in the bath to make it look as if it had been just a sex game that had gone wrong and not a deliberate killing. They might easily have got away with it if I hadn’t had a lucky break.
Throughout all this, Margi, who was from the back streets of Liverpool with a pretty poor education, had denied any involvement in her lover’s death and said all along that she had adored her and hadn’t wanted any harm to come to her. She said Chrissie treated her better than most men treat their wives and their lifestyle certainly suggested that, with Chrissie heaping expensive presents like jewellery and clothes on Margi like a proud
Similar Books
