{"id":470876,"date":"2025-10-03T10:41:13","date_gmt":"2025-10-03T10:41:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/470876\/"},"modified":"2025-10-03T10:41:13","modified_gmt":"2025-10-03T10:41:13","slug":"read-an-extract-from-gripping-true-crime-story-the-peepshow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/470876\/","title":{"rendered":"Read an extract from gripping true crime story The Peepshow"},"content":{"rendered":"

This true-crime book was a hit with GH’s VIP reader panel who all agreed it deserved a place as a Reader Favolurite in our Autumn Collection<\/a>. They who found the account of the notorious 1950s case \u2013 when multiple bodies were discovered at 10 Rillington Place, London \u2013 riveting and well-paced.<\/p>\n

\u2018I\u2019d never read true crime before, but it was as engaging as a thriller \u2013 and thoughtprovoking,\u2019 said a reader
<\/p>\n

Preface<\/p>\n

At about 8 o\u2019clock one foggy night in March, Christina Maloney was soliciting for custom outside the cheap hotels and boarding houses in Sussex Gardens, a dilapidated stucco terrace in Paddington, when she was approached by a thin man in spectacles. He was dressed in a suit, a brown overcoat and a brown trilby. Even with his hat on, she could see that he was going bald.<\/p>\n

What to read next<\/p>\n

They exchanged a few words on the pavement, shielded from the main road by a railed enclosure of plane trees and hedges.<\/p>\n

Christina asked the man if he wanted to come home with her. He suggested that she come to his place instead. He was an estate agent, he said, who let out flats to girls like her, and he had a basement that he could show her. Christina declined his offer.<\/p>\n

She didn\u2019t go to strangers\u2019 houses, she told him.<\/p>\n

The man said that he might come back the next morning, but he seemed first to want to know more about Christina\u2019s accommodation. \u2018Do you live in the basement?\u2019 he asked. No, she said, her room was on the second floor. \u2018Are there any other people on the same landing?\u2019 Yes, Christina said, but they were out during the day. \u2018Are you sure that there will be nobody else in tomorrow?\u2019 She said that she couldn\u2019t be certain.<\/p>\n

Now the man changed tack.<\/p>\n

\u2018Have you got any photographs of girls in the nude?\u2019 he asked.<\/p>\n

Christina said that she didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

\u2018Well, there is always you,\u2019 he said. <\/p>\n

\u2018That\u2019s right,\u2019 she replied.<\/p>\n

He asked her where she was from. She told him that she had just moved to London from Ireland.<\/p>\n

The man proposed that he return to Sussex Gardens the next day at noon, and after he and Christina had done some \u2018business\u2019, she could come to his flat for a session with his photographers. He would pay her \u00a32 an hour, he said. She agreed, and he left.<\/p>\n

The stranger did not turn up the next day as promised. But just over a week later, on Sunday 29 March 1953, Christina recognised his photograph in the News of the World.<\/p>\n

PART ONE <\/p>\n

In the walls<\/p>\n

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 expos\u00e9s \u2013 \u2018Tell it to Harry Procter\u2019, people would say when they heard something outrageous. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

No 10 was the last building on the left, abutting the wall.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2018poshest\u2019 resident of the street. He immediately became the chief suspect in the murders.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s press card. The man peered at the card in the darkness, then gave a thin smile. \u2018I\u2019m Mr Christie,\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

\u2018Sit you down,\u2019 said Christie. He put a tin kettle on the stove.<\/p>\n

\u2018I know you reporters like something stronger,\u2019 he said, \u2018but I can only offer you tea.\u2019 He told Harry that his wife was asleep in the bedroom.<\/p>\n

\u2018You\u2019re a Yorkshireman, aren\u2019t you?\u2019 Christie asked, noticing Harry\u2019s accent. \u2018I was born in Yorkshire \u2013 many years ago, but you never forget the accent, do you?\u2019 There was no trace of the north in Christie\u2019s voice: he spoke with a genteel Cockney lilt.<\/p>\n

Harry confirmed that he was from Leeds. Christie said that he had been born and brought up in Halifax, only twenty miles away. <\/p>\n

Harry asked Christie about the murders of his neighbours.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Christie told Harry that the upset had made him ill. He said that he hoped the killer would be punished.<\/p>\n

He asked Harry: \u2018Who do you think murdered Mrs Evans and her baby?\u2019 He seemed nervy, Harry thought, almost ingratiating.<\/p>\n

Harry saw Christie again a few weeks later, at Tim Evans\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

After the verdict, Harry found Christie in the lobby outside the courtroom, wiping tears from the lenses of his round, hornrimmed spectacles. \u2018What a wicked man he is,\u2019 Christie had said to Harry, sadly.<\/p>\n

The few crime reporters who attended the trial, recalled Harry, had considered it \u2018dull, sordid, unglamorous, dreary\u2019.<\/p>\n

They dismissed Beryl and Geraldine Evans\u2019s killings as a \u2018fish and chippy\u2019 type of crime: a banal, vulgar, open-and-shut case of domestic violence that would quickly be forgotten.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The Peepshow by Kate Summerscale<\/p>\n

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