Low life
Pot- Jeffrey Bernard Adetective I know fixed it for me to have a guided tour of the Black Museum in New Scotland Yard this week after I had casually mentioned to him that I am morbidly fascinated by murder. I think most people probably are and I must say it was quite riveting to find myself face to face with Nilsen's kitchen stove with the catering-size boiling pan on top of it. The stove hasn't been cleaned and there are transfers of butterflies on the oven door. Next to it there is Nilsen's bath. A murder- er can't afford to be squeamish I thought. And looking at photographs of Jack the Ripper's victims I thought how lucky that I'm not particularly squeamish either. No doctor could have committed those mur- ders, as some have speculated.
But to kick off with, the man in charge of the museum, a criminologist and forensic expert of renown, showed us the weapons that are available to almost everybody in cities today. Apart from an arsenal of small arms, all lethal and extremely nasty, there was one curio that was food for thought. It was a golf ball spiked with nails on the end of a chain with a handle to hold it by while wielding it. It was made by an eight-year- old boy who told the police that he got the idea from his parents' video nasties. When the law called round and asked the parents did they know their boy watched these videos they said yes they did, they wanted him to expand his horizons and would the police mind their own business. The boy had just nearly blinded one of his school chums and I suppose you've got to start somewhere.
Probably the most gruesome exhibit and a marvellous example of German efficien- cy is a man's two arms in a glass tank of formaldehyde. They belonged to a man wanted for questioning by the Yard about his wife's murder. They heard that a man had shot himself dead in Germany and they asked the police there to send them his fingerprints to see if he was the same one they were after. But the Germans are nothing if not thorough. So they sent the arms and hands. Who needs photocopies? I stared at this tank of limbs exactly like something from a Frankenstein movie and thought what the hell am I doing here? Yesterday I was at Longchamp drinking champagne all day and being hosted by the senior stewards of the French Jockey Club in autumnal sunshine and here I am the next day looking at bits and pieces of somebody.
Next to the arms there was evidence of Haigh's blunders. You can't blame him for not having known that concentrated sul- phuric acid can't dissolve gall stones but you can see a pair of dentures when they're staring you in the face. But what a strange man he must have been to have made the dying request that Madame Tussaud's should have his real clothes after his hanging. I lived just around the corner from him when he was dissolving rich women and I once lived in a terrible dump around the corner from Rillington Place. I sometimes wonder if I ever passed the time of day with Christie in a cafe or pub. And how odd that the two most horrendous murderers of this century, Christie and Nilsen, should both at one time have been policemen. But even the trivia — visual trivia — in the Black Museum have a strange appeal: soup tins on which the Great Train Robbers left the fingerprints that got them caught and the gun Ruth Ellis used plus the minute pellet from the umbrella which killed the Bulgarian.
After the tour the detectives took me for a drink, well needed especially because of champagne dehydration. The things these people have to look at. The worst, I ventured in my imagination, would be to find somebody who had been dead for a while in their flat during a hot summer. 'I'd feel distinctly edgy', I said, 'to see a row of milk bottles growing every day."Oh, you don't need to worry about the milk bottles outside,' said my CID man, 'it's the bluebottles inside.' Since that day I keep seeing Nilsen's gas stove in my mind's eye and I have just been into the kitchen to look at mine and it looks so harmless sitting there patiently waiting to boil an egg. Nilsen's somehow didn't and it might have been those transfers of butterflies stuck on it. At the Yard it is rumoured that he is cracking now and will end up in Broadmoor. I wonder he didn't go there straight from the dock.
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