Billie Maddox The Rolex Killer
Prologue
August 1968.
Billie Maddox was eight years old and always frightened to go to sleep, the nightmares starting, it seemed, the second she closed her eyes.
Images of his face next to hers, the rancid breath a stinking mix of beer, cigarettes and garlic, lips drawn back and exposing yellowed teeth, some broken, some even missing, were all so vivid she'd wake up weeping, trembling and terrified in the pitch black of her bedroom.
Then the door would open and the rest of the nightmare would become a reality as he'd slide into bed beside her, his hands removing her pyjamas, his fingers working on her, his tongue licking her naked skin.
And the illuminated hands of his black faced, solid gold Rolex GMT Master would read two-thirty every time.
Her brutalisation started when she was six, not long after her beloved father had walked out one night, never to return and replaced by this monster her mother seemed to so adore.
His watch was worth thousands, a reward for a jewelry heist he'd been part of and he was always waving it in her face, boasting that only the very rich would be wearing similar ones.
The abuse was ignored by her mother, often a beating would follow as she screamed at her daughter, accusing her of being a filthy little liar when she tried, repeatedly, to describe what was happening to her in the dead of night.
Then, not long after she'd turned fourteen and puberty had kicked in, did her resolve harden, her mind now so utterly broken by the physical and mental damage, together with her mother's denial.
That is when she became a killer.
That is when she took a kitchen knife to the creature she hated with a passion.
That is when she slipped off his gold Rolex, wrapped it tightly in a plastic bag and buried it in the top corner of the garden, noting, by using the width of her hands as a ruler, exactly where the spot was.
And that is when she was convicted for his murder and sent down for fifteen years, first to a juvenile detention centre, then a harsh womens prison which did little or nothing to rehabilitate her whilst she served out her sentence.
But somehow, she instinctively knew she had to keep out of trouble and was released after thirteen years for good behaviour.
The years of incarceration, however, had only fuelled her obsession to take revenge out on men for a childhood obliterated by an insatiable desire for power and control taken in the form of painful sex by a serial paedophile.
The first thing she did, coincidentally at two-thirty in the morning, was visit her old home and dig up the Rolex, which she pawned, realising five thousands pounds in cash.
Through the Conservative Government's Social Fund she was awarded a Budgeting Loan to meet her intermittent needs and a Community Care Grant to assist her in living independently.
She rented a bedsit in Camden Town and was now set to seek out her victims.