He could have stepped out of a cruel comedy, but Roy Fontaine, the killer butler, was no joke.
Roy Fontaine, elegant, cultured, well-spoken and with perfect manners, was straight from the pages of Jeeves and Wooster.
Few would have guessed that under that façade of breeding lurked a cunning and devious crook who had spent half his life in jail. Fewer still would have believed that in the later summer of 1977 Fontaine, the phoney aristocrat, would turn killer, eventually murdering five people and burying their bodies in the Scottish countryside.
Most of Fontaine’s life had been a sham. Despite the cut-glass accent, Fontaine lad been born Archibald Hall, son of a post office worker, in a grimy tenement on Glasgow’s South Side in 1924.