City of Dreadful Night

by Peter Guttridge

  ‘And the arms and hands?’ Kate said.

  Tingley shrugged.

  ‘Don’t know. The arms shouldn’t have posed a problem of identification unless they had some distinguishing feature like a birthmark – these days it would be a tattoo.’

  ‘And the hands were because of fingerprints.’

  ‘Probably,’ Tingley said.

  ‘Though that in itself is interesting,’ Gilchrist said. ‘It means either that this woman had at some point been fingerprinted, so had a criminal record, or that the killer was ignorant and assumed that just the existence of fingerprints allowed for identification.’

  ‘If she had been fingerprinted, could that be because she was a prostitute?’ Kate said. ‘Killed by her pimp?’

  ‘Quite possibly,’ Gilchrist said.

  Kate noticed that Watts had not contributed to the discussion but had been listening intently.

  ‘Let’s get back to the head,’ he now said. ‘If the head they found in the rock pool was the woman’s – wrapped in newspaper like the torso in the suitcase – then it’s likely he lived around here. He’s not going to be travelling far with a head – what would he carry it in, for one thing?’

  ‘A bowling bag?’ Tingley said.

  ‘Ugh,’ Kate said.

  ‘A man we have in custody walked from near Hove station to the pier with his friend’s head under his arm in the middle of the evening a couple of weeks ago, and nobody noticed,’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘These days anything is possible,’ Watts said, ‘but in 1934 I think somebody would have noticed. No, it still suggests he was local. He’s not going to make more than one trip from London to Brighton with body parts, is he? He wouldn’t want to risk being remembered. And lugging a trunk with a torso and a bag with a head in it at the same time would be risky. Plus, he’d want to dispose of the head at night. He couldn’t very well chuck it over the cliff edge in broad daylight.’

  ‘Can we check tide tables?’

  ‘Hang on,’ Gilchrist said. ‘Are we assuming that he threw the head in there? Why? Why couldn’t it have just ended up there – thrown in somewhere else and the tide tugged it there.’

  ‘OK,’ Tingley said. ‘But we’re getting somewhere. So his trip to King’s Cross – a special trip or was he going somewhere from there?’

  ‘If he was, he’d have to come back so, again, that’s doubling the risk of being remembered,’ Gilchrist said. ‘Supposing someone had opened the case in the meantime; staff would be on the lookout.’

  ‘So it was a special journey,’ Watts said.

  ‘But the same applies to Brighton station,’ Tingley said.

  ‘Which same?’ Gilchrist leant forward in her seat.

  ‘If we’re saying he lived down here, then wasn’t there a big risk when he was leaving the trunk at Brighton station that he’d be recognized and/or remembered lugging this trunk the next time he used the station?’

  ‘Hang on – break it down,’ Gilchrist said. ‘This is important. If he did live in Brighton, as you’re suggesting, then he ran two risks turning up at the station with a trunk. One: that he might bump into someone he knew. Who would later remember, when there was all the publicity, that he was lugging a trunk. Two: that as he lived here he might be recognized as a regular user of the station.’

  ‘You mean if he was a commuter?’ Kate said. ‘Did people commute from Brighton in those days? Plus we think he had a car.’

  Tingley shrugged.

  ‘Well, all you’re really saying is that he lived down here but not in Brighton. He didn’t go up to London much because his business didn’t take him there.’

  ‘But that means she was based down here,’ Gilchrist said. ‘So you’d think they’d be able to figure out who she was.’

  ‘Why was she killed?’ Watts said.

  Kate replied:

  ‘The police theory from the files we have is that she was probably the mistress of a married man who killed her because she was pregnant.’

  ‘Good,’ Tingley said. ‘If she was a mistress in London that he visited regularly, then the station might be a problem.’

  ‘Unless he drove,’ Kate said.

  ‘But trains were quicker and more frequent then,’ Tingley said.

  ‘So it’s like not shitting on your own doorstep,’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘OK,’ Watts said. ‘Alternative scenario. He was London-based but had a second home here. He didn’t come down often but when he did he drove. He brought her down here to kill her. Then maybe never came down again for a couple of years. He was nondescript anyway so no real worries about being recognized.’

  Gilchrist nodded slowly.

  ‘But if he’s London-based, then he’s anonymous and we can’t ever locate him. If he’s down here, then at least we stand a chance.’

  ‘You mean by the rules of this kind of investigation?’ Tingley said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Kate said.

  ‘Well – Jack the Ripper – all the theories revolve around a small number of suspects listed in the police files. So Ripperologists spend all their time trying to prove which one of them did it. But why on earth should the police have hit on the right suspects? So then you get the wild card theorists who suggest it was the Prince of Wales or the Masons or Walter Sickert. But given the fact that with a random killing or crime these days the police haven’t got a clue without DNA or confessions or blind luck, then the chances are the Ripper was somebody totally different.’

  Kate frowned.

  ‘And you’re saying that applies here?’

  ‘No, no, this is different. There’s a surfeit of information – thousands of statements. It’s like the Yorkshire Ripper and all those high-profile cases. The police have already got the guys without realizing it – they’re in there among the statements. The torso murderer is somewhere in the thousands of statements the police took.’

  ‘But we don’t have those statements,’ Kate said. ‘They were destroyed. We just have a few of them.’

  ‘When were they destroyed?’ Watts said.

  ‘In the 1960s on the order of the Chief Constable,’ Kate said. ‘I assume it was some thirty-year rule.’

  Watts looked at her intently for a moment.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Nothing,’ Watts said. ‘Are there files anywhere else?’

  ‘I’m going to the County Records Office tomorrow. There are files there. There is one other thing too, which isn’t in the copies I gave you.’

  Watts tilted his head.

  ‘There is a kind of handwritten diary from a policeman involved in the case. Not all of it, just fragments.’

  ‘Which policeman?’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘I don’t know – I’m hoping the County Records will help me identify him.’

  Watts still had the odd look on his face. Before Kate could press him, Tingley glanced at his phone – they’d all heard a text alert – and took Watts to one side.

  During the discussion about the head and torso, Gilchrist had been thinking about Finch’s body washed up at Beachy Head and Gary Parker chopping up his friend. She bought another glass of wine for her and Kate. She warmed to Kate.

  ‘You know who I am, right?’ she asked her when they’d both taken a gulp.

  ‘I do. Can I ask – which has caused you most problems – your involvement with the Milldean incident or your fling with your boss?’

  Gilchrist stared at her for a long moment then burst out laughing.

  ‘Please, don’t sugar-coat it – just ask me straight out.’

  Kate flushed.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s OK. The two together are a pretty powerful combination.’

  ‘Do you regret your fling?’

  Gilchrist had asked herself the same question time and again. But now it was her turn to flush.

  ‘If I’m honest, I’m bitter about the consequences but don’t regret the fling.’

  ‘But he was marrie
d.’

  The moral certainty of youth, Gilchrist thought. She didn’t know how old Kate was but she assumed she was younger. And she’d felt that same way once, before life kicked in.

  Her mother was a feminist, had lived through the pill and the pressure on women to engage in sex for fun, whether it was fun for them or not. She belonged to that whole generation of women used by men and who ignored their own needs because most women wanted relationships, not one-night stands. Her mother couldn’t understand the notion of the mistress. Couldn’t understand the idea that women should have solidarity with each other but so many broke ranks to have affairs with married men, ignoring the suffering of the wives.

  Gilchrist scanned the room, as she’d been doing since she first entered the hotel.

  ‘What I regret is losing my anonymity,’ she said. ‘In many ways I hate Brighton – so much “Look at me”. But all this exhibitionism, paradoxically, goes side by side with anonymity. When the scandal broke, losing my anonymity was hateful.’

  Her phone beeped and she excused herself to read the text. It was from the station. Gary Parker, the man who’d chopped up his friend, wanted to see her.

  TWELVE

  ‘I want to do a deal.’

  Gilchrist looked at Gary Parker and tried not to show her distaste. This was a man who had chopped up his best friend two weeks earlier and had expressed no remorse, no curiosity, no revulsion – in fact, no emotion at all.

  ‘I don’t think a deal is going to work for you. You’ve killed someone – and in a particularly brutal way.’

  ‘I’ve got information.’

  She sighed, thinking for the moment about the anonymous woman left in the trunk in 1934. She imagined that her killer had acted more soberly, in cold blood, when he cut up her body. She turned back to Parker.

  ‘I’m listening.’

  He looked at her coldly.

  ‘No – doesn’t work like that. I need to know I’m getting a deal.’

  She stood, nodded at Reg Williamson, who was leaning by the door.

  ‘Conversation over, then.’

  ‘Bollocks. Who can authorize a deal?’

  ‘No one. You can talk to me or you can talk to that wall.’

  ‘No deal, no talk.’

  She grimaced, sat down again, not wanting to be here.

  ‘Give me a hint,’ she said, trying to keep the revulsion out of her voice. She was disgusted by this man.

  ‘I know who did them rapes in Milldean. During the street party.’

  There had been three reported rapes during the riots.

  ‘You mean during the riots?’

  ‘Fucking great that was.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘My mate.’

  ‘The one you killed?’

  ‘That’s why I done it. He can’t be behaving like that with young gels.’

  ‘That was your motive for killing him and chopping him in pieces?’

  She couldn’t keep the disbelief out of her voice.

  His hand dropped into his lap. He stroked himself for a moment. Then he seemed to forget and the hand lay there on his thigh.

  ‘You look like you got great tits. Can I have a squeeze?’

  ‘Watch your language, lad,’ Williamson growled.

  ‘Fuck you, fat man.’

  Williamson moved off the wall but Sarah raised a hand to stop him.

  ‘Are you saying that’s why you did it?’ she said.

  ‘We done a lot of kit that day. I was gone, man.’

  He lapsed into silence. Gilchrist sat still, looking down at the coffee stains on the table between them. Parker brought his hand up from his thigh and started clasping and unclasping it in his other scrawny hand on the table in front of him. His nails were chewed down to the quick and he had ‘love’ and ‘hate’ tattooed in blue ink, one letter at a time, on the knuckles of each hand.

  Gilchrist remembered being terrified by a film she’d seen on the telly as a kid. The Night of the Hunter with Robert Mitchum as an insane preacher pursuing two little children after he’d murdered their mother. Much of it seemed to take place at night or in places with deep, frightening shadows.

  Mitchum had been so scary and psychotic. To demonstrate his preaching on the struggle between good and evil, he too had ‘love’ tattooed on one hand and ‘hate’ on the other, and he clasped his big hands together and wrestled them. She’d been terrified. She shuddered now at another image of this looming man towering over a helpless little girl.

  Parker broke wind forcefully.

  ‘Jesus,’ Williamson said, disgusted.

  The smell was appalling, but Gilchrist was at least relieved to have been dragged away from the entrance to that particular memory lane.

  Parker started up again.

  ‘Some blokes only want to give it up the arse and they’re not fussy whose arse. Women, men, armadillos.’ He showed his ferret teeth and cackled. ‘OK, maybe not the fucking armadillos.’

  He began rocking in his chair.

  ‘These blokes who sew up live birds in the chests of their victims. One guy pulled their lungs out and threw them over their shoulders. There was that guy that skinned his humps.’

  ‘These are all fiction,’ she said, exasperated. ‘They’re not real,’

  ‘Fuck off – that bloke who skinned them was real – and are you trying to fucking tell me people don’t do these things in real life?’

  ‘No, you’ve demonstrated that.’

  He had to think about that for a moment.

  ‘Oh, yeah – that. Fucking weird that was. Don’t know where that came from. Where’s his head? I wanted to keep that.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I chopped him up. I was gonna make burgers but I couldn’t get him in the pan.’

  She tried to ignore that image.

  ‘I mean – what made you chop him up?’

  He tilted his head to one side and looked at her. He frowned. He seemed to have forgotten about the rapes.

  ‘Had this fucking alien growing in him, coming out of his chest. Had to kill the fucker. Plus he wouldn’t shut up.’

  ‘The alien?’

  ‘No, you stupid cunt—’

  He shook his head in contempt.

  ‘Watch your language with me,’ Gilchrist said calmly, as she sensed Williamson straining to come over and smack Parker. ‘You said he wouldn’t shut up.’

  Gilchrist tried not to react to his staring at her breasts.

  ‘What wouldn’t he shut up about? The rapes?’

  ‘That was always his fucking problem,’ he said, dropping one hand back into his lap. ‘Always trying to big it up, but nobody was fucking fooled. He was talking bollocks. Pissed me off.’

  ‘So he didn’t rape anybody in Milldean?’

  ‘Like he knew what was fucking what. He knew fuck all, the cunt.’

  She really loathed this little creep with his vacant grin, his imbecile face, the way he kept ogling her.

  ‘What was he talking about?’ she persisted.

  ‘He don’t have no fucking clue. Bigs himself up, but it’s bollocks. I know more about that fucking lark than he ever did.’

  She could see him as a rapist. After what he’d done she could see him as pretty much anything bad.

  ‘What lark?’

  Her stomach suddenly growled. She hadn’t eaten for what seemed an age. She ran her tongue quickly over her teeth: her mouth tasted stale and of too much coffee. He looked at her, suddenly cunning.

  ‘What they call a bent copper?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What do they call a bent copper? It’s a fucking joke. You’re supposed to say whatsit – you know.’

  ‘Tell me, then,’ she said, ‘what do they call a bent copper?’

  ‘That’s it! Then I say whatsit!’

  She tried to be patient. Said nothing as he searched for the punchline.

  ‘Fuck – whatsit – you know – fuckin’ . . .’

  He clenched h
is fist and hit himself on the side of the head a couple of times.

  ‘Fucking done my head in, man. Can’t remember nothing no more. What was we talking about?’

  ‘Bent policemen, for some reason. But tell me what your friend was bragging about that got you so angry.’

  ‘Police don’t know nothing, do they? Pretend you do but you fucking don’t.’

  She sighed. Someone let her out of here.

  ‘The Milldean fucking massacre. Fucking mess that was. Bet you don’t have a fucking clue about it.’

  Her stomach tightened, gurgled again. She leant forward and put her hands lightly on the table in front of her.

  ‘You know something about that?’

  ‘I’m from there, in’t I?’

  ‘Were you at the riot?’

  He ignored her.

  ‘That bum-boy in the toilet. Another fucking pain in the arse, but then he was all arse.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Spent most of his life on his hands and knees. Chugging or taking it all the way up.’

  ‘What about him?’ Gilchrist repeated.

  He clenched his fists and shifted in his seat again.

  ‘OK, what’s his name?’

  ‘Little Stevie.’

  He sniggered.

  ‘What’s funny?’

  ‘He had an even bigger dick than me.’

  I was having a solitary brunch in a café by the old Town Hall, trying to imagine this square when the police station had been in the basement of the Town Hall. Before the Thistle was built facing out to sea, the Japanese restaurant had been plonked down in the middle of the square and the underground car park had been carved out beneath it. The time of the Trunk Murder.

  I was feeling odd. I felt stalled for the moment on trying to sort out the Milldean mess and I was drawn towards this very cold case that Kate had plonked in my lap. I was deliberately not thinking about Molly or Sarah Gilchrist.

  Three long pink limousines drew up across the road from me, in front of the side entrance to the old Town Hall. It now housed the registry office and here was the first of the day’s gay marriages. It must have been somebody famous – TV vans arrived in the wake of the limousines. I drew back as I recognized a few of the TV people who had harassed me.