City of Dreadful Night

NINE

Wednesday 6th June 1934

I remember 6th June. I don’t remember it because it was Derby Day. I’m not a betting man. I remember it because of the platinum blonde.

It had been a difficult week for me. Frenchie had been over on the Monday for her visit to Dr M. I met her off the ferry at the West Pier and she was alternately weepy and angry. She’d said she didn’t want to see me after, so I took her over to Hove and asked the receptionist to be sure she got a taxi back to the pier in plenty of time for the ferry back to France. I left more than enough money.

I was working that afternoon but I felt sorry for her – yes, me – so I nipped down to see her off. However, I got waylaid by a shopkeeper complaining about kids throwing stones at his shop window. By the time I got to the pier the ferry was already chugging towards the horizon. It was too far away to make out anybody on deck, if she was on deck.

I never saw her again.

That Wednesday was hot and sticky and I was relieved to be out of the office. Brighton’s main police station is in the basement of the Town Hall, two floors below the magistrates’ court. It was no place to be on a sunny day.

I’d been out since noon. First I’d been up at the railway station. It had been mobbed. The trains clattered in at the rate of 500 a day at this time of year. From London alone, a train every five minutes from Victoria, every fifteen from London Bridge. Half a million people over a weekend, five million a week in a couple of months’ time during the wakes holidays.

I stood at the end of platform three and watched people getting off their trains, then swarming across to the single track inset between platforms three and four. There they boarded the special train that took holidaymakers up to the Devil’s Dyke, the pleasure park set in a deep gorge on the Downs.

When I came out of the station I was jostled by more arrivals spilling into the sunlight. Some queued for the little trams that ran from the station to the two piers. Others set off to walk the quarter of a mile down the Queens Road to the sea glittering at its far end.

Many families had come from the dark slums of London and you could see them dazzled by the light, looking up at the expanse of blue sky and down towards the bright sea.

I’d observed before that usually the women and children reached the seafront first. The men would find an excuse to stop off in one of the public houses that lay between the station and their family day ahead.

A day spent on the beach, on the silver painted piers, splashing in the sea, racing in miniature motors, listening to the bands playing. Idly watching small aeroplanes out of Shoreham airport write their advertisements for all kinds of products in languid trails of smoke across the sky.

Don’t tell me I can’t be poetical.

No sooner did I walk in the police station than the desk sergeant sent me straight back out to deal with an incident in the Winter Gardens on the terrace above the aquarium. A drunken man claiming to be Lobby Ludd had been pestering the young women using the deck chairs.

‘ How do we know it isn’t Lobby Ludd?’ I said. ‘He’s due down here today. ’

Lobby Ludd was sent by the Westminster Gazette to tour the south coast resorts during the summer. When he was in Brighton, his photo and approximate whereabouts were given in that day’s copy of the newspaper. If you thought you recognized him, you went up to him with a copy of the newspaper and said: ‘You are Lobby Ludd and I claim my Westminster Gazette prize. ’

I’d heard he was so popular that special excursion trains ran to resorts where he was due to appear. His popularity was to do with the fact that the main prize was?50 – more if no one had won the previous day. There were also prizes of ten bob a go if anyone found one of the Lobby Ludd cards he hid in various places about the town.

The man claiming to be Lobby Ludd had scarpered by the time I got to the deckchairs. But the platinum blonde was there. She was pretty, with freckles and a cheeky smile.

She didn’t have much to say, except with her eyes.

‘ Lobby Ludd? He tried to get fresh. Sat down next to me and invited me to lunch. I said no, so he said, “Well, what about a drink?” He said he wasn’t after anything -’ she gave me a look – ‘but then you all say that, don’t you? ’

‘ You weren’t tempted?’ I said, giving her a look back.

‘ He stank of gin and he was too desperate – kept saying all he wanted was for me to “stick close”. ’

‘ Too desperate, eh? I’ll make a note of that. ’

A few yards along, a fat spotty girl in pink was plonked in a deckchair. Her feet hardly touched the ground. A pale, bloodless girl sat beside her. She watched me avidly.

‘ Was it Lobby Ludd?’ I said to the spotty girl.

‘ He waved some cards but I don’t know if they were real. He said if I went with him for a drink, he’d let me have one of his cards so I could claim the ten bob. ’

‘ What did you say? ’

‘ I said give me the fifty pounds and I might be interested. ’

She and her friend squealed.

‘ Then what happened? ’

‘ I said I couldn’t leave my friend and didn’t he have one – to make a foursome like? He said no, then a young friend of his turned up. ’

‘ A young friend? ’

‘ He looked a bit of a bad sort. ’

‘ Did he now? ’

Behind the Regency terraces and the glamour of the seafront there was another Brighton of dark alleyways and festering slums. From here violence and crime had begun to spread.

In particular we’d been having trouble with razor gangs of young criminals marauding around town. They carried cut-throat razors and weren’t afraid to use them when they caused trouble in the dance halls, on the piers and up at the racetrack.

‘ They had a bit of a to-do,’ the spotty girl said. ‘Fred – that’s what Lobby Ludd said his real name was – left then. ’

‘ This young man he had an altercation with…? ’

‘ Well, he obviously knew Fred. But Fred denied it. Even said his name wasn’t Fred. Then he ran off. ’

The platinum blonde was looking out across Madeira Drive to the Palace Pier. I walked back to her.

I was at the railway station twice that day. But had I been there some time between six and seven in the evening, would it have made any difference? All those people flooding off the trains – would I have noticed a man lugging a brown trunk with a woman’s naked torso in it? A man who, some time in that hour, deposited it in the left parcels office, receiving in return the deposit ticket CT1945?

I returned to the station at about ten that evening to see the platinum blonde safely on her train back to whichever London slum she’d come from. It was the least I could do.

Kate paused for a moment and looked across at the Pier. She wondered who Frenchie was and Dr M. She couldn’t quite get the tone of his remarks about the platinum blonde. That last paragraph sounded harsh, callous.

The next entry she found was eleven days later.

Sunday 17th June

They found the woman in the trunk today in the left parcels office at Brighton station. I was the one who opened the trunk the second time. At the inquest my sergeant, Percy Stacey, stated that he’d opened it. He didn’t. He wasn’t even in the room. He was heaving up in the Gents because of the stench.

Old Billy Vinnicombe, the cloakroom attendant, had been aware of a bad smell for a few days. The hot weather wasn’t helping. He’d narrowed it down to this trunk he’d taken in on 6th June, Derby Day. He summoned Detective Bishop of the railway police who opened the trunk. He found it contained human remains. Bishop called us at 8.30 p.m.

Percy and me had got there ten minutes later. When we’d stepped in the office with the station manager, Percy had taken one whiff and headed for the latrines.

I’d had a good day until then. I’d been up on Devil’s Dyke and met a willing girl. I was still thinking about her, to be honest, when I dealt with the trunk.

Bloke called Henry George Rout was on duty when the trunk had been deposited. We got him in later but he couldn’t remember the man who had deposited the trunk at all: it was rush hour and the station was extra busy because of people coming back from the Derby.

I undid the straps and tugged the lid up. The stink was bad enough when the trunk was closed but as the lid fell back it was overpowering.

The station manager, Vinnicombe and I reared back and reached for our hankies. I remember Vinnicombe had a red-spotted one as if he fancied himself as Dick Whittington.

I looked into the trunk. There was a lot of cotton wool padding. I took the cotton wool out, keeping my head turned away, trying not to gag. Near the hinges the cotton wool was soaked in what looked like blood. Then I took out several layers of cheap brown paper to expose a brown paper parcel that almost completely filled the trunk. There was a thin sash cord, tied once lengthwise and three times across. I cut the cord with my clasp knife then parted the sheaves of paper.

I was looking at a naked woman’s torso, her teats small, her rib cage pronounced. It took me a few seconds to realize that in such a small trunk her torso was all there was to see. No head, arms, legs, hands or feet.

I did gag then. We all did. We had to clear it up before I could do any more with the trunk, though Percy Scales kept that out of his inquest statement too. As we mopped up we tried to joke about who’d been eating what. But we were all glancing over at the open trunk. I’m a bit of a reader so I kept thinking of it as Pandora’s Box. What had we let out?

Scales and I moved the trunk to the police station where Dr Pilling, the police surgeon, examined the woman’s remains then had us take them to the mortuary. He thought the woman was about forty. We compiled a description, such as it was, and circulated it to all stations.

Then we told our Chief Constable. Captain W. J. ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson was, like many of the senior officers, a veteran of the Great War. He’d been gassed at Mons but didn’t seem to have come out of it too badly. He had the occasional coughing fit but he was nowhere as bad as some of the men I’d come across, coughing up the lining of their lungs every morning. I was glad I’d been too young for that racket.

Hutch was a good enough boss, but the few times I’d had dealings with him I’d seen little evidence of his detection skills. He must have recognized this himself because the next day he called in Scotland Yard.

Monday 18th June

I had my feet up on my desk smoking a Woodbine and getting stirrings thinking about the girl at Devil’s Dyke when the news came through that more of the woman’s body had been found.

‘ You’re working hard, I see,’ Percy said as he barged into the office. I slid my feet hurriedly off the desk and sat up straight in my chair. ‘Maybe you should be out trying to trace the shop that sold the trunk. ’

Not bloody likely.

We’d released a photo and description of the trunk. It was made of brown canvas and plywood, battened with four hoops. It was small – two foot three inches long, by one foot five inches wide, by a foot deep. It made me sad that someone could be callous enough to pack a human being – or part of one – into such a confined space.

It was a cheap trunk you could buy almost anywhere for about 12s 6d. We’d got about fifty policemen doing the roundsof drapers, ironmongers and chemists to find out who’d soldit.

The cord I’d cut when I discovered the torso in the trunk was for a Venetian blind. One piece of the brown paper had the end of a word scrawled in blue pencil. The rest of the word had been obliterated by dried blood. The part of the word that could still be read was ‘-ford’.

These were all the clues we had.

There hadn’t been much blood in the trunk, considering, so the thinking was she’d been dead a while before she was put in there.

‘ They’ve found the legs,’ Percy said.

We’d sent out an instruction for railway officials everywhere in the Southern Railway system to search all suspicious luggage and parcels. We’d already heard there was a case at Wimbledon containing women’s clothing, but as that’s what luggage is for we weren’t getting excited.

‘ King’s Cross Station left parcels office,’ Percy said. ‘A brown leatherette suitcase – the smell had alerted them again. Her legs and feet were inside. ’

‘ King’s Cross – he was a busy boy. No head or hands? ’

‘ Not yet. Hutch is calling in Scotland Yard. ’

Chief Detective Inspector Donaldson and Detective Sergeant Sorrell of Scotland Yard were already on their way down to Brighton. When they arrived they went into close conference with Hutch and Detective Inspector Pelling, our head of CID. The Scotland Yard blokes took over the case.

Tuesday 19th June

About fifty press men representing London and provincial newspapers were rushed to Brighton yesterday. They hang around in groups outside the police station day and night. For these first few days, they constantly invaded the station, pestering officers for information about the enquiry.

Sir Bernard Spilsbury came down today. The best-known forensic pathologist in the country. The top man. He spent three hours examining the woman’s remains. He confirmed immediately that the legs belonged to the torso – it was easy to see because the bones had been sawn through about two inches from the joints rather than at the joint. The flesh had first been cut with something sharp.

She’d been dismembered several hours after death and almost certainly after rigor mortis was well established. No anatomical knowledge or skill had been shown in the dismembering. Somebody who knew how to cut up carcasses would have known how to cut through the knee joints without needing a saw.

Spilsbury took the body’s internal organs back to London to try to establish cause of death. He announced the results of his examination before he went. I’m quoting here:

Putrefaction was advancing. The skin was moist and was peeling off, the surface discoloured. The abdomen was distended with putrefactive gas, also present under skin in other parts of the body.

There was no blood in the veins. The stomach had a small amount of partly digested food but no fluid. A little food was found in the lower part of the oesophagus. The intestines and its contents were healthy.

The uterus was enlarged and the cavity blown up. It contained a foetus that weighed six ounces. The vagina was rather large – the kind of thing you’d expect after full-term labour – but there were no other signs she’d already had a child (no pigmentation of the nipples, for instance). The size of the vagina could probably be accounted for by post-mortem softening of the tissues.

Nine long hairs were found. Some had been subjected to permanent wave, but not recently. Five hairs had light brown colour. The other four were shorter and devoid of any colour, being flaxen or grey. Probably bleached by exposure to sun in sunbathing. Her pubic hair was brown. The armpits were shaved a few days before death.

The fact there was no blood in the torso or legs and scarcely any in the trunk and case suggests the woman had been dismembered and then either subjected to pressure or movement – being carried for some distance? – before her remains were put in the boxes in which they were found.

Spilsbury made the deduction that she came from a reasonable income group partly because her size four-and-a-half feet lacked calluses – she was used to wearing good-quality, well-fitting shoes.

He put her age at between 21 and 28, not the 40 the police surgeon had suggested.

Spilsbury noted that the limbs in the suitcase were wrapped in paper that had been soaked in olive oil. There was also a face flannel and two copies of the Daily Mail, dated 31st May and 2nd June 1934. The case was new.

‘ Doctors and surgeons use olive oil to stop bleeding,’ Percy said, showing off his knowledge.

‘ Italian restaurants cook with it,’ I said, showing off mine.

‘ We’re lost without the head,’ Percy said. He scratched the dry skin that runs all round his hairline. ‘We’ve been assigned to help the Scotland Yard chappies. Council’s given up some space in the Royal Pavilion for the incident room so we’ll be shifting over there later today. ’

Kate’s phone rang, jerking her back to the present day. She realized night had fallen and that she had unconsciously brought the pages of the diary nearer and nearer to her face so that she could read it by the light spilling out of her sitting room.

Her answerphone clicked in. After the beep her father’s voice came on. ‘Babe,’ he said. Kate winced. ‘I need to talk to you. Call me on my mobile.’

In your dreams, Kate mouthed. She wondered whether to phone Bob Watts tomorrow, to let him know about this diary she’d discovered and the things in it. When she’d photocopied the documents she hadn’t thought to turn them over so they weren’t among his material.

She looked back at the pages she had just read. The poor woman. What Kate found most upsetting was the thought of Spilsbury examining the feet, which had been detached from the legs. She couldn’t help but think of him handling them as if they were a pair of shoes, turning them in his hands, this way and that.

The woman was pregnant. She wondered if that was the motive for her murder.

She went inside, replenished her glass and switched on her balcony light. She grabbed a throw from her sofa and wrapped it round her before returning to the balcony. She took a swig of her wine and picked up the pages again. The diary jumped a day.

Wednesday 20th June

We had the inquest today. It didn’t last long. Percy Scales gave evidence that we were called to the railway station to witness the opening of the trunk. The coroner announced that the dead woman had been expecting her first baby. He also stated that cause of death had not been ascertained. So much for Spilsbury’s talents. The inquest was adjourned until 18th July.

Brighton was full of reporters from all over the country. Those from the big papers in London stayed at the Grand. They seemed to have money to burn. They hung around in the pubs when they were open. When the pubs were closed thelittle cafe across the square from the Town Hall became the unofficial press headquarters.

They were very free with their hospitality with any policeman they saw in the pubs or the cafe. Hutch, the Chief Constable, was being a bit tight-mouthed – hardly ever had a press conference – so the reporters were trying to find out whatever they could on the QT.

‘ It’s like making bricks without straw,’ one of the London blokes complained to me in the pub this lunchtime, eyeing me furtively over his double whiskey. His name was Lindon Laing and I’d given him a few titbits before now, ever since he’d told me that his expenses were more than?3 a day.

‘ Don’t suppose the cloakroom attendant has remembered what the man who left the trunk looks like? ’

I shook my head. Poor Henry George Rout. The evening the trunk was deposited had been a busy one and he’s obviously not the most observant of men at the best of times. But he’d been cudgelling his brains ever since we opened the trunk trying to remember what the bloke who deposited it looked like. With no success.

I wanted to give the reporter something but I didn’t have anything of use. I told him about the bungalows.

‘ Big conference of Sussex Chief Constables yesterday. Decided to make a rigorous inspection of empty bungalows. ’

‘ Looking for the scene of the crime?’ When he grinned the reporter showed big teeth stained yellow from tobacco. He had long hairs curling from his nostrils.

‘ We need to know where the body was dismembered. ’

Ordinarily that would have done him for the day but my news was eclipsed by the fact that Hutch made a frank statement in the council chambers to around thirty newspapermen about Spilsbury’s findings. Particularly the bit about her being pregnant. He also appealed for help in identifying the young woman. This was the start of twice-daily press briefings.

Even so, press men continued to hang about outside the station. People coming to the station to make statements were intercepted and questioned. We had complaints, so usually we had to escort witnesses from the building by the back exits.

Taxicabs and press cars were kept in constant readiness outside the police station and when officers were despatched in motor cars to make enquiries, the press followed. We ended up going round the houses to reach our destinations.

Once the late evening’s papers were printed there was a sensation throughout the country. Within minutes of the publication of the appeal we were besieged with callers offering information. We all worked overtime that night but Hutch also got in a relay of clerks to take statements over the telephone.

Within about an hour of the appeal we had our first possible sighting of the torso murderer. I took the call from a Territorial Army Captain – R. T. Simmons of the 57th Home Counties Field Brigade. Posh spoken, a bit querulous.

‘ I live in Portslade and use the Worthing to Brighton train regularly to go to either of these towns,’ he said. ‘On Derby Day I came into Brighton in a rather crowded compartment. There was a man in the compartment carrying a trunk which I’m sure is similar to the one I have seen in the newspapers. ’

‘ Did you notice anything particularly about this man?’ I said, the phone tucked between my shoulder and ear as Iscribbled down his words.

‘ He kept the trunk beside him on the seat, even though the rest of us were crowded together and had little room. And when the train reached Brighton this man jumped out quickly and carried the trunk along the platform. It was clearly heavy but he ignored porters who offered to help. ’

Simmons described this man as being about 35, medium height and dressed in a dark suit.

I thanked him then went to find Scales. The statement looked promising, although the timing wasn’t quite right – the sighting had happened earlier in the day.

I’ve not been a policeman long. Perhaps that’s why I was startled by the number of suspicious characters that populate our town, revealed by the calls we had.

A lodging house proprietor, breathless with excitement, told me that on 4th June a man carrying a brown paper parcel and a small suitcase booked a room for three weeks.

‘ He seemed very worried,’ my caller said. ‘For the first fortnight he didn’t leave his room during the day, always going out at night. ’

‘ Did you ever see him with a woman? ’

‘ No, no, I didn’t. But he suddenly left town two days before the trunk was discovered. ’

‘ Before his three weeks was up, you mean? ’

‘ That’s right. ’

‘ Did you find anything unusual in his room after he’d gone? ’

‘ Not a thing,’ he said. ‘Not a thing. ’

I thanked him and put the phone down. A constable would follow the call up but I doubted it would come to anything. I looked at my watch and stretched. My shift was over and Ihad a date.

I didn’t hear until the next morning that poor old Vinnicombe, sniffing around his left parcels office this evening, had found another body in a suitcase: that of a newborn baby.

Thursday 21st June

I was late into work after a long night. Everybody was talking about Vinnicombe’s discovery and making jokes in doubtful taste about the contents in general of the railway station’s left parcels office.

We’d had some kind of tip-off – I couldn’t find out what as it was very hush-hush – about visitors to the town on or about 21st May. Plain-clothes police were visiting boarding houses to see who’d come to town that day.

Late in the morning Donaldson went up to London to follow clues to a missing Hove girl. We heard later in the day he’d found her alive and well in Finchley.

In the afternoon we heard from the woman who’d written the word ending in ‘-ford’ on the brown paper we’d found in the trunk. A Sheffield woman, Mrs Ford, said that from the photo she’d seen in the paper she was sure it was her handwriting. She said it wasn’t the end of the word, it was her last name – she always wrote it with a small letter ‘f’.

She thought the paper was part of a parcel taken to London by her daughter, Mrs Morley. Mrs Morley had been using her maiden name, Phoebe Ford. She’d been staying at a hostel in Folkestone where she had given the piece of brown paper to a German woman.

One of Donaldson’s theories was that the murder victim had come from abroad. Boats go to and fro between the pier at Brighton and France every day, as I knew full well from Frenchy’s regular visits. We’d already been in touch with Interpol. He wondered if here, with word of this German woman, he had his continental link.

Then the knives turned up in Hove.

Kate’s father had rung twice more from his mobile phone, each message more impatient. She still ignored him. By now she was sprawled on her sofa, the windows to the balcony closed, utterly absorbed in the narrative she was reading. Absorbed but also repelled by the author’s callous way of talking about the women he met.

Kate’s doorbell rang. She jumped. She had paused in her reading to think how many human stories were hidden between the lines of every statement the police took down. Why was the man who booked in to the lodging house so troubled? Why did he only go out at night? Why did he leave before his three weeks was up?

And Phoebe Ford – had she parted from her husband? Is that why she’d gone to a hostel in Folkestone and used her maiden name?

Kate looked at her watch. It was past midnight. She frowned and padded to the door. Perhaps it was Bob Watts. In your dreams, girl. She put the chain on, then opened the door a couple of inches.

‘What do you want?’ Kate said.

‘That’s not exactly the “Pater, how delightful to see you” I was hoping for,’ her father said.

She led the way into her sitting room, and waved at the sofa under the window. Her father had a small smile on his face and tired eyes. His hair was too long and absurdly floppy, as usual. He wore an expensive navy suit, although he had taken off his tie. His shoes were buffed to a brilliant shine.

‘That may be because I never see you unless it happens to fit into your schedule.’

‘I might say the same.’

He stood at the window looking out then he turned round, taking in the pile of folders on the dining table.

‘Homework?’

‘Something I’m working on, yes.’

‘Anything I can help with?’

‘Not unless you want to confess to a murder.’

He nodded as if what she’d said made sense to him.

‘I’m staying at the Grand.’

‘Good.’ She’d remained standing, feeling awkward.

‘I phoned earlier.’

‘I was working-’

‘Several times.’

‘Meaning two or three.’

‘More.’

‘I was working.’

Kate had a sudden urge to laugh. They were sounding as if they were scripted by Pinter, with an awful lot of subtext.

‘I wondered if I could buy you dinner.’

‘At this hour?’

‘Then. I was worried when you didn’t answer.’

‘I could have been doing anything. Been out on the town. Actually, I was with Bob Watts.’

‘Bob Watts?’

He turned towards the piles of folders on the table.

‘The friend you railroaded out of office.’

He pursed his lips.

‘He did it to himself. He could have left with dignity. He was stubborn. Stupid.’

‘He was your friend.’

‘Why on earth were you with him?’

Kate indicated the files.

‘We’re working on this together.’

Her father looked puzzled for a moment.

‘He was your friend, Dad,’ Kate repeated.

‘Simply a consequence of the friendship between our fathers. And he was wrong.’

‘Did you leak stuff about his one-night stand?’

He looked her in the face and smiled in an odd, intense way.

‘How would I know about his one-night stand? But he would never have gone. He is the most obstinate man I’ve ever met.’

‘So what made him?’

‘Pressure points. It’s knowing where to bring the pressure to bear.’

‘And?’

Simpson rested his hand lightly on her shoulder, ignoring her flinch.

‘Ask him about his father.’