City of Dreadful Night

FOURTEEN

G ilchrist dozed on top of her duvet. She felt like shit. Not because she was hungover after the early part of her evening but because she was knackered after the rest of her night. There had been an alarm that a five-year-old girl had gone missing. A thirteen-year-old in Hollingbury reported he’d seen a long-haired white man drag the girl into a car – a blue or turquoise Ford Escort. The force had a new system when a child went missing. It flooded the area with police and interrupted local radio and television programmes with pleas for help. Gilchrist had been called in. Although she’d had a couple of drinks, she was OK to work. She’d spent a fruitless night rousting registered paedophiles in the area.

This morning it turned out the kiddie had spent the night with her best friend four doors away. Gilchrist wondered if it was a wind-up, wondered what other crime had been carried out when the police were fully occupied with that.

She yawned. She was hoping for word back on a possible deal for Gary Parker today. Her seniors would want to keep her out of the loop but they had to tolerate her because Parker would only deal in her presence – presumably so that he could ogle her. Gilchrist wanted to interview his mother but she was out of town, nobody quite knew where.

Vice were investigating Little Stevie. Oddly, he didn’t ever seem to have been arrested – highly unusual if his occupation was as Parker suggested.

The problem was that nobody senior to her gave a toss. Since Watts had resigned, there were no senior officers who cared about investigating Milldean.

The phone rang and she reached forward to answer. She listened for a few moments and put the phone back down. Now she was awake.

From Kemp Town, Kate drove along the coast to Rottingdean, the sea sparkling to her right, then cut up across the slow curve of the Downs. When she reached Lewes she parked in the Cliffe car park by the river and the brewery, and trudged up the steep hill, past the War Memorial to the High Street. She was horribly hungover.

The records office was in the Maltings, a couple of hundred yards from the castle, which was off to her left beneath an arched defence gate and past the Barbican – little more than the keep remained.

She turned into the cobbled castle close and was perspiring by the time she passed a bowling green on her right. A sign told her that until the sixteenth century it had been the jousting field.

She was early for the records office so walked across to a viewing point. A plaque there told of the Battle of Lewes at which Simon de Montfort had defeated a larger royal force in 1264 and paved the way for Parliament. A little map showed the disposition of the troops on the Downs whose folds and soft slopes were spread out in front of her.

She took a long drink from her bottle of water and two more painkillers. At 8.45 a.m. precisely she walked into the records office and took the stairs. The room upstairs had creaking floors and high ceilings. The walls that did not have bookshelves were bare. All the floor space was occupied by rows of long tables.

The Trunk Murder files were waiting for her at reception but she was only allowed to take them one at a time. The first was a buff-coloured foolscap file on which somebody had written, in now-faded blue ink, ‘Trunk Murders File + Mancini’.

The first items in the file were two black and white photographs of creased and ripped pieces of brown paper. Someone had painstakingly put the pieces together to make what, according to the note on the bottom of the photo, purported to be a brown paper bag. She guessed this was the oil-soaked paper the victim had been wrapped in.

There was a letter and two brief notes from Spilsbury, the Home Office pathologist, with his initial conclusions about the remains he had examined. He referred to the victim as ‘the latest cut-up case’, which Kate found cold.

Next she came to the photo albums proper. The albums – little more than folders really – were all tied together by a loosely knotted piece of string. Kate untied the knot and separated the first folder from the others.

This was the part of her visit she was most squeamish about, for within these folders were photographs of the woman’s remains.

There were about a dozen people in the library by now and most of them seemed to be making use of the books just behind Kate. Taking a deep breath, she opened the folder.

It took a moment to make sense of the first photograph. When she did, she flushed and quickly closed the folder. She waited for the elderly man immediately behind her to move away before she opened the folder again and forced herself to look.

The woman’s torso had been laid on a table and this first shot was a close-up from between where her legs should have been. It showed the ragged, raw stumps of her thighs and, between them, startlingly clear, her vagina and anus. The black flesh of the stumps looked horribly like the ends of cuts of meat.

She felt shame on the woman’s behalf. Ludicrous as it was, given that the woman’s limbs and head had been hacked off, she felt the humiliation of her being exposed in this way even after death.

She turned to the other photographs. The torso had been photographed from every angle. The second and third photographs showed the torso from the sides, the arms cut off below the shoulder like some obscene Venus de Milo. The fourth was taken from where her head should have been. She had strong, shapely shoulders but her neck was abruptly terminated in another cut of meat.

Kate swallowed, looked across at the two librarians behind the reception desk, wondered what they were thinking about her wanting to see these files. She felt grubby.

She had the bottle of water in her bag but there was no drinking or eating allowed in here. Or use of pens, for that matter. She glanced at the pencil she’d brought.

The second album contained eight photographs of ‘limbs discovered at King’s Cross Railway Station’. In the first photograph the woman’s legs were laid out on a table in front of a dark brick wall. It seemed like a basement or a workshop. It seemed very cold. It was, presumably, the mortuary.

Kate felt tears welling up at the same time as she thought how comical they looked, these legs lying alone on a table. She could have believed they were false, had it not been for the way that the thighs and the rest of the legs were separ-ated a couple of inches to demonstrate how they had been hacked in half at the knee.

She’d been horrified at the thought of Spilsbury handling the feet as if they were shoes, but from the photograph she could see that the feet had not been detached after all.

Spilsbury’s autopsy report had stated the feet were well looked after, but the tops of the toes seemed to be covered with corns or blisters. The right big toe was bent at an angle and the right little toe crossed over its neighbour as if she had in fact been wearing too-tight shoes. But were all these things a consequence of her body parts being crammed into a suitcase?

The third album contained a dozen photographs linked to the other Trunk Murder, that of the prostitute Violette Kaye. Most of them were photographs of the room in which she had been killed and the one in which she had been discovered.

The last two, however, were of Violette Kaye squashed into the trunk, her legs bent, her head pushed down towards her chest, her face swollen, teeth bared. She looked hideous, but it wasn’t her fault. Mancini had made her like this, had taken her dignity away.

There were no more files, no police report saying exactly which policemen had answered the call from the left luggage office at Brighton railway station. She left the archive empty-handed and queasy.

Gilchrist found Brighton phantasmagoric, dreamlike, crude. So many wannabe artists. So much bilge talked. Then, to see the young people spill out of the railway station on a day like this. Men in T-shirts, girls in micro-minis. Raucous voices: shrill, shrieking girls; guttural, hoarse boys. Girls tottering on unfeasible heels; men swaggering, shoulders back, crotches thrust out.

It was horrible to watch because she knew all that testosterone, all that female we-want-babies, all that din, was an unholy cocktail that would end in sex, sure, but mostly in violence, rape and misery.

‘Modern life, eh?’ she said to Williamson, scowling.

‘Your version of it.’

‘Meaning?’

‘I don’t quite see things like that.’

He was looking almost benign as he watched the teenagers flood by.

‘Meaning?’

‘These are just kids out to have fun. They aren’t the children of the anti-Christ.’

‘Yes, they are. I can give you statistics.’

‘We can all do statistics. Doesn’t mean anything. When did you turn into a Daily Mail reader?’

‘The Daily Mail is much misunderstood,’ Gilchrist said.

‘By whom?’

‘Its readers, mainly.’

Williamson barked a laugh.

‘Why are we here, Sarah?’

‘I told you – I had a phone call.’

‘But you didn’t tell me what it said.’

‘A man said to come here and wait by the flower stall to learn something to my advantage.’

‘Something to your advantage? Jesus, Sarah. We’re here because of a crank call?’

‘It’s to do with the Milldean thing.’

‘Did he say I could come along?’

‘He didn’t say you couldn’t.’

Kate had lunch in Lewes at Bill’s, down beside the river. It was as crowded as ever. As she ate, she was thinking about the murderer. Would he put what he had done out of his mind? Would he savour it? Had he told anybody? Had he boasted like Violette Kay’s killer, Mancini, apparently did? What price did he pay? Did he feel guilt? Remorse? If the victim was his mistress, did he and his wife stay together? Could his wife smell death on him?

She imagined him dismembering the woman. Wearing a hat. A tiepin. Maybe those elasticated metal things to hold the sleeves of the shirt up. His shirt would have had a detachable collar. Would he have taken the collar off whilst he was using his saw on her? Would he have put on a pinny, maybe with a floral design, frilly round the edges?

She’d printed an essay off the Internet that George Orwell had written in the thirties about the perfect English murder – and murderer. Kate looked at it now. Orwell’s view was that the murderer should be ‘a little man of the professional class’ – a dentist or a solicitor, say – living an intensely respectable life somewhere in the suburbs. It would be best if he lived in a semi-detached house so the neighbours could hear suspicious sounds through the wall.

Orwell thought he should be either chairman of the local Conservatives or a leading Nonconformist strongly against alcohol. His crime would be a guilty passion for his secretary or the wife of a colleague or rival. Having decided on murder, he’d plan it in detail but slip up in one tiny, unforeseeable way. He would see murder as less disgraceful than being caught out for his adultery.

Was this the Trunk Murderer? If so, what slip had he made?

‘He’s not coming,’ Williamson was saying when Gilchrist’s mobile phone rang. The number was blocked.

‘Hello,’ she said.

She heard a matter-of-fact voice.

‘Hope you’ve got home insurance.’

The line went dead. Williamson looked at her.

‘Oh fuck,’ she said.

Kate saw Tingley enter the cafe and order a coffee at the counter. He walked towards her and sat down beside her.

‘How’s it going?’

‘Just reading George Orwell’s theory about the English murderer.’

‘Anything in the archive? Have you found out who your diarist is?’

She shook her head.

‘Just some gruesome pictures. What are you doing here?’

‘Passing through. Saw your car in the car park and guessed where you’d be.’

‘That predictable, eh?’

He shook his head.

‘There aren’t many options in Lewes.’

A harried waitress brought over Tingley’s coffee, slopping some of it on to the table as she put it down.

‘I’ve been reading up on Sir Bernard Spilsbury. Do you know why he was the only forensic pathologist ever to have been knighted whilst still working?’

Kate shrugged.

‘Because his knighthood unduly impressed juries. They automatically believed him. He was a Sir, for goodness sake. But, of course, he wasn’t always right. He was a scrupulous man but he was also egotistical and dogmatic. He was quite capable of jumping to conclusions beyond the limits of the facts. He fancied himself a kind of Sherlock Holmes. He wasn’t.’

‘So what do you think he got wrong in this case?’

Tingley soaked up the spilt coffee with a napkin.

‘I think we agree that the police did a damned good job of tracing most of the missing women in Britain aged around twenty-five. And, if our dead girl wasn’t brought in from abroad – though it’s quite possible she was – the likelihood is that she is among the seventy or so missing women not traced.’

Kate nodded agreement.

‘Assuming,’ Tingley said, matter-of-factly, ‘Spilsbury was right about her age.’

Kate’s eyes widened and she started riffing through the pages of her notes.

‘What was his evidence for that conclusion?’

‘I don’t know. He drew the conclusion after examining the torso. But here’s the funny thing. Much of the evidence for establishing a woman’s age is in the skull – the fusing of bones and so on. Since the skull wasn’t there – how did he reach that conclusion?’

Kate thought for a minute.

‘I read that, in the Mancini murder case, a friend of Violette Kay’s reported her missing, but because she was outside the age range Spilsbury had proposed the police didn’t take her disappearance seriously.’

Tingley nodded.

‘They focused entirely on women within the narrow age range Spilsbury proposed. But do you remember the police surgeon who first examined her?’

‘He thought she was older.’

‘That’s right – he put her age at about forty.’

Kate sat forward.

‘But if the police surgeon was actually correct, then the whole of the police investigation was flawed.’

She tapped the table.

‘And there’s nothing we can do about that now. We’ve reached a dead end.’

‘Not necessarily,’ Tingley said.

Kate frowned.

‘We could find the body – find where the victim is buried.’

‘How?’

‘It would be a pauper’s grave, right? Brighton would have buried her. They’ll have records.’

‘But even if we dig her up, how would that help us to identify her?’

‘DNA,’ Tingley said quietly. ‘You can extract it from bones.’

‘I thought you could only identify people from their DNA if you have their DNA on a database. And there wasn’t a database in her day.’

‘There are other ways.’

‘Actually, you’re right. I read this book saying that everybody is related to five women way back when. We can all be traced back. So we’d be able to figure out quite a lot about her.’

Tingley nodded.

‘Ancestral DNA. DNA breaks down into one hundred and seventy-seven different parts, some of which indicate ancestry. Let’s say we come up with Native American, European and sub-Saharan strands. We won’t, but just suppose. You only get that combination in the Caribbean. Then we get voluntary tests from a couple of hundred males and females from the same area. Then we compare their DNA and family history with our victim to identify which island, or even town, they come from.’

‘They can do that?’

‘Sure – remember that little boy they found chopped up in a sack in the Thames? They traced him right back to his village in Africa. There have been some really interesting studies of the ancestral DNA of phaseolus vulgaris.’

‘Phaseolus vulgaris?’

‘Yes – the common bean. It has two major geographic gene pools.’ Tingley caught the look on Kate’s face. ‘But maybe that can wait.’

‘I think so. How do we find out where she was buried?’

Tingley thought for a moment.

‘Well, the local council will have records of who is buried where. But hang on – didn’t Spilsbury take the body back up to London to examine it?’

Kate was silent for a moment.

‘No, no – he took internal organs but the body stayed in Brighton, I’m sure.’

‘Did they cremate in those days?’

Kate squeezed his arm.

‘God, I hope not.’

The fire brigade was already there. Two engines outside, two firemen on top of ladders hosing the flat through the blown-out front windows. There was a terrible smell that caught at the back of her throat.

‘We think we got it before the rest of the house took fire,’ the fire chief told Gilchrist. ‘But I’m afraid your flat is pretty much gutted.’

Gilchrist was both seething and frightened.

‘Can I go in?’

‘Tomorrow, sure.’

‘It was arson,’ she said.

‘You surprise me, officer. I think you’d be best getting away from here for now. Come back tomorrow.’

‘Is there anything left?’

‘We don’t know yet. I’m sorry.’

Williamson was looking awkward, standing on the pavement, trying to keep an eye on Gilchrist without making it obvious, trying to hide his concern.

Gilchrist went over to him.

‘Looks like I don’t have anything except what I’m wearing. Weird feeling.’

‘Is this to do with the Milldean thing?’ Williamson said.

‘Oh, I think so.’

‘You’re being warned off?’

‘I think that’s the gist of it.’

‘Is it working?’

Gilchrist looked up at the steam and black smoke billowing out of her window. She could feel the shakes starting but she knew that was adrenaline more than anything. At least, she hoped that was what it was.

‘I’ll get back to you on that.’

Tingley said he had to see a man about a son – whatever that meant – so Kate drove back into Brighton, parked in the Church Road car park and walked along to Brighton Museum. On the ground floor she passed Dali’s Mae West sofa – bright red lips on four legs – and the Rennie Mackintosh furniture that looked great but that she’d never want to sit in. She took the stairs to the local history unit.

Behind the counter a bald-headed man and a woman in linen were talking. They turned in unison.

‘I wondered if you kept records here of where people are buried,’ Kate said.

‘Good question,’ the man said. He looked at the woman. ‘Do we?’ She shrugged.

‘Not sure but they’ll certainly have records at Woodvale Crematorium.’

Kate took a phone number and on the way back to her car got through to a woman called Sally at Woodvale. She explained what she wanted.

‘She may have been cremated,’ Sally said. ‘They were doing cremations by then.’

Kate didn’t want to hear that.

‘The council would have buried her. They would have gone for the cheapest option, wouldn’t they? Which is cheaper – cremation or burial.’

‘Oh, a pauper’s grave, for sure.’

‘Can we try, then?’

‘When was she buried?’

‘I’m not entirely sure,’ Kate said. ‘She died in June 1934 and the police did an autopsy. I’m not sure how long they’d need to keep the body – well, her remains. Three months?’

‘Let’s try six,’ Sally said. ‘You have no name for this woman?’

‘That’s the problem.’

‘OK – I’ll see what I can do.’

I was feeling sorry for myself when Gilchrist phoned. I never thought I’d be the kind of person to pine but I was pining for my former life. The man who’d yomped 200 miles in six days during the first Gulf War, now acting like a wuss. I was really getting into the unfairness of it. Me, the poster boy for routinely arming the police. I took a lot of shit for that, then six months later every other chief constable in the country was clamouring for it. By then, for me, it was too late.

‘Someone has burnt my flat down.’ Gilchrist, breathing heavily.

‘Are you safe?’ I said, immediately on my feet.

‘I’m fine. I wasn’t intended to be in it – they got me out on a wild goose chase. They were warning me off, I think.’

‘Do you know who they are?’

‘Just a voice on a phone. Do you have any more ideas?’

‘I’m waiting on Tingley. You’ve lost everything – that must be dreadful.’

‘Actually, I haven’t. Most of my stuff is in store after my last move. I lost some nice CDs and, I assume, all my clothes. I think I can survive without the Mamma Mia DVD.’

‘Do you want to stay here?’

There was silence on the line.

‘Tempting but probably not a good idea.’

‘Do you want to come over at least?’

‘What I want is to go and find those Hayward Heath bastards and confront them.’

‘So much for being warned off. I’ll come with you.’

Death hadn’t touched Kate yet. Her grandparents on both sides had died when she was too young to remember them. At university she knew a couple of students well enough to say hello to who died from overdoses. But nobody close to her had ever died. She had never suffered that anguish. And never visited a crematorium before.

Woodvale was a big cemetery but it wasn’t exactly Arlington or those cemeteries for the war dead she’d seen in Normandy – line after line of white crosses. Normandy and Brittany had been regular holiday destinations when she was little, and her father had made them visit three or four of the World War Two battle sites and attached cemeteries for articles he had to write.

She went the wrong way at first. She drove up Bear Road, a steep, narrow road out of the clutter and noise of a bad road junction. It was a windy day, puffy white clouds scudding across the sky. She drove into the Woodvale cemetery. With its abundance of trees and colourful bedding, it might have been a country park.

She drove down a narrow, pockmarked road with gravestones among the trees – some ostentatious, others much less so. She followed the sign to the lodge, a Victorian flint and brick house on the right-hand side of the road. Below, she could see the road go down to connect with the hustle of the Lewes Road and the big shopping complex there.

It struck Kate as strange to have such an oasis of calm so near the bustle of rush-hour Brighton. But then that was Brighton – this hodgepodge of disparate things colliding – sometimes clashing – but somehow working. Not necessarily working together, of course, but definitely working.

She looked for cypresses as she drove through the cemetery. Those precise, evocative exclamation marks with their acutely delineated shadows so associated with death. But there were none. She went into the lodge, conscious of the heavy scent of rhododendra.

There was a narrow counter with a long, open office behind it. A pretty woman with a mass of grey hair and a tattooed ankle came over.

‘Is Sally here?’ Kate said.

‘I’m Sally.’

‘We spoke on the phone – about the Trunk Murder victim?’

The woman nodded and walked over to a cluttered desk. She picked up a sheaf of papers.

‘I found the grave,’ she said. ‘At least I found where it roughly is.’

Kate tilted her head.

‘We have grid references for a block of plots. I know roughly where she was buried but I don’t know which the exact grave is. And it’s in an area where other burials may have taken place across where she was buried.’

‘What does that mean if we’re thinking about exhumation?’

‘It means we’re not sure which is her body.’

Kate nodded.

‘I think in the circumstances she might be quite recognizable.’

The woman shrugged. She handed over the papers.

‘The woman is buried in the cemetery across the road,’ she said. ‘But these days her plot is one of a number given over to wildlife.’

Kate thanked the woman and went back to her car. She wound her window down. It had been raining and there was an earthy smell in the air. She drove slowly, avoiding the potholes in the road, past stone crosses on plinths, stained and lichened mausolea, headstones tilted at odd angles poking out of tangled undergrowth.

The entrance to the other cemetery was directly opposite. She drove in, turned right and drove up towards Woodland Grove.

The cemetery was deserted. She drove between a wall on her right and graves on her left. She took a left and parked beside a white van. An estate car was on the other side of the van.

The cemetery sloped away below her. Beyond it she could see, on the next hill, the racecourse. There was a giddy curve of houses, the railway station where all this began on another hill, and the sea beyond. Always the sea.

She checked the map and walked up the slope between newish gravestones. People who had died in the past five years. Now there were a few people in the graveyard. A couple laying flowers and a man on his own looking down on a small grave, lost in thought.

Quite a few young people buried here. Car accidents? Drugs? There were toy animals on a number of the graves. That of a three-year-old child was piled with teddy bears and other soft toys.

At the rim of these recent graves was longer grass, a grove of trees. She walked over. There was a sign: ‘This area has been designated as a nature reserve.’

The ground around and beneath the long grass was uneven – as well it might be, given that it was covering a score of graves. These were the paupers’ graves. People buried by the parish at the cost of the parish in unmarked graves. And the woman – the remains of the woman – found in the trunk at Brighton railway station was one of them.

Kate had no idea where in the twenty square feet her grave was.

She looked into the long grass. Looked up at the blue sky. A sudden wind shivered the trees. And when she looked back at the plot of ground, a man was standing at the other end of it.

Surprised, she took a step back.

He was tall, skinny, in a long black raincoat. He was in his thirties, maybe early forties. He stood, feet together, hands clasped in front of him, head bowed, as if in silent contemplation of the plot.

Then he lifted his head, just a little, and raised his eyes to look at her. He gave her a mischievous, malevolent look from that strange angle, made more sinister when he smiled. He called out to her, his voice deep, an edge to it.

‘What Katie did next, eh, darling?’

Then he turned and ambled away.