City of Dreadful Night

SEVENTEEN

P hilippa Franks had a flat in a rusting, paint-peeled sixties block on the seafront at the far end of Hove. Gilchrist drove down there late afternoon after her shift ended. She rang Philippa’s bell then waited in her car. The rain had finally let up but the sky was grey and brooding.

‘Thanks for seeing me,’ Gilchrist said when Philippa slid into the passenger seat.

‘Yeah, well…’

They didn’t speak as Gilchrist drove to Shoreham and parked behind the Arts Centre. They walked in silence back down the High Street to a rambling old pub that backed on to the wide river estuary. It was late afternoon and the pub was quiet. They took their drinks into the little paved garden. The tide was out so they sat looking out over mud flats.

They chinked glasses and Gilchrist got started.

‘I really need to know what happened upstairs in Milldean.’

‘I don’t know what happened, as I’ve already told you. And why have you got to know? You’ve got your job back.’

‘Oh yeah, and promotion is just around the corner.’

‘At least you’re still in the police.’

She wasn’t looking at Gilchrist.

‘You’re retiring on health grounds?’

‘It’s been offered. It’s probably for the best. The shifts were making it difficult with the kids. My mum’s great but you don’t want to take advantage.’

‘You have children?’ Gilchrist said. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘I don’t broadcast it. You know what organizations are like.’

‘How old?’

‘Emily’s eleven, Jackson is nine.’

‘Jackson – that’s an unusual name.’

‘My ex-partner’s idea – I don’t even want to get into why. You want kids?’

‘Not yet,’ Gilchrist said, perhaps a little too quickly. Franks glanced at her. Gilchrist continued: ‘Was your partner the man I saw you arguing with in the veggie in Hove?’

Franks looked startled.

‘You mean the organic place?’

Gilchrist nodded.

‘No, that was someone else. Another relationship going south.’

‘He looked nice.’

‘He wasn’t,’ Franks said. She looked at Gilchrist almost warily. ‘You were there? You heard us?’

Gilchrist flushed and shook her head.

‘I was thinking of coming in, put my head in the door, saw you having this intense discussion and thought I’d better go elsewhere. It was just for a minute.’

Franks shook her head.

‘Jesus. There’s no privacy in Brighton.’

‘Small place,’ Sarah said.

‘Small minds,’ Franks said. She saw Gilchrist’s look.

‘Not you,’ she added quickly. ‘I hate this town. So smug, so full of itself but so parochial.’

She looked back over the glistening mud.

‘Philippa – why won’t you talk about what happened?’

‘Why do you bloody think?’

‘You shot someone?’

‘I didn’t shoot anybody.’ She was fierce.

‘So what do you mean: why do I bloody think?’

Franks swirled her wine in her glass. Gilchrist waited. Finally Franks looked at her, her mouth twisted in a curious expression of disgust.

‘Because I’m a coward.’ The words came out as an expulsion of breath. ‘Look what’s happened to Finch and Foster. I’m just a straightforward gal. I’ve got my kids to think about.’

‘Can’t you tell me who fired first?’

‘If I did know who fired first, I wouldn’t say. I’ve a feeling it wouldn’t be healthy. But anyway, you know how those decisions go. A split second to decide, a lifetime to repent. Everybody was hyped. Someone started firing, everyone else joined in thinking they were in danger. It’s hard not to go forward in those situations.’

Gilchrist thought for a moment.

‘You know they torched my flat. Have you been threatened too?’

Franks nodded.

‘Who?’

‘Voice on the phone.’ She sighed. ‘Once you’ve got kids everything changes. They are your absolute priority. It shackles you.’

‘There’s no guarantee you or your children are safe even if you do keep quiet. It looks like whoever they are have decided to take no chances. All the deaths surrounding this case indicate that. The only way for you to be really safe is to go public.’

Philippa stared at her drink.

‘At least tell me who went up the stairs first,’ Gilchrist said.

Philippa swirled her drink round in her glass. Flat-voiced, she said:

‘The big Haywards Heath guy went up first, the one with the teeth missing – Connolly. Then Finch, then White, then Harry Potter. I’m a mere woman so, of course, I brought up the rear.

‘Connolly, White and Finch were supposed to go straight to the front of the house whilst Harry and me took care of the back bedroom and the bathroom. But White stumbled at the top of the stairs and his gun went off. He was blocking our way. Next thing I hear Finch – I think it’s Finch – shout “This is an armed police raid”, then almost immediately there’s a volley of shots. I don’t know how many – three or four, perhaps.

‘By now White is back on his feet and heading to the front of the house. It’s pandemonium. Everybody is hyped.’ She drew a ragged breath. ‘So then I heard a single shot along the corridor. All the shots were really loud in that confined space. My ears were ringing. I looked and Finch was standing in the bathroom doorway, lowering his gun.’

She shook her head.

‘And that was it. Your team came up the stairs and I was in the corridor, deaf and feeling sick.’

‘So Finch shot Little Stevie in the bathroom.’

‘Little Stevie?’

‘That’s the name of the victim. Some kind of rent boy.’

Franks looked at Gilchrist for a moment.

‘A rent boy. Really?’

‘Unusually, he doesn’t have a record.’

‘That is unusual.’ Franks finished the rest of her drink. ‘My round? I could do with another.’

‘I’m driving. A tomato juice will do.’

Gilchrist watched Franks walk, stiff-shouldered, to the bar. Was she telling the truth?

Tingley’s meeting at Gatwick was almost surreal. He met the contact from one of the intelligence services in a seedy cafe area near to Domestic Arrivals. The man had flown in from Edinburgh. He was tall, stoop-shouldered, in an elegant suit but with dandruff on his shoulders. His face was pinched, his eyes hooded.

They sat at a tiny round table under bright fluorescent lights that made the man’s skin look sallow and tired.

‘Why did Bob Watts get dumped on?’ Tingley said.

The man shrugged.

‘Because he’d fucked up.’

‘There’s more to it than that.’

The man looked at his polished right brogue for a moment, jiggling his foot.

‘I’m not entirely clear why my agency sent me to meet with you.’

‘Because your agency and me go back a long way.’

‘But what I’m about to tell you is highly sensitive.’

‘So am I, especially when I’m mucked around. Just tell me, please.’

‘Telling is almost invariably a bad idea.’

‘You don’t have a choice, as I’m sure you’ve been informed. I’m calling in a large number of favours.’

The man stretched his right hand out and examined his nails for a moment. Satisfied with them, he looked at Tingley with an insincere smile.

‘Yes, I gather you’ve been quite a help to us over the years. Operations few people know about…’

Tingley said nothing. The man nodded.

‘The targets in the house were the man and woman.’

‘The ones in bed together?’

The man nodded.

‘What about the guy sitting on the toilet?’

‘Collateral. But not innocent.’

‘What about the man killed in the kitchen?’

The foot jiggled again.

‘An informer. Dispensable.’

Tingley wanted to hit him. He’d met people like this before. Every nation had them, every period of history. People who kill remotely, who don’t have to see the cost of their decisions in human misery.

Tingley lived with the bad things he’d done. He believed that one day he’d answer for them. But at least his bad deeds were always in war, overt or covert, and face to face. It didn’t mean he had a right to kill those he’d killed but it made some kind of sense.

He watched the man’s foot. The shoelace was unevenly tied, with a long stretch hanging over the side of the shoe.

‘Mind you don’t trip on that,’ he said, gesturing at the shoe. The man didn’t look down.

‘What had they done?’ Tingley said.

The man told him.

When I got back from London I drove over the Downs into Ditchling and bumped into Ronnie, the neighbourhood cop. Traffic was at its usual standstill because of cars parked on the High Street, so he led me into an alley near the church to tell me the body in the burnt-out car had been identified.

‘It was Edwards, sir. I believe his snitch had started the whole Milldean thing.’

‘Wonder who was using his credit cards in the south of France?’ I said.

‘Probably sold on.’

I nodded. I wasn’t sure that Edwards’s death took us any further than his disappearance had, but I needed to think through a few things. I thanked Ronnie and wandered into The Bull. I was pleased to see the big log fire was burning.

The music was turned off, thank goodness. The new landlord had introduced non-stop music into the quiet space. Bob Marley, Lionel Ritchie – I’d been there with all of that. I play music all the time in the car but in a pub I like silence.

On the odd occasions I bought crime fiction, it made me laugh to read of this or that policeman’s musical interests. This one’s a jazz fan, that one is into prog rock, another’s an opera buff and there’s one north London cop who likes country and western.

My musical tastes are more eclectic. Dissonance is my preference but one of the perks of my old job was getting invited to Glyndebourne for the opera and the Brighton Festival for world music.

It amused me too that the barmaids in this pub were so ill-suited to their job. They exuded arrogance and boredom because they were usually the good-looking daughters of local wealthy people. Tonight, it was a final-year student at Sussex with good legs and a sour mouth. She didn’t notice any of the customers because she kept her head down. Since there was a pile of people at the bar, it was irritating that she served only who was next in her narrow line of vision, however long others had been waiting.

When I eventually got my drink I sat down beside the log fire. It had started raining and my mind drifted as I gazed into the embers. Three policemen dead. Foster, Finch and Edwards. Presumably the ones who could talk about who was behind what had happened.

But what about Connolly and White, his Haywards Heath sidekick? I felt sure they took the lead in what had happened in the house in Milldean. Were they under threat or were they the ones doing the threatening? What was William Simpson’s involvement? Blackmail because of Little Stevie or something more? Was he the man pressing to get the investigation closed down? More to the point – was he the man arranging to have people knocked off?

I was contemplating the odd coincidence that our fathers were both around during the Trunk Murder investigations. I was still curious about how much my dad really knew. I was pretty sure he’d written the diary, even though I didn’t recognize the handwriting as his. I’d also been trying to get hold of Tingley but he was as elusive as ever.

Judging by the intriguing individuals drifting into the pub – mostly men, largely macho, often dodgy – I guessed there had been racing at Plumpton, a few miles down the road.

I couldn’t stop chewing over my encounter with Simpson. I knew I’d missed something. There was a look on his face when I focused on Little Stevie. Inscrutable, to be sure, but a hint of relief. It was there for just a moment then was veiled again. He was expecting something else. Something worse. I’d known this guy a long time. I was pretty certain I was right, I just didn’t know how to get him. It was bloody irritating. What had I missed? What else was there?

A guy came and stood in front of me, blocking my view of the fire. He was standing feet planted, legs apart, shoulders squared. Not big but thickset. Looking down at me.

‘I know you, you cunt,’ he said.

Which isn’t the most neutral of conversational openings. I looked up at him. Didn’t recognize him. I shrugged.

‘Remind me?’

At this point I was aggravated but calm. However, from the pugnacious way he was leaning over me, I thought it appropriate to uncross my legs and drop my hands on to my knees. The problem with the army training I’ve had is that it’s easier to think about the way to kill someone than it is ways merely to disable. And one of the first things you’re taught is that if you get the first punch in, you’re probably going to win the fight.

So, one part of me was resisting the – strong – urge to rise and smash the side of my hand into the base of his nose, driving the bone up into his brain. That’s the death option. Or I could just reach out, grab his balls and give them a good twist.

I smiled at my thought processes, since I was worrying that the second was a bit crude for a family pub, but I was having no such worries about the first option, which was, ultimately, cruder.

‘You don’t know me,’ he said. ‘But you’re the guy who backs murderers.’

I was drinking a glass of Zinfandel and I had been enjoying the taste of it and the memories it evoked – I had spent a year on a police exchange in California. I took a healthy mouthful.

‘That’s under investigation,’ I said calmly, although already I was irritated by the gel in his hair, the suede jacket and the way he was pushing his cock in my face.

This guy was muscular but paunchy. I could drive my fingers up beneath his diaphragm and he’d be crippled for the rest of the day and unable to draw a proper breath for a week. I could kick his feet from under him and as he fell… Frankly, I could do anything.

‘You’re blocking my view of the fire,’ I said.

‘You policemen think you own the world.’

One or two people could hear and turned their heads but mostly the boisterousness of the pub hid what he was saying.

‘Ex-policeman,’ I said, my fists clenching. ‘Do you want to get to the point?’

I think he must have glimpsed something in my eyes, or seen my body tense. He took a step back but he held his ground. I felt my anger bubble. But I was also conscious of the situation. I hadn’t reamed anyone out in a pub since I was in the military, and even then it was before I made rank.

Fuck it. He wasn’t who I wanted to lash out at, but he’d do. I started to rise.

‘Mine’s a cranberry juice – sorry I’m late.’

We both looked. Molly was standing beside me. She sat down in the chair opposite. The paunchy guy and I looked at each other. The steam went out of both of us, though neither was going to admit it.

‘OK, then,’ I said to him, turning to Molly. He shuffled past me back to the bar.

I sat down opposite her.

‘How are you doing?’

She laughed at the incongruity. She’d always had a lovely laugh.

‘I mean, thank you for turning up when you did,’ I said. ‘And how are you doing?’

‘How do you think I’m doing?’

‘A glass of wine?’

She shook her head.

‘I told you – cranberry juice.’

She saw something in my face.

‘Surprised?’ There was an edge to her voice but not the hostility I’d been used to lately.

‘A little,’ I admitted.

‘It’s been a week.’

I reached for her hand but she pulled it back into her lap.

‘Must be tough,’ I said.

‘It’s nice to start feeling things again.’

‘Really? I thought the point of drink-’

‘Was to stop feeling? Well, yes, but that’s not a good way to live your life. And there’s not enough alcohol in the world to shut out some feelings.’

‘I’m so sorry about what happened. If we could talk-’

Molly pushed the palm of her hand at me.

‘It’s too late for talk.’

I looked at the fire.

‘So why did you come in here?’

She shrugged and looked down at the table.

‘Sentiment? I saw your car in the car park.’

I nodded and smiled. She looked at me.

‘Of course, I was also prepared to find you in here with her.’

There was little intensity in her voice, but even so I reared back.

‘I wouldn’t do that,’ I said.

‘What – you have no problem shagging her but you draw the line at going to the local with her?’

Her voice had risen. One or two people looked over again.

‘I didn’t mean that.’

She looked at her hands.

I’d always put my work before my marriage and my kids. Molly was a woman I’d pursued and wooed (after a fashion) and swore to spend the rest of my life with, even before we got married. But I hadn’t kept that promise.

I wanted to. When I thought about it – and given that I was a man, I tried not to think about it very often – I was desperate that we were not still together. Oh, I missed Molly. She was difficult, but when we chimed we could talk for hours, laugh for hours over the littlest things.

‘Molly.’ I leant across the table but she stood up.

‘Take care, Robert.’

‘You too,’ I murmured as she walked out of the pub.

Kate had decided against seeing her father in London. Not cowardice, she told herself, just timing. She was curled up on the sofa in her flat sipping a mug of green tea. Her head was spinning from what she’d stumbled on in the National Archive. She was excited about the discovery of a suspect, Dr Massiah, and the possibility he was the Dr M referred to in the memoir. She was frustrated that she could find no other documents about him.

And she was knocked sideways to have found at the back of the second file a memo about the discovery of the torso at the left luggage office that mentioned in passing the names of the police officers present.

Knocked sideways because there were two names she recognized.

Her doorbell rang. It made her jump – she still wasn’t over the scare she’d had – but then she heard someone climbing the stairs and the insertion of a key in the lock. A moment later, Sarah Gilchrist came through the door.

‘Hi,’ Kate said, sitting up.

‘Didn’t want to startle you with the key in the door, so thought I’d scare you with the bell,’ Gilchrist said.

They both smiled.

‘There’s some green tea,’ Kate said, indicating the teapot on the table.

Kate watched as Gilchrist went into the kitchen and returned with a mug. It had hit her with some force today that she had a major crush on Gilchrist.

‘Did you get any clothes today?’ Kate said.

‘Didn’t have time,’ Gilchrist said, pouring her cup of tea.

‘I bought you some underwear in M amp;S,’ Kate said. Gilchrist looked at her. Kate felt suddenly embarrassed.

‘There was a store right next to the Archives and I was buying myself some and thought that just in case you didn’t have time. I guessed your size and they’re probably not very flattering-’

Kate realized she was blushing.

‘Thanks,’ Gilchrist said, sounding distracted. ‘That was thoughtful of you. How was your day in Kew?’

‘Great,’ Kate said. ‘I’ve got a new suspect and my grandfather may be the mystery memoirist – or possibly Bob’s father.’

Gilchrist laughed.

‘You’re going to have to run all that by me again.’

‘I found a police report about the original discovery of the body and it listed the policemen who were in attendance. Our autobiographer described how he was there. One of the names is that of my grandfather. And another is called Donald Watts.’

‘Crikey. And who is the new suspect?’

Kate told her about Dr Massiah and the Dr M in the memoir.

‘But I don’t know what happened in the investigation,’ she ended. ‘There were no more documents about him.’

Gilchrist was paying more attention now. She sat in the armchair opposite the sofa, balancing the mug on her knee.

‘You’re thinking that the Frenchy referred to in the memoir may be the victim?’

Kate nodded.

‘That’s great.’

‘Maybe,’ Kate said, standing up. ‘But then there’s this.’

She went over to the table and brought back the fragment of memoir about the older woman who looked like Carole Lombard. Gilchrist read it.

‘I was wondering why the head was cut off,’ Kate said. ‘Was it because she would be instantly recognizable?’

‘That he cut the head off meant the killer was worried someone would recognize her. And looking like a movie star would make it more likely.’

‘I’d assumed Frenchy was young, but there’s no reason why she shouldn’t be this older woman. Especially if Tingley is right and Spilsbury got it wrong.’

Gilchrist studied the fragment again.

‘I don’t know – the tone of voice in this-’

Kate’s phone rang. It was the radio station manager wanting to change her next shift. When Kate turned back to the room, she saw that Gilchrist had put the sheets of the memoir down and was staring at Kate. Kate flushed again.

‘What?’ she said, panicked for a moment that Sarah could read her mind. ‘What?’

I’d parked in the public car park below the community hall in Ditchling. As I reached the bottom of the incline, I was aware of a figure to my left detaching from the shadows of the building. At almost the same moment I heard hurried footsteps behind me. I turned to see the man from the pub, face contorted, as he wielded a baseball bat above his head.

Wielding a weapon with accuracy whilst running isn’t easy. This man was running downhill with a couple of pints inside him. His momentum was leading him. As he reached me, I bent low and he went over my shoulder. I gave him extra propulsion as I straightened. He hit the ground with a terrible wet crunch. I heard that horrible, hollow sound as his head cracked against the tarmac. I turned to face the man who’d come out of the shadows. He was about five yards away, his bat ready to whack a ball – or my head.

‘Be proud to be British,’ I said. ‘At least use a bloody cricket bat.’

The second man didn’t respond either to my bravado or to the plight of his colleague. He just moved in a half-crouch two yards closer.

I was out at practice at this stuff. Which is why I wondered too late how many others were in the car park. A third man came up behind me and whacked me hard across the small of my back. I arched and grunted, and fell backwards. Knowing as I fell that, once I was on the floor, it was all over.

Kate was feeling strange and embarrassed about the evening. She really liked Gilchrist. OK, fancied her. But she was worried that Gilchrist had guessed and was put off by the thought. Gilchrist had gone to bed early, leaving Kate to ponder this and her notes on the Trunk Murder.

She wondered about her grandfather. He’d died long before she was born and her father had never really talked about him. Nor had she been curious until now. She wasn’t upset about this family link to the Trunk Murder, although she disliked intensely whoever the memoirist was.

She might not be so pleased if her grandfather turned out to be the murderer but, then again, doesn’t everybody hope for a villain when they research their family histories?

That brought her to her father. Part of her estrangement from him was because once he was in government she’d had to give up wondering about his involvement in anything. She was sure he’d been behind getting Watts fired. Now, of course, in light of the threat to her in the cemetery, she was wondering if he’d done far worse.

Gilchrist knew she’d blanked Kate for a moment and in the process freaked her a bit. She was sorry for that. It was simply that, though she was touched by Kate’s thoughtfulness and intrigued by what she had discovered about the Trunk Murder, her mind was elsewhere. She was almost entirely focused on the present. Specifically, what Philippa Franks had told her. It sort of made sense but Gilchrist was cautious. She was remembering how upset Franks had been on the night of the tragedy. Was that normal post-trauma emotion or was there something else?

Gilchrist excused herself from Kate and retreated to the spare room. She put the underwear in the chest of drawers. One of the top drawers was taken up with framed photographs placed face down. Family photos, she guessed, to be brought out when her parents were using this room.

Gilchrist was lying in bed but she couldn’t sleep. The room was hot, the duvet heavy. But it wasn’t really that. It was all this stuff going around in her head. And something else. In work today, in the canteen, she’d seen Jack Jones, the CSI officer who’d been involved in analyzing the Milldean crime scene. The man she’d once had a fling with. The man she’d confided in about her one-night stand with Bob Watts. The man who’d sold her to the press.

She should have confronted him but she didn’t. At the time she thought she was being mature, rising above it. Now she was wondering if she’d just been cowardly.

And that brought her on to Bob Watts. And what, for want of a better term, she’d been thinking of as their second-night stand. Neither of them had referred to it again. Both had retreated to a kind of default position. There was no intimacy between them when they were together. The passion when the lights went out had shrivelled in the glare of the day.

She finally dozed off thinking about Bob Watts. The room felt hotter.

I didn’t go down. The man who was close enough to whack me across my back was close enough for me to engage with. And because it was a hit right across my back, it didn’t do me serious injury, even though it did hurt like hell. If he’d rammed the bat into one of my kidneys, or across the back of my head, he would have been more effective. As it was, the main blow was to my spine. It jarred me, but he’d need a lot more force to snap it.

I twisted as I was falling, and grabbed first the bat, then his forearm. Pulling down on his arm, I swung my legs off the ground and drove one knee into his side, the other into his neck.

I fell on him, my body a dead weight, and that was it. Except that the one man who seemed to have a bit of savvy was now standing over me, pondering where his bat could do most damage.

It was clear that this was nothing to do with the altercation in the pub. These guys had been sent to deliver a message. A message I wasn’t wild about receiving.

I scrabbled around and grabbed the bat of the man I was lying on. I brought it up just as the other bat came down. The thwock of contact was hard and loud, and I felt the impact shudder down my arm.

The man above me was now off-balance so I snaked around, swivelled at the hip and my outstretched legs swept his legs from under him. He fell backwards, abandoning his bat to break his fall with his arms, keeping his head off the tarmac.

I looked around to see if there were more roughnecks waiting to tip in. Seemed not. I launched myself on to him, pinning him to the ground.

I hissed in his ear:

‘You gonna tell me the message you were supposed to deliver?’

He struggled but I was pinioning his arms.

‘Back off,’ he gasped.

‘Fuck you,’ I said.

He shook his head, breathing badly.

‘That was the message. I was to say you had to back off.’

‘Who’s the message from?’

‘Me,’ a voice said, as someone knocked me unconscious.