City of Dreadful Night

SIX

T he severed arm was found in the children’s paddling pool at about the time Sarah Gilchrist took the call from Australia. She’d been back at her desk a week, her suspension lifted, though the enquiry had not yet issued its final report. Since her return she’d been lumbered with the most menial jobs and the worst shifts – which is how come, tonight, she was alone in the office.

The phone rang as she was standing by the window. She was watching the waves roll in. It was dusk but the sky was still bright blue.

‘DS Gilchrist,’ she said.

‘Look, I’m phoning from Sydney.’ The man’s voice was urgent and shaky. ‘I want you to listen to something.’

‘Oh yes?’ Gilchrist said, immediately on her guard, especially as the man didn’t sound Australian. ‘Who are you, sir?’

‘I got this message on my answerphone waiting for me when I got home. Fucking freaked me out, excuse my French.’

‘What’s your name, sir?’ Gilchrist reached for a pen and pulled a pad towards her.

‘It’s from a bloke I know lives in Hove. You’ll have to listen closely – the tape isn’t very good.’

‘Sir-’

She heard the muffled beep of an answerphone then this drunken voice, refracted by the phone line. What the man said sent a chill through her.

‘I just fucking took a fucking hammer and smashed John’s brains all over the wall, mate. Then I got one of my swords. He’s all over the fucking wall, all over the floor, all over the ceiling. John’s like lying on the floor in… loads of bits. I don’t know why I did that, man.’

Gilchrist blanched. The voice was gleeful.

‘Is this a real recording?’ she said to the caller. ‘Wasting police time is-’

‘I’m not wasting your time. It’s a guy called Gary Parker. He’s always been a bit of a nutter. His best mate is John Douglas. They live in this flat in Hove.’

‘Give me your details.’

She scribbled down his name and address.

‘And the address in Hove?’

It was a house almost diagonally across from Hove railway station.

‘Your local police will be visiting you shortly to collect the tape and interview you,’ she said.

On her way out she stopped at the desk and asked the duty sergeant to phone the police in Sydney and to send out a call for back-up at Parker’s address. It still might be a hoax, but she wasn’t taking any chances.

The sergeant gazed blankly at her.

‘You got that?’

He gave a little start.

‘Sorry, Detective Sergeant. Had a bit of a shock. A man has just phoned in to say that he’s found an arm in the kiddies’ paddling pool on the seafront. I’ve sent a couple of constables down there.’

Maybe not a hoax, then. Gilchrist nodded and headed for the door.

‘I’ve a horrible feeling I know where the rest of the body is,’ she called back to him.

Two squad cars, lights flashing, were parked outside the shabby, three-storey Edwardian building. Commuters looked over as they came from the station and drinkers in the bar opposite were standing at the windows watching the action.

Gilchrist and four constables walked up to the front door. The curtains of the ground-floor flat were drawn. She rang the bell. No answer. Rang the bells of all the other flats to get through the house door. They crowded into the hallway, littered with flyers and free newspapers. She rapped on the cheap-looking door of the ground-floor flat.

No answer.

She looked at the constables. Caught one of them eyeing her up. Ignored that.

They were hefty-looking boys.

‘Break it down,’ she said.

It took two attempts, then the door burst open with a splinter of wood and a screech of hinges. The constables started in but came to an abrupt halt when they caught sight of the interior. They stepped aside to let Gilchrist see.

The living room was drenched in blood. It was sprayed across the walls and looked as if it had been poured on the furniture from a paint pot. It was pooled around the gruesome object in the centre of the room. A naked male, without head, arms or genitalia, spindly legs stretched out on the carpet. A bayonet sticking out of his chest.

The sickly stench of the blood hit Gilchrist as she looked around the room and down at what remained of the young man. Dispassionately, she reminded herself she was always surprised to see that a body could hold so much blood. Then she threw up.

Gilchrist was still at the station at nine the next morning. She was light-headed, nauseous and exhausted. She sipped at a bottle of water. She was standing at the window again, watching the waves roll in, when the phone rang.

It took her a moment to respond. She’d been thinking about last night’s crime scene. All the officers threw up at pretty much the same time.

When she’d calmed herself Gilchrist had moved in and looked more closely at the torso. It had been hacked about pretty badly. There was a yawning red-black hole where the penis and scrotal sack had been.

In the bedroom she’d found a large plastic bag stuffed with what, after a moment, she realized were body parts. In the kitchen a pale, thin arm and hand lay on the electric hob. A hammer, a Gurkha knife and a Samurai sword, all matted with blood and hair, lay on the kitchen table.

She picked up the phone. It was Sheena Hewitt’s secretary.

‘Sheena thought you’d be the best person to handle this call,’ she said.

‘Is it to do with last night’s case?’ Gilchrist asked.

‘I believe so.’

The killer, Gary Parker, had been picked up on the beach in the middle of the night. A scrawny man of about twenty-five with a beer gut and scarred knuckles, lost on drink and drugs. His face was puffy, his eyes slitted, mouth a sour line. He’d been sitting cross-legged beneath the Palace Pier. He had his friend’s mutilated head balanced between his thighs.

Later, in a holding cell back at the station, Gilchrist had asked him about the arm on the hob.

‘Was going to cook chickenburger sandwiches.’ He bared yellow teeth. ‘The only way I could see of getting rid of him. Bits of him kept falling out of the plastic bag.’

Gilchrist had managed to get through the rest of the night without throwing up, but remembering his words now she felt another wave of nausea.

‘Shall I put the call through?’ Hewitt’s secretary said.

Gilchrist gulped down air.

‘OK.’

‘Hello,’ a man said in a strangled voice, ‘I’m Brian Rafferty, director of the Royal Pavilion, and I must say I’m a little tired of being shunted from pillar to post. I hope you’re not going to pass me on to somebody else.’

The Royal Pavilion was the city’s chief tourist attraction but she’d never cared for it. The paint on the outside was drab and its garish interior looked like something out of Disneyworld.

‘I hope so too,’ she said without enthusiasm. ‘You’re speaking to DS Gilchrist, Mr Rafferty. How can I help?’

‘DS Gilchrist – that name sounds familiar.’

‘The reason for your call?’

‘We’ve found some files here that belong to you.’

‘Files?’

‘About the Trunk Murder.’

Gilchrist tightened her grip on the phone. What files, when Gary Parker had only dismembered his friend the previous night?

‘What do you know about the Trunk Murder, Mr Rafferty?’

‘Only what everybody knows from books – and, to be honest, I’d got the two mixed up.’

‘Two?’ Gilchrist was lost.

‘You know. They got the man for Violette Kay but there was this other one-’

Tiredness washed over Gilchrist.

‘Are you taking the piss?’ she said. She regretted the words as soon as she uttered them.

‘I beg your pardon?’ Rafferty sounded indignant.

‘Why have you called, sir?’

Rafferty hung up.

Kate Simpson was bored silly. It was James Bond Week and Tim, the presenter, had gone off at a tangent to babble about toupees, running his words together to stave off the fear of silence that dwells in every radio presenter’s heart. Kate found listening to him exhausting. Mind-numbing too, but then she had only herself to blame for taking a job at Brighton’s local commercial radio station.

She had wanted a job in broadcasting. She hadn’t wanted her father – William Simpson, government fixer – to use his influence to get her one. In consequence, here she was, the trainee and general dogsbody, the lowest of the low.

‘That’s the hot question of the day, then,’ Tim blathered. ‘Forget Daniel Craig. Forget Piers Brosnan. We’re talking Roger Moore: real or rug? The lines are open, let me hear your views.’

Tim cued up a record and Kate gazed out of the window at the flow of people heading to and from nearby Brighton station.

The phone rang.

‘The toupee hotline at Southern Shores Radio,’ she said, trying to hold back the sarcasm. ‘What’s your opinion about Roger Moore: real or rug?’

She realized nobody had spoken at the other end of the line.

‘Hello?’ she said.

‘I wanted to talk to someone at Southern Shores Radio.’

It sounded like a man trying to do an impersonation of Brian Sewell, the art critic.

‘You are,’ Kate said.

‘You seemed to be saying you were some kind of hairdresser.’

Kate didn’t try to explain.

‘How can I help?’

‘We’ve found something that might form the basis of an interesting radio slot.’

Kate withheld a groan. In the few months she’d been here she’d grown to dread people phoning in with ‘interesting’ ideas. The topics the station actually covered were banal but seemed inspired compared to the ideas the public phoned in.

‘Perhaps if you would write-’

‘It’s about the Trunk Murder.’

‘Trunk Murder?’

‘It’s coming up to eighty years since it happened, you know.’

Actually, Kate did know. She had come down to Brighton to do her doctorate three years earlier. For a laugh during her first Brighton Festival, she’d gone with a couple of new friends on one of those moonlit murder walks. A procession of giggly, tipsy people touring the town and hearing about the gruesome murders, real and literary, that had taken place in this street or that arcade. The Brighton Trunk Murders were a main attraction.

‘I thought there was more than one,’ she said.

‘Strictly speaking, yes,’ the man said. ‘Two separate investigations often get confused, as indeed they did at the time. I believe these files relate to the first Trunk Murder. The one that remains unsolved.’

‘And you are?’ Kate said, conscious from the lights flashing on the mini-switchboard that people were calling in on the other two lines.

‘Brian Rafferty. Director of the Royal Pavilion.’

Kate put him on hold whilst she answered the other calls. It was running two to one in favour of the wig. She patched the callers through to Mingus, the producer, for on-air discussion.

‘Most of the files relating to the case were presumed destroyed years ago,’ Rafferty continued. ‘But we’ve found some of them.’

‘In the Pavilion?’

‘It was the HQ for part of the original investigation.’

Kate’s interest was piqued.

‘You’ve looked through these files?’

‘Cursorily.’

There’s a posh word, Kate noted.

‘Do you agree there’s a story here?’

Kate did – and it was one she wanted to handle herself. It wasn’t the hard news she yearned to do but it was a cut above the ditzy fare she usually had to deal with.

‘Of course there’s a story. But what about the police? Don’t these files belong to them?’

‘I phoned the police.’ Rafferty spoke with asperity. ‘They kept me hanging on for an age, trying to work out what to do with me. Then they were very rude.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Kate said, trying to keep her amusement at his irritation out of her voice.

‘But it doesn’t matter,’ he went on. ‘It was only a courtesy call, after all. They aren’t interested in decades old files. Isn’t there some kind of thirty-year rule in the police force where they either destroy stuff or pass it on to the county records office?’

‘I believe so,’ Kate said, fiddling with a plastic beaker of tepid water. She didn’t like Rafferty.

‘I believe so, too.’

An anniversary of the unsolved murder would be a good peg. She was already imagining getting one of the many crime writers who lived locally to go over the files. And perhaps a policeman. In fact, she knew exactly which policeman to ask. The ex-Chief Constable, Robert Watts.

I went back into Brighton late the next morning to meet my friend James Tingley in The Cricketers pub.

What can I say about this man, who matches that clumsy Churchillian construction about a riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a mystery?

I’ve known him for twenty years yet don’t really know him at all. I don’t know his sexual preferences, for instance. I’ve never seen him with a woman, never seen him with a man. Never heard him talk about either in a sexual way.

He seems to be that type beloved of crime novelists – a genuine loner. And that’s strange because he has an ease with people, can fit into most social situations. But he remains watchful, always, taking everything in.

I had invited him to dinner many a time with Molly and me but he’d declined. ‘Not much for small talk,’ he’d said. And he was right. Not that he got uncomfortable about it.

He was happy not to talk, didn’t bother him. I’ve never met a more self-contained man. Yet there was nothing chilly about him. He was warm, caring, but always controlled.

You wouldn’t notice him in the street, wouldn’t look twice at him in the pub. But if you did, you’d see something that would warn you at some primitive level not to mess with him.

He was quite the deadliest man I knew, an expert in unarmed and armed combat. To my certain knowledge he’d killed five men with his bare hands. Well, hands, feet and elbows. I’d seen him do it.

We were in the army together before he moved on to the SAS and got involved in all sorts of hairy and lethal operations. Often he was in corners of the world where the SAS weren’t supposed to be. And I know he spent some time with the Israeli security forces.

I assumed he’d be in the service for life, though his distaste for authority meant he would never rise to a high rank. They kept trying to promote him, but he wasn’t having any of it.

I don’t know why he left the service. When I asked him once, he changed the subject. Artfully. I thought he’d tell me when he was ready but he never did. Yet we were friends. I knew I could trust my life to him – and had. I believe he knew the same about me – though whether I now would be able to fulfil that trust as effectively as he, I somehow doubted.

I expected him at least to stay in government service after he left the army – become a spook of some sort – but he moved to Brighton and set up a security business. It wasn’t quite clear what some of the work was. Deep checks on companies and individuals, a little bit of industrial espionage, perhaps. He might still have been working for the intelligence services for all I knew.

We didn’t see each other much. He was away a lot – had been away during the Milldean mess. He’d called me when he got back and suggested we meet.

It was a bright morning. I left my car in the car park beneath the old Town Hall and walked up the steps, which as usual smelled of piss. I strolled across the road to look at the sea. Seagulls squawked, there was a salt tang in the air and the sun glittered on the shifting surface of the water.

I stood by the railings on the promenade and looked over at the West Pier, little more than a grey skeleton since the arson attacks a couple of years earlier.

Joggers and rollerbladers weaved their way through the people walking past me. The pebble beach was already crowded with sunbathers, although no one was foolhardy enough either to be in the water or to be windsurfing on it. It wasn’t by accident that Surfers Against Sewage was based in Brighton.

I was thinking about my father, who used to tell entertaining stories about what went on in Brighton on the seafront – and particularly on the West Pier – back in the thirties. But then entertaining stories were my father’s stock-in-trade. Truth was something else again.

I walked up Ship Street and past the Hotel du Vin, glancing through the windows to see if there was anyone inside that I knew. That would have been my preferred venue. The Cricketers, however, was one of Tingley’s regular watering holes. He liked his pubs cosy and a little gloomy.

I found him sitting – alone, naturally – in the covered courtyard of the pub. It was a sunny day and the warm light filtering through the tacky corrugated plastic above our heads made the scuffed yellow walls glow like honey.

It was over a year since I’d seen him but he looked the same – so neat as to be nondescript. He had regular features with well-cut black hair combed back from his forehead. As usual he wore an understated dark suit, white shirt and plain tie.

He was of medium height and slim, despite the amount of drink he seemed to consume. I could think of many occasions when I had been startled by the quantity he had put away, although I had never seen him act in a drunken way. Even overseas, in the forces, where there was little else to do off-duty but drink.

Tingley drank a disgusting concoction – rum and peppermint – that he called rum and pep.

He was sitting in the courtyard, his rum and pep, packet of cigarettes and lighter lined up in front of him. It wasn’t yet noon so I’d bought a cup of coffee. I pointed at his drink. He shook his head.

I sat down opposite him, held out my hand. He took it, gave it a little squeeze.

‘You’ve been better, I warrant,’ he said, inspecting my face. ‘You should have got hold of me. Let me help.’

‘I’d heard you were out of the country.’ It was an unspoken agreement that I never asked him where he’d been. Never pried at all, in fact. ‘Besides, I fight my own battles.’

‘But now…?’

I laughed.

‘Now I need your help.’

He nodded.

‘What exactly are you doing these days?’ I said.

He took a sip of his rum and pep.

‘Does it have to be exact?’

I smiled.

‘I hope you’re not risking your neck doing security in Iraq or Afghanistan.’

‘I’m mad but not that mad.’

‘Good money.’

‘If you live to spend it… Tell me,’ he said, putting his drink down. ‘Why’d you put your neck on the block?’

‘I did what I felt was right.’

Tingley laughed. For some little while. He saw my discomfort – OK, my mounting anger – and laughed some more. Then he pointed at me.

‘Your ego is your blessing and your curse. Gets you places because you can’t imagine you can’t get there. Fucks you because you don’t know when to stop.’

‘Thanks for the analysis, Dr Tingley,’ I said, smiling again. Or, at least, attempting to.

He tilted his head.

‘Actually, ego and obstinacy – are they the same thing? Because when you think you’re right, you’re outrageously obstinate.’

‘You think I was wrong?’

Tingley caught the heat in my voice, reared back, hands out.

‘Whoah, Bobby. I’m on your side, remember.’ He looked hard at me. ‘Remember?’

I remembered. The Gulf War – the first one. Pretty much of a turkey shoot, except my squadron had been sent out on reconnaissance with the wrong grid references. We’d strayed into friendly fire from the Yanks, who preferred to be sure rather than safe when it came to obliterating everything that got in their way.

Then we’d hit some Iraqis who were up for a fight and knew what they were doing.

A dozen of us survived but only with the weapons we had in our hands and what we stood up in. Our communications were buggered, we didn’t have so much as a compass and a map between us. We didn’t know where the hell we were.

Nothing but sand and blistering sunshine. We slept during the day in sweltering sand scoops, moved at night when the heat was only slightly less, navigating by the stars as best we could.

And then we stumbled across this man. One minute we were trudging across the dunes, sinking up to our thighs in the soft sand, the next a sandman was standing in front of us. We should have shot him but our reflexes were buggered. He peeled his balaclava off. Spoke to us in English.

He laughed like a drain when I told him where we were supposed to be.

‘I’ll take you there,’ he said.

As we waded through the sand, I asked him how long he’d been out here. He told me a couple of months, living off the land. Jesus – what was there to live off? We’d been out a week and were suffering big time. My respect for him was established there and then.

He got us to our destination. He got down and dirty with us when we met opposition on the way. He pointed us in the right direction then disappeared into the night.

That was the first of many encounters all over the world. He saved my neck more than once and, I modestly submit, I did the same for him on a couple of occasions. We kept in touch, met up pretty regularly when we were both in the same country and off-duty.

He was one of the few men I trusted absolutely.

I’d tried to get him talking many a time but he always turned the conversation back on me. And, well, like he said, I had an ego.

‘I want to find out what really happened in Milldean and what was behind it.’

‘What about the enquiry?’

‘They’ve got nowhere fast, as far as I can tell.’ I fiddled with my empty coffee cup. ‘And nobody in the police service is willing to talk to me. I’m outside the tent as far as my old associates are concerned.’

‘I don’t have an in there,’ Tingley said, looking past me and lowering his voice as a young couple came through from the public bar and sat at the far end of the courtyard.

‘No, but you’re well connected locally – and nationally.’

‘Locally is fair enough but – what? – you think there was some kind of conspiracy at a national level?’

I drained my coffee.

‘All I know is that the government and the media turned against me pretty damned quickly.’

‘Bobby, Bobby – surely you can see why? You shot your mouth off in support of your officers when you shouldn’t have done. Plus you were the poster boy for arming the police and oversaw a bloodbath. You had to go.’

I’d been hearing this from everybody I spoke to. Intellectually, I understood it but, emotionally, I was having a tough time accepting it.

‘What do you want, Bobby?’

‘Revenge.’ There it was again, out on the table.

‘It doesn’t help.’

I sighed.

‘Oh, I think it will. Me, anyway.’

‘Revenge against whom?’

‘Against anyone involved with what happened.’

‘Will it get you your job back?’

‘Probably not.’ He arched an eyebrow. ‘No.’

‘Sometimes you’ve just got to accept they’re bigger than you. Remember donkeys years ago that Manchester copper went over to Northern Ireland and did a report nobody liked? He resigned and resigned himself to his fate, made the most of his reputation as an honest copper. That innocent Liverpool lassie – all the mud they sprayed on her, they knew some would appear to stick. The gay cop who was soft on drugs – stitched up.’ He shook his head. ‘If they want to get you, they’ll get you.’

‘I don’t want a new career advertising double-glazing or house security systems, thanks very much.’ I rubbed the scars on the knuckles of my left fist. ‘And I don’t give up.’

I pointed at his glass. He nodded. When I came back with his drink and a glass of red wine for me, he leant forward intently and started speaking before I sat down.

‘And you still don’t know who the people are who were killed in the house?’

‘There may be an Eastern European connection but nothing solid.’

‘And Milldean – nobody’s talking there, right?’

‘Nobody ever does,’ I said. ‘But I’m out of the loop, remember.’

‘Know what the Israelis would do with that estate?’

‘Flatten it and kill everybody they could?’

‘Nah. They’ve got unrivalled intelligence. Maybe the Jordanians are better. Maybe. You go through that estate house by house. You find out who lives there, what they do for a living, what school they went to, who their friends are, which of their friends’ sisters or brothers they’ve shagged. Once you know everybody’s interrelationships, that’s when you know how things really are there. Grasses just aren’t enough. You’ve got to get the detailed picture.’

I shrugged. He touched my arm.

‘So you want my help?’

‘Please,’ I said. ‘It is, as you say, essentially an intelligence gathering exercise.’

‘Know what would make the police job easier? Get everybody in the land DNA’d and fingerprinted.’ He caught my look. ‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘They’re talking about it. Civil liberties might be a problem.’

I looked at him sitting opposite me. I was thinking about him in Israel. I knew he’d killed Palestinian terrorists – freedom fighters, if you will. I think he’d been in Lebanon for the last shindig against Hamas. I hoped he hadn’t been in Gaza.

‘OK, as I understand it, this is what you need to know for starters, outside of what actually happened in that house.’ He tilted his glass, examined the viscous liquid inside it. ‘Who was the informer who said Grimes was in the house in the first place? Who was watching the house to give the false information about him coming back from the off-licence alone at eight o’clock? Who the hell were the people in the house? Oh, and what happened to the disappeared policemen – Finch and Edwards?’

I nodded.

‘That’s a start.’

Tingley downed his drink in one, gently replaced the glass on the table and spread his hands.

‘Easy-peasy.’