Peter Guttridge - City of Dreadful Night

‘Want a coffee?’

‘Nothing at all, thanks, sir.’

I sat behind my desk, not because I wanted it to be a barrier – my management experience clicking in – but because it was the only other seat in the room.

‘No identification possible yet, I assume.’

‘The SoCs are on it but the fire was intense. I just have to get a statement from you for the record. Oh, and I need the shoes you were wearing to identify your footprints in the field.’

‘Sure. The locals must be in shock.’

‘I’m in shock,’ he said with a grimace. ‘The most violent stuff I usually have to deal with are drunken youths on the weekend, the badger-baiters and the Countryside Alliance going rabid.’

I gave him my statement, such as it was. When I had finished he got up to go, then stood awkwardly for a moment.

‘How’s the enquiry going, sir, if you don’t mind my asking?’

‘It’s not getting anywhere, as best I can tell,’ I said with a shrug.

‘Truth will out, sir, I’m sure of it.’

I smiled and patted his shoulder.

‘I wish I shared your optimism.’

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.’