Peter Guttridge - City of Dreadful Night

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.