Peter Guttridge - City of Dreadful Night

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.’

G ilchrist’s treat for the day was to investigate a body found in a secluded cove at Black Rock. The drift patterns for bodies at the whim of the tides suggested it was probably a suicide from Beachy Head, the high chalk cliff that vied with the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol for the most popular place in Britain for people to off themselves.

She was accompanied by Reg Williamson, a policeman she already knew. He was a dour, cynical old stager who had been her boss briefly before her promotion to detective sergeant.

There was little human to see in the bloated body crammed between rocks and wrapped in seaweed. It doesn’t take long for dead bodies in water to deteriorate. Undersea scavengers get to work almost immediately, waves and rocks buffet them, water mixes with gases to pump them up to twice their actual size.

Gilchrist didn’t get nearer than five yards. Sometimes, she knew, bodies exploded, letting out foul and noxious fumes. She talked with the medical team who were getting the body on a stretcher to take back to the lab, spoke to the local coastguard about tides, then scrambled back over the rock to where Reg Williamson stood, belly out, fag in his mouth, his face tilted towards the sun.

‘Beachy Head?’ he said when she came up to him. He was still taking in the sun’s rays.

She nodded and moved past him.

Kate Simpson was a meticulous researcher. Before she went to her meeting with Brian Rafferty at the Royal Pavilion she went into the local history library in the Brighton Museum to see what it had on the Trunk Murder.

There were a handful of people sitting at desks or in front of the microfiche readers. Kate went to the card index and found a dozen or so entries for the Trunk Murders. She was hoping for a quick in-and-out, but the books and pamphlets were in the basement and would take ten to fifteen minutes to deliver to her. She asked about using the fiche machine to look at newspaper reports from 1934.

‘You’ve got to book in advance,’ the stocky guy behind the enquiry counter said. ‘And there’s nothing free for a couple of days.’

He looked down at the list she’d compiled.

‘The Trunk Murder? Hang on.’

He came out from behind the counter and walked over to a filing cabinet. A couple of seconds later he pulled from it a see-through folder and proffered it to her.

‘We’ve made files of newspaper cuttings and other stuff that we’re always asked for. This is the one for the Trunk Murder.’

‘It’s that popular?’

‘Sure.’ He smiled shyly. ‘This should get you started.’

There were some thirty cuttings in the file. They were from the Brighton and Hove Herald or the Brighton Gazette. The Gazette for Saturday 23rd June had the headline ‘Ghastly Find At Brighton: Body In Trunk: Woman Cut To Pieces.’

Kate read the article and scanned the rest of the cuttings quickly. She hadn’t realized quite what big news the Trunk Murder had been at the time. It had attracted both national and international coverage.

A woman’s torso had been found packed in a trunk in the left luggage office on 17th June 1934. The next day her legs and feet had been found in a suitcase at King’s Cross station’s left luggage office.

The famous pathologist, Sir Bernard Spilsbury, had examined the remains and provided a profile of the victim that concluded she was a well-nourished young woman, aged around twenty-five, who was pregnant for the first time. There were no body scars, no poison in the stomach, no sign of violence on the body (except, of course, its dismembering), no sign of death from natural causes.

For twelve months Scotland Yard led the murder hunt throughout Sussex, much of Britain and other parts of the world. The investigating officers were swamped by information – thousands of letters, hundreds of written statements and over one thousand telephone messages.