Peter Guttridge - City of Dreadful Night

‘Fucking neat, isn’t it?’

‘Fucking is,’ one of the other youths said.

‘Fucking neat.’

Tingley laughed along with them for a moment or two. Then:

‘It’s bad luck opening an umbrella indoors.’ He nodded at the mirror behind the bar. ‘If that goes as well, we’re all fucked.’

He held out his open hand out for his bag.

‘If you please.’

Gilchrist was thinking that in a movie, silence would have fallen at this point. Here it was a change in the atmosphere, a drop in pressure.

‘If I please,’ Cuthbert said. ‘If I please.’

Tingley kept his hand out but looked across at Gilchrist. As she started to rise, he gave an infinitesimal shake of his head. Then he reached over and took hold of his bag. Tingley and Cuthbert exchanged looks.

‘Check me out,’ Tingley said. ‘Name’s James Tingley. I’ll come back in a couple of days so we can talk.’

Cuthbert frowned but released the bag. Tingley turned to Cuthbert’s posse.

‘Gentlemen.’

He turned and walked to the door. Gilchrist was on her feet a moment later. Trying not to hurry, she strolled out of the pub after him.

Tingley was standing about twenty yards down the road looking back at her. She walked towards him.

‘Bet you’re glad you didn’t have to pull your warrant card,’ he said when she reached him.

‘Is it that obvious?’

‘To me.’

‘I know of you, Mr Tingley.’

‘I know of you too, Ms Gilchrist. That was very foolhardy of you to go in that pub. Had you been recognized-’

‘You know who I am?’

‘Your photo has been in all the papers – that’s why you were taking a risk going there.’

Tingley looked beyond Gilchrist and quickly took her arm.

‘Get in your car and follow me – I’m parked down at the end of the street.’

Gilchrist crossed to her car, head down, ignoring the two men who were standing outside the pub watching her. One of them called to her but she slid into her car and drove down the street.

Tingley led her to the Marina.

Driving home, Kate couldn’t concentrate. She was thinking about the Trunk Murder but she was also thinking about Watts. Although she didn’t really go for older men, he was a bit of a hunk. He was a quiet man, but there was something about him that suggested he could take care of himself. And others?

She wondered about the third glass – whether Watts had been entertaining somebody who had hidden. Who might that have been?

She let herself into her flat. She lived in a first-floor flat in Sussex Gardens in Kemp Town, overlooking the sea. Kemp Town was the fashionable place to live in Brighton. Rows of Georgian terraces and brightly coloured cottages interspersed with restaurants and New Age shops.

Her flat in Sussex Gardens was her one concession to her parents. When she had moved to Brighton to do her doctorate, her father had bought the flat. As an investment, he said, but for her to live in whilst she was there.

She hated being beholden to her father but her mother pleaded with her. Kate selfishly didn’t want to share with other people – the last time had been a disaster – but she couldn’t afford the rent on anywhere decent in Brighton. Prices were the same as London. And this was more than decent.

She agreed. It was a two-bedroom flat and her parents came down sometimes to stay in the second bedroom over a weekend. It didn’t happen very often since it was awkward. She had worried at first that her father would want to stay when he came down for the Party Conference or when he had meetings with Labour politicians in town. But he chose to stay around the seafront in the Grand or the Hotel du Vin.

Kate went to the box in her living room. She moved the vase of lilies from the dining table and started to empty the box on to it. There was a box file labelled ‘Witness statements’ and a dozen or so cardboard files, all empty. Some had odd titles neatly printed on the covers: ‘Smells’, ‘Missing Women’, ‘Paper’, ‘Empty Houses’.

She took out the loose sheaves of papers from the cardboard box, papers that had at one time presumably belonged in these files. They were in no discernible order. A number were headed ‘County Borough of Brighton’ then ‘Statement of Witness’. Most were typed on manual typewriters, the occasional red letter coming through in the black type. Others were handwritten in blue or black ink by many different hands.

She turned one sheet over and found something strange typed on the reverse.

‘ This isn’t a diary as such. It’s a memoir if you like. A reminiscence. A slice of autobiography. Call it what you will – just don’t call it a confession. ’

Her interest piqued, she turned other sheets over and soon had a stack of what were clearly entries from a diary.

Excited, Kate settled down on her balcony. She looked around the square and smiled or nodded at those people in other flats who were on their balconies. Music drifted across the square. Coldplay and Bach and Miles Davis.

The sea was calm. As the sky darkened, the white lights that strung the length of the stubby finger of the Palace Pier grew brighter.

She had gathered the pages of the anonymous diary into some kind of date order. She was sure there were more pages in the files, but since the entries were typed up on the back of other documents, or on witness statement sheets, it was difficult on cursory examination to distinguish them from other typed material.

There were fragments that didn’t have dates attached. She put these aside. She started to read the entry for 6th June, the day the trunk was deposited at Brighton station.

Wednesday 6th June 1934

I remember 6th June. I don’t remember it because it was Derby Day. I’m not a betting man. I remember it because of the platinum blonde.

It had been a difficult week for me. Frenchie had been over on the Monday for her visit to Dr M. I met her off the ferry at the West Pier and she was alternately weepy and angry. She’d said she didn’t want to see me after, so I took her over to Hove and asked the receptionist to be sure she got a taxi back to the pier in plenty of time for the ferry back to France. I left more than enough money.

I was working that afternoon but I felt sorry for her – yes, me – so I nipped down to see her off. However, I got waylaid by a shopkeeper complaining about kids throwing stones at his shop window. By the time I got to the pier the ferry was already chugging towards the horizon. It was too far away to make out anybody on deck, if she was on deck.

I never saw her again.

That Wednesday was hot and sticky and I was relieved to be out of the office. Brighton’s main police station is in the basement of the Town Hall, two floors below the magistrates’ court. It was no place to be on a sunny day.

I’d been out since noon. First I’d been up at the railway station. It had been mobbed. The trains clattered in at the rate of 500 a day at this time of year. From London alone, a train every five minutes from Victoria, every fifteen from London Bridge. Half a million people over a weekend, five million a week in a couple of months’ time during the wakes holidays.

I stood at the end of platform three and watched people getting off their trains, then swarming across to the single track inset between platforms three and four. There they boarded the special train that took holidaymakers up to the Devil’s Dyke, the pleasure park set in a deep gorge on the Downs.

When I came out of the station I was jostled by more arrivals spilling into the sunlight. Some queued for the little trams that ran from the station to the two piers. Others set off to walk the quarter of a mile down the Queens Road to the sea glittering at its far end.