Peter Guttridge - City of Dreadful Night

Many families had come from the dark slums of London and you could see them dazzled by the light, looking up at the expanse of blue sky and down towards the bright sea.

I’d observed before that usually the women and children reached the seafront first. The men would find an excuse to stop off in one of the public houses that lay between the station and their family day ahead.

A day spent on the beach, on the silver painted piers, splashing in the sea, racing in miniature motors, listening to the bands playing. Idly watching small aeroplanes out of Shoreham airport write their advertisements for all kinds of products in languid trails of smoke across the sky.

Don’t tell me I can’t be poetical.

No sooner did I walk in the police station than the desk sergeant sent me straight back out to deal with an incident in the Winter Gardens on the terrace above the aquarium. A drunken man claiming to be Lobby Ludd had been pestering the young women using the deck chairs.

‘ How do we know it isn’t Lobby Ludd?’ I said. ‘He’s due down here today. ’

Lobby Ludd was sent by the Westminster Gazette to tour the south coast resorts during the summer. When he was in Brighton, his photo and approximate whereabouts were given in that day’s copy of the newspaper. If you thought you recognized him, you went up to him with a copy of the newspaper and said: ‘You are Lobby Ludd and I claim my Westminster Gazette prize. ’

I’d heard he was so popular that special excursion trains ran to resorts where he was due to appear. His popularity was to do with the fact that the main prize was?50 – more if no one had won the previous day. There were also prizes of ten bob a go if anyone found one of the Lobby Ludd cards he hid in various places about the town.

The man claiming to be Lobby Ludd had scarpered by the time I got to the deckchairs. But the platinum blonde was there. She was pretty, with freckles and a cheeky smile.

She didn’t have much to say, except with her eyes.

‘ Lobby Ludd? He tried to get fresh. Sat down next to me and invited me to lunch. I said no, so he said, “Well, what about a drink?” He said he wasn’t after anything -’ she gave me a look – ‘but then you all say that, don’t you? ’

‘ You weren’t tempted?’ I said, giving her a look back.

‘ He stank of gin and he was too desperate – kept saying all he wanted was for me to “stick close”. ’

‘ Too desperate, eh? I’ll make a note of that. ’

A few yards along, a fat spotty girl in pink was plonked in a deckchair. Her feet hardly touched the ground. A pale, bloodless girl sat beside her. She watched me avidly.

‘ Was it Lobby Ludd?’ I said to the spotty girl.

‘ He waved some cards but I don’t know if they were real. He said if I went with him for a drink, he’d let me have one of his cards so I could claim the ten bob. ’

‘ What did you say? ’

‘ I said give me the fifty pounds and I might be interested. ’

She and her friend squealed.

‘ Then what happened? ’

‘ I said I couldn’t leave my friend and didn’t he have one – to make a foursome like? He said no, then a young friend of his turned up. ’

‘ A young friend? ’

‘ He looked a bit of a bad sort. ’

‘ Did he now? ’

Behind the Regency terraces and the glamour of the seafront there was another Brighton of dark alleyways and festering slums. From here violence and crime had begun to spread.

In particular we’d been having trouble with razor gangs of young criminals marauding around town. They carried cut-throat razors and weren’t afraid to use them when they caused trouble in the dance halls, on the piers and up at the racetrack.

‘ They had a bit of a to-do,’ the spotty girl said. ‘Fred – that’s what Lobby Ludd said his real name was – left then. ’

‘ This young man he had an altercation with…? ’

‘ Well, he obviously knew Fred. But Fred denied it. Even said his name wasn’t Fred. Then he ran off. ’

The platinum blonde was looking out across Madeira Drive to the Palace Pier. I walked back to her.

I was at the railway station twice that day. But had I been there some time between six and seven in the evening, would it have made any difference? All those people flooding off the trains – would I have noticed a man lugging a brown trunk with a woman’s naked torso in it? A man who, some time in that hour, deposited it in the left parcels office, receiving in return the deposit ticket CT1945?

I returned to the station at about ten that evening to see the platinum blonde safely on her train back to whichever London slum she’d come from. It was the least I could do.

Kate paused for a moment and looked across at the Pier. She wondered who Frenchie was and Dr M. She couldn’t quite get the tone of his remarks about the platinum blonde. That last paragraph sounded harsh, callous.

The next entry she found was eleven days later.

Sunday 17th June

They found the woman in the trunk today in the left parcels office at Brighton station. I was the one who opened the trunk the second time. At the inquest my sergeant, Percy Stacey, stated that he’d opened it. He didn’t. He wasn’t even in the room. He was heaving up in the Gents because of the stench.

Old Billy Vinnicombe, the cloakroom attendant, had been aware of a bad smell for a few days. The hot weather wasn’t helping. He’d narrowed it down to this trunk he’d taken in on 6th June, Derby Day. He summoned Detective Bishop of the railway police who opened the trunk. He found it contained human remains. Bishop called us at 8.30 p.m.

Percy and me had got there ten minutes later. When we’d stepped in the office with the station manager, Percy had taken one whiff and headed for the latrines.

I’d had a good day until then. I’d been up on Devil’s Dyke and met a willing girl. I was still thinking about her, to be honest, when I dealt with the trunk.

Bloke called Henry George Rout was on duty when the trunk had been deposited. We got him in later but he couldn’t remember the man who had deposited the trunk at all: it was rush hour and the station was extra busy because of people coming back from the Derby.

I undid the straps and tugged the lid up. The stink was bad enough when the trunk was closed but as the lid fell back it was overpowering.

The station manager, Vinnicombe and I reared back and reached for our hankies. I remember Vinnicombe had a red-spotted one as if he fancied himself as Dick Whittington.

I looked into the trunk. There was a lot of cotton wool padding. I took the cotton wool out, keeping my head turned away, trying not to gag. Near the hinges the cotton wool was soaked in what looked like blood. Then I took out several layers of cheap brown paper to expose a brown paper parcel that almost completely filled the trunk. There was a thin sash cord, tied once lengthwise and three times across. I cut the cord with my clasp knife then parted the sheaves of paper.

I was looking at a naked woman’s torso, her teats small, her rib cage pronounced. It took me a few seconds to realize that in such a small trunk her torso was all there was to see. No head, arms, legs, hands or feet.

I did gag then. We all did. We had to clear it up before I could do any more with the trunk, though Percy Scales kept that out of his inquest statement too. As we mopped up we tried to joke about who’d been eating what. But we were all glancing over at the open trunk. I’m a bit of a reader so I kept thinking of it as Pandora’s Box. What had we let out?

Scales and I moved the trunk to the police station where Dr Pilling, the police surgeon, examined the woman’s remains then had us take them to the mortuary. He thought the woman was about forty. We compiled a description, such as it was, and circulated it to all stations.