Peter Guttridge - City of Dreadful Night

Then we told our Chief Constable. Captain W. J. ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson was, like many of the senior officers, a veteran of the Great War. He’d been gassed at Mons but didn’t seem to have come out of it too badly. He had the occasional coughing fit but he was nowhere as bad as some of the men I’d come across, coughing up the lining of their lungs every morning. I was glad I’d been too young for that racket.

Hutch was a good enough boss, but the few times I’d had dealings with him I’d seen little evidence of his detection skills. He must have recognized this himself because the next day he called in Scotland Yard.

Monday 18th June

I had my feet up on my desk smoking a Woodbine and getting stirrings thinking about the girl at Devil’s Dyke when the news came through that more of the woman’s body had been found.

‘ You’re working hard, I see,’ Percy said as he barged into the office. I slid my feet hurriedly off the desk and sat up straight in my chair. ‘Maybe you should be out trying to trace the shop that sold the trunk. ’

Not bloody likely.

We’d released a photo and description of the trunk. It was made of brown canvas and plywood, battened with four hoops. It was small – two foot three inches long, by one foot five inches wide, by a foot deep. It made me sad that someone could be callous enough to pack a human being – or part of one – into such a confined space.

It was a cheap trunk you could buy almost anywhere for about 12s 6d. We’d got about fifty policemen doing the roundsof drapers, ironmongers and chemists to find out who’d soldit.

The cord I’d cut when I discovered the torso in the trunk was for a Venetian blind. One piece of the brown paper had the end of a word scrawled in blue pencil. The rest of the word had been obliterated by dried blood. The part of the word that could still be read was ‘-ford’.

These were all the clues we had.

There hadn’t been much blood in the trunk, considering, so the thinking was she’d been dead a while before she was put in there.

‘ They’ve found the legs,’ Percy said.

We’d sent out an instruction for railway officials everywhere in the Southern Railway system to search all suspicious luggage and parcels. We’d already heard there was a case at Wimbledon containing women’s clothing, but as that’s what luggage is for we weren’t getting excited.

‘ King’s Cross Station left parcels office,’ Percy said. ‘A brown leatherette suitcase – the smell had alerted them again. Her legs and feet were inside. ’

‘ King’s Cross – he was a busy boy. No head or hands? ’

‘ Not yet. Hutch is calling in Scotland Yard. ’

Chief Detective Inspector Donaldson and Detective Sergeant Sorrell of Scotland Yard were already on their way down to Brighton. When they arrived they went into close conference with Hutch and Detective Inspector Pelling, our head of CID. The Scotland Yard blokes took over the case.

Tuesday 19th June

About fifty press men representing London and provincial newspapers were rushed to Brighton yesterday. They hang around in groups outside the police station day and night. For these first few days, they constantly invaded the station, pestering officers for information about the enquiry.

Sir Bernard Spilsbury came down today. The best-known forensic pathologist in the country. The top man. He spent three hours examining the woman’s remains. He confirmed immediately that the legs belonged to the torso – it was easy to see because the bones had been sawn through about two inches from the joints rather than at the joint. The flesh had first been cut with something sharp.

She’d been dismembered several hours after death and almost certainly after rigor mortis was well established. No anatomical knowledge or skill had been shown in the dismembering. Somebody who knew how to cut up carcasses would have known how to cut through the knee joints without needing a saw.

Spilsbury took the body’s internal organs back to London to try to establish cause of death. He announced the results of his examination before he went. I’m quoting here:

Putrefaction was advancing. The skin was moist and was peeling off, the surface discoloured. The abdomen was distended with putrefactive gas, also present under skin in other parts of the body.

There was no blood in the veins. The stomach had a small amount of partly digested food but no fluid. A little food was found in the lower part of the oesophagus. The intestines and its contents were healthy.

The uterus was enlarged and the cavity blown up. It contained a foetus that weighed six ounces. The vagina was rather large – the kind of thing you’d expect after full-term labour – but there were no other signs she’d already had a child (no pigmentation of the nipples, for instance). The size of the vagina could probably be accounted for by post-mortem softening of the tissues.

Nine long hairs were found. Some had been subjected to permanent wave, but not recently. Five hairs had light brown colour. The other four were shorter and devoid of any colour, being flaxen or grey. Probably bleached by exposure to sun in sunbathing. Her pubic hair was brown. The armpits were shaved a few days before death.

The fact there was no blood in the torso or legs and scarcely any in the trunk and case suggests the woman had been dismembered and then either subjected to pressure or movement – being carried for some distance? – before her remains were put in the boxes in which they were found.

Spilsbury made the deduction that she came from a reasonable income group partly because her size four-and-a-half feet lacked calluses – she was used to wearing good-quality, well-fitting shoes.

He put her age at between 21 and 28, not the 40 the police surgeon had suggested.

Spilsbury noted that the limbs in the suitcase were wrapped in paper that had been soaked in olive oil. There was also a face flannel and two copies of the Daily Mail, dated 31st May and 2nd June 1934. The case was new.

‘ Doctors and surgeons use olive oil to stop bleeding,’ Percy said, showing off his knowledge.

‘ Italian restaurants cook with it,’ I said, showing off mine.

‘ We’re lost without the head,’ Percy said. He scratched the dry skin that runs all round his hairline. ‘We’ve been assigned to help the Scotland Yard chappies. Council’s given up some space in the Royal Pavilion for the incident room so we’ll be shifting over there later today. ’

Kate’s phone rang, jerking her back to the present day. She realized night had fallen and that she had unconsciously brought the pages of the diary nearer and nearer to her face so that she could read it by the light spilling out of her sitting room.

Her answerphone clicked in. After the beep her father’s voice came on. ‘Babe,’ he said. Kate winced. ‘I need to talk to you. Call me on my mobile.’

In your dreams, Kate mouthed. She wondered whether to phone Bob Watts tomorrow, to let him know about this diary she’d discovered and the things in it. When she’d photocopied the documents she hadn’t thought to turn them over so they weren’t among his material.

She looked back at the pages she had just read. The poor woman. What Kate found most upsetting was the thought of Spilsbury examining the feet, which had been detached from the legs. She couldn’t help but think of him handling them as if they were a pair of shoes, turning them in his hands, this way and that.

The woman was pregnant. She wondered if that was the motive for her murder.

She went inside, replenished her glass and switched on her balcony light. She grabbed a throw from her sofa and wrapped it round her before returning to the balcony. She took a swig of her wine and picked up the pages again. The diary jumped a day.