Peter Guttridge - City of Dreadful Night

‘So they found the head?’ Watts said.

‘And lost it again,’ Kate and Gilchrist said, almost together. Kate smiled at Gilchrist. ‘It was in the police report.’

‘Though the public didn’t know until a newspaper report in 1964,’ Tingley said. He turned to Kate. ‘Hello, I’m Bob’s friend, Jimmy Tingley.’

‘You know about all this, then?’ Kate said, puzzled by his presence. She was worried she was going to lose control of the investigation.

‘I’ve given it some thought from time to time. I like analyzing things.’

‘And what has your analysis concluded?’ Watts asked.

Tingley took a sip of his drink.

‘Rum and pep,’ Watts said to Kate, seeing her curious look. ‘Otherwise he’s more or less normal.’

‘First, you’ve got to figure out how this guy got the trunk into the left luggage in Brighton. The body weighed seventy pounds – that’s a lot to lug around. The maximum weight marines are expected to carry in their packs is fifty-five pounds. They’re big, fit blokes.’

‘He took the train from London,’ Gilchrist said.

‘Maybe – if that sighting of a middle height man at London Bridge is accurate. But he still had to get it to the station in the first place. Same if he just dropped it off from somewhere in Brighton. This bloke is going to have difficulty moving this thing around. Such a high-profile case, a taxi driver would remember picking him up and helping him with the trunk.’

‘There’s nothing in the files I read about taxi drivers coming forward,’ Watts said.

‘So, perhaps he thought of that risk and he drove to the station. Whether he did the deed in Brighton or elsewhere, he would still have needed to drive.’

‘Getting the suitcase to King’s Cross would have been easier,’ Gilchrist said. ‘We need to check how easy that journey would have been from Brighton – and think about why he chose King’s Cross. What was its significance?’

‘At random?’ Tingley said. ‘Unfortunately, with just one crime there isn’t enough information to do a geographic profile based on the stations.’

‘What’s a geographic profile?’ Kate said.

‘A guy called Stuart Kind devised it. He accurately predicted where the Yorkshire Ripper lived by cross-indexing times of attack with locations. He figured out that this man was on a clock – he had to get home. So the later in the day the crime, the nearer to this man’s home.’

Kate nodded.

‘Ingenious. But I have a question. Why didn’t he throw everything into the sea, like he did the head? Assuming that was her head at Black Rock. And what happened to her arms and hands? OK, two questions.’

‘Perhaps he worried about the tides and that all the separate parts would end up in the same place,’ Gilchrist said. ‘Thought he could get away with disposing of the head like that. And that there would be a long gap between the discovery of that and the rest of the body.’

Tingley leant forward.

‘Gross as it sounds, a head is relatively easy to move around – heavy though it is. But a torso you’ve got more of a problem – the weight for one thing. If he’d chucked it in the sea, he’d probably have to do it in the trunk and then there’s the problem of floating.’

‘And the arms and hands?’ Kate said.

Tingley shrugged.

‘Don’t know. The arms shouldn’t have posed a problem of identification unless they had some distinguishing feature like a birthmark – these days it would be a tattoo.’

‘And the hands were because of fingerprints.’

‘Probably,’ Tingley said.

‘Though that in itself is interesting,’ Gilchrist said. ‘It means either that this woman had at some point been fingerprinted, so had a criminal record, or that the killer was ignorant and assumed that just the existence of fingerprints allowed for identification.’

‘If she had been fingerprinted, could that be because she was a prostitute?’ Kate said. ‘Killed by her pimp?’

‘Quite possibly,’ Gilchrist said.

Kate noticed that Watts had not contributed to the discussion but had been listening intently.

‘Let’s get back to the head,’ he now said. ‘If the head they found in the rock pool was the woman’s – wrapped in newspaper like the torso in the suitcase – then it’s likely he lived around here. He’s not going to be travelling far with a head – what would he carry it in, for one thing?’

‘A bowling bag?’ Tingley said.

‘Ugh,’ Kate said.

‘A man we have in custody walked from near Hove station to the pier with his friend’s head under his arm in the middle of the evening a couple of weeks ago, and nobody noticed,’ Gilchrist said.

‘These days anything is possible,’ Watts said, ‘but in 1934 I think somebody would have noticed. No, it still suggests he was local. He’s not going to make more than one trip from London to Brighton with body parts, is he? He wouldn’t want to risk being remembered. And lugging a trunk with a torso and a bag with a head in it at the same time would be risky. Plus, he’d want to dispose of the head at night. He couldn’t very well chuck it over the cliff edge in broad daylight.’

‘Can we check tide tables?’

‘Hang on,’ Gilchrist said. ‘Are we assuming that he threw the head in there? Why? Why couldn’t it have just ended up there – thrown in somewhere else and the tide tugged it there.’

‘OK,’ Tingley said. ‘But we’re getting somewhere. So his trip to King’s Cross – a special trip or was he going somewhere from there?’

‘If he was, he’d have to come back so, again, that’s doubling the risk of being remembered,’ Gilchrist said. ‘Supposing someone had opened the case in the meantime; staff would be on the lookout.’

‘So it was a special journey,’ Watts said.

‘But the same applies to Brighton station,’ Tingley said.

‘Which same?’ Gilchrist leant forward in her seat.

‘If we’re saying he lived down here, then wasn’t there a big risk when he was leaving the trunk at Brighton station that he’d be recognized and/or remembered lugging this trunk the next time he used the station?’

‘Hang on – break it down,’ Gilchrist said. ‘This is important. If he did live in Brighton, as you’re suggesting, then he ran two risks turning up at the station with a trunk. One: that he might bump into someone he knew. Who would later remember, when there was all the publicity, that he was lugging a trunk. Two: that as he lived here he might be recognized as a regular user of the station.’

‘You mean if he was a commuter?’ Kate said. ‘Did people commute from Brighton in those days? Plus we think he had a car.’

Tingley shrugged.

‘Well, all you’re really saying is that he lived down here but not in Brighton. He didn’t go up to London much because his business didn’t take him there.’

‘But that means she was based down here,’ Gilchrist said. ‘So you’d think they’d be able to figure out who she was.’

‘Why was she killed?’ Watts said.

Kate replied:

‘The police theory from the files we have is that she was probably the mistress of a married man who killed her because she was pregnant.’

‘Good,’ Tingley said. ‘If she was a mistress in London that he visited regularly, then the station might be a problem.’

‘Unless he drove,’ Kate said.

‘But trains were quicker and more frequent then,’ Tingley said.

‘So it’s like not shitting on your own doorstep,’ Gilchrist said.

‘Exactly.’

‘OK,’ Watts said. ‘Alternative scenario. He was London-based but had a second home here. He didn’t come down often but when he did he drove. He brought her down here to kill her. Then maybe never came down again for a couple of years. He was nondescript anyway so no real worries about being recognized.’