Peter Guttridge - City of Dreadful Night

Parker started up again.

‘Some blokes only want to give it up the arse and they’re not fussy whose arse. Women, men, armadillos.’ He showed his ferret teeth and cackled. ‘OK, maybe not the fucking armadillos.’

He began rocking in his chair.

‘These blokes who sew up live birds in the chests of their victims. One guy pulled their lungs out and threw them over their shoulders. There was that guy that skinned his humps.’

‘These are all fiction,’ she said, exasperated. ‘They’re not real,’

‘Fuck off – that bloke who skinned them was real – and are you trying to fucking tell me people don’t do these things in real life?’

‘No, you’ve demonstrated that.’

He had to think about that for a moment.

‘Oh, yeah – that. Fucking weird that was. Don’t know where that came from. Where’s his head? I wanted to keep that.’

‘What happened?’

‘I chopped him up. I was gonna make burgers but I couldn’t get him in the pan.’

She tried to ignore that image.

‘I mean – what made you chop him up?’

He tilted his head to one side and looked at her. He frowned. He seemed to have forgotten about the rapes.

‘Had this fucking alien growing in him, coming out of his chest. Had to kill the fucker. Plus he wouldn’t shut up.’

‘The alien?’

‘No, you stupid cunt-’

He shook his head in contempt.

‘Watch your language with me,’ Gilchrist said calmly, as she sensed Williamson straining to come over and smack Parker. ‘You said he wouldn’t shut up.’

Gilchrist tried not to react to his staring at her breasts.

‘What wouldn’t he shut up about? The rapes?’

‘That was always his fucking problem,’ he said, dropping one hand back into his lap. ‘Always trying to big it up, but nobody was fucking fooled. He was talking bollocks. Pissed me off.’

‘So he didn’t rape anybody in Milldean?’

‘Like he knew what was fucking what. He knew fuck all, the cunt.’

She really loathed this little creep with his vacant grin, his imbecile face, the way he kept ogling her.

‘What was he talking about?’ she persisted.

‘He don’t have no fucking clue. Bigs himself up, but it’s bollocks. I know more about that fucking lark than he ever did.’

She could see him as a rapist. After what he’d done she could see him as pretty much anything bad.

‘What lark?’

Her stomach suddenly growled. She hadn’t eaten for what seemed an age. She ran her tongue quickly over her teeth: her mouth tasted stale and of too much coffee. He looked at her, suddenly cunning.

‘What they call a bent copper?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What do they call a bent copper? It’s a fucking joke. You’re supposed to say whatsit – you know.’

‘Tell me, then,’ she said, ‘what do they call a bent copper?’

‘That’s it! Then I say whatsit!’

She tried to be patient. Said nothing as he searched for the punchline.

‘Fuck – whatsit – you know – fuckin’…’

He clenched his fist and hit himself on the side of the head a couple of times.

‘Fucking done my head in, man. Can’t remember nothing no more. What was we talking about?’

‘Bent policemen, for some reason. But tell me what your friend was bragging about that got you so angry.’

‘Police don’t know nothing, do they? Pretend you do but you fucking don’t.’

She sighed. Someone let her out of here.

‘The Milldean fucking massacre. Fucking mess that was. Bet you don’t have a fucking clue about it.’

Her stomach tightened, gurgled again. She leant forward and put her hands lightly on the table in front of her.

‘You know something about that?’

‘I’m from there, in’t I?’

‘Were you at the riot?’

He ignored her.

‘That bum-boy in the toilet. Another fucking pain in the arse, but then he was all arse.’

‘What about him?’

‘Spent most of his life on his hands and knees. Chugging or taking it all the way up.’

‘What about him?’ Gilchrist repeated.

He clenched his fists and shifted in his seat again.

‘OK, what’s his name?’

‘Little Stevie.’

He sniggered.

‘What’s funny?’

‘He had an even bigger dick than me.’

I was having a solitary brunch in a cafe by the old Town Hall, trying to imagine this square when the police station had been in the basement of the Town Hall. Before the Thistle was built facing out to sea, the Japanese restaurant had been plonked down in the middle of the square and the underground car park had been carved out beneath it. The time of the Trunk Murder.

I was feeling odd. I felt stalled for the moment on trying to sort out the Milldean mess and I was drawn towards this very cold case that Kate had plonked in my lap. I was deliberately not thinking about Molly or Sarah Gilchrist.

Three long pink limousines drew up across the road from me, in front of the side entrance to the old Town Hall. It now housed the registry office and here was the first of the day’s gay marriages. It must have been somebody famous – TV vans arrived in the wake of the limousines. I drew back as I recognized a few of the TV people who had harassed me.

In the next ten minutes more people arrived in garish clothes, and policewomen in bright yellow jackets came for crowd control, as a large group of spectators gathered.

Time to move. I paid for my meal and, head down, slipped out of the cafe and down the street a few yards before turning into the side entrance to a shopping arcade. I walked through it, avoiding eye contact, then up into the Laines. I ducked into The Bath Arms.

I ordered a coffee and settled myself in a corner of the old pub away from the late-morning drinkers part-way through their first pints.

I was thinking about the friendship William Simpson and I had inherited from our fathers. And then I was thinking about my father on one particular day.

It was sunny and we were all in the garden. Sally and James, my sister and brother, were bickering, as usual. I was in the hammock, strung between two trees. Mum was reading an Iris Murdoch in a deckchair with a canopy – she didn’t do well in the sun. Dad was sitting at a table in the shade writing longhand in one of the cheap exercise books he used. He was in his sixties but didn’t look it and certainly didn’t act it.

The doorbell rang.

Dad had set up some kind of system so there was a bell attached to the back of house too. It also worked when the telephone rang.

My mother looked alarmed. My father frowned. Unexpected visitors were not welcome.

Mum closed her book.

‘Robert,’ Dad said, without taking his eyes from his notebook.

I rolled out of the hammock. Smiled at my mother.

I was woozy from the sun so when I opened the front door I was a bit blank.

‘You must be Robert,’ the woman said.

I was eighteen, with little experience of women. This woman was almost as old as my mother but I still desired her immediately. I suppose she was in her late thirties, early forties. But not only was she beautiful, she also exuded sex. Or maybe that was me, full of testosterone, bestowing on her my own lusts.

She was – the word is apt – glamorous. A beautiful oval face, green eyes, abundant auburn hair. Tall. Big-breasted.

Attractive as she was, there was also an intensity about her that made me nervous. She had full lips, crimsoned with lipstick. When she smiled, there was a twitching of the nerves at the edges of her mouth.

‘Is Frank in? Your father.’

Oh, she was trouble. I had a feeling of dread, but also of excitement.

‘He’s in the garden,’ I said. ‘With my mother.’

There was movement at the edges of the mouth.