Peter Guttridge - City of Dreadful Night

Tingley nodded.

‘Glad to hear it. Now I’m wondering about these important people you know. I’m wondering – are your important people more important than my important people?’

‘Who is his father?’ Gilchrist asked Williamson as they walked out into the car park at Lewes Prison, where Parker was on remand. Williamson had his unlit cigarette between his fingers. He shrugged.

‘Mother’s a single parent living on benefits, three other kids still at home.’

‘Milldean?’

He nodded.

‘Can we talk to her?’ She stopped. ‘Does she know what he’s done? Has anyone been to see her?’

‘He’s an adult. No need for his mother to be informed.’

They resumed walking.

‘Let’s talk to her.’

Kate was running out of time before her shift started but she was desperate to finish off all the pieces of the diary she had managed to compile. She was sitting on her sofa, looking at her watch every few minutes, calculating then recalculating what was the latest time she could afford to leave.

Monday 16th July

Another trunk murder victim turned up yesterday. In Kemp Street, up near the station. Another woman, of course. No official information was given, but today’s newspapers published contradictory stories concerning the contents of the trunk. Hutch wasn’t too happy.

‘ The captain’s bloody furious,’ Percy said.

I said nothing. The Daily Mail headline read: ‘Trunk Murder Sensation; Second Woman’s Body Found.’ The line underneath moved away from the facts. ‘Discovery of first victim’s head and arms last night. ’

The report went on: ‘The discovery of the head and arms of the Brighton trunk murder victim, packed into a second large black trunk, with the body of the woman who had been killed apparently by a hammer blow on the back of the head… ’

They also declared that a tray of striped cloth stretched across a wooden frame had been found – the missing tray from the first trunk.

Now, maybe I was too extravagant with my story of a trunk stuffed with a dead body and another’s body parts – but who came up with the second story? Not me. I’m outraged. Somebody else in the force is leaking false stories to the press.

The press men homed in on the occupants of the house in Kemp Street and a house in Park Crescent where the second murder was actually committed. They tried every method possible to obtain entry to these houses. We had to post officers at both houses to stop them. They offered large sums of money for photographs and information.

The trunk had been in the Kemp Street house for about six weeks and other tenants had complained about the smell. Ironically, neither of the owners – Mr and Mrs Barnard – had a sense of smell so they’d been unaware of anything amiss.

Tuesday 17th July

The new victim has been identified as a prostitute, Violette Kay. A woman in her forties. Her pimp, Mancini, is a bit of a mystery. There’s a Soho gangster with that name who has a lot of form but we’re not sure if it’s the same man. That Mancini was a member of a razor gang. He was a deserter from the forces.

At any rate, this Mancini is much younger than her – she was in her forties, he is in his twenties.

Early this morning – the middle of the night really – Donaldson, Sorrell and Pelling left the Town Hall to arrest him in London. He’d been picked up walking along a road in the middle of the night.

I went with them. We were followed by a number of press men in a fast car. We shook them off in the side streets. When we came back from London, the press car was waiting just outside the borough boundary. It followed us to the Town Hall.

I was sitting in the back seat with Mancini. He was regarded as a ladies’ man but he wore a cheap suit. He was only 5'5''. I wasn’t even going to talk to him but when I did try to make conversation he had this terrible stutter. A stuttering ladies man. Ronald Colman had better watch out.

Later in the morning, Pelling had a meeting with us. He was angry.

‘ On several occasions throughout the course of this enquiry press men have been successful in securing the substance of the particular enquiry on hand, the result being that sensational stories have been published which invariably have been far from accurate and have had the effect of impeding our work. ’

Around now I noticed Percy giving me the evil eye. He couldn’t hold it, though. He looked away.

‘ From the commencement of this enquiry it’s been obvious that several of the press men are entirely unscrupulous in their methods of obtaining information. As a result, the remainder – who are far more fair and reasonable – have to do the same to keep their newspapers posted with the sensational stories published by the minority referred to. This means that at times the press has been more troublesome than the actual investigation.

‘ The stories in the papers about the second trunk murder are going to cause us serious problems. It’s unlikely that there is any link between the two killings. There were, needless to say, no remains of the first victim found in the trunk containing the second. When we announce the arrest of her pimp, people will simply assume he did both crimes and stop bringing us information. ’

When the meeting had ended Percy came over to me.

‘ Hutch wants a word with you. ’

Here it was: the beginning of the end.

And there the diary entry ended. Damn, damn. Kate pushed the rest of the papers into her bag, grabbed her keys and hurried out of the door. She got a bus almost immediately, plonked down and almost tore the papers out of her bag. She groaned. The next diary entry was over two weeks later.

2nd August 1934

We’ve finally found out where the brown paper with the partial word ‘-ford’ on it comes from. It’s the end of ‘Bedford’, which in turn is the end of an address a clerk working for the Loraine Confectionery Company – a sweet and chocolate shop in Finsbury Road – wrote on paper wrapped around a box of some defective confectionery.

She wrote it some time between 1st January and 22nd May 1934 when she was sending the confectionery back to an associated company, Meltis Ltd in Bedford. Both these companies are part of Peek Frean, which has its London depot in Bermondsey.

This is where it gets complicated. Although, apparently, Finsbury Park isn’t that far south of Bedford, and anything going between the two goes on a van via Bermondsey, which is off in east London.

When this particular parcel reached Meltis in Bedford with a lot of other parcels, the despatch department would have opened it, passed the contents on and chucked the wrapping paper on the floor.

One of two things could have happened to this wrapping paper. It might have been used to wrap a box of confectionery sold at a discount to staff. It might have been used as packing in either vans or railway containers delivering boxes of confectionery to depots in Glasgow, Manchester, Reading, London – or down here in Brighton.

Now, whether this is going to help, I don’t know, but Hutch is acting pretty gung-ho for the first time in an age. By tomorrow he’s hoping to have traced every female who has left Meltis since January 1934 and have a list of men working for the company who were off work on 6th and 7th June.

None of this has appeared in the papers yet, for obvious reasons.

Kate had reached her stop and the diary had come to an end, aside from some undated scraps. She let out a little snort of frustration as she got off the bus at the railway station and started to hurry down to the radio studio. Then she paused and looked back at the station. She glanced at her watch, turned and went to find the left luggage office.