Peter Guttridge - City of Dreadful Night

Kate was in a fog and not just because of the alcohol she’d consumed on an empty stomach. She didn’t like the man who wrote the diary and she thought he was keeping secrets that the missing bits of it might reveal. From what Bob Watts had said, perhaps his father had written the memoir. Or her grandfather. Then again, perhaps neither of them had.

As for the idea of either of them being the murderer, well, of course, if this were fiction, one of them would be. But this wasn’t fiction. This was real life.

Tingley was talking. She didn’t listen at first but then she tuned in.

‘I’m thinking he got the idea to put her in the trunk from precedent: 1927 at Charing Cross Station. The mainline cloakroom. A trunk was delivered by taxi, but the porter didn’t remember the man who was with it. It wasn’t airtight so the cloakroom attendants started to smell it quite soon. Inside – under brown paper – was a woman divided into five parts by amputation at shoulder and hip joint.’

‘Did the police get the murderer?’ Kate said.

‘They did, by tracing the taxi and finding where he picked up the person with the trunk. Spilsbury was the man who did the autopsy. He concluded the woman had been knocked out, then asphyxiated. He also said that because of the skilled way she’d been cut up the murderer was a slaughterman. In that he was entirely wrong.’

‘So the great Spilsbury wasn’t infallible,’ Watts said.

‘Far from it – and something for us to bear in mind.’

Watts looked at Kate.

‘What do you see when you think of the Trunk Murderer?’ he said.

‘I see either your father or my grandfather.’

Watts smiled.

‘Not really,’ she said. ‘My imagination has been colonized by the movies. I think in film images. A man standing beneath a yellow gaslight, the light falling at an angle and spreading a long shadow on the cobbled street. It’s an image that I’ve got from Hitchcock’s The Lodger morphing into The Exorcist.’

‘And this is your killer?’

‘Yes – and in black and white, despite the yellow light – if that makes sense.’

‘Sort of.’

‘Then there’s a man in a homburg and topcoat, his shoes polished, walking with deliberate steps down a rain-glistening alley.’ She smiled. ‘Except in reality it was summer so it was probably daylight and he would have been sweltering.’

‘Strange, isn’t it,’ Tingley said, ‘how we picture him through a series of mirrors, representation of murderers from that period in photos and TV and books and our own imaginations. I see him smoking a pipe and in a heavy three-piece suit – even in the summer.’

‘I don’t see him at all,’ Watts said, rather sadly, Kate thought. ‘But I wonder if he intended to kill her? If he did, then chopping her up would be cold-blooded, thought out. If he didn’t, it would perhaps be more difficult, much more upsetting.’

‘And how did he live with that for the rest of his life?’ Kate said.

‘Maybe he was her pimp so he was pretty insensitive anyway,’ Tingley said. ‘Maybe he killed others, in other ways.’

‘Maybe I’ll find out tomorrow when I go to the records office in Lewes.’ Kate pointed at the handwritten pages in front of Tingley. ‘I’m absolutely certain I’ll find out who our anonymous scribe is.’

Kate was about to leave when Watts’s phone rang. It was Gilchrist.

‘I don’t think I can do that now,’ Watts said. ‘It’s Gilchrist,’ he said to Kate and Tingley. He looked at Kate. ‘Do you want to meet her when her shift finishes to give her a debrief?’

Kate liked Gilchrist. Kate was tipsy. She thought for just a moment.

‘Sure.’

An hour later, she was meandering rather than walking into Ha Ha to meet Sarah Gilchrist. She tried to sober up with strong coffee. She had done a reasonable job by the time Gilchrist arrived looking drawn and tense. Kate watched the way she seemed to shoulder her way into the bar. She nodded at Kate but didn’t come over until she’d got a drink. She stood at the bar, shoulders high and tense, until the barman handed her a glass of wine, then she came over to Kate and sat down stiffly on the sofa beside her.

‘Glad you’ve got a drink,’ Gilchrist said. ‘I hate women who go in bars and don’t buy a drink until their friends arrive. Or just order tapwater. They want to be in nice places but they don’t want to pay to be there. They seem to have a problem understanding how capitalism works.’

Kate watched her for a moment. Gilchrist responded to the scrutiny.

‘Rough day,’ she said quietly.

Kate nodded and listened while Gilchrist outlined the discovery of the man in the bathroom and his girlfriend unconscious on the blood-soaked bed.

‘They were both under the influence of GHB. A fun drug, supposedly, unless you take too much. Taken to excess, it causes hallucinations. They were seeing floating furniture, clowns, witches.’ She took a swig of her drink. ‘And somewhere in this he decided it would be a good idea to pull her teeth out with a pair of pliers. We found eighteen.’

Gilchrist shook her head.

‘Drugs are killing this town.’

After ten minutes or so they moved to the back of the restaurant. It was quieter there, although they could still hear noise from the front of the restaurant.

‘I’m sorry that I haven’t engaged fully with the Trunk Murder,’ Sarah said, swirling her red wine in her oversized glass. ‘I’ve been preoccupied.’

‘Clearly – plus your career has been jeopardized – how could you not be preoccupied?’

Gilchrist shrugged.

‘If I’ve got this right,’ she said, ‘the Trunk Murder victim had been pregnant for four months. Do you think she knew? Was she scrupulous about when her periods were happening?’

Kate put down her drink.

‘I think so. And being pregnant and unmarried would be a big deal. In those days, if you weren’t married, you needed to get married if you were pregnant.’

‘Yes, you’re right – she knew.’ Gilchrist flexed her shoulders. ‘A woman knows, though doesn’t always want to admit she knows, right? So she chooses her time to tell the man. If she’s a mistress, she waits to use it as a lever for him to leave his wife?’

‘I’ve been wondering if she got pregnant deliberately or knew the rules?’

‘Rules?’ Gilchrist said.

‘You know – that mistresses are just that – no claims on the man.’

Gilchrist smiled.

‘I don’t think it has ever worked quite like that. I believe it’s rare that a mistress just wants to be a mistress – she wants to move up in the pecking order.’

‘Was that how…’

Gilchrist, still smiling, gave Kate a look. Kate flushed.

‘How it was for me with Bob? No – that was strictly a one-night thing.’ Gilchrist took a bigger swig from her wine. ‘I wouldn’t do that to another woman – except I did.’

‘So what does that make our unidentified woman in the trunk?’

Gilchrist reached over and squeezed Kate’s arm. ‘I think you’re doing a great job for her. It’s about respect, isn’t it?’

Kate felt that she was trying to breathe life into the sad remains of the victim’s body.

‘I wonder what she was like?’ she said. ‘Was she clinging? Demanding? A bitch? Gullible? Giving? Unselfish? In love? Was there someone else who cared for her and, if so, why did that person not come forward?’

‘Even if she were any of those negative things, nothing can justify what he did.’

‘Of course – and as soon as you start using words you’re building a construct of this woman which may or may not be true.’

Gilchrist waved at the waitress and tilted her glass to get another round for them.

‘A fiction,’ Kate continued. ‘One of many possible stories.’