Peter Guttridge - City of Dreadful Night

The waitress brought their fresh drinks and their food. They’d both chosen the fishcakes with salad leaves.

‘I think the police were right,’ Gilchrist said. ‘She was the lover of a married man who made a fuss when she got pregnant.’

‘Obviously the abortion option would have been tried,’ Kate said. ‘She said no. It would have been a backstreet abortion in those days. Four or five months pregnant – she’d be starting to show, or soon would be. She needed a commitment from him.’

‘But if she had a job – would she not have been missed at work?’ Gilchrist said. ‘By her friends? What happened to the place where she lived? Presumably he kept her. Maybe he owned it. But what about the neighbours? What did he do with all her stuff? Her clothes?’

Kate thought for a moment.

‘They compiled a list of eight hundred missing women and managed to trace seven hundred and thirty of them – quite extraordinary really. Do you think the victim was one of the seventy unaccounted for?’

‘I’m sure of it. They had her but they just had too much material.’

‘Shame we don’t,’ Kate said, thinking about her grandfather’s destruction of the Brighton files.

G ilchrist dozed on top of her duvet. She felt like shit. Not because she was hungover after the early part of her evening but because she was knackered after the rest of her night. There had been an alarm that a five-year-old girl had gone missing. A thirteen-year-old in Hollingbury reported he’d seen a long-haired white man drag the girl into a car – a blue or turquoise Ford Escort. The force had a new system when a child went missing. It flooded the area with police and interrupted local radio and television programmes with pleas for help. Gilchrist had been called in. Although she’d had a couple of drinks, she was OK to work. She’d spent a fruitless night rousting registered paedophiles in the area.

This morning it turned out the kiddie had spent the night with her best friend four doors away. Gilchrist wondered if it was a wind-up, wondered what other crime had been carried out when the police were fully occupied with that.

She yawned. She was hoping for word back on a possible deal for Gary Parker today. Her seniors would want to keep her out of the loop but they had to tolerate her because Parker would only deal in her presence – presumably so that he could ogle her. Gilchrist wanted to interview his mother but she was out of town, nobody quite knew where.

Vice were investigating Little Stevie. Oddly, he didn’t ever seem to have been arrested – highly unusual if his occupation was as Parker suggested.

The problem was that nobody senior to her gave a toss. Since Watts had resigned, there were no senior officers who cared about investigating Milldean.

The phone rang and she reached forward to answer. She listened for a few moments and put the phone back down. Now she was awake.

From Kemp Town, Kate drove along the coast to Rottingdean, the sea sparkling to her right, then cut up across the slow curve of the Downs. When she reached Lewes she parked in the Cliffe car park by the river and the brewery, and trudged up the steep hill, past the War Memorial to the High Street. She was horribly hungover.

The records office was in the Maltings, a couple of hundred yards from the castle, which was off to her left beneath an arched defence gate and past the Barbican – little more than the keep remained.

She turned into the cobbled castle close and was perspiring by the time she passed a bowling green on her right. A sign told her that until the sixteenth century it had been the jousting field.

She was early for the records office so walked across to a viewing point. A plaque there told of the Battle of Lewes at which Simon de Montfort had defeated a larger royal force in 1264 and paved the way for Parliament. A little map showed the disposition of the troops on the Downs whose folds and soft slopes were spread out in front of her.

She took a long drink from her bottle of water and two more painkillers. At 8.45 a.m. precisely she walked into the records office and took the stairs. The room upstairs had creaking floors and high ceilings. The walls that did not have bookshelves were bare. All the floor space was occupied by rows of long tables.

The Trunk Murder files were waiting for her at reception but she was only allowed to take them one at a time. The first was a buff-coloured foolscap file on which somebody had written, in now-faded blue ink, ‘Trunk Murders File + Mancini’.

The first items in the file were two black and white photographs of creased and ripped pieces of brown paper. Someone had painstakingly put the pieces together to make what, according to the note on the bottom of the photo, purported to be a brown paper bag. She guessed this was the oil-soaked paper the victim had been wrapped in.

There was a letter and two brief notes from Spilsbury, the Home Office pathologist, with his initial conclusions about the remains he had examined. He referred to the victim as ‘the latest cut-up case’, which Kate found cold.

Next she came to the photo albums proper. The albums – little more than folders really – were all tied together by a loosely knotted piece of string. Kate untied the knot and separated the first folder from the others.

This was the part of her visit she was most squeamish about, for within these folders were photographs of the woman’s remains.

There were about a dozen people in the library by now and most of them seemed to be making use of the books just behind Kate. Taking a deep breath, she opened the folder.

It took a moment to make sense of the first photograph. When she did, she flushed and quickly closed the folder. She waited for the elderly man immediately behind her to move away before she opened the folder again and forced herself to look.

The woman’s torso had been laid on a table and this first shot was a close-up from between where her legs should have been. It showed the ragged, raw stumps of her thighs and, between them, startlingly clear, her vagina and anus. The black flesh of the stumps looked horribly like the ends of cuts of meat.

She felt shame on the woman’s behalf. Ludicrous as it was, given that the woman’s limbs and head had been hacked off, she felt the humiliation of her being exposed in this way even after death.

She turned to the other photographs. The torso had been photographed from every angle. The second and third photographs showed the torso from the sides, the arms cut off below the shoulder like some obscene Venus de Milo. The fourth was taken from where her head should have been. She had strong, shapely shoulders but her neck was abruptly terminated in another cut of meat.

Kate swallowed, looked across at the two librarians behind the reception desk, wondered what they were thinking about her wanting to see these files. She felt grubby.

She had the bottle of water in her bag but there was no drinking or eating allowed in here. Or use of pens, for that matter. She glanced at the pencil she’d brought.

The second album contained eight photographs of ‘limbs discovered at King’s Cross Railway Station’. In the first photograph the woman’s legs were laid out on a table in front of a dark brick wall. It seemed like a basement or a workshop. It seemed very cold. It was, presumably, the mortuary.

Kate felt tears welling up at the same time as she thought how comical they looked, these legs lying alone on a table. She could have believed they were false, had it not been for the way that the thighs and the rest of the legs were separ-ated a couple of inches to demonstrate how they had been hacked in half at the knee.

She’d been horrified at the thought of Spilsbury handling the feet as if they were shoes, but from the photograph she could see that the feet had not been detached after all.