Peter Guttridge - City of Dreadful Night

Spilsbury’s autopsy report had stated the feet were well looked after, but the tops of the toes seemed to be covered with corns or blisters. The right big toe was bent at an angle and the right little toe crossed over its neighbour as if she had in fact been wearing too-tight shoes. But were all these things a consequence of her body parts being crammed into a suitcase?

The third album contained a dozen photographs linked to the other Trunk Murder, that of the prostitute Violette Kaye. Most of them were photographs of the room in which she had been killed and the one in which she had been discovered.

The last two, however, were of Violette Kaye squashed into the trunk, her legs bent, her head pushed down towards her chest, her face swollen, teeth bared. She looked hideous, but it wasn’t her fault. Mancini had made her like this, had taken her dignity away.

There were no more files, no police report saying exactly which policemen had answered the call from the left luggage office at Brighton railway station. She left the archive empty-handed and queasy.

Gilchrist found Brighton phantasmagoric, dreamlike, crude. So many wannabe artists. So much bilge talked. Then, to see the young people spill out of the railway station on a day like this. Men in T-shirts, girls in micro-minis. Raucous voices: shrill, shrieking girls; guttural, hoarse boys. Girls tottering on unfeasible heels; men swaggering, shoulders back, crotches thrust out.

It was horrible to watch because she knew all that testosterone, all that female we-want-babies, all that din, was an unholy cocktail that would end in sex, sure, but mostly in violence, rape and misery.

‘Modern life, eh?’ she said to Williamson, scowling.

‘Your version of it.’

‘Meaning?’

‘I don’t quite see things like that.’

He was looking almost benign as he watched the teenagers flood by.

‘Meaning?’

‘These are just kids out to have fun. They aren’t the children of the anti-Christ.’

‘Yes, they are. I can give you statistics.’

‘We can all do statistics. Doesn’t mean anything. When did you turn into a Daily Mail reader?’

‘The Daily Mail is much misunderstood,’ Gilchrist said.

‘By whom?’

‘Its readers, mainly.’

Williamson barked a laugh.

‘Why are we here, Sarah?’

‘I told you – I had a phone call.’

‘But you didn’t tell me what it said.’

‘A man said to come here and wait by the flower stall to learn something to my advantage.’

‘Something to your advantage? Jesus, Sarah. We’re here because of a crank call?’

‘It’s to do with the Milldean thing.’

‘Did he say I could come along?’

‘He didn’t say you couldn’t.’

Kate had lunch in Lewes at Bill’s, down beside the river. It was as crowded as ever. As she ate, she was thinking about the murderer. Would he put what he had done out of his mind? Would he savour it? Had he told anybody? Had he boasted like Violette Kay’s killer, Mancini, apparently did? What price did he pay? Did he feel guilt? Remorse? If the victim was his mistress, did he and his wife stay together? Could his wife smell death on him?

She imagined him dismembering the woman. Wearing a hat. A tiepin. Maybe those elasticated metal things to hold the sleeves of the shirt up. His shirt would have had a detachable collar. Would he have taken the collar off whilst he was using his saw on her? Would he have put on a pinny, maybe with a floral design, frilly round the edges?

She’d printed an essay off the Internet that George Orwell had written in the thirties about the perfect English murder – and murderer. Kate looked at it now. Orwell’s view was that the murderer should be ‘a little man of the professional class’ – a dentist or a solicitor, say – living an intensely respectable life somewhere in the suburbs. It would be best if he lived in a semi-detached house so the neighbours could hear suspicious sounds through the wall.

Orwell thought he should be either chairman of the local Conservatives or a leading Nonconformist strongly against alcohol. His crime would be a guilty passion for his secretary or the wife of a colleague or rival. Having decided on murder, he’d plan it in detail but slip up in one tiny, unforeseeable way. He would see murder as less disgraceful than being caught out for his adultery.

Was this the Trunk Murderer? If so, what slip had he made?

‘He’s not coming,’ Williamson was saying when Gilchrist’s mobile phone rang. The number was blocked.

‘Hello,’ she said.

She heard a matter-of-fact voice.

‘Hope you’ve got home insurance.’

The line went dead. Williamson looked at her.

‘Oh fuck,’ she said.

Kate saw Tingley enter the cafe and order a coffee at the counter. He walked towards her and sat down beside her.

‘How’s it going?’

‘Just reading George Orwell’s theory about the English murderer.’

‘Anything in the archive? Have you found out who your diarist is?’

She shook her head.

‘Just some gruesome pictures. What are you doing here?’

‘Passing through. Saw your car in the car park and guessed where you’d be.’

‘That predictable, eh?’

He shook his head.

‘There aren’t many options in Lewes.’

A harried waitress brought over Tingley’s coffee, slopping some of it on to the table as she put it down.

‘I’ve been reading up on Sir Bernard Spilsbury. Do you know why he was the only forensic pathologist ever to have been knighted whilst still working?’

Kate shrugged.

‘Because his knighthood unduly impressed juries. They automatically believed him. He was a Sir, for goodness sake. But, of course, he wasn’t always right. He was a scrupulous man but he was also egotistical and dogmatic. He was quite capable of jumping to conclusions beyond the limits of the facts. He fancied himself a kind of Sherlock Holmes. He wasn’t.’

‘So what do you think he got wrong in this case?’

Tingley soaked up the spilt coffee with a napkin.

‘I think we agree that the police did a damned good job of tracing most of the missing women in Britain aged around twenty-five. And, if our dead girl wasn’t brought in from abroad – though it’s quite possible she was – the likelihood is that she is among the seventy or so missing women not traced.’

Kate nodded agreement.

‘Assuming,’ Tingley said, matter-of-factly, ‘Spilsbury was right about her age.’

Kate’s eyes widened and she started riffing through the pages of her notes.

‘What was his evidence for that conclusion?’

‘I don’t know. He drew the conclusion after examining the torso. But here’s the funny thing. Much of the evidence for establishing a woman’s age is in the skull – the fusing of bones and so on. Since the skull wasn’t there – how did he reach that conclusion?’

Kate thought for a minute.

‘I read that, in the Mancini murder case, a friend of Violette Kay’s reported her missing, but because she was outside the age range Spilsbury had proposed the police didn’t take her disappearance seriously.’

Tingley nodded.

‘They focused entirely on women within the narrow age range Spilsbury proposed. But do you remember the police surgeon who first examined her?’

‘He thought she was older.’

‘That’s right – he put her age at about forty.’

Kate sat forward.

‘But if the police surgeon was actually correct, then the whole of the police investigation was flawed.’

She tapped the table.

‘And there’s nothing we can do about that now. We’ve reached a dead end.’

‘Not necessarily,’ Tingley said.

Kate frowned.

‘We could find the body – find where the victim is buried.’