Peter Guttridge - City of Dreadful Night

Stranger and stranger.

‘I’ve got work, Dad.’

‘Don’t you have leave due?’

‘I haven’t been there long enough to get leave yet.’ And if I had, she thought but didn’t say, I wouldn’t want to spend it at home.

‘Maybe next weekend, then.’

‘Maybe – it depends on my shifts.’

Another silence. Finally:

‘OK, then. Well, you take care, Kate. And phone me if you need me.’

‘Will do, Dad.’

‘Love you.’

‘Bye, Dad.’

She dropped the phone in her lap and listened to Amy Winehouse’s by now poignant views on rehab ricocheting round the square. She thought for a moment about other singers she’d liked, who’d arrived but hadn’t stayed long. Whatever happened to Macy Gray?

But really she was thinking about her dad calling. It had to be more than coincidence. The man in the cemetery was something to do with the grey areas of her father’s life. The many grey areas. In threatening her, the man was sending a message to her father. And her father had clearly received it.

There had been concern in her father’s voice as their conversation had gone on. It was a long time since she had heard that. It would have touched her had she allowed it to. There was fear too. She had never known her father to be in a situation he didn’t fully control. Maybe this was it – the first time.

Kate pulled the throw up over her shoulders and waited to hear from Watts.

‘James Tingley – you tease,’ I said. ‘Who would have thought it?’

‘I’m not teasing. I’m trying to get it clear in my head. I’d thought it would be Cuthbert – same Cro-Magnon mentality. I’d hoped it was Hathaway so we could do a deal that would explain your situation. But it’s neither.’

‘We get that,’ Sarah said. ‘So who is Gary Parker’s father?’

‘Another close friend of Mr Watts here. This whole affair is bedevilled with them.’

‘And that close friend is…?’ I said, trying to listen to the satnav instructions at the same time. I was driving down dark, winding lanes to the north of Hampstead Heath.

‘A certain Mr Winston Hart.’

‘You’re joking!’ I said, almost missing a turning.

‘Who’s Winston Hart?’ Sarah said.

Tingley looked wolfish.

‘The Chair of the Police Authority that forced Bob’s resignation,’ he said.

Kate had gone back inside her flat from the balcony, double-locked the French windows and pulled out the Trunk Murder files again. She was conscious that she was spending far too much time on this but, frankly, she didn’t have much else in her life. Her last relationship had gone south, her job was boring as hell… and so it went.

She looked again at the remaining two undated scraps of the diary.

My background is Northern. You don’t look at the mantelpiece when you’re poking the fire. I didn’t bother too much about faces – I was more interested in bodies. So that was unusual for me. Noticing the face so much, I mean. Nobody would have thought she was forty. She looked ten years younger. In fact, she looked like Carole Lombard, that movie star. Spitting image.

Who was he talking about? Just another of his many women? Kate was thinking about what Tingley had said about Spilsbury getting the age wrong. Oh, there was something here, for sure. But what exactly?

The next entry was more factual.

Come September and we’d looked at about 3,000 statements from the public. We had about 1,000 letters from Germany. But now I was out of work so far as the Trunk Murder investigation was concerned. The Scotland Yard boys, Donaldson and Sorrell, went back up to London. Unofficially they had another twelve months to solve the case. The operations room in the Royal Pavilion was wound up.

I told the local press that Scotland Yard would be investigating ‘a secret list of fifty men, selected because of their association with certain sorts of women’. Of course, that wasn’t entirely true – in fact, I’d plucked the number out of the air.

I was in trouble, though. The powers that be were giving me a hard time about my extra-curricular activities. There was talk of disciplinary action. Possibly resignation. Perhaps criminal proceedings. Ha bloody ha.

Kate assumed it was the diarist’s habit of leaking stories to the press that was the problem. But she wondered about his way with women. Wondered whether sometimes his seduction method was too forceful.

She needed to explore whatever files were available in the National Archives in Kew. That was the repository for all the old Scotland Yard files, and she hoped there would be material in there that existed nowhere else. Failing that, there might be something that would help her to identify whoever was writing this diary.

‘You’re only paranoid if people haven’t really got it in for you,’ I said triumphantly – but my mind was whirring. First, I couldn’t figure the man Sarah had described as the son of the effete Winston Hart with his stupid moustache and his middle-class pretensions. Second, did that actually mean I was right and he was somehow part of a plot against me?

‘I’m tempted to abandon Connolly and head for Hart,’ I said.

‘No,’ Sarah said. ‘We have to talk to Connolly – he’s in this up to his neck.’

‘I’ve seen Hart,’ Tingley said. ‘And we’re here. Drive past the house, Bob.’

We’d reached an imposing Elizabethan farmhouse, alone on the road, with a wide drive to one side of it. I noticed that lights were on in various parts of the house. I drove about a hundred yards past it and pulled into a passing point.

‘You’ve seen Hart? And?’

‘Not now, Bob.’

I sighed.

‘So what do we do?’

‘We go up and knock on the door,’ Gilchrist said.

‘What if he won’t see us?’ I said.

Tingley just grinned.

Somebody rapped on Kate’s door. She had a fisheye lens set in it. She looked through it but nobody was there. The chain was on but she didn’t open the door. Her heart thumping, she stayed with her eye glued to the fisheye. Still nobody there. She retreated to her sofa but couldn’t take her eyes off her door. All she could think, however, was that to knock on her door you had to get through the locked outer door to the whole house.

She phoned Watts.

‘This is not a good time,’ I said when I heard Kate’s voice. Tingley was straddling Connolly, Gilchrist was over by the window looking out, rubbing her chin. Connolly was struggling to get his breath. Tingley punched him again, very precisely. Connolly’s breath bubbled in his throat.

‘Enough now, Jimmy. You’ve made your point.’

‘Have I?’ he said, slapping Connolly across the face. ‘Do you feel I have, Billy boy?’

‘Fuck you,’ Connolly spluttered.

‘Tough guy,’ Tingley said, drawing his fist back.

‘Enough.’ Gilchrist this time, striding across from the window to grab Tingley’s arm.

Tingley kept his arm raised but didn’t try to get out of Gilchrist’s grip. Instead he reached down with his other hand and smoothed Connolly’s hair. After this oddly gentle gesture, he drew himself off Connolly and, in the same fluid movement, stood upright. In the process, with a quick twist and shake, he freed his arm from Gilchrist’s grip.

Gilchrist grasped at thin air and looked momentarily bemused as she watched Tingley go to sit on a narrow sofa. Connolly lay on the floor beside Gilchrist, his chest heaving. He gave her a malignant look.

He pulled himself to a sitting position, all his weight on his right arm. His left arm hung useless by his side. His face was engorged with blood, his eyes bulging. He looked over at Tingley, who ignored him, fixing his own eyes on the stacks of DVDs beside the rogue policeman’s giant plasma screen.