Peter Guttridge - City of Dreadful Night

‘OK, well, I’m going to go,’ Watts said. ‘Give you a lift, Jimmy?’

‘What’s the plan for tomorrow?’ Kate said. ‘I’m going to go up to the National Archive to look at police files for the Trunk Murder.’

She sensed that nobody else was particularly interested in the cold case just at the moment. To be honest, she wasn’t either but she felt she needed to persevere. And she was thinking that when in London she might call in on her father.

‘I’m getting back to Hathaway, see if he has anything for us,’ Tingley said.

‘I’m on shift but I’m going to see if I have anything of my flat left,’ Gilchrist said. ‘And I’m going to talk to Philippa Franks.’

Only when Watts and Jimmy had left did Kate realize that Watts hadn’t said anything about his own plans.

G ilchrist was still waiting for word of a potential deal with Gary Parker. He had been interviewed again twice in her absence but had refused to say anything more until he got his deal. Somebody was stalling – maybe somebody was putting pressure on Acting Chief Constable Sheena Hewitt.

Gilchrist wondered if Winston Hart at the Police Authority was also putting pressure on Hewitt to make the deal for his son. But maybe he was just worrying about the scandal when the press found out about his connection to a sick killer.

She sat at her desk looking out of the window at the rain sheeting down. It was only 6.30 a.m. and she was waiting until a more civilized time to phone Philippa Franks to arrange to meet. She wouldn’t be put off this time.

She’d come into work via her flat. She’d stood on the pavement and looked at the boarded-up windows. She’d been renting so had no emotional attachment to the place but she was pissed off about her belongings. There wasn’t much there of personal significance. She was pissed off because she hated shopping and was going to have to hit the high street today to get some clothes.

Kate had offered to lend her anything she needed, but Gilchrist couldn’t see herself getting into Kate’s clothes.

Now, sipping at her too-hot coffee, she thought about the man who had been shot in the kitchen. She could believe that there was nothing sinister about his death, that a sniper had simply reacted too quickly, perhaps because he thought the object in the man’s hand was a gun. But who was he?

Could he have been the man who had actually been watching the house? Gilchrist had assumed that person had been a policeman, but perhaps the watcher was Edward’s snitch. But why was he inside the house? So he could be clear where everybody was? Was he in direct touch with Macklin, the gold commander, just before the raid, or was he in contact with Foster, the silver commander actually in charge of the operation? Were either men in on it or were they being fed false information?

So many questions. Still too few answers.

She’d been patient enough. She phoned Philippa Franks just before seven a.m.

Kate took an early train up to Victoria then the District Line to Kew. It seemed to take forever. She dozed on the first and yawned on the second. At Kew she walked down a quiet street of Victorian terraced houses to the National Archives. The building was on a kind of shopping estate so first she nipped into M amp;S on the site to buy a healthy lunch. She also bought some underwear for herself and guessed at Sarah’s size to get some knickers for her. Bras were a little more complicated.

In the archives she called up her files then went outside to sit on one of the benches by the lake. She ate her sandwich watching the ducks dipping for food. She looked up at the blue sky and the plump white clouds. It was so peaceful, so ordered.

She sighed and looked at her notes. There were only two files she hadn’t already seen. They referred to a Director of Public Prosecution’s proposed action against a policeman for leaking information to the press about the Brighton Trunk Murder. This, Kate felt sure, was her anonymous narrator.

She was wrong. When she went back in and got settled with the files she saw that the first DPP file was about a man called Bowden, a policeman for twenty-seven years, head of Hove CID for thirteen years.

He’d established a relationship with a freelance journalist called Lindon Laing. Kate knew that name from the memoir. Under duress, Laing told the Brighton Chief Constable ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson that Bowden had already leaked a story to him some years earlier about somebody called Major Bailey, so Laing thought he’d ask him about the Trunk Murder. When Laing was asked if anyone else close to the investigation had been feeding him stories, he said no.

Kate paused for a moment. So when the anonymous memoirist had been summoned to Hutchinson’s office after the Chief Constable’s lecture about leaks, it might not have been about his relationship with Laing. What, then?

She read on. Laing said he had asked Bowden about the Trunk Murder on the afternoon of 30th October 1934 – the day the CID man was retiring from the police force. Unfortunately for Bowden, he was still on his final shift when that night’s Evening News came out. Laing’s story was splashed on the front page with the headline, ‘I know the man’. Laing had quoted Bowden saying he knew who the killer was.

Bowden insisted he hadn’t told Laing anything he shouldn’t have done, that he had in fact told him he didn’t think they’d ever find the culprit.

Kate looked at another document, an opinion from a barrister, dated 12th November, about whether Bowden could be prosecuted for public mischief. According to this, Bowden had been ‘trying to curry favour with the newspaper because they had agreed to buy his memoirs after his retirement’.

Another document suggested that the man Bowden had referred to was a suspect called William Augustus Offord of 152 Fortess Road, Kentish Town. He came under suspicion very early because his handwriting was similar to that on the paper ‘and he had known immoral associations with a number of young women’.

This was clearly hokum. Not the existence of Offord – she was sure he was real enough. But she knew from her other reading that the words on the paper had not been written by the killer.

The second file was much thinner, containing only a few sheets of flimsy paper. The first sheet was a memo dated April 1935. A policeman in Reigate sent it to Pelling, Brighton’s head of CID, with a letter from an unemployed nurse attached. She was asking the police to locate the present whereabouts of a friend of hers. This friend had worked as a cook and housekeeper for a doctor in Hove who had also employed the nurse.

The nurse claimed that her friend had disappeared and was pretty much suggesting that the doctor might have done away with her. Kate guessed that the nurse had a grudge against the doctor – she assumed she was unemployed because he had fired her. But his name drew her attention. Dr Edward Seys Massiah of 8 Brunswick Square, Hove.

Dr Massiah. Kate didn’t realize she was tapping her pencil on the desk until a man nearby cleared his throat. She put the pencil down. Dr Massiah. She was remembering the start of the memoir. The writer saying that he had taken his girlfriend, Frenchy, to a doctor in Hove. Kate realized she’d been holding her breath and slowly exhaled. The writer had referred to the doctor as Dr M.

‘Hello, Lizzy.’

Lizzy Simpson, William’s wife and Kate’s mother, looked at me in a calculating way. I’d always found her chilly. When I had status I always felt she simply tolerated me. I believed she was actually a sociopath, unable to empathize with other humans, so that in order to fit in she forever had to conjure up the simulacra of emotions she didn’t know how to feel.