Peter Guttridge - City of Dreadful Night

Gilchrist studied the fragment again.

‘I don’t know – the tone of voice in this-’

Kate’s phone rang. It was the radio station manager wanting to change her next shift. When Kate turned back to the room, she saw that Gilchrist had put the sheets of the memoir down and was staring at Kate. Kate flushed again.

‘What?’ she said, panicked for a moment that Sarah could read her mind. ‘What?’

I’d parked in the public car park below the community hall in Ditchling. As I reached the bottom of the incline, I was aware of a figure to my left detaching from the shadows of the building. At almost the same moment I heard hurried footsteps behind me. I turned to see the man from the pub, face contorted, as he wielded a baseball bat above his head.

Wielding a weapon with accuracy whilst running isn’t easy. This man was running downhill with a couple of pints inside him. His momentum was leading him. As he reached me, I bent low and he went over my shoulder. I gave him extra propulsion as I straightened. He hit the ground with a terrible wet crunch. I heard that horrible, hollow sound as his head cracked against the tarmac. I turned to face the man who’d come out of the shadows. He was about five yards away, his bat ready to whack a ball – or my head.

‘Be proud to be British,’ I said. ‘At least use a bloody cricket bat.’

The second man didn’t respond either to my bravado or to the plight of his colleague. He just moved in a half-crouch two yards closer.

I was out at practice at this stuff. Which is why I wondered too late how many others were in the car park. A third man came up behind me and whacked me hard across the small of my back. I arched and grunted, and fell backwards. Knowing as I fell that, once I was on the floor, it was all over.

Kate was feeling strange and embarrassed about the evening. She really liked Gilchrist. OK, fancied her. But she was worried that Gilchrist had guessed and was put off by the thought. Gilchrist had gone to bed early, leaving Kate to ponder this and her notes on the Trunk Murder.

She wondered about her grandfather. He’d died long before she was born and her father had never really talked about him. Nor had she been curious until now. She wasn’t upset about this family link to the Trunk Murder, although she disliked intensely whoever the memoirist was.

She might not be so pleased if her grandfather turned out to be the murderer but, then again, doesn’t everybody hope for a villain when they research their family histories?

That brought her to her father. Part of her estrangement from him was because once he was in government she’d had to give up wondering about his involvement in anything. She was sure he’d been behind getting Watts fired. Now, of course, in light of the threat to her in the cemetery, she was wondering if he’d done far worse.

Gilchrist knew she’d blanked Kate for a moment and in the process freaked her a bit. She was sorry for that. It was simply that, though she was touched by Kate’s thoughtfulness and intrigued by what she had discovered about the Trunk Murder, her mind was elsewhere. She was almost entirely focused on the present. Specifically, what Philippa Franks had told her. It sort of made sense but Gilchrist was cautious. She was remembering how upset Franks had been on the night of the tragedy. Was that normal post-trauma emotion or was there something else?

Gilchrist excused herself from Kate and retreated to the spare room. She put the underwear in the chest of drawers. One of the top drawers was taken up with framed photographs placed face down. Family photos, she guessed, to be brought out when her parents were using this room.

Gilchrist was lying in bed but she couldn’t sleep. The room was hot, the duvet heavy. But it wasn’t really that. It was all this stuff going around in her head. And something else. In work today, in the canteen, she’d seen Jack Jones, the CSI officer who’d been involved in analyzing the Milldean crime scene. The man she’d once had a fling with. The man she’d confided in about her one-night stand with Bob Watts. The man who’d sold her to the press.

She should have confronted him but she didn’t. At the time she thought she was being mature, rising above it. Now she was wondering if she’d just been cowardly.

And that brought her on to Bob Watts. And what, for want of a better term, she’d been thinking of as their second-night stand. Neither of them had referred to it again. Both had retreated to a kind of default position. There was no intimacy between them when they were together. The passion when the lights went out had shrivelled in the glare of the day.

She finally dozed off thinking about Bob Watts. The room felt hotter.

I didn’t go down. The man who was close enough to whack me across my back was close enough for me to engage with. And because it was a hit right across my back, it didn’t do me serious injury, even though it did hurt like hell. If he’d rammed the bat into one of my kidneys, or across the back of my head, he would have been more effective. As it was, the main blow was to my spine. It jarred me, but he’d need a lot more force to snap it.

I twisted as I was falling, and grabbed first the bat, then his forearm. Pulling down on his arm, I swung my legs off the ground and drove one knee into his side, the other into his neck.

I fell on him, my body a dead weight, and that was it. Except that the one man who seemed to have a bit of savvy was now standing over me, pondering where his bat could do most damage.

It was clear that this was nothing to do with the altercation in the pub. These guys had been sent to deliver a message. A message I wasn’t wild about receiving.

I scrabbled around and grabbed the bat of the man I was lying on. I brought it up just as the other bat came down. The thwock of contact was hard and loud, and I felt the impact shudder down my arm.

The man above me was now off-balance so I snaked around, swivelled at the hip and my outstretched legs swept his legs from under him. He fell backwards, abandoning his bat to break his fall with his arms, keeping his head off the tarmac.

I looked around to see if there were more roughnecks waiting to tip in. Seemed not. I launched myself on to him, pinning him to the ground.

I hissed in his ear:

‘You gonna tell me the message you were supposed to deliver?’

He struggled but I was pinioning his arms.

‘Back off,’ he gasped.

‘Fuck you,’ I said.

He shook his head, breathing badly.

‘That was the message. I was to say you had to back off.’

‘Who’s the message from?’

‘Me,’ a voice said, as someone knocked me unconscious.

‘ S ome people are crap at delivering messages,’ Tingley said, standing by my hospital bed.

‘That’s not how I see it,’ I mumbled, wincing as I tried to sit up.

‘Well, as I understand it, you don’t know who sent the message and you don’t know what the message was since they knocked you unconscious.’

‘The medium is the message,’ I whispered. I couldn’t get my breath.

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’ I coughed. ‘Presumably they would have left the message had they not been disturbed.’

I’d regained consciousness in the car park to find a gaggle of people crowding around me. Racegoers who’d disturbed my attacker. The two thugs still standing had hauled the two on the floor into a white van and sped the wrong way out of the car park.

After I vomited on their shoes, the racegoers had given me space. Someone had called Ronnie, the community policeman, and he had got me into hospital in Haywards Heath. I’d been kept in overnight in case I had concussion from the whack on my head. This morning the doctor had decided I was probably OK.