Peter Guttridge - City of Dreadful Night

Sarah Gilchrist -

Detective Sergeant, Brighton police force

John Hathaway -

Brighton crime boss

Kate Simpson -

Radio journalist

William Simpson -

Government fixer and Kate Simpson’s father

James Tingley – ex-SAS soldier and security adviser

Donald Watts -

Novelist (writing as Victor Tempest) and Robert Watts’s father

Molly Watts -

Robert’s wife

Robert Watts -

Chief Constable, Brighton police force

Reg Williamson -

Detective Sergeant, Brighton police force

‘The City is of Night; perchance of Death’

The City of Dreadful Night (1874) by James Thomson (B.V.), not known for laughs.

‘Brighton – the City Beautiful’

Sir Herbert Cordon, idealistic creator of much that is good and much that is bad about Brighton.

Just about balances out.

BRIGHTON GAZETTE, SATURDAY, 23 JUNE, 1934 GHASTLY FIND AT BRIGHTON BODY IN TRUNK WOMAN CUT TO PIECES SCOTLAND YARD’S TASK

Brighton was shocked early in the week by the news of a particularly horrible crime which came to light with the finding of the nude torso of a woman in a trunk at Brighton Central Railway Station, and the discovery of the legs in the King’s Cross Station Luggage Office.

The grim discovery was made on Sunday evening, 17th June. The trunk was forced open after there had been a complaint to the police that there was an offensive smell coming from it. The naked remains of the woman were found inside. The head, legs and arms had been sawn off. The trunk had been deposited on Wednesday, 6th June.

Clue of Letters

The remains were wrapped in brown paper and tied with window cord. On the edge of the paper, written in blue pencil, are the letters ‘ford’.

Scotland Yard was called in to deal with the ghastly affair, in conjunction with the local police. Chief Detective Inspector Donaldson and Detective Sergeant Sorrell at once came down and set to work after a long conference with the Brighton Chief Constable, Capt. W. J. Hutchinson.

It was at first thought that the woman was about forty years of age, but later Sir Bernard Spilsbury, the country’s leading forensic pathologist, gave as his opinion that she was in her twenties and certainly not more than thirty years old.

Legs found at King’s Cross

There came a startling development on Monday evening, 18th June, when detectives from Scotland Yard visited King’s Cross station and in the Left Luggage department found a suitcase which contained the legs missing from the Brighton body.

The suitcase at King’s Cross was deposited on 7th June, the day after the trunk was deposited at Brighton. The attention of an attendant at King’s Cross was drawn to the case by the odour.

The Inquest

The proceedings only lasted two minutes before Mr Charles Webb, the Deputy Coroner, adjourned the enquiry until Wednesday, 18th July, at eleven o’clock.

Mr Webb summarized the events of the past few days since the body was discovered. Referring to Sir Bernard Spilsbury’s examination of the previous day, Mr Webb said there were no marks or scars on the body by which it could be identified. The cause of death was not known.

I will not screw up.

Detective Sergeant Sarah Gilchrist repeated the sentence to herself like a mantra. She was determined to do everything right. Aside from anything else, she refused to give Finch the satisfaction. He was boorish about women police officers at the best of times, but when it came to them taking part in armed response operations he was positively Neanderthal.

For the same reason she was determined not to show her fear. All the way here in the van he’d been coming on Mr Machismo whilst she’d been trying not to vomit.

John Finch was now at least out of sight around the other side of this seedy house as Gilchrist crouched in its rubbish-strewn back garden, her pistol clenched tightly in her fist. She was anxious but determined, trying to stay focused – on her breathing, on the job in hand.

Three officers were crouched beside her. Two more were poised beside the back door, the battering ram hanging from short leather loops between them. There were police marksmen in upstairs rooms of the houses immediately behind her.

They were all waiting for the word in their earpieces to signal the start of the operation.

In her anxiety, Gilchrist’s physical discomfort loomed large.

It was a hot, humid evening; beneath her body armour she was dripping sweat. Her knees were aching from the crouching, her thighs and calves were feeling constricted. One of the team, possibly her, had trodden in some dog shit. The stink made her want to vomit even more.

She felt heavy, weighed down, sinking into the soft earth beneath her boots. Yet in a moment or two she would have to surge forward and go through that back door at the gallop.

Her unit’s job was to secure the ground floor of the house. The kitchen was the other side of the back door, then there was a passage with first the dining room and then the living room off to the right. On the left, the staircase to the first floor faced the front door. The other unit would come through that door at the same time and head for the first floor and its target.

The target had entered the house at eight p.m. carrying bottles in a plastic bag from the local off-licence. He was reported to be upstairs in the front bedroom. He was reported to be alone.

This would be Gilchrist’s fourth armed home arrest but she was more anxious than she’d been on her first.

Partly, this was because of the relative inexperience of the members of this evening’s task force. It was supposed to comprise the tactical firearms unit of the South East Constabulary, acting as support for an elite team from Gatwick Airport.

The airport officers were well used to armed operations but the Gatwick team couldn’t leave the airport because of a terrorist alert. Her team had become the lead unit whilst a second unit from three different divisions had been hurriedly assembled. For some members it was their first operation. And none of them had worked together before.

That would have been OK had Danny Moynihan been leading the operation on the ground. Moynihan, ex-SAS, was experienced, careful, as cool as they come. She trusted him implicitly after her other three operations with him. But at the last moment he’d been stood down – she didn’t know why – and replaced by Chief Superintendent Charlie Foster. Who was definitely second eleven.

The timing of the operation was unfortunate too. The other operations she’d been involved with had been dawn raids, the targets asleep in their beds. Sunrise streaking the sky as the house doors front and back had been breached, the explosion of violence rupturing the morning’s calm.

But this was ten in the evening. Dusk had just fallen, but there were lots of people out in their gardens, television shows and music blaring from open windows, cars revving by. Ten in the evening, there were all sorts of problems. Especially here, in this neighbourhood.

The main reason for her anxiety.

‘It’s straightforward enough,’ Charlie Foster had said in the briefing before they left the station thirty minutes before – but he was sweating when he said it. ‘Career criminal called Bernard Grimes. Wanted in connection with a string of armed robberies and the shooting of two security guards in a payroll robbery in Willesden. Hard nut.

‘He’s got a place on the Cote de Crime – all the best crooks prefer Provence to the Costa Brava these days.’ He got a rumble of laughter for that. ‘We have a tip from a reliable source that he’s heading there via tomorrow morning’s Newhaven-Dieppe car ferry. And that he’s spending tonight in a house in Milldean.’