City of Dreadful Night (25 page)

This morning it turned out the kiddie had spent the night with her best friend four doors away. Gilchrist wondered if it was a wind-up, wondered what other crime had been carried out when the police were fully occupied with that.

She yawned. She was hoping for word back on a possible deal for Gary Parker today. Her seniors would want to keep her out of the loop but they had to tolerate her because Parker would only deal in her presence – presumably so that he could ogle her. Gilchrist wanted to interview his mother but she was out of town, nobody quite knew where.

Vice were investigating Little Stevie. Oddly, he didn't ever seem to have been arrested – highly unusual if his occupation was as Parker suggested.

The problem was that nobody senior to her gave a toss. Since Watts had resigned, there were no senior officers who cared about investigating Milldean.

The phone rang and she reached forward to answer. She listened for a few moments and put the phone back down. Now she was awake.

From Kemp Town, Kate drove along the coast to Rottingdean, the sea sparkling to her right, then cut up across the slow curve of the Downs. When she reached Lewes she parked in the Cliffe car park by the river and the brewery, and trudged up the steep hill, past the War Memorial to the High Street. She was horribly hungover.

The records office was in the Maltings, a couple of hundred yards from the castle, which was off to her left beneath an arched defence gate and past the Barbican – little more than the keep remained.

She turned into the cobbled castle close and was perspiring by the time she passed a bowling green on her right. A sign told her that until the sixteenth century it had been the jousting field.

She was early for the records office so walked across to a viewing point. A plaque there told of the Battle of Lewes at which Simon de Montfort had defeated a larger royal force in 1264 and paved the way for Parliament. A little map showed the disposition of the troops on the Downs whose folds and soft slopes were spread out in front of her.

She took a long drink from her bottle of water and two more painkillers. At 8.45 a.m. precisely she walked into the records office and took the stairs. The room upstairs had creaking floors and high ceilings. The walls that did not have bookshelves were bare. All the floor space was occupied by rows of long tables.

The Trunk Murder files were waiting for her at reception but she was only allowed to take them one at a time. The first was a buff-coloured foolscap file on which somebody had written, in now-faded blue ink, ‘Trunk Murders File + Mancini'.

The first items in the file were two black and white photographs of creased and ripped pieces of brown paper. Someone had painstakingly put the pieces together to make what, according to the note on the bottom of the photo, purported to be a brown paper bag. She guessed this was the oil-soaked paper the victim had been wrapped in.

There was a letter and two brief notes from Spilsbury, the Home Office pathologist, with his initial conclusions about the remains he had examined. He referred to the victim as ‘the latest cut-up case', which Kate found cold.

Next she came to the photo albums proper. The albums – little more than folders really – were all tied together by a loosely knotted piece of string. Kate untied the knot and separated the first folder from the others.

This was the part of her visit she was most squeamish about, for within these folders were photographs of the woman's remains.

There were about a dozen people in the library by now and most of them seemed to be making use of the books just behind Kate. Taking a deep breath, she opened the folder.

It took a moment to make sense of the first photograph. When she did, she flushed and quickly closed the folder. She waited for the elderly man immediately behind her to move away before she opened the folder again and forced herself to look.

The woman's torso had been laid on a table and this first shot was a close-up from between where her legs should have been. It showed the ragged, raw stumps of her thighs and, between them, startlingly clear, her vagina and anus. The black flesh of the stumps looked horribly like the ends of cuts of meat.

She felt shame on the woman's behalf. Ludicrous as it was, given that the woman's limbs and head had been hacked off, she felt the humiliation of her being exposed in this way even after death.

She turned to the other photographs. The torso had been photographed from every angle. The second and third photographs showed the torso from the sides, the arms cut off below the shoulder like some obscene Venus de Milo. The fourth was taken from where her head should have been. She had strong, shapely shoulders but her neck was abruptly terminated in another cut of meat.

Kate swallowed, looked across at the two librarians behind the reception desk, wondered what they were thinking about her wanting to see these files. She felt grubby.

She had the bottle of water in her bag but there was no drinking or eating allowed in here. Or use of pens, for that matter. She glanced at the pencil she'd brought.

The second album contained eight photographs of ‘limbs discovered at King's Cross Railway Station'. In the first photograph the woman's legs were laid out on a table in front of a dark brick wall. It seemed like a basement or a workshop. It seemed very cold. It was, presumably, the mortuary.

Kate felt tears welling up at the same time as she thought how comical they looked, these legs lying alone on a table. She could have believed they were false, had it not been for the way that the thighs and the rest of the legs were separ-ated a couple of inches to demonstrate how they had been hacked in half at the knee.

She'd been horrified at the thought of Spilsbury handling the feet as if they were shoes, but from the photograph she could see that the feet had not been detached after all.

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 café 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.