City of Dreadful Night (10 page)

‘I got this message on my answerphone waiting for me when I got home. Fucking freaked me out, excuse my French.'

‘What's your name, sir?' Gilchrist reached for a pen and pulled a pad towards her.

‘It's from a bloke I know lives in Hove. You'll have to listen closely – the tape isn't very good.'

‘Sir—'

She heard the muffled beep of an answerphone then this drunken voice, refracted by the phone line. What the man said sent a chill through her.

‘I just fucking took a fucking hammer and smashed John's brains all over the wall, mate. Then I got one of my swords. He's all over the fucking wall, all over the floor, all over the ceiling. John's like lying on the floor in . . . loads of bits. I don't know why I did that, man.'

Gilchrist blanched. The voice was gleeful.

‘Is this a real recording?' she said to the caller. ‘Wasting police time is—'

‘I'm not wasting your time. It's a guy called Gary Parker. He's always been a bit of a nutter. His best mate is John Douglas. They live in this flat in Hove.'

‘Give me your details.'

She scribbled down his name and address.

‘And the address in Hove?'

It was a house almost diagonally across from Hove railway station.

‘Your local police will be visiting you shortly to collect the tape and interview you,' she said.

On her way out she stopped at the desk and asked the duty sergeant to phone the police in Sydney and to send out a call for back-up at Parker's address. It still might be a hoax, but she wasn't taking any chances.

The sergeant gazed blankly at her.

‘You got that?'

He gave a little start.

‘Sorry, Detective Sergeant. Had a bit of a shock. A man has just phoned in to say that he's found an arm in the kiddies' paddling pool on the seafront. I've sent a couple of constables down there.'

Maybe not a hoax, then. Gilchrist nodded and headed for the door.

‘I've a horrible feeling I know where the rest of the body is,' she called back to him.

Two squad cars, lights flashing, were parked outside the shabby, three-storey Edwardian building. Commuters looked over as they came from the station and drinkers in the bar opposite were standing at the windows watching the action.

Gilchrist and four constables walked up to the front door. The curtains of the ground-floor flat were drawn. She rang the bell. No answer. Rang the bells of all the other flats to get through the house door. They crowded into the hallway, littered with flyers and free newspapers. She rapped on the cheap-looking door of the ground-floor flat.

No answer.

She looked at the constables. Caught one of them eyeing her up. Ignored that.

They were hefty-looking boys.

‘Break it down,' she said.

It took two attempts, then the door burst open with a splinter of wood and a screech of hinges. The constables started in but came to an abrupt halt when they caught sight of the interior. They stepped aside to let Gilchrist see.

The living room was drenched in blood. It was sprayed across the walls and looked as if it had been poured on the furniture from a paint pot. It was pooled around the gruesome object in the centre of the room. A naked male, without head, arms or genitalia, spindly legs stretched out on the carpet. A bayonet sticking out of his chest.

The sickly stench of the blood hit Gilchrist as she looked around the room and down at what remained of the young man. Dispassionately, she reminded herself she was always surprised to see that a body could hold so much blood. Then she threw up.

Gilchrist was still at the station at nine the next morning. She was light-headed, nauseous and exhausted. She sipped at a bottle of water. She was standing at the window again, watching the waves roll in, when the phone rang.

It took her a moment to respond. She'd been thinking about last night's crime scene. All the officers threw up at pretty much the same time.

When she'd calmed herself Gilchrist had moved in and looked more closely at the torso. It had been hacked about pretty badly. There was a yawning red-black hole where the penis and scrotal sack had been.

In the bedroom she'd found a large plastic bag stuffed with what, after a moment, she realized were body parts. In the kitchen a pale, thin arm and hand lay on the electric hob. A hammer, a Gurkha knife and a Samurai sword, all matted with blood and hair, lay on the kitchen table.

She picked up the phone. It was Sheena Hewitt's secretary.

‘Sheena thought you'd be the best person to handle this call,' she said.

‘Is it to do with last night's case?' Gilchrist asked.

‘I believe so.'

The killer, Gary Parker, had been picked up on the beach in the middle of the night. A scrawny man of about twenty-five with a beer gut and scarred knuckles, lost on drink and drugs. His face was puffy, his eyes slitted, mouth a sour line. He'd been sitting cross-legged beneath the Palace Pier. He had his friend's mutilated head balanced between his thighs.

Later, in a holding cell back at the station, Gilchrist had asked him about the arm on the hob.

‘Was going to cook chickenburger sandwiches.' He bared yellow teeth. ‘The only way I could see of getting rid of him. Bits of him kept falling out of the plastic bag.'

Gilchrist had managed to get through the rest of the night without throwing up, but remembering his words now she felt another wave of nausea.

‘Shall I put the call through?' Hewitt's secretary said.

Gilchrist gulped down air.

‘OK.'

‘Hello,' a man said in a strangled voice, ‘I'm Brian Rafferty, director of the Royal Pavilion, and I must say I'm a little tired of being shunted from pillar to post. I hope you're not going to pass me on to somebody else.'

The Royal Pavilion was the city's chief tourist attraction but she'd never cared for it. The paint on the outside was drab and its garish interior looked like something out of Disneyworld.

‘I hope so too,' she said without enthusiasm. ‘You're speaking to DS Gilchrist, Mr Rafferty. How can I help?'

‘DS Gilchrist – that name sounds familiar.'

‘The reason for your call?'

‘We've found some files here that belong to you.'

‘Files?'

‘About the Trunk Murder.'

Gilchrist tightened her grip on the phone. What files, when Gary Parker had only dismembered his friend the previous night?

‘What do you know about the Trunk Murder, Mr Rafferty?'

‘Only what everybody knows from books – and, to be honest, I'd got the two mixed up.'

‘Two?' Gilchrist was lost.

‘You know. They got the man for Violette Kay but there was this other one—'

Tiredness washed over Gilchrist.

‘Are you taking the piss?' she said. She regretted the words as soon as she uttered them.

‘I beg your pardon?' Rafferty sounded indignant.

‘Why have you called, sir?'

Rafferty hung up.

Kate Simpson was bored silly. It was James Bond Week and Tim, the presenter, had gone off at a tangent to babble about toupees, running his words together to stave off the fear of silence that dwells in every radio presenter's heart. Kate found listening to him exhausting. Mind-numbing too, but then she had only herself to blame for taking a job at Brighton's local commercial radio station.

She had wanted a job in broadcasting. She hadn't wanted her father – William Simpson, government fixer – to use his influence to get her one. In consequence, here she was, the trainee and general dogsbody, the lowest of the low.

‘That's the hot question of the day, then,' Tim blathered. ‘Forget Daniel Craig. Forget Piers Brosnan. We're talking Roger Moore: real or rug? The lines are open, let me hear your views.'

Tim cued up a record and Kate gazed out of the window at the flow of people heading to and from nearby Brighton station.

The phone rang.

‘The toupee hotline at Southern Shores Radio,' she said, trying to hold back the sarcasm. ‘What's your opinion about Roger Moore: real or rug?'

She realized nobody had spoken at the other end of the line.

‘Hello?' she said.

‘I wanted to talk to someone at Southern Shores Radio.'

It sounded like a man trying to do an impersonation of Brian Sewell, the art critic.

‘You are,' Kate said.

‘You seemed to be saying you were some kind of hairdresser.'

Kate didn't try to explain.

‘How can I help?'

‘We've found something that might form the basis of an interesting radio slot.'

Kate withheld a groan. In the few months she'd been here she'd grown to dread people phoning in with ‘interesting' ideas. The topics the station actually covered were banal but seemed inspired compared to the ideas the public phoned in.

‘Perhaps if you would write—'

‘It's about the Trunk Murder.'

‘Trunk Murder?'

‘It's coming up to eighty years since it happened, you know.'

Actually, Kate did know. She had come down to Brighton to do her doctorate three years earlier. For a laugh during her first Brighton Festival, she'd gone with a couple of new friends on one of those moonlit murder walks. A procession of giggly, tipsy people touring the town and hearing about the gruesome murders, real and literary, that had taken place in this street or that arcade. The Brighton Trunk Murders were a main attraction.

‘I thought there was more than one,' she said.

‘Strictly speaking, yes,' the man said. ‘Two separate investigations often get confused, as indeed they did at the time. I believe these files relate to the first Trunk Murder. The one that remains unsolved.'

‘And you are?' Kate said, conscious from the lights flashing on the mini-switchboard that people were calling in on the other two lines.

‘Brian Rafferty. Director of the Royal Pavilion.'

Kate put him on hold whilst she answered the other calls. It was running two to one in favour of the wig. She patched the callers through to Mingus, the producer, for on-air discussion.

‘Most of the files relating to the case were presumed destroyed years ago,' Rafferty continued. ‘But we've found some of them.'

‘In the Pavilion?'

‘It was the HQ for part of the original investigation.'

Kate's interest was piqued.

‘You've looked through these files?'

‘Cursorily.'

There's a posh word, Kate noted.

‘Do you agree there's a story here?'

Kate did – and it was one she wanted to handle herself. It wasn't the hard news she yearned to do but it was a cut above the ditzy fare she usually had to deal with.

‘Of course there's a story. But what about the police? Don't these files belong to them?'

‘I phoned the police.' Rafferty spoke with asperity. ‘They kept me hanging on for an age, trying to work out what to do with me. Then they were very rude.'

‘I'm sorry to hear that,' Kate said, trying to keep her amusement at his irritation out of her voice.

‘But it doesn't matter,' he went on. ‘It was only a courtesy call, after all. They aren't interested in decades old files. Isn't there some kind of thirty-year rule in the police force where they either destroy stuff or pass it on to the county records office?'

‘I believe so,' Kate said, fiddling with a plastic beaker of tepid water. She didn't like Rafferty.

‘I believe so, too.'

An anniversary of the unsolved murder would be a good peg. She was already imagining getting one of the many crime writers who lived locally to go over the files. And perhaps a policeman. In fact, she knew exactly which policeman to ask. The ex-Chief Constable, Robert Watts.

I went back into Brighton late the next morning to meet my friend James Tingley in The Cricketers pub.

What can I say about this man, who matches that clumsy Churchillian construction about a riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a mystery?

I've known him for twenty years yet don't really know him at all. I don't know his sexual preferences, for instance. I've never seen him with a woman, never seen him with a man. Never heard him talk about either in a sexual way.

He seems to be that type beloved of crime novelists – a genuine loner. And that's strange because he has an ease with people, can fit into most social situations. But he remains watchful, always, taking everything in.

I had invited him to dinner many a time with Molly and me but he'd declined. ‘Not much for small talk,' he'd said. And he was right. Not that he got uncomfortable about it.

He was happy not to talk, didn't bother him. I've never met a more self-contained man. Yet there was nothing chilly about him. He was warm, caring, but always controlled.

You wouldn't notice him in the street, wouldn't look twice at him in the pub. But if you did, you'd see something that would warn you at some primitive level not to mess with him.

He was quite the deadliest man I knew, an expert in unarmed and armed combat. To my certain knowledge he'd killed five men with his bare hands. Well, hands, feet and elbows. I'd seen him do it.

We were in the army together before he moved on to the SAS and got involved in all sorts of hairy and lethal operations. Often he was in corners of the world where the SAS weren't supposed to be. And I know he spent some time with the Israeli security forces.

I assumed he'd be in the service for life, though his distaste for authority meant he would never rise to a high rank. They kept trying to promote him, but he wasn't having any of it.