City of Dreadful Night (33 page)

‘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.

EIGHTEEN

‘
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.

‘I could have told them that last night,' Tingley said. ‘You and your hard head.'

‘Somebody got the number plates, but the van will be stolen or the plates will be cloned,' I said. ‘And I didn't get a look at the man who said the message was from him.'

‘Did anyone else?'

‘Apparently not – baseball cap pulled low – you know.'

‘At least for once it was the appropriate headgear,' Tingley said.

After a moment I smiled and gingerly touched the lump on the back of my head.

‘I've got stuff to tell you,' Tingley said. ‘But not here.'

‘I'll be discharged later this morning.'

I winced again.

‘Let's meet at The Cricketers.' Tingley said. ‘But soft drinks for you.'

‘Will I like what you have to say?'

Tingley waggled his hand.

‘Etsy ketsy,' he said.

‘Which is Greek to me,' I said.

‘I'll see you at one.'

Gilchrist and Reg Williamson were on their way to Lewes Prison to take a new statement from Gary Parker.

‘On the direct orders of Sheena Hewitt, eh?' Williamson said as they drove out of Brighton. ‘The deal must have been done. Wonder what the scumbag is being offered.'

‘I don't know, Reg. There isn't much room for manoeuvre.' Gilchrist was excited, as she hoped Parker might have some real news for her.

‘You're kidding, Sarah. They'll go the temporary insanity route, he'll be put in some country club loonie bin, get tested in a couple of years and come out in three.'

‘Well, he
was
under the influence of a lot of drugs,' Gilchrist said.

‘The guy's a scumbag born and bred.'

‘Reg, can I ask – do you think those awareness courses you've taken have been working?'

Ten minutes later, Gilchrist was tending to agree with him.

Parker was looking even unhealthier than the last time she'd seen him. His face was puffy and sallow, almost green, and his eyes were sunk into their sockets. His mouth was even filthier too.

‘You know what I discovered?' he said. ‘I discovered that poncey people like cock and twat as much as the rest of us.' He sniffed. ‘Actually, they love it more.'

Parker's solicitor was sitting beside him. He was a harassed man in an ill-fitting pinstripe suit. He stared at the table as Parker was talking.

‘Is that your news?' Gilchrist said. ‘Next you'll be telling me there are gays in Brighton.'

Parker sniggered.

‘Well, it's arse bandits I'm talking about. Easy money to be made down at Black Rock. Fucking perverts turning up, cock in one hand, roll of twenties in the other.'

‘You're saying you've been a rent boy?' Gilchrist said.

‘Stick it up your tight arse. I've kicked their fucking heads in, pissed on them, then taken their money is what I've done. Easy bloody money.'

Gilchrist's mind wandered for a moment. Black Rock was where the head of the Trunk Murder victim had been found, then lost again. Then and now there were posh apartments above. Now there was also a lot of nocturnal activity in the bushes below. It was a well-known cottaging place, but Gilchrist hadn't heard much about gay-bashing there. She guessed it was the closet gays who were being attacked. They weren't going to report it.

‘What has gay-bashing got to do with Little Stevie and the Milldean thing?'

Parker started jiggling his leg but said nothing.

‘I thought we were supposed to be moving forward in this meeting.' Gilchrist addressed herself to the lawyer. He adjusted his glasses on his nose and looked from her to Parker. Parker didn't know which nervous tic to focus on. He was actually quivering. Gilchrist knew he was being given methadone and other medication to help his withdrawal from the cocktail of drugs and booze he'd been living on for years.

Parker chewed at his finger.

‘Bloke I was at school with. Bunked off school with, really. We was mates. Turns out he takes it up the bum. Likes chugging it too.'

‘Little Stevie.'

Parker looked at Gilchrist.

‘You've got a mouth on you – bet you've chugged a few in your time. Will you chug me?'

‘Mr Parker,' the lawyer said quietly.

‘That must have messed you up,' Williamson snarled. ‘Your mate being gay. Did you bash him?'

‘I give him one up the arse is what I did. Fucking poof.'

Williamson leant forward.

‘You lost me there,' he said. ‘You punish a homosexual by sodomizing him?'

‘So you're gay, too?' Gilchrist said.

Parker stubbed a finger on the table.

‘Course not, you ignorant bint.'

‘Mr Parker—' the lawyer said, his voice gloomy.

‘You do someone, even a bloke, that's the power. You let yourself be done, that's something else.'

Gilchrist forced a laugh, though she never felt less like laughing.

‘Oh, it's that prison thing – you're only gay if you're on the receiving end.'

‘Don't know about that—'

‘Dream on, Parker,' Williamson said. ‘You're a jobbie jammer – and, as for sucking men off, is that why your teeth are such a bloody mess?'

‘All right, that's enough—' the lawyer said.

Parker swivelled his eyes between Gilchrist and Williamson.

‘I ain't gay, you dyke bitch, and you, you fat bastard.'

‘If you're not now, you will be by the time they've finished with you in prison.' Williamson said. ‘You'll be able to get the Flying Scotsman up you by the time some of those boys have finished with you. Sorry – Flying Scotsman is before your time. It's a train, boyo – and not a diesel.'

The lawyer was on his feet.

‘I think that's the end of this discussion.' He looked down at Parker. ‘Mr Parker.'

Parker was still looking from Gilchrist to Williamson, his horrible teeth bared in a grin. He pointed at Gilchrist.

‘'S OK, Mr Whatsit. As long as she frigs me. Or she could do the milkmaid's shuffle.'

The lawyer looked exasperated and sank back in his seat. Williamson was clenching his fists. Gilchrist touched his arm.

‘What about this friend of yours?' she said. ‘Little Stevie.'

Parker seemed to have forgotten his request.

‘He was a rent boy. Made a lot of money in Brighton.'

‘We have no record of him. Besides, I would have thought, given the number of consenting adults, this would be a place where you wouldn't make money.'

‘He wasn't on the streets. Conferences. Especially the political ones. All these happily married men wanting to stuff him. He made good money.'

‘You kept in touch, then?'

‘Saw him around.'

‘And?'

‘And fucking what?' He was scrunched up in his seat now. Gilchrist looked at the ceiling, talked to it.

‘And how did he end up dead in Milldean?'

Parker glanced at his lawyer. The lawyer nodded.

‘He met this bloke. Did him. Bloke left his wallet behind.'