The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (53 page)

The “murder squad” detective chosen for the assignment was Chief Inspector Robert Donaldson, who was, in comparison with most other policemen, quite short. His relative diminutiveness and neat apparel might have led people to believe that he was a “desktop detective”; also that he lacked endurance. Both notions would have been far from the truth. Not only had he taken part in a number of murder investigations, but on several occasions he had “gone in mob-handed” to arrest violent criminals, some carrying firearms. Any doubts about his stamina would be dispelled by his sojourn in Brighton, during which he worked eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, for months on end.

The detective-sergeant who accompanied Donaldson to Brighton was Edward Sorrell, who at twenty-six had only recently joined Scotland Yard. Donaldson had not worked with him before, but chose him as his assistant after talking to him and getting “an impression (proved accurate) of intelligence and alertness”. (That and subsequent otherwise unattributed quotations are from letters that Robert Donaldson wrote to me from his home in New Zealand in the early 1970s.)

Donaldson knew that it was vital to get the support of Arthur Pelling, who might feel put out at having had control of the investigation taken away from him. This he succeeded in doing; indeed, the two men became friends. Donaldson considered Pelling “a very competent detective. A Sussex man whose father had been in the force, he was serious-minded and conscientious. He showed no resentment that Scotland Yard were summoned to the inquiry, and it was largely through his efforts that the Brighton Constabulary, as a whole, were most co-operative.”

Captain Hutchinson arranged for Donaldson to have a team of a dozen detectives and uniformed officers, and promised that additional manpower would be provided if and when it was required. As no large offices were available to be turned into “trunk-crime headquarters” at the police station, Captain Hutchinson asked the town clerk if there was space to spare in any council-owned premises, ideally in the centre of Brighton. Thus it was that the investigators took over three apartments adjoining the music salon in the Royal Pavilion, and there, amidst the chinoiserie bequeathed by George IV, and sometimes to the muffled accompaniment of string quartets and of choirs eager with hosannas, got on with the task of trying to identify the Girl with the Pretty Feet, of trying to establish who had gone to such lengths to make that task difficult.

The police did all the things one would suppose they would have done; and many that were out of the ordinary. The investigation, uniquely thorough, comprised a myriad of activities, some of long duration, others of a day or so or a matter of hours. For instance:

As a result of what the press called “the great round-up”, 732 missing women were traced. A questionnaire was sent to every hospital and nursing home in the country. Hundreds of general practitioners and midwives were interviewed. At Queen Charlotte’s Hospital, London, 5,000 women, some from abroad, had received pre-natal advice or treatment between the beginning of February and the end of May; all but fifteen were accounted for.

Statements were made by several residents of Worthing, just along the coast, to the effect that a man who had until recently owned a sea-going vessel had offered them the opportunity of seeing a rather unusual double-bill: first, the murder of a woman, then her dismemberment. The would-be exponent of
grand-guignol
was tracked down, interviewed, and dismissed as being “all mouth and no achievement”. Much the same description was applied to the several men and two women who insisted, despite clear evidence to the contrary, that they were the “trunk criminals”. Donaldson’s men took notes but little notice of what clairvoyants, water-diviners, teacup-readers, numerologists, vivid dreamers, and people who had been given ouija-boards for Christmas had to say. (One of the clairvoyants, known to his many fans as Grand Wizard of the Past and Future, told a Brighton detective—and, after being shown out of the Royal Pavilion, a reporter for the
Sunday Dispatch
—that “the trunk criminal is probably called George; he has busy hair, works in a wholesale seed-store, and originally used the brown paper found in the trunk for wrapping up tyres”.)

Police throughout the country asked register-office clerks whether in the past few months couples had given notice of marriage but not turned up to complete the transaction. The thought behind this question was that whoever had made the trunk-victim pregnant may have bolstered the conning of the girl with indications of legitimizing intentions.

Of the many people who responded to repeated appeals that anyone who was at Brighton railway station between six and seven on the evening of Derby Day should come forward, two women and a man, the latter a retired warrant officer of the Royal Engineers, claimed to have seen the—or
a
—trunk being transported towards the left-luggage office. The trouble was that, whereas the women—fellow-Tory-travellers from a garden party at North Lancing—were convinced that they had seen just one man coping with a trunk, the ex-soldier was sure that he had seen two men sharing a similar load. Still, his description of one of the men—“about forty-five, tall, slim, dark, clean-shaven, and quite respectably attired”—came close to the description arrived at (perhaps after much “No, you’re wrong, Mabel”—“I’m certain I’m right, Edna” discussion) by the women; and as all three witnesses had been at the station within a period of a few minutes, it was reasonable to hazard a guess—based on the station-master’s notes of the actual times that trains had reached Brighton—that if the trunk was brought to the station by rail, its journey was short, probably from the west and no further away than Worthing. An artist was called in to make a portrait from the witnesses’ specifications, and copies of this were shown to staff at local stations; but though one or two railwaymen raised hopes by saying that the drawing slightly resembled someone or other who at some time or other had entrained to somewhere or other, the eye-witness evidence led nowhere.

An imperfection was observed in the serration of a piece of brown sticky tape affixed to part of the wrapping that had been round the torso. Therefore, policemen called on every single stationery supplier in London and the Southern Counties, trying—but without success—to find a saw-blade cutter with one tooth blunted in a peculiar way.

So as to check a London suspect’s alibi, particles of sand found in his car were compared with samples of sand from near Brighton and from sandy-beached resorts east of Bournemouth and south of Yarmouth. The sand turned out to be unique to Clacton, in Essex—a fact that lent support to his story.

Upon completion of one of the early-begun tasks—the interviewing of residents of Brighton who might help to establish the whereabouts of women who had suddenly become conspicuous by their absence—Donaldson ordered that the interviews be repeated. A roster was prepared, its aim being to ensure that everyone already interviewed was revisited—and by a different officer.

Right at the end of the first sweep, one of Violette Kaye’s customers had called at 44 Park Crescent and, having been told by the landlady that “Mr and Mrs Mancini” had gone, she knew not where, reported the prostitute’s departure to the police. On Saturday 14 July, a constable had traced Toni Mancini to the Skylark Café and, not liking the look of him, decided to take him to the Royal Pavilion rather than question him at his place of employment. But after Mancini, ostensibly quite at ease, had said that his “old friend Vi” was trying her luck in France, Germany, or somewhere like that—and that she was forty-two, at least fourteen years senior to the trunk-victim—he was allowed to leave.

But Mancini did not return to the Skylark Café; nor did he go to the house in Kemp Street—the front of which had since the day before been latticed with scaffolding, put there on behalf of a firm of decorators who were to start repointing the brickwork on Sunday. No; he sought out a girlfriend and treated her to a plate of cod and chips at the Aqua Café, which was at Old Steine, near the Palace Pier. He was not his usual cheery self. Ever the perfect gentleman, though, he commented that the girl looked rather nice in her new dress (which was not new at all: once the possession of Violette Kaye, Mancini had presented it to the girl a week or so after Vi’s demise, suggesting that it could do with dry-cleaning). The girl was still eating when Mancini abruptly asked for the bill, paid it, left an over-generous tip, and, muttering something that the girl didn’t catch, walked out of the café. The waitress scurried across to bag the tip. Lifting the cup of tea that Mancini had barely touched, she pointed out to the girl that he had left her a message, scribbled in blue crayon on the tablecloth:
SEE YOU LATER
,
DUCK
.

Mancini was already on his way to the northern outskirts of the town, where he would hitch a ride to London.

On Sunday morning, just as one of Donaldson’s team was about to leave the Royal Pavilion to start a round of repeat-interviews, including a second chat with Toni Mancini, at his home this time, a telephone call was received from a foreman-decorator, who insisted that the police come to 52 Kemp Street at once. Why? Well, for the simple reason that he and his mates, repointers all, needed gas-masks against the dreadful smell coursing into the street from the nether regions of the dilapidated house.

The detective with 52 Kemp Street on his list of addresses was told to delay his departure. When he left the Royal Pavilion, he was accompanied by colleagues, one of whom was Detective-Constable Edward Taylor—who, you may recall, was the officer who had opened the stinking trunk at the railway station exactly four weeks before. Arriving outside the house, the detectives at once followed the example of the waiting decorators and turned up their noses; Taylor afterwards expressed mystification that the smell, which must have been polluting the outside air for days, had not offended any of No. 52’s neighbours, nor the scaffolders, into complaining about it to a health officer. As there was no reply when the detectives banged on the front door (it turned out that the landlady and her husband—he as senseless of smell as she was—had arranged to be away on holiday while the external decorations were being done), they broke it down.

Having descended the uncarpeted steps to the basement, the detectives first of all flung open the windows, front and back. Then the highest-ranking of them pointed an accusing finger at the black trunk and twitched another finger in Taylor’s direction, indicating that he had been selected to open it. The detectives, every one of them, were sure that the trunk contained the missing head and arms. Taylor grabbed a sharpening iron from among the stuff on the draining-board and, his head reeling from a blend of stink and
déjà vu
, prised open the locks and pulled back the lid.

You will be aware—basically at least—of what was revealed. Though predictable, mention must be made of the fact that the contents were lavish with maggots, the most gluttonous of which were more than an inch long.

In the afternoon, Sir Bernard Spilsbury visited Brighton for the second time within a month. Following his examination of the body of Violette Kaye, he noted on a case-card that

Even before Spilsbury’s arrival, Robert Donaldson—depressed that he now had two trunk-crimes to deal with, though “Brighton Trunk-Crime No. 2” seemed to be virtually solved—broadcast a message to all police forces, giving a description of Toni Mancini and asking that he be apprehended.

At about eleven o’clock on the night of Thursday, 18 July, Police Constables William Triplow and Leonard Gourd were sitting in a patrol-car near the Yorkshire Grey pub in Lewisham, South London, close to Mancini’s birthplace. All at once, Triplow nudged his partner and pointed through the windshield in the direction of a well-lighted roundabout. A man was walking towards an all-night café. “So what?” Gourd muttered. “Look at his walk,” Triplow said. Gourd looked. Yes, there was something odd about it: it was more of a prance than a walk; the feet merely dabbed the ground, making one think of a liberty-horse—a tired liberty-horse. “I reckon it’s the Brighton-trunk bloke, the ‘dancing waiter’,” Triplow said. With that, he left the car and ran towards the man.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said, “but do you happen to be Mr Marconi?”

“Mancini,” he was corrected. “I couldn’t half go a cup of tea and a sandwich or something.”

Triplow and Gourd took Mancini to the local police station. A phone call was made to Scotland Yard, and from there a message was sent to Brighton police headquarters, saying that Mancini would be arriving under escort in the town in the early hours of the morning.

The arrest was front-page news on papers that reached Brighton at about the same time as did Mancini. The reports heaped praise on William Triplow, one going so far as to call him “the sharpest-eyed policeman in the Metropolis”. (When I met him at his home in Lewisham in 1970, he had been blind for several years.)

Presently, a queue began to form outside the magistrates’ court. Most of the queuers were young women, some of whom bragged of having partnered Toni on the dance-floor, others of whom went farther in boasting of their knowledge of him. Soon there were more than fifty people in the queue. As there were only fifty seats in the gallery of the court, the thousand or so latecomers disorganized themselves into a cheering, singing, waving-to-press-photographers mob. Mounted policemen were needed to bisect it when Mancini, flanked by detectives, made his first public appearance as a celebrity. He looked as if he had been allowed to shave, but his clothes—dark blue jacket, grey shirt, white tie, flannel trousers—were crumpled. He smiled in response to the shouts and screams of “Hello, Toni,” “Keep your pecker up,” “Don’t worry, love, all will be well,” and frowned concernedly when a woman in beach-pyjamas fainted, either from sheer emotion or from absence of underwear on a rather chilly morning. The girl he had treated to fish and chips at the Aqua Café stood apart from the mob; she was again wearing the dress he had given her.