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 eyewitness 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
she had been five feet two inches in height and well-nourished;
she had used peroxide to turn her brunette hair blonde;
her head was badly bruised, and she had been killed “by a violent blow or blows with a blunt object, e.g. head of hammer, causing a depressed fracture extending down to the base, with a short fissured fracture extending up from its upper edge.
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 rec
kon 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.
Similar scenes were enacted when he left the court, having been remanded in custody, and when, over the next few weeks, he was brought from Lewes Goal, first for further remands, then for the committal proceedings, at the end of which he was ordered to stand trial at the forthcoming Lewes Assizes.
The trial lasted four days. Beforehand—perhaps on his own initiative, perhaps at the suggestion of his counsel, Norman Birkett—he had done some preparation:
“I had carefully rehearsed my lines like an actor. I had practised how I should hold my hands and when I should let the tears run down my cheeks. It might sound cold and calculating, but you have to remember that my life was at stake.”
His story—in its essentials, entirely false, as he admitted when the rule against double-jeopardy protected him—was that he had found Violette Kaye lying dead when he returned to the basement flat in Park Crescent on 10 May. As he had a record of convictions for petty crimes (none involving violence—an important point in his favour, Birkett contended), it would not have occurred to him in a month of Sundays to report the matter to the police: “I considered that a man who has been convicted never gets a fair and square deal from the police.” So—very silly of him, he now understood—he had bought the trunk, wedged the body in it, and moved, trunk and all, to a different basement.
Birkett brilliantly abetted the lies, saliently by patching together disparate answers from prosecution witnesses so that they seemed to support the theory that Violette Kaye had either taken a mite too much morphine and fallen down the area steps or been pushed down them by a dissatisfied, over-eager or jealous client—and that, whatever had caused the fall, she had struck her head on a projecting rail or a pilaster of masonry.
Holes gaped in both Mancini’s story and Birkett’s theory: but the jury, having stayed out for some two hours, returned to the bijou court with a verdict of “Not guilty”.
Was Mancini surprised? One cannot tell. When he entered the dock to hear the verdict, he was wearing an overcoat—indicating that he expected to walk out into the high street a free man—but when the foreman of the jury spoke two words rather than the fatal one, he staggered and stared, and when he was at last able to speak to his counsel, muttered, “Not guilty, Mr Birkett—not guilty?”, as if he were a character in someone else’s dream.
(The following summer, Mancini toured fairgrounds with a sideshow featuring a variation on the trick of sawing a woman in half. Instead of a box, he used a large black trunk; his “victim” was his wife, whom he had met at Aladdin’s Cave shortly before his flight from Brighton and married a week after his acquittal. He did not draw the crowds for long, and was almost forgotten by 1941, when he was serving in the navy. In that year, a man who really was named Toni Mancini was hanged for a gang-murder in Soho, and people recalled the earlier case, the self-styled Toni Mancini, and said, “Now there’s a coincidence.”)
While Brighton Trunk-Crime No. 2 had been delighting the populace, Robert Donaldson and his eventually reduced team of helpers had been working hard to solve Trunk-Crime No. 1. Donaldson had reason to believe, but was never able to prove, that one or both of the missing arms had been burned on the Sussex Downs, close to a place where, after the Great War, the bodies of Hindu soldiers who had died in hospitals in or around Brighton were cremated. As to the whereabouts of the head—well, perhaps Donaldson obtained a general indication of its resting place when, early in September, he was put in touch with a young man of the town. The latter stated that “shortly before the discovery at the railway station, he and his girl had been walking along Black Rock, to the east of Brighton. In a rock pool they found a head. It was the head of a young woman. The man explained to his sweetheart that they should leave it alone as it was probably the remains of a suicide and that the police had removed all they needed of the body”.
As soon as Donaldson received this information, he caused a search to be made of the whole beach: “Nothing relevant was found, so I consulted various marine authorities on the question of where the head might be; the sweep of the tides indicated that it could have been taken out to sea and then swept ashore at Beachy Head, but nothing was found there either.”
The courting couple’s silliness was just one thing among many that Donaldson had to hide his anger about. His greatest reason for anger was the action of a high-ranking policeman stationed at Hove.
By early July, Donaldson had garnered indications that the person directly or indirectly responsible for Trunk-Crime No. I was Edward Seys Massiah, a man in his mid-fifties who hailed from the West Indian island of Trinidad. One of Massiah’s parents had been white, the other black, thus making him a mulatto, his skin dark but not ebony, his hair more wavy than crinkled, his lips quite thin. He had an impressive collection of medical qualifications: MD, MB, B.Ch, DTM. All but the last of those designatory letters, which stood for Doctor of Tropical Medicine, were scratched larger than his name on his brass shingle, which in 1934 gleamed beside the imposing entrance to a slightly less imposing house within sight of the sea at Hove: 8 Brunswick Square.
The fact that he lived as well as practised there was something he stressed in conversation with prospective patients and with gentlemen whose lady-friends were pregnant or at risk of becoming so; he was, so to speak, open all hours, and that convenience was allied with a guarantee of confidentiality. No doubt you will have guessed that he was an abortionist; and it will have occurred to you that abortion was a criminal offence.
Now, a likely cause of the death of the Girl with the Pretty Feet was a mishap during an attempt to abort her embryonic child; if that was the cause, then a person who had been involved in the arrangements for the abortion or the person who had tried to perform the operation, or both, would have been most anxious that the transaction and, more important, their roles in it remained secret.
When Robert Donaldson had put together diverse reasons for being suspicious of Edward Massiah (whose qualification of B.Ch was, by the way, a shortened form of the Latin Baccalaureus Chirurgiae, meaning Bachelor of Surgery), he found a sum greater than its parts. But as that sum did no
t equal justification for making an arrest, he came to the obvious conclusion that efforts were needed to ascertain whether there were additional reasons for suspicion—or whether there was a single exculpatory fact. Towards that end, he gathered a number of people together in one of the apartments at the Royal Pavilion; among those present at the meeting were Captain Hutchinson, Inspector Pelling, key-members of the trunk-crime team, and a senior officer from Hove. Donaldson enumerated the points that seemed to tell against Edward Massiah, invited discussion of them, and then—speaking specially to the man from Hove—requested covert collection of information regarding the doctor’s background, his present activities and acquaintances, and his movements on Derby Day. He emphasized the word covert.
However, that emphasis was overlooked or ignored by the Hove policeman. Having come upon—and kept to himself—a further unflattering fact about Edward Massiah, he went, uninvited and unexpected, to 8 Brunswick Square and laid Donaldson’s cards on the consulting-room table. Massiah paid attention, smiling the while, never interrupting. The sun shining through the tall windows glistened on the ranks of surgical instruments, on the green and crystal-clear pots of medication, on the framed diplomas, tinctured the red-plush couch, nestled in the careful creases of the doctor’s pearl-grey cravat, black jacket and striped trousers, flashed from the unspatted parts of his patent-leather shoes. Towards the end of the policeman’s speech, the doctor took a silver pencil and began jotting on a pad. Notes of what he had said and was saying, the policeman guessed.
The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes Page 40