City of Dreadful Night

by Peter Guttridge

  ‘Oh, a pauper’s grave, for sure.’

  ‘Can we try, then?’

  ‘When was she buried?’

  ‘I’m not entirely sure,’ Kate said. ‘She died in June 1934 and the police did an autopsy. I’m not sure how long they’d need to keep the body – well, her remains. Three months?’

  ‘Let’s try six,’ Sally said. ‘You have no name for this woman?’

  ‘That’s the problem.’

  ‘OK – I’ll see what I can do.’

  I was feeling sorry for myself when Gilchrist phoned. I never thought I’d be the kind of person to pine but I was pining for my former life. The man who’d yomped 200 miles in six days during the first Gulf War, now acting like a wuss. I was really getting into the unfairness of it. Me, the poster boy for routinely arming the police. I took a lot of shit for that, then six months later every other chief constable in the country was clamouring for it. By then, for me, it was too late.

  ‘Someone has burnt my flat down.’ Gilchrist, breathing heavily.

  ‘Are you safe?’ I said, immediately on my feet.

  ‘I’m fine. I wasn’t intended to be in it – they got me out on a wild goose chase. They were warning me off, I think.’

  ‘Do you know who they are?’

  ‘Just a voice on a phone. Do you have any more ideas?’

  ‘I’m waiting on Tingley. You’ve lost everything – that must be dreadful.’

  ‘Actually, I haven’t. Most of my stuff is in store after my last move. I lost some nice CDs and, I assume, all my clothes. I think I can survive without the Mamma Mia DVD.’

  ‘Do you want to stay here?’

  There was silence on the line.

  ‘Tempting but probably not a good idea.’

  ‘Do you want to come over at least?’

  ‘What I want is to go and find those Hayward Heath bastards and confront them.’

  ‘So much for being warned off. I’ll come with you.’

  Death hadn’t touched Kate yet. Her grandparents on both sides had died when she was too young to remember them. At university she knew a couple of students well enough to say hello to who died from overdoses. But nobody close to her had ever died. She had never suffered that anguish. And never visited a crematorium before.

  Woodvale was a big cemetery but it wasn’t exactly Arlington or those cemeteries for the war dead she’d seen in Normandy – line after line of white crosses. Normandy and Brittany had been regular holiday destinations when she was little, and her father had made them visit three or four of the World War Two battle sites and attached cemeteries for articles he had to write.

  She went the wrong way at first. She drove up Bear Road, a steep, narrow road out of the clutter and noise of a bad road junction. It was a windy day, puffy white clouds scudding across the sky. She drove into the Woodvale cemetery. With its abundance of trees and colourful bedding, it might have been a country park.

  She drove down a narrow, pockmarked road with gravestones among the trees – some ostentatious, others much less so. She followed the sign to the lodge, a Victorian flint and brick house on the right-hand side of the road. Below, she could see the road go down to connect with the hustle of the Lewes Road and the big shopping complex there.

  It struck Kate as strange to have such an oasis of calm so near the bustle of rush-hour Brighton. But then that was Brighton – this hodgepodge of disparate things colliding – sometimes clashing – but somehow working. Not necessarily working together, of course, but definitely working.

  She looked for cypresses as she drove through the cemetery. Those precise, evocative exclamation marks with their acutely delineated shadows so associated with death. But there were none. She went into the lodge, conscious of the heavy scent of rhododendra.

  There was a narrow counter with a long, open office behind it. A pretty woman with a mass of grey hair and a tattooed ankle came over.

  ‘Is Sally here?’ Kate said.

  ‘I’m Sally.’

  ‘We spoke on the phone – about the Trunk Murder victim?’

  The woman nodded and walked over to a cluttered desk. She picked up a sheaf of papers.

  ‘I found the grave,’ she said. ‘At least I found where it roughly is.’

  Kate tilted her head.

  ‘We have grid references for a block of plots. I know roughly where she was buried but I don’t know which the exact grave is. And it’s in an area where other burials may have taken place across where she was buried.’

  ‘What does that mean if we’re thinking about exhumation?’

  ‘It means we’re not sure which is her body.’

  Kate nodded.

  ‘I think in the circumstances she might be quite recognizable.’

  The woman shrugged. She handed over the papers.

  ‘The woman is buried in the cemetery across the road,’ she said. ‘But these days her plot is one of a number given over to wildlife.’

  Kate thanked the woman and went back to her car. She wound her window down. It had been raining and there was an earthy smell in the air. She drove slowly, avoiding the potholes in the road, past stone crosses on plinths, stained and lichened mausolea, headstones tilted at odd angles poking out of tangled undergrowth.

  The entrance to the other cemetery was directly opposite. She drove in, turned right and drove up towards Woodland Grove.

  The cemetery was deserted. She drove between a wall on her right and graves on her left. She took a left and parked beside a white van. An estate car was on the other side of the van.

  The cemetery sloped away below her. Beyond it she could see, on the next hill, the racecourse. There was a giddy curve of houses, the railway station where all this began on another hill, and the sea beyond. Always the sea.

  She checked the map and walked up the slope between newish gravestones. People who had died in the past five years. Now there were a few people in the graveyard. A couple laying flowers and a man on his own looking down on a small grave, lost in thought.

  Quite a few young people buried here. Car accidents? Drugs? There were toy animals on a number of the graves. That of a three-year-old child was piled with teddy bears and other soft toys.

  At the rim of these recent graves was longer grass, a grove of trees. She walked over. There was a sign: ‘This area has been designated as a nature reserve.’

  The ground around and beneath the long grass was uneven – as well it might be, given that it was covering a score of graves. These were the paupers’ graves. People buried by the parish at the cost of the parish in unmarked graves. And the woman – the remains of the woman – found in the trunk at Brighton railway station was one of them.

  Kate had no idea where in the twenty square feet her grave was.

  She looked into the long grass. Looked up at the blue sky. A sudden wind shivered the trees. And when she looked back at the plot of ground, a man was standing at the other end of it.

  Surprised, she took a step back.

  He was tall, skinny, in a long black raincoat. He was in his thirties, maybe early forties. He stood, feet together, hands clasped in front of him, head bowed, as if in silent contemplation of the plot.

  Then he lifted his head, just a little, and raised his eyes to look at her. He gave her a mischievous, malevolent look from that strange angle, made more sinister when he smiled. He called out to her, his voice deep, an edge to it.

  ‘What Katie did next, eh, darling?’

  Then he turned and ambled away.

  FIFTEEN

  ‘Well, something is kicking off,’ I said the moment Gilchrist had got into my car. ‘What happened to your flat is the worst, but I’ve just had calls from Kate and Tingley. Kate had a scare put into her – some guy hassled her up at the cemetery.’

  ‘The cemetery? What was she doing there?’

  ‘She’s found the grave of the Trunk Murder victim.’

  ‘Oh, that. Clever girl. And Tingley?’

  ‘He’s found out who Gary Parker’s fa
ther is.’

  Gilchrist snapped her head round.

  ‘How the hell has he done that? We don’t know yet.’

  ‘He has his methods. Anyway, somebody is getting really rattled or pissed off – or both.’

  ‘Gary Parker’s father?’

  ‘No, that doesn’t make sense. The timing is wrong for him to come down heavy on us if his son is wanting a deal.’

  ‘I want to talk to that gap-toothed bastard, Connolly, in Haywards Heath.’

  ‘Tingley is on to him too. We’re going to pay him a visit. But we’ve got to collect Tingley from Gatwick first.’

  ‘Tingley’s been away?’

  ‘Not unless Lewes counts. A meeting. As usual, he was enigmatic.’

  Tingley was waiting for them at the South Terminal. He slid into the back seat. Gilchrist told him about her flat but was really just waiting to ask one question.

  ‘Who is Gary Parker’s father?’ she said.

  ‘Not who you’d expect,’ Tingley said.

  Kate was trying hard not to freak out. The man at the cemetery had chilled her to the bone. What could he possibly want from her? Surely nothing to do with the Trunk Murder – this wasn’t one of those silly thrillers where secret societies protected a secret for centuries. Was it?

  Wrapped in a rug, she was on her balcony. Tonight, the music in the square was just Amy Winehouse and something unrecognizable involving a heavy bass beat. She had a notepad on her lap and a pencil in her hand. She was trying to focus on the Trunk Murder but all she could think about was that thin man standing at the other end of the burial plot.

  When he walked away she thought of following to ask what he meant, but there was no one around and she wondered if he might attack her. Then she thought he might have done something to her car. When she got back to it she got in gingerly and locked it immediately, before starting the engine and testing the brakes.

  She’d entered her flat nervously too, but there was no sign of any kind of break-in. She’d phoned Watts and told him what had happened. He’d told her to stay in the flat until he got over there later in the day. Told her to keep her mobile beside her.

  It rang now, playing the irritatingly perky tune she couldn’t figure out how to change. Her parents’ number flashed up on the screen.

  ‘Hello, Kate,’ her father said in an oddly hearty voice. ‘How are things?’

  ‘Things are fine, Dad, thanks.’

  ‘Everything going OK, is it? You’re feeling OK?’

  Her father never asked anything about her except when he was checking up on her for his own peculiar reasons.

  ‘I’m fine, Dad. Why do you ask?’

  There was silence on the line for a moment. Then:

  ‘Nothing unusual happened?’

  It was Kate’s turn to be silent as she pondered his asking her this question after her encounter in the cemetery.

  ‘Not really, no.’

  ‘Not really – what do you mean, not really?’

  ‘I mean no. How’s Mum?’

  ‘Mum’s fine,’ he said impatiently. ‘She’s wondering when you might be coming up to London again for a visit.’ He cleared his throat. ‘In fact, we were both wondering if you might like to come and stay for a few days. We don’t see nearly enough of you.’

  Stranger and stranger.

  ‘I’ve got work, Dad.’

  ‘Don’t you have leave due?’

  ‘I haven’t been there long enough to get leave yet.’ And if I had, she thought but didn’t say, I wouldn’t want to spend it at home.

  ‘Maybe next weekend, then.’

  ‘Maybe – it depends on my shifts.’

  Another silence. Finally:

  ‘OK, then. Well, you take care, Kate. And phone me if you need me.’

  ‘Will do, Dad.’

  ‘Love you.’

  ‘Bye, Dad.’

  She dropped the phone in her lap and listened to Amy Winehouse’s by now poignant views on rehab ricocheting round the square. She thought for a moment about other singers she’d liked, who’d arrived but hadn’t stayed long. Whatever happened to Macy Gray?

  But really she was thinking about her dad calling. It had to be more than coincidence. The man in the cemetery was something to do with the grey areas of her father’s life. The many grey areas. In threatening her, the man was sending a message to her father. And her father had clearly received it.

  There had been concern in her father’s voice as their conversation had gone on. It was a long time since she had heard that. It would have touched her had she allowed it to. There was fear too. She had never known her father to be in a situation he didn’t fully control. Maybe this was it – the first time.

  Kate pulled the throw up over her shoulders and waited to hear from Watts.

  ‘James Tingley – you tease,’ I said. ‘Who would have thought it?’

  ‘I’m not teasing. I’m trying to get it clear in my head. I’d thought it would be Cuthbert – same Cro-Magnon mentality. I’d hoped it was Hathaway so we could do a deal that would explain your situation. But it’s neither.’

  ‘We get that,’ Sarah said. ‘So who is Gary Parker’s father?’

  ‘Another close friend of Mr Watts here. This whole affair is bedevilled with them.’

  ‘And that close friend is . . . ?’ I said, trying to listen to the satnav instructions at the same time. I was driving down dark, winding lanes to the north of Hampstead Heath.

  ‘A certain Mr Winston Hart.’

  ‘You’re joking!’ I said, almost missing a turning.

  ‘Who’s Winston Hart?’ Sarah said.

  Tingley looked wolfish.

  ‘The Chair of the Police Authority that forced Bob’s resignation,’ he said.

  Kate had gone back inside her flat from the balcony, double-locked the French windows and pulled out the Trunk Murder files again. She was conscious that she was spending far too much time on this but, frankly, she didn’t have much else in her life. Her last relationship had gone south, her job was boring as hell . . . and so it went.

  She looked again at the remaining two undated scraps of the diary.

  My background is Northern. You don’t look at the mantelpiece when you’re poking the fire. I didn’t bother too much about faces – I was more interested in bodies. So that was unusual for me. Noticing the face so much, I mean. Nobody would have thought she was forty. She looked ten years younger. In fact, she looked like Carole Lombard, that movie star. Spitting image.

  Who was he talking about? Just another of his many women? Kate was thinking about what Tingley had said about Spilsbury getting the age wrong. Oh, there was something here, for sure. But what exactly?

  The next entry was more factual.

  Come September and we’d looked at about 3,000 statements from the public. We had about 1,000 letters from Germany. But now I was out of work so far as the Trunk Murder investigation was concerned. The Scotland Yard boys, Donaldson and Sorrell, went back up to London. Unofficially they had another twelve months to solve the case. The operations room in the Royal Pavilion was wound up.

  I told the local press that Scotland Yard would be investigating ‘a secret list of fifty men, selected because of their association with certain sorts of women’. Of course, that wasn’t entirely true – in fact, I’d plucked the number out of the air.

  I was in trouble, though. The powers that be were giving me a hard time about my extra-curricular activities. There was talk of disciplinary action. Possibly resignation. Perhaps criminal proceedings. Ha bloody ha.

  Kate assumed it was the diarist’s habit of leaking stories to the press that was the problem. But she wondered about his way with women. Wondered whether sometimes his seduction method was too forceful.

  She needed to explore whatever files were available in the National Archives in Kew. That was the repository for all the old Scotland Yard files, and she hoped there would be material in there that existed nowhere else. Failing that, there might be something that
would help her to identify whoever was writing this diary.

  ‘You’re only paranoid if people haven’t really got it in for you,’ I said triumphantly – but my mind was whirring. First, I couldn’t figure the man Sarah had described as the son of the effete Winston Hart with his stupid moustache and his middle-class pretensions. Second, did that actually mean I was right and he was somehow part of a plot against me?

  ‘I’m tempted to abandon Connolly and head for Hart,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ Sarah said. ‘We have to talk to Connolly – he’s in this up to his neck.’

  ‘I’ve seen Hart,’ Tingley said. ‘And we’re here. Drive past the house, Bob.’

  We’d reached an imposing Elizabethan farmhouse, alone on the road, with a wide drive to one side of it. I noticed that lights were on in various parts of the house. I drove about a hundred yards past it and pulled into a passing point.

  ‘You’ve seen Hart? And?’

  ‘Not now, Bob.’

  I sighed.

  ‘So what do we do?’

  ‘We go up and knock on the door,’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘What if he won’t see us?’ I said.

  Tingley just grinned.

  Somebody rapped on Kate’s door. She had a fisheye lens set in it. She looked through it but nobody was there. The chain was on but she didn’t open the door. Her heart thumping, she stayed with her eye glued to the fisheye. Still nobody there. She retreated to her sofa but couldn’t take her eyes off her door. All she could think, however, was that to knock on her door you had to get through the locked outer door to the whole house.

  She phoned Watts.

  ‘This is not a good time,’ I said when I heard Kate’s voice. Tingley was straddling Connolly, Gilchrist was over by the window looking out, rubbing her chin. Connolly was struggling to get his breath. Tingley punched him again, very precisely. Connolly’s breath bubbled in his throat.

  ‘Enough now, Jimmy. You’ve made your point.’

  ‘Have I?’ he said, slapping Connolly across the face. ‘Do you feel I have, Billy boy?’

  ‘Fuck you,’ Connolly spluttered.

  ‘Tough guy,’ Tingley said, drawing his fist back.

  ‘Enough.’ Gilchrist this time, striding across from the window to grab Tingley’s arm.