‘Get in your car and follow me – I’m parked down at the end of the street.’
Gilchrist crossed to her car, head down, ignoring the two men who were standing outside the pub watching her. One of them called to her but she slid into her car and drove down the street.
Tingley led her to the Marina.
Driving home, Kate couldn’t concentrate. She was thinking about the Trunk Murder but she was also thinking about Watts. Although she didn’t really go for older men, he was a bit of a hunk. He was a quiet man, but there was something about him that suggested he could take care of himself. And others?
She wondered about the third glass – whether Watts had been entertaining somebody who had hidden. Who might that have been?
She let herself into her flat. She lived in a first-floor flat in Sussex Gardens in Kemp Town, overlooking the sea. Kemp Town was the fashionable place to live in Brighton. Rows of Georgian terraces and brightly coloured cottages interspersed with restaurants and New Age shops.
Her flat in Sussex Gardens was her one concession to her parents. When she had moved to Brighton to do her doctorate, her father had bought the flat. As an investment, he said, but for her to live in whilst she was there.
She hated being beholden to her father but her mother pleaded with her. Kate selfishly didn’t want to share with other people – the last time had been a disaster – but she couldn’t afford the rent on anywhere decent in Brighton. Prices were the same as London. And this was more than decent.
She agreed. It was a two-bedroom flat and her parents came down sometimes to stay in the second bedroom over a weekend. It didn’t happen very often since it was awkward. She had worried at first that her father would want to stay when he came down for the Party Conference or when he had meetings with Labour politicians in town. But he chose to stay around the seafront in the Grand or the Hotel du Vin.
Kate went to the box in her living room. She moved the vase of lilies from the dining table and started to empty the box on to it. There was a box file labelled ‘Witness statements’ and a dozen or so cardboard files, all empty. Some had odd titles neatly printed on the covers: ‘Smells’, ‘Missing Women’, ‘Paper’, ‘Empty Houses’.
She took out the loose sheaves of papers from the cardboard box, papers that had at one time presumably belonged in these files. They were in no discernible order. A number were headed ‘County Borough of Brighton’ then ‘Statement of Witness’. Most were typed on manual typewriters, the occasional red letter coming through in the black type. Others were handwritten in blue or black ink by many different hands.
She turned one sheet over and found something strange typed on the reverse.
‘ This isn’t a diary as such. It’s a memoir if you like. A reminiscence. A slice of autobiography. Call it what you will – just don’t call it a confession. ’
Her interest piqued, she turned other sheets over and soon had a stack of what were clearly entries from a diary.
Excited, Kate settled down on her balcony. She looked around the square and smiled or nodded at those people in other flats who were on their balconies. Music drifted across the square. Coldplay and Bach and Miles Davis.
The sea was calm. As the sky darkened, the white lights that strung the length of the stubby finger of the Palace Pier grew brighter.
She had gathered the pages of the anonymous diary into some kind of date order. She was sure there were more pages in the files, but since the entries were typed up on the back of other documents, or on witness statement sheets, it was difficult on cursory examination to distinguish them from other typed material.
There were fragments that didn’t have dates attached. She put these aside. She started to read the entry for 6th June, the day the trunk was deposited at Brighton station.
NINE
Wednesday 6th June 1934
I remember 6th June. I don’t remember it because it was Derby Day. I’m not a betting man. I remember it because of the platinum blonde.
It had been a difficult week for me. Frenchie had been over on the Monday for her visit to Dr M. I met her off the ferry at the West Pier and she was alternately weepy and angry. She’d said she didn’t want to see me after, so I took her over to Hove and asked the receptionist to be sure she got a taxi back to the pier in plenty of time for the ferry back to France. I left more than enough money.
I was working that afternoon but I felt sorry for her – yes, me – so I nipped down to see her off. However, I got waylaid by a shopkeeper complaining about kids throwing stones at his shop window. By the time I got to the pier the ferry was already chugging towards the horizon. It was too far away to make out anybody on deck, if she was on deck.
I never saw her again.
That Wednesday was hot and sticky and I was relieved to be out of the office. Brighton’s main police station is in the basement of the Town Hall, two floors below the magistrates’ court. It was no place to be on a sunny day.
I’d been out since noon. First I’d been up at the railway station. It had been mobbed. The trains clattered in at the rate of 500 a day at this time of year. From London alone, a train every five minutes from Victoria, every fifteen from London Bridge. Half a million people over a weekend, five million a week in a couple of months’ time during the wakes holidays.
I stood at the end of platform three and watched people getting off their trains, then swarming across to the single track inset between platforms three and four. There they boarded the special train that took holidaymakers up to the Devil’s Dyke, the pleasure park set in a deep gorge on the Downs.
When I came out of the station I was jostled by more arrivals spilling into the sunlight. Some queued for the little trams that ran from the station to the two piers. Others set off to walk the quarter of a mile down the Queens Road to the sea glittering at its far end.
Many families had come from the dark slums of London and you could see them dazzled by the light, looking up at the expanse of blue sky and down towards the bright sea.
I’d observed before that usually the women and children reached the seafront first. The men would find an excuse to stop off in one of the public houses that lay between the station and their family day ahead.
A day spent on the beach, on the silver painted piers, splashing in the sea, racing in miniature motors, listening to the bands playing. Idly watching small aeroplanes out of Shoreham airport write their advertisements for all kinds of products in languid trails of smoke across the sky.
Don’t tell me I can’t be poetical.
No sooner did I walk in the police station than the desk sergeant sent me straight back out to deal with an incident in the Winter Gardens on the terrace above the aquarium. A drunken man claiming to be Lobby Ludd had been pestering the young women using the deck chairs.
‘ How do we know it isn’t Lobby Ludd?’ I said. ‘He’s due down here today. ’
Lobby Ludd was sent by the Westminster Gazette to tour the south coast resorts during the summer. When he was in Brighton, his photo and approximate whereabouts were given in that day’s copy of the newspaper. If you thought you recognized him, you went up to him with a copy of the newspaper and said: ‘You are Lobby Ludd and I claim my Westminster Gazette prize. ’
I’d heard he was so popular that special excursion trains ran to resorts where he was due to appear. His popularity was to do with the fact that the main prize was?50 – more if no one had won the previous day. There were also prizes of ten bob a go if anyone found one of the Lobby Ludd cards he hid in various places about the town.
The man claiming to be Lobby Ludd had scarpered by the time I got to the deckchairs. But the platinum blonde was there. She was pretty, with freckles and a cheeky smile.
She didn’t have much to say, except with her eyes.
‘ Lobby Ludd? He tried to get fresh. Sat down next to me and invited me to lunch. I said no, so he said, “Well, what about a drink?” He said he wasn’t after anything -’ she gave me a look – ‘but then you all say that, don’t you?
