’
‘ You weren’t tempted?’ I said, giving her a look back.
‘ He stank of gin and he was too desperate – kept saying all he wanted was for me to “stick close”. ’
‘ Too desperate, eh? I’ll make a note of that. ’
A few yards along, a fat spotty girl in pink was plonked in a deckchair. Her feet hardly touched the ground. A pale, bloodless girl sat beside her. She watched me avidly.
‘ Was it Lobby Ludd?’ I said to the spotty girl.
‘ He waved some cards but I don’t know if they were real. He said if I went with him for a drink, he’d let me have one of his cards so I could claim the ten bob. ’
‘ What did you say? ’
‘ I said give me the fifty pounds and I might be interested. ’
She and her friend squealed.
‘ Then what happened? ’
‘ I said I couldn’t leave my friend and didn’t he have one – to make a foursome like? He said no, then a young friend of his turned up. ’
‘ A young friend? ’
‘ He looked a bit of a bad sort. ’
‘ Did he now? ’
Behind the Regency terraces and the glamour of the seafront there was another Brighton of dark alleyways and festering slums. From here violence and crime had begun to spread.
In particular we’d been having trouble with razor gangs of young criminals marauding around town. They carried cut-throat razors and weren’t afraid to use them when they caused trouble in the dance halls, on the piers and up at the racetrack.
‘ They had a bit of a to-do,’ the spotty girl said. ‘Fred – that’s what Lobby Ludd said his real name was – left then. ’
‘ This young man he had an altercation with…? ’
‘ Well, he obviously knew Fred. But Fred denied it. Even said his name wasn’t Fred. Then he ran off. ’
The platinum blonde was looking out across Madeira Drive to the Palace Pier. I walked back to her.
I was at the railway station twice that day. But had I been there some time between six and seven in the evening, would it have made any difference? All those people flooding off the trains – would I have noticed a man lugging a brown trunk with a woman’s naked torso in it? A man who, some time in that hour, deposited it in the left parcels office, receiving in return the deposit ticket CT1945?
I returned to the station at about ten that evening to see the platinum blonde safely on her train back to whichever London slum she’d come from. It was the least I could do.
Kate paused for a moment and looked across at the Pier. She wondered who Frenchie was and Dr M. She couldn’t quite get the tone of his remarks about the platinum blonde. That last paragraph sounded harsh, callous.
The next entry she found was eleven days later.
Sunday 17th June
They found the woman in the trunk today in the left parcels office at Brighton station. I was the one who opened the trunk the second time. At the inquest my sergeant, Percy Stacey, stated that he’d opened it. He didn’t. He wasn’t even in the room. He was heaving up in the Gents because of the stench.
Old Billy Vinnicombe, the cloakroom attendant, had been aware of a bad smell for a few days. The hot weather wasn’t helping. He’d narrowed it down to this trunk he’d taken in on 6th June, Derby Day. He summoned Detective Bishop of the railway police who opened the trunk. He found it contained human remains. Bishop called us at 8.30 p.m.
Percy and me had got there ten minutes later. When we’d stepped in the office with the station manager, Percy had taken one whiff and headed for the latrines.
I’d had a good day until then. I’d been up on Devil’s Dyke and met a willing girl. I was still thinking about her, to be honest, when I dealt with the trunk.
Bloke called Henry George Rout was on duty when the trunk had been deposited. We got him in later but he couldn’t remember the man who had deposited the trunk at all: it was rush hour and the station was extra busy because of people coming back from the Derby.
I undid the straps and tugged the lid up. The stink was bad enough when the trunk was closed but as the lid fell back it was overpowering.
The station manager, Vinnicombe and I reared back and reached for our hankies. I remember Vinnicombe had a red-spotted one as if he fancied himself as Dick Whittington.
I looked into the trunk. There was a lot of cotton wool padding. I took the cotton wool out, keeping my head turned away, trying not to gag. Near the hinges the cotton wool was soaked in what looked like blood. Then I took out several layers of cheap brown paper to expose a brown paper parcel that almost completely filled the trunk. There was a thin sash cord, tied once lengthwise and three times across. I cut the cord with my clasp knife then parted the sheaves of paper.
I was looking at a naked woman’s torso, her teats small, her rib cage pronounced. It took me a few seconds to realize that in such a small trunk her torso was all there was to see. No head, arms, legs, hands or feet.
I did gag then. We all did. We had to clear it up before I could do any more with the trunk, though Percy Scales kept that out of his inquest statement too. As we mopped up we tried to joke about who’d been eating what. But we were all glancing over at the open trunk. I’m a bit of a reader so I kept thinking of it as Pandora’s Box. What had we let out?
Scales and I moved the trunk to the police station where Dr Pilling, the police surgeon, examined the woman’s remains then had us take them to the mortuary. He thought the woman was about forty. We compiled a description, such as it was, and circulated it to all stations.
Then we told our Chief Constable. Captain W. J. ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson was, like many of the senior officers, a veteran of the Great War. He’d been gassed at Mons but didn’t seem to have come out of it too badly. He had the occasional coughing fit but he was nowhere as bad as some of the men I’d come across, coughing up the lining of their lungs every morning. I was glad I’d been too young for that racket.
Hutch was a good enough boss, but the few times I’d had dealings with him I’d seen little evidence of his detection skills. He must have recognized this himself because the next day he called in Scotland Yard.
Monday 18th June
I had my feet up on my desk smoking a Woodbine and getting stirrings thinking about the girl at Devil’s Dyke when the news came through that more of the woman’s body had been found.
‘ You’re working hard, I see,’ Percy said as he barged into the office. I slid my feet hurriedly off the desk and sat up straight in my chair. ‘Maybe you should be out trying to trace the shop that sold the trunk. ’
Not bloody likely.
We’d released a photo and description of the trunk. It was made of brown canvas and plywood, battened with four hoops. It was small – two foot three inches long, by one foot five inches wide, by a foot deep. It made me sad that someone could be callous enough to pack a human being – or part of one – into such a confined space.
It was a cheap trunk you could buy almost anywhere for about 12s 6d. We’d got about fifty policemen doing the roundsof drapers, ironmongers and chemists to find out who’d soldit.
The cord I’d cut when I discovered the torso in the trunk was for a Venetian blind. One piece of the brown paper had the end of a word scrawled in blue pencil. The rest of the word had been obliterated by dried blood. The part of the word that could still be read was ‘-ford’.
These were all the clues we had.
There hadn’t been much blood in the trunk, considering, so the thinking was she’d been dead a while before she was put in there.
‘ They’ve found the legs,’ Percy said.
We’d sent out an instruction for railway officials everywhere in the Southern Railway system to search all suspicious luggage and parcels. We’d already heard there was a case at Wimbledon containing women’s clothing, but as that’s what luggage is for we weren’t getting excited.
