Herald with an appeal. I had a drink with that London journalist when I came off shift, just before closing time. I told him about the knives.
‘ So that’s it, then – you’ve found the murder weapons,’ he said gleefully. ‘The killer is in Hove – probably did it in Hove.’ He tilted his head to look at the smoke-blackened ceiling of the pub. ‘The Hove Horror.’ He chinked his glass to mine. ‘Lovely stuff. ’
‘ Hove detectives have whisked some bloke off in a car to look at an empty house down there. ’
‘ A man whose identity has not been revealed,’ the reporter said, his intonation putting quotation marks around the statement. ‘Arrest imminent. ’
‘ I wouldn’t say that. It’s just the landlord of the property, I think. ’
He beckoned the barman over and bought me another round. Well, why not? I was seeing a young lady this evening and the drink would get me in the mood. Although I don’t need drink for that. I’m always in the mood. Sometimes I worry I’ve got it on the brain.
‘ Who cares?’ he said. ‘It’s a good story. So are the knives. ’
‘ They probably aren’t relevant – he used a saw to get the limbs off. ’
‘ We’ll worry about that when the saw turns up. Until then, the police have found the murder weapons.’ He flashed his awful yellow teeth in a cold smile.
Monday 25th June
What a difference three days make. By now we’ve got thousands of statements. We’re overwhelmed by the mass of material the public is offering us. Most of it is bound to be tripe but it’s working out what isn’t that’s the difficult part.
The number of people who have told us about mysterious noises and smells coming from their neighbours’ houses has been quite remarkable.
But we’re no further forward with the brown paper with the word ‘-ford’ on it. Turns out it’s got nothing to do withthe Sheffield woman, her daughter and the German woman, after all.
It would help if the Chief Superintendent could decide about the trunk. First he said it was a cheap one. Then on Friday he sent out a new statement. The trunk has clasps and fittings that you only find on certain manufacturer’s trunks.
Also on Friday, after I’d gone off shift, CDI Donaldson followed up a statement that a girl’s screams had been heard on a pleasure boat leaving Brighton. How do you distinguish between a scream of glee when a girl is being tickled or is overexcited and a screamof terror? The woman was alive and well.
Those knives have been bothering me. You could argue that the murderer would want to get rid of the murder weapons with all this fuss in the press about the murder. On the other hand, the murder was committed weeks ago. If the murderer had any ‘nous’, he’d have got rid of them then, before everybody was looking for such things. And this murderer must have ‘nous’ – or at least bravado. I mean, what would it take for him to transport human remains in a trunk then deposit them at Brighton’s left luggage office without giving himself away? Guts, that’s what.
Tuesday 26th June
I took a statement from a shop assistant this morning. Pretty young thing. Flirtatious. She’d been out on the Downs in Patcham with a party of girlfriends on Saturday when they’d seen a man in a blue suit and straw hat setting fire to a pile of rubbish.
‘ We told him it was dangerous as it was near a wooden fence. ’
‘ Proper little Girl Guide, aren’t you?’ She just looked at me. ‘What did he say? ’
She looked indignant.
‘ He told us to clear off. ’
She was a buxom girl. She caught me glancing at her breasts but didn’t seem to mind. I’m sure she arched her back a little.
‘ So we asked him what he was burning. He said fish. The smell was something peculiar but we couldn’t see properly because he wouldn’t let us get any nearer. ’
‘ You like going up on the Downs?’ I said.
She looked me straight in the eye.
‘ Are you asking in your…’ she seemed to be searching for the right phrase, ‘… official capacity? ’
Wednesday 27th June
Today we had a Southern Railway porter telling us about his experience with a man arriving at London Bridge station at 2.25 p.m. on Derby Day. He got off a train from Dartford en route to Brighton. He had a trunk that looked like the one pictured in the newspapers.
This porter – Edward Todd was his name – offered to carry the trunk. Unwillingly the man let him. Todd had difficulty lifting it – it weighed something like 60 pounds. And when he got the trunk to his shoulder he heard a dull thud inside it.
That train would have arrived in Brighton at 4.05 p.m. A bit early for the time we’d established, but this man could have been the killer.
Kate was really curious about the identity of the memoirist. She’d flicked ahead and through some of the files but couldn’t find any indication. She wondered where the rest of the records might be. She was sure that there must be some official account of who attended the opening of the trunk – she could find his name that way.
She phoned the library. A cheerful young woman gave her the number for the County Records Office in Lewes. Yes, they had the files that had belonged to the Central Division of the South East Police Authority. She could make an appointment to see them. And the autopsy photographs. That last threw her.
She knew Lewes. It was a pretty town, its streets clustered about the ruins of the castle keep. It was Islington-by-the-sea for fashionable Londoners who wanted to start a family in a place where there was a better quality of life.
She’d been brought up in Hampstead, just off Southend Green. When she was a teenager and taking her first alcoholic drinks, the pub she used was the one outside which Ruth Ellis had shot her lover. A bullet hole could still be seen on the outside wall of the pub – well, they said it was a bullet hole.
Sarah Gilchrist was talking to Reg Williamson when her mobile rang. They’d moved away from finding Finch’s body to the recent raid on the rotten meat store in a rat-infested warehouse in Newhaven.
The raid was the conclusion of Operation Dinner Out, in conjunction with local environmental health officers. The warehouse had been stacked to the rafters with rotten meat. Around a hundred tonnes of it. The stench had been incredible. Rancid chicken that had turned yellow through putrefaction had been bleached with chemicals to make it look healthy.
Then they’d found the ‘specialty’ meat. Decomposing lambs’ brains and cows’ feet, cows’ muzzles, smoked cattle-hide, gizzards and goat carcasses in two huge freezers. It was supposed to be sold as pet food but somebody cute – and they were thinking Steve Cuthbert – had decided to buy it from abattoirs, process it, package it and reintroduce it into the human food chain.
‘You know, all I see is the shit in life at the moment,’ she said. ‘It’s really getting me down. People acting as low as they can.’
‘I’m impressed by the ingenuity of criminals,’ Williamson said, rolling his ever-present, ever-unlit cigarette between his chubby fingers. ‘The way they can figure out how to make a buck in the gaps between. Jesus, if they applied that entrepreneurial spirit to legitimate business, they’d be captains of industry.’
‘What, you think captains of industry are legitimate?’
‘True enough,’ he said. ‘But when do they have the time to think up this stuff? Who would think Steve Cuthbert, if it is him, would say to himself: “Hello, there’s a gap in the market for reusing rotten meat.” How would they have the chemical knowledge to know what to do to make it at least look edible? And then to set up the production line, the transport infrastructure. And these are guys who were kicked out of school at twelve.’
Gilchrist stood and walked over to the window.
‘I don’t eat meat in ethnic restaurants any more,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, I just don’t. Most of that rotten meat ends up in halal butchers and specialist outlets. I’m not being racist but I do want to know where my food has come from.’
‘It’s no worse than fast food,’ Williamson said, ‘big greasy burgers.’
‘I don’t eat them either. Or sausages because usually they’re made from the sweepings off the butcher’s floor.’
