‘There is a kind of handwritten diary from a policeman involved in the case. Not all of it, just fragments.’
‘Which policeman?’ Gilchrist said.
‘I don’t know – I’m hoping the County Records will help me identify him.’
Watts still had the odd look on his face. Before Kate could press him, Tingley glanced at his phone – they’d all heard a text alert – and took Watts to one side.
During the discussion about the head and torso, Gilchrist had been thinking about Finch’s body washed up at Beachy Head and Gary Parker chopping up his friend. She bought another glass of wine for her and Kate. She warmed to Kate.
‘You know who I am, right?’ she asked her when they’d both taken a gulp.
‘I do. Can I ask – which has caused you most problems – your involvement with the Milldean incident or your fling with your boss?’
Gilchrist stared at her for a long moment then burst out laughing.
‘Please, don’t sugar-coat it – just ask me straight out.’
Kate flushed.
‘Sorry.’
‘It’s OK. The two together are a pretty powerful combination.’
‘Do you regret your fling?’
Gilchrist had asked herself the same question time and again. But now it was her turn to flush.
‘If I’m honest, I’m bitter about the consequences but don’t regret the fling.’
‘But he was married.’
The moral certainty of youth, Gilchrist thought. She didn’t know how old Kate was but she assumed she was younger. And she’d felt that same way once, before life kicked in.
Her mother was a feminist, had lived through the pill and the pressure on women to engage in sex for fun, whether it was fun for them or not. She belonged to that whole generation of women used by men and who ignored their own needs because most women wanted relationships, not one-night stands. Her mother couldn’t understand the notion of the mistress. Couldn’t understand the idea that women should have solidarity with each other but so many broke ranks to have affairs with married men, ignoring the suffering of the wives.
Gilchrist scanned the room, as she’d been doing since she first entered the hotel.
‘What I regret is losing my anonymity,’ she said. ‘In many ways I hate Brighton – so much “Look at me”. But all this exhibitionism, paradoxically, goes side by side with anonymity. When the scandal broke, losing my anonymity was hateful.’
Her phone beeped and she excused herself to read the text. It was from the station. Gary Parker, the man who’d chopped up his friend, wanted to see her.
TWELVE
‘ I want to do a deal.’
Gilchrist looked at Gary Parker and tried not to show her distaste. This was a man who had chopped up his best friend two weeks earlier and had expressed no remorse, no curiosity, no revulsion – in fact, no emotion at all.
‘I don’t think a deal is going to work for you. You’ve killed someone – and in a particularly brutal way.’
‘I’ve got information.’
She sighed, thinking for the moment about the anonymous woman left in the trunk in 1934. She imagined that her killer had acted more soberly, in cold blood, when he cut up her body. She turned back to Parker.
‘I’m listening.’
He looked at her coldly.
‘No – doesn’t work like that. I need to know I’m getting a deal.’
She stood, nodded at Reg Williamson, who was leaning by the door.
‘Conversation over, then.’
‘Bollocks. Who can authorize a deal?’
‘No one. You can talk to me or you can talk to that wall.’
‘No deal, no talk.’
She grimaced, sat down again, not wanting to be here.
‘Give me a hint,’ she said, trying to keep the revulsion out of her voice. She was disgusted by this man.
‘I know who did them rapes in Milldean. During the street party.’
There had been three reported rapes during the riots.
‘You mean during the riots?’
‘Fucking great that was.’
‘Who was it?’
‘My mate.’
‘The one you killed?’
‘That’s why I done it. He can’t be behaving like that with young gels.’
‘That was your motive for killing him and chopping him in pieces?’
She couldn’t keep the disbelief out of her voice.
His hand dropped into his lap. He stroked himself for a moment. Then he seemed to forget and the hand lay there on his thigh.
‘You look like you got great tits. Can I have a squeeze?’
‘Watch your language, lad,’ Williamson growled.
‘Fuck you, fat man.’
Williamson moved off the wall but Sarah raised a hand to stop him.
‘Are you saying that’s why you did it?’ she said.
‘We done a lot of kit that day. I was gone, man.’
He lapsed into silence. Gilchrist sat still, looking down at the coffee stains on the table between them. Parker brought his hand up from his thigh and started clasping and unclasping it in his other scrawny hand on the table in front of him. His nails were chewed down to the quick and he had ‘love’ and ‘hate’ tattooed in blue ink, one letter at a time, on the knuckles of each hand.
Gilchrist remembered being terrified by a film she’d seen on the telly as a kid. The Night of the Hunter with Robert Mitchum as an insane preacher pursuing two little children after he’d murdered their mother. Much of it seemed to take place at night or in places with deep, frightening shadows.
Mitchum had been so scary and psychotic. To demonstrate his preaching on the struggle between good and evil, he too had ‘love’ tattooed on one hand and ‘hate’ on the other, and he clasped his big hands together and wrestled them. She’d been terrified. She shuddered now at another image of this looming man towering over a helpless little girl.
Parker broke wind forcefully.
‘Jesus,’ Williamson said, disgusted.
The smell was appalling, but Gilchrist was at least relieved to have been dragged away from the entrance to that particular memory lane.
Parker started up again.
‘Some blokes only want to give it up the arse and they’re not fussy whose arse. Women, men, armadillos.’ He showed his ferret teeth and cackled. ‘OK, maybe not the fucking armadillos.’
He began rocking in his chair.
‘These blokes who sew up live birds in the chests of their victims. One guy pulled their lungs out and threw them over their shoulders. There was that guy that skinned his humps.’
‘These are all fiction,’ she said, exasperated. ‘They’re not real,’
‘Fuck off – that bloke who skinned them was real – and are you trying to fucking tell me people don’t do these things in real life?’
‘No, you’ve demonstrated that.’
