the bedside table. It was bloody. There was a pile of the woman’s teeth in it. Other teeth were scattered over the bed.
‘Actually, Clint, I still hate this job,’ she muttered.
‘You and me both,’ Williamson said. ‘You and me both.’
I watched Kate’s expression change as she took in the implications of what I’d told her.
‘You mean my grandfather was the one who ordered the destruction of the Trunk Murder files.’
‘If I’ve got my dates right, quite possibly – but the dates might be wrong.’
Kate thought for a moment.
‘How weird a coincidence is it that I’m doing this research now? But why would he do that?’
‘There’s more, I’m afraid.’
‘Go on.’
‘I’m not sure but I think he may have started his police career here…’
‘Back in the early thirties?’
I nodded. Kate sat back.
‘Wow. Just bloody wow.’
She took a long swallow of her drink. Tingley and I exchanged glances.
‘Small world,’ he said.
‘Smaller than you think,’ I said. ‘My dad was a policeman too.’
Kate put her drink down.
‘He’s a writer, isn’t he?’ she said.
‘But he was a policeman back in the thirties.’
Kate frowned. The thirties was ancient history to her.
‘I thought you said he was alive.’
‘He is. He’s ninety-five. He’s the George Bernard Shaw of the crime genre. He was running marathons until he was eighty-five.’ I shook my head. ‘And he’s a bastard.’
‘As a father, you mean?’ Kate said. ‘Tell me about it.’
‘No, more than that.’
Tingley had been watching me closely. He’d picked up on a tone in my voice.
‘Where did he serve?’
I gave a small smile and jabbed a finger towards the floor.
‘Here. That’s how he met your grandfather, Kate.’
There was silence around the table.
‘Kate, you’re wondering if either your grandfather or my father wrote that diary.’
‘I’m wondering more than that,’ she said.
‘If she’s wondering the same as me,’ Tingley said, ‘she’s wondering which one of them was the Brighton Trunk Murderer.’
Kate was in a fog and not just because of the alcohol she’d consumed on an empty stomach. She didn’t like the man who wrote the diary and she thought he was keeping secrets that the missing bits of it might reveal. From what Bob Watts had said, perhaps his father had written the memoir. Or her grandfather. Then again, perhaps neither of them had.
As for the idea of either of them being the murderer, well, of course, if this were fiction, one of them would be. But this wasn’t fiction. This was real life.
Tingley was talking. She didn’t listen at first but then she tuned in.
‘I’m thinking he got the idea to put her in the trunk from precedent: 1927 at Charing Cross Station. The mainline cloakroom. A trunk was delivered by taxi, but the porter didn’t remember the man who was with it. It wasn’t airtight so the cloakroom attendants started to smell it quite soon. Inside – under brown paper – was a woman divided into five parts by amputation at shoulder and hip joint.’
‘Did the police get the murderer?’ Kate said.
‘They did, by tracing the taxi and finding where he picked up the person with the trunk. Spilsbury was the man who did the autopsy. He concluded the woman had been knocked out, then asphyxiated. He also said that because of the skilled way she’d been cut up the murderer was a slaughterman. In that he was entirely wrong.’
‘So the great Spilsbury wasn’t infallible,’ Watts said.
‘Far from it – and something for us to bear in mind.’
Watts looked at Kate.
‘What do you see when you think of the Trunk Murderer?’ he said.
‘I see either your father or my grandfather.’
Watts smiled.
‘Not really,’ she said. ‘My imagination has been colonized by the movies. I think in film images. A man standing beneath a yellow gaslight, the light falling at an angle and spreading a long shadow on the cobbled street. It’s an image that I’ve got from Hitchcock’s The Lodger morphing into The Exorcist.’
‘And this is your killer?’
‘Yes – and in black and white, despite the yellow light – if that makes sense.’
‘Sort of.’
‘Then there’s a man in a homburg and topcoat, his shoes polished, walking with deliberate steps down a rain-glistening alley.’ She smiled. ‘Except in reality it was summer so it was probably daylight and he would have been sweltering.’
‘Strange, isn’t it,’ Tingley said, ‘how we picture him through a series of mirrors, representation of murderers from that period in photos and TV and books and our own imaginations. I see him smoking a pipe and in a heavy three-piece suit – even in the summer.’
‘I don’t see him at all,’ Watts said, rather sadly, Kate thought. ‘But I wonder if he intended to kill her? If he did, then chopping her up would be cold-blooded, thought out. If he didn’t, it would perhaps be more difficult, much more upsetting.’
‘And how did he live with that for the rest of his life?’ Kate said.
‘Maybe he was her pimp so he was pretty insensitive anyway,’ Tingley said. ‘Maybe he killed others, in other ways.’
‘Maybe I’ll find out tomorrow when I go to the records office in Lewes.’ Kate pointed at the handwritten pages in front of Tingley. ‘I’m absolutely certain I’ll find out who our anonymous scribe is.’
Kate was about to leave when Watts’s phone rang. It was Gilchrist.
‘I don’t think I can do that now,’ Watts said. ‘It’s Gilchrist,’ he said to Kate and Tingley. He looked at Kate. ‘Do you want to meet her when her shift finishes to give her a debrief?’
Kate liked Gilchrist. Kate was tipsy. She thought for just a moment.
‘Sure.’
An hour later, she was meandering rather than walking into Ha Ha to meet Sarah Gilchrist. She tried to sober up with strong coffee. She had done a reasonable job by the time Gilchrist arrived looking drawn and tense. Kate watched the way she seemed to shoulder her way into the bar. She nodded at Kate but didn’t come over until she’d got a drink. She stood at the bar, shoulders high and tense, until the barman handed her a glass of wine, then she came over to Kate and sat down stiffly on the sofa beside her.
‘Glad you’ve got a drink,’ Gilchrist said. ‘I hate women who go in bars and don’t buy a drink until their friends arrive. Or just order tapwater. They want to be in nice places but they don’t want to pay to be there. They seem to have a problem understanding how capitalism works.’
Kate watched her for a moment. Gilchrist responded to the scrutiny.
‘Rough day,’ she said quietly.
Kate nodded and listened while Gilchrist outlined the discovery of the man in the bathroom and his girlfriend unconscious on the blood-soaked bed.
‘They were both under the influence of GHB. A fun drug, supposedly, unless you take too much. Taken to excess, it causes hallucinations. They were seeing floating furniture, clowns, witches.’ She took a swig of her drink. ‘And somewhere in this he decided it would be a good idea to pull her teeth out with a pair of pliers. We found eighteen.’
