Gilchrist shook her head.
‘Drugs are killing this town.’
After ten minutes or so they moved to the back of the restaurant. It was quieter there, although they could still hear noise from the front of the restaurant.
‘I’m sorry that I haven’t engaged fully with the Trunk Murder,’ Sarah said, swirling her red wine in her oversized glass. ‘I’ve been preoccupied.’
‘Clearly – plus your career has been jeopardized – how could you not be preoccupied?’
Gilchrist shrugged.
‘If I’ve got this right,’ she said, ‘the Trunk Murder victim had been pregnant for four months. Do you think she knew? Was she scrupulous about when her periods were happening?’
Kate put down her drink.
‘I think so. And being pregnant and unmarried would be a big deal. In those days, if you weren’t married, you needed to get married if you were pregnant.’
‘Yes, you’re right – she knew.’ Gilchrist flexed her shoulders. ‘A woman knows, though doesn’t always want to admit she knows, right? So she chooses her time to tell the man. If she’s a mistress, she waits to use it as a lever for him to leave his wife?’
‘I’ve been wondering if she got pregnant deliberately or knew the rules?’
‘Rules?’ Gilchrist said.
‘You know – that mistresses are just that – no claims on the man.’
Gilchrist smiled.
‘I don’t think it has ever worked quite like that. I believe it’s rare that a mistress just wants to be a mistress – she wants to move up in the pecking order.’
‘Was that how…’
Gilchrist, still smiling, gave Kate a look. Kate flushed.
‘How it was for me with Bob? No – that was strictly a one-night thing.’ Gilchrist took a bigger swig from her wine. ‘I wouldn’t do that to another woman – except I did.’
‘So what does that make our unidentified woman in the trunk?’
Gilchrist reached over and squeezed Kate’s arm. ‘I think you’re doing a great job for her. It’s about respect, isn’t it?’
Kate felt that she was trying to breathe life into the sad remains of the victim’s body.
‘I wonder what she was like?’ she said. ‘Was she clinging? Demanding? A bitch? Gullible? Giving? Unselfish? In love? Was there someone else who cared for her and, if so, why did that person not come forward?’
‘Even if she were any of those negative things, nothing can justify what he did.’
‘Of course – and as soon as you start using words you’re building a construct of this woman which may or may not be true.’
Gilchrist waved at the waitress and tilted her glass to get another round for them.
‘A fiction,’ Kate continued. ‘One of many possible stories.’
The waitress brought their fresh drinks and their food. They’d both chosen the fishcakes with salad leaves.
‘I think the police were right,’ Gilchrist said. ‘She was the lover of a married man who made a fuss when she got pregnant.’
‘Obviously the abortion option would have been tried,’ Kate said. ‘She said no. It would have been a backstreet abortion in those days. Four or five months pregnant – she’d be starting to show, or soon would be. She needed a commitment from him.’
‘But if she had a job – would she not have been missed at work?’ Gilchrist said. ‘By her friends? What happened to the place where she lived? Presumably he kept her. Maybe he owned it. But what about the neighbours? What did he do with all her stuff? Her clothes?’
Kate thought for a moment.
‘They compiled a list of eight hundred missing women and managed to trace seven hundred and thirty of them – quite extraordinary really. Do you think the victim was one of the seventy unaccounted for?’
‘I’m sure of it. They had her but they just had too much material.’
‘Shame we don’t,’ Kate said, thinking about her grandfather’s destruction of the Brighton files.
FOURTEEN
G ilchrist dozed on top of her duvet. She felt like shit. Not because she was hungover after the early part of her evening but because she was knackered after the rest of her night. There had been an alarm that a five-year-old girl had gone missing. A thirteen-year-old in Hollingbury reported he’d seen a long-haired white man drag the girl into a car – a blue or turquoise Ford Escort. The force had a new system when a child went missing. It flooded the area with police and interrupted local radio and television programmes with pleas for help. Gilchrist had been called in. Although she’d had a couple of drinks, she was OK to work. She’d spent a fruitless night rousting registered paedophiles in the area.
This morning it turned out the kiddie had spent the night with her best friend four doors away. Gilchrist wondered if it was a wind-up, wondered what other crime had been carried out when the police were fully occupied with that.
She yawned. She was hoping for word back on a possible deal for Gary Parker today. Her seniors would want to keep her out of the loop but they had to tolerate her because Parker would only deal in her presence – presumably so that he could ogle her. Gilchrist wanted to interview his mother but she was out of town, nobody quite knew where.
Vice were investigating Little Stevie. Oddly, he didn’t ever seem to have been arrested – highly unusual if his occupation was as Parker suggested.
The problem was that nobody senior to her gave a toss. Since Watts had resigned, there were no senior officers who cared about investigating Milldean.
The phone rang and she reached forward to answer. She listened for a few moments and put the phone back down. Now she was awake.
From Kemp Town, Kate drove along the coast to Rottingdean, the sea sparkling to her right, then cut up across the slow curve of the Downs. When she reached Lewes she parked in the Cliffe car park by the river and the brewery, and trudged up the steep hill, past the War Memorial to the High Street. She was horribly hungover.
The records office was in the Maltings, a couple of hundred yards from the castle, which was off to her left beneath an arched defence gate and past the Barbican – little more than the keep remained.
She turned into the cobbled castle close and was perspiring by the time she passed a bowling green on her right. A sign told her that until the sixteenth century it had been the jousting field.
She was early for the records office so walked across to a viewing point. A plaque there told of the Battle of Lewes at which Simon de Montfort had defeated a larger royal force in 1264 and paved the way for Parliament. A little map showed the disposition of the troops on the Downs whose folds and soft slopes were spread out in front of her.
She took a long drink from her bottle of water and two more painkillers. At 8.45 a.m. precisely she walked into the records office and took the stairs. The room upstairs had creaking floors and high ceilings. The walls that did not have bookshelves were bare. All the floor space was occupied by rows of long tables.
The Trunk Murder files were waiting for her at reception but she was only allowed to take them one at a time. The first was a buff-coloured foolscap file on which somebody had written, in now-faded blue ink, ‘Trunk Murders File + Mancini’.
The first items in the file were two black and white photographs of creased and ripped pieces of brown paper. Someone had painstakingly put the pieces together to make what, according to the note on the bottom of the photo, purported to be a brown paper bag. She guessed this was the oil-soaked paper the victim had been wrapped in.
There was a letter and two brief notes from Spilsbury, the Home Office pathologist, with his initial
