conclusions about the remains he had examined. He referred to the victim as ‘the latest cut-up case’, which Kate found cold.
Next she came to the photo albums proper. The albums – little more than folders really – were all tied together by a loosely knotted piece of string. Kate untied the knot and separated the first folder from the others.
This was the part of her visit she was most squeamish about, for within these folders were photographs of the woman’s remains.
There were about a dozen people in the library by now and most of them seemed to be making use of the books just behind Kate. Taking a deep breath, she opened the folder.
It took a moment to make sense of the first photograph. When she did, she flushed and quickly closed the folder. She waited for the elderly man immediately behind her to move away before she opened the folder again and forced herself to look.
The woman’s torso had been laid on a table and this first shot was a close-up from between where her legs should have been. It showed the ragged, raw stumps of her thighs and, between them, startlingly clear, her vagina and anus. The black flesh of the stumps looked horribly like the ends of cuts of meat.
She felt shame on the woman’s behalf. Ludicrous as it was, given that the woman’s limbs and head had been hacked off, she felt the humiliation of her being exposed in this way even after death.
She turned to the other photographs. The torso had been photographed from every angle. The second and third photographs showed the torso from the sides, the arms cut off below the shoulder like some obscene Venus de Milo. The fourth was taken from where her head should have been. She had strong, shapely shoulders but her neck was abruptly terminated in another cut of meat.
Kate swallowed, looked across at the two librarians behind the reception desk, wondered what they were thinking about her wanting to see these files. She felt grubby.
She had the bottle of water in her bag but there was no drinking or eating allowed in here. Or use of pens, for that matter. She glanced at the pencil she’d brought.
The second album contained eight photographs of ‘limbs discovered at King’s Cross Railway Station’. In the first photograph the woman’s legs were laid out on a table in front of a dark brick wall. It seemed like a basement or a workshop. It seemed very cold. It was, presumably, the mortuary.
Kate felt tears welling up at the same time as she thought how comical they looked, these legs lying alone on a table. She could have believed they were false, had it not been for the way that the thighs and the rest of the legs were separ-ated a couple of inches to demonstrate how they had been hacked in half at the knee.
She’d been horrified at the thought of Spilsbury handling the feet as if they were shoes, but from the photograph she could see that the feet had not been detached after all.
Spilsbury’s autopsy report had stated the feet were well looked after, but the tops of the toes seemed to be covered with corns or blisters. The right big toe was bent at an angle and the right little toe crossed over its neighbour as if she had in fact been wearing too-tight shoes. But were all these things a consequence of her body parts being crammed into a suitcase?
The third album contained a dozen photographs linked to the other Trunk Murder, that of the prostitute Violette Kaye. Most of them were photographs of the room in which she had been killed and the one in which she had been discovered.
The last two, however, were of Violette Kaye squashed into the trunk, her legs bent, her head pushed down towards her chest, her face swollen, teeth bared. She looked hideous, but it wasn’t her fault. Mancini had made her like this, had taken her dignity away.
There were no more files, no police report saying exactly which policemen had answered the call from the left luggage office at Brighton railway station. She left the archive empty-handed and queasy.
Gilchrist found Brighton phantasmagoric, dreamlike, crude. So many wannabe artists. So much bilge talked. Then, to see the young people spill out of the railway station on a day like this. Men in T-shirts, girls in micro-minis. Raucous voices: shrill, shrieking girls; guttural, hoarse boys. Girls tottering on unfeasible heels; men swaggering, shoulders back, crotches thrust out.
It was horrible to watch because she knew all that testosterone, all that female we-want-babies, all that din, was an unholy cocktail that would end in sex, sure, but mostly in violence, rape and misery.
‘Modern life, eh?’ she said to Williamson, scowling.
‘Your version of it.’
‘Meaning?’
‘I don’t quite see things like that.’
He was looking almost benign as he watched the teenagers flood by.
‘Meaning?’
‘These are just kids out to have fun. They aren’t the children of the anti-Christ.’
‘Yes, they are. I can give you statistics.’
‘We can all do statistics. Doesn’t mean anything. When did you turn into a Daily Mail reader?’
‘The Daily Mail is much misunderstood,’ Gilchrist said.
‘By whom?’
‘Its readers, mainly.’
Williamson barked a laugh.
‘Why are we here, Sarah?’
‘I told you – I had a phone call.’
‘But you didn’t tell me what it said.’
‘A man said to come here and wait by the flower stall to learn something to my advantage.’
‘Something to your advantage? Jesus, Sarah. We’re here because of a crank call?’
‘It’s to do with the Milldean thing.’
‘Did he say I could come along?’
‘He didn’t say you couldn’t.’
Kate had lunch in Lewes at Bill’s, down beside the river. It was as crowded as ever. As she ate, she was thinking about the murderer. Would he put what he had done out of his mind? Would he savour it? Had he told anybody? Had he boasted like Violette Kay’s killer, Mancini, apparently did? What price did he pay? Did he feel guilt? Remorse? If the victim was his mistress, did he and his wife stay together? Could his wife smell death on him?
She imagined him dismembering the woman. Wearing a hat. A tiepin. Maybe those elasticated metal things to hold the sleeves of the shirt up. His shirt would have had a detachable collar. Would he have taken the collar off whilst he was using his saw on her? Would he have put on a pinny, maybe with a floral design, frilly round the edges?
She’d printed an essay off the Internet that George Orwell had written in the thirties about the perfect English murder – and murderer. Kate looked at it now. Orwell’s view was that the murderer should be ‘a little man of the professional class’ – a dentist or a solicitor, say – living an intensely respectable life somewhere in the suburbs. It would be best if he lived in a semi-detached house so the neighbours could hear suspicious sounds through the wall.
Orwell thought he should be either chairman of the local Conservatives or a leading Nonconformist strongly against alcohol. His crime would be a guilty passion for his secretary or the wife of a colleague or rival. Having decided on murder, he’d plan it in detail but slip up in one tiny, unforeseeable way. He would see murder as less disgraceful than being caught out for his adultery.
Was this the Trunk Murderer? If so, what slip had he made?
‘He’s not coming,’ Williamson was saying when Gilchrist’s mobile phone rang. The number was blocked.
‘Hello,’ she said.
She heard a matter-of-fact voice.
‘Hope you’ve got home insurance.’
The line went dead. Williamson looked at her.
‘Oh fuck,’ she said.
Kate saw Tingley enter the cafe and order a coffee at the counter. He walked towards her and sat down beside her.
‘How’s it going?’
