City of Dreadful Night (29 page)

She sat at her desk looking out of the window at the rain sheeting down. It was only 6.30 a.m. and she was waiting until a more civilized time to phone Philippa Franks to arrange to meet. She wouldn't be put off this time.

She'd come into work via her flat. She'd stood on the pavement and looked at the boarded-up windows. She'd been renting so had no emotional attachment to the place but she was pissed off about her belongings. There wasn't much there of personal significance. She was pissed off because she hated shopping and was going to have to hit the high street today to get some clothes.

Kate had offered to lend her anything she needed, but Gilchrist couldn't see herself getting into Kate's clothes.

Now, sipping at her too-hot coffee, she thought about the man who had been shot in the kitchen. She could believe that there was nothing sinister about his death, that a sniper had simply reacted too quickly, perhaps because he thought the object in the man's hand was a gun. But who was he?

Could he have been the man who had actually been watching the house? Gilchrist had assumed that person had been a policeman, but perhaps the watcher was Edward's snitch. But why was he inside the house? So he could be clear where everybody was? Was he in direct touch with Macklin, the gold commander, just before the raid, or was he in contact with Foster, the silver commander actually in charge of the operation? Were either men in on it or were they being fed false information?

So many questions. Still too few answers.

She'd been patient enough. She phoned Philippa Franks just before seven a.m.

Kate took an early train up to Victoria then the District Line to Kew. It seemed to take forever. She dozed on the first and yawned on the second. At Kew she walked down a quiet street of Victorian terraced houses to the National Archives. The building was on a kind of shopping estate so first she nipped into M&S on the site to buy a healthy lunch. She also bought some underwear for herself and guessed at Sarah's size to get some knickers for her. Bras were a little more complicated.

In the archives she called up her files then went outside to sit on one of the benches by the lake. She ate her sandwich watching the ducks dipping for food. She looked up at the blue sky and the plump white clouds. It was so peaceful, so ordered.

She sighed and looked at her notes. There were only two files she hadn't already seen. They referred to a Director of Public Prosecution's proposed action against a policeman for leaking information to the press about the Brighton Trunk Murder. This, Kate felt sure, was her anonymous narrator.

She was wrong. When she went back in and got settled with the files she saw that the first DPP file was about a man called Bowden, a policeman for twenty-seven years, head of Hove CID for thirteen years.

He'd established a relationship with a freelance journalist called Lindon Laing. Kate knew that name from the memoir. Under duress, Laing told the Brighton Chief Constable ‘Hutch' Hutchinson that Bowden had already leaked a story to him some years earlier about somebody called Major Bailey, so Laing thought he'd ask him about the Trunk Murder. When Laing was asked if anyone else close to the investigation had been feeding him stories, he said no.

Kate paused for a moment. So when the anonymous memoirist had been summoned to Hutchinson's office after the Chief Constable's lecture about leaks, it might not have been about his relationship with Laing. What, then?

She read on. Laing said he had asked Bowden about the Trunk Murder on the afternoon of 30th October 1934 – the day the CID man was retiring from the police force. Unfortunately for Bowden, he was still on his final shift when that night's
Evening News
came out. Laing's story was splashed on the front page with the headline, ‘I know the man'. Laing had quoted Bowden saying he knew who the killer was.

Bowden insisted he hadn't told Laing anything he shouldn't have done, that he had in fact told him he didn't think they'd ever find the culprit.

Kate looked at another document, an opinion from a barrister, dated 12th November, about whether Bowden could be prosecuted for public mischief. According to this, Bowden had been ‘trying to curry favour with the newspaper because they had agreed to buy his memoirs after his retirement'.

Another document suggested that the man Bowden had referred to was a suspect called William Augustus Offord of 152 Fortess Road, Kentish Town. He came under suspicion very early because his handwriting was similar to that on the paper ‘and he had known immoral associations with a number of young women'.

This was clearly hokum. Not the existence of Offord – she was sure he was real enough. But she knew from her other reading that the words on the paper had not been written by the killer.

The second file was much thinner, containing only a few sheets of flimsy paper. The first sheet was a memo dated April 1935. A policeman in Reigate sent it to Pelling, Brighton's head of CID, with a letter from an unemployed nurse attached. She was asking the police to locate the present whereabouts of a friend of hers. This friend had worked as a cook and housekeeper for a doctor in Hove who had also employed the nurse.

The nurse claimed that her friend had disappeared and was pretty much suggesting that the doctor might have done away with her. Kate guessed that the nurse had a grudge against the doctor – she assumed she was unemployed because he had fired her. But his name drew her attention. Dr Edward Seys Massiah of 8 Brunswick Square, Hove.

Dr Massiah. Kate didn't realize she was tapping her pencil on the desk until a man nearby cleared his throat. She put the pencil down. Dr Massiah. She was remembering the start of the memoir. The writer saying that he had taken his girlfriend, Frenchy, to a doctor in Hove. Kate realized she'd been holding her breath and slowly exhaled. The writer had referred to the doctor as Dr M.

‘Hello, Lizzy.'

Lizzy Simpson, William's wife and Kate's mother, looked at me in a calculating way. I'd always found her chilly. When I had status I always felt she simply tolerated me. I believed she was actually a sociopath, unable to empathize with other humans, so that in order to fit in she forever had to conjure up the simulacra of emotions she didn't know how to feel.

I could see she was trying to figure out how she was supposed to be with me. She'd known me a long time. We were, by nature of my friendship with her husband, supposedly close. But I was no longer high status, no longer potentially useful. Rather the reverse.

I wondered if her husband had briefed her against me. I smiled as the word ‘briefed' popping into my head in relation to a husband talking to a wife. In their case, I'm sure that was exactly how they conducted business.

She mistook my smile and pasted one on her own face for just an instant. Her sourness had affected her undoubted beauty. Her mouth turned down at the edges, her skin was taut against her high cheekbones. Her pursuit of thinness had made her gaunt. The cords of her neck were hawsers, her legs were sticks.

I was two steps down from her so our eyes were at the same level.

‘Bob. How nice. Is William expecting you?'

‘I doubt it.'

She turned, throwing over her shoulder:

‘I'll tell him you're here.'

‘I assume I don't need to wait on the doorstep.'

She didn't reply.

I went into the wide hallway. I hadn't been in this house for several years but nothing seemed to have changed. Period prints in heavy frames on the walls, stripped pine floor and staircase, waxed not varnished, of course. Opulent flowers on a table – lilies and some exotic succulents.

I went into the sitting room to my left. Marble fireplace with a log fire laid but not lit. Two deep sofas with scatter cushions in expensive fabrics laid across them. Two floor-to-ceiling windows looking over the square.

Some of their art was on the walls. Lizzy liked BritArt. They had a small, early Damian Hirst just inside the door. There was a collage made of elephant dung and discarded snake skins by an artist whose name I had forgotten.

I walked to the window. How could someone who was essentially a public relations guy afford to live in one of these multimillion-pound Holland Park villas? Had he done a Mandelson and borrowed money from one of the party's generous friends? Well, that was a question but not one of the ones I intended to ask.

‘He'll be down in a moment.'

Lizzy's voice was as tight as her face. She sat on the sofa at the far side of the room, bony knees together.

‘I hear you've been seeing a lot of our daughter.'

I sank into the sofa opposite. She pointed at the lapel of my jacket.

‘You'll never get that pollen off.' I looked at the brown dust from the lilies I didn't realize I'd brushed against.

‘We've been working together on something.'

‘Her men aren't normally as old as you.' Her smile was mocking. ‘Though her women sometimes are.'

I let that go, though I realized I hadn't given Kate's sexuality a single thought – why would I?

‘How's work, Lizzy? Got some interesting projects?'

‘I'm doing a couple of tellies, a few profiles. But I've been commissioned to write a novel.'

‘Sex and sleaze in Westminster?'

‘Naturally.
Très
discreet, though.'

‘I didn't think those books were supposed to be discreet.'

‘Well, you know – relatively speaking.'

‘Bob – what a surprise.'

Simpson was standing in the doorway. He didn't come forward to greet me, I didn't stand.

Lizzy uncoiled from the sofa.

‘Lovely to see you, Bob.'

Simpson closed the door behind his wife and replaced her on the sofa.

‘I can't do anything for you, you know,' he said. ‘You made your own bed.'

‘Other people tucked me in.'

Simpson's mouth twitched in slight acknowledgement of a smile. I hadn't really noticed until now how sinister he looked. That Prince of Darkness tag that used to be applied to spin doctors certainly applied to the way he looked now. His hair had gone grey but his eyebrows and goatee beard were black. His mouth was an ungenerous slash.

I thought about how pretty and warm his daughter was. How come?

‘You've been seeing a lot of my daughter,' he said, reading my thoughts.

‘So I gather. You know she's been threatened because of you.'

‘What?'

‘You know. Don't pretend you don't. What are you into? Is it linked to the Milldean mess?'

Simpson looked at me, then out of the window. He pouted a little.

‘It's none of your business, Bob. Let me just say that it was a misunderstanding.'

‘
Was?
Does that mean you've got it sorted.'

Simpson always had a poker face. Like most politicos, you could never tell what he was really thinking. But I thought I saw something in his eyes.

‘She's still in danger, isn't she?'

‘Absolutely not,' he said.

‘But it's not sorted.'

‘Just a little local difficulty, Bob, that's all.'

‘Tell me about Little Stevie.'

‘Who's Little Stevie?' he said, looking genuinely puzzled.

‘One of the victims. The one who was shot sitting on the loo.'

‘Can't help you there. Why would you think I'd know?'

‘He was a rent boy of some sort.'

‘I repeat my question.'

‘Was it blackmail? Are you still being blackmailed – did your account just get passed on to somebody else when Little Stevie was killed?'

‘Blackmailed about what?' Simpson uncrossed his legs and leant forward. ‘Do you mean about my sexuality? You know I swing both ways – is that what you're referring to?'

Although we'd never talked about it, I did know. There was an occasion years ago when Simpson and I had gone one lunchtime to hear some free jazz in the ICA.

It had been too free, even for me, but it was summer and hot and the wine had flowed freely. When the wine ran out, we'd left together and as we were walking across St James's Park in the heat of the afternoon he said: ‘This is the kind of day to have a cool shower then spend the rest of the afternoon in bed with somebody.'

I laughed and nodded my head.

‘Shall we?' he said.

I laughed again and gestured to the people sitting on the grass.

‘Who did you have in mind?'

He looked at me for a moment.

‘I was thinking you and me.'

It hung there as we threaded our way between the sunbathers. I remember distinctly wondering what the fuck I could say to that. I liked the guy but I wasn't interested in sex with him. As best I recall, I pretended that we were just joking.

‘Another time, gorgeous,' I probably said.

‘You're on,' he definitely said.

It was never referred to again.

Simpson laughed now without warmth.

‘I still remember your face as you attempted to fend me off without hurting my feelings. Priceless.'

‘I think you knew Little Stevie,' I said

He gestured with his hands.

‘Prove it.' He leant forward again. ‘Bob, let me give you some advice. Forget this obsession about the massacre. Get what remains of your life back together. Do your little radio spot about the Trunk Murders—'

‘You're offering me career advice?'

I was pushing down the anger. I hated his imperturbability, hated the fact he'd been part of the train wreck of my recent life. My wife may have been right – I was looking for someone to blame because I wasn't willing to take the responsibility myself. Maybe so, but I felt justified in focusing on my former friend. My anger seethed because I couldn't see how to get him.