City of Dreadful Night (18 page)

Kate didn't get on with her mother. It was one of those things. Well, actually, it wasn't. Her mother was another journalist. It was all she did. She was obsessive – obsessed. (Kate never quite knew the difference.) She went into her newspaper every day, worked relentlessly. She had a sister who was a TV producer and both were seriously competitive.

Kate's mother was not loving. For years Kate thought that was just the way mothers were. Only when she was older did she realize it was specific to her mother. She was remote, had a coldness that combined with excessive self-absorption to exclude Kate almost entirely.

Kate eventually came to realize that her mother wasn't a particularly good writer but that that wasn't the criterion for success in newspapers. All the editors cared about was getting copy of a reasonable standard to length, on time.

She sighed. She'd brought the next portion of the diary into work. It had jumped again. In between fielding phone calls she scanned through it.

The Chief Constable got very excited – had them photographed to put in tomorrow's
Brighton and Hove Herald
with an appeal. I had a drink with that London journalist when I came off shift, just before closing time. I told him about the knives.

‘
So that's it, then – you've found the murder weapons,' he said gleefully. ‘The killer is in Hove – probably did it in Hove.' He tilted his head to look at the smoke-blackened ceiling of the pub. ‘The Hove Horror.' He chinked his glass to mine. ‘Lovely stuff.
'

‘
Hove detectives have whisked some bloke off in a car to look at an empty house down there.
'

‘
A man whose identity has not been revealed,' the reporter said, his intonation putting quotation marks around the statement. ‘Arrest imminent.
'

‘
I wouldn't say that. It's just the landlord of the property, I think.
'

‘
Who cares?' he said. ‘It's a good story. So are the knives.
'

‘
They probably aren't relevant – he used a saw to get the limbs off.
'

‘
We'll worry about that when the saw turns up. Until then, the police have found the murder weapons.' He flashed his awful yellow teeth in a cold smile.

‘
We told him it was dangerous as it was near a wooden fence.
'

‘
Proper little Girl Guide, aren't you?' She just looked at me. ‘What did he say?
'

‘
He told us to clear off.
'

‘
So we asked him what he was burning. He said fish. The smell was something peculiar but we couldn't see properly because he wouldn't let us get any nearer.
'

‘
You like going up on the Downs?' I said.

‘
Are you asking in your . . .' she seemed to be searching for the right phrase, ‘. . . official capacity?
'

Kate was really curious about the identity of the memoirist. She'd flicked ahead and through some of the files but couldn't find any indication. She wondered where the rest of the records might be. She was sure that there must be some official account of who attended the opening of the trunk – she could find his name that way.

She phoned the library. A cheerful young woman gave her the number for the County Records Office in Lewes. Yes, they had the files that had belonged to the Central Division of the South East Police Authority. She could make an appointment to see them. And the autopsy photographs. That last threw her.

She knew Lewes. It was a pretty town, its streets clustered about the ruins of the castle keep. It was Islington-by-the-sea for fashionable Londoners who wanted to start a family in a place where there was a better quality of life.

She'd been brought up in Hampstead, just off Southend Green. When she was a teenager and taking her first alcoholic drinks, the pub she used was the one outside which Ruth Ellis had shot her lover. A bullet hole could still be seen on the outside wall of the pub – well, they said it was a bullet hole.

Sarah Gilchrist was talking to Reg Williamson when her mobile rang. They'd moved away from finding Finch's body to the recent raid on the rotten meat store in a rat-infested warehouse in Newhaven.

The raid was the conclusion of Operation Dinner Out, in conjunction with local environmental health officers. The warehouse had been stacked to the rafters with rotten meat. Around a hundred tonnes of it. The stench had been incredible. Rancid chicken that had turned yellow through putrefaction had been bleached with chemicals to make it look healthy.

Then they'd found the ‘specialty' meat. Decomposing lambs' brains and cows' feet, cows' muzzles, smoked cattle-hide, gizzards and goat carcasses in two huge freezers. It was supposed to be sold as pet food but somebody cute – and they were thinking Steve Cuthbert – had decided to buy it from abattoirs, process it, package it and reintroduce it into the human food chain.

‘You know, all I see is the shit in life at the moment,' she said. ‘It's really getting me down. People acting as low as they can.'

‘I'm impressed by the ingenuity of criminals,' Williamson said, rolling his ever-present, ever-unlit cigarette between his chubby fingers. ‘The way they can figure out how to make a buck in the gaps between. Jesus, if they applied that entrepreneurial spirit to legitimate business, they'd be captains of industry.'

‘What, you think captains of industry are legitimate?'

‘True enough,' he said. ‘But when do they have the time to think up this stuff? Who would think Steve Cuthbert, if it is him, would say to himself: “Hello, there's a gap in the market for reusing rotten meat.” How would they have the chemical knowledge to know what to do to make it at least look edible? And then to set up the production line, the transport infrastructure. And these are guys who were kicked out of school at twelve.'

Gilchrist stood and walked over to the window.

‘I don't eat meat in ethnic restaurants any more,' she said. ‘I'm sorry, I just don't. Most of that rotten meat ends up in halal butchers and specialist outlets. I'm not being racist but I do want to know where my food has come from.'

‘It's no worse than fast food,' Williamson said, ‘big greasy burgers.'

‘I don't eat them either. Or sausages because usually they're made from the sweepings off the butcher's floor.'

‘Minced testicles and eyeballs in some frankfurters, I read. Give me Chinese any day. Hit me with that monosodium.'

Gilchrist's mobile phone rang.

‘It's Bob.'

She was silent for a moment, aware of Williamson watching her.

‘Hello, s—, hello,' she said with forced enthusiasm.

‘I'm sorry to call you there – I know it's awkward – but I wondered if you'd had a chance to look up that car that was burnt on Ditchling Beacon.'

‘As a matter of fact—'

‘Did the report say anything about a cat?'

‘A cat?' she said, her tone clearly reflecting her thought that he was losing it.

‘I seem to remember they found a cat in the boot of the car.'

There was silence again.

‘Your ex-dancer on Beachy Head?'

No, she was the one losing it. She flushed.

‘I'll get back to you later,' she said, breaking off the call. She looked at Williamson. ‘We might have a bit of a break. And do you know why? That woman's missing cat.'

‘Tiddles to the rescue, then.'

Tingley had called and wanted to meet at lunchtime in English's Oyster Bar. When I arrived he was sitting at the narrow counter, tucking into a plate of oysters in their shells on a bed of ice.

‘You're going up in the world,' I said. ‘Bit of a change from the Cricketers.'

He didn't look up.

‘Are you going to eat? The Dover Sole is always good.'

‘Sure.' I took the stool beside him and glanced around. Although English's was something of a Brighton institution, with its white painted Georgian fascia and its location just at the edge of the Laines, I'd never been in here. Behind Tingley's head was a framed poster for a play from God knows when signed by an actress called Susannah York. ‘Thank you for a third lovely evening' she'd written. Next to it was an old black and white studio portrait of George Robey and below him a more recent actress in a posh dress.

Through the open windows of the pub opposite I could hear a bunch of men singing raucously.

The waitress came over. A tall, pale woman with fine features and an accent. I ordered and when she'd gone into the kitchen, Tingley said:

‘Estonian – part of the latest tranche from eastern Europe.'

‘The influx causes all sorts of problems when they get into trouble – from prostitution to orphanages. In policing terms—'

‘Yes, but you're not a policeman any more.'

I looked down at the stained marble counter.

‘Difficult to lose the mindset.'

‘But you've never been a proper policeman. When you came in here you didn't scan the room to check out the suspicious characters.'

Now he was looking at me. Was he trying to pick a fight? I glanced at the two glasses beside his plate. One was a wine glass, half-filled with something red; the other was an empty whiskey glass.