being away.’ May shot Bryant a look that silenced him.
‘I don’t mind being in an empty house,’ Kallie admitted, ‘but this rain is so depressing. I miss Paul, I wish he’d come home. He sends postcards from all over Europe—I just want him to get the travel bug out of his system and come back to me.’ She hadn’t meant to mention him, but realized she was with good people who were used to listening, and suddenly needed to talk. There was something so peculiarly old-fashioned and comforting about them, as though they belonged in the crepuscular sooty gloom of King’s Cross and St Pancras, between the shunting yards and brown-painted pubs filled with bitter-sipping railwaymen. Sergeant Longbright resembled the photographs of Ava Gardner she had seen in old movie magazines, but was kind and approachable. Bryant was the key, of course, the one who held them together in lopsided camaraderie. You could go to them with a problem. Perhaps this was how all police once were.
‘I’m sure he’ll come back to you when he’s ready,’ said Longbright. ‘Some men get a fire in them that has to be allowed to burn itself out.’
‘We were just discussing forgotten murderers,’ said Bryant, in a terrible attempt to change the subject. ‘I suggested Tony Mancini, real name Cecil England, unjustly forgotten in my view, very big at the time, though.’
‘The Brighton Trunk Mystery,’ May explained, a little embarrassed.
‘A good example of the dangers of jumping to conclusions,’ Bryant forged on. ‘His mistress, Violette, was a vaudeville artiste turned prostitute. He sent her body to his house in a trunk. The Crown suggested that he had beaten her to death with a hammer, but it was likely that she fractured her skull falling down the stairs under the influence of morphine. Found not guilty. Yet ten days earlier, another trunk had turned up at Brighton railway station containing a woman’s severed torso: victim and murderer never identified. Were the cases connected? If the Peculiar Crimes Unit had existed then, would we have uncovered new evidence?’ He gulped his beer, blue eyes glinting above hoppy brown bitter, just a little mad.
‘The thirties were a rich time for sensational murder,’ May explained. ‘The level of moral snobbery was outrageous, but far worse in Victorian times, so I’d have to pick George Joseph Smith, the “Brides in the Bath” murderer. He was born in Bow in 1872—’
‘Near me,’ interjected Bryant. ‘I was a Whitechapel boy.’
‘—spent most of his childhood in a reformatory and emerged with that strange emptiness of the soul one still sees in disappointed youths. Proceeded to marry gullible women and steal their savings before deserting them—he ditched one in the National Gallery—then moved on to drowning them in a zinc tub, but his refusal to vary the method of execution led to suspicion and capture.’
‘Personally, I always felt for Ruth Ellis,’ said Longbright, stirring the lemon in her gin and French. ‘If her affair with Blakely had occurred a few years later, neither of them would have acted as they did. If ever a woman was a victim of her time, it was Ellis. She thanked the judge for sentencing her to death, did you know that? Even the gallows seemed preferable to her miserable existence.’
‘Oh yes, there have been some interesting deaths in London,’ said Bryant with relish. ‘Did you know that Peter Pan threw himself under a train at Sloane Square? Peter Llewelyn Davies had been adopted by J. M. Barrie, and was the model for Barrie’s fairy-tale hero, but he got sick of fans asking him where Neverland was and chucked himself on to the live rail.’
‘Is that true?’
‘Absolutely.’ Bryant crossed his heart with a finger.
‘Aren’t there any interesting modern murderers?’ Kallie asked.
‘Oh, a few,’ sniffed Bryant, ‘but nothing to write home about. We’ve handled most of the decent cases. Motivation has changed, of course. Victims still become trapped in the same debilitating circumstances, but now there’s so much money swilling around that there are other ways to solve your problems. Get a divorce, have an abortion, take some pills—there’s less of a stigma.’
‘I suppose it’s easier to solve a crime since the discovery of DNA.’
‘New technologies will never explain the actions of desperate people,’ said Bryant. ‘They were using fingerprints to catch murderers in twelfth-century China.’
‘How did you become so interested in crime?’
‘My grandfather was one of the first constables on the scene when Martha Tabram died,’ Bryant explained. ‘The previous summer had been the hottest on record. The