The Chelsea Murders

by Lionel Davidson

  ‘No tick. Customer. What you want, Artie, you buy arose?’

  ‘Just looking in, Denny.’

  ‘Not a coffee shop. Flank rooking in, Arab rooking in. Crose shop here. Go somewhere else rook in.’

  ‘Yeah, okay, only I’ve got to sleep tomorrow,’ Artie told him, and realized he should be telling Steve. ‘So don’t call me,’ he told Steve. ‘I just brought this in. We can meet in the evening.’

  ‘You’re surely not going to work now.’

  ‘I have to. I forgot to tell them I’d be up all night.’

  ‘Rooking very fine. Extleme fashion,’ Denny was saying as Artie left. He’d taken over the scarecrow himself, spreading his L’s and R’s as usual.

  Artie was spreading his, too, as he went back out in the rain. Gleen blood. Why Flank in shop? Why Arab? He began to talk French to himself. He’d be speaking it for most of the evening. He could feel his brain tiring now. It was still going ceaselessly but it felt heavy. There was something it was trying to tell him, but it needed more Speed.

  Before he got to work he passed another newspaper poster, however, and realized what it was. Strangled, the poster said. Drowned, Steve had said.

  Could it be the same one? There were so many. Sleeping and waking, his life was full of murder lately.

  3

  ‘WHAT kind of beastly thing?’ Mooney said. She was looking along her long legs and scruffy jeans to her sneakers, equally scruffy, on the arm of the next chair. (This was hours earlier and a couple of miles away.) There was no one else in the room and it was raining outside and she didn’t feel very good, anyway. He’d asked her twice if he couldn’t speak to the editor himself. She’d told him he couldn’t. It was Wednesday, and the editor was off in Dorking putting the sodding thing to press.

  She looked idly over the last proof pages, willing him to say ‘contraceptive’. Not a bad little story if he’d gone and found one there in the vestry.

  She saw she had quite a nice by-line on the front page. CHELSEA PENSIONER SAVES GIRL FROM GANG. Gazette Reporter: Mary Mooney. The phone on the next desk was giving her a headache, so she lifted it off. ‘Vicar, could you hang on a tick,’ she said, and answered it. ‘News room.’

  ‘Mary Mooney there?’

  ‘Speaking … Chris?’ she said. The Evening Globe.

  ‘Mary – could you get down to The Gold Key, pub near

  World’s End?’

  ‘What’s doing?’

  ‘I don’t know. Could be big. Germaine – check that spelling – Roberts. Barmaid. We’ve got it as Diane Germaine Roberts. She was picked up out of the river. A buzz from Scotland Yard. She was a part-timer there.’

  ‘What, drowned?’

  ‘Yeah, she was drowned. Packer was just on the blower. He’s over there. Apparently she was living on the premises.’

  ‘Gold Key. Germaine Roberts. Packer’s where?’ she said.

  ‘At the Yard. He’s staying there. The Gold Key is on the corner of –’

  ‘I know The Gold Key. What – taxi?’ Mooney said.

  ‘Just get there fast as you can.’

  ‘Okay, fine, I’ll call,’ Mooney said. She got her feet down off the chair. The third? Was it possible? ‘Hello, sorry, Vicar,’ she said. ‘Urgent call there. Can I ring you back later?’

  ‘Well, I wonder if the editor could –’

  ‘Of course,’ Mooney said. ‘I’ll see he gets the message. I’ll make a special point of it.’

  She shot off down the stairs and got her bike. It was in the narrow passage at the foot of the stairs next to the advertising department. There was hardly room to squeeze it in and they always kicked up a row. She’d told them, the best thing was to widen the passage. She wasn’t leaving it outside. She got her plastic off the hanger and wound it round her. She hated the shitty place. A regular little artisan’s cottage.

  They’d been kicked out of the King’s Road, together with the Chelsea News, after seventy years. The leases had fallen in. Boutiques had taken over at twelve times the rent. The same thing was happening all over Chelsea. Now they were chronicling events (to give the activity a name) from the middle of Fulham. All the management had done was tart up the ground floor with plate glass and carpets and a rubber plant and put a sign over the top, CHELSEA GAZETTE. It looked like a poofish dry-cleaner’s or a travel agency. The editorial, above, remained in its pristine squalor. Never mind.

  She trundled her vehicle out to the street, and slammed the side door behind her. She’d save on a taxi (60p there and 60p back, with any understanding at the Globe end), and it would be quicker by bike, anyway.

  Mooney was six feet tall and thirty years old, a divorcee. She had a heavy long Spanish face which attracted the wrong kind of person. She knew about this as about a lot of things. Her journalistic career had been interrupted by marriage and motherhood (and divorce and bereavement, respectively), and she had since learned to cope with a number of problems, including the contraction of the Fleet Street Press which made it difficult for her to get a job there. She had returned to her first job on the Chelsea Gazette, at minimum rates, turning a penny here and there with extras as a stringer for the London Press, a lot of which involved getting rain in your face.

  She turned in before World’s End at Stanley Street, with The Gold Key on the corner, and right away saw the fuzz flexing outside.

  ‘Morning,’ she said politely, wheeling her cycle and standing it outside the Gents’. ‘I wonder if I could ask you to keep an eye on that.’

  The constable didn’t say anything, but when he saw her going to the side door and pressing the bell, he came up to her.

  ‘What did you want?’ he said.

  ‘Mr Logan,’ she said. She’d suddenly remembered the name from the little gilt sign above the door, Gerald Logan, Licensed to sell Beers, Spirits, Wines & Tobaccos.

  ‘Oh, yes?’ the constable said.

  In one joyous burst she realized that nobody had got here yet. ‘Gerry,’ she said.

  ‘Was it anything special?’ the constable said.

  The door opened and a skinny little woman in an overall was standing there.

  ‘Hello, dear,’ Mooney said, nodding most warmly. She’d never cast eyes on her before. ‘Tell him I’m here. It’s Mrs Mooney.’

  The woman and the constable were both looking at her anxiously.

  ‘I came the moment I could,’ Mooney apologized.

  After looking anxiously at her, the fuzz and the help were now looking at each other. ‘How is he?’ Mooney said. An advantage of her heavy eyes and long Spanish chops was that, despite her gangling figure, she could transform at will into Our Lady of Sorrows. ‘In a dreadful state, I’m sure.’

  ‘Well, he is,’ the help said. She was scratching at a little wart on her lip. ‘Just a minute, I’ll see.’ She looked nervously at the constable and went.

  ‘What, er, actually was it?’ the fuzz said.

  ‘It’s at times like these,’ Mooney said, dropping him a look of bottomless compassion, ‘that we’re really needed.’ While dropping him it she uneasily recalled having seen him knocking about the area. He didn’t seem to have recalled her yet, which was something.

  ‘I’m not supposed to let anyone in, you see,’ he said.

  ‘Not even us?’ Mooney said, incredulously.

  Logan was suddenly standing there. She remembered him when she saw him, big beery belly, potato face. ‘Oh, Gerry!’

  ‘Yeah. Jesus,’ he said. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘What can I say to you?’ Mooney said, solemnly pushing him inside. ‘The shock of it!’

  ‘Yeah,’ Logan said again. He was watching with bemusement as she closed the door in the constable’s face. ‘I don’t know what the hell is happening,’ he said.

  ‘Of course you don’t, poor man,’ Mooney told him. ‘You can carry on now,’ she said to the help.

  Mooney didn’t know how all this commanding stuff was coming out of her. It rose unbidden at moments of creation, such as the dawn o
f a truly shit-hot story. There was one here. She had absolutely no doubt about it. Fuzz at the door – for a common drowning? Not likely. Something was going on. Better still, it was just one piece of fuzz, unconfident of instructions, not totally in possession of his marbles. Surely a rapid drafting from an undermanned local station? He was holding the fort till the C.I.D. men arrived. They hadn’t arrived yet. She was in at the dawn.

  ‘Let’s go to her room,’ she said, realizing the mileage that had to be crammed into a few minutes. She was on tenterhooks for the sound of a siren.

  ‘Her room?’ Logan said.

  ‘Germaine.’

  ‘Germaine’s room?’

  ‘Poor man, you’re all done in,’ Mooney said, suppressing an urge to do him in. His hair was dishevelled, wits all away. This was the way they had to be kept. ‘You lead the way,’ she said. ‘I’ll need to contact her dear parents.’

  ‘Germaine’s parents? What parents?’ Logan said.

  ‘The rest of her poor family,’ she amended. No parents. Or the girl was a liar. What was a part-timer doing living on the premises, anyway? The place smelt terrible, unaired, and only half an hour to opening time. Where was the landlady? Something was amiss here, the story improving by the moment. They were standing in a dark beery little porch, one passage leading to the cavernous bar, another to inner regions. She turned there. ‘I think I remember it,’ she said.

  ‘No, let me,’ Logan said. ‘What was that name – Mooney?’

  ‘Mooney. Mary,’ she gently reproved.

  ‘Sorry, Mary. This is a hell of a thing. Are you a relation, then?’

  ‘Not a relation,’ Mooney said, again reprovingly. ‘I’ll have to tell her relations … So full of life. What happened?’

  ‘I don’t know what happened.’ Logan’s enormous backside, flapping shiny cloth, sagged ahead of her up the steep stairs. ‘She said she didn’t feel well. She came up here about nine o’clock. We had a full house.’

  ‘You gave her a knock.’

  ‘I gave her a knock,’ Logan agreed. ‘I don’t know when, maybe half-past, and she said she’d come down, but she never.’

  No landlady, then; and he hadn’t sent anyone else up to give her a knock. Logan was in the way of giving her knocks. All good.

  ‘And later she wasn’t there?’ Mooney said.

  ‘That’s right,’ Logan said, and looked round at her with his mouth open. ‘Were you here, then?’ he said.

  Mooney sorrowfully shook her head, and solicitously prodded his rear upwards. She had an acute mental image of police cars coming down the King’s Road at this very minute; also of assemblies of taxis en route from Fleet Street, occupants’ eyes fixed on the meters.

  It wasn’t on the first landing. Germaine’s room was an attic. A frowsty one, too; the deceased, on the immediate evidence, a first-class slut. There was a heavy female smell in the curtained room. The bed had been slept in and hastily made up again, covers thrown over. A few shoes were kicked under a small padded chair, on which was a tangle of tights and of grotty, by no means spotless, knickers; Germaine not a big, or regular, washer.

  A combful of blondish hair was on a dressing table whose glass top was finely dusted with powder. Under the glass was a selection of photos; one, squarish and larger than the others, of a pony-tailed blonde looking candidly up from some undisclosed activity on a floor. Enormous boobs drooped from a bikini top. A quarter page, Mooney hungrily thought, if ever she’d seen one. If it happened to be old Germaine, of course … She sought frantically for ways to pose her inquiry.

  ‘Is this recent?’ she said reverently.

  ‘I don’t know when she had it done,’ Logan said moodily.

  ‘Ah, they will love it,’ Mooney said; she raised the glass and whipped the thing out. On the back, to her still dawning astonishment at the nature of what was blossoming here, a rubber stamp said Property of the I.L.E.A. She had it in her shoulder bag in a flash. ‘It reminds me so of her last holiday,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Things go so fast, when was it now?’

  She had thought, with the impregnated air of the room, that Logan was about to sneeze, but realized, with no loss of faculties, that he was crying. ‘Perhaps her passport will tell us,’ she said.

  *

  She called the Globe from a call-box two hundred yards away, having thanked the fuzz for looking after her bike. She heard the sirens going as she got through.

  ‘Chris, you’re right, it’s a big one. Anything fresh from Packer, first?’

  ‘Yeah. She was strangled. The river police picked her out downstream of Albert Bridge but she must have gone in between Wandsworth and Battersea, maybe Lots Road. Don’t mess about, love, what have you got?’

  ‘What I’ve got, first of all, is a fantastic picture. Exclusive.’

  ‘Portrait?’

  ‘Portrait? Tits down to here. Bikini.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘It looks professional.’ She was gazing at it. ‘It says I.L.E.A. on the back. That’s something, eh?’

  ‘I.L.E.A.?’

  ‘Inner London Education Authority.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Well, damn it, what can it mean? An art school. She was modelling. We haven’t just got a barmaid here. We’ve got an artist’s model. Murdered. In Chelsea.’

  ‘Christ. Anybody else got it?’

  ‘Nobody. I was there before the C.I.D. I can hear them now. There are sirens going. Listen, I’ll bring it in. I’d better give you a bit of stuff first.’

  ‘Okay, hang on. I’ll put you on to Typists.’ The phone jiggled. ‘Transfer this call to copy-takers. Urgent.’

  ‘Copy,’ Typists said.

  ‘Mooney, Chelsea,’ Mooney said.

  ‘Yeah, Mary.’

  ‘Chelsea Art Model Murder.’

  ‘Chelsea Art Model Murder,’ Typists said, clicking away.

  ‘Distraught fifty-four-year-old Gerald Logan, landlord of The Gold Key,’ Mooney dictated. She spelled it out. She spelled out the girl’s name, too, and her age, and all the other passport details. She spelled out about fifty-four-year-old Gerald’s wife, now dying in the Brompton Hospital, and how he had given the twenty-five-year-old Manchester hopeful bed and board while she pursued her promising career.

  Fifty-four-year-old Gerald and twenty-five-year-old Germaine had both liked a breath of river air before packing it in for the night. Not finding her, he had gone to see if she was taking one by herself. He wondered if she had strolled over to the opposite bank where he had seen some television or film shooting going on at one of the abandoned wharves, but he hadn’t gone to see.

  ‘You want that last par in?’ Typists said. There had been some trouble unscrambling it.

  ‘Why not? I’ve got a photo-caption, too,’ Mooney said. ‘Do you want it?’

  ‘Who’s got the photo?’

  ‘I have. I’m bringing it in.’

  ‘No, love. Art department, when you get here.’

  ‘Mooney, Chelsea, right?’

  ‘Got it.’

  4

  THE men making the siren noise spent some minutes clearing up the mystery of Mrs Mooney. There were mysteries in abundance already but to Detective Chief Inspector Summers one of the biggest was how a young prick like this constable on the door had ever got into the force.

  ‘What’s your name, son?’ he said.

  ‘Nutter,’ the constable said, reddening.

  ‘Yes.’ The chief inspector let it hang in the air. Well, I don’t want to be hard on you, lad, were the words that sprang to mind but he left them unuttered. With a name like that a lifetime of problems lay ahead, anyway. ‘And you thought she was what?’ he said.

  ‘Well, a nun, something like that.’

  ‘In jeans?’ (On a bike? Mrs?)

  ‘Something like that. A missionary, or a welfare worker, something religious. They expected her here. I thought they did, sir. She told them that,’ he said aggrievedly.

  This seemed to be the case
. The help said she’d thought the landlord had phoned her. The landlord said he’d thought someone had sent her. They were all standing in the beery little porch looking at each other. The landlord didn’t seem to know his arse from his elbow; for which, the chief inspector thought, there might be good reasons. He had a recent piece of information which he wished to pursue, so he said, ‘Let’s get on, then. You lead the way, landlord. Take over here, Mason,’ he added with a significant look at Nutter.

  Detective Constable Mason took poor Nutter outside.

  ‘Never mind him,’ he said. ‘We all make mistakes.’

  ‘Yes, don’t we?’ Nutter said, his colour still high. He didn’t like references to his name. ‘And some go on making them,’ he added.

  Mason understood the allusion; common lately. But all he said was, ‘That’s what makes him irritable.’

  ‘Well, people in glass houses,’ madly persisted Nutter.

  Yeah, okay, Nutter. You toddle off then, Nutter. You’ll be all right, Nutter, old son, was what Mason passionately wanted to urge the fool. But again he held off, only nodding as Nutter strode proudly away. With a name like that, the plain-clothes man thought, strategy was needed, and Nutter didn’t seem to have any.

  Mason had plenty himself. He was a very controlled young man, a promising detective. He had an idea something promising was doing here.

  Logan’s sagging behind was meanwhile once more making the dolorous ascent to Germaine’s bower; and within about five minutes he was crying again. There was no opening time at The Gold Key that morning, though a growing band of customers – augmented by thirty ladies and gentlemen of the Press – impatiently awaited it.

  *

  The girl had been murdered; the third murder in a fortnight, and the third within a mile.

  The man stuck with this bad news sat sourly in his room, one of a suite he’d taken over at Chelsea police station as his Murder HQ, and realized he was in the deep end again.

  (He didn’t yet know how deep. The girl without the head still had it that morning; she had some time to go with it.)

  His name was Warton and he was a detective chief superintendent, a powerful roly-poly figure who seemed below medium height because of his enormous barrel chest and hunched shoulders. He had very little neck and a round baldish head which protruded outwards into an immensely long snout. It gave him the appearance of a wart-hog.