The Chelsea Strangler

by Susanna GREGORY

  ‘So they claim, but look at the report on their condition. They were fit, well-fed and unburned by the sun. I think they allowed themselves to be caught deliberately, just to get inside the prison.’

  ‘But how could they know they would be brought to Chelsea?’ Vincent sounded dubious. ‘There are other gaols for captured Hollanders besides this one.’

  ‘Not for sailors from the Battle of Lowestoft,’ argued Reymes. ‘They all came here, as anyone who frequents a London coffee house will tell you. Ergo, Spring could have gone to the coast, rowed a boat into the area patrolled by our ships, and waited for “rescue”.’

  ‘And all because of…’ mused Vincent wonderingly.

  ‘Yes,’ said Reymes with finality. ‘Which I should have guessed a lot sooner.’

  They began discussing a consignment of barley at that point, causing Chaloner to clench his fists in exasperation. All because of what? But it was no time to ponder. He returned to the strongroom, swearing under his breath when he discovered not one lock on the door, but two. They were good ones, and took him longer than usual to pick. Each time there was a squeak or a click, he paused in an agony of tension, sure that Reymes or Vincent would hear.

  But he succeeded in the end, and the door swung open. He stepped inside, acutely aware that the sentry was beginning to stir. The lantern outside shed just light enough to show him that the chamber was full of wooden boxes – ones that were the same size and shape as those that had been unloaded from the carts the previous night. The lid on one had been flipped back, and he looked inside it to see a neat line of small cloth bags. He grabbed one, and heard the distinctive clink of coins within. Not food then: Doyley had been lying. Or had he? Eleanore had pointed out that the commissioner might just have repeated what he had been told.

  Chaloner shoved the bag in his pocket to examine more carefully later, and turned to leave, stepping over the sentry as he did so. Unfortunately, the man was not as groggy as he thought, because a hand fastened around his ankle. He tried to pull loose, but the grip was powerful.

  ‘Help!’ the sentry croaked. ‘Intruders!’

  Chaloner wrenched free and ran as the heads of Reymes and Vincent snapped towards him. Had they seen his face, or was the corridor too dark? Regardless, he heard their footsteps hammering after him as he tore up the stairs and made for the front door. Unfortunately, he reached it at exactly the same time as Wilkinson, who was just arriving home. Chaloner pulled his hat low over his eyes as the rector hauled out a pair of handguns, glad the house was dimly lit, although recognition would hardly matter if he was dead.

  Wilkinson took aim, but Chaloner had already turned, and was sprinting up the stairs towards the bedrooms. There was a deafening report, and splinters flew from the banister next to his hand. The rector spat a curse, and his next ball pounded into the wall above Chaloner’s head. Chaloner did not stop, although clattering footsteps told him that at least half a dozen brown-coats had joined the race to catch him.

  The only way to escape from the upper floor was to climb through a window and jump down into the garden, so Chaloner dived into Wilkinson’s bedchamber and tore open the shutter. But the mullions were too narrow for him to squeeze through, and there was no time to try another room. He ducked behind a bureau when Vincent appeared in the doorway, although he knew the game was up. He was trapped, and there would be no escape now. Then Reymes released a triumphant cry from the chamber next door.

  ‘I have him! He is here! Jem? What are you—ouch! Vincent! To me!’

  Obligingly, Vincent hurtled to Reymes’ rescue, and there came the sounds of a scuffle – grunts from the commissioner, an angry bellow from Jem, and Lil’s distinctive whine. Chaloner sagged in relief, waited a moment to catch his breath, then tiptoed out into the corridor. He glanced into the next room as he crept past it, and saw an unexpected tableau.

  The Colliers had clearly been in the act of rifling through a chest, because it lay open in front of them. Both were being firmly held by the brown-coats, while Reymes regarded them with icy anger. Wilkinson was there, too, waving his guns in a way that suggested he itched to use them.

  ‘The front door was wide open, so what do you expect?’ demanded Lil, apparently of the opinion that her transgression was someone else’s fault for providing the temptation in the first place. ‘It was an invite, so we took it.’

  ‘You are common criminals?’ asked Wilkinson dangerously. ‘You, who have accepted the charity of Mrs Bonney and her staff?’

  ‘We ain’t common,’ declared Lil, aggrieved.

  ‘And we ain’t criminals neither,’ added Jem. ‘This is the first time we done any burgling, and only then because the door was open. But we weren’t going to take nothing, honest.’

  ‘Look,’ said Lil, holding out the sack she still held. ‘There’s hardly nothing in it. Just a few candlesticks and a bowl. You can spare them, being a Christian man.’

  ‘I did leave the front door open,’ acknowledged Wilkinson, and glared at Reymes. ‘I assumed it would be safe with all your guards around. How could these rogues have come all the way up the stairs without being seen? Were your people asleep?’

  ‘Their eyes are on the basement,’ replied Reymes shortly. ‘For obvious reasons.’

  Footsteps on the stairs prompted Chaloner to dash back to Wilkinson’s bedchamber to hide. It was the sentry, white-faced and reeling from the blow he had suffered.

  ‘They were in the strongroom,’ he gasped, clutching the doorframe for support. ‘They knocked me over the head, and made off with a bag of coins. Search them.’

  ‘Here!’ said Lil indignantly, as Vincent began to oblige. ‘Watch where you put your hands! And we never went down no basement. We just came up here.’

  Chaloner slipped away as the commotion intensified, padding into the dusk-shadowed garden and scaling the wall at the back. When he reached the top, he glimpsed someone hiding in the nearby trees, but by the time he reached the spot, the figure had gone. Was it the spectre? He knew one thing, though: it had moved with an uncanny lightness of foot, so he was sure it was someone who knew the area well. He began to poke around, and there in the last light of the dying day, he saw a strand of wool caught on a bramble. It was cornflower blue.

  Since Chaloner had been inside the rectory, the courtiers had swung into action, and there was a terrific rumpus emanating from Buckingham House. He walked to the gate, where the usual cluster of interested villagers stood, all staring agog at what was happening – which was some sort of hide-and-seek that involved the losers dispensing with items of clothing. Chaloner pushed through the gawpers and hurried up the drive, knowing instinctively that Kipps would have gone to join his friends there when he had finished staging his diversion.

  ‘Well, Tom,’ the Seal Bearer asked with a happy grin, his eyes fixed on a scantily clad Lady Castlemaine. ‘Were my efforts any good? I was able to keep the ruse going much longer than I anticipated, because some hapless fisherman happened to be out in the marshes.’

  ‘Yes – Wadham,’ replied Chaloner, and told him what had happened.

  ‘Then thank God for the Colliers,’ breathed Kipps when Chaloner had finished. ‘Or I might have been left to solve this nasty business alone. Lord! The very thought of it is enough to make a man yearn for a drink.’

  He hurried away to get one, ignoring the closer jug in favour of the one that was next to the object of his lust. Yet wine was a good idea, and Chaloner felt better when he had availed himself of a cup. He looked around and saw Brodrick, Greeting and Hungerford sitting despondently nearby. All looked haggard, and Greeting was complaining about a sour smell. He had good cause: there was a vinegar-dipped sponge under the chair in which he sat. Clearly, someone was still afraid of catching the plague, even in elegant company like that at Buckingham House.

  ‘I have never known such wild frolics,’ said Brodrick hoarsely. ‘I would not have imagined that Reymes had it in him. He does not seem like that kind of fellow.’

  ‘He i
s not,’ chuckled Hungerford tipsily. ‘That is why he paid Greeting and me to—’

  ‘Hungerford!’ barked Greeting urgently. ‘It is a secret, remember?’

  ‘Paid you to what?’ demanded Chaloner, although he had already guessed the answer. ‘To make the activities in Buckingham House as noisy and boisterous as possible?’

  ‘No,’ said Hungerford in a way that made it plain the answer was yes. Greeting rolled his eyes, while Brodrick gaped his astonishment. Chaloner was only disgusted that he had not put two and two together sooner, because it was obvious what was happening: Reymes was using his debauched guests to attract attention away from the rectory. Tales of odd happenings there had still leaked out, but they were mostly eclipsed by talk about the antics at Buckingham House.

  ‘It was too good an offer to refuse,’ said Greeting defensively. ‘Although it was conditional on us keeping the matter to ourselves.’ He scowled at Hungerford. ‘He might refuse to pay us now that we have broken the terms of the agreement, and I need that money.’

  ‘I need some, too,’ put in Brodrick, while Chaloner thought Reymes was a fool to have recruited Hungerford for the task, a drunkard who barely remembered his own name most days. ‘Perhaps he will hire me instead – I can keep a secret. And yet it is a curious business. Why would he want his entertainments to be raucous?’

  ‘He declined to say,’ replied Hungerford. ‘That was another condition of the arrangement – no questions asked.’

  Chaloner regarded the courtier thoughtfully. ‘Your family estate is near Bath, is it not? Did the Collier family ever work for you?’

  ‘No,’ replied Hungerford shortly, ‘and they are lying when they tell people that they did. I meant to mention it to Parker, but I kept forgetting. And it is too late now, given that he is dead.’

  In a pensive frame of mind, Chaloner returned to the Swan.

  Chapter 13

  Chaloner woke early the following day, his thoughts churning in agitation long before he was fully awake. There had been no reply from either the Earl or Williamson, and he sensed that he and Kipps stood alone against whatever was unfolding in Chelsea. However, he had answers to some of his questions, including understanding at last the connection between the strangler’s victims.

  Nancy’s window had a good view of the rectory, and she had spent a lot of time looking out of it with Martha’s Dutch telescope. Meanwhile, Underhill had been one of Williamson’s spies; Kole had been a peeping Tom; and Parker’s coffee-induced madness had caused him to wander about at odd times. All had been in a position to witness the peculiar happenings at the rectory – happenings almost certainly related to the money in the cellar.

  Cocke, however, had been killed by a different hand, and Chaloner was fairly sure that he had been dispatched for reasons wholly unconnected to the business at Wilkinson’s home.

  He had been too tired to give the bag he had stolen more than a cursory glance the previous night, so he pulled it out of his pocket now, and emptied it into his hand. It contained about a hundred shillings. All were grubby, which meant they were probably real – shiny new ones were more likely to be counterfeit. If each of the wooden boxes in the strongroom contained fifty purses, then a veritable fortune was in there. No wonder it was so well guarded, and that the carts bringing more of it had arrived in the dead of night!

  So where had it come from? The Treasury? Reymes was prefect, so had he ferried it to Chelsea for safekeeping? But then Chaloner remembered what he had learned about the Treasury at White Hall – that it was stored mainly as gold, and that its boxes were smaller and made of metal. Then was it the money that the goldsmiths had donated for the war? But that had come in sacks, and there had not been nearly enough of them to fill the boxes in the rectory. Chaloner racked his brain for other large caches of money, but no answers came.

  As Kipps and Wiseman were still asleep, he worked on the cipher he had found under Cocke’s mattress. It took him an hour to decode, but he succeeded in the end. It read:

  Tayke 40s for sheetes, 10s for fiyrewood, and 3d for each playte.

  He opened Cocke’s ledger, and saw the accompter had done just that – and that all three amounts were in excess of what Mrs Bonney’s receipts showed had been paid. He frowned. Did it mean Cocke had been following orders to steal from Gorges? But why would he do such a thing when suspicion would inevitably fall on him? And who would be in a position to issue such instructions? Chaloner stared at the note, but the writing was unfamiliar.

  He prodded Kipps awake, feeling the need to discuss what he had reasoned, and was pleased when Wiseman stirred, too. The surgeon’s sharper wits would be far more useful. Unfortunately, neither man had any great insights to offer.

  ‘Well, I can tell you for certain that the chests we saw being unloaded in Wilkinson’s garden did not come from the Treasury,’ averred Kipps. ‘I would have recognised them at once. I am Messenger of the Receipt, you know.’

  Chaloner supposed that was true. ‘Then where else could they have come from?’

  ‘The Dutch?’ suggested Wiseman. ‘We captured nine ships during the Battle of Lowestoft, and I know for a fact that there were coins aboard some of them.’

  ‘Or perhaps Reymes filched them from another courtier,’ said Kipps, eyes gleaming hopefully at the notion that his Earl’s enemy could be exposed as a felon. ‘Doyley and Wilkinson will not know they are helping to conceal stolen goods, of course. Those brown-coats are Reymes’ men, not theirs.’

  Their opinions served to confuse Chaloner even further.

  Having had their say, the pair of them settled down to the game of chess that they had started the previous night, after Wiseman had declared himself the best player in London, and Kipps had decided to prove him wrong. The truth was that neither was very good: the surgeon was all reckless aggression, while Kipps favoured ‘cunning’ tactics that did not work. Both were determined to win, however, and the atmosphere around the board was poisonous. Kipps concentrated in icy silence, but Wiseman cursed in Latin, and some of his insults were so ripe that Chaloner was surprised that the Seal Bearer did not surge to his feet and call him out.

  While they played, Chaloner’s mind seethed with questions. What should he do? The Earl would be delighted to hear that Reymes was involved in something untoward, but Chaloner felt he needed to learn exactly what it was before sending a report that would see the prefect in trouble.

  And what about the College? Were the men in the Garden Court the ones on the lists he had taken from Tooker and Cocke, and if so, what did they intend to do? Something on Wednesday – tomorrow – as Akers believed? Did it involve the money in the rectory? And what was meant by ‘elephants’? Were they guns, and a lot of very dangerous rebels intended to make an assault on London while the King and his government were away?

  Was the spectre involved, and if so, who was he? Chaloner had been told it was Wilkinson, Sutcliffe, Reymes or a woman, with Lil going so far as to accuse Eleanore. Dorothy had drawn what she had seen, a visage that was uncannily like the description Parker had supplied – ‘lithe, hook-nosed and brooding with evil’. Or was the ‘apparition’ just one of the brown-coats, prowling around the village as part of the security arrangements put in place to protect the rectory?

  The first item on the agenda that day was to visit Gorges. There was ample proof – in the ledger and the note that Chaloner had just decoded – that Cocke had made off with the missing thirty pounds, but what about the thefts from the residents? The Colliers being caught stealing had muddied the waters, and Chaloner was loath to declare the case solved until he was sure exactly who had taken what. And hopefully, by the time he had sorted that out, Williamson would have sent reinforcements to deal with the other problems that were bubbling in Chelsea.

  Night was only just fading into day, and it was still too early to call at a respectable place and expect to be allowed in, so Chaloner ate the stale bread and cheese that Landlord Smith provided, although he chafed impatiently at the delay. Kipps
joined him, gloating because he had won the chess, while a sulking Wiseman remained in the bedchamber to heft his stones.

  At that moment, Reymes and Doyley arrived, claiming that the revels at Buckingham House were still in progress, and they wanted to breakfast in peace. Chaloner felt his pulse quicken. It was an excellent opportunity for an interrogation, although his questions would have to be put with care, given that Reymes had a private army at his command.

  ‘You were right yesterday, Kipps,’ said Doyley amiably, approaching their table. ‘There were thieves at large. Unfortunately, you sent everyone off in the wrong direction – the villains were the Colliers, and while we all hunted in the marshes, they sneaked into the rectory. They are now lodged in Gorges, which is the only house in the area with a cellar secure enough to hold them.’

  ‘I would have thought that the rectory had plenty,’ said Chaloner innocently.

  ‘Much of our stockpiled food is in those,’ replied Reymes, holding his gaze in the way liars do when trying not to appear shifty. ‘But it would not remain secret for long if the likes of Lil and Jem got wind of it.’

  ‘I agree,’ nodded Doyley. ‘That pair is better off in Gorges.’

  ‘Why did they target the rectory?’ asked Kipps, feigning nonchalance.

  ‘Apparently, they saw the door had been left open and that was enough.’ Doyley grimaced in disgust. ‘The home of a cleric! Is nothing sacred?’

  ‘I have been told that Wilkinson is very wealthy,’ said Kipps. ‘And that he keeps boxes of coins in his basement.’

  Alarmed, Chaloner kicked him under the table. They would never thwart whatever was brewing if Reymes guessed that they suspected him and took measures to have them silenced.

  ‘Wilkinson is wealthy?’ asked Doyley in disbelief. ‘Whoever told you that?’

  ‘I cannot recall,’ mumbled Kipps. ‘One of the villagers, probably.’

  ‘Well, he is mistaken,’ stated Reymes firmly. ‘The rectory is a grim and shabby place, as you must have noticed on your visit. The only thing of value is the food.’