The Chelsea Murders

by Lionel Davidson

‘Not at home. Gone away.’

  ‘Police looking for him?’

  ‘We are.’

  ‘What’s this, Chris?’

  ‘Little hunch of Mooney’s. There might be nothing in it. She gets things, that girl, though.’

  6

  MOONEY was just then getting the beer. She was doing it in The Chelsea Potter (known as The Potters), one of a dozen pubs in the stretch between Sloane Square and World’s End. The attraction of The Potters was that Frank regularly used it. It didn’t look as if he’d be doing so tonight, however. All she’d got was Artie and Steve.

  ‘Well, then,’ she said, making the best of this. ‘And how’s Frank and his book these days? Where is he, anyway?’

  ‘Frank?’ Steve said. ‘Well, I think he’s just about up to Rossetti – that it, Artie?’

  ‘Rossetti?’ Artie said, startled. ‘Oh, Rossetti. Dante Gabriel. Big Gabe,’ he added. ‘Yeah, that’s where he’s at with it.’

  ‘Well, good,’ Mooney said.

  Something was going on, for certain. No questions were being answered on Frank. She tried again.

  ‘It’s time I gave him another par on that, I promised him. There ought to be a way I could tie up the book with the film, give you all a turn.’

  ‘Sweetheart, it’s not a Pre-Raphaelite film,’ Artie told her.

  He was like a long black cat, golliwog smile in place under his beehive; she smiled back at him.

  ‘How did the night-shooting go, incidentally?’

  ‘Good. You should have come. I told you.’

  ‘Does Frank take a practical interest in that?’ she asked with immense seriousness.

  ‘Well, of course he does. He has to,’ Artie said. ‘There’s a hundred things, costume, period, style.’

  ‘He was there, was he?’

  She actually saw Steve’s foot move there, just as Artie opened his mouth. Artie didn’t falter. ‘Well, that’s always a scramble,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to keep my eyes on everything to be sure we don’t miss things. I mean, we hire that stuff practically by the minute. Well, you know how we’re working.’

  Mooney knew how they were working. She’d done a couple of stories on the film, which she’d thought at first a joke. She knew now it was no joke. They were obsessed with it. Every penny they had or could borrow had gone into it. They’d taken their dim part-time jobs just to be able to carry on with it.

  She listened as Artie carried on about it now: their hand-cranking flicker effects, the long mascara looks, bumbling Keystone cops – all the 1920-ish tricks they were using to make a piece of period slapstick out of some contemporary situations.

  She’d heard it all before, though, so she watched Steve.

  She saw that the little manikin, though relaxed, was watching her. It was his idea, most of the film, she knew. He’d dreamed it up at the film school. All three of them, Steve, Artie and Frank, had been at the school – and before that at Chelsea Art School. Frank was back at the art school now, though as a lecturer this time.

  She sought for ways to get back to Frank; and tackled it her own way, as soon as Artie drew breath.

  ‘How’s Abo, then?’ she said. ‘Still coming up with the bread?’

  The foot moved again, and this time Artie did falter.

  ‘Why – I guess so,’ he said.

  ‘Of course he is,’ said little Steve. ‘That’s a bright Arab.’

  ‘What’s he doing these days?’

  ‘Shagging his ears off,’ Artie said.

  ‘Apart from that.’

  What Abo was doing apart from that, as Mooney knew, was learning English, with Frank.

  ‘I haven’t seen too much of him,’ Steve said.

  ‘Has he got over that cousin of his?’

  ‘Unfortunately.’

  ‘Some party!’

  ‘It was.’ Steve sipped his beer. ‘What that Arab needs is more cousins.’

  ‘I thought he had two thousand already,’ Artie said; adding curiously, ‘And why the hell is everv last one of them called Feisal?’

  ‘They aren’t,’ Mooney said. ‘Some are called Abo.’

  ‘Well, that’s right,’ Artie confessed. ‘And Mohammed. Abo is a Mohammed, too.’

  ‘No, he isn’t.’ Mooney was the expert on this. She had written a little piece after Abo’s commemorative party for his young countryman Feisal, who had been beheaded for assassinating his Uncle Feisal, king of Saudi Arabia. ‘He’s ibn Mohammed – Abdul Azbig ibn Mohammed. It means his father was Mohammed.’

  ‘Every Arab’s father was Mohammed,’ Steve said. ‘He was the father of the race.’

  ‘No, he wasn’t.’ Mooney knew this, too. ‘Abraham was. He was the father of all the Semites, Jews and Arabs.’

  ‘Catholic guy, Abraham. Ibrahim,’ Steve said prissily, speaking like Abo.

  Just then Abo spoke for himself. ‘Hello,’ he said, with muted delight. He’d swung in, questing, from the King’s Road, long leather jacket swinging. Mooney recollected the boom of a Ferrari some moments before.

  ‘Hello, Abo, we were discussing your Catholic family,’ she said.

  ‘Catholic?’

  ‘Have a beer,’ Mooney said.

  ‘Whisky. Whisky?’ Abo said, producing his wallet.

  ‘Go on, pervert us.’

  Abo bought the whisky, sizing up the form in the pub. There wasn’t much; Thursday evening. The labourers who favoured the place were paid on Friday. Abo, twenty years old, weirdly resembling in feature his late monarch Feisal, had catholic tastes.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to call you, Abo,’ Mooney said, in a friendly fashion. In her many calls today she’d already tried him a dozen times. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Very good.’

  ‘How are the English studies?’

  ‘Good,’ Abo said.

  ‘How’s Frank?’

  ‘He is my good friend.’

  ‘Teaching you much English?’

  ‘Much. Oh!’ Abo said, rolling his eyes to show how much.

  ‘Did he work you hard today?’

  ‘Not today. Frank not here today.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘We fold our tents,’ Steve said, ‘and quietly steal away. Longfellow.’

  ‘So soon?’

  ‘Artie has a job,’ Steve said, ‘which I’m walking him to. But we’d be glad of a piece. Really. Let’s get together soon.’

  ‘Sure,’ Mooney said, and hungrily watched them go.

  Nothing out of Abo, as she’d instantly sensed. He didn’t know anything. That was why they’d left her with him.

  All Abo knew (though he bought her another whisky) was that this was one of the ugliest women he’d ever seen. Women should be blonde and about his own size, which was five foot five, and they should have faces either like dolls or like gazelles. This one had a face like a camel.

  But he thought his own thoughts, and Mooney thought hers.

  She thought about Artie.

  He was weird.

  They all were, but he was possibly the weirdest. There couldn’t be too many young Liverpool blacks who’d translated and published their own versions of the poems of Rimbaud. She knew about his sea-going days, of his three years in Paris and two in Los Angeles; his art school scholarship. Now he was producer of the film, and it was in this capacity, as she knew, that he was reading away in the reference library, covering all the cases in which the police had made particular fools of themselves – both to duplicate the hairier bits of action and to steer them clear of libel.

  Knowing all this, she still felt she didn’t know much.

  She knew far more about Frank, if only because feckless Frank told you everything – even his most ‘intimate’ items. He’d had lectureships at several art schools until he’d decided suddenly to do his book on the Pre-Raphaelites, and had then dropped the other schools, retaining only Chelsea.

  To make ends meet and pay his whack with the film, he’d taken a job at a language school because of its flexible hour
s; and at the language school he’d met Abo, now the principal backer of the film.

  That was how things happened with Frank.

  Abo, intended for a classier seat of learning, was having his troubles with English. Meanwhile, fantastically rich, palatially housed, he wasn’t averse to casting a few alms in a direction that guaranteed him a ready supply of boys and girls.

  Mooney wondered what had gone wrong there. She had an idea something had. But mainly she wondered about Frank. You could always raise Frank somewhere. She hadn’t been able to raise him for two days now.

  Something funny was going on.

  Frank wasn’t just deviant and not just a hop-head. To say he was degenerate was simply to offer an opening remark on his whole fascinating awfulness.

  She was aware that Abo was asking if she wanted more whisky. She thanked him and said she didn’t, and went home and resumed phoning.

  She had a flat close by in the King’s Road.

  It was opposite the post office.

  *

  Artie knew he was late when he left the pub but he didn’t hurry. He actually slowed. Steve was keeping something from him.

  Every time Frank had been mentioned, the subject had been changed. Okay, there was something with Frank; immediately, without question, he had followed Steve’s lead. Now Steve was still doing it.

  Artie felt one of his rages building up; felt it in his hands, the desire to smash faces, to break things.

  He kept talking, though. Steve might still tell him; as if he’d meant to all the time, but that business had to come first.

  The business was lousy.

  Abo had called at the shop to give Steve the bills back. He said he wouldn’t be paying any more. That left them in a great position; a few hundred feet of film stock left, no way of hiring equipment or costumes for the next scenes. They couldn’t even see the results of the night-shooting; the labs wouldn’t let the stuff out without money.

  ‘What’s the least they’d take?’ Steve said.

  ‘Two hundred. It’s nothing on what we owe. They’ve been okay.’

  ‘Well, we’ll have to get it,’ Steve said.

  ‘What is it with Abo?’

  ‘Who knows? We’ll settle him, but it takes time.’

  ‘Can’t Frank talk to him?’ Artie said.

  ‘He’ll have to.’

  In the pause Artie said, ‘Where is Frank?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Steve said.

  Artie let some moments elapse.

  ‘Why did he come in to see you?’ Artie said.

  ‘He bombed out over the girl. I told you.’

  ‘What were you supposed to do about it?’

  ‘Christ, Artie,’ Steve said. ‘He flipped. He came in in a flipped condition. He wanted his hand held. I held it.’

  ‘He was screwing her, wasn’t he?’

  ‘You know Frank doesn’t screw girls.’

  ‘He does some bloody thing. Where is he now?’

  ‘In bed, I suppose. He’s low, leave him alone.’

  ‘If he was in bed, Mary would have got at him.’

  ‘So he’s somewhere else. What do you want, Artie?’

  Artie wanted to yell To know why you’ve got him away from the police. He knew where Frank would be: at the country pad his old portraitist Dad had left him. They’d been there. No phones, hardly any roads. He’d be hiding while he thought what to do. He waited for Steve to say casually he might have a couple of things to do himself that week-end. Then he would pick Steve up and throw him in the road.

  Steve didn’t say this. He said, ‘What did the police want?’

  ‘You know what they wanted,’ Artie said. ‘They wanted a list of everybody on the location.’

  ‘Did you give them it?’

  ‘Everyone I knew. Frank wasn’t there, was he?’

  ‘Oh, Jesus!’ Steve said.

  They had got to the restaurant now.

  ‘Okay,’ Artie said. He left Steve and went in right away.

  They were all eating duck inside.

  Serge said, ‘Ah, le poète en personne. La muse est parmi nous’.

  ‘Que pouvons-nous lui offrir?’ Marc said. ‘Qu’est-ce qui va inspirer son âme et son palais aujourd’ hui?’

  Artie told them all what they could do.

  Steve was crossing the Albert Bridge in a cab. He got off at the other side of the river and hurried into the residential hostel.

  He wasn’t, strictly speaking, entitled to this favoured accommodation, but he’d managed to keep himself listed as a student.

  He let himself into his flat and switched on the light. He had left the door locked that led to his bathroom and bedroom and he unlocked it and switched the light on there, too.

  Frank stirred unhealthily in the bed.

  ‘Get up now, Frank,’ Steve said.

  7

  ‘CHRIST. Must you?’ Frank said.

  He was shielding his eyes from the light.

  ‘Get up,’ Steve said, and waited till Frank did.

  Frank groped first for his glasses and put them on. Then the long thin length of him articulated out of the bed. He just had his shirt on. He looked awful.

  ‘God,’ he said. He had to clutch at the bed.

  Steve didn’t help him. ‘Take a cold shower,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, don’t be so fucking beastly.’

  ‘Have a wash, then. I’ll make coffee.’

  He went and did this and presently Frank appeared in a robe.

  ‘Here we are,’ Steve said.

  Frank shakily sat and sipped the hot, very black coffee. He looked about sixty. He was thirty. Steve alertly watched him.

  ‘How do you feel?’ he said.

  ‘Daisy-like. Flower-fresh.’

  ‘Do you want to talk?’

  Frank smacked his foul mouth a little. ‘Do I?’ he said. ‘I don’t know. What’s been happening in the world?’

  ‘Germaine is all over the front pages, and the back pages, and other pages.’

  ‘Well, she made it,’ Frank said. ‘She wanted to.’

  ‘What did you do to her?’

  ‘I didn’t do anything. And stop looking like a lawyer.’

  ‘They say she was strangled, Frank.’

  ‘Oh, God, do they?’

  ‘Yup.’ He poured more coffee. ‘What happened?’

  Frank was assimilating this.

  He said dazedly, ‘I was in the King’s Road. Going to the night shooting. And there was old Germaine, outside The Gold Key. She said she was going to the river.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know why,’ Frank said pettishly.

  ‘But you went with her.’

  ‘Did I?’ Frank said. ‘I think I did. Yes. Down those pissy streets. World’s End. That’s right. That’s what we did do.’

  ‘Frank, had you had a fix?’ Steve said gloomily.

  ‘What if I had?’

  ‘All right, then what?’

  ‘Then we got there and saw the lights at the other side, the film lights, and I said didn’t she want to come and see, and she said she couldn’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘So you went.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where?’

  Frank looked round the room. ‘Oh, God,’ he said. ‘I wish I wasn’t here.’

  ‘When you left Germaine, Frank,’ Steve said patiently, ‘you went somewhere. You were going to cross the bridge to those lights at the other side. Did you do that?’

  ‘I think,’ Frank said slowly, ‘I went home. To bed.’

  ‘And in the morning you got up.’

  ‘Well, of course I did. I had a lecture.’

  ‘I don’t think you gave it, Frank.’

  ‘No, I wish you’d stop this. Of course I didn’t give the fucking lecture. I told you that.’

  Steve blinked.

  ‘Why didn’t you?’ he said.

  ‘Are you imbecilic, or what? A kid on th
e bus had this transistor. I told you. They do news items between the noise. And I suddenly heard Germaine’s name and something about the police, so I got off and bought a paper. It was the early one, full of racehorses and greyhounds. But in the stop press it said she’d been drowned. It blew me out of my mind. I suppose I looked a bit funny.’

  ‘That’s right, you did,’ Steve said. ‘Frank, you walked a long way past the art school to come and tell me that.’

  Frank looked at him for some moments.

  ‘You don’t think I killed her, do you?’ he said.

  ‘Do you know if you did, Frank?’

  Frank stared even longer.

  ‘Well, I’m going home, for God’s sake. Are you mad?’ he said.

  ‘Frank, you’ve been here a couple of days – do you know that? The police are looking for you.’

  ‘Are they?’ Frank said. One lank black lock was touching his glasses and his eyes were squinting behind the thick lenses. ‘Steve, you surely don’t think –’

  ‘I don’t know what to think,’ Steve said, ‘except you need a better story. We’ve got to go back over every bit of it, see how much you remember.’

  Frank drew his robe a bit closer.

  ‘Have you got a drink?’ he said.

  ‘Don’t have a drink, Frank.’ Steve could smell him. He’d left a bottle of Scotch in the room. All gone. ‘Have a cigarette,’ he said and lit two. ‘Okay. The pissy streets and the river and we’re sitting watching the lights, right?’

  ‘Well, nearly,’ Frank said. ‘We’re leaning, actually. We leaned on the wall.’

  ‘At the wharf.’

  ‘What wharf? We were on the embankment.’

  ‘Those pissy streets go to the wharves,’ Steve said. ‘You have to turn off to get to the embankment.’

  ‘Did we?’ Frank said.

  ‘Can’t you remember?’

  Frank thought. ‘I remember a street,’ he said. ‘Fairly hideous. Quite long. Awful.’

  ‘With a power station in it? Lots Road?’

  ‘That’s right.’ Frank was blinking. ‘Lots Road. That’s what it was. That is clever of you, Steve.’

  ‘Frank, don’t take offence,’ Steve said. ‘But Germaine had done a couple of things for you, hadn’t she? Did you sort of – fancy anything just then? Have a small gin, if you want.’

  He got up and poured Frank one.