The Chelsea Murders

by Lionel Davidson

  ‘Sorry I’m late. I wanted all the shit straight. Take a look at it,’ he said, before nosing into the pint.

  The accounts, bound in a maroon folder, were immaculately typed.

  ‘Who did it?’

  ‘A chick.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Love,’ Artie said.

  ‘Well, it’s beautiful.’

  ‘I tell you,’ Artie said. ‘It’s fantastic. We’re already there, sweetheart. He’s going to query the wardrobe. It’s the one thing he knows about. That’s where we shuffle our feet and ask his advice. Is his partner going to be there?’

  ‘I don’t think so. He was seeing him earlier … Look, Artie, you know I think he’s only humouring us,’ Steve said. ‘I mean, don’t take off if he gives us a straight –’

  ‘I won’t take off,’ Artie said. ‘Quit worrying, Steve. We’ve gone a long way on sweet eff-ay. It’s a great job. I’m high on it today.’

  ‘Well, I hope you’re right.’

  ‘Sweetheart, don’t doubt.’

  Steve was glad to see him out of his sombre mood, anyway, so he didn’t voice further doubts. He just went anxiously there and back over the accounts, bracing himself for the encounter with Denny.

  *

  Denny, some time earlier, had been bracing himself, too. There had barely been need to discuss it with his partner, Chen. A few words and a few looks had sufficed.

  They had discussed it in the office, and then they had discussed some other affairs in the basement, and he had let Chen off the premises, and returned to his books.

  When the bell had gone a few minutes later, he thought Chen must have forgotten something.

  He went down to the front door and opened it.

  But it wasn’t Chen.

  ‘Hello?’ he said, surprised at seeing his visitor.

  ‘Can I see you for a minute?’ the visitor said.

  ‘Well, just now busy,’ Denny explained.

  ‘Won’t take a moment, honestly. I’m after information.’

  ‘Information?’ Denny said, curious.

  ‘Honestly only a moment.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Denny let the visitor in.

  At a few minutes to half-past seven, Steve and Artie crossed the road from The Potters and walked to Blue Stuff.

  ‘Well, here goes,’ Steve said, and pressed the bell.

  A minute or two later, he pressed it again.

  ‘Is that thing working?’ Artie said.

  ‘You can’t hear it down here. It only sounds upstairs.’

  ‘He hasn’t gone, has he?’

  Steve stepped back on the pavement and looked up. The light was shining in the office above.

  ‘No, he hasn’t gone.’

  Artie rapped on the glass door and tried to peer through.

  ‘Should we try the side door?’ he said.

  ‘We could,’ Steve said, puzzled. ‘Okay.’

  They rounded the corner of Larkhall Street to the dustbins, and tried the bell there. Steve put his ear to the door this time, and heard it ringing. There was no other sound, so he banged a couple of times, and rattled the handle, and while doing it, opened the door. He looked at Artie.

  ‘Isn’t that supposed to be locked?’ Artie said.

  Steve didn’t say anything. He felt around in the dark passage and switched the light on. ‘Denny!’ he called up the stairs.

  There was no answer, so he started up, Artie following.

  He couldn’t find the stock-room switch on the landing, but a slit of light was shining from Denny’s inner office. He cautiously felt his way to it, and opened the door, and they saw why Denny hadn’t answered the bell.

  From the long rafter above his desk the chairman seemed to be attentively watching them. Along with the flights of wild duck and calligraphy Mr Ogden Wu was hanging, by his neck.

  *

  One of the more grotesque aspects of him was that his head was in a bag. It was a plastic bag, and his final inhalations had sucked it into a crumpled, but recognizable, mould of his face. A tiny bulge showed the neat nose, a bigger one his tongue, which was evidently out. It wasn’t the only grotesque aspect.

  Denny had been hoisted aloft by the stock-room’s block and tackle. The long end of the nylon cord had been secured to a leg of the desk, which in consequence was raised from the floor; the whole desk slanted at a slight angle as if from a final lurch by the chairman.

  ‘Let’s go, Artie,’ Steve said, quietly.

  They went, in haste, back through the dark stock-room and down the stairs.

  ‘Hold it a minute,’ Artie said at the bottom. ‘Lock the door. Use your handkerchief.’

  Steve looked at him, but he locked the outside door.

  ‘Where’s he keep the money?’ Artie said.

  ‘Christ, Artie –’

  ‘Where?’ They were speaking in whispers.

  ‘Well, the basement, but how the hell –’

  ‘A safe in the floor, something like that … Let’s see.’

  They stared at each other a moment, and Steve led the way.

  They stepped carefully into the denim-smelling shop, dimly lit by outside lighting, and then down more stairs. It was pitch black at the bottom. Steve felt around, and they entered the large fitting room, and he closed the door and switched on the light.

  ‘Okay,’ Artie said. He could see his image in the wall mirror, and Steve’s, looking frail and bewildered beside him. He saw the carpet was loose-laid, and raised the edge and peeled it back, revealing a felt underlay, which he pulled up, too. He got out his handkerchief and felt around with it over the floorboards, and almost immediately found the loose one.

  There was no safe. A small metal box sat under the loose board, on concrete. Artie picked it out and weighed it in his hand, and tried the lid. It was locked.

  ‘Artie, we can’t do this,’ Steve said.

  ‘Yes we can,’ Artie said, and put the box in his pocket and replaced the board and the underlay and the carpet. ‘Okay, scram.’

  They were on the way out before Steve came to.

  ‘Jesus – hang on! We’ve got an appointment with him. He’ll have told Chen. We have to get the police.’

  Artie licked his lips. ‘Not before we’ve opened this,’ he said.

  ‘Have you flipped?’

  ‘No. I haven’t,’ Artie said. ‘All we need is the key. Well, he’ll have it on him, won’t he?’

  ‘Artie –’

  Artie was going back up the stairs. After an indecisive moment, Steve followed.

  Denny was still hunched and watching them from his end of the rope. His body swung as Artie went through the pockets. A small button-up wallet in the left trouser pocket had the keys. Feeling carefully with his handkerchief, Artie singled out the smallest and in a moment had the cash box open. Inside were half a dozen small packets and some green paper money: hundred-dollar bills. There were five of them.

  ‘Where’s all the rest, then?’ Artie said.

  He looked carefully under the packets. There was no more money. He picked out one of the packets with his handkerchief, and ripped the adhesive tape and sniffed inside. Then he put a finger in and licked the powder on the end.

  ‘Heroin.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus Christ,’ Steve said. He was shaking. ‘Put all that back, you bloody madman!’

  ‘We’ll have the money, anyway,’ Artie said, and pocketed it, and repacked the heroin and locked the box.

  ‘What if you’re searched with it?’

  ‘Right!’ Artie said. He looked around. ‘That other room.’

  ‘The stock-room?’

  ‘Don’t just stand like a tit. Help.’

  Steve helped. They taped the five hundred dollars inside the leg of a pair of jeans in a bale on the upper shelves, and replaced the box under the basement floor. Then they called the police.

  But it was a mistake, this incident. And it led to many others; although not to Hoppity-Hop. Hoppity-Hop was on the drawing board, anyw
ay.

  Three

  Hoppity-hoppity,

  Hoppity-hoppity,

  Hoppity-hoppity,

  Hop.

  20

  A SERGEANT gave Warton a discreet shake at half-past one the next afternoon, and said, ‘Sandwiches, sir.’

  ‘Right.’ He hadn’t been sleeping; he didn’t think he had. But as he sat up on the camp bed and saw the chap emptying his full ashtray into the bin, he realized that he had been at the least day-dreaming. ‘Garbage,’ he said.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Where’s Chief Inspector Summers?’

  ‘Just got his head down. Not ten minutes ago, sir,’ the man said reproachfully.

  ‘Get him.’

  Summers came gauntly into the room.

  ‘When was the garbage cleared?’ Warton said.

  ‘Garbage?’

  ‘There were two big metal containers – what do they call them, skips – in that street. We checked the dustbins, we didn’t check them. Have they been cleared?’

  ‘Well, I –’

  ‘Get on to the sanitation people. Mustn’t be destroyed.’

  ‘Oh. You mean –’

  ‘Do it now. And come back here. Also, want the Cumulative. Get it sent in right away.’

  The coffee tasted terrible. So did the sandwiches. He knew it must be his mouth. Apart from a couple of visits to Blue Stuff during the night while the search proceeded, he had sat smoking in this room.

  There was a light scattering of ash over the desk; the cleaners hadn’t been able to get in. He had a look at the photos again as he drank the coffee. Various views of the room, and of the Chinaman; hanging and on the floor; with the bag on and the bag off. He had been chloroformed before the bag had gone on.

  His desk was a litter of messy reports that had ceased to mean anything to him. His head thudded distantly. But he was able to concentrate on the Cumulative when it came in, and to note that it was up to date as of noon.

  The fellow Chen had left the shop at six-forty. The two young men had found the body soon after seven-forty.

  In that hour the Chinaman had been killed, and in that hour their alibis stood up, so he’d had to let them go. He had done it reluctantly, because he didn’t like alibis. Innocent people rarely had much in the way of an alibi. But everybody seemed to have one here.

  Warton had methodically had every conceivable suspect questioned, though he knew the person he wanted could only be the one who had sent the O.W. message; which meant one privy to Brenda’s tale: Giffard or Johnston, Colbert-Greer or Mooney. One of those four.

  He had entertained some wild thoughts about Mooney, but he knew now it couldn’t be Mooney. Mooney had been at a wine and cheese session of the Chelsea Poetry Society between six and eight; amply attested, apart from being attended by her tail.

  Colbert-Greer had been having a drink at six with a colleague, who had then walked part of the way home with him. His irate fellow tenant Mrs Bulstrode was pretty certain he had been moving about in the room above hers at six-thirty. And an Indian student (almost certainly homosexual) said he had visited and remained with him from shortly before seven. There were loopholes here, and Warton liked them; but he didn’t suspect Colbert-Greer. The hanging was not the work of a Colbert-Greer.

  He looked at the entry on the coloured bloke: JOHNSTON, Arthur (Artie).

  He had been visiting a female who had done some secretarial work for him at Putney, three miles away. She attested that he had left her at six-fifteen; which left a full hour before he had turned up at the pub at seven-fifteen. He said he had gone to his own home at Putney to check some work. Nobody had seen him enter the flat. But a bus conductor, same colour, had confirmed that a man of his description had boarded his bus at Putney at a few minutes to seven, and had got off, the full three miles away, outside the pub. That left twenty minutes between the earliest time the shop could have been entered (never mind killing the Chinaman and stringing him up), and the time that Johnston had turned up on a returning bus three miles away.

  Well, the conductor could have been wrong. There were other negroes with Afro hair styles. Loopholes here, too.

  There were no loopholes in Giffard’s story, and Warton brooded over the entry: GIFFARD, Walter Stephen (Steve).

  Giffard had arrived home from work at six-twenty; which the caretaker had particularly noticed because he had a registered letter for him, and Giffard had asked him for it. He had then had a shower and changed and gone out again, twenty minutes later. He had certainly turned up at the pub fifteen minutes after that, at five minutes to seven. And the journey would have taken him fifteen minutes, unless he’d grabbed a cab. Even with a cab, there was no time for him to go in and do the Chinaman and turn up at the pub when he had.

  Warton pondered this. The timing was neat. It was too neat. At the same time he turned over in his mind another question.

  There had been no signs of a struggle at either the front or the back door of the shop, or on the stairs. This indicated that the Chinaman had let in the person who had killed him; or that the back door had been left open for him. All these suppositions suggested somebody close to the business.

  Warton also pondered another matter: the absence of the chloroform. He knew now where the chloroform had come from. Inquiries after the attack on Honey revealed that a bottle was missing from a laboratory at Chelsea College.

  Among recent visitors to the laboratory were Mary Mooney (who had done a diary item on it), and the golden threesome now under review. This shower had toured the place with a view to using it in their horrible film.

  Wherever he turned, Warton found this golden threesome.

  A further puzzle was the mode of administering chloroform. A person wasn’t given a bottle and asked to sniff. The stuff must have been presented on a pad, as it had been to Honey. Where was the pad, and where was the bottle?

  In his bones, Warton knew that one or both of these young bastards had done for the Chinaman. What had they done with the pad and the bottle?

  He had had them searched immediately, and also the premises. But when squad cars had brought in first Chen and then the shop’s two full-time employees, Stanley Barrow and Wendy Lawrence, he had been presented with another reason for search. The young chap Barrow had confidentially told him that Wu kept large sums of dollars in a cash box in the basement. Persistent eavesdropping had revealed to him that whenever Chen appeared there was a share-out of these dollars.

  Chen had naturally denied any knowledge of this; but an immediate search of the basement room had produced the cash box, under the floorboards; the key to it had been found on Wu. The box had been found to contain sixty grams of first-quality heroin, but no money.

  Experience, on such occasions, had taught Warton never to watch the find itself, but the expressions of those who were watching it. A very faint frown, instantly removed, had appeared on Chen’s face. Stanley Barrow had gaped at the moneyless box before looking hard at Chen, and then even harder at Steve Giffard. The girl had simply stared at it with her mouth open. But Giffard and Johnston, Warton saw, hadn’t been watching the box at all. They had been watching him.

  Yes. They knew. Bloody certainly, they knew. They’d been at the box. So where was the money? And the chloroform and the pad?

  The search had produced nothing, though six experienced men had gone to work.

  He had kept Giffard and the black till three in the morning, but then he’d had to let them go; and had himself worked on for hours, before taking to the camp bed.

  ‘Okay on the skips, sir,’ Summers said, coming in. ‘They were removed this morning, but the stuff is intact at the yards. I’ve got blokes on the way now.’

  ‘Good. Have a cup, Summers.’

  ‘One out there, sir,’ Summers said dolefully.

  ‘Bring it in.’

  When Summers returned, yet more dolefully, he found Warton still brooding over the Cumulative. He didn’t speak for several minutes.

  ‘There’s a bottle o
f chloroform somewhere, Summers,’ he said. ‘Not just the small quantity used last night. Biggish job. Being kept somewhere.’

  Summers remained silent.

  ‘Also this costume.’ Warton had turned back a few pages to the attack on Honey. Her description of the mask and the wig had suggested a professional kit, so inquiries had gone out to all theatrical costumiers. They had turned up one which had supplied the small film company. They hadn’t supplied this particular mask. Still: the old threesome again.

  ‘There are three things hidden away,’ Warton said. ‘There’s the chloroform. There’s the mask. And there’s the material for making up these messages. He’s got them somewhere.’

  ‘Search warrants, sir?’

  ‘Have to – although he won’t have it at home. All of this lot would go in a quite small package, shopping bag, something like that. Locked up somewhere, where he can get at it.’

  ‘What – railway terminals, lock-up boxes?’

  ‘I think so. We have to regard anything small and light as suspicious. No reason for anybody to leave it. Get cracking on the warrants. We’ll do the lot in one sweep.’

  ‘House searches for Giffard and Johnston. Colbert-Greer?’

  ‘Certainly. Could be harbouring stuff.’

  ‘Mooney?’

  Warton paused. The girl had been rendered harmless as a reporter, whether she knew it yet or not. And it certainly couldn’t be her. Apart from anything else, she’d had a tail solidly following her.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘in the interests of elimination, yes. But when through, take the tail off her. I want the others tailed.’

  ‘All three? Nine men, sir.’

  ‘I know it. See these people are present at their house searches – want everything in order. Afterwards I’ll have Giffard and Johnston back here.’ He squinted at his watch. ‘Two o’clock. I’ll take a kip at four. Bring them in any time after six. You look as if you could do with one yourself, Summers.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Summers said.