The Chelsea Murders

by Lionel Davidson

  At this time he was already planning (his alter-ego Freer was, he said in the statement) the murder of the Arab, who had plenty of money and was messing them about. He decided to postpone this for the time being and instead to do something with the cleaver, which might at one and the same time exonerate him and implicate Artie. In pondering how to do it he recalled the registered-mail book he had signed on claiming his registered letter from the caretaker. Above his own name in the book had appeared that of a Dutch student with an apt set of initials, W. S. Groot.

  ‘That was the money she was thanking her friend Nellie for, sir,’ Warton advised. He watched the C.C. read slowly through the next half page and then turn rather restlessly back.

  ‘His room wasn’t searched after that murder?’ the C.C. said.

  ‘Not then, sir, no. You have to see the situation at the time.’

  Warton amplified it for him.

  With the keys copied, Steve had slipped out to his other room in Sevastopol Street. His ‘protection’ was at the front so he had felt safe enough in slipping out of the back. He had picked up his kit (cleaver, cape, mask, etc.) and had returned and used them. He had deposited the major part of this kit in his bedroom wardrobe before returning to inflict the rather severe wound on himself in the doorway; and had then waited for the first caller and the police. The rest of the house had then been searched, but in the circumstances his own room had not been searched.

  ‘I see,’ the C.C. said.

  Next day, choosing his moment, Steve had returned the kit to Sevastopol Street. But in the ensuing days, with his arm being treated, he had rethought the position. He was aware that he wasn’t under suspicion himself now. As he had planned, Artie was under suspicion. This seemed now not such a great idea. Artie might be pulled in and confronted with the evidence of the messages, which was the last thing he wanted. This came of acting under pressure. He now thought without pressure.

  The best idea was for Artie to be neutralized. Best of all was for him to be eliminated. But he didn’t see his way to arranging this at the moment. So an interim idea was needed.

  He had been aware from the start that the police knew that it had to be one of the three. It obviously wasn’t him now, and it had better not be Artie. On the whole, it had better be Frank.

  He thought he’d give Frank the Arab’s murder.

  He had been planning it for a long time and he liked every detail of it. But a detail came up just then that he hadn’t thought of. With both of the other two being double-tailed (as he’d heard separately from them) how could either be in a position to send off one of the familiar messages to Murder HQ? Similarly, with only one arm, how could he prepare one?

  The answer to both these points came from Father Christmas. In a heap of sales rubbish at the hostel he found him decorating a Special Offer from the L.E.B., lavish with order forms for toasters and hair-dryers, and complete with Freepost return envelope.

  He over-stuck the envelope with the printed address of his local branch (Sloane Street) also included in the heap of bumf, and with his left hand and a ballpoint quaveringly added the superscription URGENT.

  On a vacant bit of newspaper, he executed his chosen quotation HOPPITY – HOP in the same style, wrote out another envelope, to Murder HQ, and inserted the lot into the post-paid cover.

  He realized that since police suspicion now rested on Artie, a likely result of his coup would be even more hawk-like vigilance; and he planned to make full use of it. The surveillance of Artie, properly managed, could serve to establish both his and Artie’s alibis; leaving Frank, as planned, in vacant possession of Abo’s murder.

  On the day, Sunday, he phoned Abo and told him to put off all appointments after six-thirty because he had a piece of video pornography so special it would knock him cold. He also told him not to tell anyone, and to get rid of the servant. He knew Abo would do this.

  And Abo did. Steve had turned up, with his supplies, in good time, watched the servant off the premises; and had then announced himself on the buzzer.

  His first act on entering the penthouse was to ask to make a phone call, which he then did – to Colbert-Greer. The aim of this vital call was to ensure that Frank was alone and to take him out of circulation. He simply said he was calling to remind Frank they had a date at nine and that he should now leave his book (which he knew him to be working on) and settle to the lighting plan.

  Colbert-Greer thanked him for the call, promised to start work on the plan which would only take a couple of hours, and assured him he had nobody with him. Steve hung up, easy in the knowledge that he had just handed out Abo’s murder and ready now to get on with it.

  He and Abo had gone to the video room, where he had put an empty spool on the player, seated Abo comfortably, and immediately chloroformed him from behind. He had managed this with the nylon noose he had brought with him. He said that Abo had fought like a cat, holding his breath for an unconscionably long time, but the noose over the pad had in the end done the trick; he had only had to keep one hand tight on the knot, though both hands were now in fair working order.

  Inside fifteen minutes he had done all the things already known (costuming, clock, video-taping, trussing, etc.), and also a couple of things not known. He had relieved Abo of £700 and $1300 (‘We’ve got it, sir – also Wu’s two thousand’), and had had him nicely balanced on the fire escape, the air conditioning removing the smell from the video room, before calling Artie and establishing his own alibi at seven.

  ‘He phoned Artie from the Arab’s?’ the C.C. said.

  ‘That’s it, sir.’

  ‘But – Artie left immediately.’

  ‘So did he. Got a cab in Sloane Square. And he went to Sevastopol Street first, and made it back home with minutes in hand. Cool customer.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Yes,’ Warton said.

  Just as well everybody did.

  What followed was less coherent because Steve had been less coherent, but Warton explained it.

  Steve’s reckoning was that the police would have to accept Frank as the only one of the three without an alibi; and that if they did, all well and good. Before the messages came up at any subsequent stage, Artie would be out of the way. An accident would happen to Artie.

  If for some reason the police let Frank go – after he had seen the messages – Artie’s accident would have to happen faster. It would have to happen via the agency of Frank.

  In any event there’d be no Artie.

  There might or might not be a culpable Frank Colbert-Greer.

  In no event at all would there be a culpable Steve Giffard. All the events could start to happen just as soon as Colbert-Greer was arrested.

  However, the police hadn’t arrested Colbert-Greer.

  This threw Steve into a kind of stupor.

  The following day, Monday, still slightly stupefied, he had gone to Sevastopol Street. On the way he’d bought the Chelsea Gazette, Friday’s copy. The artful lodger.

  Given his state of mind, and the emergency, Warton thought his ploy still quite acute: the message to the police that had more or less forced them to take in Colbert-Greer, and the accompanying one, due to arrive the following day, that had shown why Colbert-Greer might have wanted to be taken into custody.

  The reasoning here was complex, and obviously not a hundred per cent, but still not bad. The man who had sent the illiterate letter was either a man who had seen a black man dump stuff, or one who had dumped it himself.

  Since the black man in question was being double-tailed at the time and couldn’t conceivably have dumped it, the sender of the letter had to be the second of the two characters. And since it was always possible, in view of the known suspicion between them, that Colbert-Greer had not known if Artie was being double-tailed, it looked as if he might frantically be trying to wriggle out of suspicion himself: establishing his innocence as writer of the letter by being in custody. There were holes in it, but material enough, at least, for the police to hang on
to him.

  That had been the idea, anyway, but it had rapidly been overtaken by other ideas.

  Ideas had been going so fast then, nobody could keep up with them.

  For a start, Mary Mooney had found the room, Tuesday evening.

  (Steve had skipped from it on Monday afternoon.)

  She had found the burnt draft incriminating Artie, and had managed to reach both Artie and Steve on Wednesday morning.

  Steve had been the one who had got the point.

  About the time that he had got it, the telex material from Munich had started coming in, unknown to him.

  The evidence known to him he had then begun trying to destroy.

  ‘Yes. Yes,’ the C.C. said. ‘But if he knew Artie was on the way –’

  ‘His idea there, so far as he had one, was that when Artie arrived he’d try and pin the murder on him. He thought he had murdered her – she was shoved under the bed, with the bag not quite on her. In any case, he had to move so fast –’

  ‘Yes. I see that. What I’m not clear on, Ted, is this question of six-footers.’

  ‘Ah. That one. Ng,’ Warton said. ‘You’ll see it there, sir. Not quite clear. Talking a bit funny. We thought he wanted something for his mouth, which was in a state. Pointing at it. His meaning was that he had been looking out of it. The mouth. Of the costume, sir. The neck of it was thick because his head was in it. What his eyes were looking out of was the mouth. It was open and smiling rather, like this, ‘Warton said, smiling most evilly with his own. ‘The eyes in the costume were about six inches above his own. Gave him an extra six inches of height, you see.’

  37

  PEOPLE were shocked, of course.

  Frank was horribly shocked.

  Artie was practically in shock, for week after week, at Steve’s betrayal, and all the things that he had done.

  Steve was even a bit shocked himself, looking back.

  Some called him a dastard, and others a bastard, but all agreed he wasn’t mad; which was how he got life.

  Artie just got six months.

  Mooney got her job on the Globe.

  Mason got made detective sergeant.

  There were many around, of course, who said it was all very well solving the second series of murders, but how about the first?

  Warton, by then into a dream job (up on the 9.30, back on the 5.30), had a proper answer for all these.

  He could point to the distinguished list of unsolved crimes that constituted such a feature of police forces everywhere. He could and did say that almost everybody had prophesied a bad end for Germaine Roberts, and she had come to one. Miss Manningham-Worsley was a different case, it was true, but after eighty-two years could her end be said to be precipitate? As for Alvin C. Schuster (pretty obviously a wrong bloke), his bizarre extinction, so far from home, file still open, ensured remembrance long beyond the normal span.

  In any case, it had all happened in Chelsea; and as far as he was concerned anything could happen there. He was through with the murder game, anyway. Too often, in that kind of game, he’d been led by the nose; and he thought he wasn’t the only one.

  About the Author

  Lionel Davidson was born in 1922 in Hull, Yorkshire. He left school early and worked as a reporter before serving in the Royal Navy during World War II. His first novel, The Night of Wenceslas, was published in 1960 to great critical acclaim and drew comparisons to Graham Greene and John le Carré. It was followed by The Rose of Tibet (1962), A Long Way to Shiloh (1966) and The Chelsea Murders (1978). He has thrice been the recipient of the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award and, in 2001, was awarded the CWA’s Cartier Diamond Dagger lifetime achievement award.

  Copyright

  This ebook edition first published in 2011

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  All rights reserved

  © Lionel Davidson, 1978

  The right of Lionel Davidson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–28090–2