The Chelsea Murders (2 page)

‘W
HAT
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 of 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.’

T
HE
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.

By nature and training Warton was an unpleasant man;
suspicious
, close-grained, unfriendly. He was very senior in his job, which for a long time now had been striking him as a ridiculous one; it seemed high time he was out of it and into something more solid and administrative with set hours and respectable anonymity. There was something raffish and unsavoury in this skittering about, setting up headquarters and solving mysteries.

However, he was better than competent at it, which was why he was here.

When the first murder had occurred the newly appointed Crime Commissioner (C.C.) at the Yard had immediately sent for one of his commanders and said, ‘Get someone reliable on this right away, someone like Ted Warton. We can’t have a nonsense here.’

There’d been too many nonsenses. There had been the
nonsense
involving Lord Lucan, and Lady Lucan. There had been the nonsense with Slipper of the Yard, returned from Brazil without his rightful captive, Biggs the train-robber. There had been the Cambridge rapist who had terrorized the university town for months until on his belated, almost accidental, capture he had been found to have a record from here to next week apart from having left prodigal evidence, including signed messages, in his trail.

None of this was good for the police.

‘What’s Ted got on his plate?’ the C.C. had inquired.

Warton had nothing. He had been cunningly clearing things off his plate in anticipation of translation to other sees.

This was how he had bought the assignment.

Two weeks before, an American called Alvin C. Schuster had been found wrapped round a lamp-post near his house in Bywater Street. There were two stab wounds in his chest and he had been dead for three hours.

A neighbour exercising her dog had first noticed him at a few minutes to midnight. Other neighbours had been stepping in and out of their houses all evening without having noticed him, which had brought Warton out in his first evil distemper.

Obviously, someone had put Schuster round that lamp-post – and shortly before the neighbour found him. This wasn’t an easy thing to do, unless Schuster had been dragged there from his house. This he had not been. The family dog never failed to bark when Schuster so much as approached the house. It hadn’t barked.

But if he hadn’t reached the lamp-post via his house, how had he got there? Bywater Street was a cul-de-sac lined
bumper-to
-bumper with the cars of the residents. It could only be entered from the King’s Road; getting to the lamp-post, which was three-quarters of the way down it, would have caused considerable commotion even by sedan chair.

Warton’s frazzled inquiries into any possible Intelligence angle – result negative – had brought him an early morning call, at home, from the C.C. He had been curtly told not to put funny buzzes about. The Americans leaked things, and people talked. The C.C. told him to remember the people he had in the district, and to treat the case as one of normal murder.

Warton knew the people he had in the district – troublemakers of all kinds, judges, bankers, politicians. Mrs Margaret Thatcher, the leader of the Conservative Party, had her well-publicized abode in Flood Street, just a few hundred yards from Schuster’s lamp-post.

He also knew normal murder. Long grubby experience taught that ninety-nine per cent of it was domestic in origin.

However, it didn’t seem to be the origin in Schuster’s.

So far as the most thorough investigation could show, Alvin C. had been having no side orders of sex; no arguments, either, or drink or drugs, or any other kinds of trouble. He had been a cheery horn-rimmed oil executive, sensitive to the anxieties of labour in industry, mindful of the role of management. He owed nobody any money. Nobody owed him any. He hadn’t sacked anybody much.

Warton thought the most likely thing was that someone had got the wrong bloke.

Unfortunately, this was worse than getting the right one. Your average bloke, reading his paper, could well understand how even the most violent and baffling of murders had a rational cause. A natural justice or reason would be found lurking beneath the surface of the thing. Wrong blokes were a different kettle of fish entirely. Anybody could turn out to be one of those. It led to anxiety and indignation, and often letters to legislators (many living in Chelsea).

He had proceeded from the phone call to his Chelsea HQ (
unpromisingly
sited in Lucan Place) immediately into the next golden spot of the day. His deputy, Summers, had greeted him with the news that they had got another. Two streets away from Schuster, Jubilee Place, a daily had shown up with a bright good morning to find her employer starkers in the hall. Her employer
had been Miss Jane Manningham-Worsley, aged 82. She had been throttled and raped.

Warton went to the third floor flat and had a look at her.

Everything was in ship-shape order (saving Miss
Manningham
-Worsley) except that the daily said the safety catch wasn’t on. She had never known it not to be on unless the old lady had admitted a friend. This meant that the old lady had had an aberration, or that she had known and admitted the friend who had raped and throttled her, or that the bastard had come in some other way.

Nothing of value was missing; not the old lady’s money, not any of her jewellery. The only thing the daily couldn’t find was a jar of pickles she had brought the day before.

Warton felt his subordinates looking at him so he lit a
cigarette
and went down to the car and hunched there, looking more of a wart-hog than ever.

Yes. All as normal. All they wanted in this one was a chap with a zest for pickles and for ladies of 82.

No sense anywhere. Not a glimmer of it.

He had depressively told his wife so, as he’d wound the clock last night at Sanderstead.

But long before the clock rang, his bedside phone did.

Four in the morning.

Summers’s voice was hushed at the other end.

‘Thought you’d want to know, sir. River police have a floater in our patch.’

‘Right.’

He had lumbered up at once and out to the car in the dark.

He’d stood hunched at the autopsy, simply nodding as the pathologist pointed silently to the bruised Adam’s apple.

‘Anything doing?’ he asked.

The pathologist manipulated Germaine a bit.

‘Oh, I think so,’ he said.

‘Okay. Open her.’

The first moment of true satisfaction in a couple of weeks had come when the midget foetal mess was cupped invitingly for his attention in the pathologist’s glove.

‘How old’s that?’

‘Ten weeks? I could tell you better tomorrow.’

‘Fine.’

So it was. Sense at last! Two people had been involved in the making of that gloveful. Find the other, he’d found his lead.

‘He didn’t know
what
?’ he therefore demanded menacingly now of Summers. Summers had just returned from The Gold Key.

‘That she was pregnant, sir. I’d go bail on it.’

‘But having it off with her?’

‘Oh, not a doubt of that.’ Unlike his boss, the chief inspector was a tall and gaunt individual, a pipe-smoking bloodhound. ‘All I can say, is that he seemed surprised to me. Shocked. Taken aback,’ he amended.

‘Chaps having it off get taken aback when young women are put in the club?’

‘Days of the pill, sir.’

‘Which she was on, was she?’

‘Evidently not.’

‘
Evidently
not. What the hell are you on about, Summers?’

‘Well, sir.’ Summers tamped his pipe. ‘The thing with this girl – I’ve got a few lines out – she was a bit of an all-rounder. Both sexes, general fun and games.’

‘I can tell you one game, Summers,’ Warton said, inner eye constant on the only bit of sense these past two weeks, ‘and one sex that put her in the club. Know which one?’

‘My meaning there,’ Summers said mildly, ‘was that given her way of life, it wouldn’t have caused much alarm. I’d guess she’d had a spot of trouble before, sir, wouldn’t you?’

Warton declined to speculate on other trouble.

He sat hunched and brooding over his own.

‘This landlord. Weeper,’ he said. ‘Just as untroubled, is he?’

‘He’s over the top,’ Summers said briefly. ‘Petrified his wife will find out – result of this case. Dying in hospital. You’ll see it there, sir.’

Warton grunted, examining the papers placed on his desk.

‘What’s this film crew over the river?’ he said.

‘Semi-amateur crew. We’ll have more later.’

‘Who’s Mrs Mooney?’

‘Yes.’ Summers began scraping his pipe. ‘Slight cock-up there. Uniformed man on the door let her in before we got there. Some confusion about what she wanted.’

‘Bike. Jeans,’ Warton read out. ‘That’s a local reporter,’ he said, looking sharply up.

Summers scraped away. ‘What I thought,’ he said.

So he had, after Detective Mason had diffidently suggested it.

‘She’ll be a stringer. For one of the nationals.’ Warning bells had begun to clamour in Warton’s brain. ‘Before you got there …? What did she get, then?’

‘Well, the landlord was a bity hazy as to exactly –’

‘What was there to get? What have we got? What was she doing, this part-timer, when not at the bar or having her fun?’

‘A bit of modelling, nothing very –’

‘What – masseuse?’

‘No. Just the odd session posing for –’

‘A model? An
artist’s
model? A real Chelsea artist’s model?’

A certain baying note in his voice, an experienced old note, brought the inspector’s startled face up from his pipe.

‘You could call it that,’ he admitted with quiet alarm.

‘
Could
call it? They bloody will, bet your bottom dollar. Did she get a photo? Were there any photos?’

‘Well, a few snapshots, but I don’t think –’

There was a polite knock on the door. ‘Latest editions, sir.’

With a wordless snarl Warton had them on his desk.

The
Evening News
and the
Standard
had sizeable headlines:
CHELSEA BARMAID MURDERED
, and a photo of The Gold Key.

The
Globe
had a much more sizeable headline:
CHELSEA ART
MODEL MUREDERED
, also a photo of The Gold Key: also another one, a huge one, flagged
Exclusive
, of Germaine looking
candidly
up from a floor.

Just a few short hours before, the superintendent had seen her looking up from a slab. He read through the big type of the intro, and the columns underneath, and on the back. Playing it up big.