The Chelsea Murders (24 page)

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.’

P
EOPLE
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.

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.