The Chelsea Murders

I
N
her black slip and her fluffy mules, Grooters was ironing a skirt. She was lumping around on the room’s creaking
floorboards
to do this, in a state of high excitement. She had a date. She could scarcely remember when she’d had one last.

When the wardrobe door popped open, she shoved it to with her elbow and carried on ironing. But when it did it again she uttered an oath in Dutch and went hunting on the floor for the bit of paper that normally kept it shut.

One night the thing had creaked open just as she was going off to sleep, scaring her out of her wits. It had only been Penny fiddling in her own wardrobe at the other side of the locked partition door; but since then she’d kept it jammed.

She was on the top floor of the Comyns Hall of Residence, one of a group of student hostels in the Albert Bridge Road. Half the places at the Comyns were specifically for Chelsea students, of whom Grooters was one. She was studying sculpture at Chelsea Art School.

She found the paper and jammed the door, and as she did so felt further movement, which was strange. Penny had been away for a week. She was supposed to be away for another week.

She called, ‘Penny?’

No answer from Penny’s side; and no wonder. The girl couldn’t hear her. Someone had a record-player blasting below.

Grooters had a quick peep through her curtains to see if light was coming from Penny’s window, and it was, so that was all right; she had come back early.

She made fast work of the skirt and held it against her for a moment together with the new blouse that went with it, and looked in the wardrobe mirror. Now she’d done it, she wasn’t sure the combination worked. As she pondered, her image came forward. To her astonishment, the whole wardrobe did, about three inches.

The door behind it had opened by the same amount.

Grooters’s first thought was that it was a joke, and her second that she had better get the hell out of it. But she didn’t fancy going downstairs in her slip.

She said, ‘Is that you, Penny?’

The wardrobe moved a bit more. With her heart beginning to lurch, Grooters leaned hard against it and pushed it back. It didn’t go all the way back; something had been wedged in the gap.

‘That is you, Penny, isn’t it?’ Grooters said. But she was so frightened, the words hardly came out.

She knew it wasn’t Penny.

She knew now that she had to get the hell out of it.

The safety catch was on the door. They had all been warned to keep their safety catches on lately.

She could feel her teeth chattering. With her back against the wardrobe, she reached out and pulled across the table she had been ironing on, and leaned against that, and then dragged the armchair over.

She tiptoed to the door in her mules, watching the wardrobe, and silently unchained the safety catch. She wanted to see the wardrobe move before she opened the door – to know that the person was at that end of the room and not this. It did move slightly. Everything moved – wardrobe, table, chair. Grooters opened the door and, with her legs turned to jelly, looked out.

The corridor was empty; everybody at dinner in the refectory. Elton John boomed up from the record-player below. She slipped her mules off and kicked them back in the room. Better in bare feet. On bare feet she crept past Penny’s door, and saw the figure right away.

The figure saw her, too.

The door was open, and it stood in the middle of the room, arms away from its body.

It was very tall, with a large head, a woman’s head. It wore a plastic cape and rubber boots and rubber gloves.

Grooters took in all this in one petrified glance and tried to scream. But she had never screamed well, and what came out was only a small moan. She found she was dancing from one foot to the other, unable to decide whether to make the dash to
the stairs or to dash back. She didn’t think she would make it to the stairs, so she scuttled back, her frantic idea being to lock herself into her small bathroom until people came back from the refectory.

She made it to her room and slammed the door, and then, as if in slow motion, every mini-second of the horror extending itself, realized that the figure had expected this. It had returned swiftly to the wardrobe, and with one lunge pushed it right in. With a rumble and a creak the wardrobe tottered, the table and chair both slid, and the thing was in the room with her.

The figure was so grotesque, Grooters felt her legs almost doubling underneath her, and she wet herself.

Despite the carnival character of the mask – curls piled high, open cupid’s mouth radiantly smiling – the occupation suggested by the cape and the boots and gloves was rather that of a slaughterer, or a surgeon, perhaps even a mortuary attendant.

Grooters was a healthy young girl, and her training had strengthened her arms, but she had read of this apparition, and terror weakened her. She didn’t make it to the bathroom, though she struggled quite hard, and she couldn’t make it back to the door.

The figure twisted her round there, and got behind her, one arm crooking up round her throat. She heard the other one rustling in the plastic of the cape and presently felt, and choked on, the pad thrust over her mouth and nose.

She clawed to pull it away, but the arm that had been around her neck came up suddenly in a strong lock, reinforcing the one already in position. Grooters pummelled with her elbows and kicked with her bare feet, but she didn’t do much damage and the pad wasn’t even fractionally shifted.

She knew she mustn’t breathe through the pad. The first sweetish smell had warned her. But she couldn’t hold her breath for ever and, weeping, she knew she’d had it. She saw the room light begin first to spin slightly in her tears, and then recede along a familiar tunnel, together with Elton John.

Just for a moment before it all went, she knew she was only in the dentist’s chair, and that it would all be all right, really. Then everything did go.

Feeling her succumb, her attacker waited a moment, and then lowered her to the floor, keeping the pad in place. One gloved hand felt in the large patch pocket of the cape, removing a plastic bag. Two rubber bands fell out. One went round the girl’s face to keep the pad in position. Then the bag went over her head, and the other band secured it under her chin.

Grooters was left in this position, where she died presently, while her assailant went through to Penny’s room and closed the outer door there. Returning, the murderer looked down at the girl and turned her over on her face; and then went into the small bathroom and turned on the shower and the water in the hand-basin.

Grooters remained where she was for a while, and then her murderer took off the bag. The rubber bands and pad went back in it, and everything was returned to the patch pocket, from which a small cleaver was removed. With this cleaver, the murderer proceeded to cut off Grooters’s head.

The cleaver, of bluish steel and French make, had a small serrated portion. This dealt readily with the tough bits at the rear of the neck, and the rest presented no problem. A small tug and a slice released the head, and the murderer took it and put it face-down in the hand-basin, and went and stood under the shower.

This was about mid-way through the Chelsea murders.

It contained the elements that later identified the murderer; although this was no consolation to Grooters who by then was lying quietly in a cemetery in Leyden.

T
HREE
weeks before, Artie was into murder. He was into blood that had sprayed on the ceiling. To have sprayed like that it could only have flicked back off a weapon striking an already bleeding wound.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he said.

He wrote it all down, though. He felt like bringing up.

The piece of gas-piping was grossly distorted and heavily bloodstained, Westminster Coroner’s Court heard today. The bloodstains in the room, of a similar group to those found in Lord Lucan’s car …

‘I wonder if you would be so good,’ said the old scholar next to him, rather breathlessly, ‘as to keep your comments to
yourself
? I’d be awfully obliged.’

‘No problem,’ Artie said. He hadn’t caught the old man’s breathless stuff but he said ‘no problem’ on principle and carried on writing. Time was tight.

He was in Chelsea Reference Library.

Bloodstains on the ground floor were entirely Group A (Lady Lucan) apart from a tuft of bloodstained hair in the bathroom. But those in the Ford Corsair borrowed by Lord Lucan and found abandoned at Newhaven matched the groups of both Lady Lucan and murdered nanny Sandra Rivett.

He was high as a kite (bombed out of his mind, in fact; up all night and on Speed ever since) but he had an idea some chuffing was coming at him so he looked up. He found the old man mouthing at him with speechless rage. He had a healthy old face, pink skin, topped by silvery hair, but all of it was working. Artie had heard faces worked but had never before seen such a thing. This one was going like hell.

‘You babble. You do nothing but babble,’ the old man said, choking. ‘You’ve babbled since you came. You have to keep silence here. It’s impossible to concentrate on any work.’

Artie looked over to see what work he was concentrating on. It was
The Times
of 1875, and a magnifying glass was helping bring up the packed columns. Under the glass a small headline said
Mr Disraeli Purchases Suez Canal Shares
.

‘Well, you just read the stuff I’ve got to read, Jack,’ Artie told him, shaking his huge head, ‘and you’d be babbling, too.’

Artie’s stuff was hotter than Disraeli’s. He had a pile of
Evening Standards
from June 1975.

‘Don’t be impudent. Don’t call me Jack,’ the old man said. His face was jerking so much he couldn’t say any more. He shoved his volume along the desk, and joined it, and then shoved
everything
one place further. He looked back over the two empty
places, shaking. There was no healthy pink in Artie’s skin, nor any trace of silver in his hair. All of him was black. His hair was an enormous globe of black. ‘Damned insolence,’ the old man said furiously at it.

‘Just a saying,’ Artie said.

He looked blindly out of the window. He knew he ought to have stayed in bed today. But there was too much to do, and he had promised Steve.

Now his eyes hurt and he felt himself trembling all over. He knew it was the Speed; he’d been gobbling the amphetamines for hours. The tablets kept the brain working but seemed to disconnect some other circuits. He could feel his brain up there, lodged like a pea in a pod.

Also the blood disgusted him today. It fascinated him, but mainly it was disgusting. How could it be green?

He wondered if they should make it red. But he knew they couldn’t. Red was a piece of horseshit whatever you did. Red meant Hitchcock, with some girl going bananas every time she thought of blood. Or it meant psychedelic crap in various orders. It couldn’t be red.

Anyway, they’d matched the green, a fabulous old green, very strange, very chemical. They were using it to show it was night-time. They had stolen a few frames from the Mary Pickford clip at the school. They planned to match the style of the 1920s captions, too, swelling and contracting like toads on the old acetate, bits crumbling off, blowing up bright then dim.

They’d agreed to use only one tint with the black and white; Steve, Frank, all of them had agreed. Frank was in charge of the art direction and he said the main thing was to stay away from the half-assed psychedelic areas. Artie certainly agreed with this, but he thought it was time now for Frank to offer some juice on the green blood question. Where the hell was Frank, anyway? He hadn’t seen him all yesterday. He hadn’t been on the location last night. Shouldn’t he be here today?

He leafed through the rest of the needed stuff and tidied up.

He saw the chick on the desk smiling at him so he stopped there.

‘You all done?’ she said.

‘Done done.’

‘What’s tomorrow – Jack the Ripper?’

‘Right.’ He threw her his most manic smile. Tomorrow was bed. All fugging day. ‘Did Frank come in?’ he said.

‘I didn’t see him.’

He looked beyond her to the Special Collections attic where Frank was mainly writing his book.

‘He isn’t up there, anyway,’ she said.

He knew she didn’t like Frank.

‘Is he working some other place today?’

‘What day is it – Wednesday?’

‘I don’t know what day it is. I don’t know where the hell I am,’ Artie said.

‘Well, wow. You’ve been going it.’

She had a quaint cockney lilt and a dimple that showed as she smiled down at her hands. He saw he was supposed to notice the new thing she’d done with her hair. It gave her the look of a golden Pre-Raphaelite chick. Frank said they would all look that way after his book hit town.

‘You could try across the road,’ she said, nodding there.

‘Maybe I will. Okay.’

He felt so disconnected going downstairs he thought he’d skip Frank. But out in the street he thought he wouldn’t. A sudden shower had come smashing down. It was bouncing back off the road. The glass and concrete box of the art school, right opposite, looked as if newly formed there, steaming. The
building
depressed him always, but he ducked across to it.

He looked all over the lousy place but he couldn’t find Frank, and scrambled out to Manresa Road again knowing he was late.

The rain had eased to a drizzle and he hunched through it to the corner. He had to grab a bus in the King’s Road but when he got there he saw the whole street jammed with traffic, lines of buses stuck unmoving.

He began making it on foot, threading his way through the slanted umbrellas, hands over his head. He couldn’t feel the rain but he knew it was there. He didn’t want a headful of rain.

Now, in fresh air, moving, he felt disconnected from
everything
. Nothing was real, all Chelsea slanting with umbrellas,
toytown. For minutes at a time he could hardly think why he was hurrying, or where. He passed a newspaper-seller on a
corner
and saw from a poster that someone had been murdered, but was well past before it meant anything.

He knew it couldn’t be their murder. Their murder had been completed last night. He had taken everything back from it this morning, the costumes, the gear, everything. He’d returned the generator van, the lighting; dropped the cans of footage into the lab. All that was this morning; already another age.

He’d been awake forty hours. Another eight before he was through. He knew he needed more Speed, but he couldn’t take it on an empty stomach. He’d eat first. He’d see Steve first.

The lights had come on everywhere. Going fast, not tiring, he passed rows of lighted boutiques, antique shops, restaurants, glistening in the rain. He turned in to Blue Stuff.

His spirits hit bottom in Blue Stuff. The place was packed with customers, come in out of the rain, damp and reeking. Mr Blue Stuff was there himself. The Chinaman had hardly any nose and no expression at all. He was telling a young fat girl how good she looked in a cowgirl jacket. All over the shop goons were fingering denim, shuffling through hangers, looking at themselves in it in mirrors. He saw Steve fitting an elderly one in a whole stiff suit of it. The scarecrow was holding his arms up at about forty-five degrees, a whimsical smile on his face, and Steve was tugging at him like a little pale gnome.

Steve looked frailer, more delicate than ever. Artie saw him leave the goon with his arms up and come over.

‘You get it all back on time?’ Steve said.

‘Sure.’

‘The genny, lights, everything?’

‘No problem.’ They hired on a daily basis. An hour after signing-in time and they’d hired for another day.

‘How about the cans?’

‘In. I made out the sheets. They know it’s under-lit.’

‘Great. You look shagged, Artie,’ Steve said.

‘Yeah. Anyway,’ Artie said. He was tugging out his notes. ‘Here’s this. And we got problems with green blood. I was looking for Frank.’

‘Leave Frank, Artie. He’s low today.’

‘I couldn’t find him. Where the hell –’

‘Leave him. It’s that chick they pulled out of the river.’

‘What chick?’

‘Haven’t you seen the news?’

‘Jesus, I’ve had no time –’

‘From The Gold Key. The barmaid. She’s drowned. Leave him just for –’

‘Hey, what you do?’ Blue Stuff said. ‘Customer standing.’

‘Won’t be a tick, Denny.’ Blue Stuff’s given name was Ogden, in honour of a Baptist minister in Hong Kong, but he was known as Denny, and on occasion Chairman, for he was also the chairman of his company, Wu Enterprises. He had a lot of enterprises, did Wu.

‘No tick. Customer. What you want, Artie, you buy arose?’

‘Just looking in, Denny.’

‘Not a coffee shop. Flank rooking in, Arab rooking in. Crose shop here. Go somewhere else rook in.’

‘Yeah, okay, only I’ve got to sleep tomorrow,’ Artie told him, and realized he should be telling Steve. ‘So don’t call me,’ he told Steve. ‘I just brought this in. We can meet in the evening.’

‘You’re surely not going to work now.’

‘I have to. I forgot to tell them I’d be up all night.’

‘Rooking very fine. Extleme fashion,’ Denny was saying as Artie left. He’d taken over the scarecrow himself, spreading his L’s and R’s as usual.

Artie was spreading his, too, as he went back out in the rain. Gleen blood. Why Flank in shop? Why Arab? He began to talk French to himself. He’d be speaking it for most of the evening. He could feel his brain tiring now. It was still going ceaselessly but it felt heavy. There was something it was trying to tell him, but it needed more Speed.

Before he got to work he passed another newspaper poster, however, and realized what it was. Strangled, the poster said. Drowned, Steve had said.

Could it be the same one? There were so many. Sleeping and waking, his life was full of murder lately.