The Chelsea Murders (15 page)

‘What happened?’ Artie said.

The police checked the house rapidly. The huge Victorian mansion had its four storeys partitioned into thirty-six individual bed-sitters. Most of the rooms were locked, the students still in the refectory. When they had checked lists, and found out who was out, and who should be in, only one room remained to be investigated. It was on the top floor and occupied by a Dutch girl known as Grooters.

The police car hadn’t brought a doctor, though one was on the way, so Steve went up with the investigating party.

Grooters had evidently been doing a bit of ironing. The electric iron had been knocked off the table and had burnt a triangle in the carpet. It would have burnt Grooters’s head, if it was there, but it wasn’t. Instead, it had set frothing and hissing
the large bog of blood left by her head. Her head was nowhere in the room.

The girl’s plumpish trunk was lying on its front, her black slip raised but her underwear undisturbed. Her fluffy slippers had come off. Large bloody footsteps led to the bathroom, and water was running there; the shower was full on, and so was one of the taps in the hand-basin. In the basin was the head. One of the detectives picked it up. Only one of the blue eyes was closed in a kind of leery bedraggled wink. The man looked at the face for a moment, and put it back in the basin again.

Apart from the two detectives, Steve had been the only one allowed in the room, and hearing the sound coming out of him, one of the detectives quickly hurried him out.

‘Not here,’ he said urgently. ‘Mustn’t disturb anything.’

Steve was sick outside on the landing.

When they had got him, white and shaking, downstairs, Summers had arrived. He had not hurried immediately
upstairs
, but was going through the bursar’s list, which the
caretaker
had supplied. The dead girl had signed herself in, in the Continental manner, surname first, groot, which was why she was afterwards nicknamed Grooters. But her full name, he saw, was Wilhelmina Sonje Groot. Yes, W.S.G.

When Warton arrived, twenty minutes later, it was the first thing he wanted to know, too.

T
HE
full conference was on Wednesday, three days later. The story was a world one now, and Warton felt himself on trial. He had eaten no breakfast and was pale; and also, Summers thought, dangerous; so he kept his own activities discreet.

‘Both psycho reports, sir.’

‘
Summaries!
Not reading out that bloody lot.’

‘Yes, sir. And cards?’

‘Don’t want cards. Photos.’

‘In, sir. You’ve got them.’

Warton knew he was snapping, and tried not to. Keep calm, he told himself. His handling couldn’t be faulted – not by
anyone
who knew anything.

He had written himself a brief note with headings, and he needed time to prepare, so he said, ‘Okay, Summers. Watch the clock.’

With Summers gone, he lit a cigarette and concentrated on the headings.

  
Initials theory.

  
How theory leaked & to whom.

  
Why early suspects ditched.

  
Work on Mrs Honey, Wu & Dutch girl.

  
Why last is key case. Explain girl.

Yes. He marshalled his thoughts. From the Dutch police and local inquiries, he now had a pretty full picture of her.

A loner, almost friendless. Family relationships in Holland not good, accounting for her presence in England. In the last four months her mother had written four times; the girl had replied once.

She had no known intimates, either at the hostel or at school. Rarely went out. Also rarely missed a meal. How the fact that she had missed one that night, together with her evident
preparations
for going out, suggested that, unusually, she had a date.

He’d tackle the date question later.

Shrink’s findings first: how the fellow had surmised, from her Dutch and British medical records, that a girl of this type would almost certainly have one intimate. She was secretive: kept no diary or letters.

Dutch police’s efforts at tracing intimate.

At the London end, on possible ‘date’, briefly recount the policy on the Press, with a nod at the C.C.

The C.C.’s mode of disposing of the crap on his plate had struck Warton as particularly impressive. He had simply called in all media heads and distributed the crap among them. He had outlined the scope of the problem and the need to prevent panic.
He had admitted that notes were being received and regretted his inability to give details on the grounds that imitative ones would foul investigations.

He had said he had no intention of applying for censorship, relying instead on their responsibility; in return for which he would share every scrap of information that would not vitally impede police inquiries.

And this they had done. They had immediately given them Chen’s note; and very useful, too, in Warton’s view; money a fruitful source of dissension among thieves.

The girl’s possible date was an even better story, and it had been widely used. But no date had shown up.

Yes. He continued with the list.

  
Theories on date.

  
How girl ‘set up’.

  
Materials cached.

  
Reasons for lopping (shrink).

  
Money.

  
Permissions wanted.

Summers knocked. ‘Time, sir.’

‘Right.’

He kept calm. He knew he was quite normal.

Summers thought he looked so sick, he wondered if he’d throw up before he got to the car.

Case in hand, all quite normal, Warton went down to the staff car and sat in the rear. ‘Okay,’ he said.

He saw the fellow looking at him twice.

Just as the car turned into the forecourt of New Scotland Yard, his stomach gave a single heave.

He’d met the Commissioner and the Assistant Commissioner, of course. Bloody full house, though: C.C.; all crime
commanders
; several chaps of his own rank pulled in from other cases.

But he kept calm. He saw a carafe and glass had been placed ready for him; expected to speak for some time, evidently. Well, he would.

He spoke for over an hour.

After the first ten minutes, he knew it was all right.

He walked through the initials theory. He swung into the theories on the girl’s possible ‘date’.

If the murder had been planned to take place in the room, and the elaborate preparations indicated that this was the case, the murderer had to ensure that she would be there at a time when everyone else was eating. He would have arranged this time with her; he would have told her not to eat first. He would have ‘set her up’.

The preparations had certainly been elaborate. Three keys copied: one to the back door of the hostel, one to the room adjoining the girl’s, and one for the partition door between the two rooms. The suspect with easiest access to the keys (which were available and labelled in the caretaker’s small room,
normally
locked) was Steve Giffard; indicating that, he, too, had been set up.

‘Just one moment, Ted.’ It was Battersby. Warton wasn’t put out. Battersby had written the highly esteemed internal reports for the Yard on several complex provincial cases, and Warton respected him. ‘You haven’t, I’m sure, overlooked the possibility of this Steve “protecting” the culprit – despite the attack on him.’

Warton nodded. ‘No, I haven’t. You mean an arrangement of some kind between Steve and the murderer, with the attack on him as part of it? Well, if so, I think we can say something went wrong with the arrangement. It needed sixteen stitches. This doesn’t mean there wasn’t one, of course. It
could
have gone wrong. Or it could have gone sour, with the chap trying to do for Steve to protect himself.

‘Possible. I’ll explain later why I don’t buy it – and the same with the idea of his “protecting” the other guy, that is, by
falsifying
his account to conceal the chap’s identity. Let’s just take the attack on him again.’

He gave Steve’s account of it: his trip out to the hall, his first glimpse of the dripping figure in mask, cape and boots at the rear door; his dash back to his own room; the small hand-saw type of implement that had sliced through the gap in the doorway.

‘There are two interesting points here. First, the weapon wasn’t a saw. The forensic evidence shows that the head was
severed with a cleaver, Continental type – sharp cutting blade with a round serrated end. Almost certainly he was attacked with the same weapon. We’ve done some studies. Steve is a smallish chap, just over five foot six. From his angle, and in that light, the end of such a cleaver, if wielded by a chap over half a foot taller does appear as something like a saw.

‘Secondly, his description of the figure, and the amount of detail he gives … I’m not talking about the cape and boots, of which we knew nothing. We have to take his word on that. But on the mask itself, particularly the neck, his account is identical with Mrs Honey’s, even to the differences she noted between the one on the film and the one she saw. If you’ll just look at – photo number five …’

He had distributed the blow-ups of the film frames.

‘… you’ll see it’s quite an elaborate job. It sits on the shoulders, secured at the back. You will notice the long
swan-like
neck. Well, there was nothing swan-like about the chap who attacked Mrs Honey. She said the neck was short and thick. Steve Giffard told me the same. There’s a reason for this,’ he said, noting the puzzled frowns coming at him.

He paused and shuffled through the prints.

‘Photo three gives a better idea. The wearer is, in fact, a woman, and the mask was designed for her. Colbert-Greer told me she simply had a long neck – so the mask has since evidently been altered. Also that enormous hair style. In a later scene of the film, the girl has to take the thing off. Underneath she has an even bigger hair style. The construction of the mask takes into account this big hair style.’

In the pause the Commissioner said, ‘I’m not quite sure, what the implication –’

‘The coloured chap, Artie Johnston, has a big hair style. But he also has a man’s neck. And that’s what’s been altered.’

‘Ah.’

‘So taking it all together, I don’t see Steve “protecting” him. Similarly on height. Mrs Honey made a particular point that her attacker was very tall and slim. So did Steve. Artie Johnston is six foot one. I think the chap is giving an entirely accurate account of what he saw. Of course, this doesn’t absolve him of
collusion – if some strange brand of double-think is going on that we haven’t yet figured. However, if there was an
arrangement
, it’s hard to see what his contribution can have been. The keys? Perhaps. The costume? Certainly not.

‘We can say without any question that he had no way of hiding the costume. From the moment his rooms were searched after Wu’s murder, he has been tailed every moment. There is no way he could suddenly have produced it. Which leaves us with Artie.’

It also left Warton with the embarrassing story of Artie
slipping
his tail. He told it poker-face, and heard the heavy silence as he did so.

‘Where
that
leaves us,’ he said, ‘is into the problem of where Artie
could
have kept the costume. That is, if it was worn. Again, I’ve got to repeat, we only have Steve Giffard’s word for it. If it was worn, we have to ask why. The answer might be either for shock effect, or for protection. The attack, after all, might not have succeeded. The girl might have escaped, to identify him. But if worn, where was it, and where is it?’

He told of the theories on this front. Artie had carried only a slim note-case when he left home, and had certainly turned up at the hostel carrying just that. His story was that, on slipping his tail, he had gone for a walk.

Their latest thinking was that he might have an extra rented room somewhere, a place chosen for speedy access. A small item had just been fed to the local press: a low profile story that would not be picked up by the London evenings, but that might bring the right landlady forward.

‘However, whatever else he’s got there, it’s very doubtful if he’ll have the money.’

Wu’s twenty-five hundred dollars, Warton was almost certain, were now in Liverpool. He didn’t think Artie had been foolhardy enough to carry the money with him. He thought he had probably posted it, in one or more covers, and had then gone up to make arrangements for what he wanted doing with it.

‘But before going into that,’ Warton said, ‘I’d like to take up what seems to me to be the key aspect. The decapitation. Why he did it. The girl was already dead. He had nothing against
her; no reason to mutilate or humiliate her. I made it a priority to get a psychiatric reading of it.’

The reading was from a government expert who had in his care some dozens of psychotic killers ‘detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure’. He had seen all the evidence, including the notes. His first important finding was that instead of the wild and eccentric individual suggested by the Press, the person they were after was one in a state of over-control.

‘Of what?’ the Commissioner said.

‘He controls himself beyond the limits normal for him. He gets up a head of steam, and when it gives, he goes over the top. He’s then apparently capable of acting out the most violent fantasies.’

As he read out the summary, he sensed them picking up the points one by one.

The decapitation was a responsive act: the Press had earlier depicted a systematic and bloodless ‘genius’. The beheading was both a refutation of this picture and a testing of himself; its public intention to confound and horrify.

The evidence revealed a ‘basically aesthetic individual,
fastidious
and well-organized’, but suffering frustration, and anxious to demonstrate his quality. He was of a type quick to believe that ‘people had to be used’, and could swiftly still his sense of guilt at the means deemed necessary to use them.

His mockery and flouting of the police was unlikely to be a sudden or solitary outburst. His social deviance might already have shown in some other form in police records. His outward characteristics would almost certainly be describable in such terms as ‘generous’ or ‘reckless’.

‘I’ll just read his conclusion,’ Warton said. ‘He says, “The factor qualifying all of the above is, however, undoubtedly his state of over-control. He is unlikely to break down under
interrogation
, whatever impression he may seek to give. You are after a cunning and imaginative liar.”’

There was a lengthy silence when he had finished.

‘What’s your conclusion, Mr Warton?’ the Commissioner said.

‘Well, it’s not a bad picture,’ Warton said. ‘With regard to a police record, Artie Johnston is the only one with any form.
What struck me particularly was the question of not breaking up under interrogation. “Whatever impression he may seek to give.”’

He scratched his chin and studied the phrase again.

‘He gave me a pretty good impression of breaking up over the matter of the two hundred pounds. Yet he knew he was covered – Colbert-Greer had certainly given him the money. So he was playing with us. Which brings me to the main point.’

He tidied his papers and replaced them in the folder.

‘One part of the problem, at least, is over. While working on it, it looked to us, naturally, as the main one. Finding him. I suspect the real difficulty is just beginning – how to take him. The beggar has caused tremendous havoc, and he’s enjoying it. However, he seems to have got in the way now of pushing his luck. I think, sir,’ he said, addressing the Commissioner directly, ‘that there is one area where he is vulnerable. It’s why I feel bound to ask for some special permissions.’

The permissions as Warton had judged, raised some
difficulties
, and he sat out the discussion that followed.

‘You don’t think,’ the Commissioner said at last, ‘it would be safest to pull him in on suspicion while you continue with the other steps? I could get you substantial help from other forces.’

‘No, I don’t, sir,’ Warton said, putting an immediate stopper on this. He explained again: he wanted the man in the open and in the position of having to take steps himself. When Johnston took the steps, he wanted to react as fast as possible, with no one else in the way.