Gilded Edge, The (13 page)

‘Can they get any worse?’

‘I’m talking about the only thing he now has left, his reputation.’

‘I know what you’re talking about. I was just being horribly facetious. I know how much these things matter to men like Johnny and his friends.’

‘So in many ways, I’m sorry to say, having committed suicide would be the best outcome for both of you.’

At this there seemed to be a perceptible collapse in her indignation. She said, ‘And would that also be the best outcome for you, Detective Treadwell?’

‘No, the truth would be,’ he shrugged, ‘but that’s just me.’

‘And me, too. I loved Johnny and I won’t slander him. He was funny, charming . . . sounds trite, I know, but you’ll hear that said about him a lot, because it was true. Yet there was another side to the raconteur: he was gentle, kind and, for a while, my best pal. Whatever happened between us, he deserved better than that. And I really need to know if I killed him.’ She took a long pause that seemed to imbue the room with an uncomfortable significance, and Vince couldn’t really think of anything to say to dispel it. Eventually she stepped in with, ‘I’m not looking for excuses, or a way out. I’m looking for the truth, and I’m looking for forgiveness. Not from you or from the police. If I’m guilty, Detective Treadwell, I’ll take my punishment and be glad of it. And then, hopefully, that way I’ll find some forgiveness.’

Vince gave a considered nod to all this. It seemed strangely old-fashioned, but was said with such sincerity that he believed every word of it.

He stood up. ‘My advice is, don’t give up on yourself too quickly, Miss Saxmore-Blaine. And as someone once said, get off the cross, we need the wood.’

She wasn’t so pious that she couldn’t laugh. But she wasn’t so irreverent that it could last too long either. Vince collected her prepared statement off the coffee table.

‘Oh, can you do me a favour?’ she asked, standing up and reaching into her dressing gown to pull out the crumpled pack of cigarettes and a book of matches. ‘We’re not supposed to smoke in our rooms. They’ve been so kind to me here. Would you mind?’

‘Of course.’ Vince took the empty cigarette packet and the book of matches and slipped it into his jacket pocket.

She walked him to the door and opened it for him. ‘You never did call me Isabel, did you?’

‘No, I never did. Maybe next time.’

It was 9 p.m. and Vince was back in his castle: a one-bedroom first-floor flat in Pimlico. The spacious pad had darkly polished floors covered in thick Moroccan rugs that he’d picked up while travelling in that part of the world a couple of years back. The freshly painted walls were adorned with three large oils on canvas. This triptych of impressionistic jazz-playing figures, splashed on the canvas in vibrant primary colours, had been picked up through a friend of a friend who worked in a West End art gallery specializing in young American painters. Vince got them at a snip, but they were still the biggest purchase he’d ever made, and came in with the kind of price tag that made him constantly question their artistic merit, his own aesthetic judgement, and his economic acumen. At different times and in different moods, they either put a smile on his face or gave him an anxiety attack.

Vince had a shower and a shave and stared contemplatively into the bathroom mirror as he located the parting in his new haircut, and took the time to reflect on his day. It had been long, and as untypical and unpredictable as his untypical and unpredictable job allowed. Which was why he loved it.

After he had handed in Isabel Saxmore-Blaine’s statement to Mac and Chief Superintendent Markham, the powers-that-be decided that she should be questioned further in regards to the death of Johnny Beresford, and therefore bailed on a Habeas Corpus Proceeding. This was all legalese to lessen the blow that she was in fact the prime suspect and was being booked on suspicion of murder. With the bail she was putting up, her family connections and her contrite attitude she was not considered a threat of flight, but she was still considered a risk to herself, and so was put under house arrest – with terms and conditions – at the Harley Street hospital.

He pondered Isabel Saxmore-Blaine. There was a lot to ponder. Externally she was easily put together: tall, slim, blonde, beautiful and privileged. That the genetic gods had been very good to her was plain to see. The other stuff that needed working out wasn’t so plainly evident. The guilty or not guilty? The mad or not mad? The blackout drunk or not blackout drunk? The lover or the killer? Of course the answers to everything, and all of the above, probably lay somewhere in between, hidden within the crevices and curves, and dimmed in the shadows hanging over this case.

And if Isabel Saxmore-Blaine’s contriteness, confusion, tortured conscience and seemingly selfless desire to square everything were all an act, then it amounted to a pretty convincing one. Vince believed it, and he could see it flying with a judge. And what with her diminished responsibility and Beresford’s threat of violence towards her, and the fact that he had been killed with his own gun, never mind Geoffrey Lancing on the case, she would never see prison bars – just the ornate gilded ones offered by private hospitals like the Salisbury. A beaten down manslaughter charge, then off to a nunnery until the scandal faded, and the gossip columns had cooled down.

But what about Johnny Beresford? The dead man was curiously quiet, suspiciously silent. Dead men don’t talk, but they are usually accompanied by a chorus of chatter with enough speculation buzzing around them to match the babbling of a séance conducted on amphetamines. But Beresford’s family and friends had kept what most would describe as a dignified silence. They were all keeping their counsel, in public at least, and seemingly closing ranks. Ranks that Vince was going to try to break through tonight. Because there were still too many questions to be asked about the golden couple that had been Johnny and Isabel. Like when did it all start to tarnish? Isabel Saxmore-Blaine could probably have discussed the subject at length, but she currently lacked the necessary objectivity to answer things properly. And friends always have more fully formed opinions about other people’s woes, more so even than their own, and they
love
to discuss them at length.

Vince selected a midnight-blue evening suit, a crisp white shirt, a knitted black tie. He then went into the kitchen and boiled up some water in a small saucepan. Opening his coffee can, he heaped a generous scoop of Jamaican Blue Mountain on to a spoon, dumped it into his French press, and then brewed himself up a cup of strong black coffee. As he did all this, his mind shifted a few postcodes north-west of Eaton Square and Belgravia, to the other side of the socio-economical tracks, and the enclave of Notting Hill.

Unlike Isabel Saxmore-Blaine, Tyrell Lightly had been solidly and unambiguously charged with murder; there was no ‘Habeas Corpus Proceeding’ for him. Regarding this, he broke his silence long enough to consult his political and moral mentor, Michael X, who then called in a lawyer. Both men decided Tyrell Lightly should talk, and talk he did. Lightly could explain his movements on the night of the murder. At the time the crime was being committed, he was out, like a true criminal recidivist, committing another crime. His alibi was that, with a team of three cohorts, he was robbing a warehouse in Park Royal, west London. Lightly gave up his three accomplices, and they were all picked up with relative ease. And, likewise, following criminal courtesy, for reduced charges they all gave Lightly up too. And thus unwittingly provided him with an alibi. If they’d had any brains, they wouldn’t have given him up at all but merely said he wasn’t there, and let him stew on a murder charge. But brains weren’t at a premium with this mob, as the outcome of the robbery clearly illustrated. The job went wrong. At around midnight a guard, freshly armed with an Alsatian dog, spotted them clambering over the fence. After coshing the Alsatian to death and the guard unconscious, Tyrell Lightly and his mob were clambering back over the fence when the alarm was raised and the Alsatian’s three brothers, dragging along the guard’s three colleagues, came snarling and snapping at their heels. Lightly and his mob, however, made their escape, and spent the rest of the night at a lock-in in a boozer in Battersea.

Vince parked the Mk II in Bourdon Street and walked around the corner into Berkeley Square. The Montcler Club wasn’t hard to spot, for it was undoubtedly the jewel of the square. A large four-storeyed Georgian town house, it was a ‘town house’ only in the loosest sense of the term. It was a house and it was in town, but so was Buckingham Palace. Whilst it obviously fell short of the palace’s dynastic dimensions, and was terraced, Vince reckoned ‘mansion’ would be a more appropriate description.

Low-slung and elongated luxury cars – Bentleys, Bugattis, Rolls-Royce Shadows and Wraiths – and hackney carriages glided up and disgorged capped chauffeurs who loped around their polished steeds and opened doors with springy servitude, to evacuate aristocratic and carefree young couples dressed in furs and finery. These then made their way down to the basement of the Montcler, which hosted the exclusive nightclub called Jezebel’s.

The young detective’s interest was focused on the upper floors. The traffic into the casino was just as well-heeled and well-dressed, and consisted mainly of men, though not exclusively. The women that entered wore expensive furs too, perhaps as much for collateral as for warmth, but the casino crowd tended not to smile as readily as the nightclub crowd, and they looked about as carefree as Christians entering the Coliseum.

Vince approached the front door and it was opened by a fat man in a pea-green brocaded greatcoat and matching top hat, with a fulsome waxed moustache twizzled and sculpted skywards. The reception was the deep oak of a gentlemen’s club, not the red plush of a Vegas-style carpet joint. Vince was greeted by a man in his early forties, who was elegantly put together: over six foot with oiled brown hair swept off a lean face that now creased into a well-practised and welcoming smile, exposing movie-star teeth as white as the dinner jacket he wore. But he wasn’t simply twinkly eyes and sparkly molars, for there was lean muscle beneath the fine clothes and the meet-and-greet mannerisms. He introduced himself as Leonard, and was quick to tell Vince that he knew all the members personally, and didn’t recognize him. Vince cut the conversation short, badged him, and asked to speak to James Asprey. There followed a phone call made from the reception desk, where Leonard cupped his hand over the mouthpiece, and a longer than necessary conversation ensued. Leonard finally put the phone down and, with a curt smile, swept a hand before him in a gesture for Vince to enter.

As they made their way up the magnificent double sided stairs, with their gilt-scrolled balustrades, Leonard gave Vince a potted history of the place, which was built by William Kent in 1744. Horace Warpole considered it one of the finest buildings in London in scale and execution but, for all its period panache, the games conducted in its rooms were the same the world over, only played on Chippendale tables. They included various forms of poker, including three-card or punto banco; there was blackjack, roulette and craps. But it was chemin de fer – or just chemmy, as it was known – that was the real star attraction of these rooms. Easy to play, and fun, with its quick returns and losses, and very addictive.

It was Baudelaire who declared that the devil’s best trick is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist. The best trick James Asprey pulled was convincing his punters that they weren’t punters at all, but guests at a grand country house, enjoying a little harmless sport in the games room, instead of going belly up and flattening their wallets, draining their bank accounts, losing inheritances and in some cases their estates, to a high-octane, casino cash cow. Much has been said about the atmosphere of gaming rooms and casinos: the clawing and cloying desperation, the heady and binary opposites of raw cynicism and lethal optimism, the dead air and stilled time. The Montcler inverted all of that. It made you feel that you were exclusive, a special guest, and that you were lucky to be there. That you were even lucky to be losing your money there. It’s a general rule that there are no clocks in casinos. Not so with the Montcler, where there were lots of them. There were ornate Swiss timepieces on mantelpieces, long-case clocks standing up against the walls, even amusing cuckoo clocks in the dining room, all of them chirping, banging and ringing out the time. Because time in the Montcler was special, it was privileged, and each hour you spent there was to be celebrated. This was the time of your life.

The Montcler reminded Vince of Beresford’s home in Eaton Square: the same schema, just on a grander scale. Like a home from home. As he was led through the club he scoped the rooms looking for members of Beresford’s set, and immediately spotted two of them. Lord Lucan sat studying his hand of cards, wearing a troubled and none-too-bright expression on his face. It wasn’t a poker face, because his moustache seemed to twitch and bristle involuntarily, giving away the fact that Lord Lucan either didn’t like what he read on the cards or he just couldn’t read them, full stop. But dim as the good lord looked, Vince wasn’t going to judge Lucan, or any of the Montcler set, merely on Isabel Saxmore-Blaine’s say-so. She clearly viewed them all as the enemy.