Gilded Edge, The (26 page)

The greasy lump Vince had tangled with in Lucan’s hotel room-cum-bunker turned out to work for the hotel as a handyman/porter/bouncer and anything else that he might be called on to do. The Imperial employed three of these fellows, and it was clear that their main task was to protect the girls and eject any liberty-takers. The dead Arab, one Ali Azeem, fifty-three, was the owner of the hotel, or it certainly had that name above the door. But Ali was no ordinary hotelier – or ordinary pimp, for that matter. And, with a set-up like the Imperial operating in that part of town, Vince had to surmise that Ali Azeem had sleeping or silent partners who, at the drop of a hat or more likely a name, would no doubt awake from their muted slumbers and get very vociferous and volatile.

The lump said that he’d only been working at the Imperial for a week or so, therefore conveniently didn’t know too much about the workings of the place. He was keeping tight-lipped, or as tight-lipped as his harelip would allow. When Vince and Mac had questioned him in the hospital where he was being treated for three broken ribs, a broken nose, a torn septum and a fractured cheekbone (Vince had to quickly explain to Mac how the pancake proboscis and split lip wasn’t all his handiwork – he was like that before Vince met him), they could see that he was scared, very scared. When Mac flagged this up to the greasy lump himself, he immediately pointed at Vince, and continued talking to Mac as if Vince wasn’t in the room.

‘It’s him I’m scared of! I thought he was gonna send me to my grave! There’s something bad to the bone about him! He’s got the devil in his heart!”

Vince laughed it off, said the description of him sounded like a list of overly familiar R&B records. But, either way, the greasy lump was scared of something, and was keeping shtum. As for Ali the Arab, owner of the Imperial and the worst wig in Christendom, or in Mecca for that matter, he died from strangulation, garrotted with a length of telephone cord. It was clean, methodical and professional, with just the right amount of sustained pressure that it barely grazed the skin around his neck. It struck Vince as a curious killing, and not the normal method London villians used to dispatch trouble. They generally liked it louder, messier and quicker, coming tooled-up with the more traditional fare of guns and knives. These killers didn’t come loaded, they came light and improvised, and used whatever was at hand to get the job done. And they seemed all the more lethal for it. As for the wig, it had been bagged up with the rest of Ali’s possessions, to hopefully be reintroduced back into the wild at some later date.

Mac came through and broke off Vince’s musings, telling him that they were ready to interview Lucan. Mac made it clear this was still very much Vince’s case, so he wanted the young detective to lead.

Lucan sat there with his blue-chip lawyer, one Julius Cundy, a bony-faced fellow, whose skin was drawn so tightly over his face that he looked as if he could catch flies with his tongue. He wore thick-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses that sat accommodatingly on the ridge of a thin hawklike nose. From a small bony head plumed carefully attended strands of sparse red hair that were greased into place and arranged for maximum coverage, the desperate fronds clinging clawlike on to the weathered rock of his mottled pate. He looked sharp, and ready to intercede and interject at the drop of a hat.

Lucan sat choking back tears, swallowing snot, and hacking on what struck Vince as a longer than usual cigarette. Like James Asprey’s choice of ‘coffin nail’, it was probably bespoke-blended and made to measure. From somewhere he had managed to procure a very swish-looking ebony and gold banded cigarette holder; and he really shouldn’t have, because humility-wise it did his case no favours at all. Due to his frayed nerves, the extended cigarette and holder combination had about as much movement in it as a baton conducting ‘The Flight of the Bumblebee’.

Vince and Mac sat opposite them. When Vince began the proceedings with a ‘Shall we begin?’, the quailing Lord Lucan started the interview predictably enough by protesting his innocence.

‘No, no, no I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t kill anyone, let alone a woman . . . especially a woman . . .’ he uttered in a faltering voice.

Julius Cundy’s magnified eyes narrowed as he fixed the petrified peer with a hard look that said
pull yourself together, man.
Lucan took the prompt (and at Cundy’s prices, he’d have been a fool not to), remembered his military bearing, and straightened his guardsman’s back. Finally, realizing that the skittish cigarette in his hand made him look like some theatrical type up on a buggery charge, he crushed it out in the tin ashtray. He executed a traumatized swallow that sounded as though he was necking a well-knocked about tennis ball, and lamented, ‘It’s heartbreaking, a tragedy . . . but one I am not responsible for. I could not have committed such a cowardly act, of that much I am sure. Positive of that. I just . . . I just don’t have that quality within me. On the battlefield I dare say I could do so, all things being equal. But a defenceless gal? No no no.’ He took some meaningful deep breaths, did a job of arranging his features into something akin to humble sincerity, then continued, ‘Over the brief time I had spent with Miss Jones, and I stress our liaison was very brief, I grew very fond of . . .’

Vince blew an audible blast of breath that flapped his lips as he listened to the opening bars of a speech that had no doubt been whipped up for him by Julius Cundy.

‘. . . Miss Jones. We spoke at length about our respective cultures and she taught me a lot—’

Vince cut in sharply, ‘When was the last time you saw Marcy Jones?’

‘In the
Evening News,
I believe.’

Vince and Mac exchanged furrowed glances:
was he serious?Yes,
he was, gormlessly so.

‘I didn’t know she – Miss Jones, I mean,’ Lucan carried on, ‘was the gal mentioned in the papers until one of the gals at the Imperial pointed it out.’

Vince: ‘Sadie?’

‘Yes . . . yes, I think that was her. Although I can’t be sure. I suspect they use fictitious names, you know. They’re all sexy Sadies, or gorgeous Glorias. Never a Gladys or an Elsie around when you wanted one.’ Lucan attempted a fraternal smile with the other men in the room, like whoremongering was a collective activity. From the heady heights of their moral high ground, the smile was met with cold disdain; especially by his brief, Cundy, whose eyes shot up to the ceiling for higher counsel.

Vince and Mac now had the measure of Lucan’s intellect, and it was scraping somewhere along the bottom. And they also realized that by attempting to wrong-foot the good lord, you wouldn’t necessarily reveal fruitful hidden truths, but simply enter a barren wilderness of confusion. This was a man who was permanently wrong-footed, stumbling around in the dark trying to find a switch to flick, and thus make sense of a modern world that was increasingly leaving him behind, increasingly not taking him seriously. The class clown of the Montcler set, and yet even his class was conspiring against him; he wore it so brazenly that it was almost fancy dress. Lucan had come to life’s party dressed as a dim toff.

‘Okay, Lord Lucan, tell us about Marcy,’ prompted Mac.

‘Lovely gal. Such a sweet gal. She looked so different in her nurse’s uniform . . . so innocent.’

Whilst not matching the redoubtable double act of Philly Jacket and Kenny Block, Vince and Mac’s physical aspects naturally lent them their own routine. Mac was the avuncular good cop, whilst Vince was the unruly ruffian who was going to beat the shit out of you the minute the uncle’s back was turned.

So it was no surprise when Vince spat out: ‘What are we talking about here, Lucan? The real nurse’s uniform she wore to work at Charing Cross Hospital, or the rubber one she wears with fishnets at the Imperial? We’ve been to your room there, and spoken to Sadie. She told me all about your sick little routine. And, let’s face it, getting togged up in a nurse’s uniform is the least of it!’

‘I must object, Detective,’ said the lawyer.

‘Object away, Mr Cundy,’ Vince retorted, his eyes firmly clamped on Lucan.

‘My client isn’t denying he visits the Imperial Hotel—’

‘
Visits?’
Vince’s eyes now fixed themselves on Julius Cundy, as he gave an incredulous shake of his head. ‘Let’s cut to the chase, shall we? Lord Whore-Whore here has his own specially themed room there. It ain’t exactly the bridal suite, unless you’re Eva Braun or one of the Mitford sisters. It’s decorated in the neo-Nazi revivalist style, all Swastikas and death’s heads. We took some pictures and we’re considering a feature in
Homes & Gardens
.’

Before Cundy, flushed with anger, could respond, Mac raised a halting hand – ironically, but not intentionally, like Hitler’s favourite salute – then authoritatively announced, ‘Personal turpitude isn’t the issue here – it’s cold-blooded murder. And it’s cold-blooded facts we should deal in. I think it’s best we stick to those, so we’ll carry on with your movements, Lord Lucan. What Detective Treadwell initially wanted to discover was when you last saw Marcy Jones alive.’

‘It was about a week before Johnny was killed,’ said Lucan.

‘We need specifics, Lord Lucan,’ said Vince. ‘What was it, seven days, six days? Do you have a precise date?’

‘Let me work this out . . .’ Lucan enumerated with his fingers, ‘it was four days before he was killed.’

‘So that would be the Wednesday.’Vince wrote down the date on the pad in front of him. ‘Go on.’

‘I was meant to be meeting up with him that same night,’ said Lucan. ‘It was to be a boys’ night out. Me, Johnny, Aspers, Simon, Guy and Nicky. We all met up at the Montcler at about eight for supper. We weren’t going to spend the evening there, as it was supposed to be a non-gambling night. But Aspers got himself involved in a backgammon game with Eddie Stanley—’

‘Eddie Stanley, who’s he?’

‘A member of the club.’

Vince gave a wry smile. ‘Sounds like a gangster.’

‘Oh, how droll. No, no, Detective. Eddie is Edward John Stanley, the 18th Earl of Derby. Won the military cross and is an avid supporter of the Scouting movement.’

‘Glad to hear it,’ said Vince. ‘Carry on.’

‘Well, poor Eddie, Aspers smelled blood. He knew he could take him for a small fortune, because he’d already taken him for a large one the night before. So we all left Aspers and Eddie to it, and went downstairs to Jezebel’s. It was a good night, with the usual crowd. It was someone’s birthday, I seem to remember. An Australian chum of Simon’s. He paid for all the champers.’

Vince, wanting to move things along: ‘Apart from the gambling and champagne, did anything else happen at Jezebel’s that’s of significance to the case?’ Lucan said no. ‘Did you
all
go on to the Imperial Hotel after Jezebel’s?’

‘No, not all of us. Simon Goldsachs wasn’t with us by then. If I remember correctly, he slanted off early with some blonde filly. Some married filly, at that.’ On letting this slip, Lucan suddenly looked concerned. As concerned as Vince had seen him.

The lawyer instantly read what was now written all over Lucan’s face, and he immediately turned to Vince and fired off, ‘My client wants to know if he need mention any names in the liaison between Mr Goldsachs and a married woman? Surely, at this stage, considering the absence of Mr Goldsachs, there is no need to make life unpleasant for certain innocent parties.’

Vince took a moment to process this request, which told him much about Lucan and the world he operated in. The man was up to his eyeballs in murder, prostitution and Nazism, yet he was worried about disclosing someone else’s social indiscretion, and thus breaking a confidence of the Montcler. He replied, ‘If we deem it to be irrelevant to the case, we won’t.’

Julius Cundy gave Vince a quick gesture of agreement, then nodded to Lucan as a prompt to continue.

‘As I say, Simon left, so the rest of us went off to the Imperial.’

‘What time?’ asked Vince.

‘Quite early, around midnight. It usually doesn’t get interesting until after the clubs have closed, but it was now quiet at Jezzies, so—’

‘So, once you were at the Imperial, you met up with Marcy Jones?’

‘That’s right. In the bar. Well, there she was and I couldn’t resist. The others complained that I was buggering off too soon, but to be honest I was so well and truly oiled already that any more drinkies and I wouldn’t have been good for anything. Especially for the thing I really wanted to do. So I slipped off.’

‘You and Marcy Jones together?’

‘That’s right. Off to my . . . to my room.’

‘And then what?’ asked Vince. Lucan looked confused. ‘Up in your room . . . what did you do?’

It wasn’t a trick question, but it was received as such. The confusion on Lucan’s face just deepened. He turned to his lawyer for guidance, and the lawyer gave another irascible nod to encourage him to answer.

‘Well, the usual.’

‘The usual? You see, Lord Lucan, there’s nothing in that room of yours that suggests the
usual.
It all suggests very much the
un
usual. So we need to know what happened there.’

Lucan shifted in his seat. He picked up his cigarette holder, tapped it on the table until Julius Cundy told him not to, then said, ‘Well, she took her clothes off. I put on some Wagner. Then she . . . she handled me . . . you know . . . did the necessary on my chap. And then I fell asleep. I woke up, oh, around nine in the morning, and went home.’

‘What time did Marcy Jones leave?’

‘Oh, she was gone by the time I woke up, so I haven’t a clue.’

‘I do,’ said Vince. ‘She probably left as soon as she could.’

Julius Cundy said, ‘My client is cooperating in your inquiries, Detective Treadwell, therefore I see no reason for sarcasm.’

Vince continued, ‘And was that the last time you saw Marcy Jones or had any contact with her?’

‘Yes.’

Vince’s and Mac’s eyes met in conference: this wasn’t what they wanted to hear.

Vince said: ‘We believe that Marcy was at the Imperial the night she was killed. She hadn’t been out for a drink with her friends, and there were no new boyfriends on the scene. We think Marcy put her little girl to bed around about eight, then sneaked out of the house to meet you. Like you said – as did Sadie, by the way – you were always quick. It was easy money. Too damned easy.’