Gilded Edge, The (35 page)

Vince gave a series of slow considered nods to this. The ambassador had declared all of this as a matter of fact, as if the Jones family had little or no say on the subject. But Vince didn’t argue the point, as it seemed only right that reparations should be made. What’s the point of having a shit pile of money if you can’t do the right thing with it? And, anyway, what Vince was really considering was his next point. The one he knew he’d be making – and the real reason that he was there.

He hit him with it now: ‘What if I told you, sir, that I don’t think your son killed Beresford?’

The ambassador said nothing for what seemed like the longest time. For a man who talked, gave instruction and advice, smoothed over awkward situations, the silence seemed vacuumously long. He just sat there, elbows on the arms of the padded chair, both hands cupping the cut-crystal tumbler containing the single malt. Vince was certain the man had heard him, but felt duty bound to try again. He did some throat clearing to prime the ambassador that he was going again – then hit him with it.

‘I said, sir, I don’t think your son Dominic killed—’

‘I heard what you said,’ barked the ambassador. ‘I am neither deaf nor a fool who blurts things out without considering them first. Kindly allow me that time.’

Vince noted the ambassador’s emotion. Whilst keeping the carapace of calm, the man’s voice had an uneven grating sound to it, like glass in a machine.

‘But I’m also not a slow-witted buffoon who takes all day to make up his mind. And my answer to you is, of what possible use, or good, is that information to me now?’

Vince stalled. ‘Well, I . . . I think I can clear your son’s name. You see, there are too many anomalies in this case. Like the manner in which Beresford was killed and the fact that Dominic—’

‘God damn you!’The ambassador slammed his flattened palm down on the side table next to him, felling a silver-framed photo which had a domino effect and felled some more clustered nearby. They were photos of Dominic and Isabel as children.

‘My son is dead. And so too is Beresford. If there’s any justice in this world, then that’s justice enough for me. Let me make myself clear: I want this investigation ended. I want my daughter’s name out of the newspapers, and my family’s name, what’s left of it, off the tongues of all those malicious bastards.’

‘Your son is accused of a murder I don’t think he committed, therefore I don’t think justice has been done. I’m a little confused, sir. I thought you’d be—’

‘Dominic killed a young woman, that much is clear. Killing Beresford, the man who set that horrendous act in motion, was a just killing – an honourable killing. My son deserves that honour.’ The ambassador put his drink down on the table and stood up. ‘I have no need to tell you, Detective Treadwell, that I know lots of people. Let’s start with the Home Secretary, shall we, and work our way down to the Commissioner of Police.’

‘I’m breathing exalted air, Ambassador,’ Vince remarked drily. ‘But the case is officially closed,’ he added in a deliberately bemused tone. ‘And even if it was still open, it’s out of my hands now, because I’m officially off it.’

‘From what I hear about you, Mr Treadwell, open or closed means little to you. You seem to have a curiosity that needs satisfying, whatever the official status. Tenacity is a quality I admire, but not in this case. It makes me sick to my stomach.’

Vince didn’t bother with sounding bemused this time, as he saw that the ambassador had the measure of him. The ambassador then offered some avuncular advice to the younger man, but it was clear that he thought Vince was trouble, didn’t want him consorting further with his daughter and had the power and influence to end his career. Vince listened, kept his counsel, and then watched as the old man strode out the room.

Vince got the picture: if Dominic was going to go down in history as the tawdry murderer of a prostitute, why not go down with an
honourable
killing of an ex-guardsman as well? His last act of righteous revenge. Vince was getting to understand the logic, for it was pretty much the same logic employed by Asprey and the Montcler set in their day-to-day dealings with the world. Those very same men the ambassador so despised. And the more Vince thought about it, the more it stank the place up like one of Sir Arthur Saxmore-Blaine’s guano mines on a hot day.

A very old butler with a serious stoop went with him to the door and silently saw Vince out. He didn’t bump into Isabel on the way out, in fact he didn’t bump into anyone on the way out. The house seemed as empty as a graveyard at midnight.

That night, Vince headed to the Kitty Kat club in Camden Town, which offered a mixed bag. It ran a not very busy jazz night for people who really didn’t know or care that much about jazz. It had a burlesque night that did lively business. An open mic talent and comedy night, where you were unceremoniously gonged off if you didn’t cut the mustard. But the most popular nights were Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Inside the Kitty Kat club, there wasn’t much to distinguish it from any other red flock wallpaper and glitter-ball joint, apart from its clientele on a Tuesday or Thursday. Today was Tuesday, and men and women danced cheek to cheek, only not with each other. Fey young men foxtrotted with burly builders wearing full make-up. Bulldog dykes in business suits held their frilly-dressed ingénues tightly for the tango. The queer and dyke combination was fostered on the theory that if the club got raided, they’d all just swap partners,
à la
Adam and Eve, just as the Old Testament intended. Then all back to Adam and Steve and the twentieth century, just as soon as the Vice coppers had been slipped their envelopes and left. It was like a party game of musical chairs or pass the parcel.

The hostess who led Vince into the back room to meet Bernie Korshank was a pretty little blonde dyke doing a pretty good impression of Marlene Dietrich circa
The Blue Angel
(1936), in top hat, tails and fishnets. For some reason that Vince didn’t ask about, because he really couldn’t be bothered to get into it, she had a life-sized pink plastic lobster that she trailed behind her on a lead.

The back-room office was guarded by a metal-covered door with an impressive couple of locks on it. Inside, the walls were lined with boxes containing the club’s most precious commodity, liquor. Bernie Korshank, seated at a desk, had just closed a book when Vince entered:
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.
Complete enough, sonnets and all, for the hefty tome to close with a dust-raising thud.

Korshank lived up to his reputation, and to Dominic Saxmore-Blaine’s description. He was a monolith of a man made up of a pylon of fused muscle and a palaeontologist’s prize collection of bones. As a schtaraker, he looked straight out of the Lew Grade school of TV heavies. The big desk he was seated behind looked more like a tray propped on his lap. The chair he sat on had to be presumed, because Vince couldn’t actually see it. He was dressed in his bouncer’s uniform of a black tuxedo, single-breasted with satin shawl lapels. Such was his bulk that Vince reckoned it was a ‘cut and shunt job’: a canny tailor had used two tuxedos to make one, and you couldn’t see the join. The clip-on bow tie sat on the desk next to a mug of tea. The open-necked shirt revealed thick tufts of shiny black hair that, given the size of his barrelling chest, suggested he was smuggling a grizzly bear past customs. He glanced up at Vince from behind half-rimmed glasses that looked stretched to breaking point over the broad and fleshy expanse of his face. He had a full head of thick jet-black wavy hair, heavily pomaded and brushed back from a narrow brow that furrowed down into a bulbous nose that looked as if it had cushioned many a blow. Swarthy beyond measure or description, but here goes: he had the kind of face that if you shaved it using a hundred hot towels, lashings of suds and a freshly forged razor stropped to within an inch of its life, in an hour’s time he’d look as though he’d been dipped in soot and in need of another.

Korshank took off his glasses and rested them on the collected works of the Bard. The specs didn’t lessen the impact of his face; in fact, they added an archly sinister aspect. But, with or without them, Vince could see how the impressionable Dominic Saxmore-Blaine would have been terrified of this man. And how the task of felling a beast like Bernie Korshank would send you nuts – because there was simply so much of him. For the frail young man, it must have felt as if he’d committed mass murder.

Vince didn’t take any chances with the big boy, and immediately showed him his ID. Korshank nodded and gestured for him to take a seat opposite. Vince sat down and gave a nod towards the tome.

‘You rehearsing for a play?’ he asked.

‘Just reading. I likes to brush up. I spoke to you fellers already.’

The voice matched the body; big and blunted, it sounded as though it had been hauled up from the bowels of the earth. It was also slow and deliberate, as if trying hard to reach beyond the stalls with its distinct enunciation, but it was always going to be stymied by the European accent breaking in.

‘What you doing here, copper?’

‘Someone recommended the lobster.’

It had the desired effect: Korshank smiled. And, when he did, the effect was surprisingly pleasant, showing rows of squat gnashers, and comical creases around the eyes.

‘That’s Trixie,’ he said. ‘And no matter how handsome you is, copper, she ain’t for you, and that’s for sure!’

‘I sort of figured I stood more chance with the lobster.’

Korshank suddenly stopped smiling and immediately the room grew oppressive. ‘And, just in case you’re wondering, I ain’t no pansy.’

Vince immediately raised his hands and showed his palms in the international gesture of surrender, then got in quickly with: ‘Absolutely positively not. I never thought it for a second.’

The big man seemed satisfied with this answer, and the dark clouds in the room dispersed. ‘My boss got me working here on account of my acting, and mixing with theatrical types. He reckoned I’d be kosher with the queers, more tolerant. It don’t bother me much what they gets up to, not like with some of the fellers.’ The big man gave a philosophical shrug. ‘But I ain’t complaining. The boss has been good to me and we don’t get no trouble in this place. So I spends most of my time in here, and it gives me plenty of time to read.’

‘Sounds like a good set-up.’Vince brushed some imaginary lint off his trouser leg, then said, ‘I was hoping you could tell me about what happened at the Imperial.’

‘Like I said, I already spoke to you boys about it, and I don’t need reminding.’ But it was too late, he was already reminded. For a bit-part player it was a pretty convincing interpretation of sorrowful and solemn. Heavy-browed, burdensome, and Brandoesque,
à la On The Waterfront.
Vince believed the big feller wasn’t acting, or certainly believed he couldn’t act that well.

Vince prompted: ‘It was an unfortunate turn of events.’

‘If I’d have known the boy wasn’t right in the head, you think I’d have done it?’

‘Not for a second. No one’s blaming you, Bernie.’

‘Bernie?’
The big fellow arched a shiny black eyebrow. ‘What’s with the
Bernie
all of a sudden? We skipped a chapter, copper. What happened to Mr Korshank?’

Vince, again with the international gesture of surrender, said, ‘You’re right. I’m sorry, Mr Korshank.’

There was a pause before Mr Korshank said, ‘Forget it. Bernie’s fine by me, copper. And I don’t blame me neither. I blame Beresford. But he bought it, too.’ He gave a listless shrug. ‘So all’s well that ends well.’

Vince looked down at the Bard’s big book on the table, thinking that wasn’t the play title he would have chosen to sum up events. But tragedy does play out as comedy second time around, so maybe . . .

‘Talking about good reads, Bernie, I read the confession – Dominic Saxmore-Blaine’s confession. There’s a few things about it that don’t play right. Like the ending.’ The big man studied Vince intently. Undaunted, he continued. ‘Must be one of the first things you look for in a good play script, how it ends, if it makes sense.’

‘I ain’t no writer. I just does what’s put in front of me. Move here, move there, break a chair over him, hit him over the head with a bottle.’ Looking at Vince’s crinkled brow, Korshank reassured him, ‘Don’t worry, they’re props made out of balsa wood, and the bottles are made out of sugar to look like glass.’

‘Yeah, and the guns are loaded with blanks,’ said Vince, bringing it all back around to the principal players. ‘No, I’m sorry, Bernie, but I’m just not believing the end of our little story.’

Bernie Korshank rested his hands on the table as clenched fists. If his face looked as though it knew where the bodies were buried, the hands looked as though they had dug the holes that put them there. ‘What you saying, copper, I’m a liar?’

Again Vince went palms-up in a placating gesture, and was tempted to take out the perfectly creased quarter inch of white hanky from his breast pocket and wave it about frantically. ‘Easy, Bernie, that’s not what I’m saying at all. All I’m saying is, I don’t think Dominic Saxmore-Blaine killed Beresford.’

Bernie Korshank unballed his fists and weaved his fingers together again. Vince breathed easy at seeing him in the newsreader position; it meant the big man was not about to throw a punch, at least not imminently

‘God rest his soul,’ said Korshank. ‘The kid was a squit of a man, nothing of him. But in my experience, a gun in a man’s hand soon evens things up.’

‘Yeah, but what was he doing with Beresford’s gun in the first place? With real bullets in it?’

‘He could have got hold of bullets. He had time.’

‘How d’you mean, Bernie, he had time?’

‘The gun, the kid had the gun. He must have got bullets for it.’

‘Did you read the report, Bernie?’

He shrugged. ‘They didn’t have no report.’

‘Two coppers, Detectives Kenny Block and Philly Jacket?’

Another shrug from the big man. ‘Who can tell? Coppers all look the same to me. Apart from you. You’d do well in the movie business.’

‘Yeah, and before you know it I’m dragging a lobster around on a chain.’ Korshank laughed at that. Vince continued. ‘These two coppers looked especially the same, right?’ Korshank nodded. Vince cursed under his breath. A typical half-arsed job from Block and Jacket. Vince pulled up his chair and rested his arms on the desk. Korshank picked up that he was serious and drew in closer to the detective. It made for a comic silhouette, with Vince looking up, Bernie Korshank looking down.