Gilded Edge, The (6 page)

There were some big floor cushions scattered around, covered in panels of bright-coloured silk, while lots of Aztec and Mexican-style throws covered the furniture. On the floor lay Moroccan and Indian rugs with naps so deep you could hide out in them. Around the room were other knick-knacks and ornaments from those countries too, like the large bronze figure of the elephant-headed Indian god Ganesh sitting heavily on the mantelpiece. Running up one of the walls was a range of fine pencil drawings of ballet dancers, and a large bookcase was bulging with paperback and reference books on dance, fashion, travel and the arts. There was a modern glass and chromium-tubed desk against a wall, with a blue Underwood 5 typewriter resting on it alongside a well-thumbed
OED,
a frazzled-looking
Roget’s Thesaurus,
and stacks of text-covered typing paper. Next to the desk was a long magazine rack packed with glossies. On almost every available flat surface stood framed photos featuring Isabel Saxmore-Blaine on her travels, and invariably posing with Johnny Beresford. She was decorously draped around him in exotic and expensive locations, and they made for quite an eye-catching couple. Dressed up or dressed down, caught mid-laughter or unawares, from every angle she looked as though she oozed class. It was as plain as the perfectly poised nose on her face that this woman was on very good terms with the camera – it lapped her up.

‘May I ask,’ said Vince, picking up a picture of the happy couple on holiday in Sardinia, ‘how long had Mr Beresford and your sister been going out with each other?’

The swathe of Dominic Saxmore-Blaine’s hair was yet again hiding half his face. Vince glanced briefly at Mac, as if to check with him what the rules were regarding annoying haircuts, but from Mac’s neutral expression, apparently there weren’t any. Vince would soon change all that once he ruled the world, but right now he contented himself with watching as Saxmore-Blaine did the mental calculation, then his pinched little mouth twitched into life as he spoke.

‘Oh, gosh, let me see. They met around about the time I first went up to Oxford . . . so about three years now.’

Vince put the photo back on the shelf. ‘It’s very important that we talk to your sister soon. Do you have the phone number of the address she’s staying at?’

‘No . . . no I don’t.’

‘You’re staying here in her flat, yet you don’t have a number to contact her? Not even in an emergency?’

‘I’m sorry, but she always calls me, you see, so I don’t. I’m sorry.’

Vince noticed that Mac was noisily lighting up a Chesterfield, almost as a means of disguising the fact that he too didn’t believe a word he was hearing. ‘Okay, Mr Saxmore-Blaine,’ said Vince, reaching into his jacket pocket and handing him his card, ‘when you next talk to your sister, can you tell her to call us straight away?’

‘Yes, of course I will.’

Dominic Saxmore-Blaine stood up and walked the two policemen to the door. Vince turned sharply to face him and said, ‘You’re not driving, are you, Mr Saxmore-Blaine? Because it’s recommended that if you’ve been drinking, you really shouldn’t drive. Apparently they’re even thinking of bringing in laws against it.’

‘No, no, of course not. I’ll get a taxi.’

‘Where are you meeting your father?’

‘The Ritz.’

‘Of course. We happen to be going right past Piccadilly, right, Detective McClusky?’

‘Right past it, Detective Treadwell.’

‘We’ll give you a lift.’

Dominic Saxmore-Blaine did that annoying thing with his hair again, a sharp upward jolt of the head, and, for good measure, dealt it a double scrape back with both hands. ‘No, no, but thanks. That’s awfully kind, but I need to get changed first, you see.’

Vince made a show of checking out young Dominic Saxmore-Blaine’s duds – and, yes, he could see that. They left him to it.

Vince and Mac sat in the Mk II opposite the Pont Street flat, waiting for Dominic Saxmore-Blaine to emerge.

‘You allowed him a choice,’ said Mac, shaking his head.

‘I know that.’

‘Why?’

‘Because, “Can you give me your sister’s number?” is a leading question, because I’ve made the assumption that he does have her number, because it’s a logical conclusion – because of course he does. By posing the question,
“Do
you have her number?”, there’s no assumption, no following logic, and he has a choice. And it’s the choice he then makes that nails him.’Vince studied Mac’s reaction; the older detective smiled and nodded in agreement. ‘But you knew all that already, right, Mac?’

Mac lit a Chesterfield and said: ‘She’s quite a looker.’

Vince rolled down the window. ‘Who?’

‘The big sister – who else?’

‘Really? I didn’t notice.’

‘
Really?
I thought you were about to eat her picture.’

‘I noticed something else, too. She had lots of photos of Beresford there, but I didn’t see any of her in his house. And it’s a big house.’

‘That’s right. And they’ve been seeing each other for three years – but not so much as engaged? And she’s twenty-six. They get broody at that age.’

Vince gave a slow distracted nod at this; not that he necessarily agreed with Mac’s old-world view, but in this case he could find no strong opposition to it either, because Isabel Saxmore-Blaine and Johnny Beresford fitted it so well. They seemed to represent the embodiment of the establishment. And another thought had occurred to Vince, too: Isabel Saxmore-Blaine was the kind of girl you’d get a ring on as quickly as possible. But what distracted Vince from voicing all this was the sight of Dominic Saxmore-Blaine trotting down the steps in the exact same outfit he was wearing when they left him fifteen minutes earlier. Just as they had predicted. What took him so long, they suspected, was the phone call he’d been making to his sister.

Despite the advice that Vince had given him, Dominic got into a car, a snappy little Volkswagen Type 14 Karmann Ghia – badly let down by the colour orange. They followed him west, out of central London towards Hounslow and into London Airport. The sky was criss-crossed with the contrails of aeroplanes, some solid as sky writing, some fading like old smoke signals. In Vince’s immediate scope of vision he saw one plane lethargically coming in for landing whilst another was sedately nosing its way along for take-off; both in miraculous slow motion and both looking about as capable of flight as a pair of fat bumblebees in a beer garden.

At a safe distance, Vince managed to slip the Mk II in behind Saxmore-Blaine’s little orange car as they wound their way up the spiralling concrete ramp of the newly built multi-storey car park. At the top level, Vince stopped at the brink of the entrance to check where the Karmann Ghia was, and saw it was making its first turn around the central reservation of parked vehicles. The car park was less than a quarter full and, much as Vince was hit with a sudden urge to floor the Mk II and hear the screech of tyres on the smooth concrete as he tore around the first bend like Fangio, he didn’t. He drifted slowly around, stalking his prey silently, not alerting Dominic Saxmore-Blaine to their presence.

And there sat Isabel Saxmore-Blaine in a white, two-seater Sunbeam Alpine, with the roof down. Dominic slowed his car and parked next to her. She gave a perfunctory smile to her younger brother, but the tenuous grip the smile had on her lips quickly fell away as she saw Vince and Mac in the slowing Mk II. Paranoid and prepared for the worst, she had them pegged as coppers the minute she clocked them. Even in the grey concrete light of the car park, Vince could see that the refined, unflappable features of Isabel Saxmore-Blaine looked tense and tormented, like she was tuned to alert, and
everyone
looked like a copper.

She bent down to pick up a red patent-leather handbag, and flipped its interlocking double-G-shaped metal clasp.

Her brother, probably still groggy from the night before, and unaware that Vince was right behind him, went to get out of his car. Isabel, meanwhile, had found what she wanted in the bag, and pulled out a .32 snub-nosed Colt revolver.

Vince slammed on the brakes and boxed in the Alpine.

Dominic Saxmore-Blaine shouted, ‘Izzy . . . NO!’ as Isabel took the revolver and stuck the stubby muzzle in her mouth, as though she was sucking on a straw.

Vince was out of the car and running over to her. Mac followed.

As Isabel glanced up briefly from this suicidal pose, she saw Vince running towards her and her eyes widened. Then her finger curled around the trigger. She squeezed her eyes shut.

Vince dived for her head first, his clenched fist extended and leading the way before him.

The report from the gun cracked and echoed around the concrete cavern of the car park with the sharpness of a rimshot drum roll.

Five days later, Vince sat at his desk reading William Hickey’s lead on the Beresford murder in the
Daily Express.
The column was written in that high-and-dry gossipy style so favoured by society columnists, as though the ordinary world didn’t apply to them. Vince skimmed the facts: sketchy as they were, they laid out a précis of the two principal players in the scandal that was playing out. Beresford had all the advantages life had to offer, expensively educated at Eton, off to Sandhurst, then serving without much distinction in the Guards. He did better in the City, making money and filling further the family’s already abundant coffers. But he earned his real reputation on the green-baize gambling tables of London and Europe, as a ferocious and fearless and, more importantly, winning gambler. As a staunch member and stalwart of the Montcler Club and considered very much part of their ‘set’, he played and beat some of the richest and most powerful men in the world.

Isabel Saxmore-Blaine’s family stock, and her life, seemed to mirror that of her ‘victim’. She was educated at Cheltenham College, but a promising career as a dancer with the Royal Ballet was stalled after an injury. She moved to America, her mother’s home country, and took a degree at the prestigious Vassar College in upstate New York. She then took up journalism and became a respected art correspondent for
Tatler
magazine, and a freelancer for various other upmarket publications. Her father, now a widower, came from a long line of distinguished ambassadors and diplomats, and had himself been ambassador to Washington for five years, before retiring and going on to become a royal equerry. Murder at such close quarters to the Queen?

Vince put down the paper. There was more, lots more, but after the initial facts it spiralled downwards into salaciousness and innuendo, and looked as if it was gearing up to become the next Profumo Affair.

What became apparent to Vince was that, as well as the expensive education and all the other goodies of her gilded life, what money and privilege really seemed to buy Isabel Saxmore-Blaine was that most luxurious of gifts: time. For any normal citizen it would have been a couple of aspirin and then down to some gruelling questioning. Because Vince’s fist had hit its target and knocked the gun out of Isabel’s mouth, and knocked her out cold. With the hammer cocked, when the gun was punched out of her hand it hit the door and a shot was fired into the dashboard – not through the back of her skull.

But it was pretty clear – from the doctors’ reports, the psychologists’ reports and the journalists’ reports – that Isabel Saxmore-Blaine had problems other than a bruised jaw. She was a depressive and a lush who had admitted to an addiction to pills of every description: uppers, downers, prescription painkillers, the works. Even though she was on suicide watch, and under sedation on doctor’s orders, in a private Harley Street hospital, details, stories, background and gossip about the case kept being leaked to the press – and all of them in her favour, running along the lines that Beresford was a bully who was violent towards her. Add that to the swelling tide of medical records documenting the state of her mental health, and it looked like, by the time she woke up from her stupor, she would have a well-marshalled argument claiming self-defence against aggravated physical provocation, with diminished responsibility thrown into the mix. Even though the motive and circumstances were all in place – it was the end of the romance, they got drunk and fought and, in the
Sturm und Drang
of it all, she had somehow managed to put a bullet in her about-to-be-ex-lover’s head – Isabel Saxmore-Blaine still looked like walking free.

It seemed to Vince a perverse and cruel paradox that, while Miss Saxmore-Blaine was being kept silent under the chemical cosh in a private clinic whilst her expensive lawyers could rustle up a defence, little Ruby Jones was in hospital, mute through shock, and as the days slipped by it was becoming easier for her mother’s killer to get away.

All attention in CID’s Incident Room was focused on the Marcy Jones case. Prime suspect Tyrell Lightly was nowhere to be found. Rumour was he’d fled the country and was now back in his ‘yard’ in Jamaica. Rumour also was he’d got ‘politics’ and fled to South America, to fight on the front line. Rumour was he’d ended up in the cement being used for the new Westway flyover they were building.

‘Got some news for you, Vince!’