‘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.
CHAPTER 8
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 b
een 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!’
Vince broke out of his reverie to see Doc Clayton standing before him. The good doctor grabbed up the newspaper lying on Vince’s desk and turned to the racing section. Vince grabbed the paper back.
‘I want to see what price they’ve got for Arkle in the Gold Cup!’
‘It’s the favourite, no value. What news, Doc?’
‘Forensics found another set of prints on the gun.’
‘Yeah?’
`Partial prints mind, but prints none the less. They belong to Beresford.’
Vince frowned. ‘How’s that news? It was his gun.’
‘It’s news because we also found carbon traces, gunpowder, on his trigger finger. Fresh ones, too. Which would strongly suggest that he himself fired the gun that night.’
Vince considered this point. As Doc Clayton awaited Vince’s opinion, he couldn’t help himself from grabbing up the paper again to check the racing section. Vince let him read it whilst he theorized, and postulated: ‘So, Isabel and Beresford got drunk together. They had an argument. Beresford gets a gun, waves it about for dramatic effect, maybe fires it into a wall to scare her? And then Isabel clobbers him with the champagne bottle . . . snatches the gun and puts one in his head?’
‘Sounds good to me,’ said Doc Clayton, eyes still fixed on the racing page.
‘But why move the body?’ asked Vince, grabbing back the paper. Only a big fat shrug from Doc Clayton. ‘And not only why move the body, but how? Beresford is six foot something and weighs in at fourteen stone something else. She’s five foot eight and catwalk skinny. There’s no way she could have lifted his dead weight and moved him. And anyway she was drunk and stoned.’
Doc Clayton arched a doubtful eyebrow over his wiry spectacles. ‘You’d be surprised at the reserves of strength the human body has. If she really did shoot him, she would have been running high on adrenalin. There’s lots of cases of people gaining three, four times their natural strength in a situation where their fear levels are raised. Or if their life is in danger. It’s known as dynamic tension.’
‘Like a pumped-up athlete?’
‘Exactly! They say that’s why the Russians are so good in the Olympics, because they’re scared they’ll end up in Siberia if they lose!’
‘What does Mac say about it?’
‘He says to refer everything to you first, as you’re running the case.’
Vince smiled, swung his feet off his desk, and picked up the paper and ditched it in the wastepaper bin. ‘Okay, let’s get a team down to Beresford’s place and try and find that bullet.’
Vince and Doc Clayton were able to rustle up three PCs, and two forensics, and headed to Eaton Square. First of all they swept the ground-floor living room where Isabel and Beresford had their little party and, predictably enough to Vince, found nothing. And then they concentrated on the basement study where Beresford’s body had been found. However much Vince bought into Doc Clayton’s theory of her adrenalized body gaining extra strength, he doubted that Isabel could sustain the amount of strength necessary to drag the corpse out of the drawing room, along the hallway, down the stairs and into the study. And, with the bloody head wound he had incurred, she certainly couldn’t have done so without leaving some kind of visible trail.
In the study, Vince and the team fine-toothed the room wall to wall, floor to ceiling. They even took down the books from the shelves to see if the bullet had got lodged in any of the tomes, which mostly dealt with history, finance, military exploits, hunting and fishing and shooting and gambling, along with a twenty-four piece leather-bound encyclopedia and some signed copies of Ian Fleming’s James Bond adventures. But, fitting as that might have been, there were no bullets to be found in 007. Vince got up on a ladder to give the two mounted stags a quick autopsy, to check that neither of the poor souls had copped for yet another bullet. Every inch of the room was searched, and nothing found. Far from the case being cut and dried, Vince was determined – family money or no money, personal contact with the Queen or not – to wake up Sleeping Beauty and ask her the questions that needed to be asked.
Before Vince left the room, he was drawn again to the photograph of Beresford and his five friends at the Montcler Club. He suspected he might be needing it, so he took the photo out of its cantilevered silver frame and slipped it in his pocket.
CHAPTER 9
It was around 5 p.m. when Vince parked the Mk II in Kensington Church Street and walked towards Notting Hill Gate. For the last three days and nights, he had been hanging around the same area to pick up whatever information he could on Tyrell Lightly. Photos of him showed a snappily attired Negro with sharp good looks, a pencil moustache, and a petulant slyness in his eyes. Back home in Kingston, Jamaica, Tyrell Lightly had put his looks to good use as the lead singer in a calypso outfit called the Gayboys. He was a heartthrob crooner by night, but by day he was a guntoting rude boy aligned to the Spanish Town Posse. Like all the Jamaican gangs, the STP had politics in their blood, as well as other rackets, and they composed the muscle behind the right-wing Jamaican Labour Party, and were in charge of getting the vote out. When the JLP lost the ’57 elections to their main rival, the left-wing People’s National Party, the Spanish Town Posse – and Tyrell Lightly in particular – had left too many bodies lying on the street to be brushed under the carpet, and had made too many widows and too many enemies to be given a government pardon. So Tyrell Lightly had swapped Jamaica for England, Kingston for London and Trenchtown for Notting Hill. He’d stopped crooning by then and was now pure muscle: a bantamweight of wiry knife-wielding venom poured into an electric-blue tonic suit topped off with a red felt Homburg hat sporting a peacock feather.
Vince had been regularly visiting places like Frank Crichlow’s El Rio Café at 127 Westbourne Park Road, where West Indian and white kids hung
out together and listened to the new Blue Beat and Ska craze on one of the best-stocked jukeboxes in London. Other favoured haunts, such as the Calypso and the Fiesta One Club, both on Westbourne Grove, were equally busy with hustlers and players. Then you had Johnny Edgcombe’s Dive Bar on the Talbot Road, a jazz club that seemed to never close, and was a favourite with both the artist and the junkie crowd. And not forgetting either all the shebeens in Elgin Crescent, Latimer Road and Oxford Gardens. All these were establishments that Tyrell Lightly’s boss, Michael de Freitas, either ran, had an interest in or took a ‘pension’ from. Vince even played a hand or two in a de Freitas-run spieler in a basement on the Talbot Road, so he blended in easily with the crowd.
To the rest of England, after the so-called ’58 race riots where a couple of hundred white Teddy boys gathered under the lightning-bolt symbol of British fascist banners, and started beating up as many black people as they could find, Notting Hill was seen as a no-go area for, ironically, white people. In reality the disturbance just fired everyone’s imagination and it became the place to go. At any given time, in those illicitly smoking rooms, it was packed with writers, artists, models, musicians, film people and thrill seekers of every description, from well-heeled Chelseaites slumming to East End villains exploring fresh territories and letting their Brylcreemed hair down.
Detectives Kenny Block and Philly Jacket thought Vince was wasting his time, for Lightly was bound to have skipped Notting Hill, skipped London if not the country, and was probably back in the yards of Kingston. But Vince wasn’t so sure: sometimes hiding out in plain view was the best place of all. Lightly would feel safe in Notting Hill, and also his boss, Michael de Freitas, had the money and the muscle to protect him. Outside Notting Hill, Tyrell Lightly was just another ‘spade’, but in that de Freitas-run fiefdom – the City of Spades – Tyrell Lightly was if not himself the king, then certainly close enough to him to feel secure. So Vince decided to pay the king a visit.
Gilded Edge, The Page 5
