‘Jessica was a stunner, just like Isabel. And, believe me, Detective, I have had the pleasure of snapping a lot of beautiful girls. But women like Jessica and Isabel have that other quality about them that can’t be captured on camera. It’s too elusive.’
‘How did she kill herself?’
‘She ended up sticking her head in the oven, Sylvia Plath style. She was the poet who killed herself—’
‘By sticking her head in an oven.’
‘Quite. The joke with Jessica was, to everyone’s astonishment, that she’d managed to do it. That was not because of her other failed attempts. No, everyone was just astonished that she’d managed even to turn the oven on – because she’d never used one before.’ He gave a short mirthless laugh, but it quickly faltered as a memory struck, and he fell into melancholy. ‘Poor Isabel. I remember it vividly. And so does she, no doubt. It’s not the sort of thing you ever forget or ever get over, I suppose. So you see, Detective Treadwell, there’s a history there of unstable behaviour. And I always feared there was more tragedy in store for her, poor Isabel.’
‘That’s all very interesting, Mr DeVane, but I’ve already spoken to Ms Saxmore-Blaine in some detail,’ Vince said with a guiding edge in his voice. ‘It’s Johnny Beresford’s friends I’m interested in now.’
DeVane looked disappointed that Vince hadn’t congratulated him on his gems of insight, whipped out his notebook and feverishly written down his words verbatim. The snapper huffily folded his arms, and said: ‘Quite. You asked if I could kill Johnny, and I said yes, so let me explain. He was my best friend, and we’ve known each other since school, where I was a year below him. But there’s a part of me that’s glad he’s . . . gone. Isabel always had her problems, but Johnny exacerbated them. He knew how to press her buttons, as it were. But I’m sure she’s not capable of killing anyone. Not while sober anyway.’
‘She wasn’t sober,’ added Vince redundantly. Because he knew DeVane knew that she wasn’t.
‘Quite.’ DeVane paused for thought, then said determinedly, ‘Isabel needs protecting, not persecuting.’
Vince weighed DeVane up. Was he himself protecting her or persecuting her? Vince came down on the latter. Out of Nicky DeVane’s mouth, from her closest friend, came words as damning and loaded as that smoking gun in her hand.
‘One last question, Mr DeVane.’
‘Surely.’
‘Where were you on the night he was killed?’
DeVane looked taken aback at this, and made a show of his displeasure by creasing his brow and putting a petulant little twist on his mouth. ‘I take it that line of questioning is merely standard procedure? I can’t imagine you think I’d kill my dearest friend.’
‘You’ve admitted that, given the right circumstances, you could have killed him. I’m just checking to see if you did.’
‘You misunderstood me, Detective. I . . . I just meant that I would do anything to protect Isabel. Do you not see that?’
Vince saw it, but didn’t really buy it, and he didn’t throw him a lifeline. His mouth stayed shut, but his eyes said: Just answer the fucking question.
DeVane muttered his astonishment at all this, then spun around and reached over to a large red desk diary and flicked through it to the appropriate page. ‘Ah, yes, I was in Soho. Met some friends for drinks at Muriel’s Colony Rooms, then on to the Whiskey-a-Go-Go in Wardour Street with Brian and Anita. Then we met up with John and George and some others and went off to Brian Epstein’s party at Tiki’s on the King’s Road. I left at about three, with a friend called Gloria. She’s on the cover of this month’s Vogue.’
‘You needed to check your dairy to remember that?’
DeVane gave an immodest little shrug that verged on smugness, flipped the diary shut, and said: ‘It’s irrelevant anyway, Detective. I know what you’re thinking, and killing Johnny wouldn’t have done me any good with Isabel. I’ve always known she doesn’t love me – not as one would wish. She clearly sees me as her brother, I fear. She fell in love with Johnny the first time she clapped eyes on him, I think. Of course, irony upon ironies, I even introduced them.’
You didn’t need to be a detective to catch the palpable and barely disguised bitterness in Nicky DeVane’s voice. But Vince was, and he did – and he exploited it. ‘The dashing and daring army man, uh? And so tall and handsome. What was he, six-five, six-six?’
DeVane took an angry breath, then said guardedly, ‘I don’t know. I’ve never measured him.’
Vince decided not to mine this rich vein of antagonism and said, ‘Did he know about your feelings towards Isabel?’
‘Of course he knew. But we didn’t talk about Isabel, nor would he say anything derogatory about her in front of me, because he knew how I felt. He respected that feeling. It was the love that daren’t speak its name.’
‘Not quite, though.’
‘Quite. No, not quite. But you get the idea.’
Quite. Vince got the idea. And, on that, he drew the interview to an end. Outside, night was cramming in, as all the neon signs that spelled the end of the day were being switched on.
‘Well, Detective Treadwell, if there’s anything else I can help you with, do let me know,’ said DeVane, leading Vince to the door. ‘Oh, yes, and I owe you – for ignoring the indiscretion. I hardly touch the stuff myself-—’
‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘Very enlightened of you, Detective.’
‘I let the little things go, just so I can get on with the big things. It’s more time management than enlightenment, Mr DeVane.’
‘Quite.’
‘Actually, you could do me a favour. Can I borrow your phone?’
‘Of course. I’ll leave you to it,’ said the photographer before exiting the office.
Vince waited for the click of DeVane’s Cuban heels to fade away before he dialled the direct number. ‘Mac, it’s Vince.’
Mac said, ‘Got some news for you on Isabel Saxmore-Blaine.’
‘Good or bad?’
CHAPTER 20
‘This place is driving me crazy!’
‘You could do a lot worse, and a lot of people in your position do actually do a lot worse,’ said Vince, looking around Isabel Saxmore-Blaine’ private room – or suite – at the Salisbury Hospital. It was 10.30 a.m. He sat drinking a cup of coffee, as she paced the floor with all the poise and grace of a professional dancer. She was dressed in a black roll-neck sweater that seemed like a tube of liquorice wrapped around her long elegant neck, black ski pants, and a pair of black leather ballet-pump style shoes. No make-up today except a slash of red lipstick that looked glossy and moist, like a fresh paint job on an Italian sports car. Her hair was scraped back into a polka-dot Alice band.
‘Yes, I know I should be grateful,’ she said. ‘But even a gilded cage, at three hundred guineas a week, is still a cage when you can’t go out.’
‘Not without an escort, you can’t.’
He said it with enough of a mischievous inflection in his voice for her to immediately stop her pacing and look around at him with a childlike expression, her eyes lit up in expectation like a kid at Christmas time.
So twenty minutes later they were in St James’s Park, throwing stale bread to the ducks in the pond. All around them, London brooded under a dark sky, heavy clouds slowing, rearranging themselves against a stark background of a metallic winter light. The pond was busy with web-footed birds of all descriptions milling around as they looked forward to the impending rain. A magisterial swan with four fluffy grey cygnets in tow, like little tugs around a grand ocean liner, approached them for a hand-out. Isabel tore off strips of bread for this feathered family, while Vince merely viewed them with suspicion. He’d never liked swans, and he had the feeling they didn’t much care for him either – or any of his species, for that matter. Swanning around as if they owned the place. And, with their royal connections and warrants, in this most royal of royal parks, they probably did. But with their vaunted violence, their venomo
usly hissing leathery tongues and archangel wings, Vince viewed them as feathered velociraptors.
‘Vincent!’
‘Whoops,’ he said drily, as the large lump of bread he’d just thrown caught the adult swan squarely on its beak and it ruffled its feathers. ‘They say they can break your arm with one flap of their wings,’ he observed.
‘You don’t believe that, do you?’
‘Adamantly. I have first-hand experience. I got chased by one as a kid.’
‘Poor you. It must have been terrifying.’
Vince weighed up the terror aspect of it. ‘Humiliating, more like, running away from an overgrown duck.’
She laughed. ‘And you’ve held it against them ever since?’
‘Well, let’s just say, if one tries to pull anything now, I’m ready.’
‘You’ll end up in the tower, seeing as they’re the property of the Queen.’
‘You think I’d let some law that was probably etched on to the side of a turnip in 1066 stop me?’ She laughed some more. ‘Anyway, your father could get me off the hook. I hear he knows her personally.’
‘Before he became an ambassador, he was equerry to her father. So, yes, he does know her. It’s my father I now feel sorry for. He’s been through so much already.’
‘Are you talking about your mother?’
Sadness sent a ripple through her voice as she answered, ‘Yes, I suppose I am. And I take it, being a detective, you know all about that too?’
Vince shrugged in innocence and lied. ‘Only what’s in the papers, and I certainly don’t believe everything I read in them.’ Isabel swept her attention back to feeding the ducks, obviously not wanting to discuss her past, and Vince didn’t see much point in that either, so he pressed on with the present. ‘I’ve got some real news for you,’ he said. ‘We traced a phone call you made on the night of the murder, and for fifty-seven minutes you were using the upstairs line in his bedroom. You started the call at 10.12 p.m., and the operator finally cut the call at 11.09 p.m. That puts you upstairs around the estimated time of the shooting.’
Whilst he wasn’t expecting her to fly into his arms through gratitude, he was certainly hoping to put a smile on her face. But it seemed the image of him getting chased by a giant duck was more pleasing to her than learning that she might be off the hook for murder. But Vince realized that all the damage that could be done to her had already been done. Innocent or guilty, his revelations were just cold facts to her now; and nothing much to celebrate, either way.
She asked, with a cursory interest, ‘Who was I on the phone to?’
‘A woman called Rebecca Flowers.’
She looked puzzled at first, and then the name suddenly clicked into place for her. ‘Yes, of course, Rebecca. It’s her surname that threw me. You spoke to her?’
‘This morning.’
‘How was she?’
‘She was scared.’
Isabel looked concerned at this, and said, ‘I’ve not spoken to her since . . . I was too ashamed. I’d let her down by taking that first drink.’ She tore off another strip of bread and threw it to a comical-looking duck that had a Mohican haircut and a bulbous red roll on top of its bill. ‘It’s the first drink that does the damage, they say in AA, and I believe that now. If I hadn’t taken it, I wouldn’t have gotten drunk and . . . and Johnny might still be alive.’
First thing that morning, Vince had called the phone number he’d had traced, and arranged to meet a frightened Rebecca Flowers in a café not too far from the school in Hammersmith where she taught. Over several cups of strong sweet tea, Rebecca Flowers had shared her story. She had met Isabel four and a half months ago in a church crypt near Marble Arch, where they had hosted an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Through a fog of cigarette smoke, in a room full of beetroot-skinned Irishmen, swaying Scotsmen, bloated builders, addled academics, mashed musicians, cowed creatives and sallow stockbrokers, Rebecca Flowers had seen the beautiful Isabel stand up and announce, in a timorous, barely audible voice, over a soundtrack of hacking coughs, brimming sobs and the occasional bout of laughter: ‘My name’s Isabel, and I’m an alcoholic.’
Rebecca had given the newcomer an encouraging smile, and took her out for a cup of tea after the meeting. She then became her sponsor. Whenever Isabel felt the craving for a drink coming on, or experienced moments of anxiety and despair, she was to contact Rebecca and share the problem. It had all been anonymous until Isabel got herself splashed over the newspapers. Rebecca felt guilty for not coming forward then, but she didn’t want to lose her own anonymity and possibly her job at the school. She hadn’t even wanted to give Vince her name, but he insisted her secret was safe with him.
‘What did Rebecca say to you?’
‘She said you were very drunk when you phoned, and you were crying. You told her that Johnny had attacked you and that you’d hit him with a bottle, and that you thought you might have killed him.’
Pensively, she asked, ‘What else did I say to her?’
Rebecca Flowers had told Vince that Isabel then talked about her mother’s suicide, and how she felt that she too was losing her mind, and feared that she was drowning in the same gene pool, and was destined to follow her mother’s fate and take her own life. But Vince just said: ‘Until I hear from you otherwise, that’s between you and Rebecca. The most important thing is that you didn’t hang up on her. You spoke to her for about forty-five minutes, then you fell asleep with the phone to your ear and Rebecca could hear you snoring. She tried to wake you by yelling down the phone, and when that didn’t work she hung up and went to bed. Then twelve minutes later the operator cut you off. This gives us pretty solid evidence that you were asleep upstairs when he was shot.’
Not expecting much, if her previous reaction was anything to go by, Vince watched as the news worked its way through to her, until something akin to a slight smile settled on her lips. It was worth it all just to see that. The weather broke just then, and the rain began to fall. The ducks quacked and motored busily around the pond like they’d been mechanically wound up.
‘Let’s go,’ said Vince. He went to head back to the car, but Isabel just stood there unmoving. Vince wasn’t expecting trouble, so he threw her a surprised look.
‘It’s almost lunchtime, Vincent, and I know a great restaurant near here we could—’
‘I bet you know lots of great restaurants near lots of places, but I myself have work to do.’
‘Can’t I buy you lunch? I just want to thank you.’
‘Consider me thanked.’
‘I do owe you a meal, though, remember?’
‘Nice try, but come on. I don’t want to take you back to the hospital suffering with a cold.’ He turned his back on her and stalked off. Isabel soon fell in step with him as they walked through the park.
‘By the way, I met some of Johnny’s friends yesterday.’
‘Which ones?’
‘All of the ones in the photo I showed you – apart from Lord Lucan, who I’ll catch up with later today.’
‘What did you think of them?’
‘They lived up to your description – with bells and whistles.’ When Isabel suddenly stopped, Vince looked round at her and said, ‘I’m late as it is. You’re not planning on getting me into trouble, are you?’
‘One question. You could have told me all this on the phone. Or maybe you didn’t need to tell me at all. So why did you?’
A clap of thunder sounded in the distance.
‘I thought you should know.’
‘Like I said, you could have phoned me.’
He shrugged, and offered up: ‘I happened to be in the area.’ Then he turned on his heel and carried on walking, confident she would fall into step again. She jogged up next to him and hooked her arm around his. The slight smile she’d worn earlier had grown into a barely disguised grin. She clearly didn’t believe a word of it.
CHAPTER 21
As soon as Vince got back to Scotland Yard, he and Mac drove straight to the
crime scene in Notting Hill. Little Ruby Jones had talked. She had eventually broken her silence and spoken to a young nurse. Detectives Kenny Block and Philly Jacket had immediately gone off to Great Ormond Street hospital, taking along the sweetest WPC they could find (for with their unnerving double act as inquisitors, Block and Jacket had no intention of talking to the little girl themselves, just collating the information). With them also went Dr Pamela Rodriguez, a renowned female psychologist favoured by the Yard, who offered the added bonus of having a Caribbean father, in the hope that she at least could talk to Ruby. Dr Rodriguez had a powwow with the other doctors looking after Ruby, and all agreed it was still too early to expose her to people she didn’t know. And it was too early to start asking questions, that would effectively mean her reliving the horror, so they decided that the same nurse would spend the rest of day with the little girl, indulging her in whatever she wanted, in the hope that Ruby might again feel able to confide in her new-found friend. Specifically instructed not to ask Ruby any leading questions, the nurse would then relay to Dr Rodriguez any information the child offered of her own free will. Meanwhile, Vince and Mac were back in Notting Hill, verifying the information Ruby had earlier given to the nurse: ‘I didn’t see his face.’ ‘Whose face, Ruby?’ ‘The man who killed Mummy.’
Gilded Edge, The Page 17
