The lump’s grip was solid, unmovable, and it was choking the life out of him. There was a grin on the man’s face, and Vince saw drool collecting and pooling up in the sack of his bottom lip. The dam it provided was about to break, and all the sewage it held was heading Vince’s way. He could see a thick cloudy rope of toxic saliva making its way over the lump’s smooth chin, and it was set to impact around about the vicinity of Vince’s mouth. Time to act, so Vince removed his hands, which were redundantly trying to loosen the man’s grip, and arched them slightly.
Bang! In a clapping motion, Vince smashed both cupped hands against the lump’s perfectly placed plug ears. He could hear a pop, like a firecracker going off, and feel the suction as he removed his hands. The lump immediately released his grip around Vince’s neck, and grabbed at his own scorched ears, whereupon Vince wrapped his legs around his bulk and with a scissor motion twisted him off the bed, ending up with Vince on top this time. Standing shakily, Vince started to rub the blood back into his throat, and gasped some more air back into his lungs. The lump rolled around on the floor, letting out only a strange hissing sound. He then staggered to his feet, with his hands still over his ears, and stared at Vince with alarmed question marks in his eyes. Vince’s hands must have felt like crashing cymbals or a couple of mallets beating against his eardrums but, either way, he was a consummate percussionist of pain. Vince put the man out of his deafened misery as, with his left hand, he grabbed the lump by his greasy quiff, drew back his right fist as assuredly as an arrow in a bow, then sent it flying at its target: the hopelessly exposed and hapless putty of his victim’s nose. The lump fell backwards, barrelling into the fake Gestapo officer, and sending the pair of them crashing into the wall beyond.
Vince hovered over him, knuckles white and blood pumping, almost willing the lump to get up again, just so he could knock him down a second time. The lump didn’t oblige, because he was out for the count. The Gestapo officer, whose head was now off and his limbs irreversibly twisted, had more chance of regaining consciousness than the lump did. Vince pulled a Swastika flag down off the wall and threw it over them, covering them up to conceal the unsightly mess they were. And for good measure, and in memory of Winston Churchill, he took the still-standing stormtrooper’s head off with a right hook.
We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight them on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the bedroom, we shall never surrender . . .
Vince exited. He sped along the hallway and down the stairs to the reception. Halfway down the lower flight, he caught sight of two men leaving the hotel. They were of middle height and build, and both wore beige trench-coat style macs. With their backs towards him, Vince didn’t see their faces, and by the time he was down the stairs, they were out the door and gone.
And so was everyone else. The reception desk was empty. The girls previously lounging around on the sofas had vamoosed. Vince went into the bar, and found that too was empty. The barmen had absented themselves. Half-consumed drinks sat on the tables, cigars smouldered silently in ashtrays, no doubt the folding rings of their dead ash could have told Vince how long their owners had been gone, but he didn’t really give a shit about such details – they were gone. Sadie had worked fast, and the proprietors and punters knew the routine, and had evacuated the place with the discipline of a preparatory-school fire drill. But Vince didn’t expect to find them all lined up outside in the playground, awaiting a head count. He went back into the reception area, around the desk, and opened the office door beyond without so much as a knock.
Seated at his desk was the Arab in the white dinner jacket and the bad syrup. A small desk lamp lit the room. He looked up at Vince with big brown, unblinking, sad eyes. But it was the wig, of course, that held Vince’s attention.
‘No doubt Sadie told you who I . . .’ began Vince, before stopping, as the truth dawned on him.
The bewigged Arab didn’t utter a word or move a muscle. Then, slowly, his head began to tilt forward. And, even more slowly, the syrup began to slide down his face, until it lay in front of him on the desk. There wasn’t a hair to be seen on his burnished nut-brown head. Or a breath in his body. He was dead.
CHAPTER 24
At the Moncler Club, Vince was again greeted by Leonard. But once the young detective had stepped out of the street gloom and into the light of the vestibule, Leonard’s front-of-house smile quickly dropped and he looked about as welcoming as a parking ticket.
There was blood on Vince’s shirt, which had a torn collar and the top three buttons missing; a savagely yanked tie hung tightly knotted but loose around his neck, like a hangman’s noose just before the drop. But it wasn’t just the bloody and dishevelled duds that rang alarm bells with Leonard, and sent the usually unflappable front-man into a flap. No, it was Vince himself: the sunken brow, the fierce eyes, the snarling mouth. You can’t wipe violence off your face like a smirk. It’s a stain that seeps into the flesh, torques and twists the muscle and sinew, boils the blood and looks like what it is: undisguisedly and unrepentantly ugly. It would take a good couple of hours before Vince could fully shake it off and move a couple of notches back up the evolutionary scale. Leonard might have been tempted to say something stupid like, ‘I’m sorry, sir, but you can’t come in here looking like that.’ But he didn’t, as he wasn’t that stupid. He clearly got the message written all over the determined detective’s face.
‘I need Lucan,’ growled Vince, not paying Leonard too much mind as he was already through the antechamber and into the belly of the casino, with its well-phrased chatter, expensive cigar smoke, and calls from the croupiers to place their bets on the roulette tables, as well as the constant barking of ‘Banco’ at the chemmy tables.
Leonard stood nervously at his side, and proffered, ‘I think he was playing over at—’
‘I’ve got him,’ snapped Vince as he spotted the deadbeat peer. He strode over to the blackjack table, where the feckless fascist Lord Lucan was twisting on a seven of clubs, a three of hearts, and an eight of spades. Vince dealt him the ‘game over’ card – by dropping his badge on the table in front of him.
But before giving Vince his undivided attention, Lucan cast a glance around at his fellow players at the table, and in an attempt at drollery, said, ‘I’m reminded of the good old days at Aspers’ early parties. These chaps were forever turning up uninvited and empty-handed, and leaving flusher than the lot of us, without seemingly playing a hand.’ This got some muted laughs. He then looked up more closely at Vince, and read the detective’s face, and his situation, about as badly as he had the cards. ‘I was wondering when you chaps were going to get around to me.’
Vince wiped the smile off his face by slapping on the handcuffs. Unlike Lucan’s attempt at humour, this did bring a genuine smile to the gamblers gathered at the table. Because the handcuffs weren’t standard government issue. They were made of black rubber.
CHAPTER 25
Vince sat in Mac’s office drinking black instant coffee, with three sugars, out of a polystyrene cup. Always sugar with instant coffee, and always three with Scotland Yard instant coffee. Mac’s office offered a fairly unobscured view of the Thames running amok through the city. It was a rich vein of activity that morning: a rolling river working its way right through London, as little tugs and long vessels chugged up and down it, churning over the dark choppy waters. What monsters lay beneath didn’t bear thinking about. If you were to dredge the Thames thoroughly, you’d be likely to find a king’s ransom, more corpses than Highgate Cemetery, and the answers to half the crimes in London. But it was all best left alone, to mix and mingle and lie together lost in the deep. There was quite enough to deal with on the surface, with the murders of Johnny Beresford and Marcy Jones. The two murders, and the two worlds, now mixing and mingling. And lying, lots of lying – and now another murder in the mix.
At 9 a.m., in interview room one, sitting with his lawyer was Richard John Bingham, the thirty-one-year old 7th Earl of Lucan, known to all either as
Lord Lucan or as Lucky by those who considered him a friend, and considered irony an essential element in sustaining that friendship. He’d spent the previous night in the cells, crying himself into a fitful sleep. When locked down in a cell, they say that the innocent never rest. Yet the guilty, lying on their concrete bunks, can sleep like tops. Lucan had slept somewhere in between and somewhere undecided, so the slumber jury was still out on that one.
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 a
t 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.’
Gilded Edge, The Page 20
