With the agents of sleep still paying him no mind, Dominic continued pacing the flat. It wasn’t the pills and the booze keeping him awake, but the knowledge of what he’d done. He felt a rush of power mixing in with the poisonous fear. A potent cocktail. A perfect storm. His mind twisted and turned . . .
. . . The black whore . . .
She saw him. She saw the Russian’s blood on his shirt. She saw the fear, the guilt in his eyes . . .
. . . What have you been up to, Dom? . . .
‘Dom’. The diminutive of Dominic. Who the hell gave her permission to shorten it . . . to make it smaller? The cheap, filthy, mocking black whore . . .
It would all be so perfect now, if it wasn’t for her. She’d seen too much. She knew too much. She knew all about him . . .
Dominic was sure he knew what Beresford and the rest of the Montcler set would want him to do. They were men who lived by their own code of conduct. Men of action. Men of power. Men of honour . . .
So, armed with a ball-peen hammer he’d found in a bucket under the kitchen sink, next to a perished plunger and a rusted hacksaw, Dominic Saxmore-Blaine drove to the Imperial Hotel and waited for Marcy Jones, so he could stave her head in. The girl he only knew as a black prostitute, there merely to accommodate the needs of men like Lucky Lucan. She was simply a serviceable slab of meat that could nevertheless end Dominic’s glittering career and jeopardize the whole operation. Tuned-up on pills and booze, these were the thoughts than ran through Dominic’s mind as he tried to dehumanize Marcy Jones. Tried to take away her life before he physically accomplished the job.
He knew she would be there, of course. She worked the Imperial twice a week, and tonight was regularly her night. He watched as she spun out of the rotating doors, the raunchily high stiletto heels clicking on the chequer-tiled steps, and then skipped down the stairs as fast as she could. She looked as if she couldn’t wait to free herself of the Imperial and get home.
After she got in a waiting taxi, he followed the cab as it made its leisurely way along Kensington High Street, then up Kensington Church Street, on its way towards Notting Hill.
It was around midnight when Marcy Jones got out of the taxi and walked up Lancaster Road to Basing Street. She didn’t hear the man behind her until she felt him behind her, his jagged panting breath encroaching on her. She turned round sharply, awkwardly, her hand still gripping the key, which was already secured in the lock. Her flawless, pretty face creased in confusion.
‘You?’
Vince skimmed through the following account of the murder of Marcy Jones. There were no surprises in Dominic’s confession, no fresh facts. After he killed Marcy, he noticed little Ruby standing above him on the stairs, and chased her up into the flat. Unbeknown to him, Ruby had of course hidden in her favourite hiding place – the drawer under her mother’s bed. Unable to find her, his mind twisted and torqued again as he became convinced she was just a figment of his imagination. She was a ghost born out of his own guilt that would haunt him for ever. Satisfied the child did not exist and fearful of being caught, Dominic abandoned the flat and drove from Notting Hill straight to Eaton Square, Belgravia.
There he told Johnny Beresford what he had done, giving a full report to his commanding officer. But Beresford was displeased with Dominic’s actions, and they argued violently. Dominic killed Beresford, shot him with his own revolver, then left Eaton Square and drove back to Isabel’s flat in Pont Street. Thus ended the confession of Dominic Saxmore-Blaine.
Vince weighed up the manuscript in his hand, and considered this unsatisfying and underwritten ending. For all its heft, vivid description and strong motive, there was still something rather unconvincing about it all. It had a beginning, a middle . . . but no end. A narrative that quite literally dropped off the bottom of the page and died.
So it was with a certain amount of irony that Vince now said: ‘A deathbed confession. They don’t come any better than that.’
Mac, well read, well versed and hard to convince at the best of times, picked up on Vince’s tone. He gave a contemplative nod, and said, ‘Let’s talk to the other two.’
CHAPTER 29
Guy Ruley and Nicky DeVane would be picked up at their places of work, and no embarrassment to them was spared. It wasn’t just class warfare being carried out by chippy, lowly paid public-sector workers, trying to grab some headlines along the way (although Vince suspected it partly was). It was meant to pull away ladders, tear off the old school tie and, most of all, loosen tongues. It was meant to give a clear message: their blue-chip lawyers and old-boy networks couldn’t save them now. The bad old days of the police working almost as a private army for the upper classes, keeping the barbarians well and truly at the gate and not in the grounds, were supposedly long gone (although Vince also suspected it was not that long and not that gone).
A pack of squad cars jammed with uniformed coppers roared up Regent Street and along to Nicky DeVane’s Beak Street studio. Inside the studio, the sinewy frame of Kevin Ridgeway, guitarist with the High Rollers, the new bad boys of the British pop invasion, was laid out on the floor and louchely grazing on an oily joint as he watched Nicky DeVane snap his model girlfriend, Minetta Fruitful. Luckily for them, alarm bells began to ring when the alarm bells were literally rung, along with the wailing of bellicose sirens and the heavy-booted footfalls of panting policemen clambering up the metal-grated stairs. And there were a lot of people there to be alarmed: hairdressers, make-up artists and stylists, with all their gofers and assistants and an assortment of hangers-on. Kevin Ridgeway and Minetta Fruitful didn’t go anywhere without an entourage who were all well drilled in the disposing of incriminating evidence, the rapid concealment of stashes, and were thus able to extinguish and flush away anything that might have broken the butterflies on the wheel. So in this case, the law’s heavy-handed (and clod-footed) tactics proved a bit of an own goal.
The second arrest didn’t score at all. They nabbed Guy Ruley on the street outside his Cheapside offices as he was alighting from his chauffeur-driven gunmetal Bentley Continental. He had just arrived back in the country, after a private jet had taken him from Frankfurt to Paris, where his private helicopter was waiting to whisk him back to London. He had attended an urgent meeting with some foreign heads of state about a mining deal worth the kind of money that only heads of state and mining deals can muster.
Back at Scotland Yard, Detectives Philly Jacket and Kenny Block had given Dominic Saxmore-Blaine’s written confession a good once-over, got the gist and were primed and pumped and raring to go. Vince thought it would be a good idea to split the redoubtable duo up, and Mac agreed, so Jacket would sit cracking the knuckles and brooding violently in the background whilst Vince shot questions at DeVane, and Block would be doing likewise as Mac interviewed Guy Ruley.
But, after telling the two men about Dominic Saxmore-Blaine and the triple murder of their best friend Johnny Beresford, the Russian spy Boris Sendoff and Marcy Jones, nothing could have prepared Vince and Mac for what the two interviewees – dapper snapper Nicky DeVane and the minted mining magnet Guy Ruley – proceeded to tell them. It was unbelievable. It was a joke.
CHAPTER 30
In Interview Room 2, Nicky DeVane’s spry little frame had sunk back into his chair. His big brown bedroom eyes were frayed, confused and scared. Philly Jacket stood by the door, cracking knuckles, as if to highlight the fact that there was no way out for the little feller. Vince meanwhile loomed over DeVane.
Vince: ‘A joke? What do you mean a joke?’
DeVane, in a distraught and quivering voice, replied: ‘The blooding, that was the joke. It was a stunt. A set-up. A prank. The whole thing was a bloody wind-up.’
Nicky DeVane shook his head even more vigorously in disbelief, as the full horror of it sank in and the real punchline of the ‘joke’ smacked him in the gut and knocked all the wind out of him.
‘So don’t keep this joke to yourself, DeVane. Share it with us. Now!’
�
�Yes, sorry, of course. The Russian spy—’
‘Boris Sendoff.’
‘Yes, Send – off. Well, there was no Russian spy. And he wasn’t killed, for Christ’s sake. The gun was filled with blanks. The man Dominic killed . . . or thought he killed . . . was an actor just playing the role of a Russian spy. He was paid to do it.’
Vince could see where this scenario was heading as soon as he heard there had been a joke involved. In a place like the Imperial, a joke or a prank was always going to have to veer heavily towards mordacity. Something sharp and lethal enough to cut through the booze, drugs and general debauchery of the place would be needed to raise a laugh from its jaded crowd. Vince looked around at Philly Jacket, who had stopped cracking knuckles once the news had sunk in. Vince raised a finger to say, I’ll be back.
He swung out through the door of Interview Room 2 and stalked along the corridor to Interview Room 4. But before he got there, Mac had exited the same way out of Interview Room 4, and was marching towards him wearing the same perplexed look as he was. The two men locked eyes, each trying to see which one had the best answer.
Mac broke off first with: ‘A joke?’
‘You heard the punchline yet?’ asked Vince.
‘Yeah, the big Russian’s not from Stalingrad, he’s from Stamford Hill. He’s an actor named Bernie Korshank.’
‘What else have you got?’
Mac shook his head in the negative. And without further ado, they both turned on their heels and went back to their respective interview rooms, to get more. A lot more.
As Vince swung back into Interview Room 2, he found Philly Jacket pacing around the table, not only cracking knuckles but looking as if he wanted to use them. Nicky DeVane was still sitting, cowed, at the table Philly was circling, looking as though he’d been crying. Vince shot Philly a look that asked if he had used them. Philly shot a look back that said: Much as I would like to, I’m not that bleedin’ stupid.
Vince sat down opposite DeVane, clasped his hands in front of him, and took a deep and loud breath that marked a new seriousness and urgency to the proceedings. He said: ‘Tell me all about Bernie Korshank.’
‘Like I said, he’s an actor. I didn’t know him. I’d only met him once, fleetingly, at the Imperial. Johnny introduced me to him. Of course, Korshank was right up his street.’
‘Why “of course”?’
‘Johnny was always coming up with different characters to amuse himself with. He liked to mix it with all sorts, the high life and the low life of London. Variety is the spice, he used to say. Aspers and Simon Goldsachs had no time for types such as Korshank, so they always warned Johnny to be careful.’
‘Hold on,’ said Vince. ‘Why the hell should Beresford have to be careful of some actor?’
‘I call him an actor in the loosest sense of the term. Believe me, he’s no Larry Olivier. Actually, Bernie Korshank is a nightclub bouncer who does a bit of acting work on the side. He’s had a couple of lines in The Saint and Dixon Of Dock Green. He always plays the heavy – and looks the part, I must say. He’s a very frightening-looking man.’
Vince got the picture. He’d known a few of ‘the chaps’ who’d screen-tested in their time. And TV shows like The Saint always needed convincing ‘faces’ to fill a set and look the part.
‘Okay, tell me about the gun.’
‘As I said, it was loaded with blanks. Bernie Korshank had taken care of the bullet wounds with blood squibs, like they use in TV special-effects departments. Very realistic-looking.’
‘Realistic? How do you know all this, since you were asleep in the bar, according to Dominic Saxmore-Blaine’s story.’
‘Yes, I was, but Johnny told me all about it the next day. He was pissed off that I wasn’t there to witness it. He phoned to reprimand me, but he couldn’t stay pissed off for long. He soon moved on to telling me how the prank had played out. Johnny the Joker, he loved practical jokes like this one. The more elaborate and the bigger the audience the better. He’d talk about them for hours.’
‘The military coup, was all that part of the joke, too?’
DeVane’s gaze dropped towards his hands, as if to inspect the outsized oval carnelian seal ring he was wearing. ‘Sort of.’
Vince went in hard. ‘What does sort of mean, DeVane?’
Philly Jacket cracked a medley of knuckles to accompany Vince’s tougher tone. And Nicky DeVane quickly snapped back into the programme.
‘That was just Johnny indulging his fantasy life. He’d always had a fertile imagination. Always been rather a fantasist and a dreamer, wanting a life of great adventure. One of his cousins was good friends with Ian Fleming, the author, and Johnny used to play cards with Fleming at his club, Le Cercle, and later at the Montcler. After Fleming died, Johnny started dropping Fleming’s name, and telling people how he had based James Bond on him. Said it was no coincidence that they shared the same initials, JB. He even said that Fleming wanted him to do a screen test for the part. I joked that they probably wanted to save money by having him use his own luggage and monogrammed shirts. He said it was thwarted because the American producers wanted some chap who looked like a Scottish truck driver.’
‘Sean Connery?’ Philly Jacket piped up. ‘He is Scottish, and he was a truck driver.’
‘No,’ corrected DeVane, ‘he was a milkman.’
Philly: ‘Or was he a gravedigger?’
Vince: ‘He played a truck driver in Hell Drivers.’
Philly: ‘Did he play a truck driver in Hell Drivers? I thought it was that feller who played Danger Man – Stanley Baker – who played a truck driver.’
Vince: ‘Stanley Baker didn’t play Danger Man. But he was in Hell Drivers.’
Philly: ‘So who played Danger Man?’
Vince: ‘The other feller who was in it.’
Philly: ‘Sean Connery didn’t play Danger Man.’
Vince: ‘No one’s saying he did. There was another feller in Hell Drivers, who played him.’
Philly: ‘Stanley Baker, Sean Connery, and the other feller who played Danger Man were all in Hell Drivers?’
Vince (dry as you like): ‘That’s right, Philly, they were all in it. On account it’s customary to have more than one actor in a film, so they can talk to each other.’
DeVane: ‘Just like it’s customary to have more than one truck driver on the . . . uh . . . um . . . motorway.’
Vince turned from Philly to look at DeVane. Philly Jacket peered down at him too. The looks directed by the two men were enough to finish off the faltering smile that had begun to unfurl on DeVane’s lips as he realized he was still very much in a street called Shit.
With the showbiz interlude over, Vince pressed on. He wanted to know all about Beresford and the components of his rich fantasy life. Nicky DeVane, a naturally malicious gossipmonger, obliged. He sat up straight in his chair and knitted his fingers together on the table in front of him, just as he would with his girlfriends and camper colleagues in the fashion business before he settled in for what he routinely termed a ‘good goss sesh’. He had a glint in his eye, and that brisk look about him had returned as he told Beresford’s story.
After a hardly distinguished academic career at Eton, where Johnny had spent most of his time gambling and reading off-syllabus boys’ own adventures that fired his imagination, such as the works of John Buchan and Rider Haggard, Beresford went on to Sandhurst with the express intention of joining the Special Air Services and becoming an action hero. In 1941, Johnny’s father had served in the North African campaign with Sir David Stirling, the giant Scottish laird who had created the SAS. And, along with such larger-than-life real heroic figures as Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne, he had helped turn that small elite military outfit into the stuff of legend, unparalleled for their bravery, their stealth and their sheer bloody ferocity when taking it to the enemy. They dared, they won, and young Johnny Beresford had wanted in.
But there was one problem thwarting the young man’s planned warrior narrative. His feet jus
t weren’t up to the rigours: they blistered and bruised and bunioned and broke out in every sort of rash imaginable. March? He could barely walk as far as the NAAFI in his army boots. The fact was, Johnny just wasn’t up to the footslogging demands of the SAS. He was six foot three inches of prime muscle-bound old-Etonian British bully beef, and born to lead, but his Achilles heel was not just his splitting and throbbing heels; it was his collapsed arches, his clawed ingrowing toenails, and skin that looked like bubble wrap after the first mile marched in full pack. Sir David Stirling, a dear friend of the family, insisted that there was nothing he could do, there were no strings to pull in that elite regiment as there had been at Sandhurst, where more time was spent mulling over maps than marching. You were only ever as strong as your weakest link.
Beresford viewed this as a failure, a slur on his manhood, so he left the army completely. And then he went about doing what he was best at, making money and having fun. But he tried to get his revenge. He used to thrash Sir David Stirling at cards in the Montcler at every opportunity, and thus took a small fortune off him. But deep down he knew that these were hollow victories against a man like Stirling. When he quit the army, he left not only his torturous boots and kit behind, but the best part of himself as well. He abandoned the heroic side, the leadership side and, in many ways, the innocent side. He was no longer a part of something greater than himself. He was now cast adrift in the thrusting world of dog-eat-dog capitalism, where every man fought for himself – not for the unit, the regiment, or for Queen and country. He made money, but to what end? So, with the help of booze, Johnny Beresford retreated into his childhood dreams and a world of heroic adventure. But there were no real coups to savour, no daring deeds with himself leading the charge and knocking out military installations in a matter of hours along with a select band of SAS chums, and taking over small countries off the coast of West Africa to be run by the elite of the Montcler set. Just as there had been no big Russian spy – just a bit-part TV player. It was Johnny Beresford indulging his fantasy life – a deadly fantasy life that looked as if it had cost him his real one.
Gilded Edge, The Page 23
