‘There’s always a flashy little shout line where you are concerned, Treadwell, and all is not as it seems would seem to be it, in this instance. Only it’s very much as it seems, this time. As I’m sure Mac informed you, I’ve been to visit, as you so eloquently describe it, the “nuthouse”.’
Not before time, thought Vince. But he said, ‘Again, sir, you would have to have been there for the first part of the debate with my colleagues to understand the, uh . . . the language I employed.’
‘I got the drift, Treadwell.’
‘How is Miss Saxmore-Blaine, sir?’
Markham, whose eyes seemed to constantly miss the mark when addressing Vince, as though he was too unpleasant a proposition to look squarely in the eye, hit the target this time, and he fixed his authoritative glare on him. ‘As well as can be expected. I also found out that you were out with Miss Saxmore-Blaine at a supper club.’
‘She said this?’
‘Hardly matters where the information comes from, Treadwell.’
‘Well, it sort of does, because it’s not true. Sir.’
‘You deny fraternizing with her?’
Vince said, ‘Yes, sir.’Vince thought, mind your own business, you stiff—
‘It wouldn’t be the first time with you and the ladies, Treadwell.’
And hopefully not the last, you stiff— ‘I’m a public servant and take my duties very seriously, sir.’
‘Drop it, Treadwell. We know your movements after you left the club. And it’s not the only occasion you’ve sought out Miss Saxmore-Blaine’s company.’
‘May I ask again where you got—’
‘No, you may not. I shan’t be entering into a dialogue with you about your actions, Treadwell. But needless to say . . .’
Markham then went into monologue mode. Vince zoned out, busy with his own thoughts, but he picked up the gist. He was off the case, a case that Markham now considered closed anyway. It was clear that Markham was going along with Dominic Saxmore-Blaine’s confession to both murders. And clearly Markham was going with that because he had been told to go with it. Because it involved a stink, a stink that went right to the top. Any further up, and the Queen herself was likely to be asked to step down from her portrait on Markham’s wall and start giving character references.
CHAPTER 33
It was around 8 p.m. when Vince got home. After leaving Markham’s office – the monologue having dragged on longer than something out of Shakespeare, but not half so easy on the ear – he’d gone back down to the Inferno and found it empty. Mac and Block and Jacket had gone off to find the big Russian, aka Boris Sendoff, aka Bernie Korshank, to play out what they no doubt thought was the case’s endgame. Vince hung around and waited for them to return – but they didn’t. He’d talk to Mac tomorrow, knowing he wouldn’t appreciate a call tonight, and that Mac was a great believer in sleeping on things. Vince wasn’t, so the conversation with Mac that he’d been playing out over and over in his head was driving him nuts.
In need of distraction, he turned on the TV and found it was a toss-up between Peyton Place and, of all things, Danger Man. So he got up from the couch, turned off the box and went into the kitchen to stoke up the stove. He took down the French press from the cupboard, heaped in some fresh and reassuringly expensive Jamaican Blue Mountain Java, and made himself some strong black coffee. He didn’t reckon on a lot of sleep tonight; instead he reckoned on a lot of pacing around the flat, trying to figure out the next move in this case. But, as he thought about it in his present state of mind, he knew he would get about as far ahead as a one-winged fly.
Saved by the bell as the phone rang. Vince grabbed the receiver off its cradle expecting, hoping, to hear Mac’s voice. There was the sound of pips, then the sound of traffic in the background, before he heard: ‘Vincent?’
He recognized the voice, and there was a pause as Vince thought of what to say. The girl had had biblical amounts of tragedy heaped on her, enough to bury her, so the usual telephone greetings sounded trite.
‘Where are you, Isabel?’
‘That’s the first time . . . the first time . . . you’ve called me . . . Isabel.’
He thought the line must be breaking up. But it wasn’t, she was.
‘Can I meet up with you?’ he asked.
‘I’m outside your flat, in the phone booth on the corner. I hope you don’t mind.’
‘I don’t mind.’
Vince poured her a large brandy from the bottle of Napoleon that had been left behind in the flat, along with two full bottles of Scotch. When he found this dusty bulbous bottle of Corsican brandy, his first reaction was to throw it away, bad memories; but he had kept it in the hope that maybe one day he’d get a knock on the door from someone who’d appreciate Corsican brandy.
‘You won’t join me?’
‘I’m fine with this,’ he said, sitting down in the armchair opposite her with his cup of black coffee.
Her eyes were clear, not red-rimmed and stained, showing no signs of crying. She was holding on, that meant. Underneath her DAKS raincoat, which Vince had hung up in the airing cupboard to dry because it was tipping down outside, she was wearing black slacks, black patent-leather boots, and a ribbed black sweater with three brass buttons at the shoulder. She looked, as ever, very beautiful, inherently stylish, soberly dignified and, dressed in black, ready for the impending funerals.
‘I’m sorry about your brother,’ Vince offered. ‘I was planning on telling you myself, but . . .’
‘Mr Markham was perfectly pleasant.’ Vince didn’t argue that point; now was hardly the time for personal beefs. She continued, ‘It was strange. When he told me, for some reason, and God knows why, I didn’t cry . . . I even smiled.’ She looked at Vince for an answer to this mystery.
‘You’re in shock. I’ve heard of stranger things.’
Her eyes drifted away from him, and a bitterness entered her voice. ‘I wonder if Asprey collected any money on Dominic?’
‘Money?’
‘Johnny . . .’ she said, but as soon as she uttered the name, it sounded like a mistake she wouldn’t be making again. All the warmth that surrounded her old dead lover was like a hangover, a habit, and one she wanted to vanquish immediately. Her tone became clipped, distant and businesslike. ‘He told me Asprey has something called the Suicide Stakes, a list of people that he had written up on a sheet of paper, like horses in a race, with the odds next to each name. The odds were set on the likelihood of those people killing themselves. Asprey knew his crowd and, in his line of work, suicide isn’t uncommon. People get into debt, and it then becomes a matter of honour. And for the gambling addicts it’s a way out. Taking one’s own life is almost seen as the right thing to do. I knew that I was on that list, but not worth betting on apparently. I was an odds-on favourite.
‘It was all viewed as a bit of a joke, until money changed hands. The artist, Douglas Houseman, he used to play piano at the Montcler. Dougie suffered from depression. Along with a broken heart, and all the other slings and arrows that life threw at him. And if you don’t have the armour for it . . . well, he killed himself. People didn’t think that Asprey would actually collect on the bets. They thought it would be dismissed as bad taste. They thought wrong. Asprey collected his money, his blood money. Didn’t bat an eyelid, apparently. A wager is a wager, something to be honoured. Above and beyond anything else, it would seem. Certainly above ordinary morality.’
‘When I first mentioned the chances of Beresford committing suicide, you looked shocked. I take it he wasn’t on the list?’
‘He was, but at odds of a hundred to one. The only two not on the list were James Asprey himself and Simon Goldsachs. Asprey was running the book, of course, and Simon Goldsachs . . . no one dared propose him for the list as he was somehow considered indestructible. An immensely lucky gambler who always wins and, of course, he’s as rich as Croesus. Money arms you against death, that’s the reckoning.’
Vince stood up. The Jamaican Blue Mountain was percolating t
hrough his brain and a caffeine jag was kicking in. Fresh ideas were spiking and needed walking around the room. He went over to the window and inserted his fingertips into the Venetian blind for a glimpse of the outside world. The rain had a steady, relentless thrum to it.
He said, finally, ‘If Beresford’s luck at the tables was turning sour, maybe someone killed him and made it look like suicide just to collect on the bet? At a hundred to one, that’s some payday. Enough to kill him and make it look like suicide?’
The rain got louder, a lot louder. Then he realized that the room had just got quieter, a lot quieter. He looked round and saw that Isabel’s head was bowed, and her shoulder blades were hunched and trembling. The silence was due to her trying to control her breath, trying to keep it together.
Vince let out a muted groan that he hoped she heard. Because, as far as the insensitivity dial went, he was completely off the scale. He wanted to kick himself in the mouth. He’d forgotten Isabel’s grief, forgotten her tragedy, and forgotten he was no longer in the hothouse of the Inferno with Mac and Block and Jacket, riffing on the case and dispassionately throwing out ideas and motives. He went into the bathroom and collected a box of tissues and placed them on the coffee table in front of her. Then he stood there feeling stupid, and looking about the same. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘This is silly of me,’ she said in a jumpy voice, stoically trying to smile her way through the crying jag. She reached into the gaping mouth of the box, yanked out a handful of tissues, and then buried her face in them.
Vince propped himself awkwardly on the arm of the couch, at a safe distance from her, not imposing himself and altogether feeling bloody useless. But he had the idea that Isabel Saxmore-Blaine wasn’t the type to cry. She didn’t seem very good at it, seemed caught out, surprised and genuinely embarrassed by her reactions. He’d known some professional criers, some real teardrop merchants in his time, and it was always diminishing returns for those girls who would blubber at the drop of a hat, or the breaking of a date, the forgotten phone call, the neglectful comment. So when a crack squad of tears did eventually punch their way through Isabel’s shutters, and make their escape down her hot cheeks, it was all the more heartbreaking.
Eventually she emerged from her Kleenex mask, and gulped down some shaky breaths to steady herself, then said in a measured tone, ‘I don’t understand you. Mr Markham told me that Dominic had confessed to the murder of Johnny.’
Vince found himself agreeing to this. He knew he was foolish to have said what he’d just said. Her pain was still too raw. Her brother was dead, so his guilt or innocence in the murder of Beresford seemed irrelevant. Vince apologized, said he was talking out of his hat.
Isabel forgave him and said, ‘The heartbreaking thing is, Asprey would have been right to have Dominic on his list. Poor Dominic never really stood a chance. You see, when my mother took her own life, it broke my father’s heart. He never really stopped loving her, even after everything she’d put him through. So I became a Daddy’s girl, riding to hounds, shooting and fishing. Anything to be at his side; anything to please him. But it wasn’t just for him, it was for me. I’d lost one parent, and I didn’t want to lose another. I was always scared that whenever he left the house, I’d never see him again. Dominic, he got rather squeezed out. He wasn’t good at sports, and was a quiet, shy boy who never really got on with my father.
‘But Johnny made an effort with Dominic and, of course, Dominic looked up to him. That was one of Johnny’s qualities, making people feel special by taking an interest in them. I knew Dominic wasn’t his type, not really. Johnny did it for me.’
Vince saw her stoicism was again slipping. A nerve above her right cheekbone throbbed maniacally. Her jaw clenched, the pack of muscles holding it together expanding and contracting with each memory that shot through her like a poisoned arrow. And it was all aimed at Beresford, the man she had loved, the man she had grieved for, the man who had turned her brother into a murderer, and the man who had ultimately taken away his life. She wanted to scream, to throw something, but she didn’t.
She took a sip of her brandy and let the pointlessness of it all wash over her, then said solemnly: ‘And now I know it was all a cruel joke.’
‘It wasn’t just a joke on Dominic,’ said Vince. ‘From what I heard, the joke was on Beresford too.’
She looked up at him with a question mark in her eyes, and a fair amount of hostility there too. For her there was only one victim in this crime, and it wasn’t Johnny the Joker. But she wanted to know more.
Vince eased himself off the arm of the sofa and sat down a respectable distance away from her. He then explained the whole story to her, as laid out by Nicky DeVane and Guy Ruley. Isabel had heard the bare bones of the pernicious joke from Markham, but not much about the motivation behind it. About Beresford and his machinations: the spy, the assassin, the dog-of-war mercenary ready to take over a small country and rule it with an elite cabal from the Montcler. Of course, it all made perfect sense to her. The bravura, the machismo, the gun he carried tucked in his cummerbund; the big jokes and boys’ own fiction that had led to a flabby and debauched ex-guardsman slumped in a chair with a bullet in his brain, and a naïve young man with slit wrists taking the long cold nap in a crimson bath.
And then there was the girl. Yes, the girl from the wrong end of town. The girl who turned out to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
‘The girl, Marcy . . .’ Isabel said tentatively. ‘She had a daughter. What is her name?’
‘Ruby.’
‘That’s a pretty name. What happens to her?’
‘She’s still in Great Ormond Street hospital.’
‘Then what?’
Vince gave an uncertain shrug then said, ‘She’ll stay with her grandmother, I assume.’
On hearing this, Isabel’s tears seemed to evaporate, the redness disappeared, and her eyes looked clear and determined as she declared, ‘We must do something for her.’
Vince didn’t answer this, but silently agreed. He got up and poured them both some fresh coffee. After some ensuing small talk about the contents of his flat, the artwork on his walls, the books on his shelf, his taste in music, she managed to steer the conversation around to a reluctant Vince himself, and proved an accomplished inquisitor. Her journalistic experience perhaps? But Vince detected, rightly, that Isabel Saxmore-Blaine was sick of her own life and the characters that inhabited it, and now wanted to take her mind off it and engage in a different narrative, so he obliged and yielded to her questioning, and told her all she wanted to know.
She wasn’t surprised to learn that he had taken a degree in law, but was surprised that he hadn’t chosen a different and more profitable path for exploiting it, like becoming a lawyer or a barrister. Vince explained that he liked his law a little bit more on the lively side, deriving more satisfaction from the thrill of the chase and the cut and thrust of frontline detective work. He joked that he enjoyed getting into punch-ups and kicking down doors too much to don a wig and get fat and rich by sitting on the benches.
But she saw something about him that told her this wasn’t a joke. The way he carried himself, perhaps, with an athleticism, an agility. Or maybe it was something in his eyes, or just above his eye, his right eye to be precise – the thin white line slanting down across the black eyebrow, indicating a scar. He also bore a scar that sliced down through his chin, about half an inch long, accentuating his dimple. It was a very good-looking face, but she had decided that long ago, when she had first seen him properly, in the Harley Street hospital. Darkly romantic, like a good gigolo. But, unlike a good gigolo, it was a face that hadn’t always been vigilant about preserving its looks. There was a surly toughness about him, a contained violence . . . and perhaps a hint of murder around the eyes.
The onset of night became unavoidable, and it seemed to crawl around the flat, closing down the day and their conversation for good. It was time for bed for both of them, whether they liked it or not, and that awk
ward What next? exchange came up. Isabel bluntly insisted that she didn’t want to go back to the Harley Street hospital, or to stay with friends. And she doubted that she’d ever go back to her Pont Street flat. Vince offered her his bed for the night, while he’d take the couch. She took him up on his offer.
Vince’s dreams that night were vivid: a naked Isabel came back into the living room and shook him, if not awake, then enough to raise him up from the couch and steer him like a grateful and gummy-eyed somnambulist to his own bed. It was, quite literally, a dream come true. Vince had suffered these dreams before: a beautiful girl entering the room, beckoning him forth to make love to her. A shadowy spirit figure and yet, oddly, possessing the face of a movie star – say Brigitte Bardot, or Sophia Loren, or the home-grown Julie Christie. On more than one occasion she had been some anonymous beauty glimpsed in the crowd that day, or a flirtatious but wordless brief encounter in a train or tube carriage. But never with this ending: the ending he’d wanted. The ending he’d been dreaming about.
Like a pair of stumbling thieves, they made their way into the bedroom. Vince may have banged an elbow on the door jamb, and stubbed a toe on the bedpost, but it wasn’t enough to pull him out of his half slumber, his waking dream world. Once in bed, she folded herself into him and they began to kiss. She tasted good. Along with the sweetness of the brandy and the slipperiness of the lipstick (a winning combination in any man’s book), there was the sharpness of salt; her face was still hot, flushed and damp with silent tears.
She manoeuvred herself on top of him. And just as she herself was moist and ready, his hard-on was already achingly old. It was the product of the dream he’d been fervently having about making love to her in the very bed he was now actually, dreamily, making love to her in. Or rather, she was making love to him in. She had ordered him not to move. Vince, never good at taking orders, willingly accepted these instructions, did exactly as he was told, and lay there supremely supine, as stiff as a varnished eel. Then Isabel’s long body was laid fully along his; he could feel her against him inch for inch. Her legs rested hotly against his, her toes dug into the base of his shin. It seemed the only point of separation happened at round about the third rib up, where her back arched enough for Vince to see her breasts, tantalizing hand-fuls that were well and truly out of his reach. He was under strict instruction not to move – and therefore move he did not. He was tempted to be insubordinate, except her hands were firmly gripping his upper arms and pinning him to the bed. She began to build up a rhythm that was occasionally broken by stirring circular movements. He saw her long neck crane back, so he could admire the strong rim of her faultless jawline. Funny the things you only notice when you’re half asleep and being right royally seen to – like how her elbows were double-jointed.
Gilded Edge, The Page 25
