Her eyes were squeezed shut with enough concentrated vigour to crease and crinkle her taut skin. She was wrapped in her own world and he somehow felt a detachment from the proceedings, albeit a pleasurable one; like a voyeur, but not quite, because he knew that at any moment he could change what was happening. But why would he do that, he asked himself. Things were going very nicely, thank you very much.
As her movements became more vigorous, again she issued a breathless and almost pained instruction for him not to move. That was clearly to be her role, and the more she moved, the stiller he became. He was enjoying this game. Her head dipped suddenly and her thick hair came down like a curtain and covered her face, a face that was now pleasurably twisted, a mouth that now crookedly gaped. Strands of damp hair danced on his face. It tickled.
Deciding it was time to break ranks and disobey orders, he raised his hands, which were braced at his side grabbing up fistfuls of sheet, shook off her grip, reached for her hair and scraped it away from her face with some force, holding it bunched behind her head. She emitted a high-pitched exhalation, and he couldn’t tell if this was due to the activity they were both so vigorously engaged in, or from the pain of having her hair pulled back like a Chinese doll. He realized it was a heady mixture of both. When she announced in a low-pitched growl that she was about to come, he didn’t say a word. He was too busy trying not to come before she did. A concentrated effort, because the visuals were like nothing he’d witnessed before, the glorious sight of her was tearing him apart, so he closed his eyes.
When it happened, and their eyes eventually opened again, they found each other with their hands clasped around each other’s throats. A long lascivious smile was lashed around her mouth and, after some jerky movements that looked as if she was wringing every last scintilla of sap out of herself, she rolled over on to her back and, sated, folded silently into him and closed her eyes. The dream was now over, and again she looked sad.
Vince woke up the next morning feeling as though he hadn’t slept at all. He lay in the same position, flat on his back, feeling sure he hadn’t moved out of it the rest of the night. Maybe subconsciously he had still been obeying orders, and was still waiting for Isabel’s permission to move. If he was, he was out of luck, for she had gone. Maybe the whole thing had been a dream after all? A dream within a dream within . . .
In the living room, sitting on the tiled coffee table, was the brandy glass with her lipstick prints all over it. And on the couch from where he had been collected lay the twisted sheets. There was no note. He gave it an hour, made some coffee, then called the Salisbury Hospital. She had just checked out, no forwarding address or contact number.
Vince took a shower and washed away the sweet, sweet smell of dreamtime, before he cracked on with the day. He phoned Mac and found out that the case was officially closed. Detectives Kenny Block and Philly Jacket had located the ‘actor’ Bernie Korshank, who was working as a doorman at the Kitty Kat club in Camden Town. Korshank had verified Nicky DeVane and Guy Ruley’s story. Vince told Mac he still wasn’t satisfied, though there was no need to, because Mac knew how Vince felt about the case. There was a long pause in their conversation, which should have been filled with Mac saying something along the lines of, The bodies are going into the ground next week. The case is closed, and you’re already too deep in the brown stuff without a shovel, as far as Markham is concerned. So if you value your career, you’ll let this one lie.
But Mac didn’t say any of those things. Because again there was no need. The older man knew exactly the stuff the younger man was made of, so such advice would have been all rather pointless.
CHAPTER 34
Marcy Jones was laid to rest at Willesden cemetery. It was a large turnout and the church was packed. The preacher was all fire and brimstone, and the congregation were with him every step of the way: speaking in tongues, praising the Lord, raising their arms to the great above. They seemed to be working beyond faith, assured in the knowledge that there was something up there to acknowledge their swaying and praying.
Half of Notting Hill had turned up to bury its now favourite daughter. With the help of a prodigious propaganda campaign that included posters on every available wall, and leafleting on every street corner, all put out and paid for by Michael X. Marcy Jones had reached almost saintly status. An innocent black girl used, abused and then slain by the white devils was the copy that went with the picture of Marcy Jones togged up in her nurse’s uniform.
Tyrell Lightly was there, with Michael X and the rest of the Brothers X, again all swathed in the uniform of Black Power. They stood ominously scowling at a sore thumb that stood out in the congregation. But Vince Treadwell wasn’t the only white person there; there were a dozen or so nurses and doctors from the hospital where Marcy had worked. But he was the only white face who had dared walk into Michael X’s back yard and take his main man out.
Tyrell Lightly’s eyes burned through the black shades he was wearing, and straight into Vince. As Vince turned to acknowledge the now goateed and uniformed gangster, Lightly rubbed the back of his long, guitar-plucking thumbnail over the fresh scar and lump that now permanently marked his sharp nose. It was the bony gangster’s way of saying they still had unfinished business. Vince couldn’t help but pull a quick smirk at his handiwork, but then turned away quickly. He wasn’t there for a show of machismo and a staring competition, but to pay his respects. Little Ruby Jones recognized him immediately, and gave him a heartbreaking smile and a tentative little wave. This made it worth it, and neutralized the thirty or so scowls he was getting from the Brothers X.
When the preacher left his pulpit, Michael X took his place. No one in the congregation looked too pleased with this state of affairs, but the presence of the shade-wearing muscle gathered around the self-styled revolutionary soon quelled any dissenting voices.
But not all. With their hard-earned sense of Christian forgiveness and shared sufferance, the mothers and the grandmothers and the women in the congregation weren’t scared by the Brothers. Michael X may have been top dog on the streets, but this was their domain and they took instruction from a higher power. And, as Michael X delivered his diatribe about the white devils and their legions of rapists and murderers and pillagers, the women in the congregation began to make their voices heard with a chorus of disapproval, and with shakes of their heads so forceful that the Brothers X soon looked well and truly intimidated.
It was clear that Michael X was deliberately hijacking the service, and Vince knew that the ire of X was aimed squarely at him. He felt that his antagonistic presence was also playing its part, so he decided to leave. Tyrell Lightly had been eyeballing him all the way through the diatribe, looking daggers and breathing bullets, and if that wasn’t enough, as the detective left his pew Lightly laboured the point by making a knife gesture with his forefinger and then running it across his throat. But it wasn’t that message that chilled Vince; it was watching the gangster slip his arm around his little daughter’s shoulder.
As he left the church Vince knew they would meet again.
Michael X had to eventually leave the pulpit when the women drowned him out with an impromptu and full-voiced rendition of ‘What a Friend we have in Jesus’.
From reading about the Beresford funeral in the paper, Vince realized it was a very different affair. In fact a very private and muted affair. Only the Montcler set and close family were in attendance, but strictly no one else. The exclusivity that permeated the Montcler cabal in life carried over just as effortlessly into death. If you weren’t a member, you weren’t getting in. He was buried in the family mausoleum, where the rest of the battling Beresfords had been honourably discharged to. James Asprey read a eulogy, something from Thus Spake Zarathustra. Isabel Saxmore-Blaine did not attend.
But three days after Beresford’s funeral, Vince did receive a phone call from her, informing him of her brother Dominic’s funeral, which he was cordially invited to attend. She didn’t employ quite that level of
formality in her language, but the distance evident in her voice wasn’t completely explained away by the miles of phone line between them. This was the first time he’d heard from her since the night they had spent together, and there was no mention of it. Although Vince hardly expected her to review it in detail, he was at least hoping for an explanation of her flight from his bed without so much as a scribbled note left on the pillow; just to clear the air perhaps. Maybe she merely wanted it to be left shrouded in nocturnal uncertainty. Or maybe that dream sequence had been her idea of a nightmare. ‘Don’t move,’ she had insisted, and he had remained corpse-like throughout. Sex and death had mingled too closely that night. Either way it wasn’t up for discussion and, the more he thought about it, the more he agreed.
Isabel told Vince that the funeral would be another very private affair. She then told him – as if to stem any hope he might have that she wanted to see him, that it was her father who had requested his presence. To discuss certain matters. Then, polite and brusquely businesslike, she said her goodbyes and hung up in his ear.
CHAPTER 35
The Saxmore-Blaine country seat was in Wiltshire. The family owned a village, and beyond it as far as the eye could see. Which was pretty much what you always saw in the country: rolling hills with a patchwork quilt of wheat and maze and furrowed brown dirt.
Set in its wide acres, the fifteenth-century stately sandstone pile was a game of two halves. The front half was a fortified castle with castellated towers, turrets, embrasures and a crescent-shaped moat. And the back half was a Tudor manor house with a long, welcoming, mullioned window stretching across its front, and a Capability Brown garden. Architecturally this mixture was considered eccentric at the time, as if the original owners had decided to split the difference between their male and female tastes when they built their home. But the real eccentricity of it was that the wife had been allowed a say at all, and didn’t instead get dunked as a witch.
The service took place in a private chapel inside the house. It was quick, perfunctory and not very well attended. Isabel stood with her father, the ambassador. Vince had noticed an oil painting of him in one of the hallways, dressed in his full panoply of ceremonial attire, with its gold brocade and rope and a chestful of multicoloured ribbons garnered during his war days. He was midsized in height, with a large but finely appointed head that was covered in thick silver hair. He wasn’t in ceremonial uniform today, rather in morning dress. It was easy to see where Isabel got her looks from and, Vince suspected, when not on the booze or the happy pills, her fighting spirit. Isabel had told him that as a child she always wanted to be at her father’s side, and there she was, practically holding him up, for there wasn’t a lot of spirit in the old man today.
Once it was over, everyone filed wordlessly out of the chapel apart from the father, who sat in prayer with his thoughts. Vince started to follow the rest, half hoping he could make a break for it in one of the long corridors beyond. But Isabel stymied such a move when she approached quickly and hooked her arm around his, announcing, ‘I could do with a stiff drink.’
In one of the more homely sitting rooms, which nevertheless stored enough grand antiques to make a skilled burglar salivate, Isabel poured herself a large single malt with just a spit of water. Not a drink he associated with her, but it did match the surroundings. He didn’t know if this was called the Oak Room, but it should have been, for the walls were panelled in it and the furniture was made of it. There were coffers, chests, cabinets and bookcases, and taking up one entire side was a long, medieval and richly hued refectory table with fourteen pegged and dowelled chairs gathered around it. This room alone looked as though it had been responsible for the felling of a sizeable forest. Vince sat himself uncomfortably on a lumpy two-hundred-year-old haysack sofa.
And then his eye caught her. She stood above the fireplace, wearing a long gown that, due to its translucent and snug fit, made her look as if she was naked. It was a painting of Isabel’s mother. The thick golden hair, jet-black eyes, a slash of red for a mouth – all very wild and strikingly vivid against the pale background of whatever indistinct setting she was posed in. Maybe it was Greco-Roman. Or maybe it was Mars. She wasn’t wearing any shoes and was raised on tiptoe, coming at you full frontal, as though she was about to break the fourth wall and walk out of the picture. It was an odd composition, and Vince couldn’t tell if the portrait was any good, as it all seemed a little out of focus. Not abstract, or surreal, just out of focus. The eyes followed you around the room, but covertly, never fully engaging. The painting was out of sorts with the rest of the room, out of sorts with the rest of the house. The subject didn’t look as if she belonged in the English countryside at all, for that matter. And maybe that was the problem. The ambassador had taken her out of her natural environment, and she had wilted – or gone mad. So, in many ways, the artist had captured her true essence perfectly.
Isabel padded over to the fireplace and, like an actress hitting her mark, stood directly under the painting. He could see the likeness. She had some of her mother’s structure – the colour, the vivid wildness – but she was more in focus and earthed by her paternal genes.
‘Thank you for showing up.’
‘You said your father wanted to see me.’
She stood there considering him. His last statement was as perfectly reasonable as it was perfectly true, and yet it seemed to annoy her intensely.
Vince sat there appearing relaxed but, of course, she didn’t know how uncomfortable he actually felt, and not just because of the sofa he was sitting on. It didn’t help that he was sure that somewhere in the guts of the old bastard sofa there lurked an ancient coiled spring that was about to finally give way, then shoot up through the upholstery and spear him in the last place he ever wanted spearing.
Her annoyance built in the uncomfortable silence, until she said somewhat tersely, ‘Aren’t you the least curious, Detective Treadwell, as to why I didn’t contact you?’
‘You left without an explanation or a number, so I had a feeling you didn’t want to be contacted. You’ve been through a great deal, Miss Saxmore-Blaine, and I perfectly understand. But I’d just like you to know that whatever I can do to help you, I will.’
‘Quite the Galahad,’ she mocked, then took the first sip of her drink.
It must have whetted her appetite because she then took three more in quick succession, each one more voluminous than the last. Glass almost drained, she continued, ‘Well, now I have the opportunity, I’d just like to say—’
Whatever she wanted say, she wasn’t prepared to say it in the same room as her father, who had just entered. The ambassador boomed, ‘Detective Treadwell?’
Vince stood up sharply, considering it a good opportunity to get off the hay-sack missile launcher. Isabel took the opportunity to sashay over to the booze table and re-brim her glass. As she passed Vince, their eyes met in wordless conference, in which they both agreed to resume this conversation at another time, in another place. She gave her father a comforting and accommodating smile, then said, ‘I shall leave you two gentlemen to it,’ and walked out of the room.
The ambassador’s eyes were fixed firmly on his daughter as she did so, and it was the glass in her hand he was looking at with stern disapproval; like finding an unpolished buckle on the parade ground.
‘My daughter didn’t offer you a drink, Detective?’
‘No. Thank you, anyway, sir, but not just now.’
The old man went over to the table stocking the booze, and poured himself one from the same decanter as his daughter. A single this time, and with more than a dash of water. ‘I find, these days, that I prefer people who turn down a drink over those who never turn down an opportunity to have one. In my younger days it used to be the other way round.’
The ambassador’s deflated and grief-stricken state in the chapel seemed have disappeared. In fact, he now seemed rather pumped up, back straight, head held high – all ready for life and its challenges again. Vince had
the feeling the ambassador would now shed no more tears for his only son. Once he’d left that chapel, he’d left him behind and his grief with it.
Vince glanced up at a picture on the wall directly above the ambassador. It wasn’t a portrait of the ambassador, but there was a striking family resemblance in the set of the strong jaw, the full head of silvery hair perhaps. The painting, circa 1850, featured a man dressed in Harris tweed plus-fours, standing on some grey rocks. There was a choppy ocean behind him, and a blue sky with some billowy nimbus clouds, and a single white double-circumflex to indicate a seagull in flight.
‘Sir Arthur Saxmore-Blaine,’ said the ambassador, following Vince’s gaze. ‘He was army, like most of the Saxmore-Blaines.’
‘Was he an ambassador too, like most of the Saxmore-Blaines?’
‘Not an ambassador – he was far too honest and blunt-speaking for that. But he was an explorer, a naturalist and an illustrator of some repute. The family owes him a lot. You know how this family made its fortune, Detective?’ Vince shook his head. The ambassador gleefully told him: ‘Shit.’
Gilded Edge, The Page 26
