Gilded Edge, The

by Miller, Danny

  She turned slowly towards him and held him in a withering gaze that could have turned the verdantly lush and damp Buckinghamshire countryside into a barren and desiccated wasteland, and said that if he wanted a compliant little pet, he should have got a Poodle. But she eventually agreed to wait inside the car. And Vince, with his tail now between his legs, quickly got out of the vehicle and made his way along the country road towards the house.

  The mock-Elizabethan mansion was gated, but nothing that couldn’t be got over. He eventually found a way into the grounds by slipping under some rotting wooden fencing, all without snagging his dinner jacket on anything, which he considered a satisfactory result. The grounds of Chuckers stretched out before him, with kempt lawns and lots of privet hedges that sectioned off the extensive gardens into a maze-like grid construction. There was a long terrace of greenhouses that well served the grounds. The house itself, just like the real Chequers, was medievally busy, its roof serrating the dim skyline with pointed arches and turrets and chimney stacks.

  The long mullioned windows made it easy to see that there were no lights on in the house, or seemingly any signs of life, or even any furniture inside the place. This was borne out by the three removal vans parked on the gravel drive. It was clear that Guy Ruley, reported to be leaving the country soon, had put his plans into motion.

  Vince made his way around to one side of the mansion, where a small path descended to what he assumed were the servants’ quarters. There he saw a way in. Some of the leaded windows in this part of the building were in bad shape and in need of repair. On one window, the lead was long gone, and the panes were held in by chipped and crumbling putty.

  Vince took out his switchblade and began to work away, and in no time at all he had removed two rhomboid panes of glass. A hand was slipped in, a handle was turned, the window was opened, and Vince soon found himself crouching in a large white porcelain sink. He climbed out of the sink and on to the flagstone floor of the scullery. Overhead there were pots and pans hanging from S-shaped hooks, like a row of giant chimes. He was very careful not to disturb them and send them clattering into an alarming cacophony.

  With the torch illuminating his path, he made his way stealthily through the house. The deeper he got into it, the more he saw how it was emptying out – just like the house in Eaton Square. Packing boxes and tea chests sat everywhere in the middle of empty rooms.

  He padded along a wide hallway, his footfalls muted in the deep nap of a forest-green carpet that was bordered in red, and reached a door at the end. There he killed the light and pocketed the torch, put his ear to the door and heard the strained and panting breaths of exertion. Vince eyed up the door though he had no intention of kicking it in because he had no reason to believe it was locked. But it presented other problems. It was a big carved oak door with black metal fretwork fastenings and riveted cross panels. It looked as if it weighed a ton and was the kind of door that was specially built to creak and whine: a natural-born squealer that would give him away as soon as it was tugged. So, on turning the big twisted iron hoop handle and releasing the bolt from its holding, he gave it a swift firm pull and caught it by surprise. Not a peep was emitted, just the hushed whoosh of air being sucked out of the room.

  Vince stood at the doorway and scoped the huge oblong space, which looked like it served as a refectory It was already stripped bare, and Vince could just make out the lighter panels on the walls indicating where paintings had just been removed. There was an arched stone fireplace that you could park a car in, and tall French windows looked out on to the grounds.

  In the room itself, a solitary lit candle sat in a four-branched silver candelabra resting on the floor in the centre. Near that stood a chair which had a shirt, jacket, trousers and other items of clothing draped over it. Guy Ruley himself was lying on his back on a wooden bench. He was bollock naked. His outstretched arms held aloft two impressively heavy-looking dumbbells, which he lowered with a gasping count of, ‘Forty . . . four . . .’

  Vince didn’t like that count of forty-four. He would have preferred a single figure, or at least taken something still in the mid-twenties.

  On lowering the dumbbells to his chest, Guy Ruley let them drop to the floor, the heavy rug soaking up the dull 40 lb thud. He still lay on the bench, and breathed heavily and rhythmically. Whilst the single candle burned brightly in its branched candelabra, it wasn’t the main source of light in the room. Through the French windows Vince saw the grounds were lit up with footlights. Not unusual to see in large grounds with an impressive garden display to show off, but these footlights were of the bright halogen variety, arranged on a flat patch of grass, and forming a large circle.

  ‘Detective Treadwell?’

  Vince turned his attention back to the centre of the room, and to Guy Ruley, who was now standing up, flexing his muscles while engaged in some kind of stretching activity.

  ‘What can I do for you, Detective?’

  ‘You can put your pants on for a start.’

  Ruley looked perplexed, then made a play of looking down at himself, as if he hadn’t noticed he was in the altogether.

  ‘Do I have to?’

  ‘It might be an idea.’

  ‘Surely my roaming around as nature intended is not a crime. It is my house, after all. But you, on the other hand, being in my house uninvited, that is a crime.’

  ‘True. But at least I’m dressed for the occasion.’Vince gestured to his dinner suit.

  ‘How did you get in here?’

  ‘The door was open.’

  ‘That I doubt.’

  ‘And yet here I am.’

  ‘Here you are, indeed. Without so much as a warrant . . . I warrant.’

  Vince, dry as you like, replied, ‘Boom-boom.’

  Guy Ruley stopped smiling, and punning. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘We need to talk.’

  Ruley went over to the chair that held his clothes, picked up something white and skimpy and slipped it on. Vince had seen more material on a sticking plaster, but what civvies Guy Ruley chose to wear was not his call. Guy Ruley then took the trousers folded on the seat of the chair, gave them a vigorous windcracking shake and stepped into them, too. He then sat down on the chair, and looking not the least perturbed at having a detective break into his house whistled a tuneless little tune, unbunched his socks and rolled them over his feet. Finally he trod into his shoes – croc-skin loafers.

  Guy Ruley looked Vince up and down and said: ‘Looking very smart, Detective. I heard you were at the ball. We did all wonder why. The case is closed, and even if it was open, you wouldn’t be on it. And yet here you are.’

  Vince said, ‘The business deal that you and Beresford fell out over. The one you argued about at the Imperial. That was no business deal. That was about Johnny cheating at cards. That was about Beresford cheating you at cards. Am I right?’

  Guy Ruley laced his hands behind his head, stretched out his legs in front of him and crossed his natty and knotty reptile-skin covered feet. Superciliousness, supremacy and snideness all gathered around Guy Ruley’s neatly formed and generically handsome features. His refined mouth crimped into a smirk.

  Vince played along, gave him what he wanted, issued an imploring little smile and said, ‘Humour me.’

  ‘I knew Johnny was cheating. He was winning too many hands. And he was getting sloppy. He couldn’t deny it.’

  ‘But you were off bounds, surely? You were at Eton together.’

  ‘Three years below him. But it felt like a lifetime.’

  ‘His fag?’

  ‘No, that pleasure was Nicky DeVane’s. No matter what the little shit says, he was Johnny’s Gunga Din. I was viewed with too much suspicion, seen as a recalcitrant, if you will.’

  Guy Ruley yawned, stretched again, then briskly stood up and went over to the French windows. He gazed out at the lighted circle on the grounds. The darkness before the dawn had reached it apogee, and it would be lighter from here on in.
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br />   ‘So why the needle, Ruley?’

  ‘Come on, Treadwell, this is all rhetorical. You dig around, that’s what you do. Very good at it, too. That’s why you’re here. Why do you think, the needle?’

  Vince stayed where he was, in the centre of the room, as he didn’t suspect Guy Ruley was going to make a dash for it through the French windows, and he’d have to get past Vince for the only other exit.

  ‘My guess is, you can’t change the clay from which you’re made, no matter how hard you try or how much money you throw at it. That’s the theory in some circles. And certainly the ones you move in, Guy. You were at Eton, but you never belonged. As far as your running mates in the Montcler went, they all came from a long line of breeding. But I have to admit I found your past the most compelling. Isabel said your father was a scrap-metal merchant who made it big, though she was sketchy on the details.’

  ‘Bitch,’ said Guy Ruley, without any modulation in tone.

  ‘Don’t get uppity, Guy. I think she meant it admiringly. Her family made their fortune through bird shit, so I wouldn’t get too put out of joint. The name “Ruley” was deceptive. From what I read, your father was a fresh-off-the-boat Irishman who arrived in Liverpool penniless.’

  ‘Simple, he changed it from Riley. As a young man he’d picked up a record for stealing lead off roofs. Then copper piping in condemned houses. All under the name of Joe Riley. Then he changed his name by deed poll, and eventually arranged to have his criminal record removed. My father had friends in high places by then.’

  ‘From stealing the lead off roofs, he then disappeared for a few years, and turned up rich. How did he manage that?’

  ‘He made his first real money when the First World War came along. After the war, which he deserted from, there was lots of scrap metal to be had. Lots of armoury got left behind, trucks, guns, even tanks. Everything had a value. The Great War was a dirty war, and there was dirty money to be made. Chaos breeds opportunity, and he capitalized. He returned from Europe with a small fortune, then turned it into a large one. Scrap and ferrous metals led to smuggling and smelting gold bullion, and munitions and gun running. During the Spanish Civil War he infamously armed both sides. He had no affiliations.’

  ‘And with the money, he sent you to Eton and built this place, Chuckers. It looks old, but scratch the paint and you can’t disguise the new brickwork. And that must have been the same at Eton. Never quite disguising it.’

  ‘I made my way, had my father’s resilience.’ Guy Ruley turned round and faced Vince. Hands out of his pockets now, chest jutting bullishly, as if to show he was built of tougher stuff. ‘So there you go, Treadwell. You think I killed Johnny because he cheated at cards and because I never quite fitted in?’

  ‘But you did fit in, eventually. In fact, your stock is on the up. University degrees in engineering and physics gave you an edge over those floppy-fringed boys who read classics. You’ve got real skills that are useful to men like Simon Goldsachs.’

  ‘What do you want me to say, Treadwell? Getting warmer?’

  ‘A lot warmer, I’d say, Guy. Try a small energy-rich country on the west coast of Africa. Lots of civil engineering needed to get the infrastructure in place, and then get the oil and minerals up out of the ground. That takes skill. The kind of skill and connections you have in abundance. My guess is that your stock in the Montcler had risen. And as for Johnny Beresford, the exguardsman, playboy adventurer and fantasist, his had plummeted.’

  Ruley stepped back over to the chair. ‘All very intriguing, but I have an alibi. I was out the country at the time of Johnny’s demise.’

  ‘Conveniently so, if I may add. But Ireland’s not that far away. A man of your resourcefulness would have no problem slipping in and out of the country unchecked.’ Vince nodded towards the circle of light beyond the French windows. ‘A privately hired helicopter could have whisked you back into London to kill Beresford, and then whisked you right back out again.’

  ‘Proof?’

  Vince reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the playing cards – the plain pack of Waddington cards. ‘I found these in the drawer of Beresford’s card table.’ He searched Ruley’s face for clues, a tautness of tension around the mouth, an involuntary pulse, a glimmer of revelation in the eyes. But all he saw was that Guy Ruley was a good enough poker player not to give his hand away with twitchy tells or showy signs of uncontrollable guilt; and he was clearly loaded with more steely reserve than one of his old man’s scrapyards.

  Vince continued. ‘There were six decks of cards in that drawer, and these were the only ones unsealed. And not a Montcler deck, so not tampered with. These were the cards that you and Johnny Beresford played with the night he ended up dead. Which means there’s only two sets of prints on them, yours and his.’

  ‘Assuming they’re a fresh pack and hadn’t been played with before.’

  ‘Let’s assume.’

  Vince was close enough to hear that Guy Ruley’s breathing was now laboured and arrhythmical. The fitness fanatic’s heart was pumping faster than a fat octogenarian forced to take the stairs. Vince knew he had him.

  ‘Dominic Saxmore-Blaine killed Johnny Beresford,’ said Guy Ruley, slipping into his shirt. ‘That’s the way people want it. People with more power than you.’

  ‘Yes, it’s all written down in black and white. His mind twisted because of a practical joke that was played on him. What did Beresford call it, the joke . . .’

  Ruley buttoned up his perfectly tailored, bespoke shirt. Fastening the top button around his muscled neck proved to be a perplexing challenge; a neck, as Vince suspected, that was now tensing up and throbbing with hot blood at simply the mention of the practical joke.

  Vince prompted. ‘You forget?’

  Still Guy Ruley said nothing. He laced his red tie through his collar and tied a knot, yanking it tight.

  ‘It was called the blooding,’ Vince reminded him. ‘Just like in fox hunting. On your first kill, blood is smeared on your face, and you get to join the hunt. Be part of the pack.’

  Maybe it was the stiffness of the collar, or maybe it was the tightness of the knotted tie, but Vince watched Guy Ruley’s aspect change. It looked flushed. It had been all cold surface, hard, undaunted and in control of the facts. Now it wavered, pitched into uncertainty, drenched in emotion. Vince himself smelled blood.

  ‘Johnny the Joker, that’s what you called him, Guy, when we first met. Always joking around.’

  ‘Everyone called him that.’

  ‘But I heard it from you first. It stuck in my mind.’

  ‘Your point, Treadwell?’

  ‘Nicky DeVane said that Johnny the Joker had played the same joke he played on Dominic before, at school – at Eton. And no one had got killed. Nicky was wrong, and my guess is you’re lying. You haven’t forgotten that name, the blooding, because he played the same joke on you. And someone did get killed, just twenty or so years later.’

  Guy Ruley let out a snort of derision so poorly executed that Vince considered snorting one back in a derisive response. Instead, he said: ‘Dominic Saxmore-Blaine wasn’t a well boy. He had his mother’s mental frailties. And you, Guy, were just an impressionable schoolboy when it happened to you. And it left its impression on you. It twisted and it turned you, just like it did Dominic.’

  Vince could see it now, for the pain of that memory was suffused over Guy Ruley’s face. Buried and blunted for all these years, but now it was spiking and breaking through. Ruley lowered himself into the chair. His powerful body was suddenly as weak and uncertain of itself as that of a pimply and pubescent schoolboy.

  He sat awkwardly in the chair, and said: ‘It was more or less the same stunt Johnny pulled on Dominic. I had just turned thirteen, the age boys become men in certain cultures. Johnny didn’t use the fox-hunting analogy you used. Though true enough, it would be far too parochial and unadventurous for him. I think he got it from one of his Rider Haggard novels, about killing a lion as a rite of pass
age.

  ‘It was the end of term. We had a place we used to meet, in the copse near the school, and we’d been drinking. Bottles of stout were the tipple back then. Black, potent stuff it was, especially at thirteen. Johnny had paid one of the local lads from Slough to play the victim. I was spun the story that he was a no one, a little guttersnipe thief who had it coming to him. Our attitude towards him was rather like John Betjeman’s attitude towards Slough in general, reckoning that it wouldn’t be missed.

  ‘Nicky DeVane was there too, as always, at Johnny’s side. Even then he had a flamboyant way of wearing his tie, his boater worn at a jaunty angle. So when the little twerp insisted that he’d done it at my age, killed a boy I mean . . . well, I sort of had to. It was peer pressure more than beer pressure, I can assure you.

  ‘The gun was a starting pistol. Even then, Johnny reckoned he knew all about guns. He said it was real enough, and belonged to his father. Of course, I hadn’t even seen a gun back then, let alone handled one. Ironic really, considering my father had armed most of the world at one time or another, and had used plenty in his time, but he kept me away from them. Wouldn’t even let me go shooting grouse, no matter how genteel the company. He saw killing for sport as obscene. Funny that . . .

  ‘Looking back all those years ago, Treadwell, to that day in the woods, maybe I should have known it was a joke. The boy died very theatrically. He was a right little ham, a worse bloody actor than Bernie Korshank, I’m sure. Jumping about, clenching his heart, moaning and groaning and rolling around, then finally dying face-down. But the blood on his shirt looked real enough. It was from a joke shop, I was told later. But how was I to know what death looked like? I was at Eton for Christ’s sake.

  ‘After I’d shot him, I left Johnny and Nicky to it, to get rid of the body. They were going to bury him in the woods and no one would find him, they assured me. It wasn’t until I returned to school the next term that they told me the truth, that it was all a joke. Johnny gave me the whole summer to think about what I had done . . . They say the summers of your youth are the longest. How very true. But none like that . . . the longest summer ever. I wanted to die every day of it. I even tried.’ Guy Ruley raised his left arm to reveal a small white scar, about an inch long, on his wrist. ‘I did it with a shard of glass from one of the greenhouses. I didn’t have the guts for it, though, and I said the cut was an accident.’ Guy Ruley’s arm flopped down by his side, as if he’d just performed one of his vigorous weight lifts. ‘I guess I didn’t want to get anyone else into trouble . . .’