Vince considered what he’d just heard. From all the grand designs, vaulting ambitions, enormous piles of money, dreams of world domination, it all scrolled back and reduced to the sticky psyche of a thirteen-year-old schoolboy. And the playing fields of Eton.
Vince said, ‘So that’s what you and Beresford argued about at the Imperial.’
‘Yes. He had it all set up with Bernie Korshank, but I told him Dominic wasn’t up to it. And that it was a cruel childish joke, and that he wasn’t a bloody schoolboy any more. Johnny laughed it off, said it hadn’t done me any harm. I left the hotel, didn’t want any part of it. My London flat isn’t that far away, so I walked home. I wanted some fresh air, to sober up, get the stench of that place off me. But I couldn’t let it go. I had no special feelings for Dominic Saxmore-Blaine, believe me. He was one of Johnny’s little sycophants. I knew he was weak, though. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and how it felt to me. And Johnny’s words . . . about how it hadn’t done me any harm . . .’
‘So you went back to the Imperial?’
‘Too late.’ Guy Ruley gave a slow, regretful nod. ‘By the time I got there it was over. Dominic must have just left. The door to the suite was open. I saw the gun on the floor, by the entrance. I saw Johnny and Bernie Korshank, and they were laughing, having a drink. Korshank still had his bloodied shirt on. It looked so real . . . just like the blood from the joke shop. They didn’t see me.’
‘And you picked up the gun?’
Guy Ruley sat up straight in the chair, as if realizing he was no longer a slouchy teenager, but a fully grown man on the receiving end of a questioning. He forced some bravado back into his voice as he said, ‘Yes, perfect. As you deduced, Treadwell, Ireland’s not that far away. It had all been arranged, and I’d flown back to London on a private helicopter. Then I’d driven to . . .’
CHAPTER 53
Guy Ruley had arrived at Johnny Beresford’s house in Eaton Square at a little past – or perhaps a little before – midnight. He carried with him a tan pigskin attaché case. The private meeting that had been arranged between Johnny Beresford and Guy Ruley was a matter of the gravest urgency and secrecy. Guy certainly didn’t expect Isabel Saxmore-Blaine to be in the house, and he didn’t realize she was . . .
. . . Johnny woke up from his stupor not knowing that Isabel was upstairs asleep in the bedroom. He assumed that, after she had hit him over the head with the champagne bottle, she had fled the house and gone home to her flat in Pont Street. Without having time to attend the gash on his forehead, he heard a knock on the door, and answered it to find Guy Ruley.
. . . Johnny, with that big convivial grin bolted on to his face, welcomed his visitor: ‘Come on in, sport!’
. . . Guy Ruley entered the house, unsmiling, and unresponsive to Beresford’s bonhomie. Because this visit was no smiling matter. But that was Johnny’s way, come rain or shine. Always charming, always smiling, Johnny the Joker. First thing Johnny Beresford did was explain the gash on his forehead: an argument with Isabel. Guy, however, didn’t want to hear about Isabel Saxmore-Blaine. He had no sympathy and very little interest in the tiresome imbroglio that was Johnny and Isabel. Guy couldn’t resist the comment that, leaving that scenario aside, and even without the gash on his head, Johnny still looked like shit. The man didn’t argue the point, just carried on smiling. Rain or shine. Rain or shine . . .
. . . They went downstairs to the basement, the private den. Johnny topped himself up, poured himself a large single malt. He offered his guest one. Guy said he didn’t need one, said he could imbibe Johnny’s intoxicating vapours from where he was standing. He told Johnny to get on with it, as the clock was ticking and Guy had a flight to catch back to Ireland . . .
. . . Johnny Beresford opened up the rosewood side table that morphed into the green baize of a card table, and the two men took their positions opposite each other. Guy took his attaché case and put it on his lap; the snap of the locks being released produced a sharp businesslike sound that pulled everything into focus. Guy Ruley took out a fresh pack of cards from the attaché case. It was a pack of Waddington playing cards. No fancy embellishments with this pack, no minted blocks of gold hauled up from the vaults, or pretentious privateers flying their personalized colours. Just a plain pack of cards, a guaranteed clean deck. The game is poker. The style is seven-card stud.
. . . Their games were very different. Guy Ruley played with a new-found freedom, with the spirit of a man who was no longer shackled by reputation, by fear or by the past. He had found his own style. He played in silence, with a sheen of stilled serenity, imbued with confidence and a cold steel in his hand. On the opposite side of the table, Johnny Beresford knocked back brimming tumblers of Scotch, and laughed and joked and jawed his way through each hand. He played his usual game, full of zeal and panache. But its edge was blunted. It was somehow a parody of itself, and a sloppy one at that. Johnny Beresford was all rousing raises, bullshit bluffs and thoughtless folds. He was full of fizz and twang and entertainment, he was the joker and the wild card . . .
. . . But all the time, and on every hand, Guy Ruley won. He won big, he won convincingly. The victor and vanquished sat opposite each other . . .
. . . ‘What do you say, sport, another hand? Just the one? Come on, you owe me that, no?’
Vince said: ‘And Beresford’s price for losing the game?’
Guy Ruley said: ‘Another game.’
. . . Guy Ruley reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a pair of black calfskin driving gloves and slipped them over his winning hands. He then opened the pigskin attaché case again, reached into its guts and pulled out a snub-nose .32 Colt revolver, and a single bullet. The next game was to be Russian roulette . . .
Guy Ruley said: ‘But you’re right, Treadwell, it wasn’t the money. It wasn’t even about the honour. I was taken back about twenty years ago. I wanted to see real fear in Johnny the Joker’s eyes. I wanted him to know what it felt like.’
. . . Johnny Beresford took some quick, deep, staccato breaths, as if he’d just taken a wintry plunge in the English channel. It had been agreed. He was to take one shot to the temple. One pull of the trigger. A five-to-one shot. Beresford loaded the single bullet into the chamber of the gun and spun the barrel . . .
. . . Guy then told him that, instead of him taking the one shot, he was to take three shots. Three pulls of the trigger . . .
. . . Johnny the Joker laughs. When he sees that Guy is serious, and he realizes that there is no humour to be had in the room, he tells Guy to fuck off! This isn’t what they had arranged, what they had agreed on . . .
. . . Guy Ruley again reaches into the attaché case and takes out another gun. It’s the exact same model, a .32 Colt. On seeing the gun, the blood drains from Johnny Beresford’s face like the knuckles of a clenched fist . . .
. . . Guy told him that his gun was fully loaded. A full complement of bullets, one in every chamber. So it was Guy’s six against his one, if he wanted to take his chances . . .
. . . Johnny Beresford banged his fists on the table, leaving a balled imprint on the green baize and sending stacked chips jumping up into the air. He reiterates and remonstrates that this is not what they had agreed on! The gentlemen’s agreement! . . .
. . . Guy aimed the gun squarely at Johnny Beresford’s head, cocked the trigger and said the rules had changed. And, anyway, he was never much of a gentleman – like his father before him, who Johnny had never failed to remind him was a working-class guttersnipe on the make. But don’t get Johnny wrong; he was never a snob. He could mix with anyone – just as long as the anyone he was mixing with knew their place. Trouble was Guy, like his father before him, never knew his place. Always wanted to rise above it, always wanted more. He was the new order. The new way of doing things. But, as Guy saw it, it was the same as the old way. He was just stacking the deck in his own favour, giving himself the Gilded Edge . . .
. . . Six chambers, three pulls of the trigge
r, one bullet. Johnny Beresford, the great gambler and master manipulator of the odds, tried to work out those most simple of numbers. But this wasn’t a horserace, a hand of cards, the roll of a dice or even a punt on the markets. It was his life! Numbers, fractions, liabilities, probabilities, they became meaningless and abstract. All he knew was that he didn’t like these odds. He didn’t like the new rules he had to play by. And yet he knew there was nothing he could do about them. He was, perhaps for the first time in his life, powerless . . .
. . . All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Johnny the Joker together again . . .
. . . ‘Come on, Johnny. Let’s do it!’
. . . He picked up the gun. He put it to his head . . .
. . . ‘Do it, Johnny. Do it!’
CHAPTER 54
‘Bang!’ exclaimed Guy Ruley, with one hand shaped like a gun and pressed to his temple as he pulled back the imaginary trigger. He held his gun-shaped hand there for a moment, maybe imagining the imaginary bullet shooting from his finger and tearing through the soft grey matter of his head, beating around his skull trying to find an exit, then running out of steam and lodging somewhere in his brain. Maybe in the part that stored all his childhood memories.
Guy Ruley then decommissioned his hand, and used it to lift his jacket off the back of the chair. With his other hand, he picked off some specks of lint, and he continued, ‘The gods weren’t with Johnny that night. They’d stopped smiling at him long ago. The first pull of the trigger got him. Without the ability to cheat, Johnny was finished, a spent force. And he knew it.’
Vince admired the cut of the jacket that Guy Ruley had slipped on, even though he thought it hung rather heavy. Then he asked, ‘You said it had all been arranged, but who with?’
‘Johnny’s fate had been discussed over a perfectly civil lunch with James Asprey and Simon Goldsachs. Aspers, of course, knew about the Gilded Edge, but professed not to have known about him cheating on me. And, of course, he offered to pay back all the money I’d lost. I said it wasn’t about the money. Aspers, contrite – or as contrite as he is ever likely to get – fully understood. Said he didn’t expect anything less from me.’
‘What did Goldsachs have to say about it?’
‘Simon professed to know nothing about it, said the running of the Montcler was purely Aspers’ affair. Simon knew the scandal could ruin Aspers, and would reflect badly on himself, if the story broke. So in recompense they said that Johnny must give me satisfaction, whatever I wanted. But it must be settled amongst ourselves, amongst gentlemen. And of course, being a gentleman, Johnny agreed.’
‘Makes perfect sense. In the eighteenth century you and Beresford would have settled it with duelling pistols. This time around it’s Russian roulette.’
Guy Ruley paid little attention to this comment, as he was now checking his watch. He then directed his gaze over to the lit circle on the lawn. Vince knew something was coming, and coming real soon.
And then it came, the first thing anyway. Guy Ruley lightened the load in his jacket by pulling out a gun: predictably enough a snub-nosed Colt revolver. The brand was known in America as the detective’s gun. There was a certain irony there.
Guy Ruley said: ‘Tenuous as the fingerprints on the cards are as evidence, it was a slight oversight on our part.’
‘I’m equally embarrassed. Not spotting that the side table morphed into a card table was a dreadful oversight on my part.’
‘Hand me the cards carefully, Treadwell. I’m in no mood to play 52 pick-up.’
Vince considered the next move. They were standing about fifteen feet apart. At five feet less, he might have been able to pull it off. But, as it stood, Vince did as he was told. He tossed them over to Ruley, who caught them with his left hand and pocketed them.
‘Now what?’
‘We wait.’
‘We can play a quick hand. It’s a clean deck.
‘I hear you don’t gamble, Treadwell.’
‘I don’t. We can play for fun. Just until your ride turns up.’
‘Ah, you see, Treadwell, my friends and I don’t play for fun. Now, if you’d said that: winner walks free, loser accompanies you down to Scotland Yard, you might have got a game. But as it stands, it’s pretty much game over for you, Treadwell.’
Ruley put a little more conviction into getting the drop on Vince. He raised the gun so it was pointed firmly at where all his major organs were stored.
‘There’s enough other people know what I know.’
‘Your little playmate, Isabel Saxmore-Blaine? Now there’s an unreliable narrator, if ever there was one. You know, Treadwell, it may be fun for you servicing the upper crusts, but she’s bad news, take it from me. Aspers and Simon Goldsachs both blame Isabel for Johnny’s downfall. I blame her too. Not for his death, of course, but for making it all look like murder again. It was all arranged, and the whole thing should have been so simple: Johnny Beresford, a gentleman down on his luck, discredited, dishonoured, depressed with his lot, retires dignified to his study, has a stiff drink and blows his brains out. An age-old scenario. Until little Miss Saxmore-Blaine stumbled drunkenly and melodramatically on to the scene, and made it look like murder all over again.’
‘What the bloody hell is all this?’
Guy Ruley turned sharply to find Isabel Saxmore-Blaine standing in the doorway. To any man, seeing her in that get-up, she was an assault on the senses. She was car-crashingly, distractingly dangerous – so much so that she should have come equipped with her own private lighthouse. And on seeing the catsuited figure with her hands on her hips, accentuating her curves and somehow, in the half light, making her look like a pornographic egg timer, Guy Ruley did a flurry of double-takes before finally settling his wide eyes on her.
With the gun no longer trained on him, Vince made his move – he ducked down, sprang forward and tackled Guy Ruley around the waist. Ruley fell backwards, squeezing the trigger and sending a bullet rocketing up into the ceiling and hitting a metal light fitting, which in turn sent it ricocheting straight back down into the wooden floor. Close enough for Vince to see the varnished wood splinter in white shards.
Ruley was still holding the gun in his right hand. His left hand now gripped a hank of Vince’s hair and he was pulling his head back, about to stick the hot snub barrel into Vince’s mouth.
Vince still had his arms wrapped around Guy Ruley’s waist, his hands pinned to the ground under Ruley’s substantially muscled weight. He was also looking down the barrel of a gun. At the other end of the gun he saw the toothpaste grin of Guy Ruley. He watched as Ruley’s forefinger tightened around the trigger—
Then he saw the pointy toe of a patent-leather boot swing into view and kick away the hand that was about to pull the trigger. There was a mighty clap, a shocking energy and a bright white light. The gun had gone off again and the bullet just missed Vince’s cheekbone. He could feel the heat of the metal, smell the burn of powder, the eye-stinging blast of cordite.
The next thing he knew, his hands were free and working furiously at trying to rub away the blinding flash that was seared into his burning eyes – and his ears needed some attention too. The report of the gun had set off a ringing that would have sent Quasimodo reaching for the aspirins and earmuffs. Kneeling on the floor, Vince knew he couldn’t stay sequestered in this sensory torture chamber for long. That boot of Isabel’s that had kicked away the gun would now have to answer to Guy Ruley.
Vince opened his watery eyes and saw, through the webby mist, that an unearthly white light had filled the room and was shining in through the French windows. For a moment, he thought the bullet had hit its intended target – his brain – and he was on his final journey, going towards the great white light of lore. Vince ran his hands quickly around his head checking for bullet holes and blood. He didn’t find any.
The ringing in his ears had subsided enough to let in a heavy whirling sound, which also emanated from outside. He realized it was the work of
the rotating propeller blades and headlights of a helicopter hovering over its mark outlined on the lawn.
Vince turned away from the windows and scanned the room. It was like seeing everything in photographic negative – monochrome, murky and unreal. He wobbled to his feet, the deafening blast having done something to his sense of balance. He felt like a ghost unable to join the real world. He saw a shape in front of him that seemed to be floating spectrally around the room. He then heard a scream, and the hazy shape separated, as part of it fell to the floor. The bigger part, about 65 per cent of it, now came towards him. Vince then felt the full force of a very human fist as it was slotted into his mouth. It wasn’t much of a punch. As Vince suspected, the bigger shape – Guy Ruley – wasn’t much of a fighter. But it was enough to send Vince back down to the ground. Once down there, he crawled over to the supine shape lying on the floor – Isabel. He held her and peppered her face with kisses; somehow hoping, in lieu of smelling salts or medication, that it would revive her, or certainly comfort her.
Isabel groaned, and groggily uttered: ‘He hit me, Vincent. He hit me . . .’
‘I know, but you’re okay. And I’m gonna hit him right back. Wait here.’
Vince climbed to his feet and staggered over to the white light pouring in through the French windows. He was still locked in the sensory straitjacket, and feeling the effect of Guy Ruley’s sucker punch – one that he suspected could be repeated at any moment. All things being equal, he knew he could take Guy Ruley apart; one good shot to the jaw would send his pumped and bulked-out body to the ground. But all things weren’t equal, since he could hardly see his hand in front of his face, and was pretty sure he couldn’t hit the backside of a behemoth with a banjo.
Gilded Edge, The Page 40
