Gilded Edge, The (17 page)

With three-quarters of the bottle polished off and the joint smoked, she said, in a voice now thoroughly smeared with booze and dope, ‘You can put on the music now, Vincent.’

He went over to the hi-fi, where all the 45s were still scattered on the floor. There were albums featuring classical music, and some good jazz standards, and some Tamla Motown and Stax.

But it was the guilty pleasures that had been enjoyed that night. As if reading Vince’s mind, Isabel said: ‘Johnny could be pretty square about some things, but not about music. He’d listen to anything.’

The playlist had already been selected for Vince: it was all the 45s lying on the floor, out of their covers, all the platters that had been played that fateful night, like The Kinks’ ‘You Really Got Me’.

Vince sat back and watched as she danced for him, just like he assumed she had danced for Beresford that night. Her long body moved effortlessly with the beat. Inhibitions and class then went out the window when she climbed up on to the table. The dirty beat of R&B was obviously a great leveller. She didn’t dance like an uptight and out-of-step little white girl, but like one of the Ronettes trapped within a wall of sound when ‘Be My Baby’ got played.

When he flipped on Eric Burdon and the Animals’ ‘The House of the Rising Sun’, she produced some of her best moves.

Then came the killer track, and you’d have to have a pretty hard heart and feet of lead not to dance to this one. It was a little slip of a Scottish girl with the voice of a very big black man from Detroit inviting everyone to ‘Shout!’

Grabbing the second bottle of champagne, she jumped off the table. Her eyes glazed over and, with her body plugged into the rhythm, she seemed possessed. All in all, she had already polished off a bottle and a half of champagne and, along with the gimlets she’d drunk in Jezebel’s and the joint she’d smoked here, she was well and truly looking through a glass darkly and fast spiralling into blackout . . . Till she crashed and burned and hit the deck. On the floor she curled into a ball, seemingly wrapping herself around the half-empty bottle of champagne as if it was her lover.

Her body juddered and shook; her voice sounded breathless as she struggled to scream out: ‘STOP!’

. . . ‘Stop, Johnny . . . stop . . .’

She’d had tears in her eyes when she turned up the last time at Eaton Square. She knew it was the end of the affair, the end of the party. Same old Johnny stood at the door: all handsome charm and a beaming smile, and all the bonhomie of a one-man parade.

. . . ‘You’re back, darling. I’ve missed you so much. Don’t ever leave me again,’ he’d said, peppering her face with kisses, the smell of single malt potent on his breath.

. . . ‘Stop, Johnny, stop,’ she’d said. ‘We need to talk . . .’

. . . But, in an ebullient mood, he pops open a bottle of Dom Perignon to celebrate her homecoming. Isabel refuses to drink. She’s been off the booze for over a month, and now wants to keep a clear head. She tells him the score: they’ve been seeing each other for over three years, and she feels like she’s wasting her time, wasting her life with him. It’s too volatile a mix. She’s going back to New York . . .

. . . He says he loves her, that he’s sorry for the way he’s treated her, his past sins, and that he doesn’t want her to leave him. He tells her to have a drink – just the one, just the one. She is reluctant. He is persuasive . . .

. . . ‘Stop, Johnny, stop . . .’

. . . Just the one. What harm can it do? For old times’ sake. But it’s never just the one, and pretty soon the genie’s out the bottle. And one thing leads to another and the music goes on . . .

. . . Then his mood darkens. He becomes sullen, talks about his luck running out, nothing lasting for ever, and having a premonition of death. And now the one person he can trust is leaving him. She’s never before seen him like this, the bravado and bluster vanquished. She goes over to him, she holds him.

. . . And then, like a summer day in London, he turns again. He pushes her away. He wants her gone, out of his house and out of his life. He grabs her by the arm and steers her towards the hallway, trying to get her out of there.

. . . ‘Stop, Johnny, stop!’

. . . Vile abuse spews from his mouth. Isabel gives as good as she gets, she slaps his face. He slaps her back – hard. It sends her to the floor. As he looks down at her, an unbelievable cruelness comes over him. ‘Look at you, pathetic.’ He grabs her by the arms and hauls her to her feet. He squeezes her arms, as if getting the measure of her, the very depth and breadth and substance of her. His solid muscularity against her slender suppleness . . .

. . . She feels weightless, nothing more than a pitiable sobbing husk. And doesn’t he just know it! He pushes her towards the sofa, but she stays on her feet. He goes towards her again, sure this charged moment will turn into something else, as it has before. The knife edge that he believes their relationship rests on always falls in his favour. Wasn’t that the real push-and-pull: the excitement, the uncertainty, when feeling her body, her face damp with tears, pushing against him – when no really means yes, when stop really means go . . .

. . . ‘Stop, Johnny . . . stop . . .’

. . . Her breathless mouth nuzzling his ear, while she’s clawing and punching, little blows beating down on the trunk of his body, sending charges through him, driving him on . . . and then her body yields, submits. That’s the way it goes. That’s the way it always goes . . .

. . . ‘Stop, Johnny . . . Stop . . .’

‘Isabel . . .’

Vince uttered it softly, her body still now, her shoulder-length hair spread out over her like a net. He bent down on one knee and put his hand gently on her shoulder as if to wake her out of her stupor.

Isabel recoiled from his touch with such vehemence, it was like she’d been pulled back by some external force. She raised herself up, her right hand gripping the neck of the champagne bottle like a tennis player about to serve.

‘Get away from me, Johnny!’ she hollered, her eyes rounded in fear, and then glowing in anger. With a two-handed smash, she brought the bottle crashing down on to Vince’s head.

‘I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!’

Vince had been too transfixed by the hypnotic spinning saucers of her eyes to dodge it, and the onslaught had happened so fast. But somewhere in the wielding of the bottle, or in the service and delivery of the shot, she had lost her form, and the force wasn’t enough to break the bottle, nor hard enough to knock him out. But it was hard enough to send him scuttling backwards across the floor, until he was stopped by the wall.

Clutching his head he let out an exclamation of pain that seemed like a massive understatement. ‘Ouch!’ He raised his hand to the spiral of his crown and dipped his fingers gingerly into the shallow tarn of blood. By the time he looked up, he saw that Isabel was staggering out into the hall. There were two of her, so that she looked as if she was being stalked by her ghost. But there were two of everything right now: everything had an aura, a simulacrum, or a doppelgänger. Vince climbed to his feet, of which there were currently four. A dull thud originating at the top of his crown seemed to slide down his face as he stood upright. His ears rang and he could hear the blood sloshing around inside his head. He kept his feet firmly planted in the thick carpet as his surroundings wobbled around him, and slowly his vision quivered back into focus. Eventually there was one of everything again; including Isabel now perilously swaying halfway up the stairs in a state of semi-consciousness.

Vince uprooted himself and ploughed on down the hallway, then darted up the stairs till he stood just behind Isabel, ready to catch her should she lose her grip on the banister. He was all too aware of his responsibilities: he’d got her into this state, and he would make sure he got her out of it – unharmed.

The booze and the dope now had her thoroughly sequestered in the blackout. She moved in a world of lost time, a realm of death and danger. Her long eyelashes flickered like the wings of a faltering bird. She kept up a constant stream of commentary, but it was hushed and slurred and altogether incomprehensible. Yet she seemed to know where she was going. On the first-floor landing she made her way along to the master bedroom. Vince turned on the hallway lights to illuminate her path. Again, the wilted lilies in their fetid glass coffins stank the place up, redolent of death and decay.

Isabel faded into the darkness of the master bedroom. Vince followed her inside and hit the switch, a dimmer device keeping the light low. Isabel headed straight for the imposing bed, fashioned like an open clamshell with its fanned silk headboard. To Vince this, at first sight, seemed like an especially uncharacteristic ostentation on Beresford’s part, and out of keeping with the rest of the house. Vince had him down as a solid four-poster boy. But it wasn’t until he saw Isabel climb up on the bed that Vince got the joke, or understood its effect: with her on the bed, it was like Botticelli’s Venus. Beresford had found his immortal beauty, his Venus, and wanted to give her the setting she deserved. But why couldn’t he keep her? Why couldn’t he seal the deal? Why couldn’t he close the shell?

Isabel lay down across the bed, then reached over to the bedside table, her hand patting the surface as if searching for something. Unable to find it, she let out a pained groan and her eyes closed. The tearful mutterings petered out into sleepy whimpers and nose-twitching little snores.

Vince looked around the room to remind himself that, apart from the odour of the dying flowers, it was just as he remembered it, room-service tidy, and five star at that. In the en suite bathroom things were also in perfect order. The porcelain shone so you could have slurped soup from the sink, drunk Bollinger from the bidet, and doused yourself in genuine toilet water.

Vince studied Isabel’s position as she stretched out across the bed – the still unmade bed. He then went around to the bedside table she was reaching for. On the floor lay the same pile of silk sheets that had been pushed off the bed on the night of the murder. He then spotted a wire leading from under the bed into the same silken mound. He lifted it up, and there it was, hitherto unseen, hidden under the sheets: a small cream-coloured bedside telephone. Vince took out a handkerchief from his breast pocket and picked up the receiver. There was a red-coloured lipstick smear on the mouthpiece. He put the mouthpiece to his nose, and even after all these days, he could still smell Isabel’s perfumed mouth on it.

Vince smiled, and not just because he loved the scent of a woman’s lipstick.

‘Jezebel?’

‘Jezebel’s,’ corrected Vince. ‘It’s a nightclub.’ Then, by way of reassurance he said, ‘It’s very exclusive.’

‘She’s not supposed to leave the hospital, never mind go visiting nightclubs, no matter how exclusive!’

They were both in Mac’s office. Mac himself perched on a corner of his desk. Vince stood contritely before him.

‘I didn’t take her to the club, Mac.’

‘But you got her drunk!’

‘She was drunk already. Ish.’

‘Ish?’

‘Drunk
ish
.’

‘No such thing.’

‘Okay, she was drunk. I sobered her up, then got her drunk again.’

‘Oh, terrific work, Detective! Do you have any idea how this is going to play out with her brief? I kept nitto over Tyrell Lightly, because you were going to get it from Markham anyway. If he finds out about this, you’re out, Not
out-ish.
Just out. On your arse!’

Vince knew better than to answer back. And Mac was right, he had given him a pass on Tyrell Lightly and the knife Vince was carrying. So Vince stood there with his mouth shut, penitently watching and waiting as Mac filled his pipe. Whilst Mac’s nicotine habit wasn’t quite as desperately urgent as for him to be grasping for the opium pipe like a degenerate doper, it wasn’t to be sniffed at either. It was the whole routine and the paraphernalia that went with it: the ancient and oily leather tobacco pouch, the weeding it out, the filling it up, and the tamping it down in the bowl; and then setting fire to the little potted heap, all so ceremoniously assuring. And Vince knew that the pipe would have a soothing effect and cool the ire of the older detective.

He had just filled Mac in on the events of the night before, from interviewing James Asprey at the Montcler Club, to finding Isabel Saxmore-Blaine downstairs in Jezebel’s nightclub, to taking her back to Beresford’s house, and conducting his little experiment. He’d left out some details, like the diversion to Notting Hill to score two joints off Vivian Chalcott, and Isabel gyrating on the table as if she was a dancer on
Ready Steady Go!
As for the experiment itself, after Isabel crashed out on the bed, Vince had rolled her over into the recovery position, and swaddled her in silk sheets. She then slept like a baby – albeit a baby prodigiously embalmed in booze. Vince meanwhile sat on the chaise longue in the bedroom, drinking strong coffee. He needed to stay awake and watch over her, knowing that if anything happened to her whilst on his watch, it would put his pension in serious peril.
Ha!
They’d have buried him alive! He didn’t want her sleepwalking and taking a dive down the stairs, or worse. Feeling the lump on his head from the champagne bottle, he was warily reminded that there had been cases, though as rare as rocking-horse shit, of people murdered in their sleep by people who tend to murder in their sleep . . .

‘Grossly irresponsible, Vincent. You opened yourself up to all sorts of accusations and charges, and you put Isabel Saxmore-Blaine’s life in danger too. She’s borderline nuthouse and has an obvious booze and pill problem.’

‘All of it played up by her doctors and lawyers to get her a softer sentence, because they’re convinced she’s guilty. But I think she’s innocent, and I can prove it. I think I can find those missing hours, Mac. Those hours that she doesn’t know about, during which Beresford was killed.’

Vince waited under Mac’s scrutinizing gaze. The older detective stood up and moseyed around his desk, which was habitually heaped and humped with papers and files, then sat down again. He opened a bloated desk drawer as far as it would go, knowing it would be an effort to close again, and stuck in his hand, groping around among the unyielding layers. Eventually he pulled out a single pink-topped match, and scraped it against the back wall, where Vince saw the pink skid marks of previously lit pipes, and fired her up. Twenty minutes later – or what sure as hell seemed like twenty minutes – through a cloud of bonfire smoke, like big chief Sitting Bull Mac asked: ‘How?’