Gilded Edge, The (4 page)

‘Well, Doc, like with most things in life, looks can be very deceiving,’ said Mac, as he ambled around inspecting the body. ‘And dead bodies are the worst: they’re full of lies and deceit. But, somewhere about them, the truth will be bursting to get out. Right, Vincent?’

Vince gave a distracted nod. He too had his eyes and attention solidly fixed on Johnny Beresford, as he lay slumped in a green leather button-back armchair. The TV in front of him hummed and thrummed away, and was hot enough to suggest it had been on all night. Glancing around the room, Vince noticed that where the upstairs was all Georgian panache, elaborate and grand, this room was Edwardian and cigar-chompingly masculine. In the oak-panelled room there was a moderately sized billiard table and laid on top of it was the horse-racing game Escalado, with all its little painted-alloy gee-gees set up for a race. Next to take Vince’s eye was a large mahogany partners’ desk. On top of it there were three telephones, a stock-market ticket machine, a green-shaded banker’s lamp, and an in- and an out-tray, with more in ins than outs. Business papers, files, folders and documents were scattered about the desktop in the kind of ordered disorder that marked it out as a fully functioning workspace. Also fully functioning, and looking much used, was a small corner bar with three shelves holding serried ranks of booze bottles in various stages of depletion; while a selection of wines stacked in a forty-celled wine rack stood next to the bar. There was a side table in polished rosewood that looked as though it folded out into a dining table. This was borne out by the silver condiment set holding salt, pepper, oil and vinegar and the stack of six cork table-mats that sat on it. Four antique-style balloon-backed chairs were gathered around it. In a corner of the room stood another of those ominous-looking long-cased clocks, making a mechanical clacking sound, a racket that Vince knew he could never get used to.

As well as being the room that Beresford had died in, the young detective had a hunch that this was the room that Beresford did most of his living in: the engine room of the house, the epicentre of his life, the room he felt most at home and comfortable in, and the room that would probably tell them more about the victim than anywhere else.

The very walls called out his life story. Adorning them were paintings and framed photos of his regiment, the Coldstream Guards, including a portrait of the victim himself in full officer regalia. There were also lots of sporting scenes, a large print of a pair of eighteenth-century boxers shaping up: Mendoza vs Gentleman John Jackson, the pair striking a pose before they proceeded to strike each other. And oils depicting fox hunting, horse racing, shooting and fishing, and shiny-coated gun dogs clasping pheasants in their mouths. On the shelves were ranged many silver trophies and cups for various sporting achievements, from water skiing to leading the line for the first eleven. And Beresford wasn’t the only dead thing in the room, which included a couple of very lively-looking stags with long fearsome antlers, who looked as if they’d just rammed their heads through the wall, while a seriously lethal-looking swordfish in his glass coffin looked as fresh and slippery as the catch of the day. But, impressive as they all were, the centrepiece of the room remained Johnny Beresford himself. Even dead, and slowly decomposing as he must be, he looked vibrant and anomalously alive; just ripe for the taxidermist’s hand. Vince felt he could tap the dead man’s shoulder and he would have sprung to life, as if awakening from a nap in front of the TV.

It was clear that the evolutionary process had been very good to Beresford. He was a big man, at around six foot three, and would be considered traditionally handsome with his thick flaxen hair scraped back from what Vince assumed would be classed as a noble-looking brow, and a strong jawline that was almost Desperate Dan in its solidity and confidence. The nose had a slight hook to it, and looked as though it had been broken at some time, perhaps at school, on the rugby field was Vince’s guess, but it still fitted the proportions of his face perfectly. The wide and full-lipped mouth looked as easily suited to sensuality as to barking out orders on the parade ground or in the boardroom. Vince crooked his head, as if to bring into focus another slightly hidden aspect of the victim’s physical appearance: the stuff that doesn’t get written up in the reports, yet composes the metaphysics of murder. And, with this adjustment, Vince saw that Beresford looked almost contented. Even slumped and dead, there was a certain confidence in his posture, as if he was right where he wanted to be. Which went against everything one knew about death:
The last thing in the world we want to be, is the last thing in the world we end up being.

Next to the corpse was a small side table with a phone and an open black notebook on it. In the notebook were written the names of what could only have been racehorses, and columns of arithmetic that included the odds regarding each of the runners. The question was whether Beresford had been backing or laying? Vince looked again over at the Escalado racing game set up on the billiard table. Only an innocent parlour game, a toy, but he’d known serious money change hands on the result of those little metal jockeys seated on their mounts being mechanically propelled along the green vinyl track.

‘Go on then, Vince,’ said Mac, ‘talk me through it.’

Vince crouched down to take a look at Beresford’s shoes: an exotic-looking pair of low-cut loafers fashioned out of what looked like crocodile skin. Vince wasn’t just admiring them, he was wondering why a pair of bespoke shoes had both slipped loose at the heel. He stood up and considered the big man’s posture.

‘Doc’s right, he does look relaxed and contented, like he knew his killer and wasn’t expecting anything to happen. But . . . it looks wrong to me. Contrary to how it seems, I don’t think he was killed in this chair. I think he was moved here. His shoes are off at the heel, like he’d been dragged. And look at his crutch.’

Mac and the doc leaned in to look, and saw how eye-wateringly tight and uncomfortable it looked.

Vince continued: ‘The way all the material is gathered up looks like it’s squeezing the life out the boy. No, you’d have done some serious trouser adjustment before you sat down like that and relaxed in a chair to watch TV. You’d have made yourself comfortable.’

‘Yeah, he certainly does look uncomfortable,’ Doc Clayton retorted with a smile. ‘But who wouldn’t with a bullet in their head? So he was killed upstairs? That’s where all the action was, right, Vince?’

Mac shook his head. ‘Vince is right, he does look like he’s been moved, but my money’s on him being killed in this room.’

‘Me too,’ agreed Vince. ‘Upstairs may have been for the entertaining, but this is where Beresford did his business. This is where he kept his secrets.’

Mac, thinking obviously and out loud, said, ‘So the question is, why bother moving him from the place he was killed, unless you want to distract us?’

‘Yeah, and he’s a big fellow,’ said Vince. ‘Whoever did it knew they had time.’

Mac said, ‘Well, it’s not robbery, because all the pictures in the house look in place according to the maids. And there’s a couple of old masters hanging up that would definitely be missed – along with all the silverware and everything else. Plus the fact the place is fully belled-up and the alarm goes straight to Buckingham Palace Road police station.’

Vince then went over to take look at a collection of silver-framed photographs gathered on a shelf. There were a dozen or so of them, and all featured more or less the same cast of male characters in various locations: a shooting party on a country estate, a group on the deck of a large yacht with palm trees and a secluded white-sand beach as a backdrop, a team shot of them skiing in Klosters. The largest photo sat in the middle of the pack and featured Beresford and his five friends, in dinner jackets, sitting around the green baize of a card table. They all held cards in their hands. Of course Vince couldn’t see the cards they were holding, but every one of them looked as if he was holding the winning hand – holding all the best cards that life’s little game had to offer. They seemed so cocksure, pumped up and pleased with themselves. A shared sneering arrogance burned through the photo, which was both a little nauseating and compulsively magnetic. Vince reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out that most celebrated of detecting devices: the magnifying glass. Gone were the days of the ebonized handle and the big round lens, for this one was made of plastic, and about the same dimensions and with the same sliding cover action as a box of matches. He picked up the photo and, on closer inspection, all the above assessment was confirmed by the name printed in white on the green baize of the card table. It was the most exclusive gaming room in London, and probably in Europe for that matter. The Montcler Club in Berkeley Square.

Vince and Mac left Doc Clayton alone with his corpse and went for an investigative wander upstairs. There were fresh white lilies in every room, and the place was five-star spruced. The phalanx of maids that swept through the place, with their artillery of brooms and dusters, had certainly put their backs into the task.

Upon entering the master bedroom, the first thing to catch their eye was the bed. In a room containing a full suite of expensive French furniture stood a huge round bed designed to look like a giant open scallop, with a headboard covered in fanned pink satin to form the striations of the shell.

‘Will you look at that?’ gasped Mac, with a whistle.

The cream-coloured carpet was so thick and luxurious that it physically slowed down the two detectives as they waded across it. Mac pressed down on the mattress, which gave way with an undulating ease. The older detective pulled a face of supreme disapproval.

‘It’s a water bed, naturally,’ Vince informed him.

‘No good for me.’ Mac shook his head. ‘I need a mattress that’s firmer than Doc Clayton’s morgue slab.’

The bed itself was unmade, with the rumpled pearl-coloured satin sheets pushed over to one side and cascading on to the floor. They padded over to the en suite bathroom, which featured a shower cubicle and a circular bath that would have happily accommodated a five-a-side football team. Sandwiched between the washbasin and the toilet was something else.

‘What is that?’ asked Mac.

‘A bidet.’

‘A be what?’

‘A be-day.’

‘What do you wash in that, your feet?’

‘Your jacksy.’

‘You’re kidding?’

‘It’s French.’

‘What the hell’s wrong with those people?’ asked Mac, shaking his head in mild disgust.

‘Sirs!’

Both men turned round sharply. ‘Jesus Christ, Shirley! Do you have to shout?’ demanded Mac.

The craning copper, Barry Birley, stood doubled up in the doorway, addressing no one in particular because everyone here was of higher rank than him, and therefore called Sir.

‘Sorry, guv.’

Vince and Mac joined him back in the bedroom.

‘Just got some information from the maids – not the ones who found him this morning, but one of those who was working here last night.’

Vince said, ‘Mr Beresford had a visitor, a female?’

‘That’s right, his girlfriend apparently,’ said Birley. He consulted his notebook. ‘A Miss Isabel Saxmore-Blaine. She turned up at around six p.m., and was crying and upset. But apparently, according to the maid, that was nothing new or unusual.’

‘Turning up at six p.m., or crying and being upset?’ asked Vince.

Birley gave a quizzical frown, then hesitantly said: ‘Crying and being upset . . . I guess.’

‘You
guess?
The devil’s in the details, Shirley. The devil’s in the bidet.’

Isabel Saxmore-Blaine lived in Pont Street, Chelsea, a brisk tenminute walk from Beresford’s Eaton Square house. The proximity didn’t surprise Vince, who reckoned you could throw a net over Belgravia, Mayfair, Knightsbridge, Kensington and Chelsea, and snag up most of Beresford’s cohorts – if they weren’t away for the weekend at their country seats. Pont Street was composed of rows of very tall Victorian red-brick terrace houses that had been mainly converted into spacious luxury flats and maisonettes.

As Vince and Mac walked from the car towards Isabel Saxmore-Blaine’s flat, Mac said: ‘I’ve been thinking, Vincent, and I want you to take the lead on this one.’

Vince gave a neutral nod. He could see that, with retirement looming, Mac wasn’t losing his enthusiasm for the job; he was just ceding control, slowly but surely. All good murder detectives are ultimately control freaks: they like to have power over every aspect of the investigation. They’re like the killers they hunt – they like to play God. Vince noted a melancholy in Mac’s voice. This man was going to miss being a copper. Mac had his family, a wife and two daughters, one of them at a private school and the other at university. And he had his hobbies – reading and tending a garden in Friern Barnet that was alive with colourful roses – but he was already getting the jitters about retirement.

He wasn’t one of those coppers who joined the force because of job security, early retirement and a handsome pension, or because he liked pushing his weight around. He did it because he loved and understood the art of detection. On his days off, when he sat in his easy chair smoking his pipe with a book in his lap, the book was invariably a work in the area of criminal psychology, the expanding field of forensic science, and occasionally a hard-boiled American detective novel. But they all had something to do with the crooked human condition and the unearthing of unpalatable truths. He’d lent Vincent various books over the last few months, the most recent being a work of fiction,
The Moonstone.
With its opium-induced otherness, Vince was surprised to learn that it was the book that first fired Mac’s imagination as a kid. Vince hadn’t got around to reading it himself yet, but he would.

Under Mac’s tutelage, Vince felt that he was being well and truly schooled in the subtler, less prescriptive and more intuitive arts of detection. Mac wanted Vince to know what he knew and read what he read. He wanted to retire safe in the knowledge that Vince was going about things the way he would have done them himself. Of course, that could never be the case, as the two men were too different. But Vince appreciated the fact that Mac saw qualities in him that were worth nurturing, and made him worth passing the torch on to. And he knew Mac wanted him to take the lead in this case, possibly Mac’s last, so he could gauge and critique his junior’s performance. As Vince put these facts to himself, he gave an involuntary roll of his shoulders like a prize fighter, the young contender, limbering up and stepping into the ring.