Gilded Edge, The (44 page)

But, chess sets aside, there were other interesting characters assembled around the main room. At the bar sat two well-known and well-behaved West London ‘Faces’. There was a famous actor currently making inroads into Hollywood, accompanied by a stunning-looking redhead and surrounded by some lesser mortals in the same profession, who were all hanging on his well-rounded words. Also some bohemian-looking artist types, who wore their hearts and professions on their paint-spattered sleeves, and talked loudly about art between gulps of red wine, drags on roll-ups and forkfuls of rice from their dishes of
blanquette de veau.

It was a Johnny Beresford and Isabel Saxmore-Blaine type of place, decided Vince, simply because there were lots of Johnnys and Isabels seated around the place, or approximations and facsimiles of them. And maybe that’s why the conversation between them became stilted. Or maybe it was because Vince was tired and still too preoccupied with the unresolved case to make small talk. Either way, she had to coax some conversation out of him, and Vince could tell that it had really dried up when she came round to discussing their hobbies. It turned out that Isabel had lots of them, from country sports through the entire gamut of urbane salon culture. Vince, it turned out, had none to offer in return. Zero. She didn’t believe him, pointing out the broken artwork on his walls, the books on his bookshelf, the record collection. Vince eventually piped up that he had plans to learn a musical instrument – the alto sax. Isabel said that she played the piano, to Grade 6.

It was dark by the time they made it back to the flat Isabel was renting just off Flood Street in Chelsea, where she tentatively invited him up for a nightcap. He made his excuses, he was tired, not at his best and needed to get home, all of which was true. They’d done a very memorable morning, an entire afternoon and the best part of an evening together, and it was now time to call it a day. There was a tacit understanding between them that they both knew how to not outstay their welcome.

But as Isabel scraped her key in the door, there was something urgent she needed to ask him. ‘Do you think it would be possible for me to meet Marcy Jones’s family? Or is that the worst idea in the world?’

Vince could think instantly of a hundred and one reasons why it would be impossible for her to meet them, but then his mind scrolled back to Marcy’s funeral: to her mother and her aunts, and all the bonneted Christian women out-singing and, in their own way, out-muscling Michael X and his mob with their display of Christian forgiveness. Forgiveness was a concept Vince had grappled with and lost, but wielded in those women’s hands, it was a mightily powerful weapon.

‘I know where they’ll be tomorrow morning, if you want to find out.’

On the walk back to his flat in Pimlico, Vince decided to take the scenic route via the embankment. There was some genuine London fog swirling around in the damp night air, obscuring and abstracting and making everything just that little unreal, and Vince wanted to take it in. The lamps lit alongside the darkly running river glowed orange, like a landing strip for some monstrous seabird, creating a Turneresque Thames that was alive with possibilities and yet soaked in history and horrors. This was the city of his imagination. Along the embankment couples linked arms, tramps huddled around bottles and expensive cars rushed confidently past.

Vince reached into his jacket and gripped the butt of his gun. He didn’t look round, but was aware of the tap-tap of two pairs of footsteps behind him, measured in their stride as if not wanting to catch up, not wanting to overtake, but wanting to stay right behind him. Vince stopped. Whoever they were – and he had a pretty good idea – he didn’t want to lead them directly to his home. No, he wanted to leave them here, on the embankment of the Thames. He wanted to leave them lying
in
the Thames, if he had the chance. Behind him, the sound of shoe leather against the stone pavement petered out, too. Before turning round to face them, Vince transferred the gun from his shoulder holster to his right-hand-side jacket pocket. He judged they could not see this manoeuvre by what light was available to him: very little beyond eight or nine feet. The fog was doing a good job in providing cover for both parties involved. The conditions were perfect to kill someone.

There were low voices, and, somewhere wrapped in the night, he was sure he heard the words
See you around, friend.

Vince pulled the gun out of his jacket and started to move back towards them, towards that voice. He passed a seated young couple locked in a kiss. Passed three men wearing football scarves and carrying rattles. Passed a man walking a snappy terrier . . .

Vince stopped. He listened, and all he heard was his own breath, jagged through fear. He slid the gun back into its holster.

See you around, friend.

He knew that voice would never leave him.

Suited and booted in his Sunday best, Vince picked up Isabel on the King’s Road and they drove off to St James’s Methodist church on Lancaster Road in Notting Hill Gate. She too was in her Sunday best: smart, demure and respectful-looking in a dark blue suit.

God was doing good business. It was a full house, completely packed. The congregational composition was pretty much as it had been for the funeral, mainly black families with a smattering of white ones; but all unified under the one roof, and all singing from the same hymn sheet. Vince had never seen so many smiling faces. No wonder they all liked this place, he thought. He was beginning to like it himself. If he hadn’t habituated himself with a stack of newspapers and a lie-in on a Sunday morning, he could see himself pitching up here and having a good singsong, and getting to know the parishioners, volunteering himself, getting baptized, and . . . what cut the fantasy short was spotting the reason why he was here in the first place.

The Jones family had taken up all of the first three pews: Cecilia Jones and her three sisters and their husbands, and children and various other offshoots of the family. Compared to the women in the congregation, all the men seemed second-bested in church. The sermon was delivered by a man but, even elevated in his pulpit, he clearly knew that it was the women who ruled the roost in this place. After the service, Vince left Isabel still seated and went over to the family, where he was warmly met – especially by Ruby.

Isabel watched as Vince talked with the family. She had recognized Ruby immediately from the images she had seen of her dead mother in the newspapers: a posed photo of an angel-faced black girl in her nurse’s uniform; a vision of innocence and virtue and esteem. Isabel took several deep breaths to try and quell the debilitating anxiety that now took hold of her. Her cheeks flushed and she felt hot tears brewing behind her eyes. She edged out of the pew and along the aisle, as quietly and swiftly as a church mouse – though not even that, because they at least belonged there and she didn’t. She felt herself an impostor, an enemy. Once out of the church, she stood by Vince’s car and wept. She soon felt an arm around her shoulder, and she drew into him. He kissed her on the forehead, then took her hand.

In the drawing room of Cecilia Jones’s house in Chesterton Road, Isabel was sitting with the ladies, seven in all including herself. They drank piping hot tea and ate homemade cake, which was a darkly rich confection of rum and raisins. Vince ate two slices of the delicious thing, and Cecilia said she’d give him the recipe to hand on to his wife. With his mouth still full of the sticky rummy cake, he didn’t correct her and nodded to indicate his delight at this opportunity to hand it to the fictitious Mrs Treadwell.

Apart from Vince, the only other man present was the minister, who was there to serve as a spiritual policeman to the proceedings. Although forgiveness was the aim of them all and the order of the day, faced with so much to forgive they potentially needed someone on hand to guide them through it. The minister’s presence, as it turned out, wasn’t necessary. Once the cake had been snarfed and the tea drunk, Vince made his excuses and left the women to it, as all thought it best he should. His plan was to get the newspapers, and then sit in the car and catch up on the world news and the football results. But as soon as he shut the living room door, he saw Ruby sitting on the stairs.

‘Do you want to see my new room, Mr Treadwell?’

The newspapers could wait. The world could wait. Even the football results could wait.

‘I do, but only if you call me Vince. All my friends call me Vince.’

She offered him her hand, he took it, and she led him up to her new room, which was much the same as the old room, since all her toys had been transported from Basing Street to Chesterton Road. Vince got on his knees with Ruby, and she went through the names and history of each doll, teddy bear and toy in the room. All apart from one, a blonde Barbie doll in a red plastic raincoat with a matching peak cap. She sat in a moulded red plastic MG sports car with a white interior. It looked brand new, untouched and expensive. When Vince asked Ruby about the Barbie, the little girl’s head dipped and Vince realized something was wrong. He put the tip of his forefinger on to her chin, and raised her head, to reveal eyes glazed over with a sheen of tears.

‘Who gave you this doll, Ruby?’

Her hand shot up and swept his finger away from her chin.

‘You can tell me,’ he assured her.

After a protracted pause, she leaned forward and cupped her hand against his ear and whispered . . .

Vince got into the Mk II and retrieved the Colt .38 that he’d taped under the driver’s seat, and tucked it into his waistband. The switchblade hidden in the glove compartment he slipped into his jacket pocket. Tooled up, he got out of the car again and slammed the door shut. He wanted to run but held back, taking a calming breath. He knew he’d be needing all his strength and all his restraint as he strode towards the Portobello Road.

Midday Sunday, he was hoping to find Tyrell Lightly standing outside one of the pubs with his cohorts, shooting the shit and watching over their corners, as they were wont to do. Or even spot a Brother X, not that he expected too much from them, but the word that Vince was after Tyrell Lightly might have filtered back and flushed him out. In Finches bar it was the usual lazy Sunday afternoon crowd. But then, the place was full of the usual lazy Sunday afternoon crowd on any day of the week. Knots of men stood there nattering away about nothing in particular, while hangovers were getting the hair of the dog, darts were getting thrown and time was getting wasted until lunch was served.

Vince headed on down Oxford Gardens to Michael X’s headquarters. The one-stop community shop that advertised itself as being open twenty-four hours a day was closed. Vince rang the bell, banged on the door, called through the letter box and got no response. He thought he saw brief movement from behind one of the curtains covering the windows, and he could have sworn he glimpsed a sudden fleeting eclipse when he peered through the spyhole in the door. But if anyone was in, they weren’t answering.

He then did the rounds of known haunts and hangouts, just like he had done when he first went in search of Tyrell Lightly. The drinking club in Powis Square, where he’d last located Lightly, had been closed down and a For Sale sign was now attached to a pillar of the portico. Vince headed down to Westbourne Grove to the Calypso club and the Fiesta. Business there was brisk, but again no Tyrell Lightly. History repeated itself, unsurprisingly: the daily grind of criminality in most cities is all about history repeating itself. The quest for the quick and illicit pound could be as dull as the dullest nine-to-five – just with longer hours. So it wasn’t such a surprise to find the drug dealer Vivian Chalcott plotted up in the Walmer Castle, sitting in a snug, on his own, reading the papers, and minding his own damn business with a pint of Guinness patiently losing its head before him.

Vince stood over him, casting a long and impatient shadow, till Chalcott lowered his paper and peered up with alarmed eyes, a glistening white foamy moustache covering his thin bristly moustache like a morning frost. His business today was no longer his own, and he knew it.

‘Tyrell Lightly. I need him, Vivian. And need him now.’

The Cellar Door was an aptly named one-room drinker with a pool table, and was situated in the cellar of a second-hand furniture shop on the Golborne Road. Vivian Chalcott had given up Tyrell Lightly, again, without too much of a fuss. He didn’t like Lightly. He’d heard the rumours about his predilections, and Vince now confirmed them. Vivian told him the news that Tyrell Lightly was out of favour with Michael and the Brothers X. He was back in his pimp gear and no longer wearing the uniform of X. Vivian put it down to Lightly holding out on some deals, cutting up rough with the whores, trying to carve out some business of his own and generally rude-boying his way all over town and pulling cowboy stuff as if he was still back in the yards of Trenchtown.

So here Vince was, descending the steep rickety cellar stairs leading into the Cellar Door club, while listening out for the voice of Tyrell Lightly, or at least the mention of his name, amid the bar-room chatter and West Indian patois that blended so effortlessly with the chinking of the glasses and the potting of pool balls. As Vince reached the foot of the stairs, if there had been a piano in the place it would have stopped playing. All eyes were fixed on him; Vince counted about ten pairs of them. Someone uttered a heavily question-marked ‘Pig?’. Vince was hearing that word a lot lately.

Two fellows playing pool moved in front of him, blocking his view. They looked as if they’d been living in the place all their lives, seldom coming up for air. Behind them, Vince heard the unnerving click of pool balls, knowing full well that three of them swung around inside a sock could do a lot of damage.

Beyond the pair of pool players, a door creaked, and he was sure someone had slipped out of the place. There was music playing on a transistor radio, something chirpy and innocuous by the Dave Clark Five. It got turned up full pelt and soon became oppressive white noise. And, as if on cue, the pool cues that the two players wielded for sport were now gripped to inflict violence.