Gilded Edge, The (7 page)

Vince broke out of his reverie to see Doc Clayton standing before him. The good doctor grabbed up the newspaper lying on Vince’s desk and turned to the racing section. Vince grabbed the paper back.

‘I want to see what price they’ve got for Arkle in the Gold Cup!’

‘It’s the favourite, no value. What news, Doc?’

‘Forensics found another set of prints on the gun.’

‘Yeah?’

`Partial prints mind, but prints none the less. They belong to Beresford.’

Vince frowned. ‘How’s that news? It was his gun.’

‘It’s news because we also found carbon traces, gunpowder, on his trigger finger. Fresh ones, too. Which would strongly suggest that he himself fired the gun that night.’

Vince considered this point. As Doc Clayton awaited Vince’s opinion, he couldn’t help himself from grabbing up the paper again to check the racing section. Vince let him read it whilst he theorized, and postulated: ‘So, Isabel and Beresford got drunk together. They had an argument. Beresford gets a gun, waves it about for dramatic effect, maybe fires it into a wall to scare her? And then Isabel clobbers him with the champagne bottle . . . snatches the gun and puts one in his head?’

‘Sounds good to me,’ said Doc Clayton, eyes still fixed on the racing page.

‘But why move the body?’ asked Vince, grabbing back the paper. Only a big fat shrug from Doc Clayton. ‘And not only why move the body, but how? Beresford is six foot something and weighs in at fourteen stone something else. She’s five foot eight and catwalk skinny. There’s no way she could have lifted his dead weight and moved him. And anyway she was drunk and stoned.’

Doc Clayton arched a doubtful eyebrow over his wiry spectacles. ‘You’d be surprised at the reserves of strength the human body has. If she really did shoot him, she would have been running high on adrenalin. There’s lots of cases of people gaining three, four times their natural strength in a situation where their fear levels are raised. Or if their life is in danger. It’s known as dynamic tension.’

‘Like a pumped-up athlete?’

‘Exactly! They say that’s why the Russians are so good in the Olympics, because they’re scared they’ll end up in Siberia if they lose!’

‘What does Mac say about it?’

‘He says to refer everything to you first, as you’re running the case.’

Vince smiled, swung his feet off his desk, and picked up the paper and ditched it in the wastepaper bin. ‘Okay, let’s get a team down to Beresford’s place and try and find that bullet.’

Vince and Doc Clayton were able to rustle up three PCs, and two forensics, and headed to Eaton Square. First of all they swept the ground-floor living room where Isabel and Beresford had their little party and, predictably enough to Vince, found nothing. And then they concentrated on the basement study where Beresford’s body had been found. However much Vince bought into Doc Clayton’s theory of her adrenalized body gaining extra strength, he doubted that Isabel could sustain the amount of strength necessary to drag the corpse out of the drawing room, along the hallway, down the stairs and into the study. And, with the bloody head wound he had incurred, she certainly couldn’t have done so without leaving some kind of visible trail.

In the study, Vince and the team fine-toothed the room wall to wall, floor to ceiling. They even took down the books from the shelves to see if the bullet had got lodged in any of the tomes, which mostly dealt with history, finance, military exploits, hunting and fishing and shooting and gambling, along with a twenty-four piece leather-bound encyclopedia and some signed copies of Ian Fleming’s James Bond adventures. But, fitting as that might have been, there were no bullets to be found in 007. Vince got up on a ladder to give the two mounted stags a quick autopsy, to check that neither of the poor souls had copped for yet another bullet. Every inch of the room was searched, and nothing found. Far from the case being cut and dried, Vince was determined – family money or no money, personal contact with the Queen or not – to wake up Sleeping Beauty and ask her the questions that needed to be asked.

Before Vince left the room, he was drawn again to the photograph of Beresford and his five friends at the Montcler Club. He suspected he might be needing it, so he took the photo out of its cantilevered silver frame and slipped it in his pocket.

It was around 5 p.m. when Vince parked the Mk II in Kensington Church Street and walked towards Notting Hill Gate. For the last three days and nights, he had been hanging around the same area to pick up whatever information he could on Tyrell Lightly. Photos of him showed a snappily attired Negro with sharp good looks, a pencil moustache, and a petulant slyness in his eyes. Back home in Kingston, Jamaica, Tyrell Lightly had put his looks to good use as the lead singer in a calypso outfit called the Gayboys. He was a heartthrob crooner by night, but by day he was a guntoting rude boy aligned to the Spanish Town Posse. Like all the Jamaican gangs, the STP had politics in their blood, as well as other rackets, and they composed the muscle behind the right-wing Jamaican Labour Party, and were in charge of getting the vote out. When the JLP lost the ’57 elections to their main rival, the left-wing People’s National Party, the Spanish Town Posse – and Tyrell Lightly in particular – had left too many bodies lying on the street to be brushed under the carpet, and had made too many widows and too many enemies to be given a government pardon. So Tyrell Lightly had swapped Jamaica for England, Kingston for London and Trenchtown for Notting Hill. He’d stopped crooning by then and was now pure muscle: a bantamweight of wiry knife-wielding venom poured into an electric-blue tonic suit topped off with a red felt Homburg hat sporting a peacock feather.

Vince had been regularly visiting places like Frank Crichlow’s El Rio Café at 127 Westbourne Park Road, where West Indian and white kids hung out together and listened to the new Blue Beat and Ska craze on one of the best-stocked jukeboxes in London. Other favoured haunts, such as the Calypso and the Fiesta One Club, both on Westbourne Grove, were equally busy with hustlers and players. Then you had Johnny Edgcombe’s Dive Bar on the Talbot Road, a jazz club that seemed to never close, and was a favourite with both the artist and the junkie crowd. And not forgetting either all the shebeens in Elgin Crescent, Latimer Road and Oxford Gardens. All these were establishments that Tyrell Lightly’s boss, Michael de Freitas, either ran, had an interest in or took a ‘pension’ from. Vince even played a hand or two in a de Freitas-run spieler in a basement on the Talbot Road, so he blended in easily with the crowd.

To the rest of England, after the so-called ’58 race riots where a couple of hundred white Teddy boys gathered under the lightning-bolt symbol of British fascist banners, and started beating up as many black people as they could find, Notting Hill was seen as a no-go area for, ironically, white people. In reality the disturbance just fired everyone’s imagination and it became
the
place to go. At any given time, in those illicitly smoking rooms, it was packed with writers, artists, models, musicians, film people and thrill seekers of every description, from well-heeled Chelseaites slumming to East End villains exploring fresh territories and letting their Brylcreemed hair down.

Detectives Kenny Block and Philly Jacket thought Vince was wasting his time, for Lightly was bound to have skipped Notting Hill, skipped London if not the country, and was probably back in the yards of Kingston. But Vince wasn’t so sure: sometimes hiding out in plain view was the best place of all. Lightly would feel safe in Notting Hill, and also his boss, Michael de Freitas, had the money and the muscle to protect him. Outside Notting Hill, Tyrell Lightly was just another ‘spade’, but in that de Freitas-run fiefdom – the City of Spades – Tyrell Lightly was if not himself the king, then certainly close enough to him to feel secure. So Vince decided to pay the king a visit.

But there was something else grabbing Vince’s attention in that area. He’d spotted it three days ago in a music store on the Bayswater Road, near Notting Hill Gate. The shop girl had taken it off the shelf for him, and shown him how to apply his curled bottom lip and puckered upper lip to the beak of the instrument. After some huffing and puffing, nothing came out, so she told him to relax. He relaxed, and pretended he was Bird, Art Pepper, Trane, Sonny Stitt . . . and out it came. Just the one note. But it was enough. He was hooked. He wanted more. In his mind’s eye he was already headlining at Ronnie Scott’s. For aesthetic reasons alone, the alto saxophone was a winner, so damn cool. Bold and brassy, it hung in front of you and curled upwards like a king cobra about to bite. It wasn’t cheap, but it was necessary. Learning an instrument was on his list of things he must do before he died; along with learning another language, and a slew of other things that tuned in and out depending on his mood. But the instrument and the language were two constants.

As Vince looked longingly at the alto sax in the window, the girl in the shop saw him and invited him to have another go. Vince explained that he was still just at the looking and longing stage, and needed more time to flirt with his potential new paramour. So he resisted going in, and just stood at the window ogling the shapely and brassy object of desire, until the girl put up the ‘closed’ sign.

Night was closing in as Vince made his way down the Portobello Road. The market stalls were being dismantled, wooden crates were being stacked, trestle tables were being folded and vans were being loaded; and all very loudly as the stallholders got in their last bits of banter to entertain the street and passing traffic. The light from the pubs and late night shops and restaurants and chippies kept the bustling centipede of the Portobello Road alive as, one by one, its multiple legs led off sideways to Colville Terrace, Elgin Crescent, Talbot Road, and then the turning Vince wanted, Cambridge Gardens.

At this end of Notting Hill, things got slow and slummy. The shops and the lights died out and it was now tall terraced houses in various states of disrepair and the new low-rise concrete council blocks that already looked as if they were in rehearsals for becoming urban blight. Next to a brightly painted corner shop that sold everything from booze to bath salts stood another shop. This one was painted black and had a heavy black curtain covering the window – it was about as inviting as a funeral director’s. The gold-letter writing on the window stated its intent:
The Notting Hill Brothers & Sisters Letting Agency – Incorporating Your One Stop Community Shop.
The letting agency/community shop stayed open till well past midnight, under the guise of serving as a local advice centre.

Vince had heard that this was Michael de Freitas’ HQ, and not the spieler in Powis Terrace as everyone thought. Downstairs, he ran his burgeoning property empire, whilst upstairs he conducted card games, dice and dominoes. From here he also ran a book-making operation that ran unhindered by other West London villains because it catered for black punters only; and a private taxi and limousine service that delivered drugs and stunning black whores all over the city.

Vince remembered Michael de Freitas well, a tall Trinidadian with narrow suspicious eyes that were shaded by a heavy frowning brow. On a broad chin he bore the scars picked up in chiv fights, which he covered with a goatee beard that wrapped around a wide mouth that seemed to be permanently set in a scowl. His face was worn like a frightening mask, which for his purposes – having started out as muscle for the slum landlord Peter Rachman – served him well. Faced with Mikey de Freitas banging down the door, people did as they were told, which was either pay up, sell up or shut up! Before Rachman died in ’62, he looked down favourably on the Trinidadian tearaway who had collected his rents and evicted people with such terrifying efficiency, and bequeathed him around twenty of his one hundred and fifty properties in the area. And now, with all his other rackets, Michael de Freitas was surely chewing on the fat end of a good few quid.

Black doors on dark nights, with no one around and only the low hellish sodium glow of orange street lights, are always a little intimidating. They reminded Vince of the great void, the end, and something you don’t really want to go through. Standing at the door, Vince could hear laughter and the sound of dominoes being slammed down on a table, and sensed the rustle of money changing hands.
Them bones, them bones, them crazy bones!
What was traditionally seen as an old man’s game played in backstreet boozers was a different proposition in these boys’ hands. Like with mah-jong games in Chinatown, big money was played on the laying down of a tile. Vince rang the bell, then peered through the small round spy-hole in the glossily painted black door – and saw the light from inside quickly eclipsed. After the few seconds it took for the report to be carried back, the sound of laughter and dominoes stopped.

Vince counted to ten, then questioned if pitching up here on his own was such a good idea. He decided it probably wasn’t – then had the decision taken out of his hands as the door opened. At around six foot, Vince was no midget, but he felt like one as he craned his head skywards to look up at the man in front of him. He was big and black, seven foot if he was an inch. With that height he could have been one of the Harlem Globetrotters – with that height he could have been two of them. His bigness and blackness was made to look all the more big and black because he was so unrelentingly swathed in it too: clad in a long leather trench coat and capped with a black beret. Though worn at an angle, the beret wasn’t of the jaunty French type; it was the serious military kind. Dusk had dutifully departed and it was now officially night, but the tall boy was wearing sunglasses. No light from inside the building escaped because the solid figure was fitted into the doorway as tight as a jigsaw piece in a puzzle. Vince dispensed with the introductions and badged him. The man then stepped back and closed the door. This wordless exchange seemed surreal, so Vince decided to knock again and, this time, say something. But before he could do so, the door opened again and ‘Tiny’ – for that proved to be his nickname – gestured for Vince to come in. Not wanting to be considered a mute, Vince said, ‘Thanks very much.’