And that’s exactly what Block and Jacket had been doing about three hours earlier. In a salacious case that had made all the papers, a schoolteacher had murdered his wife and her lesbian lover, who just happened to be the school’s lollipop lady – the alliteration alone was enough to crack everyone up. The schoolteacher himself was out of the country at the time – a keen philatelist attending a convention in Germany – when the killer broke into the home of his wife’s lollipop lady lesbian lover and splattered both of their brains all over the hire-purchase furniture with a twelve-bore shotgun. Salacious soon became farcical. The schoolteacher was discovered to be enjoying underage relations with one of his pupils. The girl’s father had found out about the affair and confronted the teacher with a twelve-bore shotgun. And, somewhere in the calming-down process, the teacher and the factory-worker father had come up with the idea of killing the teacher’s wife and collecting on the insurance and on her not insubstantial savings.
Vince and Mac had successfully joined the dots and brought the case in, whereupon Block and Jacket had extracted the confessions. For Mr Chips it had seemed like a good idea at the time, rather like in the film Strangers on a Train – but without the train, of course, or even the strangers.
After their case had been put to bed, still too jagged on strong coffee and victory to go home to bed, the coppers had decided to hang on until morning and thus cop for some more overtime, while playing a few hands down in the Inferno.
‘Unbelievable,’ spluttered Philly Jacket.
‘Sit down, Philly,’ said Kenny Block, ‘it was a mistake. You’re just overtired, you’ve had too much coffee, and now you’re overreacting and making a prick of yourself!’
Every feature on Philly Block’s face widened as incredulity took hold. ‘A mistake? Coffee? Tired? Prick? You were cheating!’
‘The cards are gummy, must have got stuck together, you prick!’
‘Again with the prick! Who you calling a prick?’
‘Easy, take it easy,’ said Mac, standing between them and jabbing his index fingers in both their chests in turn. ‘Let’s play nice now, or not at all.’
‘What did you see, Mac?’ asked Philly.
‘What are you asking me for?’ Mac replied, wisely wishing to stay out of it. ‘Ask Vince,’ he suggested, sitting back down at the table before gathering up the cards and shuffling them.
‘He’s not even playing.’
‘Exactly, therefore he hasn’t got a stake in this game. Both you mugs owe me, and I’m not siding with anyone.’
In unison, Kenny Block and Philly Jacket looked at Vince. ‘You been watching the game?’ asked Kenny.
‘Uh-uh.’
‘Then why d’you come down here?’
‘The scintillating conversation.’
Philly and Kenny looked at each other, then back over at Vince. They wanted to take their frustrations out on the young detective.
‘Don’t drink, don’t gamble. What do you do, Treadwell?’
Vince glanced over at them and winked.
‘I bet he does,’ said Kenny, ‘the little bastard! And lots of it. A face for the ladies has Treadwell.’
Vince considered winking again, but realized the two men were very tightly wound up and looking for an excuse to hit someone – anyone – and were happier for it not to be each other. So he just smiled and carried on reading his paper.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Philly Jacket to Kenny Block. ‘Those looks won’t last, not in this job. Someone will knock that smile off his face.’
‘Until that day comes, gentlemen, until that day comes . . .’ said Vince in a distracted sing-song voice.
‘Oh, it’ll come, and sooner than you think,’ muttered Kenny Block to Philly Jacket.
‘Don’t take it out on me because you can’t win a hand,’ said Vince. ‘Which, by the way, I was listening to and believe me, Kenneth and Philip, you can learn as much about a game by listening as you can from watching. Just by hearing how the betting goes.’
‘You know nothing about gambling.’
‘I know everything about gambling. That’s why I choose not to do it. And I know what I heard.’
Block and Jacket’s eyes met in silent conference, both looking for verification of this fact. And, like a mirror image, both faces drew a blank. So they turned to Mac for guidance. Mac weighed it up, and seemed to nod encouragingly in Vince’s favour. Mac then sparked up another Chesterfield.
‘Go on then, enlighten us. What did you hear?’ demanded Block with a begrudging and cynical grimace.
Vince was perched on a cardboard box that was crammed full of files, with his feet up on another box which contained more of the same. The contents of a hundred or so similar boxes should have been either destroyed or filed away long ago, but no one had yet got around to it. And so the sagging containers had been turned into reasonably comfortable furniture, making up the stools the men were sitting on and the table they were playing at.
The four coppers were currently in a storage room located in the basement next to the ‘Tombs’, the old holding cells of Scotland Yard. The bright red NO SMOKING sign was habitually ignored, and the smoking was regularly accompanied by lots of drinking and gambling. Ground-out cigarette butts studded the floor. Discarded matches were tossed over shoulders with drunken abandon. All of which could be viewed as more than a little careless, considering the place was a veritable tinderbox of cardboard boxes filled with parched old files, therefore likely to ignite at any minute. Someone had once commented that this basement storage room had the smoky and hellish atmosphere of Dante’s Inferno. The name had stuck. No one, Vince suspected, had read that epic poem, but they were all pretty sure that hell must be something like it – especially when you were on the end of a losing hand of cards.
Vince considered the other men, felt the weight of expectation on him, the potential for a punch-up, and the shredding of a reputation. And the opportunity for a good wind-up. He pulled a wicked grin internally, but externally remained poker-faced. He finally put down his paper, swung his legs around and planted his feet firmly on the ground, striking a Rodin pose as he gave the enquiry some serious rumination.
‘Come on, Treadwell, what did you hear?’ barked Philly Jacket.
After a hefty sigh, Vince said, ‘Well, gentlemen, from what I heard, I reckon . . .’
Vince was saved by the bell. The fire alarm. And soon that was all that any of them could hear. Its repetitive note ricocheted around the room, almost sending ripples through the fug of smoke in the Inferno.
‘Ah, what in the sweet name of?’ cried Mac, standing up, shaking his head, and stubbing out his Chesterfield in the coffee dregs in a Styrofoam cup.
‘What’s all this about?’ demanded Kenny Block, doing the one-footed twist as he ground his Benson & Hedges into the floor.
‘Unbelievable! Un-fucking-believable!’ crowed Philly Jacket, chipping a just-lit Rothmans and putting it back in the packet.
Vince didn’t smoke – he didn’t need to with the amount of time he spent in the Inferno.
The alarm stopped as suddenly as it had started, and PC Barry Birley, the most lanky and long-limbed copper that anyone had ever seen, stretched his presence into the room.
‘What’s it all about Shirley?’ barked Mac. The Birley/Shirley joke had happened to the lanky copper’s surname a long time ago.
‘The Guv’s idea. He assumed you lot would be down here.’
‘What’s Markham doing here, Shirley?’ pressed Philly Jacket, looking at his watch, and not liking what he saw. It was 8 a.m.
Mac threw Philly Jacket a stupid-question look. He knew exactly what the Supe – a church-goer, then an avid golfer – would be doing in the office at 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning.
‘Where is it, Shirley?’
‘There’s two of them. One in Notting Hill, one in Belgravia.’
CHAPTER 2
The murder of a black girl of limited means in a not too salubrious part of town, and the murder
of a very well-heeled and very well-connected white male in a very salubrious part of town? No one dared say that one murder outweighed or took priority over the other but, given institutional thinking in places like the Met, Vince couldn’t help but be quietly satisfied at having been handed the Belgravia caper (every crime was described as a caper, from gruesome murders to frauds and thefts). All things being equal, Vince, being Vince, might rather have got the Notting Hill caper. He’d spent time in that area, while working Shepherds Bush, his first posting, and still had friends and contacts there. But being thrown the Belgravia caper did tell him one thing: that, after being in CID’s Murder Squad for all of four months, he was now trusted with a high-profile case.
But, of course, he was partnering DCI Maurice McClusky, an officer with an outstanding record. And, over the three months they’d been working together, he’d not only learned an immeasurable amount but had grown fond of the older detective.
Mac was a tall slim man, who, though only in his late forties, looked well north of his late fifties. He had a slow burn about him: professorial, methodical, walking with meandering stooped gait. He reminded Vince of the actor Jimmy Stewart, who, with his willowy frame and cautious demeanour, always managed to look older than his years. Mac had a long, gaunt face with deep lines running down it, like the folds in a theatrical curtain, all of which just accentuated his serious expression. His skin had an ashen pallor, perhaps accounted for by the constant haul of smoke he took on board through his beloved Chesterfields or his trusty pipe. Smoking aside, he wasn’t the type to get flustered and red-faced, and Vince had never seen him break into anything resembling a run, never mind a sweat. He took everything in his stride, seeming the most measured man Vince had ever met. Mac had a full head of thick wavy hair that was now salt and pepper in colour but impressively white at the temples; like a dove had perched on the back of his neck and was hugging his head. And he always wore the same grey flannel suits, always a crisp white shirt and a black tie. With this monochrome appearance, he looked as if he’d stepped out of a black-and-white film into a Technicolor world. Or from Kansas into Oz, if you will.
Vince wheeled his shimmering petrol-blue Mk II Jaguar out of the car park and headed west. Hands planted at ten to two on the knotted wood of the steering wheel, looking down at the burr-walnut dashboard that framed the polished binnacles housing the various dials with their jolting needles, Vince gunned the engine to a steady purr as he made his way around Oxford Circus, along Park Lane, down to Victoria then finally Belgravia. He kept the Mk II at a sedate pace, allowing them to take in London’s pomp – its history, its vanity, its palaces, its arches, its grand roadside gestures memorializing bloody battles – while roundabouting its stalled one-way traffic systems. Bronze eighteenth-century warriors sat proudly astride their mounts, looking down at First World War troops crawling all around an insurmountable stone block that marked their mass grave. They, in turn, were looking up at the Second World War Tommies standing aloft on their plinths, too occupied to appreciate their luck in being born a generation later because they were busily eyeing up a couple of scantily clad older birds: Britannia and Boudicca, rendered in marble and sitting safely in their squares.
Two uniformed coppers stood sentry before the columns supporting the portico of number 57 Eaton Square. Marked and unmarked police cars were double-parked immediately outside. Getting out of his car, Mac stretched and took in a deep and sonorous sniff of the crisp morning air, then said: ‘You smell that, Vincent?’
Vince sniffed the air too, but nothing came to mind.
‘Money,’ Mac said. ‘Unmistakable.’
Vince laughed. ‘Any idea how much a place like this might cost?’
‘More than our public-sector pay packet could ever spring for.’
‘Maybe I’ll marry well.’
‘Wouldn’t surprise me. If you’re in need of a butler, keep me in mind.’
Vince couldn’t actually smell it, but he could see it. There was something coolly aloof about this square: the ordered affluence perhaps. No kids playing out in the street – for that matter, no one on the street at all. Even the litter seemed to have picked itself up and put itself in the bins. And, for all the police presence and the potential for excitement and scandal, there were no gawpers, no rubber-neckers. Doubtless the neighbours were concerned, but they were metropolitan enough not to appear openly surprised. This was London – this was the middle of it – and it wasn’t always a box of chocolates. And even if it was, no matter how rich and creamy the centre, there was always a hard carapace surrounding it. So the local residents stayed secure inside their alarm-belled and white-walled castles.
The two detectives unnecessarily badged the two uniformed coppers, who had known who they were the minute Vince and Mac had parked across the street and come striding over to the house. Not that they looked especially like coppers – Vince himself was threaded-up in a Prince of Wales check suit, worn with a pale blue shirt with faux French cuffs and a black knitted tie subtly flecked with dark blue dots. A beige three-quarter-length Aquascutum raincoat kept out the wind, which held a bitter bite, and he was shod in a pair of black Chelsea boots polished to within an inch of their life, so the puddled pavement didn’t prove too much of a problem. He was also road-testing a new haircut, for his black hair, normally worn swept back, was now worn with a side parting. It was more Steve McQueen in The Great Escape than Ringo Starr in A Hard Day’s Night, and he liked it. He liked looking in the mirror in the morning and fussing around for a few minutes, trying to re-establish his parting as he thought about his day ahead. Cutting a dash seemed compulsory these days, and everyone was at it. Vince Treadwell could thus have been anyone he wanted to be, from a fast-talking Ogilvy & Mather’s advertising man off to a pitch, or a suited and booted rock-and-roller attending a court appearance on a dope pinch. The boundaries were breaking up: this was the age of reinvention and upward mobility. Yes, in 1965 you could be anyone you wanted – or at least that’s what the man from Ogilvy & Mather was selling you, and what the rock-and-roller up on a dope pinch was singing about.
No, it wasn’t the duds that marked Vince and Mac out as a pair of detectives; it was the attitude, the way they crossed the road and walked up to the house. They were at work from the minute they got out of the car. They took in the street, their eyes subtly scoping and scouring and absorbing the scene, as they looked for people watching, curtains twitching, scaffolding erected nearby that might offer vantage points into the house itself, flower sellers, taxi stands, kiosks, tented builders digging up the road, checking on anyone who might have witnessed the ins and outs of the victim’s home; anything that might just look out of place or provide a witness. And that was why Mac, the experienced and wily copper, kept to such a meandering pace, because he was assessing and assimilating the world he was entering, and capturing mental film footage that would be stored up for future reference. And Vince was absorbing Mac’s movements and was learning to slow his pace, too.
Nice and easy does it.
CHAPTER 3
In one of the downstairs reception rooms, scene-of-crime officers were deep in discussion with the white coats of forensics and pathology. Clayton Merryman had already inspected the body and was making his preliminary notes. Nearby came the flash of magnesium, as cameras popped and pictures were taken. Details of the victim had been gathered, and teams of uniforms were being sent out to ask the neighbours what they had seen, or heard, or knew. Mac went straight over to join the huddle of coppers and white coats, while Vince hung back and studied the room. It was cathedral-like in its proportions, and the ornate decoration on the ceiling looked as if it had been piped on by a master cake decorator. Two stalactite crystal chandeliers, which wouldn’t have looked out of place in an opera house, hung miraculously. Small, and not so small, expensive figurines stood in every available space on the richly hued mahogany furniture. A long-cased clock skulking in one corner of the room struck the hour with a gloomy chime. The gilt-framed painti
ngs on the walls featured dark and serious portraits of men dressed for war, from a fey-looking Elizabethan in doublet and hose to a First World War officer encased in a greatcoat, amid warriors and soldiers from every war and imperial skirmish along the way. The women all looked the same: stiff and starched in lace and festoons, with powdered hair and alabaster doll’s skin and brightly painted pinched lips. Meet the family! The whole room looked as if it needed a red rope sectioning it off, and a uniformed guide to talk you through the contents.
It wasn’t until Vince looked more closely that he spotted the details that assured him he hadn’t time-travelled back a couple of hundred years. Tucked away in a corner was a shiny hi-fi; a record sat on the turntable and some 45s, out of their sleeves, were scattered on the floor nearby. On a marble-topped coffee table stood two fluted glasses, one bearing the distinctive lipstick print of a woman – the colour was red. Vince spotted two empty champagne bottles by the Parian marble fireplace; another sat on the floor by a red-striped, silk-covered chaise longue. They all bore the eyecatching, wallet-thinning, burnished-gold shield label of Dom Perignon. Resting on a French marble-topped commode, next to an enormous bronze figure depicting the god Atlas supporting the world, about the size of a football, on his back, was a heavy cut-crystal ashtray. It was brimming with the butts of thirty or so thoughtlessly smoked cigarettes. Vince went over to take a look. Bending down, he saw that among the biscuit-coloured filtered butts were three hand-rolled joints smoked down to the roach.
Mac meandered back over towards him, and Vince said: ‘It looks like our man had company last night. A little party? I bet it wasn’t with his wife – if he’s even married.’
Mac nodded in agreement, but wanted this deduction explained. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘When was the last time you and your wife got drunk and danced around to Lulu’s “Shout!” – just the two of you?’
‘You’d be surprised, Vincent, what me and Betty get up to. And she much prefers The Rolling Stones.’
Gilded Edge, The Page 2