Gilded Edge, The

by Miller, Danny

  Standing by the marble coffee table, Vince looked down at the neatly piled folios of A4 white embossed paper. They contained Isabel Saxmore-Blaine’s prepared statement, signed by her and counter-signed by Geoffrey Lancing. And they were covered in some of the finest penmanship he’d ever seen. The handwriting slanted to the right, like rippling waves, but never fell into disorder: each letter, each word looked perfectly balanced and almost hypnotic. This was not the scratchy scrawl of a nervous suicidal wreck.

  ‘I suppose I should give you that thank you now, Detective Treadwell.’

  Vince glanced up from the statement towards Isabel Saxmore-Blaine. Her hair was shoulder-length, golden in colour and thick as honey, with blonde streaks running through it from the sun. Her skin was taut and lightly tanned, stretched over high cheekbones that gave her face its inherent structural beauty. With this combination, the rest of her features didn’t have to work so hard in the looks department, but they all pulled their weight. A lineless forehead showed off plucked dark eyebrows that arched over large brown eyes. A slender nose, nothing much to report there; it looked just as it was meant to be, and fitted effortlessly into place. The mouth was rather shapely, not narrow and pinched, and looked as if it could easily open out into a broad and welcoming smile – just not right now. And all this was cradled on a faultlessly defined jawline. The only visible flaw was the bruise, but that was Vince’s imprint, not nature’s. Isabel Saxmore-Blaine’s was a subtle beauty, nothing overpowering and pouty. It was demure, classy. It drew you in, made you want to lean forward to take a closer look. Somewhere about her, maybe in the eyes, she held a puzzle, an innate mystery you wanted to solve, a missing piece you wanted to find . . .

  ‘You don’t have to thank me,’ said Vince. ‘Trite as it might sound, it’s all part of the job.’

  ‘I only said I wanted to thank you because I wanted to clear Geoffrey out of the room.’

  Once the initial shock of her up-close and in-the-flesh beauty had been appraised and applauded, Vince noticed that she was looking at him as though he was a hat stand; something in her line of vision but no more. The widely set eyes were now hooded, and Vince couldn’t tell if this was a withering look or maybe the effects of the tranquillizers she’d been on. But since the departure of the lawyer, he felt things in the room had become decidedly frosty.

  ‘But you really shouldn’t have bothered, and it would have been easier and quicker if you hadn’t. I wanted to die,’ she said, seemingly without moving her lips or modulating her tone in any way.

  Vince considered this. When it happened, he hadn’t believed she wanted to kill herself. She had the gun in her bag and had plenty of time to squeeze off a shot before he arrived. Killing yourself is always the final – and you can’t stress that enough – the final option. Vince and Mac turning up on the scene just accelerated her options. He hadn’t saved her; if anything, he’d almost killed her.

  A thin blue thread of smoke rose up from her cigarette as she gestured for him to sit down, which he did, on the floral-patterned sofa that the lawyer had been sitting on.

  ‘I wanted to see you because I want to tell you everything I remember.’

  Vince gave a cautious nod to the written statement lying on the coffee table. ‘It’s not already written down?’

  ‘Yes, the facts as they are – as I remember them. But I read it all through, and it’s not quite enough. Do you understand?’

  Vince understood. Without turning a statement into a poem or a novel, it would be what it was – just a record of the facts. And somehow they never managed to tell the full story. ‘Then Mr Lancing was right,’ he said, ‘and I need to advise you that it would be best to have a lawyer present.’

  ‘I don’t want one. I don’t need one. I’m assuming I’m guilty, and I’m assuming that I’m going to be arrested for murdering Johnny. Am I right?’

  Again Vince gestured towards the statement. ‘Depends on what’s in this. I take it your statement was prepared with Mr Lancing present?’

  She nodded.

  ‘And is it true?’

  ‘Yes, it’s true. And, if you read it, I’m sure you’ll agree that it makes a very good case for me being innocent, because Geoffrey is one of the finest lawyers in the land . . .’

  Although her voice was low and infused with a smoky decadence, it was still cut-glass in its precision. Nothing got lost or trampled on; every syllable was pronounced to within an inch of its life. He also noted the slight American accent.

  ‘So I hear, but it seems that you’re not so sure?’

  She looked away from him, down to her hand holding the cigarette. It had burned down to the biscuit-coloured filter. She walked carefully over to the handbasin. Vince noticed that her movements were slightly mechanical. She ran the tap and extinguished the butt, took out the empty crumpled cigarette packet, put the butt inside it, then returned it to her pocket. She re-joined Vince and composed herself on the sofa. Not as cosy as it sounded; the sofa was as big as a boat and she was seated starboard, he was port.

  ‘I must warn you, Miss Saxmore-Blaine, that if you wish to talk to me about the suspected murder of Mr Beresford, I’ll need to first inform you of your rights.’

  ‘I don’t care about that – about the law.’

  ‘You should, because the law will care about you, and in all the wrong ways. You’re in a very precarious position since, as far as we know, you were the last person to see Mr Beresford alive. Also you had in your possession the gun that killed him.’

  With her hands clasped in front of her, she sat very still, taking deep controlled breaths. And for the first time he clearly saw the hangover from the medication. It was slowing Isabel Saxmore-Blaine’s world and keeping everything manageably unreal for her, freezing up the delta of tears that was now backing up behind those lustrous dark eyes. So dark that the pupil and the iris were almost indistinguishable. Her voice was so precise because it was overcompensating, reacting just a second or so too late.

  She said: ‘I have to tell you what happened. Because I need to know myself if I killed Johnny.’

  Vince saw that she was ripe to talk; she wanted to unburden. He’d seen that look before with suspects, and it had always resulted in eliciting the truth. She began to talk, oh so carefully.

  It was all pretty much as they had picked up on, anyway, from family and friends and the investigation they had conducted. For the last month or so, Isabel had been out of the country, staying with friends on the sleepy Balearic island of Ibiza. She had wanted to get away from Johnny Beresford and the high-octane social whirligig of the London party scene that she had been caught on for the last few years; just to clear her head and do some sober thinking. She was convinced that her future no longer rested with Johnny, and had returned to London to tell him so. When she arrived at Eaton Square, he had been all charm and affection, kisses and cuddles, stating his love for her and how much he’d missed her, and how his night-owl days of gambling and carousing were now over, and how he wanted to settle down with her and raise a family. But it was obvious that he’d been drinking, and he soon confessed that he’d been drinking all day. Johnny Beresford had an almost superhuman capacity for handling industrial amounts of booze: he could out-drink a poet on payday or a gang of sailors putting into port.

  Isabel looked ashamed as she confessed that one thing had led to another, and they ended up popping open some champagne and getting drunk together. One last hurrah, perhaps? She knew it was a bad idea, having been on the wagon for almost three months now. Things had soon changed, as things are apt to do when people get drunk. The inhibitions slipped away and the old grievances and animosities resurfaced. As they argued, Beresford started getting abusive. He’d been abusive before, but she’d never seen him like this – till she feared for her life. It was as if he was losing his mind. That’s when she hit him with the bottle, to protect herself when he came at her. But then she blacked out. Next thing she remembered was seeing him dead in the armchair, and the gun lying
on the floor . . .

  ‘Do you smoke, Detective?’ she asked suddenly.

  ‘No, but I could go downstairs and get you a pack,’ he said eagerly, not wanting her to lose her train of thought through the distraction of a nicotine jag.

  ‘No, no,’ she said, with a resolute shake of her head. ‘I’m not allowed to smoke in this room, of course, and I’m trying to give up anyway – you hear such stories these days.’

  ‘Were there other women in his life?’

  At this question, her face registered that she thought it was if not impertinent, then certainly a distasteful one. ‘Why do you ask?’

  Vince matter-of-factly responded, ‘The life you described, it goes with the territory.’

  She gave a conceding sigh, then said, ‘One would assume so, but I don’t know any names in particular. For Johnny and his friends it was not just perfectly acceptable to have a mistress; it was deemed dreadfully unacceptable not to have one.’

  ‘You weren’t married.’

  ‘Correct. Not that it makes it any better. In fact, that makes it slightly worse – right, Detective?’

  Vince got on to safer territory. ‘What was Mr Beresford doing with a gun in the house?’

  ‘Johnny loved guns and hunting almost as much as gambling. Almost, but not quite.’

  ‘Was that the other woman? I’ve known a few gambling widows in my time. He was a member of the Montcler Club, I believe?’

  ‘A member is an understatement. A devotee and an exalted one of the brethren, I’d say, but yes, Detective, you’re right. Very perceptive of you. That place has been responsible for creating more lonely widows than a reasonably large and very disastrous war. And yes, Johnny’s gambling had been a point of issue between us. Not that he lost that much. On the contrary, he seemed to win rather a lot. But it was the amount of time he spent at the club. I had sort of resigned myself to it, because that’s what he was, a gambler. He’d been doing it long before he met me – as he pointed out – so I knew the score, or the deal I should say.’

  ‘So tell me about Mr Beresford and guns.’

  ‘I won’t say they held a fetishistic obsession for him, but sometimes Johnny would carry one when he went out at night – going to the Montcler Club to play cards, or to a party, or a business meeting. It amused him; maybe it turned him on in some way. Can you see that, Detective?’

  Vince indeed could see it: something forbidden and deadly lurking within the polite society. ‘Did he keep it tucked in his cummerbund?’

  ‘I’m assuming that remark was humorous, Detective, but it’s also pretty well spot on. A macho affectation, a childish accessory and, yes, completely ridiculous.’

  ‘Did he actually fire the gun at you that night?’

  At this she recoiled, as though it was the most ridiculous thing she’d heard in the world. ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Don’t look so shocked Miss Saxmore-Blaine. You said you were both drunk. You said he was acting erratically and you’d never seen him like that before. Then you hit him over the head with a champagne bottle and he ended up with a bullet in him. Considering how things panned out that night, and his penchant for macho affectations, it’s not such an outrageous question.’

  She immediately ceded the point and looked shamefaced at the litany of behaviour laid before her.

  Vince continued. ‘Okay, the gun . . . you say you blacked out and woke up to find him dead in the chair, the gun lying at his feet?’ She nodded. ‘Had you passed out in the basement study?’

  She put the fingertips of each hand to her temples, as if trying to focus her mind. Then, after a meditative pause, she lowered them and shook her head in failed resignation. ‘I don’t know what I was doing down there. The last thing I remember was being in the living room. I remember hitting him . . . hitting him with the bottle . . . and then I blacked out. Next I was down in the study. I had the gun in my hand, and there was blood on it. I must have gone looking for him, and picked it up . . .’

  ‘Why didn’t you call the police, instead of picking up the gun and running out of the house?’

  ‘Maybe because . . . because I knew I was going to kill myself?’

  ‘Because you’d killed him?’

  He saw the anxiety and uncertainty gathering on her face, almost reaching the tipping point into tears.

  ‘I don’t know . . . To say anything else would be a lie. Because I swear to God, I just don’t know.’

  ‘Well, unless we can find out more than you’ve revealed, it’s looking cut and dried, Miss Saxmore-Blaine. You killed Johnny Beresford with his own gun, then ran out of there.’

  She stood up quickly and strode back over to the window. Vince stood up, but didn’t go over to join her. She wasn’t running away from his questions, and she wasn’t denying that she had killed Beresford. She just wanted confirmation of the fact, either way.

  With her back to him, Vince watched as she straightened up and inhaled some strenuous breaths. Gazing out at the winter sun breaking through the clouds that hung portentously in the London sky, she said with a certain cheerful resignation, ‘That’s it then. I did it. I killed him.’ She turned round sharply, her chin up, defiant. Her eyes weren’t even moist. She was determined not to cry, as if she didn’t want such emotion to cloud his judgement of her.

  Vince reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the photo of Johnny Beresford seated at the gaming table with five other players, and handed it to her.

  ‘Could you tell me something about these gentlemen?’

  She didn’t need to study the characters, she’d seen the line-up a thousand times before and knew them all well enough. And as she considered them, her stoic expression soured into aversion.

  ‘I’m sure I could tell you lots, Detective Treadwell, but in the interests of objectivity I’ll stick with the facts. First up, top of the table is James Asprey, known to all his chums as Aspers. He owns the Montcler Club. Like most professional gamblers I’ve met, he can be an incredibly cold-hearted bastard when he wants to be. The trouble with Aspers is that he wants to be that way most of the time. He’s a monkey-loving misanthrope who likes animals more than people. So much so that he’s even building himself a private zoo. I would describe Aspers as the leader of the pack.

  ‘The fellow to the right of him is Simon Goldsachs. Born in Paris to an English father, who was a politician and later a millionaire hotelier, and a French mother. The Goldsachs family, much like their relatives the Rothchilds, were merchant bankers dating back to the sixteenth century. The only reason I know all this about him is because he insisted on telling me all this about him over a game of chess one day, whilst he was trying to seduce me.’

  Vince raised an eyebrow at this. She lowered it with: ‘Don’t read too much into that, Detective, Simon tries to seduce everyone; it’s almost a reflex action. I surrendered my King to him, but not my virtue, and made my escape. Simon Goldsachs is a greedy, arrogant, vengeful philanderer, and a completely magnetic charmer to boot. He’s also by far the richest man sitting at that table. Next up is Dickie Bingham, or – to give him his full title – the seventh Earl of Lucan. He’s never done a day’s work in his life and probably wouldn’t be good at anything anyway because, as the joke goes, he’s not so much an idiot-savant as an idiot with servants.

  ‘This fellow next to Lucan is Guy Ruley. I always thought Guy was somewhat in awe of Johnny, used to want to be like him. He’s something in the city, and also something of a bore. The only interesting thing about him is that his father was a scrap-metal dealer or something like that, who struck it rich and could afford to send his son off to Eton. And that fact’s not really about him so, no, nothing interesting at all.’

  As Isabel reached the last member of the Montcler set gathered around the table, her robotic rat-tat-tat of dismissive commentary stopped, and a warm smile arrived on her face.

  ‘And that’s the lovely Nicky DeVane – the very talented photographer and one of my oldest friends.’ She gestured towards t
he dozen roses in a vase on the bedside table. ‘He sent me those. Of course I’ve not heard from any of the others. They’ve closed ranks, as usual.’

  ‘They were Mr Beresford’s friends but not yours?’

  ‘Apart from Nicky DeVane, no. I think they view me with suspicion. You see, Detective, I was neither a wife nor a mistress, and those men have both. I was in the hinterland, and they never quite knew what to say to me. They were forever getting on to Johnny to do something about it: either marry me and get himself a mistress, or marry someone else and have me as the mistress. Or, preferably, marry someone else and get another mistress. They don’t feel comfortable around educated women with opinions of their own.’

  ‘Why didn’t you two get married?’

  She stuck her hands in the pockets of the robe, her hand scrunching around the dead packet of cigarettes, obviously wishing there was a fresh one in there. She shrugged and went over to the sofa. ‘I think that ship had already sailed for us,’ she said, sitting down. ‘It’s strange, but we’d reached a stage where we’d become pals more than anything. I loved him, and the attraction to him was as strong as ever – and his towards me, I believe. But too much bad behaviour had passed between us. We’d seen each other at our worst too many times. We needed to start anew. Does that make sense, Detective?’

  Vince joined her on the sofa. ‘So you went around to Eaton Square intending to finish it with him?’

  ‘Unfortunate choice of words, but yes. I was planning on leaving London for good, and going back to New York.’

  ‘And what did he say to that?’