Vince, again with the international gesture of surrender, said, ‘You’re right. I’m sorry, Mr Korshank.’
There was a pause before Mr Korshank said, ‘Forget it. Bernie’s fine by me, copper. And I don’t blame me neither. I blame Beresford. But he bought it, too.’ He gave a listless shrug. ‘So all’s well that ends well.’
Vince looked down at the Bard’s big book on the table, thinking that wasn’t the play title he would have chosen to sum up events. But tragedy does play out as comedy second time around, so maybe . . .
‘Talking about good reads, Bernie, I read the confession – Dominic Saxmore-Blaine’s confession. There’s a few things about it that don’t play right. Like the ending.’ The big man studied Vince intently. Undaunted, he continued. ‘Must be one of the first things you look for in a good play script, how it ends, if it makes sense.’
‘I ain’t no writer. I just does what’s put in front of me. Move here, move there, break a chair over him, hit him over the head with a bottle.’ Looking at Vince’s crinkled brow, Korshank reassured him, ‘Don’t worry, they’re props made out of balsa wood, and the bottles are made out of sugar to look like glass.’
‘Yeah, and the guns are loaded with blanks,’ said Vince, bringing it all back around to the principal players. ‘No, I’m sorry, Bernie, but I’m just not believing the end of our little story.’
Bernie Korshank rested his hands on the table as clenched fists. If his face looked as though it knew where the bodies were buried, the hands looked as though they had dug the holes that put them there. ‘What you saying, copper, I’m a liar?’
Again Vince went palms-up in a placating gesture, and was tempted to take out the perfectly creased quarter inch of white hanky from his breast pocket and wave it about frantically. ‘Easy, Bernie, that’s not what I’m saying at all. All I’m saying is, I don’t think Dominic Saxmore-Blaine killed Beresford.’
Bernie Korshank unballed his fists and weaved his fingers together again. Vince breathed easy at seeing him in the newsreader position; it meant the big man was not about to throw a punch, at least not imminently
‘God rest his soul,’ said Korshank. ‘The kid was a squit of a man, nothing of him. But in my experience, a gun in a man’s hand soon evens things up.’
‘Yeah, but what was he doing with Beresford’s gun in the first place? With real bullets in it?’
‘He could have got hold of bullets. He had time.’
‘How d’you mean, Bernie, he had time?’
‘The gun, the kid had the gun. He must have got bullets for it.’
‘Did you read the report, Bernie?’
He shrugged. ‘They didn’t have no report.’
‘Two coppers, Detectives Kenny Block and Philly Jacket?’
Another shrug from the big man. ‘Who can tell? Coppers all look the same to me. Apart from you. You’d do well in the movie business.’
‘Yeah, and before you know it I’m dragging a lobster around on a chain.’ Korshank laughed at that. Vince continued. ‘These two coppers looked especially the same, right?’ Korshank nodded. Vince cursed under his breath. A typical half-arsed job from Block and Jacket. Vince pulled up his chair and rested his arms on the desk. Korshank picked up that he was serious and drew in closer to the detective. It made for a comic silhouette, with Vince looking up, Bernie Korshank looking down.
‘Okay, Bernie, in the report it says that Dominic Saxmore-Blaine confessed that he dropped the gun before leaving the room. Is that true?’
‘Not to my knowledge.’
‘Why do you say that, Bernie?’
‘Because the gun was gone. You got to remember, my eyes were closed at the time. I was playing dead – and when I play dead, I’m dead. I’m gone, lights out, goodnight Vienna, a one hundred per cent stiff. Mr Beresford was paying me for the night’s work, and I looked upon it as a professional engagement. Just as I would if I was working with Mr Roger Moore in The Saint. Which I have done, on two occasions. Once with dialogue when I said, “He’s in there.” I takes pride in my work.’
‘I’m sure you do, Bernie. Tell me about the gun that night.’
‘When Mr Beresford gave me the sign that the kid had gone . . .’ Korshank gave a solemn shake of his head, and grief and guilt rattled in his voice, ‘I have to admit . . . we both cracked up laughing. Then we tidied the place up, and I got changed into a new shirt. He thought the kid must have dropped the gun at the door. He was sure he heard him drop it, too. But it wasn’t there.’
‘So Beresford never had the gun?’
‘That’s what I’m saying! The kid must have taken it with him. Too scared to think, he just ran out of there with it. But Mr Beresford wasn’t too bothered. It wasn’t his favourite gun, just a little revolver.’
‘A snub-nosed Colt .32?’
‘That’s the piece,’ said Bernie Korshank. Then, amongst his disgust, he tried to rustle up some irony. ‘Yeah, he got it back in the end, though. With one in the head.’
Vince had one last question for the three-storey thespian: ‘When Dominic ran out the room, did he leave the door open?’
Bernie Korshank shrugged, and Vince saw that he didn’t have a clue. Because only three people knew that information – and two of them were dead. The third, well, that was yet to be discovered.
Vince said his goodbyes and his thank-yous to Bernie Korshank. At least he was sure he did, but he wouldn’t have put his life on it, because his mind was now elsewhere. It was at the Imperial Hotel, his next port of call. He knew of three ways of accessing the upper floors of the hotel: there was the lift, the main stairs, and then there were the service stairs . . .
As he floated, heavy in thought, past the dancing fruits in the Kitty Kat club, he gave a distracted nod to Trixie, the Marlene Dietrich with her pet lobster, and made his way out of the club and into the clogged night air of Camden Town. His head was swimming with possibilities, and the case stretched out in front of him further than Camden’s Parkway. He swung left into Arlington Street, heading to where he’d parked the Mk II, and clicked his fingers and smiled as an idea spiked, livening him up from amid the swamp of possibilities, motives and scenarios he was mired in.
If that fresh thought had spiked a moment or two earlier, Vince might not have felt the cosh that crashed into the back of his knees, instantly crumpling him, or smelled the chemical tang of the saturated rag as it smothered his muzzle and took him out.
CHAPTER 37
Everything about him ached. Everything about him throbbed. Everything seemed an effort. Which came as a surprise because, as far as he was aware, he wasn’t doing anything. He was lying down. His eyelids, which also ached and throbbed, strained to open with all the ease of a pair of rusted old shutters. There was a lugubrious throb pulsing through him, but he couldn’t locate or localize it, because it was all of him. His hands wanted to reach out and grip the parameters of the fold-out cot he was lying on, but they couldn’t, as they had been bound together behind his back and were bloodless and numb. He felt beaten up, and wasn’t sure that he hadn’t been . . . His short-term, or maybe his longterm memory . . . he couldn’t remember which was which, but either way it wasn’t working.
The room was lit with furtive shards of light that sidled in from a door that looked as if it had been cobbled together out of illfitting wooden boards. It suited the room itself, which looked like it had been thrown together out of wattle and daub. Vince sniffed the air and could still smell the fumes from the chemical cosh that had taken him out – chloroform. But there was another smell, and it smelled like a mixture of wet grass and shit. And then there was the silence. No cars, no wailing sirens, howling boys, screaming girls, baying drunks, distressed derelicts. In fact no city. As he adjusted to the silence, other noises filtered through – the sound of crickets being the predominant one. The more he listened, the louder they got. The crickets were making a real racket, drowning everything out. He was sure he wasn’t in Camden any more.
Vince galvaniz
ed himself, and swung his feet around and off the cot and on to the flagstone floor. He felt the cold stones beneath his soles and realized he was shoeless. And that his feet were bound together as well. He then raised his upper torso up off the cot; it was all such a painful effort that it alerted him to the fact that his ribs and stomach muscles had taken a beating. All this sudden movement sent a rush of blood swirling around his body that all seemed to get dumped inside his head; a head that now felt on fire – and then it felt like the fire was being put out with a heavy wooden mallet. This pain led to a sustained and loud groan that alerted whoever was on the other side of the door, because they came swiftly through it.
There were two of them. They closed the door behind them on entering, but there was just enough light in the room for Vince to make out the broad strokes of shape, size and dress, but not any details or features. They were dressed the same, beige trench-coat style macs, black roll necks and black leather driving gloves. He had the feeling the gloves were worn more for knuckle work than for driving. That feeling was confirmed when a gloved hand gripped a hank of his hair, and a second gloved hand shaped like a clenched fist hurtled towards his cheek. It wasn’t a knock-out punch, but it was an introduction to the way things were, had been and, Vince suspected, were likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Vince rode the punch as, for some reason, he had no fight left in him. It struck him as strange that he should have no fight left in him. When did the fight leave him? Had he already had the fight beaten out of him? Did he ever have it in the first place? He just couldn’t remember, since this was just a morass of pain.
Then he realized he was naked. What he had initially thought was clothing, a dark fabric covering his skin, wasn’t at all. It was bruising. It was dirt. It was grime mixed in with sweat and blood and shit. His own shit. It was as if he’d been dragged through a ploughed field, rolled around on the black and grimy stone floor and then kicked around like a football.
He was lifted from the cot and dumped into a wooden kitchen chair. He felt as though he’d been in this chair before. Everything now seemed familiar. Ghastly and familiar. The men in the mackintoshes he’d seen before, he knew them, they were . . .
‘How’s it going, friend?’ said the one on the left. Or was it the right?
‘Still not talking, friend?’ said the one on the right . . . left?
‘Friend doesn’t want to talk to us.’ Left, right, left, right . . .
‘Friend’s not friendly,’ said the two-headed mackintosh monster.
Their accents weren’t English, yet they weren’t European either. The language was their mother tongue, but not of these shores. It sounded harsh, authoritarian, and used to getting its own way. But although the language was English, he still didn’t know what the hell they were talking about.
He was about to ask them, when the next blow was delivered. It was a short jab to the right side of his mouth with enough force for Vince to let out an anguished yelp, but again not enough to clam him up with a broken jaw. Another landed on his left side, just to even things up. He felt his lip split, then sweet, tangy blood seeped into his mouth and trickled hotly down his chin. The flesh had split too easily. He realized that it split because it was a previous wound that hadn’t had time to heal. There was a sickening familiarity to it all. And the memory of all the pain they had heaped on him was amassing itself now and washing over him. Long-term and short-term memory came flooding back, just when he didn’t need it or want it. The cumulative effect was agonizing. He wanted to cry, but instead he started to giggle. High-pitched and hysterical, like a hyena on amphetamines. Yeah, that was it. It was animal. It was raw from pained naked flesh.
‘The friend is laughing again.’
‘What’s the friend laughing at?’
One gloved fist glanced off his chin, the second came in from another angle. His eyes closed. More punches landed. A stinging slap to the left cheek, followed quickly by the full pelt of a backhander across the right cheek. A hook to the jaw forced him to bite into his tongue, the salty and sweet blood was again in his mouth, he could feel loose flapping flesh.
‘Friend mustn’t go to sleep on us.’
‘No, friend needs livening up.’
Vince opened his eyes to see that a box had been produced. It was a dull green colour, not much bigger than a shoe box. Once the lid was lifted, he could see it was an old military field telephone that worked off a hand-wound generator. Two leads were attached to the generator’s red and black conductor valves, with a vicious-looking pair of crocodile clips just waiting to bite on to something. It wasn’t long before they did. One of his torturers, which is surely what they were by now, attached the cables to his nipples. He wasn’t even aware that he had nipples until these things were attached to them. The memory returned, and punished him again. Vince now had confirmation of why his skin was mottled with filth. He had been writhing around on the dirt covering the flagstones.
Two strips of black gaffer tape were swiftly placed over the electrodes to insulate them, and to make sure they didn’t come loose. They were determined that Vince should feel the full blast of the shock. Without ceremony or any arch words, the crank handle of the hand-held generator was vigorously rotated. Vince saw a red needle jolt on the generator’s small dial. Then came the current. On impact, his body torqued and twisted and stiffened. The current coursed through him, torching his nipples, numbing his chest, but it was a violent numbness like a sustained hammer blow. The electric anguish then shook him and threw him out of the chair and on to the floor, rolling and writhing around as if he was trying to put out a fire.
It was down there, on the soothingly cold stone flags, that he saw the colours. Bright fizzing electric colours, neon shards cutting through his brain. Pain became a spectrum of great and surprising beauty. Taking on a life of its own, turning into something indescribably and incandescently striking and sensual. A vivid and deepening ecstasy overtook him. And, when the shooting stars, neon glows, phosphorus rainbows and hallucinogenic firework displays were done, the blackout came.
Everything about him ached. Everything about him throbbed. Everything seemed an effort. Which came as a surprise because, as far as he was aware, he wasn’t doing anything. He was lying down. His eyelids, which also ached and throbbed, strained to open with all the ease of a pair of rusted old shutters. There was an ache, a lugubrious throb that pulsed through him, but he couldn’t locate or localize it, because it was all of him. His hands wanted to reach out and grip the parameters of the fold-out cot he was lying on, but they couldn’t, as they had been bound together behind his back and were bloodless and numb. He felt beaten up, and wasn’t sure that he hadn’t been . . .
‘The friend is laughing again.’
‘What’s the friend laughing at?’
Vince closed his eyes in readiness as the two men in the mackintoshes inexorably went about their business . . .
The cold bite of the crocodile clips as the electrodes were attached . . .
It was the blood that woke him. He felt it bubbling up in his throat. He was lying on his back, and he couldn’t move, but he knew he had to otherwise he’d drown. He was surprised he had any blood or fluid left in his body, for he imagined his innards to be a blackened desiccated pit. His carrion flesh drained of blood. He rolled over on to his side and coughed it up. Each cough wrenched his body and ratcheted up the pain. Every bruise, cracked rib and piece of pummelled flesh cried out. He put a voice to his pain. At first a low blood-bubbling gurgle that turned into an angry growl, which then subsided into a wretched whinnying sound, accompanied by a sustained crying jag that he wouldn’t have wanted anyone to witness. And finally a fuck-it-all-to-hell, full-throttled howl. The animal was dying. He knew it would be over soon. No one deals out this kind of punishment and leaves the victim to tell the tale.
The beams of light sliced through the slatted door. His tormentors, the mackintosh men, stepped into the room. They lifted him off the cot and placed him in the chair. Vince
knew what that meant, more of the same. He didn’t know how many times he’d gone through this. It seemed as if he couldn’t remember a time without it. But he also knew he wasn’t capable of withstanding much more of it, even if they were.
‘One last time, friend.’
‘Are you ready to talk, friend?’
‘Who do you work for, friend?’
‘Who’s paying you, friend?’
‘Who’s your master, friend?’
‘We’re sick of you, friend.’
‘We’re tired of you, friend.’
‘Are you tired, friend?’
‘You want to sleep, friend?’
‘You want to close your eyes, friend?’
Vince made a noise that might have resembled the words Yes, please, kill me now. He was ready to close his eyes. He wanted it over with, he wanted it done, he wanted out. And they accommodated. Again in unison, like some dreadful conjuring trick, the black leather gloves were pulled from the mackintosh men’s pockets and slipped over nimble knuckles, and they went to work on him again. Pulling their punches to deliver the pain in small percentages, but they all added up, and he knew these were just the warm-up shots to get them into their stride. Once they were in it, the blows came in harder, heavier and faster. It was a mutual feeling; they’d had enough of Vince like he’d had enough of them. Vince felt his swollen blood-blistered lips pull taut, then break open with watery blood eddying down into the dimple in his chin. And just when it got to the point that he couldn’t take it any more, hey presto, the green box was produced. The great livener!
There was also something new; a fresh prop was produced. A dirty-looking towel was wrapped round his head like a turban. The towel was heavy and slipped down over his eyes. It took a few moments for Vince to realize it was soaking wet. The cold wet towel felt good, soothing, but that wasn’t its purpose. Its purpose was to be used as a conductor for what Vince reckoned to be the final killer jolt of juice that would fry him.
Gilded Edge, The Page 28