Gilded Edge, The (21 page)

Vince saw what she meant. He left with the sight of Goldsachs grabbing an expensive piece of modern-design furniture, meant for sitting on and talking about, and hoisting it up into the air and then sending it crashing down on to the model. The one blow destroyed his Shangri-la, smashing his golden domes, and sent Dinky Toy-sized figures of men and women and beasts of the field flying into the air. Goldsachs’ cold war nightmare (and everyone else’s for that matter) had come true. It was too late for the scientists and their new technologies to save his brave new world.

Goldsachs had dropped the bomb.

Another part of the city, away from the outer zone of picturesque Richmond, and right into the heart of the matter. The epicentre. Smack bang in the middle of
everything.
One of the most talked-about thoroughfares in London town. The place where the British Invasion came to arm and swathe itself. Carnaby Street, or just off. In Beak Street, to be precise, and the photographic studios of the Honourable Nicholas Raphael Evelyn DeVane. Of course, the name on his business card had slimmed him down to plain old proletariat Nicky DeVane.

It was four p.m. as Vince walked down Carnaby Street, and this rich little vein of central London was doing cracking business. Mods were still the order of the day, but the hair was well and truly creeping over the collars now, and the gear was getting a little louder, a little more lairy. There were braided military tunics, candy-striped boating jackets, Paisley-print shirts, and lots of things with Union Jacks on them. In fact Union Jacks seemed to be everywhere. England may no longer be a great power on the world stage, but it was finding new ways to assert itself and fly the flag, in music, culture and clothes.

Vince climbed the stairs to the Beak Street studio, and had one of those surreal little moments that capture time and place perfectly. Brian Jones, with his unmistakable mop of blond hair, and a girl (equally blonde) were making their way down the stairs. They both wore wraparound shades and were giggling as if they didn’t have a care in the world, and to Vince’s mind they probably didn’t. Vince stood aside as they wafted downwards arm in arm, with broad smiles on their pretty little faces. Vince couldn’t tell if they were smiling at him or just the planetary arrangements that had momentarily placed them right at the centre of everything. He watched as their stardust disappeared out through the door to the waiting car. It was exotic air Vince had breathed for that brief moment – they were both smoking joints. He imagined the pinch, and he wondered sometimes if he was cut out for this work, because most coppers would have been all over that little opportunity, and the publicity that came with it. But nicking potheads held absolutely no interest for Vince, no matter who they were. Two more long-limbed girls came down the stairs next, with bright-eyed and bushy-tailed enthusiasm. He assumed they were models; they had that sense of otherness about them that other girls just don’t have.

Vince climbed to the third floor and knocked on the industrial-looking door. An unsmiling girl dressed in black, with black shades and a lopsided bob haircut, answered it with all the welcoming enthusiasm of a mortician. Vince introduced himself and stated his business, without flashing his badge, and was let in. Still she didn’t smile, but she did ask if he wanted a cup of coffee. He said that he did, and she strode purposefully off to make it. And was never to be seen again, with or without coffee.

The studio was just as Vince had imagined it would be. Painted matt white with high ceilings and long windows. Lots of lighting equipment rigged up on the ceiling like a theatre, and tall freestanding arc lamps that stood around looking impressive, expensive and technical, with white and silver foiled umbrellas mushrooming off them, presumably for reflective purposes, not decorative, but they looked good anyway. There were painted backdrops and props, and racks of clothes and the occasional cigarette butt crushed out on the floor. Vince went over to where a very pleasing noise emanated, that of girls giggling.

Nicky DeVane was showing a card trick to two models dressed in identical long sequinned body-hugging gowns. They stood towering over him, drinking champagne from Styrofoam cups and sharing a long oily hash joint. Vince waited for DeVane to finish his card trick, which he did to gasps of wonderment and whoops and kisses and hugs from his gorgeously gangly and giggling audience. It was a neat performance.

‘Mr DeVane, I’m Detective Vince Treadwell,’ he said, stepping out from behind a rack of clothes and showing the now turned faces his badge. They froze like a freshly snapped photograph, and said nothing, but their mouths all formed perfectly shaped Os. Vince, by way of defusing their fear of being busted on a dope charge, stated his intention. ‘I’ve come to talk to you about Mr Beresford, that’s all.’

On this, and realizing it wasn’t a stunt, they got all three-dimensional again and sprang back to life. The joint was quickly deposited in a Styrofoam cup, and long slim hands pointlessly fluttered the air in front of them, as if to disperse the illicit smoke. Vince smiled.

Five minutes later, he was standing in Nicky DeVane’s private office, which was a partitioned-off section of the studio with a couple of folding metal chairs, a filing cabinet, and a long trestle table cluttered with papers, magazines and lots of photos of lots of gorgeous women in lots of different outfits.

‘You don’t look like a policeman,’ said Nicky DeVane, who stood leaning against the trestle table. ‘Which can be rather, uh, disorientating. I thought you were with one of the girls at first. You’ve got good bones. You’d take a good photo.’

‘And you, if I may say, look every inch the photographer.’

Size-wise, Nicky DeVane was the runt of the Montcler litter. Depending on the extravagancies of his footwear, he was around five foot six, slender, sprightly-looking, but with a round cherubic face and large brown eyes. Shiny brown curls were gathered under a peaked corduroy cap. The rest of his ensemble consisted of a Paisley button-down collar shirt, a pair of tight blue cords matching the cap that he was wearing, and black Cuban-heeled chisel-toed boots with nifty side zips. This was all out of sorts with the rest of the Montcler set, with their sombre business suits, or those dinner-jacketed figures assembled in the photo. But this was Carnaby Street, and he was a photographer, so his fashionably flamboyant garb could be viewed as merely the overalls of his profession.

Nicky DeVane took off his cap and chucked it on the table. He then ruffled his curly hair and said, ‘Well, yes, just keeping up appearances,’ then almost apologetically, ‘You have to look the part.’

‘Speaking of which, was that who I thought it was on the stairs?’

Knowing immediately who Vince meant, DeVane said, ‘Brian just dropped by. He’s a chum. There’s always a lot of people dropping in and hanging out here.’ He gave an exasperated sigh. ‘It’s the location, of course. I’m thinking of moving actually, so I can get more work done.’

Nicky DeVane then took on a look of real concern to replace the seemingly frivolous one he had previously and asked, ‘Isabel, how is she?’

‘She’s doing better now than she was. Mainly because she’s beginning to believe she’s innocent.’As Vince said this, he searched DeVane’s face for a reaction, signs of either relief or of concern. But nothing came. ‘She told me a little about you – and of course I saw your flowers at the hospital. A dozen red roses.’

Nicky DeVane caught the snag in Vince’s voice. ‘You think that strange, Detective? It’s no secret that I love Isabel. Always have.’

Vince, equally matter-of-factly, ‘Enough to kill Johnny Beresford over?’

‘Let’s just say this, if anyone tried to hurt Isabel, then yes, I would.
Anyone.
I’ve known her all my life. When you’ve known someone as a little girl, that never leaves you. They, and you, remain innocent, somehow, through it all.’

‘She speaks very highly of you, too.’

‘Do you know about her mother, Detective?’

‘Only what I read in the papers.’

‘Then let me fill you in on Isabel’s mother Jessica. Jessica Dallowmain, to give her maiden name, was an American, of the famous Dallowmains of Boston. A frightfully rich brood, with a lineage going back, oh, about as long as the work desk I have in my study. But believe me, Detective, those Bostonians know a thing or two about being snobs – they can out-snob a Brit at a hundred paces! Anyway, Jessica left Isabel’s father when Isabel was just eight or nine. She ran off with an Argentinian polo player. That was no surprise, because there were other men before that, lots of them. Spanish bullfighters, Ecuadorian racing drivers, Tunisian tennis players . . . She suffered from tuberculosis and, apparently, one of the side effects is that it makes you incredibly promiscuous. Whether that’s true or not, I’m no doctor, but Jessica was recklessly randy, uncontrollable, and frankly mad. Lord Saxmore-Blaine had to go to extreme measures to cover it all up – because of scandal, blackmail, she was open to the lot. It was a full-time job keeping her misdemeanours under wraps. Poor old sod, there must have been a sense of relief when she did eventually end it all. She’d tried before, you see: various aborted hangings, a failed wrist slashing, and some underwhelming overdoses.

‘Jessica was a stunner, just like Isabel. And, believe me, Detective, I have had the pleasure of snapping a lot of beautiful girls. But women like Jessica and Isabel have that other quality about them that can’t be captured on camera. It’s too elusive.’

‘How did she kill herself?’

‘She ended up sticking her head in the oven, Sylvia Plath style. She was the poet who killed herself—’

‘By sticking her head in an oven.’

‘Quite. The joke with Jessica was, to everyone’s astonishment, that she’d managed to do it. That was not because of her other failed attempts. No, everyone was just astonished that she’d managed even to turn the oven on – because she’d never used one before.’ He gave a short mirthless laugh, but it quickly faltered as a memory struck, and he fell into melancholy. ‘Poor Isabel. I remember it vividly. And so does she, no doubt. It’s not the sort of thing you ever forget or ever get over, I suppose. So you see, Detective Treadwell, there’s a history there of unstable behaviour. And I always feared there was more tragedy in store for her, poor Isabel.’

‘That’s all very interesting, Mr DeVane, but I’ve already spoken to Ms Saxmore-Blaine in some detail,’ Vince said with a guiding edge in his voice. ‘It’s Johnny Beresford’s friends I’m interested in now.’

DeVane looked disappointed that Vince hadn’t congratulated him on his gems of insight, whipped out his notebook and feverishly written down his words verbatim. The snapper huffily folded his arms, and said: ‘Quite. You asked if I could kill Johnny, and I said yes, so let me explain. He was my best friend, and we’ve known each other since school, where I was a year below him. But there’s a part of me that’s glad he’s . . . gone. Isabel always had her problems, but Johnny exacerbated them. He knew how to press her buttons, as it were. But I’m sure she’s not capable of killing anyone. Not while sober anyway.’

‘She wasn’t sober,’ added Vince redundantly. Because he knew DeVane knew that she wasn’t.

‘Quite.’ DeVane paused for thought, then said determinedly, ‘Isabel needs protecting, not persecuting.’

Vince weighed DeVane up. Was he himself protecting her or persecuting her? Vince came down on the latter. Out of Nicky DeVane’s mouth, from her closest friend, came words as damning and loaded as that smoking gun in her hand.

‘One last question, Mr DeVane.’

‘Surely.’

‘Where were you on the night he was killed?’

DeVane looked taken aback at this, and made a show of his displeasure by creasing his brow and putting a petulant little twist on his mouth. ‘I take it that line of questioning is merely standard procedure? I can’t imagine you think I’d kill my dearest friend.’

‘You’ve admitted that, given the right circumstances, you could have killed him. I’m just checking to see if you did.’

‘You misunderstood me, Detective. I . . . I just meant that I would do anything to protect Isabel. Do you not see that?’

Vince saw it, but didn’t really buy it, and he didn’t throw him a lifeline. His mouth stayed shut, but his eyes said:
Just answer the fucking question.

DeVane muttered his astonishment at all this, then spun around and reached over to a large red desk diary and flicked through it to the appropriate page. ‘Ah, yes, I was in Soho. Met some friends for drinks at Muriel’s Colony Rooms, then on to the Whiskey-a-Go-Go in Wardour Street with Brian and Anita. Then we met up with John and George and some others and went off to Brian Epstein’s party at Tiki’s on the King’s Road. I left at about three, with a friend called Gloria. She’s on the cover of this month’s
Vogue.
’

‘You needed to check your dairy to remember
that?’

DeVane gave an immodest little shrug that verged on smugness, flipped the diary shut, and said: ‘It’s irrelevant anyway, Detective. I know what you’re thinking, and killing Johnny wouldn’t have done me any good with Isabel. I’ve always known she doesn’t love me – not as one would wish. She clearly sees me as her brother, I fear. She fell in love with Johnny the first time she clapped eyes on him, I think. Of course, irony upon ironies, I even introduced them.’

You didn’t need to be a detective to catch the palpable and barely disguised bitterness in Nicky DeVane’s voice. But Vince was, and he did – and he exploited it. ‘The dashing and daring army man, uh? And so tall and handsome. What was he, six-five, six-six?’

DeVane took an angry breath, then said guardedly, ‘I don’t know. I’ve never measured him.’

Vince decided not to mine this rich vein of antagonism and said, ‘Did he know about your feelings towards Isabel?’

‘Of course he knew. But we didn’t talk about Isabel, nor would he say anything derogatory about her in front of me, because he knew how I felt. He respected that feeling. It was the love that daren’t speak its name.’

‘Not quite, though.’

‘Quite. No, not quite. But you get the idea.’