Gilded Edge, The (29 page)

The bridal suite of the Imperial was chock-full of forensics in their virginal white coats, fanning out and fine-toothcombing the place. Of course, if Dominic’s deathbed confession was to be believed, and Beresford was as good as his word, Boris Sendoff would be long gone and untraceable. He clearly was, on both counts: no bloodstains on the carpet, no blasted bone fragments on the bedcovers, no dried scabs of bullet-strewn flesh on the wallpaper.

Vince and Mac stood by the door. Mac had been reading Dominic’s confession, up to the point that had taken the group of men to the Imperial. He shook his head and said: ‘It’s well written, I’ll give him that.’

Vince said, ‘Nice to see that his expensive education wasn’t wasted.’

‘Reads like a novel.’

‘A real potboiler. You’ve got spies, military coups, toffs, tarts – and with young Dominic Saxmore-Blaine featuring as its main protagonist, a psycho triple killer.’

‘See where it takes us, Vincent,’ said Mac, offering him the manuscript. Vince took it and read on.

After killing Boris Sendoff, the newly initiated assassin had stepped out of the bridal suite and legged it along the corridor and down the stairs. It was on the second-floor landing that Dominic had run into Marcy Jones, who was just coming out of Lucky Lucan’s room. Marcy saw the blood on Dominic’s shirt, and the fear stacked up in his eyes.

‘You? What have you been up to, Dom?’

Dominic didn’t answer. He pelted on down the stairs and out of the Imperial, and straight into a black cab. Once safely ensconced back at his sister Isabel’s flat in Pont Street, he poured himself a large Scotch to rid himself of the taste of the vodka. It was a drink he’d always detested for its vapid nothingness, and now it tasted like murder.

And he waited, and waited, for his fellow conspirator, Johnny Beresford, to call. Hours fell off the clock, but there was no word. He paced, he panicked, he picked up the phone to call him . . . but didn’t Johnny tell him to wait? The world of intrigue he had just entered offered too many potentially life-threatening options to risk disobeying orders. So he poured himself another drink. And pretty soon after that he found his sister’s hidden stash of pills: a bottled balancing act of uppers and downers.

Night became day, and then turned back to night again. Two days passed and still no call from Beresford . . .

Dominic had made the mistake of looking at himself in the mirror, his narrow frame almost disappearing from view in it, like a vampire. The eyes felt lidless from lack of sleep, burning hot and cold, circled in black, sinking deep into his crumbling skull.

With the agents of sleep still paying him no mind, Dominic continued pacing the flat. It wasn’t the pills and the booze keeping him awake, but the knowledge of what he’d done. He felt a rush of power mixing in with the poisonous fear. A potent cocktail. A perfect storm. His mind twisted and turned . . .

. . .
The black whore
. . .

She saw him. She saw the Russian’s blood on his shirt. She saw the fear, the guilt in his eyes . . .

. . .
What have you been up to, Dom?
. . .

‘Dom’. The diminutive of Dominic. Who the hell gave her permission to
shorten
it . . . to make it
smaller?
The cheap, filthy, mocking
black whore . . .

It would all be so perfect now, if it wasn’t for her. She’d seen too much. She knew too much. She knew
all
about him . . .

Dominic was sure he knew what Beresford and the rest of the Montcler set would want him to do. They were men who lived by their own code of conduct. Men of action. Men of power. Men of honour . . .

So, armed with a ball-peen hammer he’d found in a bucket under the kitchen sink, next to a perished plunger and a rusted hacksaw, Dominic Saxmore-Blaine drove to the Imperial Hotel and waited for Marcy Jones, so he could stave her head in. The girl he only knew as a black prostitute, there merely to accommodate the needs of men like Lucky Lucan. She was simply a serviceable slab of meat that could nevertheless end Dominic’s glittering career and jeopardize the whole operation. Tuned-up on pills and booze, these were the thoughts than ran through Dominic’s mind as he tried to dehumanize Marcy Jones. Tried to take away her life before he physically accomplished the job.

He knew she would be there, of course. She worked the Imperial twice a week, and tonight was regularly her night. He watched as she spun out of the rotating doors, the raunchily high stiletto heels clicking on the chequer-tiled steps, and then skipped down the stairs as fast as she could. She looked as if she couldn’t wait to free herself of the Imperial and get home.

After she got in a waiting taxi, he followed the cab as it made its leisurely way along Kensington High Street, then up Kensington Church Street, on its way towards Notting Hill.

It was around midnight when Marcy Jones got out of the taxi and walked up Lancaster Road to Basing Street. She didn’t hear the man behind her until she
felt
him behind her, his jagged panting breath encroaching on her. She turned round sharply, awkwardly, her hand still gripping the key, which was already secured in the lock. Her flawless, pretty face creased in confusion.

‘You?’

Vince skimmed through the following account of the murder of Marcy Jones. There were no surprises in Dominic’s confession, no fresh facts. After he killed Marcy, he noticed little Ruby standing above him on the stairs, and chased her up into the flat. Unbeknown to him, Ruby had of course hidden in her favourite hiding place – the drawer under her mother’s bed. Unable to find her, his mind twisted and torqued again as he became convinced she was just a figment of his imagination. She was a ghost born out of his own guilt that would haunt him for ever. Satisfied the child did not exist and fearful of being caught, Dominic abandoned the flat and drove from Notting Hill straight to Eaton Square, Belgravia.

There he told Johnny Beresford what he had done, giving a full report to his commanding officer. But Beresford was displeased with Dominic’s actions, and they argued violently. Dominic killed Beresford, shot him with his own revolver, then left Eaton Square and drove back to Isabel’s flat in Pont Street. Thus ended the confession of Dominic Saxmore-Blaine.

Vince weighed up the manuscript in his hand, and considered this unsatisfying and underwritten ending. For all its heft, vivid description and strong motive, there was still something rather unconvincing about it all. It had a beginning, a middle . . . but no end. A narrative that quite literally dropped off the bottom of the page and died.

So it was with a certain amount of irony that Vince now said: ‘A deathbed confession. They don’t come any better than that.’

Mac, well read, well versed and hard to convince at the best of times, picked up on Vince’s tone. He gave a contemplative nod, and said, ‘Let’s talk to the other two.’

Guy Ruley and Nicky DeVane would be picked up at their places of work, and no embarrassment to them was spared. It wasn’t just class warfare being carried out by chippy, lowly paid public-sector workers, trying to grab some headlines along the way (although Vince suspected it partly was). It was meant to pull away ladders, tear off the old school tie and, most of all, loosen tongues. It was meant to give a clear message: their blue-chip lawyers and old-boy networks couldn’t save them now. The bad old days of the police working almost as a private army for the upper classes, keeping the barbarians well and truly at the gate and not in the grounds, were supposedly long gone (although Vince also suspected it was not that long and not that gone).

A pack of squad cars jammed with uniformed coppers roared up Regent Street and along to Nicky DeVane’s Beak Street studio. Inside the studio, the sinewy frame of Kevin Ridgeway, guitarist with the High Rollers, the new bad boys of the British pop invasion, was laid out on the floor and louchely grazing on an oily joint as he watched Nicky DeVane snap his model girlfriend, Minetta Fruitful. Luckily for them, alarm bells began to ring when the alarm bells were literally rung, along with the wailing of bellicose sirens and the heavy-booted footfalls of panting policemen clambering up the metal-grated stairs. And there were a lot of people there to be alarmed: hairdressers, make-up artists and stylists, with all their gofers and assistants and an assortment of hangers-on. Kevin Ridgeway and Minetta Fruitful didn’t go anywhere without an entourage who were all well drilled in the disposing of incriminating evidence, the rapid concealment of stashes, and were thus able to extinguish and flush away anything that might have broken the butterflies on the wheel. So in this case, the law’s heavy-handed (and clod-footed) tactics proved a bit of an own goal.

The second arrest didn’t score at all. They nabbed Guy Ruley on the street outside his Cheapside offices as he was alighting from his chauffeur-driven gunmetal Bentley Continental. He had just arrived back in the country, after a private jet had taken him from Frankfurt to Paris, where his private helicopter was waiting to whisk him back to London. He had attended an urgent meeting with some foreign heads of state about a mining deal worth the kind of money that only heads of state and mining deals can muster.

Back at Scotland Yard, Detectives Philly Jacket and Kenny Block had given Dominic Saxmore-Blaine’s written confession a good once-over, got the gist and were primed and pumped and raring to go. Vince thought it would be a good idea to split the redoubtable duo up, and Mac agreed, so Jacket would sit cracking the knuckles and brooding violently in the background whilst Vince shot questions at DeVane, and Block would be doing likewise as Mac interviewed Guy Ruley.

But, after telling the two men about Dominic Saxmore-Blaine and the triple murder of their best friend Johnny Beresford, the Russian spy Boris Sendoff and Marcy Jones, nothing could have prepared Vince and Mac for what the two interviewees – dapper snapper Nicky DeVane and the minted mining magnet Guy Ruley – proceeded to tell them. It was unbelievable. It was a
joke
.

In Interview Room 2, Nicky DeVane’s spry little frame had sunk back into his chair. His big brown bedroom eyes were frayed, confused and scared. Philly Jacket stood by the door, cracking knuckles, as if to highlight the fact that there was no way out for the little feller. Vince meanwhile loomed over DeVane.

Vince: ‘A joke? What do you mean a
joke
?’

DeVane, in a distraught and quivering voice, replied: ‘The blooding,
that
was the joke. It was a stunt. A set-up. A prank. The whole thing was a bloody wind-up.’

Nicky DeVane shook his head even more vigorously in disbelief, as the full horror of it sank in and the real punchline of the ‘joke’ smacked him in the gut and knocked all the wind out of him.

‘So don’t keep this joke to yourself, DeVane. Share it with us. Now!’

‘Yes, sorry, of course. The Russian spy—’

‘Boris Sendoff.’

‘Yes, Send –
off
. Well, there was no Russian spy. And he wasn’t killed, for Christ’s sake. The gun was filled with blanks. The man Dominic killed . . . or thought he killed . . . was an actor just playing the role of a Russian spy. He was
paid
to do it.’

Vince could see where this scenario was heading as soon as he heard there had been a joke involved. In a place like the Imperial, a joke or a prank was always going to have to veer heavily towards mordacity. Something sharp and lethal enough to cut through the booze, drugs and general debauchery of the place would be needed to raise a laugh from its jaded crowd. Vince looked around at Philly Jacket, who had stopped cracking knuckles once the news had sunk in. Vince raised a finger to say,
I’ll be back
.

He swung out through the door of Interview Room 2 and stalked along the corridor to Interview Room 4. But before he got there, Mac had exited the same way out of Interview Room 4, and was marching towards him wearing the same perplexed look as he was. The two men locked eyes, each trying to see which one had the best answer.

Mac broke off first with: ‘A
joke
?’

‘You heard the punchline yet?’ asked Vince.