Gilded Edge, The (30 page)

‘Yeah, the big Russian’s not from Stalingrad, he’s from Stamford Hill. He’s an actor named Bernie Korshank.’

‘What else have you got?’

Mac shook his head in the negative. And without further ado, they both turned on their heels and went back to their respective interview rooms, to get more. A lot more.

As Vince swung back into Interview Room 2, he found Philly Jacket pacing around the table, not only cracking knuckles but looking as if he wanted to use them. Nicky DeVane was still sitting, cowed, at the table Philly was circling, looking as though he’d been crying. Vince shot Philly a look that asked if he
had
used them. Philly shot a look back that said:
Much as I would like to, I’m not that bleedin’ stupid
.

Vince sat down opposite DeVane, clasped his hands in front of him, and took a deep and loud breath that marked a new seriousness and urgency to the proceedings. He said: ‘Tell me all about Bernie Korshank.’

‘Like I said, he’s an actor. I didn’t know him. I’d only met him once, fleetingly, at the Imperial. Johnny introduced me to him. Of course, Korshank was right up his street.’

‘Why “of course”?’

‘Johnny was always coming up with different characters to amuse himself with. He liked to mix it with all sorts, the high life and the low life of London. Variety is the spice, he used to say. Aspers and Simon Goldsachs had no time for types such as Korshank, so they always warned Johnny to be careful.’

‘Hold on,’ said Vince. ‘Why the hell should Beresford have to be careful of some actor?’

‘I call him an actor in the loosest sense of the term. Believe me, he’s no Larry Olivier. Actually, Bernie Korshank is a nightclub bouncer who does a bit of acting work on the side. He’s had a couple of lines in
The Saint
and
Dixon Of Dock Green.
He always plays the heavy – and looks the part, I must say. He’s a very frightening-looking man.’

Vince got the picture. He’d known a few of ‘the chaps’ who’d screen-tested in their time. And TV shows like
The Saint
always needed convincing ‘faces’ to fill a set and look the part.

‘Okay, tell me about the gun.’

‘As I said, it was loaded with blanks. Bernie Korshank had taken care of the bullet wounds with blood squibs, like they use in TV special-effects departments. Very realistic-looking.’

‘Realistic? How do you know all this, since you were asleep in the bar, according to Dominic Saxmore-Blaine’s story.’

‘Yes, I was, but Johnny told me all about it the next day. He was pissed off that I wasn’t there to witness it. He phoned to reprimand me, but he couldn’t stay pissed off for long. He soon moved on to telling me how the prank had played out. Johnny the Joker, he loved practical jokes like this one. The more elaborate and the bigger the audience the better. He’d talk about them for hours.’

‘The military coup, was all that part of the joke, too?’

DeVane’s gaze dropped towards his hands, as if to inspect the outsized oval carnelian seal ring he was wearing. ‘Sort of.’

Vince went in hard. ‘What does
sort of
mean, DeVane?’

Philly Jacket cracked a medley of knuckles to accompany Vince’s tougher tone. And Nicky DeVane quickly snapped back into the programme.

‘That was just Johnny indulging his fantasy life. He’d always had a fertile imagination. Always been rather a fantasist and a dreamer, wanting a life of great adventure. One of his cousins was good friends with Ian Fleming, the author, and Johnny used to play cards with Fleming at his club, Le Cercle, and later at the Montcler. After Fleming died, Johnny started dropping Fleming’s name, and telling people how he had based James Bond on
him.
Said it was no coincidence that they shared the same initials, JB. He even said that Fleming wanted him to do a screen test for the part. I joked that they probably wanted to save money by having him use his own luggage and monogrammed shirts.
He
said it was thwarted because the American producers wanted some chap who looked like a Scottish truck driver.’

‘Sean Connery?’ Philly Jacket piped up. ‘He
is
Scottish, and he
was
a truck driver.’

‘No,’ corrected DeVane, ‘he was a milkman.’

Philly: ‘Or was he a gravedigger?’

Vince: ‘He played a truck driver in
Hell Drivers
.’

Philly: ‘Did he play a truck driver in
Hell Drivers?
I thought it was that feller who played
Danger Man
– Stanley Baker – who played a truck driver.’

Vince: ‘Stanley Baker didn’t play
Danger Man.
But he was in
Hell Drivers.’

Philly: ‘So who played
Danger Man?’

Vince: ‘The other feller who was in it.’

Philly: ‘Sean Connery didn’t play
Danger Man
.’

Vince: ‘No one’s saying he did. There was another feller in
Hell Drivers,
who played him.’

Philly: ‘Stanley Baker, Sean Connery, and the other feller who played
Danger Man
were all in
Hell Drivers?’

Vince (dry as you like): ‘That’s right, Philly, they were all in it. On account it’s customary to have more than one actor in a film, so they can talk to each other.’

DeVane: ‘Just like it’s customary to have more than one truck driver on the . . . uh . . . um . . . motorway.’

Vince turned from Philly to look at DeVane. Philly Jacket peered down at him too. The looks directed by the two men were enough to finish off the faltering smile that had begun to unfurl on DeVane’s lips as he realized he was still very much in a street called
Shit
.

With the showbiz interlude over, Vince pressed on. He wanted to know all about Beresford and the components of his rich fantasy life. Nicky DeVane, a naturally malicious gossipmonger, obliged. He sat up straight in his chair and knitted his fingers together on the table in front of him, just as he would with his girlfriends and camper colleagues in the fashion business before he settled in for what he routinely termed a ‘good goss sesh’. He had a glint in his eye, and that brisk look about him had returned as he told Beresford’s story.

After a hardly distinguished academic career at Eton, where Johnny had spent most of his time gambling and reading off-syllabus boys’ own adventures that fired his imagination, such as the works of John Buchan and Rider Haggard, Beresford went on to Sandhurst with the express intention of joining the Special Air Services and becoming an action hero. In 1941, Johnny’s father had served in the North African campaign with Sir David Stirling, the giant Scottish laird who had created the SAS. And, along with such larger-than-life real heroic figures as Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne, he had helped turn that small elite military outfit into the stuff of legend, unparalleled for their bravery, their stealth and their sheer bloody ferocity when taking it to the enemy. They dared, they won, and young Johnny Beresford had wanted in.

But there was one problem thwarting the young man’s planned warrior narrative. His feet just weren’t up to the rigours: they blistered and bruised and bunioned and broke out in every sort of rash imaginable. March? He could barely walk as far as the NAAFI in his army boots. The fact was, Johnny just wasn’t up to the footslogging demands of the SAS. He was six foot three inches of prime muscle-bound old-Etonian British bully beef, and born to lead, but his Achilles heel was not just his splitting and throbbing heels; it was his collapsed arches, his clawed ingrowing toenails, and skin that looked like bubble wrap after the first mile marched in full pack. Sir David Stirling, a dear friend of the family, insisted that there was nothing he could do, there were no strings to pull in that elite regiment as there had been at Sandhurst, where more time was spent mulling over maps than marching. You were only ever as strong as your weakest link.

Beresford viewed this as a failure, a slur on his manhood, so he left the army completely. And then he went about doing what he was best at, making money and having fun. But he tried to get his revenge. He used to thrash Sir David Stirling at cards in the Montcler at every opportunity, and thus took a small fortune off him. But deep down he knew that these were hollow victories against a man like Stirling. When he quit the army, he left not only his torturous boots and kit behind, but the best part of himself as well. He abandoned the heroic side, the leadership side and, in many ways, the innocent side. He was no longer a part of something greater than himself. He was now cast adrift in the thrusting world of dog-eat-dog capitalism, where every man fought for himself – not for the unit, the regiment, or for Queen and country. He made money, but to what end? So, with the help of booze, Johnny Beresford retreated into his childhood dreams and a world of heroic adventure. But there were no real coups to savour, no daring deeds with himself leading the charge and knocking out military installations in a matter of hours along with a select band of SAS chums, and taking over small countries off the coast of West Africa to be run by the elite of the Montcler set. Just as there had been no big Russian spy – just a bit-part TV player. It was Johnny Beresford indulging his fantasy life – a deadly fantasy life that looked as if it had cost him his real one.

As for the business with Dominic Saxmore-Blaine, Nicky DeVane dismissed it as a schoolboy prank. ‘That’s all it was supposed to be. Christ, Johnny had played the same one at school on more than one occasion, and no one ever got hurt.’

Vince leaned across the table to Nicky DeVane, and said calmly: ‘The only problem with the joke was that no one bothered to tell Dominic the punchline. You knew it, Mr DeVane, so did you call Dominic to reassure him that the bullets he’d fired into a man were blanks? That the man he thought he’d killed was just playacting? That it was all a big joke?’

The collapse in Nicky DeVane was palpable. If anyone had walked in right now, they’d have thought that Vince must have given Philly Jacket the okay to pummel DeVane where he sat. He looked as if someone had slipped the bones from his body.

But Vince didn’t let up. He loaded up again and carried on firing into the contrite corpse that was Nicky DeVane. ‘So no one told Dominic it was a joke, and in that seventy-two hours, Dominic Saxmore-Blaine turned himself into a real killer. To cover his tracks, he killed a woman he thought had been a witness to his crime. A young mother and an innocent woman, regardless of what she did to earn her money.’

‘The girl . . . the girl in the papers?’

‘That’s right, Mr DeVane, the girl in the papers. Marcy Jones was her name. Don’t forget that.’

‘I’d seen her, of course . . . with Lucky at the Imperial. But she looked so different . . .’

Nicky DeVane now did something that no doubt his friends would have frowned upon: he began to sob uncontrollably. His shoulders juddered and his head shook, tears flying everywhere, like a manic lawn sprinkler.

Vince turned away from DeVane and towards Philly Jacket, who stood against the wall, hands turning over change in his pockets, eyes hooded, dripping contempt from a snarling mouth. Vince returned his attention to DeVane. He didn’t know whether to put a comforting arm around the little feller, or slam him back against the wall and tell him to shape up.

What stopped either of these things happening (and more likely the latter) was a knock on the door, and Mac entering. A quick glance at Nicky DeVane answered the question he’d come to ask, but he asked it anyway.

‘You ready?’

Vince gave him the nod and stood up.

‘C-c-c-can I go now?’ DeVane asked through plaintive sobs.

‘Don’t be fuckin’ stupid!’ barked Philly Jacket, before either Vince or Mac could reply.

They stepped outside and closed the door, hearing the scrape of a chair against the cold floor as Philly Jacket took the seat Vince had just vacated. Then the rumbling voice: ‘So you’re a photographer, eh? Small world. I got me a camera for Christmas . . .’

They stepped out of earshot of events in Interview Room 2, knowing that Philly Jacket was about to commit Chinese water torture with his tongue.

‘Did you get any tears from Guy Ruley?’

‘Not a bit of it,’ said Mac. ‘Dead-eyed and impassive throughout. He blames it all on Dominic Saxmore-Blaine. Said he always knew Dominic was weak. Said that’s why he didn’t want to be in on the joke blooding. Not just because he didn’t think the kid couldn’t handle it, but because he didn’t think Dominic was worthy of joining their little dining club. A fag at Eton and a fag out of it, he reckoned. He thought he was a sissy boy.’

‘Is that what he and Beresford argued about at the Imperial?’

Mac gave a little
comme ci, comme ça
nod, and said, ‘Yeah, but it was mainly to do with some money that Beresford owed Guy. They were in a business deal together.’

‘Yeah, Ruley told me about that.’Vince shook his head in mild disgust and major insight at how this lot operated, and opined, ‘They wouldn’t allow an inconsequential little thing like Dominic Saxmore-Blaine to spoil their evening. When it comes down to it, it’s the money with them – always the money.’

‘I’ll finish up with Ruley,’ said Mac. ‘I left Kenny boring the hell out of him about his stock of premium bonds. Meet you in the Inferno in fifteen minutes. I’m dying for a snort. All this has left a bad taste in my mouth.’

‘I need to break the news to Isabel.’

‘Markham took a WPC and went to see Miss Saxmore-Blaine personally.’

Vince caught loud and clear the disapproval in Mac’s tone at his use of the ex-suspect’s first name. And he himself thought doing so a little strange, when he had always addressed her formally as Miss Saxmore-Blaine, even when she had insisted on being called Isabel. It was a reluctance he put down to not wanting to be drawn in by a beautiful woman, and led smack-bang into a dead end.

‘I’m heading the case, Mac. I thought that was my job?’

‘I think there was some concern that you might end up taking your work home with you.’

Before Vince could go through the routine of rustling up some indignation at his professionalism thus being called into question, Mac saved them both the trouble, about-heeled, and headed back down the corridor to Interview Room 4.