Gilded Edge, The (33 page)

The onset of night became unavoidable, and it seemed to crawl around the flat, closing down the day and their conversation for good. It was time for bed for both of them, whether they liked it or not, and that awkward
What next?
exchange came up. Isabel bluntly insisted that she didn’t want to go back to the Harley Street hospital, or to stay with friends. And she doubted that she’d ever go back to her Pont Street flat. Vince offered her his bed for the night, while he’d take the couch. She took him up on his offer.

Vince’s dreams that night were vivid: a naked Isabel came back into the living room and shook him, if not awake, then enough to raise him up from the couch and steer him like a grateful and gummy-eyed somnambulist to his own bed. It was, quite literally, a dream come true. Vince had suffered these dreams before: a beautiful girl entering the room, beckoning him forth to make love to her. A shadowy spirit figure and yet, oddly, possessing the face of a movie star – say Brigitte Bardot, or Sophia Loren, or the home-grown Julie Christie. On more than one occasion she had been some anonymous beauty glimpsed in the crowd that day, or a flirtatious but wordless brief encounter in a train or tube carriage. But never with this ending: the ending he’d wanted. The ending he’d been dreaming about.

Like a pair of stumbling thieves, they made their way into the bedroom. Vince may have banged an elbow on the door jamb, and stubbed a toe on the bedpost, but it wasn’t enough to pull him out of his half slumber, his waking dream world. Once in bed, she folded herself into him and they began to kiss. She tasted good. Along with the sweetness of the brandy and the slipperiness of the lipstick (a winning combination in any man’s book), there was the sharpness of salt; her face was still hot, flushed and damp with silent tears.

She manoeuvred herself on top of him. And just as she herself was moist and ready, his hard-on was already achingly old. It was the product of the dream he’d been fervently having about making love to her in the very bed he was now actually, dreamily, making love to her in. Or rather, she was making love to him in. She had ordered him not to move. Vince, never good at taking orders, willingly accepted these instructions, did
exactly
as he was told, and lay there supremely supine, as stiff as a varnished eel. Then Isabel’s long body was laid fully along his; he could feel her against him inch for inch. Her legs rested hotly against his, her toes dug into the base of his shin. It seemed the only point of separation happened at round about the third rib up, where her back arched enough for Vince to see her breasts, tantalizing hand-fuls that were well and truly out of his reach. He was under strict instruction not to move – and therefore move he did not. He was tempted to be insubordinate, except her hands were firmly gripping his upper arms and pinning him to the bed. She began to build up a rhythm that was occasionally broken by stirring circular movements. He saw her long neck crane back, so he could admire the strong rim of her faultless jawline. Funny the things you only notice when you’re half asleep and being right royally seen to – like how her elbows were double-jointed.

Her eyes were squeezed shut with enough concentrated vigour to crease and crinkle her taut skin. She was wrapped in her own world and he somehow felt a detachment from the proceedings, albeit a pleasurable one; like a voyeur, but not quite, because he knew that at any moment he could change what was happening. But why would he do that, he asked himself. Things were going very nicely, thank you very much.

As her movements became more vigorous, again she issued a breathless and almost pained instruction for him not to move. That was clearly to be her role, and the more she moved, the stiller he became. He was enjoying this game. Her head dipped suddenly and her thick hair came down like a curtain and covered her face, a face that was now pleasurably twisted, a mouth that now crookedly gaped. Strands of damp hair danced on his face. It tickled.

Deciding it was time to break ranks and disobey orders, he raised his hands, which were braced at his side grabbing up fistfuls of sheet, shook off her grip, reached for her hair and scraped it away from her face with some force, holding it bunched behind her head. She emitted a high-pitched exhalation, and he couldn’t tell if this was due to the activity they were both so vigorously engaged in, or from the pain of having her hair pulled back like a Chinese doll. He realized it was a heady mixture of both. When she announced in a low-pitched growl that she was about to come, he didn’t say a word. He was too busy trying not to come before she did. A concentrated effort, because the visuals were like nothing he’d witnessed before, the glorious sight of her was tearing him apart, so he closed his eyes.

When it happened, and their eyes eventually opened again, they found each other with their hands clasped around each other’s throats. A long lascivious smile was lashed around her mouth and, after some jerky movements that looked as if she was wringing every last scintilla of sap out of herself, she rolled over on to her back and, sated, folded silently into him and closed her eyes. The dream was now over, and again she looked sad.

Vince woke up the next morning feeling as though he hadn’t slept at all. He lay in the same position, flat on his back, feeling sure he hadn’t moved out of it the rest of the night. Maybe subconsciously he had still been obeying orders, and was still waiting for Isabel’s permission to move. If he was, he was out of luck, for she had gone. Maybe the whole thing had been a dream after all? A dream within a dream within . . .

In the living room, sitting on the tiled coffee table, was the brandy glass with her lipstick prints all over it. And on the couch from where he had been collected lay the twisted sheets. There was no note. He gave it an hour, made some coffee, then called the Salisbury Hospital. She had just checked out, no forwarding address or contact number.

Vince took a shower and washed away the sweet, sweet smell of dreamtime, before he cracked on with the day. He phoned Mac and found out that the case was officially closed. Detectives Kenny Block and Philly Jacket had located the ‘actor’ Bernie Korshank, who was working as a doorman at the Kitty Kat club in Camden Town. Korshank had verified Nicky DeVane and Guy Ruley’s story. Vince told Mac he still wasn’t satisfied, though there was no need to, because Mac knew how Vince felt about the case. There was a long pause in their conversation, which should have been filled with Mac saying something along the lines of,
The bodies are going into the ground next week. The case is closed, and you’re already too deep in the brown stuff without a shovel, as far as Markham is concerned. So if you value your career, you’ll let this one lie
.

But Mac didn’t say any of those things. Because again there was no need. The older man knew exactly the stuff the younger man was made of, so such advice would have been all rather pointless.

Marcy Jones was laid to rest at Willesden cemetery. It was a large turnout and the church was packed. The preacher was all fire and brimstone, and the congregation were with him every step of the way: speaking in tongues, praising the Lord, raising their arms to the great above. They seemed to be working beyond faith, assured in the knowledge that there was something up there to acknowledge their swaying and praying.

Half of Notting Hill had turned up to bury its now favourite daughter. With the help of a prodigious propaganda campaign that included posters on every available wall, and leafleting on every street corner, all put out and paid for by Michael X. Marcy Jones had reached almost saintly status. An innocent black girl used, abused and then slain by the white devils was the copy that went with the picture of Marcy Jones togged up in her nurse’s uniform.

Tyrell Lightly was there, with Michael X and the rest of the Brothers X, again all swathed in the uniform of Black Power. They stood ominously scowling at a sore thumb that stood out in the congregation. But Vince Treadwell wasn’t the only white person there; there were a dozen or so nurses and doctors from the hospital where Marcy had worked. But he was the only white face who had dared walk into Michael X’s back yard and take his main man out.

Tyrell Lightly’s eyes burned through the black shades he was wearing, and straight into Vince. As Vince turned to acknowledge the now goateed and uniformed gangster, Lightly rubbed the back of his long, guitar-plucking thumbnail over the fresh scar and lump that now permanently marked his sharp nose. It was the bony gangster’s way of saying they still had unfinished business. Vince couldn’t help but pull a quick smirk at his handiwork, but then turned away quickly. He wasn’t there for a show of machismo and a staring competition, but to pay his respects. Little Ruby Jones recognized him immediately, and gave him a heartbreaking smile and a tentative little wave. This made it worth it, and neutralized the thirty or so scowls he was getting from the Brothers X.

When the preacher left his pulpit, Michael X took his place. No one in the congregation looked too pleased with this state of affairs, but the presence of the shade-wearing muscle gathered around the self-styled revolutionary soon quelled any dissenting voices.

But not all. With their hard-earned sense of Christian forgiveness and shared sufferance, the mothers and the grandmothers and the women in the congregation weren’t scared by the Brothers. Michael X may have been top dog on the streets, but this was their domain and they took instruction from a higher power. And, as Michael X delivered his diatribe about the white devils and their legions of rapists and murderers and pillagers, the women in the congregation began to make their voices heard with a chorus of disapproval, and with shakes of their heads so forceful that the Brothers X soon looked well and truly intimidated.

It was clear that Michael X was deliberately hijacking the service, and Vince knew that the ire of X was aimed squarely at him. He felt that his antagonistic presence was also playing its part, so he decided to leave. Tyrell Lightly had been eyeballing him all the way through the diatribe, looking daggers and breathing bullets, and if that wasn’t enough, as the detective left his pew Lightly laboured the point by making a knife gesture with his forefinger and then running it across his throat. But it wasn’t that message that chilled Vince; it was watching the gangster slip his arm around his little daughter’s shoulder.

As he left the church Vince knew they would meet again.

Michael X had to eventually leave the pulpit when the women drowned him out with an impromptu and full-voiced rendition of ‘What a Friend we have in Jesus’.

From reading about the Beresford funeral in the paper, Vince realized it was a very different affair. In fact a very private and muted affair. Only the Montcler set and close family were in attendance, but strictly no one else. The exclusivity that permeated the Montcler cabal in life carried over just as effortlessly into death. If you weren’t a member, you weren’t getting in. He was buried in the family mausoleum, where the rest of the battling Beresfords had been honourably discharged to. James Asprey read a eulogy, something from
Thus Spake Zarathustra
. Isabel Saxmore-Blaine did not attend.

But three days after Beresford’s funeral, Vince did receive a phone call from her, informing him of her brother Dominic’s funeral, which he was cordially invited to attend. She didn’t employ quite that level of formality in her language, but the distance evident in her voice wasn’t completely explained away by the miles of phone line between them. This was the first time he’d heard from her since the night they had spent together, and there was no mention of it. Although Vince hardly expected her to review it in detail, he was at least hoping for an explanation of her flight from his bed without so much as a scribbled note left on the pillow; just to clear the air perhaps. Maybe she merely wanted it to be left shrouded in nocturnal uncertainty. Or maybe that dream sequence had been her idea of a nightmare. ‘Don’t move,’ she had insisted, and he had remained corpse-like throughout. Sex and death had mingled too closely that night. Either way it wasn’t up for discussion and, the more he thought about it, the more he agreed.

Isabel told Vince that the funeral would be another very private affair. She then told him – as if to stem any hope he might have that she wanted to see him, that it was her father who had requested his presence. To discuss certain matters. Then, polite and brusquely businesslike, she said her goodbyes and hung up in his ear.

The Saxmore-Blaine country seat was in Wiltshire. The family owned a village, and beyond it as far as the eye could see. Which was pretty much what you always saw in the country: rolling hills with a patchwork quilt of wheat and maze and furrowed brown dirt.

Set in its wide acres, the fifteenth-century stately sandstone pile was a game of two halves. The front half was a fortified castle with castellated towers, turrets, embrasures and a crescent-shaped moat. And the back half was a Tudor manor house with a long, welcoming, mullioned window stretching across its front, and a Capability Brown garden. Architecturally this mixture was considered eccentric at the time, as if the original owners had decided to split the difference between their male and female tastes when they built their home. But the real eccentricity of it was that the wife had been allowed a say at all, and didn’t instead get dunked as a witch.