Gilded Edge, The (34 page)

The service took place in a private chapel inside the house. It was quick, perfunctory and not very well attended. Isabel stood with her father, the ambassador. Vince had noticed an oil painting of him in one of the hallways, dressed in his full panoply of ceremonial attire, with its gold brocade and rope and a chestful of multicoloured ribbons garnered during his war days. He was midsized in height, with a large but finely appointed head that was covered in thick silver hair. He wasn’t in ceremonial uniform today, rather in morning dress. It was easy to see where Isabel got her looks from and, Vince suspected, when not on the booze or the happy pills, her fighting spirit. Isabel had told him that as a child she always wanted to be at her father’s side, and there she was, practically holding him up, for there wasn’t a lot of spirit in the old man today.

Once it was over, everyone filed wordlessly out of the chapel apart from the father, who sat in prayer with his thoughts. Vince started to follow the rest, half hoping he could make a break for it in one of the long corridors beyond. But Isabel stymied such a move when she approached quickly and hooked her arm around his, announcing, ‘I could do with a stiff drink.’

In one of the more homely sitting rooms, which nevertheless stored enough grand antiques to make a skilled burglar salivate, Isabel poured herself a large single malt with just a spit of water. Not a drink he associated with her, but it did match the surroundings. He didn’t know if this was called the Oak Room, but it should have been, for the walls were panelled in it and the furniture was made of it. There were coffers, chests, cabinets and bookcases, and taking up one entire side was a long, medieval and richly hued refectory table with fourteen pegged and dowelled chairs gathered around it. This room alone looked as though it had been responsible for the felling of a sizeable forest. Vince sat himself uncomfortably on a lumpy two-hundred-year-old haysack sofa.

And then his eye caught her. She stood above the fireplace, wearing a long gown that, due to its translucent and snug fit, made her look as if she was naked. It was a painting of Isabel’s mother. The thick golden hair, jet-black eyes, a slash of red for a mouth – all very wild and strikingly vivid against the pale background of whatever indistinct setting she was posed in. Maybe it was Greco-Roman. Or maybe it was Mars. She wasn’t wearing any shoes and was raised on tiptoe, coming at you full frontal, as though she was about to break the fourth wall and walk out of the picture. It was an odd composition, and Vince couldn’t tell if the portrait was any good, as it all seemed a little out of focus. Not abstract, or surreal, just out of focus. The eyes followed you around the room, but covertly, never fully engaging. The painting was out of sorts with the rest of the room, out of sorts with the rest of the house. The subject didn’t look as if she belonged in the English countryside at all, for that matter. And maybe that was the problem. The ambassador had taken her out of her natural environment, and she had wilted – or gone mad. So, in many ways, the artist had captured her true essence perfectly.

Isabel padded over to the fireplace and, like an actress hitting her mark, stood directly under the painting. He could see the likeness. She had some of her mother’s structure – the colour, the vivid wildness – but she was more in focus and earthed by her paternal genes.

‘Thank you for showing up.’

‘You said your father wanted to see me.’

She stood there considering him. His last statement was as perfectly reasonable as it was perfectly true, and yet it seemed to annoy her intensely.

Vince sat there appearing relaxed but, of course, she didn’t know how uncomfortable he actually felt, and not just because of the sofa he was sitting on. It didn’t help that he was sure that somewhere in the guts of the old bastard sofa there lurked an ancient coiled spring that was about to finally give way, then shoot up through the upholstery and spear him in the last place he ever wanted spearing.

Her annoyance built in the uncomfortable silence, until she said somewhat tersely, ‘Aren’t you the least curious, Detective Treadwell, as to why I didn’t contact you?’

‘You left without an explanation or a number, so I had a feeling you didn’t
want
to be contacted. You’ve been through a great deal, Miss Saxmore-Blaine, and I perfectly understand. But I’d just like you to know that whatever I can do to help you, I will.’

‘Quite the Galahad,’ she mocked, then took the first sip of her drink.

It must have whetted her appetite because she then took three more in quick succession, each one more voluminous than the last. Glass almost drained, she continued, ‘Well, now I have the opportunity, I’d just like to say—’

Whatever she wanted say, she wasn’t prepared to say it in the same room as her father, who had just entered. The ambassador boomed, ‘Detective Treadwell?’

Vince stood up sharply, considering it a good opportunity to get off the hay-sack missile launcher. Isabel took the opportunity to sashay over to the booze table and re-brim her glass. As she passed Vince, their eyes met in wordless conference, in which they both agreed to resume this conversation at another time, in another place. She gave her father a comforting and accommodating smile, then said, ‘I shall leave you two gentlemen to it,’ and walked out of the room.

The ambassador’s eyes were fixed firmly on his daughter as she did so, and it was the glass in her hand he was looking at with stern disapproval; like finding an unpolished buckle on the parade ground.

‘My daughter didn’t offer you a drink, Detective?’

‘No. Thank you, anyway, sir, but not just now.’

The old man went over to the table stocking the booze, and poured himself one from the same decanter as his daughter. A single this time, and with more than a dash of water. ‘I find, these days, that I prefer people who turn down a drink over those who never turn down an opportunity to have one. In my younger days it used to be the other way round.’

The ambassador’s deflated and grief-stricken state in the chapel seemed have disappeared. In fact, he now seemed rather pumped up, back straight, head held high – all ready for life and its challenges again. Vince had the feeling the ambassador would now shed no more tears for his only son. Once he’d left that chapel, he’d left him behind and his grief with it.

Vince glanced up at a picture on the wall directly above the ambassador. It wasn’t a portrait of the ambassador, but there was a striking family resemblance in the set of the strong jaw, the full head of silvery hair perhaps. The painting, circa 1850, featured a man dressed in Harris tweed plus-fours, standing on some grey rocks. There was a choppy ocean behind him, and a blue sky with some billowy nimbus clouds, and a single white double-circumflex to indicate a seagull in flight.

‘Sir Arthur Saxmore-Blaine,’ said the ambassador, following Vince’s gaze. ‘He was army, like most of the Saxmore-Blaines.’

‘Was he an ambassador too, like most of the Saxmore-Blaines?’

‘Not an ambassador – he was far too honest and blunt-speaking for that. But he was an explorer, a naturalist and an illustrator of some repute. The family owes him a lot. You know how this family made its fortune, Detective?’ Vince shook his head. The ambassador gleefully told him: ‘Shit.’

‘Shit?’

‘Shit. No other word for it. Shit. Good old-fashioned, good honest shit. Of course the Saxmore-Blaines were an industrious lot. After all, houses and land like this don’t come cheap. They had made and lost other fortunes in the past. But none like Sir Arthur there had bequeathed. The joke is, he left us a pile – a pile of shit. And that shit was worth its weight in gold. Let me explain.’

‘I’m wishing you would, sir.’

‘You see the seagull behind him?’

Vince saw it. On further inspection, it looked a little out of perspective for the picture, more like an oversized albatross or a small glider. But once the ambassador had pointed it out, Vince figured it was emphasized because it wasn’t just background; it was very much part of the story.

‘You see, Detective Treadwell, seabirds were a favourite with my ancestor. He travelled the world studying and illustrating them. It took him to their colonies, as far away as Peru and the Christmas Islands, where they massed in their thousands for nesting and breeding purposes. And, as well as breeding and eating fish and what have you, the other thing they do is
shit
. Lots and lots of the stuff. What’s shit good for?’

‘Avoiding?’

‘You’re not a country man, Detective. I can tell that by your footwear, the cut of your suit, even by your colour and complexion. There’s a touch of the Mediterranean about you. Of Italian extraction, are you?’

‘I was left behind by the gypsies, so the story goes.’

‘I wasn’t being insulting, Detective, merely observant.’

‘You’ll have to forgive me, sir, but in the house I grew up in we didn’t have five hundred years of ancestry hanging up on the walls. So my family lineage is a little murky.’

‘Well, let me tell you what shit is good for in this neck of the woods. Fertilizer. And bird shit, seabird shit, is the best fertilizer there is. Guano, as it’s referred to, has lots of valuable properties. Arthur discovered this, so he mined it for all it was worth. He laid claim to, and bought for a pittance, huge swathes of coastal land in places like Peru and Chile that were considered completely useless, due to being covered in birds and bird shit. He re-made this family’s fortune many times over. Oh, we’ve tarted that fortune up over the years with property and farming and gilts and bonds, but it’s the shit that underwrites it all.
Shit.’

At that, the ambassador turned and raised a grateful glass to the wily old shit-shoveller in the portrait, then took a hearty swig of his single malt.

‘But you’re not here to hear talk about shit,’ he continued, refocusing his gaze on the detective before him.

Vince got the feeling his host loved telling that story, and mined the ‘shit’ humour for all it was worth. Not wanting to disappoint him by missing this opportunity, Vince replied: ‘I’m not here to talk shit.’

He was right. The ambassador smiled broadly, then he threw him by saying, ‘Then why
are
you here, Detective?’

‘You wanted to see me, I believe?’

‘But that’s merely your pretext. The real reason is you’re here to see my daughter. I feel I interrupted something a minute ago.’ Vince didn’t confirm or deny the ambassador’s remark, so the old man continued, ‘She’s a beautiful woman who attracts the wrong kind. I’m not saying
you’re
the wrong kind, Detective Treadwell. But you are the wrong kind for my daughter.’

‘Of uncertain extraction and without five hundred years of ancestry up on the walls, that kind of wrong kind?’

‘You strike me as a good man, Treadwell, and an honest man. You’re a policeman, so can’t be all bad.’

‘Oh, you’d be surprised.’

‘I need calm in this house, calm for my daughter. I’ve read the papers. They’re looking for a story, asking if I blame my daughter for Dominic. Well, I don’t. Dominic was weak, always was. He was his mother’s son, God rest her soul. Well, now they are together, with their Maker.’ The ambassador glanced up at the painting of his dead wife, not lovingly, but as if to check it wasn’t about to come crashing down. ‘And if you read the papers, I assume you know all about her, too?’Vince gave no reaction, not wanting to assume too much. And certainly not wanting to mimic the ambassador, who seemed to thrive on assumptions. ‘Well, they can go to hell! I blame James Asprey and that damned gaming house of his.’

‘That’s very blunt, very honest,’ said Vince.

‘I’m a retired ambassador, and being retired is a bloody relief, Detective, I can tell you that. As well as having the privilege of meeting some real first-raters, I’ve also had the misfortune to meet more pricks and horse’s asses than I’ve had state banquets. And I’ve always held my tongue. So, now that the shackles are off, I’ve promised myself I will speak freely until my dying day.

‘I knew Beresford’s father in the army. Different regiment, different club, but a fine man, a fine soldier. In this case, the apple fell very far from the tree. The son wasn’t fit to black his father’s boots.’

The ambassador said all this with such vigour that Vince couldn’t help but wonder if he was talking about his own son. There was a frightful symmetry between the two fates that had befallen and would forever link the houses of Beresford and Saxmore-Blaine. The ambassador took some calming breaths, but couldn’t rid his face of the twisted disgust it displayed.

‘That place, it’s the Devil’s arcade.’

‘What place is that, sir?’

‘Why, the Montcler club, of course. I know many a decent man who’s lost his fortune, and his soul, at those tables. And Asprey still lets them go on playing, drawing them deeper and deeper into his debt. Asprey and his ilk represent everything that’s wrong with this country. No, sir, I didn’t approve of Beresford – and I was right. He reaped havoc on my children, on this family, and, well, he’s paid the price I suppose. But I shan’t mourn him. To hell with the lot of ’em!’

The ambassador took the first sip of his drink. He didn’t look as though he enjoyed it as much as his daughter did. Tough act to follow. But then again, he didn’t look as though he enjoyed anything as much as his daughter, or his ex-wife for that matter. But the booze obviously worked in taking away some of the bitter taste in his mouth, and seemed to soothe his rancour. He finally stopped pacing and took a seat in a stern-looking high-backed armchair with leather-padded upholstery. It was as shiny as a saddle, and looked just about as comfortable.

‘I’m not completely insensitive or deluded as to the ways of the world, Detective Treadwell, and my own place in it. And also as to my failings as a father. I want to make amends for that now. It seems the person who is most forgotten in this dreadful mess is the young woman my son killed. My daughter and I have discussed the matter, and Isabel will in due course contact her family to make arrangements for reparations to be paid to the daughter and her grandmother. I know what she did for a living, and I know that God will forgive her. I only hope that He will forgive my son.’