Gilded Edge, The (40 page)

‘I think you’re out to spread as much muck as possible,’ she snarled. ‘I think everyone who has been hurt by this case now deserves to be left alone to grieve. Your superiors have made their judgement, and I don’t see what the hell is so special about you that you think you’re above the rules!’

Lots of words struck a chord in Vince in that statement:
rules, superiors, judgement
. And he hated every one of them. ‘So who does decide all this? Your father? James Asprey and his pals? I don’t think so, Miss Saxmore-Blaine.’

‘You’re very naïve, Mr Treadwell. They’ve been making those kinds of decisions since time immemorial. And that’s what you can’t stand: the status quo.’ Her eyes looked as though they had cross hairs superimposed on them. Her mouth looked as though it needed a muzzle. ‘You don’t give a damn about Johnny, or about Dominic for that matter. Underneath all the well-tailored veneer, the looks and education, you’re just a common little spiv and a vicious little guttersnipe on the make. And on a downward spiral to nowhere, from what I hear.’

‘Last time you had that look on your face, Miss Saxmore-Blaine, you were licking my lips and dripping sweat into my eyes.’

The smirk he wore was rapidly wiped off when her flattened hand cracked across his chops. He wasn’t very proud of his last comment. It wasn’t very gentlemanly. In fact, it was guttersnipe talk, and he knew it. Taking that as a good a cue as any, he about-turned and made his way to the exit.

Vince went looking for Billy Hill. As detective work went, it was an impossible task, because if Billy Hill didn’t want to be found, he wouldn’t be found. An audience with the Pope would be easier to arrange at such short notice. But Vince’s reckoning was that, if he put his name about enough, he hoped Billy Hill might want to find him.

His first stop was the Centurion club, just off Saffron Hill in Clerkenwell. In the murky main room, men sat huddled drinking espressos you could stand a spoon up in, with slices of lemon peel on the side. The coffee drinkers who frequented the Centurion weren’t the Espresso Bongo crowd of Soho, with jazzsters, hipsters, pill-poppers and potheads enjoying a legal jolt and hanging out and shooting the shit. No, the coffee drinkers in the Centurion club were all of Italian extraction, and all ex-paisan of Charles ‘Derby’ Sabini and his Italian mob of Saffron Hill. And in their heyday, the twenties and thirties, they were all well versed in wielding a straight razor on the racetracks of England. They spoke in hushed tones so as not to be overheard, even when they were the only customers in the place. An atmosphere of suspicion hung heavy. In the back room of the club was one of the busiest bookmaking and lay-off operations in the country, run by a man named Alberto Dimeo, otherwise known as Italian Albert, or Dimes. Sitting in one of the booths was his mentor and fellow Italian from Saffron Hill, whose anglicized name was Bert Marsh. Vince had come across him previously, when he was working Vice in West End Central. Bert Marsh didn’t make the papers, didn’t push his weight around, and didn’t seem to do much more than sit in the back of the Centurion and drink a chain of two-finger measures of bitter espresso coffee, in a huddle with other men of a similarly crooked disposition. It was hard to tell his role now; some said that he’d retired in the fifties and ceded control of the Italian end of things to Dimes, who was in turn in cahoots with Billy Hill. Others said he was still the power behind the power behind the . . .

But Vince knew it paid not to be sucked into the myth-making and barroom banter of villains. However, he certainly knew that Bert Marsh was a consummate fixer, someone who knew everyone, and therefore someone who could get the word around. So Vince bought him a cup of coffee . . .

Next stop was Soho. For the Cabinet club on Gerrard Street and The Modernaires on Old Compton Street. The two clubs were run by Aggie Hill, Billy’s former wife. All clubs in Soho contained the occasional villain, but the Cabinet actually catered for them. The place was awash with Brylcreemed, dark-suited hoods with skinny ties around their necks and thick scars across their cheeks, along with frowns and scowls worn as precursors to imminent conflict. In London, all points of the compass gathered under Soho’s volcanic neon glow, and with that came plenty of rivalry and needle. It was Friday night, and already things had kicked off. Some
right fucking liberty-takers
from Deptford were going toe to toe with some
right two-bob cunts
from Islington. Vince left at the first sound of breaking glass.

The crowd in The Modernaires on Old Compton Street was more mixed, a place for wives or girlfriends – but God forbid both on the same night. The girls wore their hair as high as structurally possible, and drank Dubonnet in their double-knits and diamantés, and slurred their vowels and cackled with laughter. En masse, they seemed a far more frightening proposition than the menfolk. And when one of them gave another one of them a
funny
look whilst jostling for position before the communal mirror in the Ladies, while applying fresh mounds of mascara, a prize catfight broke out. Painted talons ripped at brittle hairdos, and the cut and thrust and the sheer up-close nature of it put the men’s set-to in the Cabinet club to shame. These women knew a thing or two about having a testosterone-fuelled tear-up.

Other clubs he hit were the Log Cabin club, Al Burnett’s Stork club, The Bagatelles, Winston’s, Churchill’s (no relation) and The Astor. Next up were the spiel joints that he knew Billy Hill had interests in, which in Soho was just about all of them.

By the time this subterranean trawl was done, and he’d foot-slogged his way all around the not-so-square mile of Soho, Vince felt as if he’d smoked five hundred cigarettes and been soaked in a vat of booze. Not that he had drunk or smoked, but just had so much of it blown over him or spilled on him amid the Friday night revelries that, by the time he got in a taxi for home, the cabbie gave him a nod and a wink and said he looked as if he’d had a good time. He hadn’t, but he’d done the trick. He’d put the word about that he was looking for Billy Hill. He had let it be known to every doorman, bartender, hostess, cloakroom attendant, cigarette girl, waiter, card dealer and shill. And none of them had given anything away – nothing concrete, nothing you could hang your hat on. Some said he was off in Tangiers, setting up new nightclubbing ventures. Others said he was in South Africa, mining a rich vein of profit in gold and diamonds. Others said he was busy buying up swathes of the Spanish coastline and developing high-rise tourist ghettos in places like Torremolinos.

Vince’s last port of call for the night was the Moscow Road in Bayswater, the address of Billy Hill’s sumptuous mansion flat. There was a pub opposite the block Hill lived in, and it was known that, on any given day, plainclothes coppers were regularly propped at the bar watching Hill’s movements. It was all so obvious, and all so well known, that Hill sent his men into the pub to talk loudly at the bar about their boss’s coming and goings. The pub soon became known as ‘the Ministry of Underworld Misinformation’. If the rumour emerged that Hill had a meeting in Myrtle Street in the East End, it was odds on he was really up on the North End Road in Fulham.

Vince told the cabbie to wait for him, got out and then bowled straight over towards the block of flats, where he was met by a uniformed and smiling concierge who opened the door for him. Vince asked if Billy Hill was in. The accommodating smile on the concierge’s face immediately transmogrified into open hostility. Adroit at talking out of the side of his mouth, he asked, ‘Who wants to know?’ Obviously on Hill’s payroll, Vince gave him all the required information, then headed back to his cab.

It was on Praed Street in Paddington, finally on his way home, that Vince had the stroke of luck that had thus far evaded him on this case. Sexy Sadie from the Imperial was striding along the street, or ‘striding’ as much as her restrictive red satin pencil skirt would allow. And she had a man in tow, a punter. Vince got out of the cab and tailed them. It wasn’t much effort. A block away from where he’d spotted her, and just past a parade of shops and restaurants, she hung a left down an alleyway and made her way to a door that she and the punter disappeared through.

Vince approached, and decided the door looked a doddle. He’d seen better security on an outhouse. But, seeing as this was the age of the new caution, he remembered an old trick Mac had taught him about closed doors. Try opening them first. Vince turned the handle, pushed the door, and it opened . . .

Met by a steep set of carpeted stairs, with the glow of a red light awaiting him at the top, he silently climbed them. The landing was whorehouse red from the carpet to the wallpaper. Chinese paper lanterns decked the halls to give a feel of the exotic Orient, and dragon silks draped the doors. But this was more Chinese takeaway than the authentic world of Suzy Wong. He doubted there was a geisha girl waiting behind any of the doors. And all he could hear was the sound of loveless, joyless, muted sex. Rents getting paid, kids getting put through private schools, but mostly habits getting their fixes.

Vince didn’t have to select a door, as one was picked for him. In shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal the ill-formed inky blottings of prison tattoos, about five foot eleven and medium build, but with one of those extended guts that looked as if it had been grafted on. He asked: ‘Who let you in?’

‘The front door was open.’

The man shook his head in weary annoyance, then said, to no one in particular, ‘How many times do I have to tell them?’ He focused back on Vince. ‘So what can I do for you?’

‘Well, I saw the light was on and I thought . . .’ And I thought I’d come up here and slam you into the wall. Vince spoke the first part, then did the second. Before the gutted pimp even knew he was in a fight, he was sliding down the wall. He hit it with such force that the skimpy structure shook and alerted the pros and the punters that all was not well.

Sadie, as the last one in, was the first out. There was no
coitus interruptus
involved for her; she hadn’t even removed her drawers or gone through her price list yet. Her punter, saggy and sadlooking, stood right next to her. He wore a winning combination of Y-fronts and socks, with just enough sartorial flourishes in the form of stains and holes to really gather some admiring glances from the ladies.

The pimp was now up on his feet, trying to look purposeful, and waving his hands around in front of him as if it meant something. It may well have done, just not to Vince, who said:‘Tell him who I am, Sadie.’

‘Leave it, Freddie, he’s a copper.’

Away from the grunts and groans, desperation and disappointments of the whorehouse, Vince and Sadie had found solace in a small hotel off Paddington Green. Its bar was cosy, with enough illicit liaisons going on there to make them both feel at home. Sadie sipped a brandy and Coke, numbing and sweet just as her cravings demanded. The intervening weeks hadn’t been kind to her, and she was desperate not to get pinched. Holloway and cold turkey didn’t appeal. In the grip of her addiction, she was clearly on the slide. It had taken her swiftly and silently, without fight or complaint. She was a lot thinner than the last time he’d seen her, the sallow skin hanging over her small bones without much conviction. In her low-cut dress, the breasts were unavoidable; but where he’d once admired them for their plumpness, they now looked tired and pouchy. What with the perfunctory glacial eyes, everything was working like machinery towards a single purpose and her only real concern, that next ‘angry fix’.

She talked. She
wanted
to talk, to unburden her woes. And Vince let her do so. This wasn’t all heart on his part. It was quid pro quo. She told him that her boyfriend had OD’d. Her girlfriend had left her. Her habit had ratcheted up. And, since the debacle at the Imperial, her income had dwindled. And now she was back on Praed Street, tipping over half of her earnings to the pimp, Fat Gut Freddie. Poor Sadie, there was enough tragedy and tumult in her story to drag down an entire army of bright-eyed and bushytailed optimists and evangelists. Enough loss of innocence to wall up Eden and hang up the condemned sign. It was at times like these that Vince understood Bernie Korshank’s little wife’s taste in décor: the smiling sheep amid the country idyll. He might try and grab some of it for himself one day. Maybe go live on a farm and toil on the land. Or go further afield, to the Rockies in Canada, or the outback of Australia, the Amazon jungle. Any damned place to throw off the stench of the city and the hard-luck stories, before his heart dried up within his ribs and looked like a piece of cuttlefish hanging in a bird cage.

Once Sadie had exhausted her luckless narrative, she glanced back at Vince, with eyes no longer moist with self-pity but narrow, tense and full of suspicion.

‘Anyway, you haven’t come to listen to my problems, have you?’

‘Dominic Saxmore-Blaine, you knew him?’ She shrugged. Vince blazed her a pair of dark eyes, put an edge in his voice, and said, ‘That wasn’t a question, Sadie. Now, tell me, was he a punter?’

‘Not one of mine, no.’

‘How about Marcy’s?’

Sadie looked away. It could have been in thought, but she could just as easily have been lost in a junkie distraction, a junkie musing, like considering the possibilities of the world existing on another plane – on her thumb nail, for instance. Vince judged himself to have already shown her enough patience. ‘They’re both of them dead, Sadie. What is there to protect now – their reputations?’

‘Yeah, he was Marcy’s punter. But more than that, I’d say. He’d sort of fallen in love with her, if you get what I mean?’Vince got it, since it wasn’t so hard to get. Sadie added, ‘Occupational hazard, dearie.’

‘But also, with the right punter, an occupational goldmine, right?’

‘It was for a while. Dominic started buying her presents, giving her money. Quite a bit of money, in fact. At twenty-one, part of his trust fund had started coming through. I told Marcy she was on to a good thing here, but she had to play it right. It’s happened to me a couple of times, in my younger days. Before this shit took . . .’ Her voice trailed off and she looked wistful.