Gilded Edge, The (49 page)

Vince went over to the side table that stood before the window that looked out on to the rising bank of the garden. It was a hefty-looking Regency side table in polished rosewood, and had a sturdy central-column pedestal that flared out into four carvedpaw feet. Innocuous-looking enough, it looked as if it folded out into a small dining table. A silver condiment set, for salt and pepper and oil and vinegar, and the stack of six cork table mats rested on it.

‘Beresford was playing cards when he was killed,’ said Vince. He then pointed to the green leather armchair positioned in front of the TV. ‘Then he was moved over to this chair, and the gun was put in his hand to make it look like he had shot himself.’Vince kneeled down to take a look underneath the table. To one side of the central support column he quickly discovered a small brass catch, shaped like a trigger, and gave it a pull. Isabel, without prompting, removed the condiment set and place mats and put them over on the desk. Then they both moved the table away from the window. Vince slid the top aside until it was open, unfolding into a table over twice its previous size. And that manoeuvre revealed that the underside of its polished surface was covered in green baize. It formed a card table that could comfortably accommodate eight players, and underneath the table top were concealed sectioned compartments stuffed with games and goodies. And clues. All of which Vince greeted with a broad smile.

Isabel said, ‘I never knew this was a card table, but then again I’ve only ever been in this room about three times. And one of them was when I discovered him dead. But it’s hardly a surprise. He was a gambler.’

‘Simon Goldsachs had a similar table in his study, which held a secret too. Grand plans for a paradise off the coast of West Africa. A Shangri-la where he and his friends could get away from the riff-raff.’

Vince rifled the compartments and took out gaming chips and money, including a roll of about five hundred pounds secured with an elastic band. There were also packs of playing cards still in their virginal cellophane wraps and stamped with the Montcler seal. And one other pack, which was already opened, and not a Montcler pack but a plain deck of Waddington playing cards that you could buy in any games store.

Vince picked up one of the Montcler packs, unsheathed it from its crispy plastic, broke the seal and opened it. He pulled up a couple of chairs and took a seat at the card table.

Isabel joined him. ‘I thought you didn’t play cards?’ she said.

‘Not with a stacked deck, I don’t, and these are stacked. Marked.’

Vince began to deal out the cards, separating them into highvalue and low-value, with six being the dividing number.

‘Nicky DeVane never told me how their card scam worked, not properly. But he revealed enough. And Billy Hill gave me some clues, too. He said it was a twenty-four carat gold cheat. The rest I figured out.’

Vince put the two separate stacks of cards next to each other on the green baize. He said, ‘Take a look at them, and what do you see?’

Isabel looked at the cards, then shrugged impatiently. ‘Just two piles of cards. So what?’

‘Take a good look at the gilding around the edges. Now what?’

Isabel looked intently at the two blocks of gold sitting on the table. She looked good and hard from all angles before she said, ‘They’re in different shades of gold?’

‘Bingo!’ said Vince, banging his fist with exclamatory zeal on the table. ‘The low-value cards have been gilded in nine carat gold, so they look dull, almost coppery in comparison to the high-value cards, which have been gilded in twenty-four carat. They look almost yellow: got a real glint to them. It’s simple enough to do; a home gilding kit could probably do the job. But once they’re shuffled . . .’ Vince shuffled the cards, ‘and mixed in together, they look the same as . . .’ Vince then took out the pack of cards he had taken from the Montcler club that evening and rested them next to the ‘marked’ pack, ‘they look the same as the legitimate deck.’

Isabel’s eyes narrowed in on the two gold blocks, and she examined them with a forensic intensity. Vince looked at his watch, and muttered something like ‘We haven’t got all night’. Isabel raised a hand to shut him up and then, in her own sweet time, eventually purred, ‘Mmmm . . . well, my darling detective, I for one can see a slight difference. The marked cards look more grainy.’

Vince leaned in for a closer gawp and saw it too. ‘Of course there’s going to be a
slight
difference, because there
is
a slight difference. But it’s only noticeable to the trained eye, and to those in the know. And you, my sweet, are now in the know.’

She looked at the grinning detective, and gave a concessionary little wobble of her head to acknowledge the fact.

‘You’re a tough crowd to please, Miss Saxmore-Blaine.’

‘I’m just playing devil’s advocate, Mr Treadwell.’

‘And you play it well. But the difference is only noticeable by close comparison, and the people being cheated are never going to see the right and the wrong decks placed side by side.’

Vince picked up the marked cards, gave them another quick shuffle. He dealt out a hand, five cards, and fanned them in front of him as if he were playing a game. He was holding the Jack of clubs, the seven of hearts, the three of spades, the five of clubs and the nine of diamonds. It was a beast of a hand – a crippled claw, a hook – but it would serve its purpose.

‘Take a good look at the top of the cards, and tell me what you see?’

Isabel sat back in her chair, at a respectable playing distance, and studied the top of the cards he was holding. She then concluded: ‘I see nothing. I can’t tell the difference.’

Vince looked perplexed. ‘Are you playing devil’s advocate again?’

‘You do want a rock-solid case, don’t you?’

‘Fair enough, Clarence Darrow.’Vince laid the cards face down on the table. He got up and went over to the partners’ desk and picked up a tall and industrial-looking anglepoise lamp, unplugged it and brought in over to the card table and plugged it back in. It gave off an illuminating 100 watts of dusty light.

He said: ‘All casinos have bright lights, as bright as possible. Not only the 150-watt bulbs in the chandeliers, but the overhead table lights too. It’s an unforgiving light that not only keeps everyone awake and playing, but it also helps prevent cheating. When you sit down at a gaming table, there are no dark spots, no hiding places. It’s as if you’re in a ring of fire.’ Again Vince held the cards like he was playing a hand. ‘Guy Ruley told me you’re a good shot. Is that true?’

‘I’ve twenty/twenty vision, the same as Johnny. To tell you the truth, I used to miss a few just so he wouldn’t go into a frightful strop. To bag more than him, anyone would think I’d just shot his balls off.’

‘Concentrate on the top of the cards, Isabel.’

It didn’t take long before she said, ‘I see it. Just a glint, but I see it.’

‘Tell me the order of them, high or low . . .’

Isabel read out the sequence, ‘High, high, low, low . . . high,’ and she got it spot on. A smile tore across Vince’s face, and he said, ‘Beresford had it down cold, had it practised. So long as the other player didn’t hold his cards too close to his chest or cover them up, he could read them. And no one in the Montcler would be that guarded, because no one would expect cheating. Because you were sitting among gentlemen, playing with Johnny Beresford and other like-minded men of honour.’

Isabel expelled a whip-cracking ‘Ha!’ at that remark.

Vince qualified: ‘Well, the Montcler isn’t exactly some two-bob back-room spiel in Bermondsey; it’s in Berkeley Square, for Christ’s sake!’ He stood up, feeling invigorated, and went over to the shelf holding the collection of silver-framed photos of Beresford and his friends at play. To Vince’s eye, the one empty picture frame looked like a big gaping mouth asking the questions
who?
and
why?
He reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out the photo that he had carried around with him since the case had started. It was creased, it was smudged, it was ripped at the corner, it was in bad shape. But as he slipped it back into the frame, it closed that gaping mouth and finally answered the questions.

Isabel came over and joined him. She looked at the series of photos with all the interest of a stranger. Vince wondered if it struck her as odd that she appeared in none of them. But he knew that thought must have struck her a long time ago, and then been washed over and conveniently forgotten in the miasma of booze and pills and emotional detachment that seemed to exist between herself and Beresford.

Looking at the men gathered in the photo, Isabel said: ‘Which one killed Johnny?’

‘He killed himself. He died by his own hand. But they’re all guilty. One is more guilty than the others, but they all had a hand in it.’

‘Johnny the golden boy. It almost seemed as if the Montcler club was created for him, and him alone. The first amongst equals . . .’

‘Maybe at one time it was like that. But in every group there’s always a pecking order. But it’s not set in stone and, with time, that order can change. Stocks rise and fall. I think there’s a new order emerging.’

The Ruley residence was situated in rural Buckinghamshire. By the time they arrived there, it was just before dawn, when darkness was at its ripest, deepest and most oppressive. A sickle of moonlight hung poignantly in the pitch-black sky, with not even the twinkle-twinkle of little stars to illuminate the scene. The house was secluded, set in its own ample and wooded acreage, so without specific directions you would never find it. Isabel knew the way, since she had been to ‘Chuckers’ before, with Johnny and the rest of his gang for the occasional shooting party. The house was unofficially called Chuckers because Joseph Ruley, Guy’s father, had built the place from scratch just after the war, and had designed it specifically to resemble the Prime Minster’s country residence, Chequers, which was in the same county and not that far away. A massive pretension on his part that didn’t go uncommented on. Joseph’s wife – Josephine, no less – was also partly to blame, because of her unrepentant northernness and penchant for referring to everyone as ‘Chuck’.

Vince slowed the engine and parked the Mk II in a small layby. Upon doing so, an argument ensued. Vince told Isabel he was going to break into Chuckers, and hopefully catch Ruley by surprise, and that she was to wait in the car. Isabel contended that she had been in the house and knew the layout, and therefore should accompany him. Vince said that he’d work it out, but she wasn’t keen on being left in the car, away from the action. He opened the glove compartment and took out a pocket torch; he didn’t need to shine it on those exquisite features to see that they were now arranged in petulant annoyance. Vince assured her that he wouldn’t be long. He then wisecracked and said he didn’t realize cats were afraid of the dark.

She turned slowly towards him and held him in a withering gaze that could have turned the verdantly lush and damp Buckinghamshire countryside into a barren and desiccated wasteland, and said that if he wanted a compliant little pet, he should have got a Poodle. But she eventually agreed to wait inside the car. And Vince, with his tail now between his legs, quickly got out of the vehicle and made his way along the country road towards the house.

The mock-Elizabethan mansion was gated, but nothing that couldn’t be got over. He eventually found a way into the grounds by slipping under some rotting wooden fencing, all without snagging his dinner jacket on anything, which he considered a satisfactory result. The grounds of Chuckers stretched out before him, with kempt lawns and lots of privet hedges that sectioned off the extensive gardens into a maze-like grid construction. There was a long terrace of greenhouses that well served the grounds. The house itself, just like the real Chequers, was medievally busy, its roof serrating the dim skyline with pointed arches and turrets and chimney stacks.

The long mullioned windows made it easy to see that there were no lights on in the house, or seemingly any signs of life, or even any furniture inside the place. This was borne out by the three removal vans parked on the gravel drive. It was clear that Guy Ruley, reported to be leaving the country soon, had put his plans into motion.

Vince made his way around to one side of the mansion, where a small path descended to what he assumed were the servants’ quarters. There he saw a way in. Some of the leaded windows in this part of the building were in bad shape and in need of repair. On one window, the lead was long gone, and the panes were held in by chipped and crumbling putty.

Vince took out his switchblade and began to work away, and in no time at all he had removed two rhomboid panes of glass. A hand was slipped in, a handle was turned, the window was opened, and Vince soon found himself crouching in a large white porcelain sink. He climbed out of the sink and on to the flagstone floor of the scullery. Overhead there were pots and pans hanging from S-shaped hooks, like a row of giant chimes. He was very careful not to disturb them and send them clattering into an alarming cacophony.

With the torch illuminating his path, he made his way stealthily through the house. The deeper he got into it, the more he saw how it was emptying out – just like the house in Eaton Square. Packing boxes and tea chests sat everywhere in the middle of empty rooms.

He padded along a wide hallway, his footfalls muted in the deep nap of a forest-green carpet that was bordered in red, and reached a door at the end. There he killed the light and pocketed the torch, put his ear to the door and heard the strained and panting breaths of exertion. Vince eyed up the door though he had no intention of kicking it in because he had no reason to believe it was locked. But it presented other problems. It was a big carved oak door with black metal fretwork fastenings and riveted cross panels. It looked as if it weighed a ton and was the kind of door that was specially built to creak and whine: a natural-born squealer that would give him away as soon as it was tugged. So, on turning the big twisted iron hoop handle and releasing the bolt from its holding, he gave it a swift firm pull and caught it by surprise. Not a peep was emitted, just the hushed whoosh of air being sucked out of the room.