Authors: Danny Miller
She took a deep breath, gave him a welcoming smile, and said: ‘Come to admire your handiwork?’
He winced at the sight of the bruise on one side of her jaw. It had now reached its full apogee of colourfulness: a crescendo of tonic blues and purples fading into ochreous browns and yellows.
And then it was her turn to wince, as she noticed the bruise on the side of his own jaw. ‘What happened to you?’
Vince’s chin-shiner was nothing compared to hers, being just several different shades of black and blue. He couldn’t tell her the truth; there was just no way of putting a good slant on that one. A list of appropriate mishaps ran through his mind: fell off his horse while playing polo, helping a lady out of her carriage, clumsily doffing his cap whilst neglectfully holding a croquet mallet. He shrugged out a dismissive mutter about an incident at work, par-for-the-course stuff.
So there they were, both wearing slight expectant smiles on bruised chins, as she invited him in. The luxury theme of the lobby had carried on up into the room, five-star all the way. The only thing to give it away as not being the presidential suite at the Dorchester was the high metal-framed bed with a clipboard of medical notes attached to the footboard.
Just rising from the sofa was a portly, elderly man in a double-breasted chalk-stripe suit, an old school tie and a gold watch-chain running from his lapel into his breast pocket. A corona of white curly hair skirted a bald head, which he now covered with a dark blue fedora, plucked from the arm of the sofa, before he struggled into a fawn covert coat with a collar of well-worn olive green velvet. Finally, collecting some papers from the coffee table, he slid them into his admirably distressed and monogrammed (
G D L
) pigskin briefcase, and fastened the brass locks.
‘Detective Treadwell, this is Geoffrey Lancing, my lawyer.’
Vince offered his hand, and the lawyer grudgingly shook it.
‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Lancing.’
‘Likewise, Detective,’ said the lawyer, not really meaning a word of it, while not taking his eyes off his client. ‘Isabel, my dear, I must ask you once more to reconsider. This is not a wise decision.’
‘Thank you, Geoffrey, but that really will be all.’
The lawyer turned to Vince. ‘May I ask you for your professional opinion, sir?’
Isabel Saxmore-Blaine said: ‘No, you may not.’
Vince looked between the two of them and said nothing.
She jumped in again before the lawyer could. ‘I’ll save you the time, Detective, as you know how long-winded lawyers can be. Geoffrey here is my father’s lawyer—’
‘Your family’s lawyer for the last thirty-five years.’
‘And a dear, dear friend for as long as I can remember.’
‘Indeed.’
‘
Indeed
,’ she repeated with a gracious smile to the anxious lawyer. ‘Geoffrey doesn’t think it wise that I talk to you on my own, as anything I say might be taken down and used in evidence against me. Is that correct?’
‘Yes, and I think it’s good advice he’s giving you, Miss Saxmore-Blaine.’
‘Isabel, please. Call me Isabel.’
The lawyer threw her a reprimanding look, as if she was fraternizing with the enemy. Which, at this stage, she was. But he needn’t have bothered, because Vince had no intention of calling her by her first name. The way he saw it, she’d already had more than her share of preferential treatment.
‘But it’s your choice whether or not you choose to have counsel present,’ he confirmed.
‘Come come, Detective Treadwell,’ interrupted the lawyer, ‘in circumstances as serious as these we both know it’s not just highly advisable but imperative that Isabel does have counsel present.’
‘Spoken like a true lawyer, Mr Lancing, and I was just about to make the same suggestion before I was interrupted. But Miss Saxmore-Blaine hasn’t been either charged or arrested in relation to this matter. I’m here just to pick up a prepared statement, I believe.’
‘Correct,’ said Isabel Saxmore-Blaine.
‘Then that’s all I shall do. And then I’m heading back to report to my superiors, who will read this statement and then decide how to proceed.’
Isabel Saxmore-Blaine looked at the lawyer with a kindly smile that would have melted the heart of the hardest litigator. ‘Geoffrey, I thank you for your concern, but really I just want to thank the detective personally – after all, he did save my life.’
Isabel Saxmore-Blaine linked arms with the lawyer and marched him to the door, and saw him out with noisy kisses on each cheek. It was one of the most impressive acts of disarming strong-arm tactics Vince had ever seen. He could see how her charm and beauty could pretty much get her whatever she wanted. And he was determined not to get worked over in the same fashion: the satin-covered cosh, the velvet-gloved fist.
With the lawyer gone, she breathed a sigh of relief. Reaching into the pocket of her pearl-coloured silk robe, she pulled out a packet of cigarettes and lit one from a book of matches. She went over to the window, crumpling the cigarette pack and putting it back in her pocket. The window was locked and had bars across it. But even the bars looked five-star: they were fancily cast gilt metal, made to look like branches and foliage. She concentrated on her cigarette, sucking down a large percentage of it with each visit to her lips. Vince sensed that there had been a strained effort at normality in dealing with her lawyer, an old family friend, who was obviously under the direct employ of her father and would be promptly reporting back to him. The endeavour not to appear broken and cowed had taken it out of her.
Standing by the marble coffee table, Vince looked down at the neatly piled folios of A4 white embossed paper. They contained Isabel Saxmore-Blaine’s prepared statement, signed by her and counter-signed by Geoffrey Lancing. And they were covered in some of the finest penmanship he’d ever seen. The handwriting slanted to the right, like rippling waves, but never fell into disorder: each letter, each word looked perfectly balanced and almost hypnotic. This was not the scratchy scrawl of a nervous suicidal wreck.
‘I suppose I should give you that thank you now, Detective Treadwell.’
Vince glanced up from the statement towards Isabel Saxmore-Blaine. Her hair was shoulder-length, golden in colour and thick as honey, with blonde streaks running through it from the sun. Her skin was taut and lightly tanned, stretched over high cheekbones that gave her face its inherent structural beauty. With this combination, the rest of her features didn’t have to work so hard in the looks department, but they all pulled their weight. A lineless forehead showed off plucked dark eyebrows that arched over large brown eyes. A slender nose, nothing much to report there; it looked just as it was meant to be, and fitted effortlessly into place. The mouth was rather shapely, not narrow and pinched, and looked as if it could easily open out into a broad and welcoming smile – just not right now. And all this was cradled on a faultlessly defined jawline. The only visible flaw was the bruise, but that was Vince’s imprint, not nature’s. Isabel Saxmore-Blaine’s was a subtle beauty, nothing overpowering and pouty. It was demure, classy. It drew you in, made you want to lean forward to take a closer look. Somewhere about her, maybe in the eyes, she held a puzzle, an innate mystery you wanted to solve, a missing piece you wanted to find . . .
‘You don’t have to thank me,’ said Vince. ‘Trite as it might sound, it’s all part of the job.’
‘I only said I wanted to thank you because I wanted to clear Geoffrey out of the room.’
Once the initial shock of her up-close and in-the-flesh beauty had been appraised and applauded, Vince noticed that she was looking at him as though he was a hat stand; something in her line of vision but no more. The widely set eyes were now hooded, and Vince couldn’t tell if this was a withering look or maybe the effects of the tranquillizers she’d been on. But since the departure of the lawyer, he felt things in the room had become decidedly frosty.
‘But you really shouldn’t have bothered, and it would have been easier and quicker if you hadn’t. I wanted to die,’ she said, seemingly without moving her lips or modulating her tone in any way.
Vince considered this. When it happened, he hadn’t believed she wanted to kill herself. She had the gun in her bag and had plenty of time to squeeze off a shot before he arrived. Killing yourself is always the
final
– and you can’t stress that enough – the
final
option. Vince and Mac turning up on the scene just accelerated her options. He hadn’t saved her; if anything, he’d almost killed her.
A thin blue thread of smoke rose up from her cigarette as she gestured for him to sit down, which he did, on the floral-patterned sofa that the lawyer had been sitting on.
‘I wanted to see you because I want to tell you everything I remember.’
Vince gave a cautious nod to the written statement lying on the coffee table. ‘It’s not already written down?’
‘Yes, the facts as they are – as I remember them. But I read it all through, and it’s not quite enough. Do you understand?’
Vince understood. Without turning a statement into a poem or a novel, it would be what it was – just a record of the facts. And somehow they never managed to tell the full story. ‘Then Mr Lancing was right,’ he said, ‘and I need to advise you that it would be best to have a lawyer present.’
‘I don’t want one. I don’t need one. I’m assuming I’m guilty, and I’m assuming that I’m going to be arrested for murdering Johnny. Am I right?’
Again Vince gestured towards the statement. ‘Depends on what’s in this. I take it your statement was prepared with Mr Lancing present?’
She nodded.
‘And is it true?’
‘Yes, it’s true. And, if you read it, I’m sure you’ll agree that it makes a very good case for me being innocent, because Geoffrey is one of the finest lawyers in the land . . .’
Although her voice was low and infused with a smoky decadence, it was still cut-glass in its precision. Nothing got lost or trampled on; every syllable was pronounced to within an inch of its life. He also noted the slight American accent.
‘So I hear, but it seems that you’re not so sure?’
She looked away from him, down to her hand holding the cigarette. It had burned down to the biscuit-coloured filter. She walked carefully over to the handbasin. Vince noticed that her movements were slightly mechanical. She ran the tap and extinguished the butt, took out the empty crumpled cigarette packet, put the butt inside it, then returned it to her pocket. She re-joined Vince and composed herself on the sofa. Not as cosy as it sounded; the sofa was as big as a boat and she was seated starboard, he was port.
‘I must warn you, Miss Saxmore-Blaine, that if you wish to talk to me about the suspected murder of Mr Beresford, I’ll need to first inform you of your rights.’
‘I don’t care about that – about the law.’
‘You should, because the law will care about you, and in all the wrong ways. You’re in a very precarious position since, as far as we know, you were the last person to see Mr Beresford alive. Also you had in your possession the gun that killed him.’
With her hands clasped in front of her, she sat very still, taking deep controlled breaths. And for the first time he clearly saw the hangover from the medication. It was slowing Isabel Saxmore-Blaine’s world and keeping everything manageably unreal for her, freezing up the delta of tears that was now backing up behind those lustrous dark eyes. So dark that the pupil and the iris were almost indistinguishable. Her voice was so precise because it was overcompensating, reacting just a second or so too late.
She said: ‘I have to tell you what happened. Because I need to know myself if I killed Johnny.’
Vince saw that she was ripe to talk; she wanted to unburden. He’d seen that look before with suspects, and it had always resulted in eliciting the truth. She began to talk, oh so carefully.
It was all pretty much as they had picked up on, anyway, from family and friends and the investigation they had conducted. For the last month or so, Isabel had been out of the country, staying with friends on the sleepy Balearic island of Ibiza. She had wanted to get away from Johnny Beresford and the high-octane social whirligig of the London party scene that she had been caught on for the last few years; just to clear her head and do some sober thinking. She was convinced that her future no longer rested with Johnny, and had returned to London to tell him so. When she arrived at Eaton Square, he had been all charm and affection, kisses and cuddles, stating his love for her and how much he’d missed her, and how his night-owl days of gambling and carousing were now over, and how he wanted to settle down with her and raise a family. But it was obvious that he’d been drinking, and he soon confessed that he’d been drinking all day. Johnny Beresford had an almost superhuman capacity for handling industrial amounts of booze: he could out-drink a poet on payday or a gang of sailors putting into port.
Isabel looked ashamed as she confessed that one thing had led to another, and they ended up popping open some champagne and getting drunk together. One last hurrah, perhaps? She knew it was a bad idea, having been on the wagon for almost three months now. Things had soon changed, as things are apt to do when people get drunk. The inhibitions slipped away and the old grievances and animosities resurfaced. As they argued, Beresford started getting abusive. He’d been abusive before, but she’d never seen him like this – till she feared for her life. It was as if he was losing his mind. That’s when she hit him with the bottle, to protect herself when he came at her. But then she blacked out. Next thing she remembered was seeing him dead in the armchair, and the gun lying on the floor . . .
‘Do you smoke, Detective?’ she asked suddenly.
‘No, but I could go downstairs and get you a pack,’ he said eagerly, not wanting her to lose her train of thought through the distraction of a nicotine jag.
‘No, no,’ she said, with a resolute shake of her head. ‘I’m not allowed to smoke in this room, of course, and I’m trying to give up anyway – you hear such stories these days.’
‘Were there other women in his life?’