Authors: Danny Miller
As they approached the big house in Pont Street, there was a ripple of net curtains on the ground floor flat – always a good sign. Vince rang the bell but no one was in, or at least no one was answering. He went to press the bell again, when the front door sprang open and out she popped: the neighbour who policed the whole building and knew the movements of its every occupant. A walking, talking (far too much) and breathing burglar alarm and information bureau. Always in, always watching, always alert and, as far as the two detectives were concerned, manna from heaven. Vince let Mac deal with the old bird. And Mac, with a flash of his badge and some second-generation Irish charm, elicited all there was to know.
Isabel Saxmore-Blaine had not been seen in a month; she was away somwhere. Her younger brother, Dominic Saxmore-Blaine, had been staying there and was looking after the flat for her. There were lots of late-night comings and goings from the young man, who was just down from Oxford and obviously gadding about town and enjoying London’s nightlife.
The nosy neighbour adjusted the eagle-eye-shaped glasses that were wedged on to her beaky nose, and wanted to know what was afoot. Mac, who had won the old crow over by now and had her eating out of his hand, spun her some enticingly harmless yarn, gave her his card, and told her to call that number as soon as Dominic Saxmore-Blaine turned up again. She chirped: ‘You must think I spend my whole day at that window.’
Neither man answered that, but they knew she would be nailed to her perch, peering out through the gauzy net curtains and awaiting the return of Dominic Saxmore-Blaine, and would then get straight on the blower to report what she’d seen, hoping to quench her thirst for a narrative of other people’s misfortunes.
As the two men walked back to the car, Vince suggested they take a quick look in at the Notting Hill caper, to see how Kenny Block and Philly Jacket were getting on.
‘You’re the boss,’ said Mac, with a smile that suggested Vince was slipping easily into Mac’s sure-footed and industrious steps.
‘Pretty girl.’
‘She’s a nurse – worked at Charing Cross Hospital.’
Vince stood with Mac and Philly Jacket in the communal hallway of 27 Basing Street, now a taped-off crime scene. They were looking down at the face of Marcy Jones, who was strapped to a gurney that was about to be taken to the morgue. Her head had been covered by a blue paper cap, to mask and also preserve the horror of her skull injuries. All that was available to the detectives was therefore her face. But the masking of these injuries didn’t extend to the walls or carpet of the hallway, which pretty well told the story. It looked like the scene of a massacre.
The three men were standing over the dead girl with heads bowed and hands clasped in front of them, as if they were offering up a prayer for her – and maybe they were. For as the news had filtered through that the victim had been a nurse, there was a collective sigh from them, in unconscious beatification of Marcy Jones.
Philly gave the two men attending the gurney the nod, and they moved it solemnly into the waiting black windowless limousine.
‘Twenty-four years old,’ said Philly Jacket. ‘She’s got an eight-year-old daughter.’
‘Where’s the kid now?’ asked Mac.
‘The neighbour said she usually stays with her grandmother when Marcy works night shifts at the hospital. We’re contacting the grandmother now.’
‘What was the weapon?’ asked Vince.
‘Pathologist says, for now, that the wound looks like a hammer blow. Struck with some force too. There was no messing about, and whoever did it meant to put her away for good. And it’s no robbery, either. Her handbag was with her, and she had sixty pounds in her purse.’
This sum got raised eyebrows from Mac and Vince. They turned and walked up the stairs into the dead woman’s flat, which turned out to be a maisonette taking up two floors. The lower part featured a decent-sized living room with a little dining room to one side, and a galley kitchen. Vince noted that the flat was in stark contrast to the scruffy communal hallway: it looked freshly decorated, with nice crisp curtains and fitted carpets. The three-piece suite looked plump and new, while the dining chairs still had their plastic coverings on the seats. Taking up pride of place in the living room was a shiny new Radio Rentals TV set in a faux walnut-finished cabinet. It looked as though nurse Marcy Jones must have been caning the HP.
A quickening clumping sound echoed up the stairs, and Kenny Block came huffing and puffing into the flat. Flushed and out of breath, he’d taken the steps three at a time. ‘Guess what?’ he asked, not waiting for an answer. ‘Marcy’s mother, Cecilia Jones, says Marcy didn’t drop the kid off last night. She hasn’t seen her since Thursday night, which was the last time Marcy worked a night shift at the hospital.’
‘Marcy was dressed up,’ noted Philly. ‘High heels, nice dress, and she was wearing a wig too. Must have been out for the night?’
‘Where’s Cecilia Jones now?’ asked Mac.
‘With the doctor and two WPCs. She’s in pieces. And she suffers with a heart condition. I thought she was going to keel over and fuckin’ die on us.’
‘Watch your mouth, Philly!’
‘Sorry, Mac.’
‘So who was looking after the kid?’ Kenny and Philly shrugged heavily in unison. ‘Looks like you’ve got an abduction on top of murder, maybe worse.’
‘Before the doctor gave Cecilia Jones a sedative,’ said Kenny, ‘I got some interesting stuff from her. Seems Marcy used to go out with a right villainous spade called – and get this – Tyrell Lightly. Ring any bells?’
No bells rang, and it was certainly the kind of name that would ring them.
‘How about this: Michael de Freitas?’
Vince clicked his fingers. ‘That does. Real flash, used to dress like Al Capone – white fedora with a feather in it and snappy purple suits. He worked for Rachman, collecting rents and general terrorizing.’
Kenny Block: ‘Tyrell Lightly got six years and the birch for cutting a PC who broke up a fight he was involved in on the All Saints Road. He got out of the Scrubs six months ago and got shipped back to Jamaica. He slipped back into the country three months ago. A right vicious little fucker, cut you to pieces if he got the chance.’ Kenny looked at Mac, to check his language again. Mac was deep in thought, however. Kenny rightly assumed that Mac only disapproved of swearing in the context of talking about grandmothers and little girls. But blade-wielding rude boys who cut up coppers were ripe for some colourful language. ‘Michael de Freitas has quite a little team working for him. They’re into everything from screwing warehouses to controlling all the drug dealers in the area – plus he gets a pension from most of the spade pubs and clubs. De Freitas fancies himself the King of Notting Hill, and Tyrell Lightly does most of the heavy work for him.’
‘So what was Marcy the nurse doing with a lowlife like him, Kenny?’ asked Vince.
‘Marcy met Lightly when she was still a kid, and they split up years ago, but Marcy’s daughter Ruby is Lightly’s. He didn’t have anything to do with her until recently, but apparently he’s been hanging around Marcy, trying to get back into her life. But, get this, Marcy was planning on moving out of London, as she has family in America . . .’ Kenny Block consulted his notepad, ‘living in a place called Trenton, New Jersey. Marcy was sure she could get work as a nurse out there, so she wanted to make a fresh start for herself and the kid. Lightly found out about that, and all of a sudden he didn’t like the idea of losing his daughter, so he started making threats.’
Then, with a click of his fingers, Mac snapped out of his deliberation and took control. ‘Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. We need to find out who Marcy Jones was out with last night . . .’
Vince left Mac in a huddle with the two detectives, and went upstairs to look about. A crayon drawing of a teddy bear tacked on to the door alerted Vince to Ruby’s room. The teddy-bear theme carried on into the room itself, with teddy-bear wallpaper and hanging mobiles and lampshades. But there were other toys, lots of toys. In fact there was a piratic haul of goodies spilling out of a wooden toy chest in one corner of the room. Again, this all confirmed the presence of money coming into the house. In Marcy’s bedroom there was a wardrobe with a full-length mirror as its centre panel. Vince checked himself out in it: he looked frayed. He hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours, and the fuel of adrenalin and strong coffee was running its course, and exhaustion was catching up and kicking in. He sat down on the bed and could have easily sunk back on to it and caught forty winks. So he did, just to rest his eyes, until someone would call for him. As he lay back, the bed made a squeak. A squeak of surprise? A squeak of distress?
Vince sat up again quickly. Then he stood up and examined the bed. Around the mattress was a polyester covering as frilly as a petticoat and serving much the same decorous purpose. He lifted it up to expose a box-spring frame that included two concealed storage drawers. He then slipped his fingers into the groove that worked as a handle for one of the drawers, and gave it a tug. It wouldn’t budge. He got down on his knees to get more leverage and yanked at it again. It opened a couple of inches, then quickly closed again. The bed was alive! Vince flipped the mattress off the bed, grabbed the drawer with both hands, put his back into it, and yanked it open. Inside the drawer, a stack of folded bed sheets quaked and quivered. Vince lifted the sheets gently and found the tear-streaked face of Ruby Jones.
She lay curled up in her burrow, as small as she could make herself, and peered up at Vince as if not knowing what to expect from him – because now she knew fully what grown-ups were capable of. The little girl squeezed her eyes shut. Salted tears had dried and crystallized to leave white powdery deposits on her hot brown skin, and she had soiled herself. As Vince lifted her out of the drawer, there was no resistance, no fight in her. Yet he felt a current of fear run through her that gave a tremulous hum to her sweat-soaked little body. She gripped her companion, a teddy bear with large button eyes, who looked equally terrified. Holding the little girl close, Vince closed his eyes and intoned softly, ‘It’s okay, it’s okay, darling, you’re safe . . . no one can hurt you now . . .’
But even as these words fell from his lips, they sounded implausibly hollow, even for impromptu words of comfort. And Vince had the feeling that such reassurances had come far too late for little Ruby Jones.
Far too late.
The curtains twitched as Vince and Mac again approached Isabel Saxmore-Blaine’s flat in Pont Street. The old bird in the ground-floor flat had come up trumps and phoned Mac’s number to inform him that Dominic Saxmore-Blaine had re-entered the house. The message came just after a traumatized Ruby Jones had been taken off to hospital. It was clear she was suffering from severe shock, of a kind she might never escape from.
Before Vince had time to press the bell, the front door swung open, and there stood a thin-faced young man. On a hunch, Vince asked if he was Dominic Saxmore-Blaine. He confirmed that he was, and that he was just on his way out. Vince and Mac badged him.
Five minutes later, Dominic Saxmore-Blaine was perched on the scrolled arm of a long white sofa, holding a fully charged tumbler of whisky and soda, to steady his nerves, as he claimed. He’d just been given the news that Johnny Beresford was dead. It had been delivered in the solemn tone of informing the next of kin; and not with the urgency of chasing down his sister because she was the main suspect.
Vince considered the visibly shaken young man before him. He was about five foot nine and rail thin, all his features small and slender apart from his eyes, which were now large and startled. In fact, on further consideration, he had one of the narrowest faces Vince had ever seen; it looked as if it might snap in two if anyone punched it, though Dominic Saxmore-Blaine didn’t look the type to get involved in that kind of rough and tumble. His hair was a stand-out feature, however: a sumptuous shade of chestnut brown with a shine that looked like a mirror finish; public-school floppy with one of those swooping fringes that constantly needed a vigorous half-head rotation, or a continuous raking with the hand, to keep it out of his eyes. Its impressive impracticality annoyed Vince; just looking at it made him want to reach for a pair of shears. But maybe that was the haircut’s main purpose, its aesthetic flamboyance being a lesson in loucheness. The floppy foppishness of it matched the rest of his garb, for he was wearing a suit of deepest blue velvet, a waistcoat of mustard-yellow silk with gold braid blazingly checking through it, and a bow tie of flushed red taffeta. He’d obviously been out for the night, and still had the acrid tang of stale booze and oozing spirits wafting about him; which he was even now topping up with a generously poured single malt and a quick burst of soda. He drank deeply, then said, ‘Poor, poor Isabel. She’ll be devastated, absolutely devastated.’
‘Where exactly is your sister, Mr Saxmore-Blaine?’ asked Vince.
‘She’s been away staying with some friends.’
‘For how long?’
‘I don’t really know . . .’
Vince, for the benefit of Saxmore-Blaine, creased his brow as if in confusion and threw a consorting look over to Mac, who was seated in a boxy-looking armchair. Mac played along with him, and batted back an equally confused glance that appeared more than a little tinged with disbelief.
Saxmore-Blaine picked up on this exchange, and was quick to continue: ‘She was abroad, you see, for a few weeks, and then she came back . . . I think.’ He put his whisky down on the side table, then put his head in his hands, sinking long fingers into the lustrously thick veil of his fringe. Then he scraped the whole lot back from his face to reveal red-rimmed eyes glistening with tears.
‘I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I have to go out now. As I said, I’m meeting my father for lunch.’
Mac and Vince made no effort to move or indicate bringing the conversation to a close. Vince glanced down at his watch and saw it was just gone 1 p.m. Then he scoped the room: obviously not as luxurious and grand as Beresford’s place, not fifteen minutes’ walk away, but a nice set-up none the less. And it looked like the furniture and décor were chosen by Isabel herself, and not inherited off some aunt who had read Jane Austen on its first publication.