Gilded Edge, The Read Online Free PDF Page A

chap who did it, I’d say.’
    The two detectives stared at Doc Clayton, whose wire-framed and magnified eyes were fixed firmly on the stiff sitting in the chair. He looked as if he couldn’t wait to get his hands on this cadaver: to cut it up and probe, and come up with further details of the death, and any other sinister little secrets that the body decided to give up. The white coats always thought they had all the answers, but it was Vince and Mac’s job to come up with who did it and why they did it. And you didn’t have to be a detective to come up with the notion that this victim knew his killer. Most of them did.
    ‘Well, Doc, like with most things in life, looks can be very deceiving,’ said Mac, as he ambled around inspecting the body. ‘And dead bodies are the worst: they’re full of lies and deceit. But, somewhere about them, the truth will be bursting to get out. Right, Vincent?’
    Vince gave a distracted nod. He too had his eyes and attention solidly fixed on Johnny Beresford, as he lay slumped in a green leather button-back armchair. The TV in front of him hummed and thrummed away, and was hot enough to suggest it had been on all night. Glancing around the room, Vince noticed that where the upstairs was all Georgian panache, elaborate and grand, this room was Edwardian and cigar-chompingly masculine. In the oak-panelled room there was a moderately sized billiard table and laid on top of it was the horse-racing game Escalado, with all its little painted-alloy gee-gees set up for a race. Next to take Vince’s eye was a large mahogany partners’ desk. On top of it there were three telephones, a stock-market ticket machine, a green-shaded banker’s lamp, and an in- and an out-tray, with more in ins than outs. Business papers, files, folders and documents were scattered about the desktop in the kind of ordered disorder that marked it out as a fully functioning workspace. Also fully functioning, and looking much used, was a small corner bar with three shelves holding serried ranks of booze bottles in various stages of depletion; while a selection of wines stacked in a forty-celled wine rack stood next to the bar. There was a side table in polished rosewood that looked as though it folded out into a dining table. This was borne out by the silver condiment set holding salt, pepper, oil and vinegar and the stack of six cork table-mats that sat on it. Four antique-style balloon-backed chairs were gathered around it. In a corner of the room stood another of those ominous-looking long-cased clocks, making a mechanical clacking sound, a racket that Vince knew he could never get used to.
    As well as being the room that Beresford had died in, the young detective had a hunch that this was the room that Beresford did most of his living in: the engine room of the house, the epicentre of his life, the room he felt most at home and comfortable in, and the room that would probably tell them more about the victim than anywhere else.
    The very walls called out his life story. Adorning them were paintings and framed photos of his regiment, the Coldstream Guards, including a portrait of the victim himself in full officer regalia. There were also lots of sporting scenes, a large print of a pair of eighteenth-century boxers shaping up: Mendoza vs Gentleman John Jackson, the pair striking a pose before they proceeded to strike each other. And oils depicting fox hunting, horse racing, shooting and fishing, and shiny-coated gun dogs clasping pheasants in their mouths. On the shelves were ranged many silver trophies and cups for various sporting achievements, from water skiing to leading the line for the first eleven. And Beresford wasn’t the only dead thing in the room, which included a couple of very lively-looking stags with long fearsome antlers, who looked as if they’d just rammed their heads through the wall, while a seriously lethal-looking swordfish in his glass coffin looked as fresh and slippery as the catch of the