Gilded Edge, The Read Online Free PDF

day. But, impressive as they all were, the centrepiece of the room remained Johnny Beresford himself. Even dead, and slowly decomposing as he must be, he looked vibrant and anomalously alive; just ripe for the taxidermist’s hand. Vince felt he could tap the dead man’s shoulder and he would have sprung to life, as if awakening from a nap in front of the TV.
    It was clear that the evolutionary process had been very good to Beresford. He was a big man, at around six foot three, and would be considered traditionally handsome with his thick flaxen hair scraped back from what Vince assumed would be classed as a noble-looking brow, and a strong jawline that was almost Desperate Dan in its solidity and confidence. The nose had a slight hook to it, and looked as though it had been broken at some time, perhaps at school, on the rugby field was Vince’s guess, but it still fitted the proportions of his face perfectly. The wide and full-lipped mouth looked as easily suited to sensuality as to barking out orders on the parade ground or in the boardroom. Vince crooked his head, as if to bring into focus another slightly hidden aspect of the victim’s physical appearance: the stuff that doesn’t get written up in the reports, yet composes the metaphysics of murder. And, with this adjustment, Vince saw that Beresford looked almost contented. Even slumped and dead, there was a certain confidence in his posture, as if he was right where he wanted to be. Which went against everything one knew about death: The last thing in the world we want to be, is the last thing in the world we end up being.
    Next to the corpse was a small side table with a phone and an open black notebook on it. In the notebook were written the names of what could only have been racehorses, and columns of arithmetic that included the odds regarding each of the runners. The question was whether Beresford had been backing or laying? Vince looked again over at the Escalado racing game set up on the billiard table. Only an innocent parlour game, a toy, but he’d known serious money change hands on the result of those little metal jockeys seated on their mounts being mechanically propelled along the green vinyl track.
    ‘Go on then, Vince,’ said Mac, ‘talk me through it.’
    Vince crouched down to take a look at Beresford’s shoes: an exotic-looking pair of low-cut loafers fashioned out of what looked like crocodile skin. Vince wasn’t just admiring them, he was wondering why a pair of bespoke shoes had both slipped loose at the heel. He stood up and considered the big man’s posture.
    ‘Doc’s right, he does look relaxed and contented, like he knew his killer and wasn’t expecting anything to happen. But . . . it looks wrong to me. Contrary to how it seems, I don’t think he was killed in this chair. I think he was moved here. His shoes are off at the heel, like he’d been dragged. And look at his crutch.’
    Mac and the doc leaned in to look, and saw how eye-wateringly tight and uncomfortable it looked.
    Vince continued: ‘The way all the material is gathered up looks like it’s squeezing the life out the boy. No, you’d have done some serious trouser adjustment before you sat down like that and relaxed in a chair to watch TV. You’d have made yourself comfortable.’
    ‘Yeah, he certainly does look uncomfortable,’ Doc Clayton retorted with a smile. ‘But who wouldn’t with a bullet in their head? So he was killed upstairs? That’s where all the action was, right, Vince?’
    Mac shook his head. ‘Vince is right, he does look like he’s been moved, but my money’s on him being killed in this room.’
    ‘Me too,’ agreed Vince. ‘Upstairs may have been for the entertaining, but this is where Beresford did his business. This is where he kept his secrets.’
    Mac, thinking obviously and out loud, said, ‘So the question is, why bother moving him from the place he was killed, unless you want to distract us?’
    ‘Yeah, and he’s a big