Gilded Edge, The Read Online Free

memorializing bloody battles – while roundabouting its stalled one-way traffic systems. Bronze eighteenth-century warriors sat proudly astride their mounts, looking down at First World War troops crawling all around an insurmountable stone block that marked their mass grave. They, in turn, were looking up at the Second World War Tommies standing aloft on their plinths, too occupied to appreciate their luck in being born a generation later because they were busily eyeing up a couple of scantily clad older birds: Britannia and Boudicca, rendered in marble and sitting safely in their squares.
    Two uniformed coppers stood sentry before the columns supporting the portico of number 57 Eaton Square. Marked and unmarked police cars were double-parked immediately outside. Getting out of his car, Mac stretched and took in a deep and sonorous sniff of the crisp morning air, then said: ‘You smell that, Vincent?’
    Vince sniffed the air too, but nothing came to mind.
    ‘Money,’ Mac said. ‘Unmistakable.’
    Vince laughed. ‘Any idea how much a place like this might cost?’
    ‘More than our public-sector pay packet could ever spring for.’
    ‘Maybe I’ll marry well.’
    ‘Wouldn’t surprise me. If you’re in need of a butler, keep me in mind.’
    Vince couldn’t actually smell it, but he could see it. There was something coolly aloof about this square: the ordered affluence perhaps. No kids playing out in the street – for that matter, no one on the street at all. Even the litter seemed to have picked itself up and put itself in the bins. And, for all the police presence and the potential for excitement and scandal, there were no gawpers, no rubber-neckers. Doubtless the neighbours were concerned, but they were metropolitan enough not to appear openly surprised. This was London – this was the middle of it – and it wasn’t always a box of chocolates. And even if it was, no matter how rich and creamy the centre, there was always a hard carapace surrounding it. So the local residents stayed secure inside their alarm-belled and white-walled castles.
    The two detectives unnecessarily badged the two uniformed coppers, who had known who they were the minute Vince and Mac had parked across the street and come striding over to the house. Not that they looked especially like coppers – Vince himself was threaded-up in a Prince of Wales check suit, worn with a pale blue shirt with faux French cuffs and a black knitted tie subtly flecked with dark blue dots. A beige three-quarter-length Aquascutum raincoat kept out the wind, which held a bitter bite, and he was shod in a pair of black Chelsea boots polished to within an inch of their life, so the puddled pavement didn’t prove too much of a problem. He was also road-testing a new haircut, for his black hair, normally worn swept back, was now worn with a side parting. It was more Steve McQueen in The Great Escape than Ringo Starr in A Hard Day’s Night, and he liked it. He liked looking in the mirror in the morning and fussing around for a few minutes, trying to re-establish his parting as he thought about his day ahead. Cutting a dash seemed compulsory these days, and everyone was at it. Vince Treadwell could thus have been anyone he wanted to be, from a fast-talking Ogilvy & Mather’s advertising man off to a pitch, or a suited and booted rock-and-roller attending a court appearance on a dope pinch. The boundaries were breaking up: this was the age of reinvention and upward mobility. Yes, in 1965 you could be anyone you wanted – or at least that’s what the man from Ogilvy & Mather was selling you, and what the rock-and-roller up on a dope pinch was singing about.
    No, it wasn’t the duds that marked Vince and Mac out as a pair of detectives; it was the attitude, the way they crossed the road and walked up to the house. They were at work from the minute they got out of the car. They took in the street, their eyes subtly scoping and scouring and absorbing the scene, as