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  DEADLY SIN

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  (International Investigators) Inc.

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  DEADLY SIN

  A Chief Inspector Bliss Novel

  James Hawkins

  A Castle Street Mystery

  Copyright © James Hawkins, 2006

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

  Editor: Barry Jowett

  Copy-editor: Andrea Waters

  Design: Alison Carr

  Printer: Transcontinental

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Hawkins, D. James (Derek James), 1947-

  Deadly sin : a Chief Inspector Bliss mystery / James Hawkins.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-55002-644-3

  ISBN-10: 1-55002-644-5

  I. Title.

  PS8565.A848D42 2007 C813’.6 C2006-904608-5

  1 2 3 4 5 10 09 08 07 06

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

  Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

  J. Kirk Howard, President

  Printed and bound in Canada

  www.dundurn.com

  Dundurn Press

  3 Church Street, Suite 500

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  M5E 1M2

  Gazelle Book Services Limited

  White Cross Mills

  High Town, Lancaster, England

  LA1 4XS

  Dundurn Press

  2250 Military Road

  Tonawanda, NY

  U.S.A. 14150

  This book is dedicated to my first granddaughter

  Charlie Eloise Hawkins

  who began her journey on the labyrinth of life on

  August 21, 2006

  With very special thanks to my dear wife, Sheila, and

  to Eileen Wilson for their unstinting support and

  encouragement

  A classical left-handed seven-circuit Cretan labyrinth — mythical home of the Minotaur.

  Note that the labyrinth is not a maze. Trace a finger around the pathway and you will discover that, like life itself, every journey begins and ends at the same point. You can decide to take that journey quickly or slowly, thoughtfully or carelessly, morally or immorally. However, once your jouney has begun you have no choice but to follow it through to the end.

  chapter one

  “Lights … cameras … action …” mutters a joker in the darkness.

  “All right. That’s enough. Let’s be serious,” commands a “voice from on high” in the dimly lit surveillance room, forcing Chief Inspector David Bliss and his team to focus on the dozen video monitors in front of them.

  The snooty tone of Hugh Grant’s voice double stutters to life from a couple of loudspeakers. “There’s a … um … a light drizzle falling in London this lunchtime as the royal cavalcade …”

  The humidified air in the soundproof room on the tenth floor of New Scotland Yard stills at the sound of the voice, but a stifled fart followed by a mumbled “Sorry” threatens the solemnity. David Bliss cranes around, searching for a red face in the darkened room, but he’s jerked back to the screens by the stentorian-voiced commander.

  “Situation report, Chief Inspector.”

  “Guinevere and Lancelot have left Point Alpha and are now approaching Point Beta,” sings out Bliss as he watches the Queen’s Rolls-Royce passing under the Admiralty Arch at the end of the Mall, and then he mutters to the officer sitting to his right, “Gawd knows who picks these stupid code names.”

  The “voice” hears. “I did, Chief Inspector,” it booms from the back of the room. “Any objections?”

  “No, sir. Sorry, sir,” apologizes Bliss without turning, and then he switches to a new set of surveillance cameras to follow the royal procession along the Strand through central London.

  The crowds are sparse close to the palace, mainly accidental witnesses drawn to the spectacle of the monarch’s passage by the phalanx of police motorcyclists and the sudden lack of traffic. But a quick check of the Queen’s destination shows Bliss a different picture. Placard-waving demonstrators bulge steel barricades; eggs and tomatoes spatter against riot shields — damaging nothing but the egos of battle-hardened officers who would rather have a barrage of rocks as an excuse to break ranks and split heads.

  “The … um … recent inter-religious disturbances in Birmingham and Bradford have heightened the controversy over this visit …” continues the radio commentary in the background as Bliss focuses on the crowd, searching for familiar “rent-a-mob” figures — anarchists, anti-royalists, anti-establishments, anti-everythings — who can be surgically taken out by undercover men already on the ground.

  Unit commanders report in relief as the motorcade passes on to the next sector without incident, while Bliss concentrates on the increasingly aggressive mob. A time check — seven minutes to destination Point Omega — and the occasional brick begins soaring over the heads of the crowd.

  “A press statement from the palace,” carries on the ex-Etonian in his best BBC, “confirms that Her Majesty is determined to proceed with this visit in an effort to promulgate harmony between the Christian and Muslim communities.”

  “Harmony. Hah!” scoffs Sergeant Bill Williams on Bliss’s left.

  “Keep your comments for your mates in the bar, Williams,” spits the commander, leading Bliss to mutter, “This is worse than school” in support of his wingman.

  Six minutes twenty seconds, and it’s Bliss’s call. “Her Highness will not be amused if we have to pull the plug,” the divisional commander — Chief Superintendent “Foxy” Fox — proclaimed at the briefing half an hour earlier, leaving Bliss to question aloud if the head of the royal household would prefer to take half a brick in the eye for her country.

  A faceless figure wearing the denim uniform of a welder creeps into a shaded corner of one of Chief Inspector Bliss’s surveillance monitors and gingerly puts down a large canvas tool bag. The obvious bulk of the man’s body armour and the darkly tinted face mask should ring alarms in the Metropolitan Police’s surveillance centre, especially as his perch is high above the royal route in a partially constructed office tower, but Bliss misses the image as he swipes perspiration from his forehead and concentrates on the agitated mob.

  “It is perhaps the first time in history that the titular head of the Churc
h of England has officially attended Friday prayers, albeit only as an observer,” the BBC voice continues, filling airtime with unnecessary chatter while the heavily protected motorcade makes its way along the Strand towards the gold-encrusted minarets of an East End London mosque. But Bliss tunes out the affected voice as he spots a potential problem some distance away from the monumental edifice.

  The commentator also has a monitor. “It seems that a large group of demonstrators has broken police lines …”

  “Well, Chief Inspector. What’re you gonna do?” demands the commander, sending Bliss scrabbling through a thick manual of orders searching for an alternative route to the mosque’s back door.

  “Too late, Bliss,” shouts the commander, ramping up the pressure. “Diversions have jammed all alternates. The city is at a standstill.”

  “Bugger,” mutters Bliss, but his problems are just about to multiply and he has yet to spot the interloper in the construction site.

  “Unauthorized aircraft entering restricted airspace,” calls Sergeant Williams as the junior officer monitors a feed from Air Traffic Control.

  Bliss takes his eyes off the surging crowd to deal with the airborne threat, and seconds later a couple of Air Force jets are screaming to his aid.

  But the phoney workman continues unnoticed by the surveillance team as he sheathes his brown-skinned hands in white latex gloves before unzipping his tool bag. Then he stops and carefully checks the skyline. Six rooftop snipers wearing police baseball caps scour the busy streets below for terrorists, but who looks for a workman on a building site?

  In skilled hands, the rifle that emerges from the tool bag, a modified Springfield M25, can take down a five-hundred-pound stag at half a mile. The man has skilled hands, but he isn’t planning on filling his freezer with venison today.

  The squadron of police motorcyclists in the vanguard of the royal convoy is being squeezed to a halt by the time Bliss returns to the situation on the ground. Lady Guinevere’s Rolls-Royce is still a mile from the mosque, and he zooms in for a closer look at the surging mob: are they religious fundamentalists determined to stop the perceived heresy or just pumped-up pedestrians hoping to snap a royal close-up on their videophones?

  “Well, Bliss,” demands the commander. “Do you want to send in special forces?”

  “Special forces,” muses Bliss, knowing that, on his word, a bunch of testosterone-hyped hit men in full riot gear will storm out of the shadows and smash heads.

  “Yes … or … no,” harangues the commander in Bliss’s ear, but Bliss is peering intently into the swelling crowd, searching for kids and smiles. The radio commentator isn’t helping. “Opinion polls suggest that there are as many Muslims hostile to this visit as there are Christians,” he is saying, but Bliss finds only flag- and camera-waving friendlies, and he is happy to see the crowd melt back to the sidewalk as the cavalcade approaches.

  “No special forces, sir.”

  “Good call, Chief Inspector,” says the commander once the royal car has passed, although the praise falls flat as a mob of sign-wielding protesters a mile down the road at the mosque batter a hole in the cordon and rush the steps.

  The sniper’s visor is up. He levels the rifle to his shoulder.

  Bliss is watching the handful of cross-waving protesters as they give a dozen uniformed men the runaround in front of the invited guests. He could bring in the heavies, but he vacillates. If the Queen gets wind from the press that a bunch of harmless loonies have been clobbered by the riot squad, he’ll be clearing out his desk at the Yard by the end of the week.

  The lineup of grey-robed mullahs, imams, and Islamic officials on the mosque’s steps are in the sniper’s sights, and he smiles as he moves along the rank, drawing a bead on each face in turn. “Pop!” he mouths, then moves on. “Pop! … Pop! … Pop!” Twenty seconds, ten shots, and any semblance of religious harmony will be back to where it was during the Crusades.

  Commander Fox has other targets in his sights, and he makes a stab at the demonstrators on Bliss’s screen who are now kneeling in prayer. “Oh, for chrissakes. Are you going to do anything?”

  Bliss reaches for a microphone, takes a breath, and takes control. “Slow the procession; send in a surgical squad, fast — no gas, no stun guns, no dogs. The world is watching. All units — one-minute delay.”

  “One minute?” queries the commander disbelievingly.

  Bliss crosses his fingers. One minute can be absorbed — a clipped speech, a few hurried handshakes with some of the minions, one less prayer. But more than a minute and he’ll have to consider revising schedules.

  “The police are moving in to clear the demonstrators …” the BBC is reporting, and Bliss watches, praying that no one gets happy-handed with any of the sacrificial Bible punchers, knowing that nothing will make the news editors or the bishops happier than an armour-plated cop beating the crap out of a sandal-wearing Jesus look-alike to clear the way for the Queen to pay homage to Mohammed.

  “Thank God for that,” mutters Bliss a minute later as the last of the zealots are carried away — still chanting, still praying.

  The Queen’s car rolls gracefully to a stop at the foot of the mosque’s marble steps, and a footman slips forward to open the door. The sniper switches aim. The BBC switches to a fashion guru whose tone is closer to disgust than disdain as she takes in the unfashionable sight. “Her Majesty appears to be wearing some form of Muslim burkha,” she says as the hooded Queen steps from the car into the sniper’s view. Then all of Bliss’s surveillance screens simultaneously fade to black.

  “Power cut,” yells Sergeant Williams, but Bliss has other ideas.

  “Line sabotage,” he says. “We’re on generator backup. Someone must’ve cut the feed —”

  “Well!” screeches the commander. “Don’t just sit there. Do something, Chief Inspector.”

  “Yes, sir,” replies Bliss, as he frantically stabs buttons. But the screens stay blank.

  “And now Her Majesty is waving to the crowd …” continues the BBC reporter, although his voice is almost drowned by whistles and boos.

  “Alpha Charlie two-zero,” shouts Bliss into a microphone, desperately trying the Queen’s bodyguard. “Get Guinevere back in the car. Get her back in the car.”

  “Now Prince Philip has joined Her Majesty as they are welcomed by Shi’ite Imam Al-Shamman,” the reporter carries on. “But it appears that many of the specially invited onlookers aren’t happy with the Queen’s wardrobe …”

  “Now what’re you gonna do, Bliss?” nags the commander, and Bliss unsuccessfully tries the bodyguard again.

  The sniper’s aim is unwavering as he follows the Queen up the steps.

  “The royal guests are slowly making their way towards the reception party on this historic occasion …”

  Bliss has an idea, punches a button, and springs to life a picture from a police helicopter hovering over the scene. “Direct radio feed — no wires,” he says proudly as he scans the scene from overhead, then he freezes in horror.

  “All units. All units!” he yells into the microphone as the sniper on his screen tenses to squeeze the trigger. “Red alert! Red alert! Red alert!”

  “Sit down, Chief Inspector,” says the assistant commissioner sternly as Bliss is ushered into the inner sanctum of New Scotland Yard an hour later. The door shuts with a firm clunk behind him.

  “You know Commander Fox,” the A.C. continues, pointing to his second-in-command as Bliss takes the strategically placed chair in the centre of the room, although the senior officer makes it clear that he has no intention of introducing the two men who are eyeing the newcomer from the comfort of a black leather settee.

  Secret Service — royalty protection, thinks Bliss, glancing at the clean-shaven pinstripe pair who are lounging, jacketless, with the smugness of Mafia capos at a lynching.

  The air is heavy despite the brilliant sunshine of the August day. Bliss sits and waits, guessing that anything he says now will only tighten the n
oose. The assistant commissioner puts on reading glasses to scan a sheet from the single slim file on his desk. The senior officer has already read it twice and knows the conclusion. But this is politics; the stakes are high, careers are on the line, pensions are at risk. Commander Fox sits alongside the A.C. with a poker stare waiting for orders, readying to pull on the rope with the others.

  Why bother with this nonsense? Bliss questions inwardly, knowing his resignation has been in his pocket for several years. Stuff you, he thinks with an eye on the assistant commissioner. I can play your stupid game — and win. Twenty-eight years on the streets for Queen and country and you think you’re going to rip me apart just to please those poncy schoolkids on the settee. Look at them; softer than baby’s shit. They wouldn’t last five minutes in Brixton on a Saturday night.

  “Well, Chief Inspector,” says the A.C., putting down his glasses with deliberation. “It seems that, overall, your performance was very satisfactory.” Then he waves to encompass the room and laughs. “You just saved us all from King Charles and Queen bloody Camilla.”

  “A satisfactory performance,” fumes David Bliss as he walks home along the Thames embankment amid the jostle of a million similarly stressed escapees.

  A mirrored image of London Eye, the giant millennium Ferris wheel, catches his attention as it slowly revolves in the river as if driven by the relentlessly flowing water, and he slips out of the miserable stream of homebound workers to watch.

  “Old Father Thames keeps rolling along …” he hums under his breath, trying to put his woes in perspective, but the torpid river’s apparent immortality drags him down with the realization that it will still be coursing through England’s ancient capital long after him. “I’m fifty tomorrow,” he muses gloomily, realizing that he is on the cusp of a downhill run with no hope of a trophy at the end. But is he halfway? He knows his chances of reaching a century: one in twenty-six, discounting nuclear holocaust and other global catastrophes. Four out of a hundred — better numbers than the lottery, but not the sort of odds to bet your life on.