Lovelace and Button (International Investigators) Inc. Read online

  LOVELACE AND BUTTON (INTERNATIONAL INVESTIGATORS) INC.

  Also by James Hawkins

  INSPECTOR BLISS MYSTERIES

  Missing: Presumed Dead

  The Fish Kisser

  No Cherubs for Melanie

  A Year Less a Day

  The Dave Bliss Quintet

  NON-FICTION

  The Canadian Private Investigator’s Manual

  1001 Fundraising Ideas and Strategies for Charities and Not-for-Profit Groups

  LOVELACE & BUTTON (INTERNATIONAL INVESTIGATORS) INC.

  A Chief Inspector Bliss Mystery

  James Hawkins

  A Castle Street Mystery

  Copyright © James Hawkins, 2004

  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: Lloyd Davis

  Design: Andrew Roberts

  Printer: Webcom

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

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

  Lovelace and Button (International Investigators) Inc. / James Hawkins.

  ISBN 1-55002-541-4

  I. Title.

  PS8565.A848L69 2004 C813’.6 C2004-905470-8

  1 2 3 4 5 08 07 06 05 04

  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.

  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

  Printed on recycled paper

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  For Nancy … with love

  chapter one

  “Samantha Anne Bliss: do you take Peter Sebastian Bryan to be your lawful wedded husband, to have and to hold, from this day forward…”

  “That’s it, then,” mutters David Bliss, Samantha’s father, thinking that he is talking to himself. “The poor sucker hasn’t got a clue what he’s taking on. I just hope he doesn’t blame me.”

  “Who’s going to blame you?” whispers an enquirer, her voice barely audible above the rain hammering on the church’s ancient copper roof.

  “… till death ye both shall part?” continues the pastor.

  Oh God! Was I talking aloud? “Sorry, Daphne,” whispers Bliss.

  “I do,” replies Samantha, without hesitation.

  No mention of honour or obey.

  Did you expect there to be? She’s a lawyer, not an office flunky. Anyway, when did she ever do what she was told?

  There’s a first time for everything.

  “Peter Sebastian Bryan: do you take Samantha Anne Bliss…”

  David Bliss feels a slight tug and has to bend a long way to question the giant toadstool hat on his left.

  “What is it, Daphne?”

  “Don’t they usually ask the man first?”

  “Not the one who’s marrying my daughter, apparently.”

  An indignant “Shush!” comes from the woman on Bliss’s right and he briefly cranes around as if trying to locate the talkative culprit.

  “I meant you, David,” says Sarah, Bliss’s ex-wife, as she digs him in the ribs.

  “Sorry…”

  “In sickness and in health,” drones the clergyman, “till death ye both shall part?”

  “I do.”

  “I now pronounce you man and wife.”

  “I’m surprised Samantha didn’t insist on changing that to, ‘I now pronounce you woman and husband,’” Bliss mutters to Daphne as he shields his elderly friend against the deluge while leading her to the limousine.

  “Weddings always make me so happy,” snivels the grandmotherly figure under the hat, but Bliss’s mind is on his ex-wife as he offers Daphne a Kleenex, saying, “That’s ‘cos you’ve never had one of your own, Daphne.”

  Daphne Lovelace, a lifelong spinster by sheer determination, haughtily waves off the proffered tissue with her own monogrammed silk handkerchief. “Well, it’s never too late, David. ‘Marry in haste, repent at leisure,’ my mother always said. And you needn’t look at me like that. I may not be a spring chicken but I’ve had offers. Anyway, it couldn’t have been too bad — aren’t you planning on doing it again?”

  “Whoever gave you that idea?” laughs Bliss, though he knows it would be easier to cart water in a sieve than keep a secret from Daphne.

  “Samantha mentioned a certain little French hen,” she replies cryptically, but Bliss refuses to play.

  “Take off the umbrella, Daphne. You’ll never get into the car wearing that.”

  “Huh. Cheek! Chief Inspector,” she snorts, but complies, saying, “If Minnie had shown up you would have had someone else’s hat to pick on. You should’ve seen the millinery creation I tarted up for her. I’m quite put out that she didn’t even phone me to say she wasn’t coming.”

  Bliss vaults into the car behind the aging woman and gazes intently through the windshield, questioning whether or not the chauffeur can see the road. “More suitable for a funeral?” he whistles, but it’s an avoidance tactic immediately rumbled by Daphne as they drive off gingerly towards the Berkeley Hotel.

  “I know you find Minnie a bit irritating at times, but we’re going on a trip around the world together, you know.”

  “Yes. You’ve already told me — three times,” he says testily, feeling he’s heard sufficient eulogizing of Minnie Dennon, Daphne’s overly amorous septuagenarian friend, to last a lifetime. “Though God knows how she can afford it.”

  Fifty miles away, in Daphne’s hometown of Westchester, Minnie Dennon has a similar concern as she takes a contemplative look around her tacky little flat and spends a few moments thinking how different her life may have been without fate’s malevolent hand.

  “Some people have all the luck,” she muses, as she checks that she has turned off the gas stove and the single-element electric fire, then quietly closes the front door behind her and listens for the latch to drop, before sliding the key under the doormat. “That’s it, then,” she mutters and, head down, pushes out into the rain. She has an important engagement — one of the most important in her life — and in veneration of the occasion she is wearing the drab olive suit she’d bought for her Alfred’s funeral.

  “Thirty-five years with the same man deserves some respect,” she’d fumed at the time, nearly twenty years ago, when Daphne had suggested that the suit was perhaps a trifle sombre considering the flippancy with which she’d treated her marriage. “Anyway, it’ll come in handy for your funeral,” Minnie had added acerbicall
y.

  The smell of mothballs surrounds Minnie as she makes her way down Watson Street, then she takes a few moments to pause at the top of the High Street and compare it with the childhood view she fondly retains.

  The picture in her mind may be faded and sepia-edged, but apart from some remodelling carried out by Hitler’s flying circus, little has outwardly changed. A hotchpotch of wooden-framed Tudor buildings on one side of the street is mirrored in the windows of a few Victorian monstrosities, housing banks and a department store, on the other. The traffic is different; dozens of zippy little cars have replaced the monstrous traction engines that belched steam and smuts, though the gentle Clydesdales of the brewery’s dray still clip-clop from pub to pub.

  Minnie juggles a few coins in her coat pocket and eyes the sweetshop on the corner of Mansard Street. A KitKat or Mars bar, perhaps? But, knowing there is no point in recounting her cash, she shakes her head. Her path is set and she moves on past the butcher’s, and the Mitre hotel, to a small café crushed under the insensitive shadow of a 1950s multi-storey car park.

  Ye Olde Copper Kettle’s front door leads Minnie into the past and, as she shakes off her coat, she winces at the huddle of youngsters crowding around the Internet terminals at the back of the room, so she closes her eyes and looks back. Stiffly starched white tablecloths match the aprons of the pink-faced young waitresses, their hair pleated up under lacy caps. The glow of a coal fire reflects warmly off the bone china crockery and polished silverware. Businessmen and bankers in blue mingle with tweedy farmers, and the town’s Ladies sit in one corner poring over Paris chic in Tatler while they chat of Ascot and exotic holidays in Bournemouth or Brighton. But the depression of the late ‘20s has bitten deeply, and the genteel Edwardian tea-room is already fading.

  A coarse voice shakes Minnie out of her memories. “Yeah. What-can-I-get-ya?”

  “Just a cup of Earl Grey, please.”

  “Sorry, luv. We’ve only got regular.”

  “I remember coming here with my mother in the thirties,” Minnie says, though it washes over the young woman.

  “Nice… Did you want the regular, then?”

  Minnie takes a deep breath; concerned that her plans are already unravelling.

  “I suppose so,” she says, resisting the temptation to run as she scans the plastic furniture and industrial china, “but please can I have a proper teapot, with a cup with a saucer.”

  The young counter assistant sees the despair in Minnie’s eyes and softens. “Of course you can, dear. You just find a seat and I’ll bring it over.”

  As Minnie pulls a chair from under a table, one of the teenage Web gamers, Ronnie Stapleton, sizes up the smartly dressed aging woman and tries to amuse his group of peers by snobbishly sneering, “Oh. I want a proper teapot like madam-f’kin’ la-di-da over there.”

  “Cut it out, Ron,” says Krysta, the fifteen-year-old love of his live, sensing Minnie’s discomfort, but Stapleton’s narcotic-addled brain blanks out his girlfriend as he continues to mock.

  “Oh. Why don’t you lick my f’kin boots?”

  “Ron…” warns Krysta and he eases off.

  “Aw’right; aw’right. Leave it out, girl; you ain’t me muvver. Just get me some water will ya. I’m skint.”

  In London, in the elegant reception suite at the Berkeley Hotel on the south bank of the Thames, the father of the bride, Detective Chief Inspector David Bliss of London’s Metropolitan Police, is about to make a similar request on behalf of Daphne Lovelace.

  “I brought my own tea bag. It’s Keemun — the Queen’s favourite,” Daphne explains conspiratorially as she squirrels it out of her bag while they wait for the remainder of the guests to arrive. “Would you mind asking one of the waiters to fetch me a pot of freshly boiled water and a nice china cup?”

  “You can’t do that here,” explains Bliss, but her expression clearly says she can, and will, so he changes tack and starts, “There’s champagne…” but he gets nowhere as Daphne fiercely points to her watch.

  “It’s four o’clock in the afternoon, David.”

  “Oh. Right,” he says, and then collides with his previous boss, now his son-in-law, as he makes his way to the bar.

  “David. A word…” Peter Bryan begins as he drags Bliss aside and drops his tone. “Did you see Edwards at the church?”

  “No. Don’t worry, son. I don’t think he showed up,” laughs Bliss, knowing that while a general invitation went out to all the senior officers at the station, everyone was praying that Chief Superintendent Edwards would send his apologies. However, Edwards hasn’t offered an apology — ever. He is an officer, with Brylcreemed hair and burnished boots, still marching in the past, who, on a good day, might apologize for being surrounded by incompetent idiots. He is a man whose pin-stuck effigy hangs in many junior officers’ lockers. And he’s a man who has stood on the gallows more than once, yet has always managed to somehow slip the noose and sling it around his accuser’s neck just as the lever was pulled.

  “Thank Christ…” says Bryan, fearing that Edward’s presence would curdle the champagne. Then he gives Bliss a quizzical look. “Hey! What’s with the ‘son’ thing?”

  “Serves you right for marrying my daughter, Detective Chief Inspector.”

  “You can cut that out, too, Dave,” Bryan replies with mock shirtiness as he stalks off. “And don’t expect me to call you ‘Dad,’ either.”

  “One pot of tea without the tea, please,” Bliss orders nonchalantly as he turns to the barman, and he watches with amusement as the young man tries to work out whether or not he might be dangerous.

  In Westchester, Minnie has scurried from the café, leaving the teapot half full, and is pushing on towards her goal when a Georgian mansion at the bottom end of the High Street solidly blocks her path. Westchester’s old general hospital was her birthplace, at a time when few families could afford the luxury of a doctor-attended birth, but Minnie stops briefly and considers detouring to avoid painful recollections of the soot-encrusted stone building. There are no joy-filled births for her; only deaths. First her younger brother who never made it out of the aediculated front doors; solid lacquered doors fiercely barred with a sign declaring, “All accidents, admissions and enquiries must use side entrance.” The double front doors were always kept well oiled, but were for the exclusive use of the Matron, together with consultant surgeons (not the riff-raff of general practitioners and interns) and mothers, with their perfect little newborns, who were ushered out through them and encouraged to pose for photos with the beaming sisters and nurses — like car builders touting their latest model to the press.

  “They might let you into the world through the front door,” the crusty ambulance driver had explained as he’d rushed Minnie’s dying mother to the side entrance. “But Gawd help anyone who tries to get out through there.”

  Minnie’s mother had been followed to the side door by various aunts, uncles and other family members, and finally Alfred, her husband. But apart from the time when she was first cradled in her mother’s arms, a triumphal exit through the hospital’s front doors has eluded Minnie and has been added to her lifelong list of unfulfilled dreams along with bridesmaid, ballerina and Princess Margaret.

  After the opening of a new medical facility in 1970, the old hospital was converted into a home for the elderly infirm, and Minnie resolutely keeps her eyes on the pavement and sticks to the curbside as she passes. She pays a penalty as a car swishes by and douses her stockings and shoes.

  She’d spent a long time choosing today’s shoes; comfortable enough to carry her across town while stylish enough for her engagement. She would have preferred the stilettos of her fifties, when she’d still had Alfred to tango with, but age has whittled away her ankles and she had feared tripping and failing in her assignment. So she’s settled for a clumpy pair of lace-ups with a heel low enough to make falling unlikely.

  Bliss’s ex-wife’s wedding shoes have also been carefully selected, though not from her exist
ing collection.

  “Hah! Of course I have to have new shoes,” she’d cried when George, Bliss’s replacement, had timorously suggested that she might find something suitable amongst the fifty or so pairs already clogging several wardrobes.

  Bliss is watching his ex-wife as she basks in the glow of their daughter, and he is weighing up the probable cost of her outfit when a familiar voice brings him back to earth.

  “David… Proud day… How’r’ya feeling?”

  “About as useful as a double-ended condom, to be honest, Mick,” replies Bliss. “I wasn’t even allowed to give Samantha away at the altar. She reckoned it was demeaning to be offered up like a sacrificial cow. So far, all I’ve had to do is get Daphne a pot for her tea.”

  “I dunno why we blokes bother with weddings,” complains Inspector Williams, and Bliss is on the point of agreeing when he realizes that Daphne has found another reluctant ear.

  “… and then we’re going to Alice Springs and Ayers Rock.”

  “So how much is this little jaunt costing exactly?” asks Bliss, taking the spotlight and allowing a fellow chief inspector to escape.

  “Nearly thirty thousand pounds,” replies Daphne smugly. “And Minnie insists on paying for everything. ‘You can’t do that,’ I told her, but she’s adamant. And it’s hardly a jaunt, David. We’re doing seven great rivers; the Zambezi, Niagara Falls, the Amazon…”

  Minnie gives a wide berth to Maplin’s Travel on Market Street, where Sandra Piddock shuffles longingly through a large stack of tickets as she peers out into the October murk. “Hawaii, Bali, the Seychelles, the Pyramids and the Great Wall,” she muses, then picks up the phone and listens to Minnie’s recorded voice inviting her to leave a message.

  “It’s Sandra at Maplin’s, Mrs. Dennon. Thursday afternoon. Just reminding you that we’ve got all the tickets ready for you and Ms. Lovelace. You’ll have to collect them by tomorrow afternoon or we’ll have to cancel them and you’ll lose your deposit. If you have any queries…”