Lovelace and Button (International Investigators) Inc. Page 17

  “Sorry,” says Dawson, using the weight of his presence in an effort to intimidate Bliss back out of the gates, “we’re not open to the public.”

  “Oh, I quite understand,” says Bliss, appearing conciliatory, though there is no retreat as he adds an edge to his voice. “But I believe two of my friends are here. Mrs. Button and Miss Lovelace —”

  “I’ve never heard of them,” cuts in Dawson, sharply. “Now, if you’ll excuse us…”

  “What is your name, sir?” enquires Bliss, digging in his heels.

  “We have no use for names here,” says Dawson, advancing to within an inch. “Now, you’ve caused enough trouble here already, so get out before I —”

  “Before you what?” challenges Bliss.

  “Before I call the police and have you thrown out of the country again.”

  “Go ahead,” says Bliss with his feet firmly planted just inside the gates.

  The ten minutes that it takes Captain Prudenski and his officers to arrive drag one second at a time for Bliss, as he stands eye to eye with Dawson between the partially opened gates, and his natural craving to strangle the truth out of the man before him is only assuaged by the attendance of the armed guard. While, were it not for the presence of Daisy, Dawson’s ferocious stare suggests that he would happily strong-arm the Englishman out onto the road. However, Bliss’s impassive expression and rigid stance make it very clear that has no intention of going anywhere without the Misses Lovelace and Button.

  Unfortunately, Prudenski takes a different view. “I’ll have no choice but to arrest you and hand you over to immigration for deportation,” says Prudenski on hearing Dawson’s contention that Bliss is trespassing. Then he adds, “Please don’t force me to do that.”

  “It’s very tempting,” says Bliss, wondering whether he can squeeze some press coverage out of the incident.

  “You’ll never be able to return to the States if that happens,” warns Prudenski.

  “But you’ve got to do something. The women are in there.”

  “Sir, if you have the evidence — and I’m talking real evidence here — then I’ll be more than happy to apply for a search warrant.”

  Bliss knows he’s sunk, but his feet are still firmly planted. “I’m warning you, Captain,” he says with his teeth clenched, “if you don’t take some action I will make sure that you are held accountable for aiding and abetting the abduction of the two women. Do I make myself understood?”

  “Absolutely, sir. So, to put your mind at ease, and as a real special favour to you as a visiting officer all the way from the Old Country, I’m gonna do one more thing.” Then he turns to Dawson with a serious mien. “Let me ask you real clear, sir. Do you have any idea of the whereabouts of the two ladies in question?”

  “No, sir.”

  “None whatsoever?”

  “That’s correct, sir. They are not here.”

  “There you are, Chief Inspector,” says Prudenski, turning back to Bliss. “You heard what the man said. Now, I wouldn’t want you getting into trouble with the immigration people cuz they can be mighty mean. So I’ll be happy to escort you to the border.”

  “This is preposterous,” yells Bliss directly into Dawson’s face.

  “Sir… Just one more time,” asks Prudenski. “Do you have any evidence —”

  “All right. All right,” cuts in Bliss. “You’ve made your point.” And giving Dawson a final poisonous glower, he walks back to Trina’s car with his head down.

  As the gates to the monastery quickly close behind Bliss, Dawson rounds on Bumface, spitting, “What the fuck’s going on?”

  “We’ve got a problem, John.”

  “I know that, you damn fool.”

  “No. I mean a real big problem,” he carries on, and then he leads his supervisor to Buzzer’s van, where Spotty Dick is frozen to the driver’s seat on the end of a guard’s pistol, while behind him, in a compartment partially concealed beneath a pile of salmon, lay Daphne and Trina.

  “Allan, Allan, Allan,” says Dawson, shaking his head in despair. “What the fuck am I gonna do with you?”

  “Okay, ladies. Get out, and no talking,” says Bumface, opening the rear doors and dragging salmon carcasses aside.

  “Take ‘em back and put ‘em in separate rooms,” says Dawson. “I’ll deal with this mess here.”

  “Sometimes I think I’m going insane,” muses Bliss as he drives away from the monastery with Prudenski on his tail. “Two weeks ago we were at Samantha’s wedding, and then Minnie chucks herself in front of a train and look what happens. How can I just go back and face her friends? ‘Where’s Daphne?’ they’ll ask. What am I supposed to say? ‘I lost her.’ I mean, she’s hardly a piece of luggage that Air Canada misplaced on the way over; she is not going to turn up in Honolulu or Buenos Aires. This just doesn’t happen. Ordinary people don’t just disappear.”

  “Never, Daavid?” queries Daisy.

  “Not without good reason — the odd bored housewife who runs off with the postman or someone nabbed with their hands in the till — that sort of thing.”

  “Nabbed?” questions Daisy, but Bliss’s mind is stuck on the conundrum of Daphne’s disappearance.

  “It’s the fact that someone obviously wanted their mobile-thing to be found in Canada that makes me so certain they’ve been abducted.”

  “Abducted?” inquires Daisy, losing further ground in Bliss’s ravings.

  “Daphne had absolutely no reason to disappear. This is a nightmare,” he rambles. “The depressing thing is that she was actually making final arrangements. Maybe she had a premonition.”

  “Oui. I understand zhat,” says Daisy, briefly catching up. “It is zhe same word — prémonition.”

  “But what about Trina?” continues Bliss, ignoring Daisy in his deliberations. “All the silly woman was thinking about was next year’s trip.” Then he pauses with a thought. “What if they’ve gone to New York?” he finds himself saying, before a pothole in the road jogs his brain and he shakes his head in disbelief. “Why am I even considering this? They were in that monastery place — which, by the way, is obviously not any kind of ecclesiastical establishment. And, even if it is, how the hell did they know that I’d been kicked out of their stupid damn country before?”

  It’s only ten p.m. when they reach the border, and Bliss is tempted to insist on staying until midnight just to be awkward, but realizes it will get him nowhere. Instead, he turns on Prudenski with a threatening finger. “If it transpires that those women are there, I’ll make sure you get busted so far you’ll have carpet burns on the underside of your chin.”

  “I’m sure that we all appreciate the advice, Chief Inspector,” says Prudenski with a sickly smile as Bliss starts to drive away. “Now, you just mind those Canadian bears. They can give you a mighty powerful hug.”

  “Get stuffed,” murmurs Bliss.

  “And you have yourself a good night, too,” calls Prudenski in his wake.

  Mike Phillips is waiting for Bliss on the Canadian side, and his face is clouded in mock annoyance. “Hey! You didn’t call,” he says as Bliss drives up.

  “Oh my God!” exclaims Bliss. “I’m so sorry, Mike. I forgot.”

  “No worries,” says the Canadian officer, softening. “I phoned Bellingham police and they told me their captain had everything in hand.”

  “Oh, yes. He had everything in hand all right.”

  “Anyway, nice to have you back in one piece. I guess they didn’t bring out the artillery this time.”

  “No, but they didn’t bring out Trina and Daphne, either.”

  “I dunno what to suggest.”

  “Tell me where the hell we go from here,” sighs Bliss in frustration.

  “You need to go to bed,” says Phillips. “You look as though you haven’t slept in days. And what’s that smell?”

  “Bananas,” grunts Bliss, then his voice cracks in annoyance as he looks back over the border. “They are there, Mike. I don’t care what the Ya
nks say. They are in that monastery place.”

  “Well, you silly old fool,” Daphne Lovelace says to herself as she scans the bare, windowless room from her new bed, “see if you can do a better job of getting out of this one.”

  But she is on her own now. Her co-escapee has been confiscated, together with her polka-dot hat, her penknife and the rest of her Girl Guides survival kit.

  “And stay out of the bathroom this time,” Bumface admonished as he shut the door, making it quite clear that the ruse to conceal Trina in the ductwork beside the shower unit would not work a second time. However, without her penknife and nail file to turn the screws, and without Trina’s slender body to hide, there is no chance of Daphne repeating the exercise.

  Thinking of Trina, Daphne puts her ear to the wall in the hope of hearing the younger woman, but there is nothing beyond the distant hum of exhaust fans and machinery.

  “Some hospital this is,” she muses as she contemplates the surveillance cameras and the lack of door handles, and she finds herself questioning the need for such security. A sanatorium for the mentally impaired, perhaps; yet the scattering of patients she’d seen when Bumface had escorted her and Trina from the gatehouse to the group of modern buildings had clearly undergone surgery — one in a wheelchair being pushed by a pretty young nurse wearing whites.

  The patients had looked ordinary enough, although most appeared to be Chinese or Korean. But they had all averted their gaze and scuttled away at the approach of Bumface and the two women.

  “Why won’t they look at us?” Daphne had mused aloud, and had caught a vicious rebuke from Dawson.

  “Shuddup, you old bat,” he’d spat, before shooing the patients off as if they were prowling dogs.

  “H’if you h’escape — don’t get caught. And h’if you get caught — watch h’out. ‘Cos things is going to get a lot worse,” the little survival expert warned, and Daphne reruns those words as she stares at the blank walls and glumly assesses her prospects.

  Allan Wallace is someone else facing a gloomy future. The bruises around his eyes are already blackening. And he would like to undo the lashings that bind him to the chair so that he could at least stem the blood pouring from his nose, but his right wrist is so badly smashed that his fingers droop uselessly. In any case, he has company.

  “I’m sure you realize that your actions have jeopardized the entire operation,” says a white-faced Dawson.

  “What are you going to do?” snivels Wallace.

  “Nothing,” says Dawson after a thoughtful pause. “And you’d better pray that English cop doesn’t do anything either. Then — maybe in a week or so, when things have quietened down — we can get back to normal and forget all about this unfortunate little incident.”

  “But what about the women?”

  “Not your worry now, Allan. They’ll be taken care of.”

  “Okay, John,” he says in apparent resignation.

  But there are two sides to John Dawson and, faced with the prospect of having to flay himself in front of his seniors, he chooses the darker of the two.

  “Give it a couple of days ‘til the heat’s off,” he tells Bumface once he’s back in the surveillance room. “In the meantime, they are not here, and they never were here. Okay?”

  “And what about Allan?”

  “Shame. Nice guy — fancy him being crushed by a falling tree like that.”

  chapter twelve

  “Now this is what we term a heavy mist in Vancouver,” explains Sergeant Mike Phillips, showering rainwater out of his hair as he meets Bliss and Daisy for a pre-dawn breakfast at their hotel. “And this is for you,” he adds, taking a soggy sheet of pink message-pad paper from a pocket of his drenched raincoat and handing it to Bliss as if it might explode.

  “I guessed he’d track me down eventually,” snorts Bliss once he has read the command to telephone Chief Superintendent Edwards — and it is a command.

  “The operator reckoned your boss melted the transatlantic wires,” continues Phillips while they take the elevator to the hotel’s top-floor dining room from whence, according to the brochure, they will have unparalleled vistas of verdant islands swimming in a bright blue ocean, together with a grandstand view of pristine peaks as far away as the Washington Cascades.

  “Oh, yes, he can be very pleasant at times,” sneers Bliss when they emerge from the elevator to a drab scene of rain-cloaked windows.

  “Wann’a use my cell phone?” offers Phillips, but the look on Bliss’s face suggests he would rather stuff needles in his ears. “Oh, what the hell,” he says finally, and tries unsuccessfully to peer through the miasma of darkness and rain as he taps in a number from memory.

  “I hear you’ve been causing trouble for our American allies, now,” complains Edwards as soon as they are connected.

  “Really,” says Bliss, giving up at the window and finding a seat next to Daisy. “And who would have told you that, sir?”

  “Bliss. Stop pissing about and get back here while you still have a job to come back to.”

  “And what about the missing women?”

  “Leave that to the Canadians.”

  “They are not in Canada,” he seethes, and then he reaches forward for his coffee cup and lets out an anguished shriek.

  “What is it, Chief Inspector?”

  “I think I’ve just put my back out, sir,” says Bliss with absolutely no attempt to hide the fact that he’s lying.

  “What?”

  “I’m afraid I’m going to be off sick for quite awhile — oh!”

  “What is zhe matter, Daavid?” asks Daisy, rising in concern as Bliss closes the phone and hands it back to Phillips.

  “Nothing, Daisy, I’m fine,” he laughs, waving her back down. “Although I do believe that Mr. Edwards has just smashed his telephone.”

  But Bliss’s laughter is short-lived. “Come on, Mike. Some ideas, please. That place is no more a monastery than this is a brothel.”

  “I wish I knew,” says Phillips, pouring himself a second coffee. “Rick Button is doing a nationwide appeal at ten this morning, though God knows how the poor guy’s gonna manage. I can’t picture what he’s going through.”

  “I can. But it’s the wrong nation he’s appealing to,” rages Bliss. “Why is no one listening to me? Have I become the invisible man?”

  “I’m listening, Dave. But as long as the Americans maintain they’re in Canada, what can we do?”

  “Just ‘cos they say it, doesn’t make it so. Christ Almighty, they insisted the Iraqis had chemical weapons when anyone with half a brain knew they didn’t.”

  “I’ve passed on all the information about the place through Interpol,” continues Phillips as he adds milk and sugar, “and they’re promising a full investigation.”

  “Or another whitewash,” scoffs Bliss.

  “Why?”

  “Because there is obviously something very fishy going on there,” says Bliss, and he makes another stab at peering through the darkness as if trying to see through the chimera surrounding the monastery and connect with Daphne. However, in the pre-dawn gloom he finds only the dreariness of another anxiety-filled day, where even the navigation lights of a trawler departing from the harbour under the nose of the waterside hotel are lost in the murk.

  “I can’t see a damn thing through this,” admits Bliss, giving up, while beneath him at sea level, Vincent Kelly, the trawlerman, edges his boat forward with his eyes glued to the radar.

  The muscular Kelly is still considered a greenhorn in the tradition of west coast trawling — a mere thirty-eight years of age, but unlike many of his peers who have given up their family’s seafaring businesses in favour of more dependable work ashore, Kelly has apparently thrived. However, while he may have taken over the boat from his father, he did not inherit the ocean’s abundance of salmon, cod and herring which had originally paid for it.

  “You know, back in my day, son, I can remember when…” bearded old men with whisky-veined noses and nicotine
d fingers often reminisce as they sit on Vancouver’s fisherman’s wharf watching their final years slip past. But if anyone ever did walk across the bay on the backs of salmon, capsize with the weight of his nets or sink under his catch, it was long before Vincent’s time.

  “Hah! Call them fish?” an oldtimer will grumble, surveying today’s measly haul. “We wouldn’t a’ fed the cat with them in my time.”

  But today, somewhere off the southernmost tip of Vancouver Island, close to the entrance to Puget Sound, Vincent Kelly has a catch already lined up for him. So, despite the dense fog and the torrents of rain tattooing the ocean’s surface that will keep most sailors in the bar, he’ll allow satellites to guide him and radar to protect him as he steers a well-worn path.

  However, the fish with Kelly’s name on it is still a long way from being landed, and as soon as the trawler hits deep water, he kicks up the throttles and listens with satisfaction to the comforting sound of twin diesels burbling richly beneath his feet.

  “Hey, Mick,” he calls to the wiry deckhand who is making coffee in the cramped galley behind the wheelhouse. “Hurry up. I need you on lookout.”

  “Coming, Vince,” says the hand.

  “Don’t forget your binoculars,” continues Kelly as he jams his face to the windshield, searching worriedly for a glimpse of any of the semi-submerged logs that bedevil boaters off the forested shoreline of the Pacific northwest.

  Thirty miles west, on the far edge of Kelly’s radar’s horizon, Captain Hwang of the South Asia Steamship Company has no such concerns as he stands on his bridge with his mind on Seattle’s ritzy fish restaurants and dockside strip clubs. With nearly a hundred thousand tons of ship and cargo under his feet it would take an entire raft of floating logs to put a dent in his hull. However, before he can relax over a cold beer, a warm lobster and a hot hooker, he will have to navigate the narrow strait that separates Vancouver Island from the rugged coastline of northern Washington, then thread his way through a string of forested islands at the entrance to Puget Sound. He will also have to rendezvous with Vincent Kelly’s little trawler without attracting the attention of the Coast Guard.