Deadly Sin Read online

  “Repent. The end is nigh,” sings out an aging sandwich man as Bliss passes, but it’s a song he has been singing for more than thirty years. His voice is hoarse, and his credibility is as tattered as the raincoat and the heavy billboards that weigh him down.

  “Give us some change for a cuppa, guv’nor,” pleads the mendicant, slipping from under his boards and sidling up to Bliss. “It’s bleedin’ boilin’ out ’ere.”

  “You need a cold drink …” starts Bliss, sees the light starting to form in the old beggar’s eyes and pauses. “Maybe you should get shot of that old coat.”

  “Not bloomin’ likely,” he snarls, baring a mouthful of nightmarish teeth. “I wouldn’t have nuvving to wear fer winter.”

  Bliss feels for a coin and jokes. “Don’t worry, mate. If you’re right, it’ll be a damn sight hotter for most of us by then.”

  “It ain’t funny, guv’nor. Look at all the bleedin’ ’urricanes an’ erfquakes. Mark my words, the end is near.”

  “But when — today?”

  The perpetually disappointed doomsayer squints at the clear blue sky as if checking for a portent — a flock of ravens; a lightning bolt; the hand of God. Finding nothing more apocalyptic than a jumbo jet spewing pollution en route to Heathrow he turns back to Bliss and whispers, “Nah. Not today, guv’nor. We’re aw’right today. Next week p’raps.”

  “I’ll be waiting,” mocks Bliss sternly as he hands over a pound coin, but as he rejoins the homebound flood of office labourers he sinks lower, thinking, What if he is right? What if I have only one more week? Mid-life crisis, he tries telling himself, but is it mid-life?

  In the August heat the Friday rush hour of weary workers is as torpid as the river. Global warming is on everyone’s lips as the mercury bumps off the scale for the third week in a row, and most are heading for the coast and the cool waters of the North Sea or the Channel.

  “Heat Wave Takes Elderly Toll,” shouts the headline in the Evening Chronicle, but Bliss delves deeper to discover that it’s editorial hype. “Health officials estimate that as many as a thousand may die …” continues the article, leaving him wondering how many of them will be happy not to have to struggle through another winter.

  A counter-flow of foreign tourists bucks the tide as homebound workers stream into the stifling stations and subways, but most of the visitors have come prepared, wearing saris, djellabas, and kaftans; many of them are thankful for the relative chill of the sweltering English weather.

  Bliss balks as he is swept towards Embankment tube station. The persistent threat of a fanatic’s bomb and the thought of being stuffed into a smelly sweatbox for half an hour turns him off, and he heads for Waterloo Bridge. The walk will do me good, he persuades himself, not needing to check his midriff, and as he crosses the river his mind is still on his age. Fifty years of relentless gravity may be having a negative effect on his gut, hair, and eyelids, but by craning back his head and straightening his spine he still has no difficulty seeing over the heads of the throng.

  Which of them have the genes, the fortitude, and the luck to beat the odds and get a birthday card from the Queen, he wonders, picking out faces with a detective’s eye — white, red, brown, and black; Caucasian, Afro-Caribbean, and Asian; sallow, ashen, and flushed; flabby, drawn, and downtrodden; pretty, ugly, and plain. Who are they? What are their hopes, dreams, and ambitions? Which of them could be talking to God, listening to God, or scheming to play God? And which God? Whose God?

  He stops mid-bridge and searches for a moment’s solace amidst the constant rumble of buses and taxis as he leans over the stone parapet to gaze into the languid water. His presence makes an eddy in the stream of silent pedestrians as they eye him watchfully, even fearfully. Couples, families, and troupes of tourists may pause to marvel at the historic riverside views without causing a stir, but not a lone man in a business suit peering introspectively at the river.

  Where are we going? he wants to know, questioning both his own future and that of humanity, and time takes a very long breath as his eyes lose their focus in the slowly swirling sludge.

  “Are you all right, sir?” queries a suspicious voice eventually, and it takes Bliss a few moments to bring himself back.

  “Brain fart,” he explains, turning slowly to the uniformed constable with an embarrassed laugh. “I was trying to look into the future.”

  “Really,” says the young officer guardedly, and Bliss immediately catches on to the constable’s look of cynicism. He quickly pulls out his warrant card, explaining, “I’m D.C.I. Bliss from the Yard,” as if his status guarantees immunity from suicidal tendencies. But his identity puts a new complexion on the officer’s baby face, and the young man stutters, “S-s-sorry, sir …” Then he attempts to deflect the blame with a vague sweep of his hand. “O-o-only, some people were worried …”

  “No problem, son,” says Bliss, recalling similarly embarrassing moments in his early years, but as he carries on across the bridge he can’t help laughing about the young officer. He’s probably still a teenager — maybe twenty; his mother sits at home fearing a terrorist attack while he spends most days as a city guide and photographer’s model praying for one. I was probably like that, reflects Bliss, and he pictures a tall, keen, athletic young man who, in his own mind, hasn’t changed a great deal. Most of his hair is still holding on, although the colour’s fading. “You can get stuff for that,” his adult daughter, Samantha, frequently reminds him. But what then — dentures, spectacles, and Viagra? And after that — incontinence pads, colostomy bags, and a constant diet of minced meat, rice pudding, and Vera Lynn?

  “You’re only fifty, for chrissakes,” he tries telling himself as he walks along the riverside path but he realizes that, like the Thames, he is a lot nearer the wide open ocean than most of his colleagues.

  It is low tide. The receding water has bared mud banks spattered with supermarket buggies and rusted bicycle frames, and a lone gull quietly worries at a bag of garbage. The guidebooks may trumpet the sighting of an occasional salmon, but the river still lacks the splendour of the Danube or the romance of the Seine, although Bliss knows well that the celebrated French river is no cleaner. Maybe Parisians see garbage differently, he surmises — like art nouveau — adding to the charm rather than detracting.

  But just how much bluer is the Danube or sweeter the Seine? he asks himself as he gazes into the brackish water, then he picks up his feet, reminding himself that someone in France is waiting for a phone call.

  “It’s bloody hot here,” Bliss complains to his French fiancée once he’s poured himself an icy lager, but Daisy LeBlanc is steps from the Mediterranean and shrugs it off.

  “Did you have zhe good day?”

  “Not really. I nearly killed the Queen.”

  “I zhink zhat is good, non?” laughs Daisy. “Like Marie-Antoinette — zhe guillotine. Perhaps zhere are many ozher zhings you can learn from zhe French, non?”

  “No,” he says, laughing. “But maybe zhe French can learn how to say ‘the.’ Anyway, it was only an exercise. Just testing communications and testing me.”

  “Did you pass?”

  “Did I pass?” he echoes, unsure of the answer. Was he supposed to pass? “The real thing is next Friday,” he says without answering. “I’ve got a week to study the manual.”

  “Too slow; too little; too late. You’re gonna have to do better, much better,” Commander Fox bitched at the debriefing once the Secret Service squad left. “You’re rusty, Bliss, that’s your trouble. You’ve had a year off and you’ve gone soft.”

  “I was writing a book,” he protested, but Fox didn’t let up.

  “Wake up, man. You’re supposed to be a policeman, not a bloody author.”

  I solved the mystery of the Man in the Iron Mask, he wanted to complain, but he knew it wouldn’t get him anywhere. Originality and creativity are not widely applauded in the police.

  “Judges can be funny about policemen with overactive imaginations, Chief Inspector,”
the commander admonished. “Stick to your job. Stick to irrefutable facts.”

  But what facts are truly irrefutable? Bliss wondered and reflected on the times he witnessed the meltdown of a cast-iron case because a dozen dozy jurymen were befuddled by the mendacious shenanigans of a defence lawyer.

  “You put her at risk. You took your eye off the ball. You’d better pray there’s no sniper next week,” Commander Fox concluded.

  A sniper! Bliss is still fuming inwardly. Why would anyone gun down a little grey-haired old lady without a penny in her purse?

  “Are you all right, Daavid?” asks Daisy, sensing a vacuum, and Bliss straightens his thoughts.

  “Sorry, dear. I was just wondering why someone would want to kill the Queen. It’s not as though she has any real power. They’d just be aggravating an ancient theocratic wound.”

  “What is zhis zheocratic zhing?” asks Daisy confusedly.

  “Don’t worry.” Bliss laughs. “I’m flying over next Friday after the Queen’s visit, and I’m going to spend the whole weekend working on your tongue.”

  “Oh, Daavid …”

  “Fifty years old and still a bloody teenager,” sniggers Bliss to himself as he puts down the phone. It buzzes almost immediately. She’s remembered my birthday, he thinks with a bounce, but he is quickly deflated. “Daphne?” he queries, recognizing the aging voice.

  “I need a little help, David,” says Daphne Lovelace, calling from her home in Westchester, Hampshire.

  “Help is what you usually give others, Daphne,” replies Bliss, having no difficulty recalling the times the eccentric spinster saved his bacon despite her advancing years.

  Daphne Lovelace, O.B.E., a woman with a hat for every occasion and an adventure for every dinner party, is a lot closer to beating the longevity odds than she is willing to admit — unless it suits her. It suits her now.

  “It’s an utter disgrace, David,” she spits. “Someone of my age shouldn’t have to put up with it.”

  “Your age?” queries Bliss, though it is rhetorical and he knows it, so he skips, asking, “What shouldn’t you have to put up with?”

  “Listen,” she says and waves the phone in the air.

  The thumping bass of rap music, the revving of motor-bikes, the barking of dogs, and a foul-mouthed woman screeching abuse coalesce into a cacophony that makes Bliss duck.

  “Daphne,” he shouts. “Is that your Gilbert and Sullivan society or are you having a rave?”

  “It’s the new neighbours,” she protests angrily, then carries on carping about the family that has moved in next door: wall-shaking music, air-rending exhausts, loud people with even louder motorbikes who entertain a constant stream of unsavoury characters at unsavoury times, and two muscular terriers who throw themselves at the fence every time she ventures into her back garden.

  “They’ve smashed my windows, peed on my gladiolis, and even pulled up the carrots I was growing specially for the horticultural fair,” she complains, although it’s not the worst. The worst is the disappearance of her cat, Missie Rouge, and she is close to tears as she says, “They probably ate the poor thing.”

  “You’re exaggerating,” says Bliss. “Anyway, I thought it was an elderly couple next door. I met them.”

  “Phil and Maggie,” she agrees with a loud sniff. “They died.”

  “Not the heat —” starts Bliss, but Daphne cuts him off.

  “Oh no. They were ever so old,” she says, as if aging is an affliction from which she is immune. “Maggie went first. She was in one of those church-run seniors’ homes, Auschwitz-by-the-sea, and Phil just pined.”

  “It happens,” suggests Bliss, ignoring the jibe, though Daphne can’t understand how her new neigh-bours got the house.

  “Phil and Maggie had no family — none worth speaking of. I’d do their shopping and get their prescriptions. And I cooked for Phil …”

  I guess you were expecting a handout, thinks Bliss uncharitably as Daphne continues with her list of good-neighbourliness. But he finds it surprising that she didn’t anticipate the existence of a relative in the woodwork. “Actually, I’m really busy,” he says, cutting her off eventually, and he suggests she take her complaint to Superintendent Donaldson at Westchester police station.

  “Ted retired last month,” complains Daphne, as if he did it deliberately. “There’s a schoolgirl running the place now, and she good-as-much told me to buy earplugs.”

  Donaldson’s replacement was clearly unaware of Daphne’s record and status. Not only was the elderly spinster the station’s charlady for more years than anyone could remember, she probably solved more crimes than many of the less inspired detectives. The number of criminals convicted in the five years since Daphne handed in the keys to Westchester police station’s tea cupboard has decreased annually, though no one at the weekly C.I.D. meeting would dream of attributing the decline to her absence. However, no one would deny that whenever she slowly lowered her polished copper pot onto the detective inspector’s desk, scratched her forehead, and mused, “That’s funny — my milkman (or baker or butcher) was telling me about …” anyone with any sense would put down their tea and pick up a pen.

  “I told little Miss Marple straight. I said, ‘I was cleaning the constables’ toilets here before you pooped your first nappy.’”

  “I bet that went down well,” mutters Bliss, but Daphne fails to see why diplomacy should trump the truth.

  “Call themselves detectives,” she rants. “Most of them couldn’t spot a turd in a toilet, and as for …” but Bliss tunes out her diatribe, knowing he’d probably agree and guessing that much the same would have been said of him and his peers in his early years.

  “If I had neighbours like that in olden times I could have bribed a witch to put a hex on their virgins and poison their goat,” Daphne is concluding when Bliss comes back, and he laughs it off.

  “Now don’t go getting yourself in trouble. I’ve bailed you out often enough.”

  “Bailed me out, Chief Inspector! I seem to remember —”

  “All right, Daphne,” says Bliss, needing no reminder of the times the shoe was on the other foot. “Only you’ll have to join the queue. I’ve already got one little old lady on my plate this week.”

  “Old!” snorts Daphne indignantly, as expected, though she calms once he’s revealed the identity of his other charge.

  “I suppose I’ll have to yield to royalty,” she says as she puts down the phone and refills the teapot. “Keemun,” she muses as she pours, knowing it is the Queen’s favourite, and then she has an idea.

  “Your Majesty,” she writes, after she has dug a monogrammed Sheaffer fountain pen and a bottle of India ink from her bureau.

  “Subversion: the art of demoralizing the enemy by persistently undermining their morale,” writes Daphne in a notebook, once she has leant on the Queen for support, then she pours another tea, sits back, and closes her eyes in an effort to blot out the neighbours’ noise.

  Images from another lifetime take shape, images undimmed by more than six decades: corrugated iron huts draped with camouflage netting in the woodland behind a solid Victorian mansion; the air heavy with the stench of latrines, cigarettes, and cheap floor polish; a hundred keen and excited women in drab fatigues being groomed for death — young women, most barely in their twenties, who a year earlier would have been giddily choosing dresses for engagement parties and coming-out balls.

  “Dishearten, demoralize, and discourage by destroying, disrupting, and denying,” ran the mnemonic of the psychological warfare officer as Daphne and her classmates were prepared to take on the Nazis in occupied France, and Daphne recalls it with a clarity that proves conclusively to her that she’s not coming down with Alzheimer’s, but twenty minutes later she puts the kettle on again. It’s not that she’s entirely bereft of ideas for ousting the enemy on her doorstep; she simply has no way to get her hands on the necessary explosives, detonators, or strychnine. “I’ll have to be subtle,” she tries telling hers
elf, but in her mind she sees a plume of smoke rising from the rubble, while sombre-faced undertaker’s men carry charred bodies to a black van and someone dumps the limp carcasses of two pit bulls into a hastily dug grave.

  “That’ll teach you for eating my poor little pussy cat,” she sniffles, but the mirage evaporates instantly as the dogs spy her peering out of her kitchen window and launch themselves against the wire fence.

  “Shut up! Please shut up!” she says as she clamps her hands over her ears, but the pulsing thunder of a bass drum beats into her.

  “Shut up! Shut up!” she yells as she escapes the kitchen with the teapot, but the noise tracks her through the hallway into the living room.

  “Shut up! Shut up!” she screeches as she stands, rigid, in the centre of the room, then she lets go, drops the pot, and slumps onto the settee where she buries her head under a pillow and bursts into tears.

  chapter two

  Four unopened birthday cards lie on David Bliss’s hall floor on Saturday morning, but none bear a French stamp. Daisy’s forgotten, he tells himself, but resists the temptation to phone in case he is proved right. “She’ll probably call later,” he muses as he drags himself to the kitchen for a coffee.

  Samantha, his married daughter, called just as he was getting into bed. “Sorry, Dad, we thought you’d be going to visit Daisy in France,” she explained, after apologizing for the fact that she and Peter, her chief inspector husband, had made alternate plans for the weekend.

  “Oh, don’t worry, Sam. I’m far too busy to bother with birthdays at my age,” Bliss protested with a brave lilt, “and I’ve got a lot of work to do on the Queen’s visit.” But sleep evaded him. “Hot and sticky,” the late-night forecaster had predicted, and Bliss’s mind wandered the hallways of his life, peeking into rooms — some distant, full of warmth and smiling families, balloons, cakes, and candles; others, more recent, empty and cold — as he sought a comfortable spot on the perspiration-soaked sheet.