Deadly Sin Read online

  “I’m not here to discuss new residents,” Trina expounds resolutely. “I’m here to investigate the disappearance of my associate, Miss Lovelace.”

  “Your associate?” echoes Davenport quizzically.

  “Yes,” says Trina, pulling herself fiercely upright in a tadasana yoga pose. “We are private investigators.” Then she hands over a printed card. “Lovelace and Button (International Investigators) Inc.,” she says, adding, “Miss Lovelace is my partner and is head of our European division.”

  Robert Jameson has loosened his tie and is turning puce in the background, while Davenport laughs nervously and scoffs, “Private investigators. Are you pulling my leg? I think you’ve got the wrong person here.”

  “I don’t think so,” says Trina reproachfully. “It says Patrick Davenport on your door.”

  “No … I meant Miss Lovelace. She can’t possibly be a detective, she’s pushing ninety and she’s senile.”

  “Nonsense,” says Trina. “I spoke with her just a couple of weeks ago and she was fine.”

  “All right,” says Davenport, dragging Trina to the window overlooking the lawn. “Have a look out there. Do you see a cat?”

  “No.”

  “Miss Lovelace did. ‘Here, kitty kitty,’ she’d go all day long. Round and round she’d go, hour after hour, calling kitty bloody kitty. It used to get on everyone’s nerves.”

  “Observation,” trumpets Trina enigmatically, recalling a chapter from her private investigator’s manual, and then she explains, “One of the attributes of a top investigator is that they are able to see things that other people miss.”

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” calls Samuel Fitzgerald as he races into Davenport’s office without knocking. “Is that woman with you?”

  “Which woman …?” starts Trina, then she follows Fitzgerald’s gaze out of the window just in time to see her mother pushing John Bartlesham out of the gates.

  “Mother!” shouts Trina as she tears out of the office and belts down the driveway, and then she turns back to Davenport. “Don’t go away. I’ll be back.”

  The disparity between Davenport’s image of a crazy old lady and Trina’s insistence that Daphne is nothing less than a female Sherlock Holmes is as profound as the difference between the elderly woman’s present appearance and the photograph on the front of the Westchester Gazette, which explains why Isabel Semaurino walks past her in the High Street without missing a step as she makes her way to the police station to see if there is any news.

  The High Street is something of a high wire for Daphne, so she keeps her hood up and concentrates on her feet as she scuttles past familiar stores and a few recognizable figures. But the heat is off. Her red herring, the train ticket to London, has worked, and with the kidnapping put to rest and the local search called off, no one at Westchester police station is particularly concerned about finding her.

  Superintendent McGregor is getting down to more serious matters when her phone rings.

  “What should I do with the dabs from St. Michael’s, ma’am?” asks the fingerprint officer. McGregor is tempted to say, “Chuck them,” but she checks herself. What if the remains of a dismembered body turn up in a ditch in five years’ time?

  “You might as well run them through the mill and stick them on file,” she replies, then dumps Daphne’s file in her “Out” box, marked, “MissPer — No further action.”

  “Edwards wants an update at four this afternoon,” says Fox as he pops his head into Bliss’s office on his way to lunch. “Have you got any ideas at all about protecting her?”

  “I might if I knew what that pickup truck was doing outside the mosque.”

  “I ordered you to leave that alone.”

  “I know —”

  “Look,” snaps Fox. “Roughly half the Muslims and half the Christians in the world are threatening to kill her if she shows up, and all you have to worry about is one slightly cranky husband. So just leave everything else to me … understood?”

  “Understood, sir.”

  “This is your last chance, Chief Inspector,” Fox warns over his shoulder as Peter Bryan appears in the corridor. “Four o’clock. Don’t be late.”

  “I’ll be there,” calls Bliss, and then he drags his son-in-law inside and shuts the door.

  “It’s movie time,” he says as he pulls another chair up to his desk.

  Bryan raises his eyebrows in mock disapproval and jests, “I hope they’re not smutty like the last time. I’m a married man, you know.”

  “They are … sort of,” says Bliss, explaining that the video technician has obtained recordings from all the congestion cameras in a three-mile radius of the mosque. “I had to promise half my pension for these,” he says as they begin watching.

  With the precise time and known direction of travel it doesn’t take long.

  “There it is,” shouts Bryan time and again as they follow the vehicle’s progress from one camera to the next, until …

  “Nothing,” says Bliss, and they backtrack to the last sighting and put an X on a map.

  “Okay,” says Bryan, using a pencil as a pointer. “Unless it vaporized into thin air it has to be somewhere in this area, and it was travelling in this direction.”

  “So what are we waiting for?” asks Bliss.

  “What was Fox ranting about when I arrived?”

  “Do you know, Peter,” says Bliss with a fiercely furrowed brow as he opens the door for his son-in-law, “the biggest problem with getting old and becoming a grandfather is that the memory just goes.”

  Despite her age, Daphne Lovelace’s memory hasn’t diminished one iota. She still remembers the velvety life that she enjoyed in the same comfortable house for nearly forty years; the zany scrapes that Trina Button got her into; Missie Rouge, her red-tinged cat; the flowers and vegetables in her garden; the afternoon tea — always Keemun, and always in a pot, never made in the cup.

  It’s nearing midday, and Mavis’s postman will soon be back at the sorting office with the envelope. So, heartened by the fact that the cemetery workers didn’t recognize her, Daphne pulls down her hood and slinks through the copse to the cul-de-sac end of her street.

  In the eyes of the police and her neighbours, Daphne Lovelace is now just another confused old lady on the loose, so, apart from a few youngsters playing hopscotch and a couple of teens sucking the dregs out of a found cigarette butt, the road is deserted.

  Daphne eyes the quiet street carefully and pulls her key out of her purse. It’s not far to her front door, but Michael Kent stands in her path.

  “Timing is everything,” he warned her on so many occasions when she was readying to make a dash for freedom with a defector on her arm or under the back seat of her car, but with Mavis only minutes away from collecting the evidence, she takes a chance.

  There’s a hole in the kitchen unit where Daphne’s fridge used to be, but it’s not the loss of the fridge that starts her tears. It’s the memory of Missie Rouge, who would sit for hours if necessary, waiting for the fridge door to open and a can of food to appear.

  “She must think it’s a food factory,” Daphne laughed to friends on more than one occasion, and the fridge’s removal is the final nail in the cat’s coffin.

  “I bet they took it for spite,” sobs Daphne, immediately accusing the neighbours, and as she pulls a crack in her curtains to see into their kitchen, she sends the dogs into a frenzy and Misty Jenkins to the phone.

  The snarling dogs send Daphne scurrying to the front of the house with her hands over her ears, and she flies up the stairs to her bedroom.

  David Bliss, Mavis, and Tony Oswald have all had a hand in trying to protect her belongings, and the sight of several bulging bags and boxes labelled “clothes,” “hats,” “bedding,” and “knick-knacks” stops her as she opens the door, then she breaks down again.

  Time warps as Daphne lies on her bed mourning the life that has been taken from her, and she doesn’t hear the arrival of Anne McGregor and a car from St.
Michael’s.

  “Miss Lovelace,” calls Patrick Davenport through the letterbox, and she wakes in an instant.

  “Open the door, please. It’s the police,” calls Anne McGregor, and Daphne is out of bed and down the stairs in a single move.

  “Now where?” she questions and turns to Michael Kent for advice.

  “Never hide in a building — the dogs will always find you. Run and you have a chance.”

  She runs — for the back door and the cornfield beyond, but in her absence Rob Jenkins has ripped down the badly mauled wire fence separating the two gardens, and she is immediately slapped against her coalhouse wall by the snarling pit bulls.

  “Get off … get off,” she screeches as she tries to push the ferocious creatures away, but the commotion has reached the front of the house, and Anne McGregor’s driver throws his shoulder against the door.

  “Come along, dear,” says the superintendent seconds later, offering a hand from Daphne’s kitchen door as Misty Jenkins tries calling the dogs off. “Your daughter’s waiting for you.”

  “Liar,” screams Daphne. “You’re all liars. Why are you lying?”

  “Daphne …” begins Hilda Fitzgerald, but Daphne would rather take her chances with the dogs.

  “They’re trying to kill me,” she shouts, backing away from Fitzgerald. “They’re trying to kill me.”

  “I’d better call for a doctor …” starts McGregor, but Davenport has it in hand.

  “Dr. Williamson is on his way,” he says. “He knows the case personally.”

  “Good,” says McGregor as Misty finally gets the dogs under control.

  “Look. They made me sign over everything to a lawyer,” Daphne is shouting to anyone who will listen. “Jameson — that was his name. Can’t you see what they’re doing? They’re saying I’ve got a daughter so they can give her my house and everything.”

  “Daphne, I’m sure …” tries McGregor.

  “No … no … no. You’re not listening to me. Please … please … please. I’m telling you. Look at his files. See all the drugs they’re giving them.”

  “All our patients need medication,” explains Davenport calmingly. “They’re all very old people.”

  “They’re killing people to steal their houses. That’s how they got Phil and Maggie’s place,” rants Daphne as the three of them close in. “They made her sign everything over to the lawyer and then they killed her.”

  “Daphne,” asks McGregor condescendingly, “have you got any proof of that at all?”

  “The papers … I had the papers,” shouts Daphne.

  “Where are they?”

  “At the post office. I posted them to Mavis, but she wouldn’t pay for them.”

  “C’mon, luvee,” coos Davenport as he makes a grab.

  “Get off,” screeches Daphne, but Davenport has a firm grip, and his sister snags an arm.

  “Come with us, dear,” says Hilda Fitzgerald as she and her brother hustle the squirming woman through the house towards the car. Then she turns back to the superintendent. “Don’t worry. We’ll take good care of her.”

  “Don’t let them take me,” screams Daphne. “They’re going to kill me.”

  “Daphne …” starts McGregor consolingly, but the terrified woman makes a final break, wriggles free of Fitzgerald’s grip, and throws herself at the superintendent’s legs.

  “Please don’t let them,” she begs as she tightly wraps her arms around the woman. Then Doctor Williamson shows up and sums up the situation at a glance.

  “Paranoia can be a very, very frightening thing in the elderly,” says Williamson as he carefully removes the hypodermic from Daphne after a few minutes of struggle and drops it into a small disposal unit while Daphne’s eyes slowly close.

  “Not just in the elderly,” says Anne McGregor as she gently unpeels Daphne’s arms from her legs and feels her heart thumping against her ribcage. “I’ve never known someone put up such a struggle.”

  “The fear of dying is a very potent force,” Williamson explains as he helps carry the limp woman to Davenport’s car.

  chapter fifteen

  Westchester’s corrugated iron and concrete sorting room is a 1950s canker on the backside of the High Street’s historic post office, but despite its leaky roof and draughty walls it is abuzz with robotic sounds of the twenty-first century as computerized hands speed the mail.

  The lengthy tables of chatty sorters are long gone. A few po-faced supervisors remain, frustrated from years of attempting to decipher the indecipherable, and one picks up Patrick Davenport’s frantic phone call.

  “There’s been a big mix-up,” gushes St. Michael’s manager, and then he rattles on about confused staff members, wrong papers, patients’ records, silly people, and a major embarrassment, before explaining that the envelope was sent to a resident’s friend by mistake.

  “Name?” asks the supervisor laconically without taking his eyes off his screen.

  “Daphne Lovelace.”

  “Address?”

  “No, sorry,” says Davenport realizing he is heading down the wrong road. “You mean, who were the papers sent to, don’t you?”

  “That would help,” groans the supervisor tiredly.

  “Her name’s Mavis somebody or other, but I don’t have the address.”

  The supervisor stops his screen and swivels his eyes to the ceiling as if trying to visualize the face of an idiot. “Half a million letters a week,” he sneers, “and you expect me to find one addressed to Mavis?”

  “I’ve got a phone number…” Davenport says before he realizes that he is talking to himself.

  Mavis Longbottom is closer to success as she catches her postman on his way home.

  “I weren’t gonna lug it around all morning,” he explains snottily as he leaps off his bicycle and removes his trouser clips. “You said you didn’t want it.”

  “I do now.”

  “Too late, luv. I chucked it.”

  Where?”

  “I dunno — somebody’s dustbin I ’spect.”

  “I’ll report you.”

  “You can tell the bleedin’ Pope for all I care.”

  Rightfully guessing that the Pope might be more attuned to absolution than Daphne, Mavis wears heavy shoes as she trudges back to the cathedral’s grounds. However, the absence of Daphne on the labyrinth’s pathway cheers her momentarily as she convinces herself that her friend has somehow retrieved the letter and couldn’t wait to get home with it.

  “Mavis!” hails a distant voice, and Angel Robinson runs up breathlessly. “Where’s Daphne? It’s in the papers and everything …”

  “She’s all right,” calms Mavis. “She was here earlier, telling me that I could learn something from the labyrinth. But I’ve been round this thing a dozen times and I just get back to where I started.”

  “It’s a metaphor for life’s journey,” explains Angel, sweeping an expressive hand across the snaking stone pathway. “It’s tortuous and long with many twists and turns, and the ending of one life is the beginning of another.”

  “But what does it do?”

  “It does nothing. It enables you to find empowerment and spiritual insight. It helps you find the right path for your life.”

  “Well it doesn’t flipping well work,” spits Mavis. “And if I’d bought it in Marks and Sparks I would have taken it back by now.”

  “It empowered Daphne.”

  “And look where it got her.”

  “But, where is she?”

  Voices echo like whispers in a pitch-black tunnel inside Daphne’s mind. People are there, she knows, but she can’t seem to reach the light switch.

  “Miss Lovelace. Can you hear me?” asks Geoffrey Williamson, with a stethoscope on her chest.

  “Daphne …” calls Isabel Semaurino as she sits by the bedside stroking the lifeless woman’s boney hand.

  “She didn’t even recognize her own daughter,” Anne McGregor told Ted Donaldson when she phoned the ex-superintendent to
bring him up to speed, and he grunted his surprise.

  “Hah! I didn’t know she had a daughter,” he said, before admitting there was much about Daphne he didn’t know.

  “So what happens now?” Donaldson asked, but they both knew the answer.

  “She is eighty-five,” stressed McGregor, and he agreed.

  It is Prague, summer of 1948, in Daphne’s mind. President Klement Gottwald, Stalin’s newly appointed puppet, has Czechoslovakia by the throat, and a handful of his thugs in Communist uniforms warm up their fists on a couple of freedom-seeking scientists while she and Michael Kent are forced to listen from the next room. “If they knock you down — stay down,” whispers Kent in the darkness of Daphne’s mind. “Life can only get worse if you get up.”

  “Daphne … Mother,” calls a voice in the darkness and Daphne knows that she has to stay down as long as possible and hope the cavalry will show up in time.

  “Time is the only thing on your side,” whispers Michael Kent. “The longer you live, the more chance you have of survival. The moment you give up, you’re dead.”

  “What can I do?” asks Isabel, looking up at the strained face of Geoffrey Williamson as she keeps a grip on Daphne’s hand.

  “Just talk to her. Judging by the struggle she put up, she could be stronger than we thought. She’s lost quite a bit of weight in the last few weeks, but physically she’s not bad. It’s her mental condition that really bothers me.”

  “But can she hear me?”

  The clear, logical words of Michael Kent override the muffled sounds from outside, so Daphne switches off as Williamson bends to whisper in Isabel’s ear on his way out. “Hearing is usually the last faculty to go, so just be careful what you say.”

  “Okay.”

  “And try to be cheerful,” he cautions. “We don’t want her picking up vibes or she’ll get hysterical again.”

  Isabel Semaurino has been an actress all her life and has never had any difficulty finding the right face for any part, but, sitting by Daphne’s bedside staring at a complete stranger, she can’t help but ask how she is supposed to feel about someone she’s never met, someone she never heard of until two weeks ago. What do you say? I wish I had known you. I wonder what kind of woman you were.