Deadly Sin Read online

  “I want to do the El Camino again,” said Winifred as they were having breakfast with Mavis in the rose garden of the Mitre Hotel, and the Englishwoman quickly volunteered to take her.

  “Maybe if I go round the thing enough bloomin’ times I’ll figure it out in the end,” she said, without admitting that by taking Winifred to the labyrinth she was, in some way, trying to atone for her neglect of Daphne.

  “I don’t suppose you …” starts Trina to Misty, but the Canadian homecare nurse lets the idea go. “No. Don’t bother. It’s okay.”

  “What? Don’t suppose what?” asks Misty, and ten minutes later she is pulling on a pair of latex gloves, saying, “I want cash, mind. No friggin’ cheques. I don’t want the Social docking it off my welfare.”

  “I told you, Misty, ten pounds an hour straight cash,” says Trina as they begin work on cleaning Daphne’s kitchen walls, adding, “And maybe I’ll teach you some yoga if we have time.”

  All three of David Bliss’s voicemail boxes — home, work, and cell — and his email inbox are overflowing as the chief inspector treats his daughter and son-in-law to dinner in a secluded corner of La Côte d’Or on Thursday evening. Transatlantic phone lines may be melting and the lights still burning on the top floors of New Scotland Yard, the Home Office, and the American Embassy, but Bliss only has his retirement in mind as he orders champagne.

  “I’m flying down to Cannes as soon as I’ve handed in my boots tomorrow,” he tells the young couple. “I think Daisy wants to come clean.”

  “Your champagne, monsieur,” says Greasy in his faux French, spinning Bliss back a few weeks to his fiftieth birthday and his delight at the sight of his fiancée amongst the surprise guests.

  Is it all over? he wonders as Samantha proposes a toast to mark the end of his career. Twenty-eight years — for what? A certificate of service and a long service medal. But did I really make a difference? Would the world be a better place if I had been a dustman or a bus driver?

  “Dad,” Samantha cuts in to his musings, “I was asking — are you sure you’re right about Daisy? She seemed so much in love with you when she came to the party.”

  “Is it all over?” he questions aloud, speaking of Daisy, the force, and life in general. “I guess I’ll find out tomorrow.”

  “I reckon they’ll have your boots off you the moment you walk in the door in the morning,” chuckles his son-in-law, knowing that a posse of senior officers spent the afternoon trying to round Bliss up after he wound Fox up with a warning and disappeared with the CIA’s mind-bending machine.

  “I just wonder what the press will make of all this,” Bliss mused aloud when Fox ordered him to hand over the equipment or face the consequences.

  “You wouldn’t …” dared Fox, but the look on Bliss’s face said that he would.

  “Look, Dave. This isn’t necessary,” tried Fox, knowing that with Bliss’s resignation already accepted he had no leverage, and Bliss laid into him.

  “In my books, the end never justifies the means,” he said through clenched teeth. “So tell Edwards and his Yankee mates to get stuffed. They won’t get any help from me, whatever they’re trying to achieve.”

  “What was their motive?” Samantha wants to know as they wait for their main course. “What were they after?”

  “Oil, probably. Isn’t it always?” proposes Bliss, although he’s guessing when he suggests that someone wants to start all-out inter-religious war as a cover for a major resource grab.

  “I just don’t buy that,” says Peter Bryan. “How did they know he would attack the imams? It’s not as though they had any control over its effects.”

  “Lobsters, Dad?” says Samantha in surprise as the waiter delivers the platters.

  “Make the most of it. After tomorrow I’ll be a pensioner.”

  “And soon to be a grandfather,” slips in Bryan, and Bliss smiles with the realization that he hasn’t reached the end of the road after all — just a fork.

  chapter nineteen

  It is 5:30 a.m. and the rumblings of an underground train shake the quiet London dawn around the mosque, while six uniformed men struggle up the steps under the weight of a piece of equipment the size and shape of a coffin. Commander Fox, in the lead, calls to the security guard at the top of the steps. “Give us a hand, mate. It’s heavy.”

  “What the hell is it?” queries the puzzled guard, a man who looks distinctly like Edwards dressed as a mullah.

  “X-ray machine. The same as the ones at the airport.”

  “No one told me …”

  “That’s security for you,” moans Lefty as he carries the rear corner. “Always the last to be told anything.”

  “I oughta check …”

  “Just open the poxin’ door first, will you? We’re breaking our backs here,” says Fox, and David Bliss, watching through a surveillance camera, panics.

  “It’s a bomb. It’s a bomb,” he tries yelling, but no one is listening. “Help! Help! It’s a bomb,” he shouts into microphones — dozens of microphones, but everyone is dead, even Daisy is dead — it is her name on the coffin, and the air is suddenly filled with the shrill scream of sirens and alarms.

  “It’s a bomb,” Bliss is still shouting as he jerks up in bed and desperately tries to get his bearings in the darkness. “What the hell?” he says as the alarms continue, and then he grabs the phone.

  “Dave. They’ve called it off,” Peter Bryan is trying to tell him as the cacophony continues.

  “Wait a minute.” Bliss yawns as he fumbles for the light and turns off the radio and his bedside alarm clock.

  “I’ve just got a call from the Yard,” explains Bryan. “They’re standing everyone down.”

  The six o’clock newsreader gives Bliss the full story once he has made coffee and showered himself awake.

  “A flare-up of bombings across the Middle East in protest at today’s visit has destroyed dozens of mosques and left many dead … Her Majesty has indefinitely postponed … The price of oil on the world market has jumped by another five dollars …”

  “I bet Lefty and bloody Pimple had a hand in that,” Bliss says when he calls his son-in-law back, but he is wrong.

  The two CIA men, with passports in the names of Andrews and Blake, have just arrived at an American air base in Virginia and are being escorted to a debriefing at their headquarters in Langley by their unhappy controller.

  “There is some serious shit flying at the Big House,” grumbles the straight-faced woman as they sit in the back of a chauffeured limousine with a soundproof panel separating them from the driver.

  “We tried … everyone tried,” says Lefty. “Their Home Secretary tried, even their Prime Minister tried, but she wouldn’t listen. She was determined to go through with it.”

  “There was always that chance,” the handler agrees. “But what’s really pissed the deputy is that you two amateurs were taken down by a regular cop, and he even got the scrambler. For Jesus’ sake, do you realize how stupid that makes us look to the Brits? And you know how sensitive that thing is.”

  “You authorized us to use it.”

  “To use it, not to lose it. And you were supposed to give her a headache, not turn her husband into a raving lunatic. ‘We’ll just give her a headache and she’ll jump back in the car and hightail it back to her palace,’ you said. So what went wrong?”

  “I dunno — Edwards was pulling the shots and missed the timing I suppose.”

  “And whose stupid idea was it for his lordship to wear his toy soldier outfit?”

  “That was Edwards. He said that if the old guy showed up in uniform someone would stop them going in.”

  “Or, just maybe, try to skewer his wife,” says the handler, adding, “I’m beginning to have serious doubts about our man Edwards.”

  Michael Edwards has no doubts about himself. He never has doubted himself or his ability to swing even the most unfavourable situations in his direction. Not that his present situation is unfavourable. He may
have suffered financial disasters through bad investments in the past — one major loss he lays at David Bliss’s door — but now, with his gold-plated chief superintendent’s pension, a substantial retainer from the CIA, and a handout from the Home Office, he is well on his way to Shangri-La. And as he sits with his feet up in front of his computer enjoying another champagne breakfast, he watches his oil stocks pumping money into his offshore accounts faster than he can count it. However, there is a fly in his glass of bubbly: D.C.I. David Anthony Bliss.

  “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer,” has always been Edwards’ motto, and with that in mind he chose Bliss to work under his thumb. But now that Bliss has his hands on the Mk-Ultra machine, he may be just too close for comfort.

  “It’s me, Roger,” says Edwards, phoning Commander Fox as soon it is late enough not to appear desperate. “We need to talk.”

  New Scotland Yard is in so much turmoil over the last-minute cancellation that no one seems to take any notice of David Bliss as he slides in one of the back entrances to begin clearing out his desk at eight-thirty. But someone has beaten him to it, and a few minutes later he stares at a couple of handfuls of his personal knick-knacks that have been pointedly piled on the floor of his otherwise empty office. Then the heavies show up — Commander Fox, Michael Edwards, and two superintendents from the Internal Investigations Department.

  “The game’s over, Bliss. Where is it?” demands Fox, and, in a preplanned attack, one of the superintendents steps in to remind Bliss that he is still a serving officer and that failure to obey a lawful order will cause him all kinds of hardships.

  Bliss is tempted to play the superintendents along to see if they know what they are dealing with, but he doesn’t bother.

  “So what are your paymasters up to?” he asks, turning on Edwards in a bid to get at least one matter cleared up.

  “I’m paid to protect Her Majesty,” starts Edwards, while deliberately invading Bliss’s territory by picking up a photograph of Daisy from the heap of personal effects and snorting his disapproval.

  Bliss grabs the picture and sneers, “The only thing you’ve ever protected is your own backside. Anyway, I’m not talking about the Home Office, I’m talking about …”

  Edwards’ fist comes from nowhere and lands cleanly on Bliss’s nose.

  “Oh, shit,” mutters Fox as Bliss crumples, then the commander spins on Edwards. “You’d better leave, Michael.”

  “Wait a minute,” says Bliss from the floor as he tries to stem blood. “I want him arrested and charged.”

  “For what?” spits Fox. “I didn’t see a thing. You must’ve fallen.”

  Bliss looks to the superintendents for support, but they have apparently spotted something of great interest out of the window, and he realizes that he is on his own.

  “I guess I will have to consult my lawyer about talking to the press, after all,” he says defiantly as he gets up, pockets a few of his valuables, snatches up the picture of Daisy, and makes his way to the door.

  “Bliss …” starts Fox, but Edwards grabs the commander.

  “Leave him, Roger. He wouldn’t dare go public.”

  “Well, Detective Chief Inspector, thank you very much for your twenty-eight years of loyal service to Her Majesty and the good citizens of London,” Bliss apes into a washroom mirror as he stems the flow of blood from his nose, then he checks to make sure that all the cubicles are unoccupied before calling Peter Bryan on his cellphone.

  “Get someone in fingerprints to go over the thing,” Bliss says, without going into detail. “Lefty and Pimple’s prints are bound to be on it unless they wore gloves, and you’ll need elims from me and from the videographer.”

  “Will do,” says Bryan. “But what will it prove?”

  “That a certain Judas is in the pocket of god almighty.”

  “Edwards?” queries Bryan.

  “Yes,” says Bliss, taking a close look at the photograph of Daisy that Edwards plucked off the floor. “And my lovely Daisy has his fingerprints all over her.”

  Elims — elimination prints — enable the fingerprint examiner to distinguish the loops, whorls, and bifurcations on a suspect’s fingertips from the multitude of impressions left on surfaces by innocent people. Although, as Superintendent Anne McGregor is well aware, often the only difference between the guilty and the innocent is that the latter has yet to be caught.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” says Pete Reagan, the civilian dactylographer at Westchester Police Station, catching the superintendent as soon as she reaches her office. “Do you remember those elimination prints that I took at St. Michael’s — the seniors’ home?”

  “Yes,” replies McGregor, without taking her eyes off the night’s incident log. “You can get shot of them now. The case is closed. The place is clean.”

  “Really,” says Reagan, and something in the smugness of his tone makes her look up.

  “What is it?” she asks, and he presents her with a file labelled, “Hilda Anne Fitzgerald, nee Davenport, a.k.a Hilda Anne Williams,” saying, “Does the name ring a bell, ma’am?”

  “Yes. She’s the manager’s sister.”

  “No, ma’am,” he says, gloating over the fact that he has an ace up his sleeve. “Try again. Hilda Williams. Ten years ago — Liverpool?”

  “Don’t worry. He’s bluffing about going public,” Edwards assures his American contact as soon as he has explained that the mind machine is still missing. “Anyway, the dumb bastard hasn’t got the brains to figure out what it is.”

  “Michael,” says the New Yorker patiently, “that’s not an acceptable risk. You assured us that it would be returned.”

  “Well. What d’ya expect me to do — use thumbscrews?”

  “We expected you to get back our property,” says the voice coldly. “But I guess we’ll have to do it ourselves, and you will have to pay.”

  “Wait a minute …” begins Edwards, but he’s talking to himself.

  It’s Friday and it’s Bliss’s final poet’s day as he walks out of Scotland Yard a couple of hours after he walked in.

  Piss off early, tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life, he tells himself, and after his treatment at the hands of Fox he sees no reason to prolong his old life a moment longer. He has said his farewells and is booked on the five o’clock flight to Nice, but the idea of hanging around London with both Edwards and Fox on the prowl doesn’t appeal, so, as he takes the tube home to pack for a few days in Provence, he makes plans for lunch in Westchester with a very old friend.

  Daphne Lovelace is still in hospital, although she has the okay to go home. Trina is to collect her after lunch, but now the veteran has a visitor. Social worker Tony Oswald hasn’t caught on to fact that his client’s apparent psychosis was her ticket to St. Michael’s and is explaining the arrangements he has made for a homecare nurse to call in on her a few days each week.

  “I really don’t need anyone. I’m quite capable of taking care of myself, thank you very much,” remonstrates Daphne, but her convincing portrayal of a demented old lady will haunt Oswald for some time to come.

  “And I’ve had a word with the animal control people at the Council,” he continues, changing the subject before she can object further. “They’re going to serve a notice on Mr. Jenkins to stop his dogs annoying you or he’ll have to get rid of them.”

  The dogs, and especially the garden fence between Daphne’s property and her neighbours’, are also matters of concern to Trina as she and Misty work on the preparations for Daphne’s homecoming party.

  “I don’t mind paying for the materials to fix it,” explains Trina, while Misty rolls the pastry for banana cream pies.

  “Okay,” says Misty as she dusts flour off her hands, and then she opens the back door and yells at her sons, who are helping the gardener straighten some of the plants damaged by the dogs. “Tell your dad to get his lazy backside over here.”

  “Right, Mum.”

  “And tell ’im to turn
that friggin’ stereo down. It’s givin’ me a friggin’ headache.”

  “That will be Mother and Mavis,” says Trina as she hears the front doorbell.

  “We’ve got eleven adults and fourteen children,” says Mavis proudly as she wheels Winifred into the kitchen. “And that doesn’t include us and the Jenkinses.”

  “I want to come as well,” pipes up Trina’s mother from her chair, although she’s not entirely sure what she is volunteering for. Her feet have recovered, and in truth, she can hobble around perfectly well. But she has grown attached to the wheelchair and the attention it brings, and she delights in recounting far-fetched tales of the trials and torments of her great pilgrimage, insisting, “The El Camino ruined my feet.”

  “The house is looking wonderful, Trina,” says Mavis as she sneaks a freshly made chocolate cookie. “Daphne will be so happy.”

  “Thanks to Misty and her boys,” says Trina as she throws her arm around the young neighbour’s shoulder, but much of the credit is due to the painters and the professional tradesmen Trina hired to smarten up the property.

  Professional burglars are in many ways similar to the tradesmen who spruced up Daphne’s house. Most work quickly and efficiently and leave the premises as neat and tidy as when they started. However, the team who turned David Bliss’s house upside down in search of the mind machine made sure their visit wasn’t overlooked.

  “They’ve totally wrecked the place,” Bliss whinges to his son-in-law by phone as he gets a glimpse of daily life in Kandahar and Kirkik. “The bastards smashed the lock off the door and trashed the place.”

  “Vandals?” queries Bryan, but he knows better.

  “No. The Americans. Lefty and bloody Pimple,” Bliss fumes as he picks through the wreckage in his front hallway. Then an unopened envelope catches his eye amongst the debris.

  “Or Edwards,” suggests Bryan, revealing that his friend in the fingerprint department has matched Edwards’ prints on Daisy’s photograph to some he found on the transceiver.