Crazy Lady Read online

  “There’s plenty of room at the back,” mutters the young woman angrily, but Mrs. Jenkins knows her place and is determined to fill it.

  “I’ll be all right here, luv,” she insists as she removes her hat to signify that she is settled, and she gets a nod of approval from Bert.

  I wonder if there’s a Mr. Jenkins, thinks Daphne as she watches the couple chit-chatting like a pair of teenagers all the way to her destination.

  “Dewminster Market Place,” sings out Bert, and Daphne dawdles for few seconds until the driver and his lady friend lightly link hands and slink together into the Market Café.

  “I ought to be a private eye,” laughs Daphne under her breath, then she stops herself, asserting, “That’s exactly what I am.”

  “You might want to start with the church,” Trina suggested earlier, as if there might only be one in the small medieval market town, but Daphne has no other clues so she asks a traffic warden for directions to the nearest.

  A bas-relief signboard atop the thatched lych-gate welcomes all to the parish church of St. Stephen’s in the Vale, while inside the wooden structure the parish notice board announces that the Rev. Rollie Rowlands will conduct all manner of ecclesiastical services.

  Daphne is momentarily fascinated by the conglomeration of swallows’ nests hanging from the rafters before her eyes are drawn down the tunnel of ancient yew trees to the squat Norman tower of the centuries-old church, but she finds her view blocked by a man laboriously pushing his bicycle along the grave-lined path towards her.

  “Sacrilegious to ride through the graveyard,” explains the wheezy man as he stops to get his breath at the gate. “The kids do it,” he carries on between breaths. “No respect — no respect.”

  Daphne sizes him up, a man with a paunch like a ten-month pregnancy, and realizes that although his numerous chins conceal his collar he is probably the vicar.

  “Rollie Rowlands, rector,” he announces with an outstretched hand, dispelling any doubts as he rests his bicycle against the lych-gate. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m inquiring about Janet Thurgood,” says Daphne once she’s introduced herself, but the big man takes off his trilby to shake his head, and Daphne has a hard job keeping her face straight as his combed-over coiffeur falls in dis-array, leaving a monkish tonsure that is clearly more an act of God than Mr. Gillette.

  “Sorry. Never heard of her,” explains Rowlands as he tries to flatten the wispy grey strands across his pate. “But I’ve only been here a few years. Mrs. Drinkwater who does the flowers will know.”

  “You seem very sure,” replies Daphne, and the reverence in Rowlands’ voice borders on fear as he explains.

  “Mrs. Drinkwater knows everything there is to know about this parish.”

  I guess that he and the flower lady have had more than a few words about the way he runs the church, Daphne is thinking and is on the point of asking where she can find the august woman when Rowlands stuffs his wayward hair under his hat and hurriedly grabs his bicycle.

  “She’ll be arriving in five minutes to fix up the church for a funeral,” he continues, nervously checking his watch. “And if you’ll excuse me, I have to leave now. Have to visit one of the parishioners — bit of an accident, sprained ankle, needs ministration. Mrs. Drinkwater will know about your woman I’m sure.”

  “Just one or two questions…” starts Daphne, but Rowlands has swung a leg over his bicycle and is forcing the reluctant machine towards the roadway.

  “Sorry… must dash.”

  “Well, I’m damned…” mutters Daphne to herself as Rowlands stands on the pedals of the old sit-up-and-beg machine, a jumble sale donation, and hauls himself away.

  Daphne spends the next few minutes reading the parish magazine and bracing herself for the arrival of Mrs. Drinkwater, whom she imagines to be a big-boned matron with a booming voice. By the time the woman arrives, precisely five minutes later, she is still large in Daphne’s mind, and her stature is not diminished by the fact that she is driven to the gate in a stately black Rolls-Royce.

  However, despite the precision of the flower lady’s arrival, Daphne is temporarily nonplussed by the appearance of a childlike figure from the front passenger seat. It is only when the wizened curmudgeon opens her mouth and yells to the uniformed chauffer, “Stop dawdling Maurice. Get those flowers into the church before they wilt,” that Daphne steps forward.

  “Mrs. Drinkwater?” she queries, and she’s grateful that she chose a suitably serious grey tweed suit and one of her least ostentatious hats as she feels the weight of the diminutive woman’s scrutiny.

  “And you are?” demands the crone in an accent that totally refutes the supposed demise of the class system.

  But Daphne can play that game and polishes her tone to reply. “I am Ms. Daphne Lovelace, OBE, at your service, ma’am.”

  “Oh!” replies the woman snottily. “That’s rather pretentious of you.” But she knows that she is outranked and concedes. “What exactly can I do for you, Ms. Lovelace?”

  “Just call me Daphne,” she suggests and waits momentarily for reciprocation.

  Mrs. Drinkwater was born with a Christian name, but she rose above such familiarities when she married into money and became a lay magistrate. Even her long-deceased husband, a local brewery magnate inappropriately named Cecil Drinkwater, only ever called her “Dear” or “My wife.” And for most of her life Amelia Drinkwater has steadfastly resisted every attempt by family or friends to soften her.

  “What can I do for you, Ms. Lovelace?” the flower lady reiterates coldly, and Daphne has no choice but to explain the purpose of her visit.

  The name “Janet Thurgood” brings a cloud to Mrs. Drinkwater’s face, and she quickly hustles Daphne under the lych-gate, as if sheltering from an expected thunderbolt, while darkly muttering, “She was an evil woman. Do you hear me? Evil.”

  “Evil?” echoes Daphne questioningly.

  “I don’t speak ill of anyone,” says Mrs. Drinkwater. “But if I were ever to change my mind she’d be the first on the end of my tongue.”

  “Oh my goodness,” breathes Daphne. “What on earth did she do?”

  The tiny woman catches hold of Daphne’s sleeve and draws her down with a conspiratorial whisper. “They say she murdered her children.”

  “Intriguing,” says Daphne, her tone asking for more, but Amelia immediately backs off, crosses herself reverently, and recants. “But you never heard that from me. Everyone knows that I never speak ill of anyone.”

  “Naturally,” replies Daphne and is tempted to push for more details, though she wonders if it’s worth the risk, especially as she knows that she has a more accommodating ally in her camp.

  “So, if that’s all?” queries the ancient-looking woman as if daring Daphne to ask.

  “Yes. Thank you very much,” says Daphne realizing that she has little prospect of gaining further information. But, as Maurice the chauffeur labours past with his arms wilting under the weight of a floral display, she seizes a final opportunity. “Can I help?” she offers, hoping to penetrate Amelia Drinkwater’s barricades under a camouflage of cut arum lilies, but the funereal arranger steps in.

  “No, thank you. Maurice is quite capable. Now, if you’ll excuse us.”

  Plan B then, thinks Daphne as she heads back to the bus stop, and is not at all surprised to find Mrs. Jenkins taking the return trip.

  “Everything all right at the doctor’s?” she queries mischievously and smiles at the confused look on the other woman’s face.

  It’s nearly five by the time that Daphne opens a can of Purr for Missie Rouge, puts the kettle on for a pot of her favourite tea, and picks up the phone.

  Eight hours’ time difference, she mentally calculates before dialling, but she’s forced to leave a message. Normality has returned to Trina’s world, and she’s on her daily round of bringing cheer to the elderly residents of North Vancouver.

  “I see the old pecker is looking up this morning,” the homeca
re nurse jests as she showers Mr. Howlins.

  The eighty-five-year-old beams toothlessly. “Not my fault, Trina. You could straighten a corkscrew with that smile of yours.”

  “Yeah, right.” She laughs, giving his appendage a friendly tap. “I bet you say that to all the girls.”

  “Once upon a time,” he replies. “Once upon a time.” And ten minutes later, with the old man tucked under a blanket in front of a warm fire, she’s on her way to clean up Mrs. Stewart.

  “Sorry, had a bit of an accident in the bed,” says the septuagenarian without getting out of her chair.

  “What a surprise,” mutters Trina sotto voce, saying aloud, “Never mind, accidents happen.”

  “Do they, dear?”

  “Every day apparently,” mumbles Trina as she pulls on rubber gloves and heads for the bedroom.

  Back in Westchester, Daphne Lovelace pours herself a cup of Keemun tea musing, “It’s the Queen’s favourite,” and tries another phone call with Plan B in mind.

  “Allo,” answers a foreign-voiced female, once Daphne has been connected to the apartment of David Bliss in St-Juan-sur-Mer on the French Côte d’Azur.

  “Is that you, Daisy?” queries the Englishwoman, recognizing Bliss’s Gallic companion, and within seconds she is talking to the man himself: Chief Inspector David Bliss, Scotland Yard detective turned author.

  “David. How’s the old novel coming along?”

  “It’s not easy, Daphne,” he says, but is too polite to add, Especially when people keep interrupting me. Instead he asks, “So, what can I do for you?”

  “Janet Thurgood…” begins Daphne, then she gives a brief account of her meeting with Amelia Drinkwater.

  “Just this once,” Bliss warns, once he’s taken a few notes. “Try bugging Superintendent Donaldson at Westchester police station if you want anything else. I’m trying to work.”

  “David. You sound cross with me.”

  He softens with a laugh. “Not really. It’s just that I didn’t realize how difficult it was to write a book. And the commissioner has only given me a year off.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll make some inquiries and get back to you.”

  RCMP Inspector Mike Phillips in Vancouver is also making inquiries. Janet’s hasty departure from Trina’s basement suite can mean only thing, especially in Sergeant Brougham’s mind. “Why else would she have run?” he demands, spreading his hands wide to invite suggestions, but while most ten-year-olds might easily come up with a dozen possible reasons for a person not wishing to be interviewed by the police, Sergeant Brougham has one and doesn’t await contradiction. “She shoved him over the top, bet my pension.”

  “It was a heart attack,” reminds Phillips, but that doesn’t stop Brougham.

  “Yeah, well, anyone would have a heart attack if they’re chucked down a basement into a fish tank.”

  Phillips lays a cautionary hand on Brougham’s shoulder. “Dave, think about it. Roddy Montgomery was twice — correction, three times — the size of this woman. You saw her, for Chrissakes, she’d have a job pushing a few grams of pot. How the hell could she have pushed him over those railings?”

  “You just wait till the DNA results come back,” continues Brougham, unfazed. “I’d bet my old granny that she was the one who attacked him. She certainly fits his description.”

  “So do half the hookers and druggies of Vancouver, Dave. Anyway, the DNA will take at least a week, perhaps two. We’d better find her before that.”

  The finding of Janet Thurgood has been on Trina’s mind all morning, and with her daily doses of diarrhea and vomit behind her, the homecare nurse flipped through the section on disguises in her private eye’s manual and prepared for a sortie into Vancouver’s underworld.

  Now she makes a final check of herself in the mirror, as suggested, and smiles at the result. A Yankees baseball cap, a pair of shades, and black lipstick top off her eye-popping luminous orange T-shirt, and a black leather miniskirt decorated with a rhinestone heart over the left buttock tops off a pair of fishnet stockings. The ensemble, confiscated from Kylie’s closet, would be fine for a June evening, and she almost makes it to the front door before it dawns on her that it’s late November, so she slings on an enormous faux mink that not only conceals most of her costume but makes the baseball cap and shades look ridiculous.

  While Chief Inspector David Bliss might grumble about interruptions to his work, he is not at all ungrateful. In fact, he is quickly discovering that, in common with most authors, he will do absolutely anything other than write. After nearly three months of counting lemons on the tree beneath his balcony, luring gulls with tidbits, and staring for hour upon hour at the undulating sea, he is grateful for a valid excuse to put down his pen and get his teeth into an investigation.

  “So what have you got?” asks Daphne excitedly when Bliss calls back in less than half an hour.

  “Does the name Joseph Crispin Creston mean anything to you?”

  “You mean the Creston chocolate guy?”

  “That’s the one,” says Bliss, then puts on a deep tone to emulate a fifties TV commercial and adds, “We make the best chocolates in the universe. Just ask J.C. himself.”

  “That takes me back a bit,” laughs Daphne.

  “Well, I think that was actually Creston Sr. His son is the big boy now when it comes to worldwide chocolate trading. And I mean big. Though it seems he’s been switching stock to diet products since the flab-fighters took over the world.”

  “He can’t lose then, can he?” laughs Daphne. “But what’s his connection to Trina’s lost woman?”

  “Janet Thurgood,” muses Bliss aloud. “And I have no way of knowing if it’s the same Janet Thurgood for sure, but Joseph C. Creston Jr. married someone of that name in the late fifties, early sixties. I could probably get someone to dig up the marriage records. Get Trina to find out the date of birth or parents’ name of the woman in Vancouver —”

  “Too late, David,” cuts in Daphne. “The woman’s on the run again.”

  “That’s it then.”

  “But what about the dead babies?”

  “Oh yeah. Well, that’s the clue. Creston Jr. and his wife had three children in four years and they all died of cot deaths.”

  “Cot deaths?” breathes Daphne.

  “Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, it’s called now, and doctors are pretty hot at trying to establish the cause, but back in the fifties and sixties it was just accepted that babies sometimes died for no apparent reason.”

  Daphne feels a shiver up her spine as the words of Amelia Drinkwater come back to her. “I was told that she murdered them,” she says with a suitably sinister tone, but Bliss has no knowledge.

  “There’s no record either of them were ever charged with any offence,” he says. “But you could ask Superintendent Donaldson to dig up the files locally — if they haven’t been destroyed.”

  “So, what happened to her? Creston’s wife,” Daphne wants to know.

  “You’d have to ask him.”

  “I might just do that,” Daphne replies, her mind beginning to whirl with possibilities as she puts down the phone and searches for Trina’s number again.

  David Bliss’s number is on the radar screen in London. A criminal record search originating from a foreign source has raised a flag in the criminal intelligence section at Scotland Yard, and he gets a call from the duty commander, Chief Superintendent Michael Edwards.

  “I thought you were supposed to be on a leave of absence,” snorts the senior officer.

  “That’s correct, sir, working on my novel.”

  “Writing a book!” It could be a question, but it’s not. It’s a sneer, an unspoken disparagement that Bliss catches onto immediately: Whatever next? We’re supposed to be running a f ’kin police force not a cultural establishment.

  “New trend, sir, police intelligence,” explains Bliss, knowing the other man will steam at the implied oxymoron.

  “How
come you’re doing criminal record checks then?” snaps the chief superintendent, and Bliss waffles for a few minutes about the possibility of the Creston family being somehow involved in his plot before cutting the call short.

  “Sorry. Must get on,” he says as he starts to put down the phone. “Anyway, I was wrong. It had nothing to do with Joseph Creston.”

  “Joseph Crispin Creston Jr. Now that’s a name destined for greatness,” the chocolate magnate’s father trumpeted at his son’s christening party, apparently ignorant of the fact that he bore the identical moniker. “It’s powerful, memorable, suggestive of aristocracy,” the suave executive pompously declared at London’s Grosvenor Hotel in the run-up to war with Hitler. Shortly thereafter, with Londoners frantically digging Anderson shelters and preparing to hunker down in the Blitz, most men of Jospeh Creston Sr.’s age strapped on Sam Browne belts and officer’s pistols. But the cocoa tycoon, together with his family and entourage, slipped aboard a two-hundred-foot private yacht registered in Casablanca and slunk off to his estates on the west coast of Africa.

  “Chocolate is essential for the morale of our troops,” he declared in a letter of justification mailed to the Times as they put into Lisbon for refuelling en route, though, as records later showed, it was never completely clear in Creston’s mind as to which side’s troops needed boosting most.

  But Creston’s empire wasn’t the only one that profited even-handedly from the global hostilities. He was even able to justify it in his own mind. “Should the sins of the fathers be visited on their sons?” he questioned of anyone in the know. “Why shouldn’t poor little German kids have a treat? And what of the thousands of workers in the plantations who can’t read and have no radio? What do the crazy politics of a feudal Europe have to do with them? They just want to make enough money to feed their families.”

  Little has changed in more than fifty years; chocolate is chocolate, as alluring and addictive as ever, though penny for penny it is cheaper than it’s ever been.