Crazy Lady Read online

  “It’s all a question of supply and demand,” the younger Mr. Creston will happily tell anyone interested today, and he is proud of the fact that his empire controls both. He might also concede, with a beam of self-satisfaction, that the Creston empire is richer and more powerful than it has ever been, though he may be more reticent in admitting that the policies of his company have broken the backs, and the dreams, of the West African farmers who labour alongside their children to provide his factories with their raw material.

  “Two dollars a day may not seem a lot to some people,” insists Joseph Creston as he addresses his weekly board meeting atop his glass tower in the centre of London. “But if only these people would stop warring, we’d probably be able to pay more.”

  It’s a lie, and Creston knows it; he knows that constant conflicts prevent the subsistence farmers from ever forming any kind of stable collective.

  “They’d only waste it on the demon drink if they had more,” sneers Robert Dawes, Creston’s company accountant, oblivious to the fact that he has supped his way through half a bottle of single malt in the past twelve hours.

  It’s 10:00 a.m. in one of the richest square miles of real estate in the world: the City of London. The British Empire may have crumbled, but echoes of its power still reverberate around the world, and in the boardroom of Creston Enterprises, a boardroom where “morning prayers” actually means morning prayers and where the teachings of the Bible take precedence over the balance sheet — but never over the bottom line — Joseph and his congregants discuss current business trends.

  However, one contemporary movement has never, and will never, be discussed: “Just how many of the Disciples were women?” The Crestons, both senior and junior, might challenge anyone who suggested such apparent sacrilege, as the staid portraits around the boardroom walls show. The most recent — Joseph Crispin Creston Jr., the man of the moment — depicts a face that falls somewhere between the dour sagacity of Prince Charles and the virginal boyishness of Richard Branson: a man of the past trying to look into the future.

  But Creston Jr. is struggling with the future as he sits at one end of the table that his father cut from a single West African mahogany. “It was the biggest damn tree in the world,” Creston Sr. proudly insisted as he added the enormous hardwood to his trophy collection, alongside tigers and elephants.

  “Organics and Fair Trade,” advocate the research papers on the giant table in front of the board members, and Creston immediately scoffs.

  “Fair… we are fair. Let’s face it, who’s going to pay five dollars for a bar of chocolate so some Ivory Coast cocoa farmer can hammer around his fields in a Hummer?”

  “It’s definitely a growing fad,” observes John Mason, Creston’s second-in-command and company lawyer. But the man at the head of the table is unimpressed.

  “Yes. And we will remain fair within the context of the average wage. Anyway, like Robert says, they’d only drink it. Surely it’s better for us to use the profits to fund the development of churches than to let them piss it down the drain.”

  “Steal from the poor and give to the rich,” could be Creston’s motto; after all it’s the rich who need the money to buy his products. “In any case,” he continues to preach, “how will it benefit them if we fail to make a profit?”

  The poor may inherit the earth in the freely distributed Creston Bibles, but with the world’s raw cocoa market concentrated in the hands of just a few powerful manufacturers, Creston and his fellow moguls will dine on the fat.

  The cream of Joseph C. Creston’s personal holdings includes Creston Hall, his mansion in Dewminster, and Daphne Lovelace, armed with the scant information obtained from David Bliss, has taken the bus back to the town and peeps through the wrought iron gates like a Dickensian waif peering wistfully at the grand Victorian house, wondering what great treasures and what dreadful secrets may lie therein.

  The estate was built at the turn of the century by Joseph’s father on the backs of peasant cocoa farmers, and has been supported similarly ever since. Creston Sr., a man who, to listen to him, tamed the tropics of Africa to bring chocolate to the masses, was, he claimed, a compassionate, God-fearing man, but whether a slave is subjugated by a whip or a Bible the result is much the same.

  Janet Thurgood’s family estate at 255 Arundel Crescent bears no comparison to Creston Hall, though Daphne gets a friendly reception at the front door of the modest house in the twitchy-curtained neighbourhood. The butter-coloured sandstone houses, solidly constructed just before the Great Depression, were built in a pastoral landscape that soon turned to Tarmac. Skylarks and nightingales were silenced by the roar of Spitfires and Lancasters, and despite assurances to the contrary, no sheep would ever peacefully graze again. Once the wartime debris was cleared, concrete council houses and towering flats blocked the surrounding sky.

  “Long before my time,” Jean Bentwhistle, the present owner, claims as she bounces one baby while a toddler clings to her legs. “I wasn’t even born till sixty-one, dear. But you’re welcome to come in and look around.”

  With little to be gained from an inspection, Daphne decides to try the neighbours and hits an elderly couple at number 259.

  “The Thurgoods?” questions Mrs. Jones loudly as she shouts the name to her husband.

  “I’m not sure…” starts the man as he tries ineffectually to hold up his sagging trousers, but the tone suggests a tacit awareness and Daphne pushes on.

  “Janet Thurgood. She lived at 255 until she married Mr. Creston.”

  “Oh… her,” sneers Mrs. Jones. “The so-called religious one.” And Daphne doesn’t need to ask more.

  Now David Bliss is back on Daphne’s target list.

  “Do you know how difficult it is to write a book?” he asks angrily when she wants him to find out more about Janet.

  “You had a perfectly good job in the police,” she reminds him.

  “And I’ll have to go back to it if you don’t stop pestering me. Although I doubt they’ll take me if I keep getting caught doing unauthorized searches.”

  “Oh, David…” she begs sweetly.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he says, and secretly he’s delighted to shelve his manuscript. It has been more than a week since he’s written anything of note. The true identity of the Man in the Iron Mask still evades him. He is even beginning to lose faith in his hypothesis that the prisoner was a seventeenth-century aristocrat who had his head encased in iron just to prove how much he loved a woman. Surely it’s too far-fetched for a man to declare, “I will build you a dream château and I will sit in this cell for eternity if necessary, but no one will ever speak to me or look upon my face until you agree to be mine.”

  It is bizarre, Bliss admits to himself, but he can’t get away from the fact that literature and histories are full of parallels: I’ll climb the highest mountain, swim the widest ocean, throw myself to the waves, build you the Taj Mahal.

  It was the exuberant era of Louis XIV when the lovestruck man locked his heart away and turned his back on all temptations; a time when, for those rich enough or corrupt enough, anything was possible. It was a period of grandiose architecture and lavish design, clothes and footwear so elaborate and ostentatious women couldn’t move in them, outrageous food like lark’s tongue pie and roast peacock. Above all, it was a time of great romanticism. My theory is still valid, Bliss tells himself, despite the fact that it has some major holes. The Château Roger was certainly built in 1687, according to the inscription on the gate pillar, the same year as the masked man’s incarceration, and the geographic location puts it directly across the strait from the fortress. The size of the famous prisoner’s cell suggests that he was not an ordinary inmate, and the murals on the wall, presumably penned by him, depict a joyous gathering, like a wedding.

  But with more than half of the manuscript piled on to his desk, Bliss has hit a sold wall: why wasn’t the seventeenth-century romantic successful? Who was the woman and where was she?

 
; A similar question is being asked of Janet Thurgood in Vancouver, where the missing woman still tops the wanted person’s list.

  “Where the hell could she be?” demands Dave Brougham as he sits down with Mike Phillips and Constable Paul Zelke, and all eyes turn northwards to the mountains and the distant community of Beautiful.

  “It’s a bit of a hangover from the sixties,” explains Zelke, the force’s expert on religious cults and sects. “It was originally set up by a bunch of American anti-war existentialists more interested in staying high than avoiding the draft. They really worshipped Dylan, Che Guevara, and Castro, but they somehow wrapped it up in a sort of revolutionary religiosity; let’s face it, almost anyone can see God through a haze of blue smoke.”

  “Yeah,” laughs Brougham. “The only real difference between Mother Theresa and Marilyn Monroe is a bottle of rye and a couple of joints.”

  “Franz Kafka was their hero really,” continues Zelke more seriously as he flicks through his notes. “David and Goliath; small men taking on the world. But there’s no overall logic as far as I can see. Shit, Nietzsche was an atheist and they even twisted his ideas into it somehow.”

  “How do they get away with it?” asks Inspector Phillips as he tries to understand.

  “Charismatic leader; usually the long-haired one with a guitar and a line on a regular supply of coke or other shit. Wayne Browning, a low-life from the southern United States, quickly took over, and most of the other men either grew up or blew out their brains, leaving him with all the women.”

  “And they never caught on?”

  “You’ll believe anything if you want to, Mike. It’s like sending money to those nuts on television ’cuz God wants you to.”

  “So, what happens there now?”

  “We’ve kinda given up, to be honest. Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer wouldn’t be too happy about us spending a bunch of money infiltrating a place like that. We’ve got a tap on his phones; we hear the odd rumours about kiddie abuse. It’s odds-on that Browning has his pick of the young virgins as they leave the nest —”

  “That’s gotta be illegal,” breaks in Brougham, but Zelke has heard it before.

  “No different from any of the other communes, Dave. We’d take them on, but the world doesn’t need another Waco or Jonestown.”

  Janet Thurgood knows nothing of the apocalyptic disasters in Guyana and Texas nor anything else that happened in the world beyond Beautiful for the forty years she was there — Wayne Browning made sure of that. And now, as she scavenges in the shadowy lanes of Vancouver’s Chinatown, she is more than ever convinced that she has somehow slipped through a galactic wormhole. It should be 1953; in Janet’s mind it is 1953. She is an eleven-year-old crying for her mother and crying over the loss of her precious Jesus.

  “Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name,” she mumbles as she squirrels into a garbage bin behind a restaurant, and then she mentally runs a list of childhood facts as she seeks security.

  “Once two is two; two twos are… Twelve pennies in a shilling; twenty shillings in a pound… Ring a ring o’ roses… The Queen is Elizabeth the second. Her official birthday is… Her real birthday is…

  “Why can’t I have two birthdays, Mummy?”

  “That would be greedy, Janet.”

  “Is the Queen greedy, Mummy?”

  “Get to your knees and pray that God didn’t hear you.”

  “Our father…”

  The vivid memories and rambling mutterings continue as she searches for her past, for food, and for her crucifix. The loss of her precious icon worries her most. It’s the crutch she has carried with her from childhood. Without it, she knows that she is forever lost.

  chapter four

  The West African rainy season is the subject of jubilation around the boardroom table at Creston headquarters in London.

  “Looks like the crop from Ivory will be above expectations,” croons Dawes, surveying the latest data from the man on the ground.

  Joseph Creston is less optimistic. “Assuming the Muslims don’t invade and destroy it.”

  “Why worry,” retorts Dawes, ever the accountant. “It’ll just push up the price of our Ghanaian and Nigerian output.”

  November in the coastal rainforests of southern Côte d’Ivoire may mean constant downpours, but along the southerly coast of mainland Europe, where the French Alps stumble heavily into the Mediterranean, brilliant sunshine still turns the beaches to gold and the clear cobalt sea mirrors the sky.

  Detective Chief Inspector David Bliss is walking — hour after hour, mile after mile — seeking inspiration to complete his novel.

  “Well, just how hard can it be?” he chastised Samantha, his lawyer daughter, when she questioned both his ability and his sanity. But now, as he wanders home along the deserted promenade in St-Juan-sur-Mer, he peers across the bay to the island of Ste. Marguerite and wonders whether or not he will ever be able to convince skeptical readers that he really has discovered the secret of the island’s most notorious prisoner — the Man in the Iron Mask.

  Despite the touch of warmth in the limpid afternoon air, the quays and beaches are silent, apart from the occasional screech of a hungry gull; the restaurants and beach-side bars are padlocked and boarded up. The transient workers of summer have been drawn north into the alpine ski resorts by the scent of money, and only a few arthritic and bronchitic Brits, desperate to escape the lugubrious English winter, wander in search of a fish and chip shop and a recent copy of the Daily Mirror.

  Most of the apartments in Bliss’s building in St-Juan-sur-Mer are as vacant as the beaches, and since his arrival at the beginning of September he has only twice spied another occupant. The whirring of the elevator usually signals the arrival of Daisy, the bubbly Provençale real estate agent whose company and bed he has been sharing for a while. Isn’t this what you wanted? he has asked himself a dozen times. Somewhere where you won’t be disturbed.

  “I ’ave just zhe place for you,” Daisy enthused with a glint in her eye. “No one will know you are here — except for me,” she added, and at first the arrangement seemed perfect.

  The sound of the elevator signals Daisy’s approach — the third time today — and Bliss can’t help thinking that he would have had more privacy had he stayed in London. But this is where it happened; this is where Louis XIV’s legendary prisoner spent eleven years of his life locked in solitary confinement with his guards forbidden to see him or speak to him on pain of death.

  “Maybe he was trying to write a book,” muses Bliss wryly while he waits for Daisy’s cheerful greeting as she lets herself in, although he knows that was not the case; he knows that the wretched man was consumed day and night by one thing alone: the love of the woman who owned his heart. He was waiting, day after day, month after month — waiting and praying that she would come to set him free.

  “Hello, Daavid,” Daisy calls in her heavily accented English. “I ’ave brought you zhe dinner.”

  “In here,” he calls from the airy room that leads onto the balcony, the room where he has set up his writing station and where he can keep in view the masked prisoner’s island fortress across the bay.

  “Terrine de volaille,” Daisy announces triumphantly as she places the dish of chicken on the table. Then she drapes herself around his neck, asking, “How iz zhe book today? Good, no?”

  “No… yes… I don’t know,” answers Bliss despondently. “I’m beginning to think this was a huge mistake.”

  “Never mind,” Daisy trills with a suggestive kiss. “Maybe we can do somezhing else.”

  Distractions, distractions, distractions, he muses to himself as he picks at the food, but at least he’s grateful that he has escaped the television. “You must have satellite,” Daisy insisted when he complained that more than ten minutes of translating the quickly spoken French on the local stations gave him a headache. “You can have maybe two hundred American channels.”

  “Terrific,” he replied, but came to his senses within
the hour.

  “What is zhe matter, Daavid?” queries Daisy, sensing tension, and Bliss wishes he had a sensible answer; he wishes he knew why his enthusiasm is draining, why he has lost his drive.

  “I don’t know…” starts the English detective, then he scuttles to the balcony and peers at the distant verdant islands. The fortress — the Fort Royal on the island of Ste. Marguerite — stands out sharply and appears strikingly forbidding as the wintry sun slips behind the island and heads for the depths of the Mediterranean. The wind is shifting to the north, kicking up whitecaps and darkening the sea from warm azure to bleak indigo, and goosebumps suddenly pepper his thighs as the chill hits.

  The sound of Daisy’s breath spins him. “What is wrong, Daavid?”

  “It’s getting cold,” he says, though knows that is not the real reason for the goosebumps. “He is still there,” he adds after a moment’s thought as pulses of energy make a whooshing sound in his brain and raise his hackles.

  “Who?”

  “The Man in the Iron Mask — l’homme au masque de fer.”

  “Daavid, zhat was three hundred years ago.”

  “This is really weird,” he carries on as he focuses on the fortress. “If I told anyone in the force about this they’d have me in front of a shrink and out on mental disability in a week.”

  “Daavid, zhere is nothing zhere,” says Daisy, pointing across the bay to the island. “It is just a museum now.”

  Bliss knows different, though he still can’t explain the powerful feeling that washed over him the first time he entered the cell that housed the famous prisoner. “It was like he was talking to me… guiding me… begging me to write his story,” he explains, as he has explained many times before. “But now I’ve lost it. I don’t what I’m doing anymore… don’t know how it ends.”

  “It will be all right —” she starts, but he cuts her off, shaking his head.

  “No… no… no,” he says, and then he spots the lemon tree in the garden below. “Watch,” he commands, dragging Daisy to the edge of the balcony and pointing to the loaded tree.