Deadly Sin Page 8

  And then Sergeant Martin Paulson, the Custody Officer, returns with the news that she is free to leave.

  “No thanks,” says Daphne, turning her head against the wall and burying her face in the pillow.

  “I’m not asking you, Ms. Lovelace,” says Paulson, putting on his policeman’s voice. “I’m telling you. I’m granting you bail in your own recognizance …” Then he pauses. “What do you mean, no thanks?”

  “I don’t want to go home,” starts Daphne, and she sniffles loudly into the pillow as she holds back the tears. “I never want to go home again. I have nothing to go home for…. All I had was Missie Rouge. I just want somewhere quiet where I can die in peace. A cell will do fine.”

  Paulson laughs. “As much as I’d like to accommodate you, I can’t. We’re full up. Anyway, our cells are only for real villains and persistent offenders.”

  “Okay,” says Daphne, rising in apparent resignation, then abruptly turning, picking up a heavy glass jug, and throwing it through the window. “There,” she says defiantly as Paulson stares in disbelief at the shattered glass. “Can you keep me in now?”

  The stupefied officer hesitates, but Daphne already has her hand on a stainless steel bedpan and her eye on another window.

  “I’ll charge you with criminal damage,” he cautions with a warning finger.

  “Naturally,” says Daphne with glee as she brings back her arm.

  “What are you — crazy?” he asks, catching hold of the bedpan.

  A crazy old lady, muses Daphne thoughtfully to herself. Maybe that’s exactly what I should be. “All right,” she concedes as she slowly relinquishes her hold on the bedpan. “I’ll take bail.”

  “Heat-related disturbances spread across the country for the third weekend in a row …” the breakfast-time television presenter is saying as Anne McGregor fries bacon for herself and her husband, Richard, in the pseudo-rustic kitchen of their swankily spruced-up thatched hovel in Moulton-Didsley.

  “Not again,” groans Anne, as global warming is blamed for riots in Glasgow and Birmingham and outbreaks of violence nationwide. “But thank God it’s not religion this time.”

  Torched cars, firebombed public buildings, and attacks on innocent bystanders all get reported. “While, around the world,” continues the presenter, taking a wider view to dissipate blame, “super-hurricanes and super-typhoons are in danger of spiralling off the Saffir-Simpson scale, tornadoes are repeatedly topping F5, and storm-driven tsunamis lash low-lying coasts.”

  “I bet that was the problem with the old crumbly who took a fancy to your finger last night,” laughs Richard, pouring himself a coffee and picking up the Guardian.

  “For gawd’s sake don’t suggest that,” says Anne. “I can just see the crafty old crone now — standing in the dock, saying, ‘It were the heat, M’lord …’”

  The buzz of the phone stops her. It is Ted Donaldson, the man whose expansive backside warmed her chair for fifteen years. “Lunch at the Mitre?” he inquires.

  “Sure, why not,” she says, and doesn’t bother to ask the occasion.

  “The silly old bat thinks she can pull strings to get off,” says McGregor as she puts down the phone and aggressively flips the bacon.

  “Well, I bet that’ll work for old Phil,” says Richard, pointing to the headline: “Archbishop to Counsel Prince.” Then he mocks the Duke as he whines, “I do have friends in very high places you know.”

  Daphne isn’t pulling strings. She is being rousted off a wooden bench in the railway station’s deserted waiting room by a uniformed ticket inspector. She has been there since six o’clock, following several hours aimlessly wandering the dark streets calling out for Missie Rouge and a stop for a tea and a pee in a transport café off the main London road from which she called Ted Donaldson.

  “C’mon, luv. This place ain’t for sleepin’,” says the uniformed man as he holds open the door. “You need a ticket to be in here.”

  I could always take the Paradise Express like Minnie, Daphne tells herself dreamily, but she considered that several times during the night as she stood on the platform while speeding trains whistled past. “At least it would be quick,” she soliloquized, but images of her friend’s body splattered across the cab of a hundred-mile-an-hour locomotive kept her back from the edge.

  “What’s the time?” she inquires wearily as she puts on her shoes and plops her moth-eaten beret over her dishevelled mop, but the inspector isn’t listening.

  “Where’s your stuff?” he demands, scouting around the room for a supermarket buggy or an old pram.

  “Stuff?” she muses. “What stuff? I don’t have any stuff.”

  “Stuff,” he repeats. “C’mon, luv. Don’t piss me about. Just take all your bloody junk with you or I’ll call the fuzz.”

  “It doesn’t matter anymore,” she says as she shuffles out. “Nothing matters anymore.”

  It is Sunday morning. Early worshippers seeking Communion scurry past the labyrinth on their way to the cathedral as Daphne seeks spiritual guidance in its looping pathway. “I’m definitely missing something,” she tells herself as she winds around and around, and she would telephone Angel but she’s left the woman’s card at home and is fearful of returning in case the Jenkinses are waiting for her.

  “I knew you were up to somethin’ you old bat,” Rob Jenkins spat nastily into her face as he roughly disarmed her the previous afternoon, adding viciously, “I’m gonna fuckin’ screw you for this.” However, he sweetened his tone for the young constable who raced to the scene, siren screaming, at the report of a lunatic going berserk with a crowbar.

  “Misty, my wife, worried she’d left the iron on,” he claimed as their reason for returning. But Daphne, still boiling, was in full flight as she was led to the police car while the street looked on. “Ask her where her bloomin’ ironing board is,” she ranted. “I bet she’s never ironed a bloody shirt in her life. Look at the place. She wouldn’t know an iron from the hole in her bum.”

  The question of Misty Jenkins’s domestic prowess was never tested. Daphne Lovelace, O.B.E., had been nabbed red-handed, and for all the constable cared, the Jenkinses could have curtailed their daytrip to Bournemouth for a game of tiddlywinks or a full-blown sex orgy.

  “I knew you’d be here,” a voice says softly in Daphne’s ear, and she spins to find Angel. “I heard you calling. I knew you needed help.”

  “Really,” says Daphne sarcastically. “If you know that much, how come you never tell me what I’m supposed to get from this damn thing.”

  “Answers —” she starts, but Daphne cuts her off.

  “All I get is sore bloomin’ feet. Anyway, you said I wouldn’t find answers here.”

  “Okay. So what happened the first time?”

  “Well, I invited the Jenkinses for tea, but that was a disaster. All they did was brag about being a ruddy nuisance.”

  “But you gave conciliation a try, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time. And what happened the next time?”

  “I met you. And I met you again the next time.”

  “I remember,” laughs Angel. “You rammed your hat down over your eyes and nearly mowed me down. Did you learn anything?”

  A lightbulb goes off in Daphne’s mind, and she brightens. “Yes. I did. When the Jenkins crowd blocked my way home and I was ready to turn around, I thought, I’m buggered if I will, and I did the same thing I did to you.”

  “So, you learnt that it was up to you to fight your way through,” insists Angel, but Daphne isn’t convinced. She’s been fighting most of her life — fighting for independence, fighting for her life, fighting the Nazis and the Communists, and, since she teamed up with Trina Button as part of a crazy crusading duo, fighting drug smugglers from Vancouver and the CIA in Washington State.

  “I don’t know about that —” starts Daphne, but Angel is in teaching mode.

  “You already have all the answers deep inside, Daphne,” she lectures, undeterred, as she takes Daphne’s hand and
lays it across the elderly woman’s breast. “A labyrinth is a metaphor for life itself. You enter in ignorance, then, in its twists and turns, you learn what you need to know. The path takes you in all directions — north, south, east, and west — but it always leads you to the centre … your centre … your core, where you find tranquility and equilibrium. Then, as you weave back out, you pick up solutions along the way and emerge rejuvenated and ready to begin life anew. All the labyrinth can do is lead you on your path of self-awareness and enable you to find the right direction.”

  “It still sounds like mumbo-jumbo,” scoffs Daphne, but Angel gives her hand a supportive squeeze, saying, “You’ll find your way, Daphne. Just have faith.”

  Bliss is lost as he loiters outside the bar L’Escale, on the quayside of the ancient fishing port of St-Juan-sur-Mer, waiting to get a coffee. He has run out of leads and ideas in his search for his fiancée. The shutters were still down and the doorbell rang hollowly when he made an early-morning call, so he pushed a note through the letterbox and left the roses on the step.

  It is Sunday morning in Provence, the fourteenth-century heart of popish power. Most of the locals are on their knees, while many of the heathen northern tourists are still on their backs, cursing the quality of the wine rather than the quantity. Angeline, the bar’s normally bouncy waitress, had a late night as Saturday’s new arrivals tested their legs against the local plonk, and she looks out blearily as she opens the blinds. Then she wakes up.

  “Ah, Monsieur Bliss,” she gushes, rushing out to throw her arms around him. “Zhe famous detective who writes zhe novel.” Then she stops to look around. “But where is Daisy?”

  “I don’t know,” he admits, pointing to his fiancée’s shuttered real estate agency a few doors away. “I wondered if you’ve seen her.”

  “On Friday, oui. She was excited about zhe weekend. She was going away …” Angeline pauses and deflates. “Oh,” she says, turning red under her Mediterranean tan. “Maybe I will get you zhe coffee, non.”

  “Yes … no … maybe … ” he vacillates, then leans on her to let him use the bar’s phone to call his daughter.

  “We went waterskiing yesterday,” Samantha bubbles as she picks up, but Bliss is unenthusiastic.

  “Be careful,” he warns. “Just remember you’re carrying the future of the Bliss dynasty.”

  “Okay, granddad —” she starts, but he cuts her off.

  “Daisy hasn’t phoned has she?”

  “Daphne was trying to get hold of you last night. She left messages, but I haven’t been able —”

  “Daphne …” he murmurs, cutting quickly in as a memory comes back. “Damn. I’d forgotten all about her. Apparently she got collared for something — shoplifting, probably, that’s the favourite with little old ladies. Give her a call if you’ve got a minute; she probably needs a lawyer.”

  “Okay.”

  “But you haven’t heard anything from Daisy?”

  She pauses, digesting the request. “Is everything all right, Dad? I thought you were spending the weekend together.”

  He briefly explains, adding, “She’s not here and her mother is buggering me about, pretending to be deaf and stupid.”

  Samantha tries to cheer him. “That’s the trouble with eccentric old grannies.”

  “I just hope that doesn’t apply to grandfathers as well,” he says as he puts down the phone.

  Ted Donaldson has one eccentric old lady on his mind as he bumps into Superintendent McGregor at the front desk of the Mitre, although Daphne Lovelace would bristle at being termed a grandmother.

  “I can’t talk business, Ted,” warns Anne before he can get in a hello. “I know what you’ve got on your mind, but I can handle it. I’m a big girl now.”

  “I noticed that,” says Donaldson, with a cheeky leer that is supposed to soften her as they walk towards the dining room. “But I still remember the day you joined.”

  “You should,” laughs the young senior officer. “You recruited me.”

  “And I remember the tears running down your cheeks when I told you that you’d have to leave your mum and go off to training school.”

  Anne McGregor turns sheepish and stops. “That’s not fair, Ted. It was a long time ago.”

  “True,” he agrees as he pulls out a chair and picks up a menu. “But now you’re a tough cookie. You’ve done well, and I’m proud of you. But beating up on a defenceless old lady …”

  “All right. You win,” says McGregor, slapping down her menu in resignation. “But this is going to cost you big if you expect me to listen.”

  “Extortion,” he laughs, then swipes a hand across the menu. “Anything you like, Anne, although I’m going for the roast beef and Yorkshire pud buffet myself.”

  “In this heat!” exclaims his guest as she dabs her forehead with her napkin. “I don’t know how you do it.”

  “Practice,” he says, patting his rotund midriff, and a few minutes later his plate overflows as he lays out Daphne’s case.

  “She reckons she tried complaining about these people but nothing was done.”

  “It doesn’t give her the right to break in …”

  “Anne,” he holds up a forkful of roast potato. “I’m not here to defend what she did — she’s quite capable of doing that herself — but I think you should look at it from a PR perspective. There’s a back story here that can explode into a national debate — octogenarian wartime hero, Order of the British Empire for services rendered, takes on neighbours from hell when police refuse to help.”

  “I didn’t refuse —” starts McGregor, but Donaldson stops her with an asparagus spear.

  “Moot point, Anne. If this catches fire in the media she could be headlining the six o’clock news as she leads a pack of elderly vigilantes on Downing Street. Anyway, from what I gather, the place was such a tip you’ll have a hard time proving what she broke.”

  “How d’you know …?” she starts, but then raises a quizzical eyebrow. “What about the television and stereo?”

  “Okay,” he concedes, adding pointedly, “But I should-n’t bother asking them for copies of the receipts.”

  “And what about the sick bay window at the nick?”

  “Accident. I distinctly remember cracking it with my elbow just before I retired. I’ll happily pay for it.”

  Anne McGregor puts on a “pull-the-other-one” face, but Donaldson is unabashed.

  “Christ — she worked for us for thirty years,” he says, stabbing a Yorkshire pudding for emphasis.

  “She was the station’s cleaning lady,” spits McGregor.

  “And so will you be if you persist with this case,” retorts Donaldson as he rises for another shot at the buffet. “Do yourself a favour, Anne. Get hold of Social Services first thing tomorrow and get someone to say that she’s going a bit batty. Then quietly drop the charges.”

  “And what if the Jenkinses kick up?”

  “Start demanding receipts — proof of purchase — cheque stubs. Get someone in traffic to do a full workout on their bikes the next time they hit the road; have a word with the council and Inland Revenue about their unpaid taxes.”

  “What unpaid taxes?”

  “Precisely, Anne. We don’t know, do we.”

  Around and around shuffles Daphne, eyes on the cracked flagstone path, as she plots a course of redemption. Messages have been pouring in all afternoon, but not from her phone. Bliss, Samantha, Trina, and Ted Donaldson have all tried that, but an answering machine is another modern convenience that Daphne has scorned. The words she has been hearing are purely metaphysical — spiritual communications from a world beyond the grave — the tortured souls of Phil and Maggie Morgan: begging, encouraging, and pleading with her not to let the Jenkinses get away with the desecration of their corporeal abode.

  The morning’s communicants returning for evensong stop in disbelief at the bereted old lady who, despite the heat, is still shambling around the labyrinth while fiercely muttering to herself.
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br />   “Is she all right?” several question, but the cathedral’s bells are insistent and they scurry inside to pray for their salvation, leaving Daphne to work out her own.

  By Monday morning, thirty unanswered messages clog Bliss’s home answerphone, but he doesn’t bother to check before leaving his hotel. He tried to change his flight to Sunday to give himself more time to prepare for his meeting with the man from the Home Office, but it’s a midsummer weekend and the airline’s representative had barely repressed laughter in her voice as she told him that he was lucky to get it in the first place.

  At least the time difference is on my side, he tells himself in the cab as he heads for the airport and his 10:00 a.m. appointment with Fox. The phone calls — a dozen each from Daisy and Trina, and the rest from his daughter, Samantha, acting on behalf of the other two — will have to wait.

  The Côte d’Azur drops quickly behind as the jet reaches high in order to crest the Alps as it heads north. Bliss is unmolested as he watches the Mediterranean disappear, although ninety minutes later he would happily switch to the aisle as lightning slashes through the black clouds above London and he finds himself heading for Luton.

  “Bugger,” he mutters under his breath as the announcement is made, and a quick check of his watch tells him that he’s in trouble.

  The tropical downpour may have flooded London’s streets and settled the dust, but the oppressive humidity has done nothing to lift the Monday morning blues, and Fox flies off the handle when Bliss phones from Luton.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Dave. Now I’ll have to make up some porky pies to cover your ass.”

  “Sorry, sir —” starts Bliss, but Fox cuts in.

  “Stay there; I’ll drive up and get you. But you’d better have some bloody good ideas for our man at the Home Office.”

  “Oh shit,” groans Bliss as he puts down the phone. Then he pulls out a pad and sketches a beady-eyed bureaucrat with Coke-bottle glasses and ink-stained fingers as he tries to come up with ways to keep the wayward Philip from killing his wife.