A Year Less a Day (37 page)

“You'd better see what he wants or he might get ideas and blab to the bill.”

As Mort puts down the phone, a teenager's hand exploring his groin reminds him that he's not alone in the bed.

“What was that about, Mort?” says the young woman and Mort grabs her hair and roughly drags her face up to his. “You didn't hear anything, right?”

“Mort. You're hurting ...”

“Say it. Nuvving. You didn't hear f'kin nuvving, right?”

“I didn't hear nothing, Mort.”

“Good,” he says, but he keeps a hold on her hair and slams her face to his groin, adding, “Now be a good girl and you won't get hurt.”

“Jeremy Maxwell,” says the occupant of the Thraxton estate a few seconds later as he opens the front door with his hand outstretched and a welcoming smile. “Do come up, Sergeant.” Then he turns and leads his visitors up the stairs.

The apartment-dweller's slow Canadian drawl sinks Ruth. On a day when she has been surrounded by the staccato of rapid English, the voice of the man at the door has an all-too-familiar ring, and she vacillates between running and grabbing onto Phillips for support.

“Come on up,” repeats the voice, ascending the stairs ahead of them, and Ruth inches up the hat rim expecting the worst, then her eyes dance with delight, and she is so excited that she can hardly get the words out as she tugs furiously at Phillips arm and whispers in his ear. “It's not Jordan.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely. I've never seen him before. He must be Maxwell.”

“Everything all right, Sergeant?” asks their host as he reaches the top and turns.

“Yes, as a matter of fact. Everything is just great, Mr. Maxwell,” replies Phillips.

Daphne and Trina are still swapping recipes in the kitchen when Minnie spies the smiling group walking back up the garden path half an hour later, and with a shriek of delight, she rushes to open the door so that she might give Ruth a congratulatory hug, followed by one for Bliss, as if he had in some way been responsible for placing the right man in the manor.

Trina is so overjoyed at the news that she kick-boxes her way around Daphne's dining table, whooping, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” and Minnie invites herself to root through Daphne's liquor cabinet, saying, “We ought to have champagne.” Daphne, on the other hand, is less enthusiastic, protesting that she simply can't believe that she had could have been so wrong.

“I was so sure that little Jeremy was going to turn out nicely,” she says, as the weight of additional guilt bears down on her.

“Well ... He's definitely not Jordan Jackson, Daphne. So he has to be Jeremy Maxwell,” explains Phillips, but Daphne is far from convinced, asking, “Then why did he have the other man's passport?”

“He could have found it. Maybe he bought the chest of drawers second-hand and it was already in there.”

“It might be years out of date, and somebody simply chucked it away,” suggests Bliss.

“I don't suppose we'll ever know,” continues Phillips. “We can't ask him outright without admitting that somebody's been snooping.”

“But why was he so horrid to me?” whines Daphne. “He was such a well-mannered little boy.”

“Daphne ...” says Bliss, taking her to one side, as Ruth finds her appetite and digs in to the salmon sandwiches,
leaving the rest of the guests to polish off the maple syrup pudding. “Have you considered the possibility that over the years he's discovered more about his father's relationship with you than you might want him to know?”

Daphne pales. “And you think he blames me?”

“Everybody else did—or so you said.”

“They did, David. Believe me, they did.”

“Well ... As he grew up he was bound to be curious about the fate of his parents. There must have been a time when he realized that the Nile wasn't as heavenly as he thought it was. Anyway, from what you told me of his grouchy aunt in Canada, it sounds as if she was probably the sort of woman who'd go out of her way to blacken you if she could.”

“That still doesn't give him the right to bin my polish,” Daphne pouts, unwilling to admit defeat.

“To listen to you talk, anyone would think she'd raised him to be a mass murderer,” says Bliss in exasperation.

“Well, something awful must have happened for him to have turned out like that. She must have poisoned his mind.”

“Daphne,” Bliss reminds her firmly, “it was just a can of spray polish.”

“There's no smoke without fire, David. You know that,” she persists, though Bliss can't help feeling that mountains and molehills might produce a more apt maxim.

Daphne's offer of suet pudding is declined by Ruth, who pats her now-shapely midriff, saying, “I really mustn't, Daphne. But thank you anyway. You've been very kind.”

“Oh, don't mention it—absolutely nothing at all,” she twitters. “I'm really quite thrilled for you, though I
must admit that in a way I was hoping that it was your husband at the manor.”

“Well I'm glad it wasn't,” says Phillips, as he steps in to put an arm around Ruth's waist, adding to her, “And I've got another surprise for you—if you can take it.”

The welter of strange experiences in the past twenty-four hours have been so unreal to Ruth that nothing would surprise her anymore, and she looks around the table at the kindly group of smiling foreigners as she stands in the dining room of an aging British agent, wondering why God has decided to turn her world upside down. Then a voice deep inside suggests that maybe he's turned it right side up.

“Well,” queries Phillips, “can you take another surprise?”

“Sorry,” says Ruth unfreezing herself. “Of course, Mike. What is it?”

Mike Phillips has had the surprise in his pocket for a couple of days, but he's been holding back, fearful that Jordan Jackson could still be alive. But now, with his mind at ease, he announces that he's been granted a further three months' secondment in Vancouver.

“Well, kiss him for chrissake,” says Trina, giving Ruth a nudge.

“So what cases have you got on the go at present?” asks Bliss, once Phillips has disentangled himself from his fans.

“I've been working the biker gangs, mainly: drugs, extortion, and porn,” he answers, adding, “But we're beginning to think we've got a serial killer on the loose.”

“They're always tricky. What's the MO?”

“Hookers and addicts; easy targets—usual thing. No one misses them for weeks or months, if ever, and the trail's stone cold before we even start.”

“Any suspects?”

“Not at the moment. He's probably some sort of religious nutbar claiming he's cleaning up the world for God.”

“We've had a few of those—that's what the Yorkshire ripper reckoned he was doing.”

“Our problem is that he's suddenly gone quiet. It's been more than four months since the last case, but some of them stretch back twenty years or more. Even Ruth's mother might have been one. By the way, any news on her father?”

Bliss laughs, and is in the process of recounting some of Daphne's little pretexts that had finally led them to isolating Geoffrey Sanderson, when, by a fortuitous fluke, the editor of the
Merseyside Mail
phones with news.

“We think we've found Sanderson,” he tells Bliss excitedly.

“Where?”

“He's still in Vancouver, apparently. The local paper ran the photo this morning and they've had several calls.”

“That's great.”

“By the way. Is Mrs. Longbottom planning the reunion for Liverpool or Westchester?”

The temptation to hand the phone to Mavis, saying, “It's for you,” is fleeting, though nonetheless amusing, but Bliss thinks better of it and stalls for time as he asks, “Has Sanderson actually been approached in person? Only, it's a fairly common name.”

“Not unless one of the informants told him. I think the Vancouver paper is holding off in the hope that they can fly Mrs. Longbottom over to get a mushy front-page photo. You know the sort of thing: ‘Old friends reunited after forty years.'”

Daphne is looking quizzically in Bliss's direction and he's seriously tempted to call her over and tell her to deal with it, but she appears so disheartened about
her misreading of Maxwell that he carries on stalling. “I expect she'll need to confirm that it is the right man first. Have you got an address for him?”

“That was good timing,” says Bliss handing Phillips the Vancouver address on a Post-It Note. “Sanderson is the only possibility, although he's a long shot, and I've no idea how you can persuade him to put his hand up to doing the nasty with Ruth's mother all those years ago.”

“I'll just have to ask him, I suppose.”

“Daphne thinks you should pinch his beer and check the glass for DNA.”

“I suspect that's illegal, Dave,” says Phillips. “Though I might be willing to give it a try if all else fails.”

“What about Ruth? Will she give a sample?”

“She already has,” Phillips says, then explains the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of Ruth's mother, and the difficulty of finding human remains in the British Columbian wilderness. “There's a whole lot of back-country in the mountains, Dave. You should come and visit sometime. But if he's stashing bodies up there, the wolves and coyotes won't leave much that can be identified. The best we might do is DNA from a few bone fragments or a few scattered teeth.”

“Good luck,” says Bliss.

“I guess it's time we were heading back to London,” says Phillips as the excitement of the day wears down, but Daphne has one last surprise.

“Wait a minute,” she yells, with a sudden thought, and she dashes out to the rear garden and into the coal-house tacked onto the back of the house. Thirty seconds later she reappears, smothered in coal dust, triumphantly carrying a dilapidated and dusty cardboard box which she places on the kitchen table with as much reverence as if it contains the crown jewels.

“Paul Anka,” she beams, as she opens the box and withdraws the warped and cracked remains of a forty-year-old LP, then her face falls as she says, “Oh, dear. I guess he's seen better days.”

Trina and Ruth share the back seat of Bliss's car with a couple of suitcases that wouldn't fit in the trunk as they prepare to leave. Minnie has already kissed David Bliss goodbye twice without complaint from Daphne, so she tries a third time.

“Time we were getting off, Minnie,” says Bliss as he ducks aside, fearing that Daphne might explode, but Daphne is still sulking over her misjudgment of Maxwell's identity and doesn't seem to notice.

“You just keep out of mischief or I'll have to come back,” Bliss tells her as he gives her a warm hug, then she pulls away in thought. “Wait a minute,” she yells, regaining some of her bounce, and she rushes back to the house and reappears with the giant hat that Ruth had worn to the manor.

“Here ... Keep it as a memento,” Daphne says, stuffing it in the window to Ruth, and, for opposite reasons, both women have tears in their eyes.

“It seems so funny that someone would actually be happy that their husband is dead,” says Daphne as she waves the car away, but Mavis doesn't find it at all unusual, telling her, “You've never been married, Daphne, that's your trouble.”

In any case, Jordan Jackson isn't dead. A point demonstrated a few minutes later when Mort gets another early-morning call in Vancouver.

“It's me,” says Jackson, and Mort uses his stump to shove a girl off his bed, hissing, “Get out,” as he spits into the phone. “Jordan, what the fuck do you want?”

“I wanna come back, Mort.”

“Well you can't can ya?”

“I want my ID back,” bleats Jackson.

“Have you got the ten grand?”

“I already paid.”

“Yeah ... with me own money. What d'ye f'kin take me for?”

“But I didn't know where she got it from.”

“That's your problem, Jordan,” he shouts. “Ten grand or you can stay there and rot.” Then he slams down the phone and yells to the bathroom, “Oy. Get back in here, slut. You ain't finished yet.”

The David Bliss sightseeing tour of London had taken in much more than the castles, palaces, and cathedrals over the following two days, but Ruth Crowfoot—formerly Jackson—and Mike Phillips had spent most of their time gawking at each other, rather than the sites of infamous events and notorious murders. The historic horrors of The Tower of London, Whitechapel, and the gruesome Black Museum at New Scotland Yard, had rounded off the trip in something of a rose-tinted blur for the happy couple and, as Bliss drops them at the airport, Mike Phillips promises that they'll stay for a week next time and pay more attention.

Trina Button is no longer with them. Having declared that she would be knee-deep in doo-doo if she left her patients a moment longer, she had headed straight back to Vancouver the day after their arrival.

“I guess that means we'll have to fly back with the jolly old riff-raff,” Phillips had said to Ruth in an
English accent, but she hadn't cared, replying, “I'd sit on the wing as long as I'm with you.”

“You could always use Daphne's hat as a parachute if anything goes wrong,” Bliss laughs as he sees his guests through check-in at Heathrow, then, as he waves the homebound Canucks through security, his cellphone rings. It's a panic-voiced Minnie Dennon in Westchester.

“David. You've got to come back right away. Daphne's gone missing again.”

“What?”

“I left my gloves round there the other afternoon and when I went back this morning she'd gone.”

“She's probably out shopping.”

“The milk is still on the doorstep, David,” says Minnie, her voice loaded with meaning, and Bliss comprehends immediately as he counts the number of times Daphne had told him that the milkman always delivers before six in the morning, usually adding, “He knows I can't do a thing until I have my morning cuppa.”