A Year Less a Day (41 page)

“They ain't gonna be happy 'til they've found her,” moans Liam.

“Let's give her to 'em then,” says Marky with an idea.

“Oh, yeah. So she can drop us all in it?”

“No, John. Once they've got a body they'll stop looking. All we gotta do is ditch the old crumbly on the road somewhere, then run her over with the Range Rover a couple of times. That thing weighs a bloody ton. She'll hardly feel it, and the filth will put it down to a drunk driver and back off.”

“Hey, that just might work,” muses Waghorn, brightening. “Though you'd have to make sure she's properly waxed. One peep out of her and we're screwed.”

“Yeah. Of course.”

“Hang on,” says Waghorn while he plays the idea through his mind, checking for flaws, before pronouncing, “OK. It's a go. Just be damn sure that you don't leave a trace. Make sure that she's got her bag and everything, and for chrissakes remember to take the stuff off her hands and mouth.”

“Of course, John.”

“And don't damage the f'kin Rover, and wash it off properly before you bring it back. I don't want them finding her blood and guts all over the place. And make sure there aren't any of her prints anywhere either.”

Five minutes later, the floodlight over the manor's entranceway bursts into life, the gates slowly open, and the Range Rover drives out. The two men in the front are pros, and are equipped with ski masks, surgical gloves, and treadless shoes, while a selection of weapons are at hand, concealed on clips under the dashboard for ease of access. Behind the vehicle's rear seat, bundled under a blanket, and still securely tied, is Daphne Lovelace, OBE.

Ruth and Mike Phillips arrive back at the sergeant's hotel minutes before four in the afternoon—nearly midnight in England—and find Trina pacing the foyer with Sergeant Brougham.

“I've got to talk to you right away,” bubbles Trina as she escorts them toward the elevator while handing Phillips an opened envelope. “It's a message from Dave Bliss,” she carries on chattily. “He says ‘Hi,' and says you've got to check your email as soon as you get in ... Oh, and he says Daphne's gone again.”

“You opened my mail?” Phillips queries in astonishment, taking out the receptionist's hand-written message.

“Of course I did. It might've been important ... Oh, nearly forgot—Dave says ‘Hi' to Ruth, as well.”

“Thanks, Trina,” says Ruth with a smile, though Phillips looks less pleased, stopping abruptly to ask, “Why is Sergeant Brougham here?”

“Protection,” Trina boasts proudly. “The mob is trying to kill me.”

“I'll fill you in upstairs, Mike,” says Brougham.

Mike Phillips fires up his computer the moment he hits his room, while Brougham outlines Trina's escapades. Trina has taken Ruth to the hotel's restaurant for tea, and has theatrically checked for mobsters around each corner and even under the table, elatedly
explaining to Ruth, “There's probably a price on my head,” before confiding to her friend that, after a spell as Mrs. Peter Healy, she is now finally a free woman.

It only takes Phillips a few seconds to pull up the fingerprints from England and forward them to his detachment from his email. A couple of minutes later he is on the phone to Bliss in a serious panic.

“Dave. You've got a real nasty situation ... the prints you sent—if it's the man in the manor—he isn't Maxwell. His name's John Waghorn.”

“And he is?” asks Bliss.

Phillips takes a breath. “Keep this under your hat, Dave, but he's the prime suspect in our serial killer case.”

“What? Are you certain?”

“Yeah. He slipped off our radar about four months ago, just about the time that Maxwell showed up at your end, I guess. We had an ‘all ports' watch out for him, but no one reported him leaving the country.”

“Because he was travelling as Jordan Jackson,” says Bliss, piecing the scenario together, and reaching the place where Daphne had been several weeks ago. “But why didn't he use Maxwell's name?”

“He couldn't. I checked Waghorn's file. He's a buddy of, wait for it, a nasty little shit-rat named Mort Maxwell. English, born 1958, a.k.a. Morty Maxwell. Real name—you guessed it—Jeremy Maxwell. I knew that I recognized the name. He's seriously naughty—convictions going back to the seventies. Maxwell can't move a muscle without it setting off an alarm.”

So much for Daphne thinking he would turn out straight
, thinks Bliss, asking, “What's his form?”

“Drugs, laundering, assault. His cover is a back-street porn studio. We've got a man in there. I'll try to contact him before he goes in this evening—see what else we can get. And Trina has just spotted two
of his goons riding around with a couple of stiffs in the trunk.”

“Trust Trina,” says Bliss. “But what have you got on our man here?”

“Nothing solid—not enough for an arrest warrant. Anyway, what's happening there? What's this about Daphne?”

Bliss catches Donaldson just before the senior officer goes to bed, and a few minutes later a couple of patrol cars speed to take up static positions close to the manor's gates while a third tours the surrounding area, but they are fractionally too late. The Range Rover has returned and the gates are closing behind it.

“Well,” demands Waghorn, meeting the vehicle at the stables, “did it go all right?”

Liam is shuffling his feet while Marky, the driver, taps the steering wheel and stares at the floor.

“What's going on?” demands Waghorn, and Marky speaks up.

“We finds a real quiet road and this Irish pillock unties her and gets her gag off. Then he gives her her handbag and the bloody old bat takes out a little bag of chocolate f'kin biscuits and gives 'em to him, sayin' ‘Here. You look like a nice young man. You 'ave 'em 'cuz I won't need 'em where I'm goin'.' And the next thing—he's bawling his f'kin eyes out.”

“So? Why didn't you drop her, for chrissake?”

“John ... Like, she's an old lady, you know ...”

“Oh, what a pair of wussies. Give me the keys, for chrissakes. Do I have to do everything around here?”

Waghorn is back at the stables in less than five minutes, and is dragging Daphne out of the Rover's trunk, shouting for Liam and Marky to help.

“What's up, boss,” says Liam. “You didn't fall for the biscuits, did you?”

“Shuddup, for chrissakes. The bloody place is crawling with cops. Get everyone together, we've got a lot of work to do.”

Cops are also on the move in Vancouver. Cruisers from all over the city are converging on the black BMW as it speeds south toward the US border. The flapping trunk lid catches the attention of every passed motorist, and cellphone calls jam the emergency switchboards of half a dozen police districts, as drivers and passengers alike recoil in horror at the ghastly sight.

Jeremy Maxwell, alias Mort, is desperately cleaning out his safe when Dave, his trusty cameraman, shows up for work with half a dozen well-armed friends. And the one-handed Englishman is still pleading both ignorance and innocence when Dave morphs into Constable Vern McLeod, takes the concealed digital recorder from his camera, plugs it into a speaker, and turns up the volume.

It's a little before five a.m. in Westchester, when Minnie Dennon bustles around Daphne's kitchen making tea for Bliss. She's wearing Daphne's cardigan and slippers again, but Bliss is too preoccupied to notice, as he daubs his face and hands with black shoe polish and struggles into the black overalls that one of Donaldson's officers had delivered to Daphne's doorstep overnight.

Donaldson sends a car for Bliss at five-fifteen and greets him at a roadblock about a mile from Thraxton Manor.

“We thought this would be the best place for it,”
says Donaldson, sweeping his hand around the collection of officers and vehicles while checking Bliss over. “Here's a radio—just squawk and we'll come running.” Then he queries, “Are you carrying?”

“No, guv,” says Bliss. “I didn't plan on doing this today.”

“Here, take this,” says Donaldson handing him a loaded police special.

Bliss hefts the piece meditatively for a second. “You realize that you'll be writing reports 'til the day you get your pension if I have to use it.”

“Don't worry about it, Dave. I could retire tomorrow if I wanted.”

The driver of the truck, on his way from the docks with yet another container bound for the manor, is on schedule until he comes around a bend and is surprised to find a commercial vehicle inspection team at a police roadblock.

“Just a routine stop, driver,” says Donaldson, climbing up to the cab. “Can I see your driver's and carrier's licenses, please?”

“Sure. You blokes are out early this mornin', aren't you?”

“We're going fishing,” muses Donaldson. “Early birds and all that,” before asking, “What's your destination, driver?”

“Thraxton Manor—I got a load of plywood.”

“We won't keep you long,” carries on Donaldson as he gives a nod to a group of officers, and four of them move in to inspect the tires and brakes.

Bliss also gets the nod, and he's shielded by a posse of officers as he crouches low to scuttle under the container, where he crawls on top of a substantial girder and clings on, thinking that he's lucky it's not far to the manor.

The whirr from the manor's big gates is lost amidst the thunder of the giant truck's engine a few minutes later, but Bliss knows he is inside the Maxwell estate as soon as the vehicle starts bouncing along the rutted gravel driveway, threatening to throw him off the girder.

The workshops and barns are dark and silent as the vehicle comes to a halt, and Bliss is just about to slip quietly from underneath the trailer when Liam approaches with his dog.

“There's an empty to go back,” the Irishman calls to the driver as his mastiff tries to pull him under the container. “Get outa there,” he yells, yanking on the animal's collar, while the driver protests, “No one told me about a return.”

Liam shrugs. “Not my fault, mate.”

Bliss stealthily drops from under the container as Liam wanders away, and, in seconds, he is slipping into the dark stables.

“Nice horsey,” he whispers, as the stallion under the hayloft's trapdoor snorts restlessly.
Now what?
Bliss asks himself, knowing that his last encounter with the equine kingdom was at the age of nine, riding a holiday donkey on the beach in Brighton—and even that had landed him in the Red Cross tent with a scraped knee.

Liam's guard dog has Bliss's scent, yet the Irishman keeps him on a tight rein, shouting, “Shuddup. It's only a horse,” as he concentrates on making sure that the driver doesn't leave without taking the container. But the whinnying horse is both a blessing and a curse as Bliss stumbles around in the murky corners of the stable, feeling for a bag of feed, or some rope. He finds the feed first and tips a pile onto the ground outside the animal's stall before opening the door.

The hayloft's trapdoor creaks open a few minutes
later, just as the truck drives away, with Liam and his dog alongside the driver in the cab.

“I ain't s'posed to take passengers,” the driver had complained when Liam had stated his intentions, but the look in the Irishman's eyes had been enough to persuade him.

“Daphne?” whispers Bliss into the darkness of the hayloft, and he switches on his flashlight, fearful of what he may find. But there is no sign of Daphne, although his light glints on something in the hay.

“Keemun ... I knew it,” he muses, once he's unscrewed the stopper of the stainless steel vacuum flask, then he throws caution to the wind, pulls out his gun, flicks off the safety, and crashes through the door into the apartment.

“Waghorn ... Armed police. Come out with your hands up,” he shouts to the room, but nothing happens.

“Waghorn, I know you're in here,” he yells, dashing frantically from room to room, breaking all the rules, building himself up to shoot first and sort out the mess later. “Waghorn. Come out.”

It only takes Bliss a minute or so—just long enough for the truck to drive out of the gates and head for the Southampton Road—before he catches on, and shrieks into his radio, “Stop the lorry. Stop the lorry. Armed men in the container.”

There is also a very large stash of marijuana, and one gutsy old lady lying bound and gagged on the floor, as Donaldson finds out a few minutes later when he throws open the container's doors, shouting, “Armed police. Put down your weapons.”

“They wouldn't have lasted two minutes in the war,” Daphne tells Bliss a short while later, after he has helped her out of the container. “‘Here. Have my chokky bickies,' I said, and the big soft Irish twerp just burst into tears.”

“Oh, Daphne,” laughs Bliss, close to tears himself as he hugs her.

“Is Missie Rouge all right?” she asks as he holds her.

“Minnie's feeding her at the moment, but I think she's getting used to being abandoned,” he says as he pulls out his cellphone and calls Phillips in Vancouver.

Inspector Wilson takes Bliss's call. Sergeant Phillips is in the midst of interviewing Monty Maxwell's son, who is boasting, “I ain't done nuvvin. You can't nail me—know what I mean?”

“We already did, Jeremy,” says Phillips confidently. “We got you on tape blowing your cousin away.”

“He was already dead.”

“Won't wash,” says Phillips shaking his head. “Plus, Dingo isn't too happy about taking the full rap for wasting Tom Burton.”

With a whisper in Phillips' ear, Wilson steps in. “Good news, Jeremy—though not so good for you, I'm afraid. We've just busted your entire operation in England, and John Waghorn's singing your name.”

“All I do is the porn. And that ain't illegal,” persists Maxwell. “I just gave him the flicks and if he liked what he saw, then we'd fix him up.”