Deadly Sin (11 page)

“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.

“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.

A tranquilizer gun, a syringe full of anaesthetic, CS gas, velvet-lined handcuffs, and a straitjacket all make it to his list before he scrubs them out. “This is impossible,” he tells himself under his breath as his mind goes back to his meeting with the assistant commissioner and the two Americans.

“The President had good reason to suspect an attack on the Queen was imminent,” one of snappily dressed foreigners claimed, and Bliss plays with the notion as he gathers a handful of dailies off the newsagent's stand and tries to piece together a consensus.

The heat wave is still taking the brunt of the blame, as it was supposed to do, but several of the trashier tabloids are backing the conspiracy theorists, even if they have peppered their columns with words such as
speculative
,
unproven
, and
wacky
.

“The Duke: Electronically Implanted?” runs one headline, although the editor has been wise enough not to blame any particular faction. Internet bloggers and loony American televangelists, on the other hand, have no such qualms and are universally pointing their fingers towards the Middle East.

So
, questions Bliss to himself as he waits for Fox,
I wonder what Lefty and Pimple actually know
.

“What's the CIA's involvement?” he asks as soon as he gets in the car, daring Fox to come up with a denial.

“They tipped us off, though God knows how they figured out something might happen.”

“I'd call it an educated guess, only I wouldn't want to give them that much credit.”

“Now, now, Dave. Be nice about our cousins,” says Fox, but Bliss can't help wondering aloud about the bloggers' assertions.

“What if someone has implanted Prince Philip with some kind of chip?” he asks rhetorically as Fox concentrates on a busy roundabout. “What's their motive? The Queen hasn't got any political power. She hasn't even got a lot of money anymore. J. K. Rowling's got more than her, and she's an author.”

“Aren't you writing a book?” asks Fox.

“It's finished.”

“Wow. Good for you. So now you'll make a fortune.”

“Yeah. Right,” chuckles Bliss. “Do you know how difficult it is to get published?”

“Well, you could always use this case to write another one.”

“Possibly,” says Bliss with little interest.

“Obviously you couldn't write about our royal family, though. You'd have to fictionalize the whole thing and call it Camelot or something.”

“Why?”

“Because they'd sue the pants off you if you didn't.”

The rain stops as suddenly as it began, and the sun turns up the heat as they approach the city centre.

“It's gonna be another scorcher,” croons Fox, but Bliss has his mind on the Home Office appointee.

“Some clueless bureaucrat, I suppose,” he moans as they drive down Whitehall.

“You know him,” says Fox. “That's why he asked for you to be assigned.”

“I don't know anyone at the H.O.,” protests Bliss bluntly. “It's out of my league.”

“Edwards, Michael Edwards,” says Fox with a mischievous smirk, and Bliss feels his face draining.

“Not —”

“That's the one,” steps in Fox. “Ex–Chief Superintendent of the Yard,” leaving Bliss simultaneously slack-mouthed and steaming.

“I don't bloody believe it,” he seethes, recalling the tyrannous reign of the senior commander whose career skidded to a halt when he was caught taking backhanders from a suspected murderer and driving under the influence. “I thought we'd seen the last of that bastard.”

“Language, Dave,” warns Fox insouciantly. “Our Mr. Edwards is flavour of the month at the big house.”

“How the hell did they fiddle that?”

“C'mon, Dave. Don't be naïve. That was his reward for going quietly.”

“But he was supposed to plead to drunk driving.”

“He did. But you know how it works. They wheeled him in front of a smiley magistrate one misty dawn while the press and everyone else were still in their pits, and the Beak says, ‘How d'ye fancy a conditional discharge?' ‘Suits me,' says Edwards, and next minute — he's walking. I'm surprised they didn't give him a couple of quid from the poor box to pay for his bus fare home.”

“Bugger,” spits Bliss. “But how the hell did he get into the Home Office?”