Deadly Sin (14 page)

The front door opens, and Inspector Mike Phillips of the RCMP marches in then stops dead.

“Trina?” he says, recognizing the bundle at his feet as a woman he has known for several years. “What on earth are you doing?”

“The balasana pose,” she explains. “It's yoga.”

“Why?”

“Well, I had to give up kick-boxing cuz I kept kicking myself in the head and giving myself concussions.”

“L
et us offer a prayer to our patron saint,” intones Samuel Fitzgerald in a sacerdotal whine as Daphne Lovelace shuffles into the common room wearing her favourite Sunday hat and expecting sloppy porridge and a plastic mug of stale tea.

“St. Michael the Archangel. Defend us in the day of battle,” Fitzgerald passionately implores, raising his eyes reverently to the brown stain on the ceiling where a blocked upstairs toilet has overflowed. “Be our safeguard against the wickedness and snares of the Devil …”

Daphne stops and searches for a seat. Four empty high-backed upholstered chairs have been arranged to one side of the altar (a collapsible picnic table covered with a disposable mauve tablecloth from Marks and Spencer's “Trendy” collection, supporting a silver-plate candelabra and a brassy crucifix with a wobbly base). But as Daphne heads for one of the vacant seats,
Fitzgerald's wife, Hilda, blocks her path, whispering, “Go to the back, Daphne.”

“This week we have said farewell and Godspeed to four of our dear, dear friends,” continues Fitzgerald, with a crack in his voice that belies his brutish appearance as he gestures to the empty chairs. Then he walks behind them, meaningfully laying his fight-gnarled hands over the back of each in turn as he ascribes to the furniture the identity of its recently departed occupant.

“Petunia Rickworth of this parish, aged eighty-two; Nathaniel Wentworth of Mouton-Didsley, aged seventy-nine; Martha …”

Daphne tunes out the Sunday preacher, who on the other six days is the gardener and general factotum, while she looks around the room at the shells of seventeen women and four men, slumped in their seats like inadequately propped scarecrows, and wonders which of them will be next.

“And Pricilla Grantley, ” Fitzgerald carries on, as Daphne attempts to elbow herself between two women seemingly asleep on a settee.

“Bugger off,” swears one of the women with one eye open as she spreads herself.

“Those of you who wish to may come forward for a blessing,” invites Fitzgerald, and a few struggle out of their seats and shuffle forward so that the gardener-cumplumber can lay his enormous soil-stained hands on their heads, but at the back of the room, Daphne crumples into a flood of noisy tears.

“I don't like it here. I wanna go home,” she snuffles loudly, and Hilda Fitzgerald comes running.

“What is it, dear?”

“There's nowhere to sit and I wanna go home,” cries Daphne as she stands, slump-shouldered, with tears dripping onto the floor.

“Have you taken your tablets this morning?”

“Yes,” sniffles Daphne. “But I don't want to stay.”

“C'mon, then. Let's get you back to your room,” says Hilda, offering a Kleenex and a guiding hand, and Daphne meekly follows.

It has been nearly a week since Daphne packed her suitcase and said a tearful goodbye to the only home she has known for more than forty years, but she still gags on the stench of stale urine and boiled cabbage as she drags her feet back to the room she shares with the bodily remains of Emily Mountjoy.

Hilda Fitzgerald, a fifty-five-year-old care assistant who doubles as the residence's cook, guides her aging charge firmly along vinyl-floored corridors, passing other residents who are now just shadows of the people they once were — creatures of the twilight, both haunted and haunting — as they shuffle silently like phantoms caught halfway between day and night, waiting for the light to go out and the reaper's scythe to strike.

“We like to think of ourselves as heaven's waiting room,” Patrick Davenport, the home's supervisor, explained pompously as he greeted Daphne at the front door on the previous Monday, like St. Peter with his arms wide in welcome.

“I see,” said Daphne, stepping into a dismal entrance hall with furniture as old as the inmates, and in similar condition.

“It's a great comfort to know that all of our guests will soon be sitting beside the Almighty,” Davenport continued as he led Daphne past the common room where a dozen pairs of eyes looked hopefully her way. Was she a visitor? A long-lost relative? A saviour coming to take them to a better place?

It might be a comfort for you
, thought Daphne as she peered at the expectant faces and wondered who they were before time took its toll.
But how do they feel about it?
Then she looked inwardly and wondered who she had been.

“This way,” said Davenport, guiding her into his piously austere office as her mind flashed through more than eighty years of snapshots, questioning which, if any, were real: the golden-haired schoolgirl; the clumsy ballerina; the lover; the traveller; the wartime parachutist; the saboteur; the artist's model; the secret agent; another lover, and yet another; the police station's tea lady; the aging adventurer; and the lonely spinster.

“You can keep a few personal things,” Davenport explained as he rummaged through her suitcase with the eye of a customs officer, while she scanned his framed collection of sacred quotes: “One book” — (his tone said “The Bible”) — “basic toiletries, family photos, and some pocket change.” Then he looked up. “We'll take care of all your jewellery, money, and other valuables.”

“Isn't that what they told the Jews?” mumbled Daphne acidly under her breath, and Davenport caught it.

“What did you say?”

“I said, ‘What a lovely June.'”

“It's August,” snapped Davenport viciously, then he softened. “I'm sure you will be very comfortable here, Miss Lovelace. Or may I call you Daphne?”

David Bliss also received a rebuke on Monday and has been fending off his ex-boss ever since.

“It was just a minor prang,” he said, shrugging off the accident involving the Queen's car, but Michael Edwards steamed at his lack of concern.

“How do you know that? Got proof, have you? Got sworn statements from everyone involved? Grilled the clown who pranged her, have you?”

“No, but —”

“Don't ‘but' me, Chief Inspector. The Home Secretary is demanding a proper investigation, not some flim-flam f'kin …”

Edwards ran out of expletives, and Bliss realized that it wasn't the Home Secretary demanding a full-scale inquiry. It was Edwards, protecting his own backside.
He'll be blamed if Philip gives her so much as a sore throat
, Bliss thought with a degree of satisfaction as he promised to look into the matter.

“Now,” says Hilda Fitzgerald, leading Daphne back to her bed, “I'll get Amelia to bring up your breakfast. We did tell you that we always hold Sunday morning service in the common room. I 'spect you forgot.”

“I did,” sniffles Daphne.

“It's all right. Just dry your eyes and try not to upset Emily. And don't forget, we have prayer meetings twice a day and Bible classes Thursdays at seven. It's all on the notice board.”

Emily Mountjoy, a sunken-cheeked, wispy-haired skeleton, sits motionless in an armchair with her unseeing eyes glued remorselessly to the roof of the City Library, where she was the senior staff member for more than thirty years. She is, however, totally incognizant of the world and of Daphne's desolation. She is beyond distress. Nothing that Daphne does, or says, will upset her. Her mind died long ago, and her body is finally catching up. However, in some ways, Emily is more advantaged than many of the other residents who are still fully sentient, watching in horror as their bodies head to the grave before they do.

Daphne tried communicating with Emily throughout the week but has drawn a blank.

On Tuesday, Daphne's first full day at the home, she picked a family portrait of a couple and their three young children off Emily's bedside table, asking, “Is this you?”

Emily didn't answer; didn't take her eyes off the library. But Daphne sank a little deeper when she returned to her own bed and looked at the bare table beside her.
Where were her pictures of a smiling husband and a clutch of rascal-faced schoolchildren?

“So. You were never married then,” said Patrick Davenport later Tuesday morning when he escorted a paunch-bellied parson to Daphne's room.

“Married?” Daphne questioned, with a look on her face that said she was trying hard to recall.

“This is the Reverend Rowlands of St. Stephen's-in-the-Vale,” Davenport continued, already knowing the answer, and he carried on talking while the red-faced vicar was in the background having a coughing fit as he tried to recover his breath after climbing the stairs. “He takes the service here on the fourth Sunday of the month, except when it falls on Christmas or Easter.”

“Or one of the other special days,” chimed in Rowlands, once he had loudly blown his nose. Then he looked at Daphne and said, “We've met before, haven't we?”

Daphne wrinkled her brow. “Have we?”

“Yes. Weren't you making inquiries about the Creston family awhile ago?”

“Was I?”

“Miss Lovelace is having a few problems with her memory, aren't you, dear?” said Davenport.

“Am I?” replied Daphne, looking quizzical.

“The reverend will visit your family or friends if you'd like him to.”

“Will he?” inquired Daphne, but when it came to giving names she balked.

“Is there anyone at all whom we should contact?” queried Rollie Rowlands as he gently clasped her hands. “Any friends or relatives. Who's looking after everything for you at home?”

“Home,” repeated Daphne, as if the memory of her neat suburban house was already fading. Then she shook her head. “No one, I don't think.”

David Bliss is one person who could be looking after Daphne's affairs. She has taken care of him often enough in the past. But he was in Scotland on Tuesday, having a clandestine meeting with the Duke of Edinburgh's protection officer.

“The old boy has no idea what the problem is,” the seconded Metropolitan inspector told him over a beer and pork pie in the corner of a pub on the outskirts of Aberdeen. “He doesn't remember getting dressed that morning. Doesn't have a clue about the sword incident. It's like it never happened.”

“Why didn't anyone stop him putting on his uniform?” asked Bliss.

“He's not a kid,” shot back the inspector. “And by the time anyone spotted him it was too late.”

“Good mornin', Miss Lovelace,” calls a perky voice as a bright-eyed youngster bustles into Daphne's room with a breakfast tray. “I poached you an egg 'specially,” adds Amelia Brimble, and Daphne's face lights up.

“Thank you, my dear.”

Amelia pulls a sympathetic face. “Mrs. Fitzgerald said the service was a bit much for you this morning.”

“Was it?”

“And she says I gotta make sure you take your pills.”

“I already did …” starts Daphne, then she pauses with a thought and squirrels a five-pound note from the inside of one of her slippers. “Amelia, dear,” she whispers, “this is for you for being so nice to me.”

“I'm not supposed …”

“Don't worry. I won't tell a soul. Only I haven't got any children to leave it to, so you might as well have it.”

“If you're sure.”

“Oh. I am, dear,” she replies as she runs a gentle finger down the girl's cheek. “You're a lovely girl. If I had a daughter I'd want her to be just like you. How old are you?”

“Sixteen and a half next month.”

“Well. One of these days you'll make some nice young man a wonderful wife.”

“Oh, Miss Lovelace …you are a one,” giggles the young girl as she pockets the cash.

The question of Daphne's lack of progeny also arose on Wednesday when Doctor Williamson visited.

“You can have your own doctor if you really want,” Patrick Davenport made clear when he signed her in. “Only Doctor Williamson is here most days, so it's easier.”

“She's in good shape physically,” Geoffrey Williamson reported following his examination. “But her mental condition is worrying. She doesn't even remember if she has any children.”

“The doctor wants you to take these for your memory,” Hilda Fitzgerald told Daphne later as she handed over the first of many tablets, but Daphne looked confused, insisting, “There's nothing wrong with my bloomin' memory.”

Wednesday was also the day Tony Oswald, the social worker, tracked down Mavis Longbottom.

“I had no idea,” she cried, without admitting that since she started experimenting with Internet dating she has hardly seen her old friend. “But she did seem very confused a couple of weeks ago.”

“Really?”

“Yes. The neighbour's dogs were getting to her, so I took her to the labyrinth at the cathedral hoping she might sort herself out.”

Daphne is still walking the labyrinth. She has been walking the labyrinth all week, although not the one at the cathedral.

“You're free to leave the grounds at any time,” Davenport pointed out when she first arrived, but he quickly
stomped on the idea. “Though not without a good reason and not without permission.”

“Auschwitz,” she silently muttered under her breath, but each day she has paced out the loops and whorls of a labyrinth on the parched lawn at St. Michael's.

“That's all she does most of the time,” Amelia explained to Tony Oswald when he wondered how Daphne was settling in. “Round and round she goes.” The young attendant chuckled. “Hour after blinkin' hour. Nattering away ten to the dozen. Like a little clockwork mouse.”