Deadly Sin (23 page)

“St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in the day of battle,” recites Rowlands in a sonorous tone as he puts his hands together and lifts his eyes to the stained ceiling, and then he spurs his elderly flock to war against Satan with a hymn. “Fight the good fight with all thy might …” he begins lustily, in a rumbling bass voice that reverberates around the common room like rolling thunder, but he soon becomes a lone crusader as his aging band of battle-weary warriors run out of breath.

Patrick Davenport and his entourage are not in the congregation this morning. Nearly two days of relentless
hunting for the missing documents, coupled with the strain of the situation, have worn the distressed manager to the point of exhaustion. He would happily offer Daphne a deal to recover his missing papers, if only that were possible.

“This past week has been a joyous time for our Dear Lord,” carries on Rowlands sanguinely as he puts on a courageous face and points to the empty chairs strategically placed to the right of the altar. “Four of our beloved sisters, and one brave brother, have joined the Almighty in heaven, and for that, we give praise.”

“Amen,” mutter a scattering of voices as Rowlands begins reading out names.

“Emily Mountjoy, spinster of this parish, whom I am sure we all remember as the moral face of Westchester Library; a brave woman who fought so valiantly for so many years to keep the heretical ramblings of blasphemers and perverts off the shelves.”

“Amen,” says a lone voice at the back.

“Charles Edward Lacy …” Rowlands continues, pointing to the next chair as he works his way towards the holy sacrament of bread and wine, symbolizing the body and blood of Christ, which sits on the altar.

Upstairs in Room 27, Daphne's room, there is neither her body nor any trace of the blood that poured from her nose following Hilda Fitzgerald's Friday attack, leaving two Westchester police constables scratching their heads.

“Let's go over this again, ma'am,” says P.C. Joan Joveneski as she tries to get Hilda Fitzgerald to look her in the eye. “Because, quite frankly, unless she's Houdini, it doesn't make a lot of sense.”

Whilst it may not make sense to Joveneski, the fact is that, sometime between 10:15 Saturday night and 7:00 Sunday morning, when Patrick Davenport arrived to find his elder sister stomping around, swearing, “She can't have
gone; the bloody door was locked,” Daphne Lovelace vanished from her room.

Hilda Fitzgerald was right. The door to Daphne's room was locked. The manager's sister locked it herself on Friday and pocketed the key, and since that time, for good reason, only she and Davenport have entered.

“You can leave that blasted woman to me,” she plainly told each and every staff member with sufficient venom to quell any dissent, although more than one of the care assistants gave her a sideways look. Amelia Brimble even confided her fears to her boyfriend Friday night, when he wondered aloud if her period was due.

“No,” protested the young woman, before explaining that her lack of interest was due to her concern over Daphne. “I reckon Hilda's killed the old dear,” she whispered morosely as they lay on the grass under the stars in the cathedral's grounds. “You shoulda heard her. The way she wuz carryin' on. Then,
smash
!”

“She smacked her one?”

“Yeah. An' it's not the first time, neither.”

“Did you see it? Like, did she smack her in the gob?”

Amelia shook her head. “I dunno. But I heard it aw'right. D'ye reckon I should tell someone?”

“Nah … Don't worry,” said Matt after a few moments' thought, although he didn't have Daphne's interest at heart as he slid his hand up the inside of Amelia's thigh and purred, “I 'spect she'll be okay. She's prob'ly tough as nails.”

“She'd have to be a flipping commando,” says P.C. Joveneski as she peers at the ground from Daphne's second-floor window and checks out a rusty drainpipe. Then she turns back to the room, rereads her notes, and confronts Hilda Fitzgerald. “Now, ma'am, you said she'd run away, but according to you, she was heavily sedated and locked in her room.”

Hilda doesn't have an explanation, and neither does Patrick Davenport. But the worried manager does have a
wary eye on his elder sister as she attempts to sweep Daphne into a dark corner.

“We had to sedate her. We couldn't do a thing with her,” grumbles Hilda before cataloguing a litany of ungodly afflictions and mental infirmities including senile dementia and devilish possession. “She could've took off on a bloomin' broomstick for all I know,” she continues with a black brush, before adding forebodingly, “If you want my opinion, she'll prob'ly reckon we were mistreating her. I wouldn't put it past her to knock herself about and make up all kinda stories. She could do herself a lotta damage.”

“And others,” agrees Joveneski, explaining, “We're actually well aware of the lady's mental condition, ma'am. She nearly bit the new superintendent's finger off.”

“Really … I didn't know,” steps in Davenport.

“Oh. Yes, sir. And she went totally berserk in her next door neighbours' place. Christ, you should have seen the bloody mess … Oh! Sorry, sir,” she says, giving a nod to the crucifix on the wall.

“No problem,” says Davenport, cheering a touch.

“We've got a good description, photographs, and fingerprints on file,” carries on the constable as her partner examines the door lock. “But we'll need to know what she was wearing and what she might have taken …”

A cough from the officer's partner gets Joveneski's attention. “Hang on, Joan,” says Kevin Scape. “We're talking about a sedated old woman who was locked in. There's no way she could have got out on her own. Someone must have used a key.” Then his face darkens as he realizes the implication of his words. “Now, you're absolutely sure you've searched the whole place properly,” he asks, nodding to Davenport.

“Absolutely, officer.”

“And she couldn't have got hold of a key.”

“That's correct.”

“Then there can only be one conclusion,” he pronounces solemnly. “She must have been abducted.”

There is another possibility, and it's one that Patrick Davenport is forced to contemplate as he fiercely eyes his sister and wonders why she so vehemently begged him not to report Daphne's disappearance to the police.

The Reverend Rollie Rowlands has wrapped up his Sunday service and is waiting in Davenport's office for his cheque when Mavis Longbottom shows up with a champion.

“I'll come with you, and I won't take no for an answer,” said Angel Robinson, Daphne's mentor, when she spotted Mavis walking the cathedral's labyrinth in search of a shoehorn to slip her past the defences at St. Michael's. “I often wondered what had happened to the old lady. I haven't seen her in weeks.”

“Oh dear,” says Rowlands gravely when Angel inquires about Daphne. “I think you may have had a wasted journey. I do believe Miss Lovelace has left us.”

“Gone!” exclaims Mavis, and the arrival of a glum-faced Davenport in the company of two police officers immediately seals Daphne's fate in her friend's mind. “What have you done with her?” she demands, flying across the room at Davenport. “I knew there was a reason you wouldn't let me see her.”

“Madam …” starts Davenport, but Kevin Scape steps in.

“What do you mean, they wouldn't let you see her?”

David Bliss checks the clock on Westchester's Elizabethan Town Hall as he drives along the tree-lined High Street, thronged with Sunday sightseers. It is a little before one o'clock, and he turns into the carriage entrance of the Mitre Hotel, the headquarters of the old school tie and blazer brigade, with lunch in mind.

The quintessentially straitlaced city of Westchester, set amidst the watercress meadows and dairy farms of southern England, is the final pastureland for many of the nation's elite. Knackered warhorses and clapped-out colonials graze leisurely each day in the Mitre and snort disdainfully about Sunday interlopers and “damned foreigners” as they jostle for a table in the packed dining room. Bliss considers a quick bar lunch, but he has time to spare. If he arrives at St. Michael's for three, he tells himself, the residents' afternoon tea bell will save him from Daphne at four, and so he tags onto the lunch line until he spots a familiar figure talking earnestly with the manager. “Ted,” he calls, and ex-Superintendent Donaldson spins.

“David. Thank goodness. You got my message, then.”

“No …” he starts, but Donaldson has him by an arm and is hustling him out of the door in a second.

Despite the fact that Superintendent Anne McGregor is still smarting from her encounter with Daphne, she has taken command and is coordinating search efforts from Patrick Davenport's office by the time Bliss and Donaldson arrive.

A forensic team, together with a fingerprint expert and several dog handlers, are on scene and are scouting for scents and leads, while nearly thirty officers from surrounding towns and villages have been bussed in and are strung out across the lawns and grounds as they search for clues. Local officers, armed with hastily photocopied mug shots of the missing woman, are scouring the streets and quizzing passersby throughout the city, while a team of detectives interview staff members.

“Well, if it isn't Ted Donaldson,” smiles Anne McGregor as her predecessor walks in. “I might have known you'd soon get wind of this.”

“This is Westchester,” he reminds her. “The abduction of an eighty-five-year-old from a seniors' home is just about as big as it gets. I'm surprised the BBC haven't shown up.”

“They have,” she says. “They've just left to get some local reaction.”

“There'll be plenty of that,” says Donaldson before introducing Bliss as another of Daphne's close friends.

“Oh. A detective chief inspector of the Grand Metropolitan Police Force no less,” says McGregor with a touch of cynicism and the hint of a disingenuous curtsy, but Bliss is in no mood for territorial rivalry. He wants information and he wants to help.

“We haven't got much to go on as far as abduction is concerned,” admits McGregor, firmly closing the door before explaining that, while she could understand someone smuggling an elderly relative into St. Michael's, it was difficult to see why anybody would want to spirit one away.

“So?” questions Bliss, sensing that there is more.

“I don't know,” she begins vaguely, and then lays out a list. “Number one: my nose always twitches when a complainant's lawyer shows up at the scene ahead of me. Two: the staff are jumpier than Michael Flatley and the whole Lord of the Dance shemozzle. Three: Patrick Davenport, the guy in charge, didn't say a dicky-bird to us, but one of the wrinklies let drop that there was a break-in a few nights ago.”

“What was taken?”

“I don't know yet,” she says as she points to the desk drawers where Daphne used a brass letter opener to wrench out the locks. “But whoever did it knew what they were doing.”

“Have you asked Davenport?”

“I'm saving that,” she says, then continues. “Four: a friend of the missing woman, Mavis Longbottom, reckons
they've been keeping the old turkey under wraps and wouldn't even let her social worker in to visit her.”

“That's interesting,” admits Bliss, recalling Trina Button's frantic phone call. “That's what she told a friend in Canada last week.”

It is barely six o'clock Sunday morning in Vancouver. The buzz of Trina's bedside phone can mean only one thing.

“Oh, no. Not again,” grumbles Rick Button as he pulls the duvet over his ears, but it's not the Mounties chasing a semi-naked wrinkly this time. It's David Bliss on a similar mission.

“No. Daphne hasn't called again, why?” asks Trina and he explains, then stands back from the phone as the zany Canadian lets fly.

“I warned you, David. Drugs, I said. Brainwashed, I said. Locked up, I said. But would you listen?”

“Trina —”

“No. Don't ‘Trina' me. You lot are as useless as our lot. You couldn't sniff out a skunk in scent shop. I told you … Oh, never mind. I'm coming over.”

“No!” It's Rick Button and Bliss together, but Trina hears neither as she slams down the phone and leaps out of bed, yelling, “They've got Daphne. I've gotta go.”

“Who's got Daphne?” Now it's only Rick as he wakes to the nightmare scenario of catering for two teenagers and a nutty mother-in-law.

“God's squad,” says Trina as she looks up a number for Air Canada. “A bunch of Bible freaks like those idiots up at Beautiful who tried messing with me last year.”

“But what about your mother? Who's gonna look after her?”

“Sorry,” says Bliss to Anne McGregor as he puts down the phone, knowing that Trina's arrival is likely to add to the young superintendent's woes if Daphne hasn't been found. “But it'll take her a couple of days to get here.”

“So, Detective Chief Inspector,” queries McGregor. “You obviously knew Miss Lovelace a lot better than I. What do you think could have happened to her? Is there anyone who would want to snatch her?”

Bliss shakes his head. “I doubt it. Although she didn't get the O.B.E. for being a Girl Guide leader.”

“That's what I was told,” admits the superintendent, although she dismissed most of the superwoman legends as junior officers' inventions intended to make her squirm.

“Just don't underestimate her survival instincts,” carries on Bliss, explaining animatedly, “She once broke into, and back out of, a highly secret CIA establishment in Washington State and brought the whole dodgy enterprise down.”

“Well,” laughs McGregor, “we all do crazy things when we're young.”

“Yes, we do,” he agrees, then puts on his serious face. “But this was the year before last.”