Deadly Sin (25 page)

“Riddle of eighty-five-year-old dementia patient snatched from seniors' home …” begins the story, and it is a full ten seconds before Isabel reaches the name of “Ophelia Lovelace, better known as Daphne.” Then she lets out a startled shriek and rushes back to the desk clerk, saying, “I need to phone the police.”

“The officer in charge of the missing woman's case, please,” she blurts the moment she's connected.

“Can I ask who's calling, ma'am.”

“Yes,” she says. “My name is Isabel Semaurino. I am Ophelia Lovelace's daughter.”

“Mavis — it's me,” whispers Daphne the moment she hears the front door slam behind Amelia and her parents.

“Daphne. Where on earth are you? Everyone's worried to death.”

“Shh …” hisses Daphne. “Has the postman been?”

“What's going on? Are you all right?”

“Mavis. Just shut up a minute. Have you got the post?”

“Yes. The blasted man was banging on my flippin' door at seven o'clock this morning, demanding money for a parcel with no stamps. Not blinking likely I said —”

“Oh, no,” breaks in Daphne.

“Well it was probably just advertising junk …” Mavis is nattering on as Daphne tunes her out and flops backwards on Amelia's bed. The envelope, full of documents from Davenport's private files, didn't have a
stamp. She searched for one for several minutes, but finally gave up and stuffed it in the residents' outgoing mailbox in the early hours of Friday morning assuming Mavis would pay.

“Was it important?” questions Mavis.

“Of course it was.”

“Well, I didn't know,” shouts Mavis in frustration. “You should've put a stamp on it. I thought it was junk …”

“All right, don't panic,” Daphne is saying, as much to herself as to Mavis, fearing that, without documents to back her claims, any accusations she makes will be labelled by Davenport and his sister as the incoherent ramblings of a confused old lady. “Where is it now?”

“How should I know? The postman just took it back. If you'd put your name on it I would have known.”

And so would Davenport, thinks Daphne, if it occurred to him to check the mailbox when he was looking for his lost papers. “All right,” she says. “Just run to the post office — tell them it was a mistake and you want it back.”

“But where are you?”

Michael Kent springs to mind, warning her never to compromise a partner by giving them information. “It's always easier for them to tell the truth than to lie,” he explained, “especially when there's an electrode clamped to their tender bits. So, what they don't know can't hurt them.”

“I'll call back in an hour,” she says. “Just make sure you get it.”

The buzz amongst patients and staff at St. Michael's has the nervous intensity of a lockdown in a maximum-security wing following a breakout.

A dozen newly awakened inmates have been jammed up against the television in the common room since 6:00 a.m., spotting themselves time and again as news cameramen
focus on the line of policemen searching the grounds, while a couple of early birds have been hovering by the front door since six-thirty for the morning's papers.

Amelia Brimble slips in through the back gate on her bicycle at eight-forty and slides in the kitchen door with her head down.

“What time d'ye call this, young lady?” grunts Hilda Fitzgerald, slamming a frying pan onto the stove with enough force to shatter an eardrum.

“Sorry, Hilda,” replies Amelia, while her twitchy fingers refuse to tie her apron strings. “My alarm didn't go off.”

“Heard that before,” scoffs Fitzgerald as she dollops porridge into bowls. “Hurry up with that apron.”

“I got it,” says Amelia as she finally succeeds, but she is still dithery as she picks up a laden tray.

“Be careful,” shouts the curmudgeon. “What on earth's the matter with you this morning, girl?”

“Nothing,” she sings out as she heads to the common room, but she is well aware of the hullabaloo over Daphne's disappearance and guesses that Patrick Davenport will be lying in wait. And she has been awake since dawn, terrified that Daphne's snores would alert her parents.

“You're gonna be late for work,” her mother called at seven-thirty, and Daphne woke and silently urged her to go. But the risk of her elderly guest's discovery held the young girl back, and she stalled in the bathroom until her parents were ready to leave a few minutes after eight, following the local radio news.

“Isn't that the place where you work?” said her father, but she pulled a face and ran back to the bathroom.

“I just feel a bit sicky this morning,” she told her mother, not untruthfully, when she reappeared, but she declined the option of a day off, fearing that her absence from St. Michael's would heighten suspicion.

“You missed all the excitement, dear,” whispers John Bartlesham as he catches Amelia on her way to the common
room and pulls her down to wheelchair level. “Someone's stolen your little clockwork mouse.”

“Do you mean Daffy?” questions Amelia with feigned surprise as an inmate sights Anne McGregor arriving and yells, “Put out your reefers, girls, the fuzz are back.”

Amelia feels her face draining as she checks the wall clock. It is only 8:45.

“I don't want you to have to tell lies for me,” Daphne told her. “But I need you to stall them until at least nine.”

It is the middle of Monday morning rush hour in Whitechapel and the habitual snarl-up is being worsened by the presence of a cherry picker parked in the road opposite the new mosque.

“Sorry, guv,” the owner/driver said when Bliss approached him about doing the police a favour later in the day. “But I've got a job startin' at nine. It's now or never.”

“What can you see?” hollers Bliss to his son-in-law, who is in the swaying bucket fifty feet above him.

“Fox and Edwards at six o'clock,” Peter Bryan yells down, and Bliss whips around in time to see the two men standing on the mosque's steps with puzzled expressions.

“Don't say a word,” Bliss quietly warns the driver, before putting on a wide smile as Edwards and the commander dodge the slow-moving traffic.

“G'mornin', sirs. You're up early on this beautiful …”

“Cut the crap, Chief Inspector. What's going on?” queries Fox. “You're gumming up the works.”

“Looking for the best place to site another camera, guv'nor,” Bliss says as he takes a bead on the front of the mosque with his index finger and yells up to Peter Bryan. “What coverage do you get from there, Peter?”

“No one told me about additional cameras,” complains Edwards. “Whose idea was that?”

“Just using my initiative,” says Bliss, turning to the Home Secretary's man. “We don't want anymore foul-ups, do we, Mr. Edwards, sir?”

“Right,” says Fox skeptically as he turns to leave. “Just hurry up and clear the road before Traffic shows up and books you for obstructing the highway.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And don't waste any more money on that. We're advising the palace to cancel. It's just too much risk with all this unrest. Birmingham got hit again last night.”

“Right, sir,” says Bliss with a touch of relief, while a voice from above sings out. “Oy, gramps. Are you asleep down there or what?”

“I've got to get some kip,” moans Bliss as Bryan returns to earth. “I was up most of the night looking for a damn woman.”

“They're twenty quid apiece in Piccadilly,” jests Bryan. “All sizes; all colours. And you can have as many as you can handle.”

“Very funny, Peter. But I'm worried about Daphne.”

“She'll turn up. She always does,” laughs Bryan, but he has something behind his back as he questions, “Don't you want to know what I found?”

A miniature satellite dish was strapped to the top of the light unit. “You couldn't see it from down here,” explains Bryan as he gives the contraption to his father-in-law. “It was camouflaged to blend with the colour of the lamppost.”

“Are you sure it's not part of the light?” questions Bliss, turning the parabolic reflector and its box of circuitry over in his hands.

“Definitely not,” says Bryan, struggling out of his overalls and checking his watch. “Although the cheeky beggars had wired it into the system to draw power.”

“But what's it for?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” says Bryan as he strides away. “I'm a cop, not a whiz kid. Anyway, I gotta
go — we've got an appointment with the gynecologist in an hour.”

“Why didn't you say —?” starts Bliss, but the driver cuts in.

“Have you finished, guv?”

“Yeah. Thanks a lot, mate,” says Bliss, slipping the man a fifty-pound note. “Much appreciated.”

“This is Miss Lovelace's daughter,” introduces Anne McGregor as she strides into Patrick Davenport's office just before nine, accompanied by Isabel Semaurino.

“She doesn't have …” starts Davenport as he rises in confusion, then he dries up and starts from a different approach. “We weren't aware she had any …”

“… any family,” continues Isabel helpfully as she steps confidently forward, adding, “Don't worry. You're not alone in that belief.”

“Any news?” questions Davenport, looking past the strikingly elegant woman to Superintendent McGregor.

“As a matter of fact, we believe we have a breakthrough,” she says as she opens her briefcase and extracts a series of photographs from the security camera above the ATM in the wall of the Midland Bank in Westchester High Street. “Last Friday … using Miss Lovelace's debit card. Do you recognize her?”

The photographs of Amelia Brimble are not particularly flattering, mainly due to her look of panic, but Davenport identifies his young staff member immediately, and seconds later the girl stands in front of them with tears running down her cheeks.

“You don't understand,” she sobs. “I didn't steal the money. I got it for Daffy.” Then she squirrels into her apron pocket with shaking hands and digs out a crumpled shopping list.

“Clothes, shoes, ticket to London, and a book of
escape methods,” reads McGregor aloud as she tosses her head in relief. “Thank goodness for that.”

“What do you mean?” steps in Isabel. “What's happened to my mother?”

“Maybe Amelia can tell us,” says McGregor, spinning on the snivelling girl. “I assume it was you, young lady, who helped her escape.”

“Yes,” mumbles Amelia through the tears. “But she's not really loopy at all. She shouldn't've been here.”

“So. You're a trained social worker, are you?” sneers McGregor, letting her own opinions about the missing woman through.

“No …” Amelia starts, and then looks up defiantly. “But Hilda shouldn't a' hit her.”

“Hilda?” questions McGregor, and Patrick Davenport pales before trying to hustle the squealer out.

“You're fired. Get your things together and I'll deal with you in a minute,” he says as he pushes Amelia towards the door, but Isabel grabs the girl as she passes.

“Wait a minute,” she demands. “Where is my mother?”

The baritone bell of the cathedral's clock booms the first beat of nine as Daphne slips out of Amelia's house and heads for the labyrinth.

“The post office reckoned they couldn't do anything until the postman gets back from his rounds at twelve,” Mavis told her when she phoned her friend back, but with the near certainty that Amelia will break under questioning, Daphne is on the run in a pair of the girl's jogging pants, pink running shoes, and an Adidas sweatshirt chosen because of its hood.

An eighty-five-year-old dressed as a teenager and wearing knockoffs of RayBan mirrored sunglasses wouldn't attract a great deal of attention in Tampa Bay or even Marbella, but Westchester is a very long way from Florida
in every respect and, with the story of Daphne's abduction and her photograph in all the papers as well as most television stations, more than one person gives her a double take as she half walks, half jogs through the cathedral grounds.

Mavis Longbottom, on the other hand, is completely in the dark as she stands in the middle of the labyrinth wondering why someone would be silly enough to wear a hood in the heat of the day.

“Why here?” demands Mavis, once Daphne has got her walking around the labyrinth's path.

“No one expects me to be out in the open,” explains Daphne, stopping to check around carefully before confiding, “And I wouldn't put it past them to be watching your place.”

“Who?”

“St. Michael's mob,” whispers Daphne, as if she is afraid of microphones. “They've been keeping me a prisoner.”

“Don't be silly …” starts Mavis, then Daphne takes off her glasses and lifts her hood. “Oh my goodness. Did you fall?”

Daphne puts Amelia's sunglasses back on with the sad realization that, without the documents or an eyewitness, Hilda Fitzgerald will undoubtedly win if it comes down to a judge's decision in the final round.

“We should go to the police …” begins Mavis, getting her feet going once she has heard about the bruises, but Daphne grabs her arm, pulls her to a stop, and puts her foot down.

“No,” she insists adamantly. “I can't trust them. I can't trust anyone until I've got the evidence back from the post office.”

“I'm sorry about that —”

“You should be,” cuts in Daphne as she picks up the path again and pushes Mavis ahead of her. “And that's another reason we're here. I want you to experience what the labyrinth taught me.”

“Why?”

“Because you gave up too easily. When the post office said you had to wait, you should've said, ‘Not effin' likely.' And you should've chased that damn postman …”

“Daphne!” exclaims Mavis, grinding to a halt. “You swore.”