Deadly Sin (27 page)

“I was wondering about Emily Mountjoy,” queries Daphne as Dennis extracts his book of work orders from a plastic cover.

“Names, dates of birth and death, date, and exact place of burial,” he explains, and then he sees the inquisitive look on Daphne's face. “I like to keep it neat out of respect.”

“Mountjoy,” she reminds him as he leafs through the book with as much reverence as he might turn the pages of a Bible.

“Last Wednesday,” he declares. “Emily Sophie Mountjoy. Born —”

“That was quick,” cuts in Daphne in amazement. “She only died Tuesday night.”

“They don't mess around if there ain't no relatives,” he explains, then he looks to the shed rafters for inspiration. “If I recall rightly, she only 'ad the vicar — Reverend Rowlands from Dewminster. Mind, she'd come from St. Michael's — the old folks' place.”

Meaning?
questions Daphne to herself. But she knows the answer; knows that she too would have been stuck in a box and unceremoniously dropped into a hastily dug hole if she had stayed at St. Michael's much longer.

The revelation that Daphne slipped her leash rather than being abducted has turned the earlier excitement at St. Michael's into mild dismay as residents shrink back into their shells. The eighty-five-year-old's daring escape will be the talk of the common room for a few days or even weeks to come but will quickly fall into the realm of folklore as new residents take over. Amelia Brimble will be remembered by the staff more for her juvenile gullibility than her bravery. “If I believed half of what they told me …” more
senior staff members chuckle as they shuffle their elderly charges in and out of soiled beds and search for lost teeth and hidden hearing aids; meanwhile, downstairs, voices are raised behind Patrick Davenport's closed door.

Robert Jameson is on his third handkerchief of the day as he launches into the home's manager. “You specifically said she had no family.”

“That's what I was told, Robert,” replies Davenport. “It's not my fault.”

“But …” starts Jameson, controlling himself with difficulty. “You should've freakin well checked. We don't need — correction, you don't need —”

“All right. You needn't remind me,” says Davenport.

“And what are you going to do about that slap-happy sister of yours?” Jameson is yelling as Trina Button comes knocking.

“Yes,” calls Davenport, and the Canadian woman puts her head around the door.

“Sorry to interrupt, but I've left my mother in the car.”

Winifred Goodenow is not in the car. She has slipped out and is in the garden starting a relationship with John Bartlesham. “I'm going to do the El Camino,” she tells him as she limbers up with a few painful hops. “Do you want to come with me?”

“I wasn't expecting a new resident …” starts Davenport in confusion, while outside, John is laughing as he points to his wheels. “I don't think I could make it in this.”

“Don't worry,” says Winifred seriously as she grabs the handles and sets off at a snail's pace. “I'll push you.”

“No … wait,” chuckles Bartlesham, but Winifred is hitting her stride.

“I'm not here to discuss new residents,” Trina expounds resolutely. “I'm here to investigate the disappearance of my associate, Miss Lovelace.”

“Your associate?” echoes Davenport quizzically.

“Yes,” says Trina, pulling herself fiercely upright in a tadasana yoga pose. “We are private investigators.” Then she hands over a printed card. “Lovelace and Button (International Investigators) Inc.,” she says, adding, “Miss Lovelace is my partner and is head of our European division.”

Robert Jameson has loosened his tie and is turning puce in the background, while Davenport laughs nervously and scoffs, “Private investigators. Are you pulling my leg? I think you've got the wrong person here.”

“I don't think so,” says Trina reproachfully. “It says Patrick Davenport on your door.”

“No … I meant Miss Lovelace. She can't possibly be a detective, she's pushing ninety and she's senile.”

“Nonsense,” says Trina. “I spoke with her just a couple of weeks ago and she was fine.”

“All right,” says Davenport, dragging Trina to the window overlooking the lawn. “Have a look out there. Do you see a cat?”

“No.”

“Miss Lovelace did. ‘Here, kitty kitty,' she'd go all day long. Round and round she'd go, hour after hour, calling kitty bloody kitty. It used to get on everyone's nerves.”

“Observation,” trumpets Trina enigmatically, recalling a chapter from her private investigator's manual, and then she explains, “One of the attributes of a top investigator is that they are able to see things that other people miss.”

“Excuse me, ma'am,” calls Samuel Fitzgerald as he races into Davenport's office without knocking. “Is that woman with you?”

“Which woman …?” starts Trina, then she follows Fitzgerald's gaze out of the window just in time to see her mother pushing John Bartlesham out of the gates.

“Mother!” shouts Trina as she tears out of the office and belts down the driveway, and then she turns back to Davenport. “Don't go away. I'll be back.”

The disparity between Davenport's image of a crazy old lady and Trina's insistence that Daphne is nothing less than a female Sherlock Holmes is as profound as the difference between the elderly woman's present appearance and the photograph on the front of the
Westchester Gazette
, which explains why Isabel Semaurino walks past her in the High Street without missing a step as she makes her way to the police station to see if there is any news.

The High Street is something of a high wire for Daphne, so she keeps her hood up and concentrates on her feet as she scuttles past familiar stores and a few recognizable figures. But the heat is off. Her red herring, the train ticket to London, has worked, and with the kidnapping put to rest and the local search called off, no one at Westchester police station is particularly concerned about finding her.

Superintendent McGregor is getting down to more serious matters when her phone rings.

“What should I do with the dabs from St. Michael's, ma'am?” asks the fingerprint officer. McGregor is tempted to say, “Chuck them,” but she checks herself. What if the remains of a dismembered body turn up in a ditch in five years' time?

“You might as well run them through the mill and stick them on file,” she replies, then dumps Daphne's file in her “Out” box, marked, “MissPer — No further action.”

“Edwards wants an update at four this afternoon,” says Fox as he pops his head into Bliss's office on his way to lunch. “Have you got any ideas at all about protecting her?”

“I might if I knew what that pickup truck was doing outside the mosque.”

“I ordered you to leave that alone.”

“I know —”

“Look,” snaps Fox. “Roughly half the Muslims and half the Christians in the world are threatening to kill her if she shows up, and all you have to worry about is one slightly cranky husband. So just leave everything else to me … understood?”

“Understood, sir.”

“This is your last chance, Chief Inspector,” Fox warns over his shoulder as Peter Bryan appears in the corridor. “Four o'clock. Don't be late.”

“I'll be there,” calls Bliss, and then he drags his son-in-law inside and shuts the door.

“It's movie time,” he says as he pulls another chair up to his desk.

Bryan raises his eyebrows in mock disapproval and jests, “I hope they're not smutty like the last time. I'm a married man, you know.”

“They are … sort of,” says Bliss, explaining that the video technician has obtained recordings from all the congestion cameras in a three-mile radius of the mosque. “I had to promise half my pension for these,” he says as they begin watching.

With the precise time and known direction of travel it doesn't take long.

“There it is,” shouts Bryan time and again as they follow the vehicle's progress from one camera to the next, until …

“Nothing,” says Bliss, and they backtrack to the last sighting and put an X on a map.

“Okay,” says Bryan, using a pencil as a pointer. “Unless it vaporized into thin air it has to be somewhere in this area, and it was travelling in this direction.”

“So what are we waiting for?” asks Bliss.

“What was Fox ranting about when I arrived?”

“Do you know, Peter,” says Bliss with a fiercely furrowed brow as he opens the door for his son-in-law, “the biggest problem with getting old and becoming a grandfather is that the memory just goes.”

Despite her age, Daphne Lovelace's memory hasn't diminished one iota. She still remembers the velvety life that she enjoyed in the same comfortable house for nearly forty years; the zany scrapes that Trina Button got her into; Missie Rouge, her red-tinged cat; the flowers and vegetables in her garden; the afternoon tea — always Keemun, and always in a pot, never made in the cup.

It's nearing midday, and Mavis's postman will soon be back at the sorting office with the envelope. So, heartened by the fact that the cemetery workers didn't recognize her, Daphne pulls down her hood and slinks through the copse to the cul-de-sac end of her street.

In the eyes of the police and her neighbours, Daphne Lovelace is now just another confused old lady on the loose, so, apart from a few youngsters playing hopscotch and a couple of teens sucking the dregs out of a found cigarette butt, the road is deserted.

Daphne eyes the quiet street carefully and pulls her key out of her purse. It's not far to her front door, but Michael Kent stands in her path.

“Timing is everything,” he warned her on so many occasions when she was readying to make a dash for freedom with a defector on her arm or under the back seat of her car, but with Mavis only minutes away from collecting the evidence, she takes a chance.

There's a hole in the kitchen unit where Daphne's fridge used to be, but it's not the loss of the fridge that starts her tears. It's the memory of Missie Rouge, who would sit for hours if necessary, waiting for the fridge door to open and a can of food to appear.

“She must think it's a food factory,” Daphne laughed to friends on more than one occasion, and the fridge's removal is the final nail in the cat's coffin.

“I bet they took it for spite,” sobs Daphne, immediately
accusing the neighbours, and as she pulls a crack in her curtains to see into their kitchen, she sends the dogs into a frenzy and Misty Jenkins to the phone.

The snarling dogs send Daphne scurrying to the front of the house with her hands over her ears, and she flies up the stairs to her bedroom.

David Bliss, Mavis, and Tony Oswald have all had a hand in trying to protect her belongings, and the sight of several bulging bags and boxes labelled “clothes,” “hats,” “bedding,” and “knick-knacks” stops her as she opens the door, then she breaks down again.

Time warps as Daphne lies on her bed mourning the life that has been taken from her, and she doesn't hear the arrival of Anne McGregor and a car from St. Michael's.

“Miss Lovelace,” calls Patrick Davenport through the letterbox, and she wakes in an instant.

“Open the door, please. It's the police,” calls Anne McGregor, and Daphne is out of bed and down the stairs in a single move.

“Now where?” she questions and turns to Michael Kent for advice.

“Never hide in a building — the dogs will always find you. Run and you have a chance.”

She runs — for the back door and the cornfield beyond, but in her absence Rob Jenkins has ripped down the badly mauled wire fence separating the two gardens, and she is immediately slapped against her coalhouse wall by the snarling pit bulls.

“Get off … get off,” she screeches as she tries to push the ferocious creatures away, but the commotion has reached the front of the house, and Anne McGregor's driver throws his shoulder against the door.

“Come along, dear,” says the superintendent seconds later, offering a hand from Daphne's kitchen door as Misty Jenkins tries calling the dogs off. “Your daughter's waiting for you.”

“Liar,” screams Daphne. “You're all liars. Why are you lying?”

“Daphne …” begins Hilda Fitzgerald, but Daphne would rather take her chances with the dogs.

“They're trying to kill me,” she shouts, backing away from Fitzgerald. “They're trying to kill me.”

“I'd better call for a doctor …” starts McGregor, but Davenport has it in hand.

“Dr. Williamson is on his way,” he says. “He knows the case personally.”

“Good,” says McGregor as Misty finally gets the dogs under control.

“Look. They made me sign over everything to a lawyer,” Daphne is shouting to anyone who will listen. “Jameson — that was his name. Can't you see what they're doing? They're saying I've got a daughter so they can give her my house and everything.”

“Daphne, I'm sure …” tries McGregor.

“No … no … no. You're not listening to me. Please … please … please. I'm telling you. Look at his files. See all the drugs they're giving them.”

“All our patients need medication,” explains Davenport calmingly. “They're all very old people.”

“They're killing people to steal their houses. That's how they got Phil and Maggie's place,” rants Daphne as the three of them close in. “They made her sign everything over to the lawyer and then they killed her.”

“Daphne,” asks McGregor condescendingly, “have you got any proof of that at all?”

“The papers … I had the papers,” shouts Daphne.

“Where are they?”

“At the post office. I posted them to Mavis, but she wouldn't pay for them.”

“C'mon, luvee,” coos Davenport as he makes a grab.