Deadly Sin (28 page)

“Get off,” screeches Daphne, but Davenport has a firm grip, and his sister snags an arm.

“Come with us, dear,” says Hilda Fitzgerald as she and her brother hustle the squirming woman through the house towards the car. Then she turns back to the superintendent. “Don't worry. We'll take good care of her.”

“Don't let them take me,” screams Daphne. “They're going to kill me.”

“Daphne …” starts McGregor consolingly, but the terrified woman makes a final break, wriggles free of Fitzgerald's grip, and throws herself at the superintendent's legs.

“Please don't let them,” she begs as she tightly wraps her arms around the woman. Then Doctor Williamson shows up and sums up the situation at a glance.

“Paranoia can be a very, very frightening thing in the elderly,” says Williamson as he carefully removes the hypodermic from Daphne after a few minutes of struggle and drops it into a small disposal unit while Daphne's eyes slowly close.

“Not just in the elderly,” says Anne McGregor as she gently unpeels Daphne's arms from her legs and feels her heart thumping against her ribcage. “I've never known someone put up such a struggle.”

“The fear of dying is a very potent force,” Williamson explains as he helps carry the limp woman to Davenport's car.

W
estchester's corrugated iron and concrete sorting room is a 1950s canker on the backside of the High Street's historic post office, but despite its leaky roof and draughty walls it is abuzz with robotic sounds of the twenty-first century as computerized hands speed the mail.

The lengthy tables of chatty sorters are long gone. A few po-faced supervisors remain, frustrated from years of attempting to decipher the indecipherable, and one picks up Patrick Davenport's frantic phone call.

“There's been a big mix-up,” gushes St. Michael's manager, and then he rattles on about confused staff members, wrong papers, patients' records, silly people, and a major embarrassment, before explaining that the envelope was sent to a resident's friend by mistake.

“Name?” asks the supervisor laconically without taking his eyes off his screen.

“Daphne Lovelace.”

“Address?”

“No, sorry,” says Davenport realizing he is heading down the wrong road. “You mean, who were the papers sent to, don't you?”

“That would help,” groans the supervisor tiredly.

“Her name's Mavis somebody or other, but I don't have the address.”

The supervisor stops his screen and swivels his eyes to the ceiling as if trying to visualize the face of an idiot. “Half a million letters a week,” he sneers, “and you expect me to find one addressed to Mavis?”

“I've got a phone number…” Davenport says before he realizes that he is talking to himself.

Mavis Longbottom is closer to success as she catches her postman on his way home.

“I weren't gonna lug it around all morning,” he explains snottily as he leaps off his bicycle and removes his trouser clips. “You said you didn't want it.”

“I do now.”

“Too late, luv. I chucked it.”

Where?”

“I dunno — somebody's dustbin I 'spect.”

“I'll report you.”

“You can tell the bleedin' Pope for all I care.”

Rightfully guessing that the Pope might be more attuned to absolution than Daphne, Mavis wears heavy shoes as she trudges back to the cathedral's grounds. However, the absence of Daphne on the labyrinth's pathway cheers her momentarily as she convinces herself that her friend has somehow retrieved the letter and couldn't wait to get home with it.

“Mavis!” hails a distant voice, and Angel Robinson runs up breathlessly. “Where's Daphne? It's in the papers and everything …”

“She's all right,” calms Mavis. “She was here earlier, telling me that I could learn something from the labyrinth. But I've been round this thing a dozen times and I just get back to where I started.”

“It's a metaphor for life's journey,” explains Angel, sweeping an expressive hand across the snaking stone pathway. “It's tortuous and long with many twists and turns, and the ending of one life is the beginning of another.”

“But what does it do?”

“
It
does nothing.
It
enables you to find empowerment and spiritual insight.
It
helps you find the right path for your life.”

“Well
it
doesn't flipping well work,” spits Mavis. “And if I'd bought
it
in Marks and Sparks I would have taken
it
back by now.”

“
It
empowered Daphne.”

“And look where
it
got her.”

“But, where is she?”

Voices echo like whispers in a pitch-black tunnel inside Daphne's mind. People are there, she knows, but she can't seem to reach the light switch.

“Miss Lovelace. Can you hear me?” asks Geoffrey Williamson, with a stethoscope on her chest.

“Daphne …” calls Isabel Semaurino as she sits by the bedside stroking the lifeless woman's boney hand.

“She didn't even recognize her own daughter,” Anne McGregor told Ted Donaldson when she phoned the ex-superintendent to bring him up to speed, and he grunted his surprise.

“Hah! I didn't know she had a daughter,” he said, before admitting there was much about Daphne he didn't know.

“So what happens now?” Donaldson asked, but they both knew the answer.

“She
is
eighty-five,” stressed McGregor, and he agreed.

It is Prague, summer of 1948, in Daphne's mind. President Klement Gottwald, Stalin's newly appointed puppet, has Czechoslovakia by the throat, and a handful of his thugs in Communist uniforms warm up their fists on a couple of freedom-seeking scientists while she and Michael Kent are forced to listen from the next room. “If they knock you down — stay down,” whispers Kent in the darkness of Daphne's mind. “Life can only get worse if you get up.”

“Daphne … Mother,” calls a voice in the darkness and Daphne knows that she has to stay down as long as possible and hope the cavalry will show up in time.

“Time is the only thing on your side,” whispers Michael Kent. “The longer you live, the more chance you have of survival. The moment you give up, you're dead.”

“What can I do?” asks Isabel, looking up at the strained face of Geoffrey Williamson as she keeps a grip on Daphne's hand.

“Just talk to her. Judging by the struggle she put up, she could be stronger than we thought. She's lost quite a bit of weight in the last few weeks, but physically she's not bad. It's her mental condition that really bothers me.”

“But can she hear me?”

The clear, logical words of Michael Kent override the muffled sounds from outside, so Daphne switches off as Williamson bends to whisper in Isabel's ear on his way out. “Hearing is usually the last faculty to go, so just be careful what you say.”

“Okay.”

“And try to be cheerful,” he cautions. “We don't want her picking up vibes or she'll get hysterical again.”

Isabel Semaurino has been an actress all her life and has never had any difficulty finding the right face for any part, but, sitting by Daphne's bedside staring at a complete stranger, she can't help but ask how she is supposed
to feel about someone she's never met, someone she never heard of until two weeks ago. What do you say?
I wish I had known you. I wonder what kind of woman you were.

“I'd like to know something about you before you …” she starts, then stops. “Sorry,” she says. “But I've never done this before … well, actually that's not quite true. I have sort of done it once before. Why am I telling you this? You can't hear me, can you? It's just that they didn't really give me enough information. It's like an improv stage show I did in Los Angeles at some downbeat backstreet place. ‘Be natural — be yourself,' they said and pushed me on stage — no scenery, no props, nothing. I just froze. I suppose I've always been used to having a script. So what will I say when people ask me about you?”

Isabel stops and tries to get a read on Daphne from her face. The violet bruises are turning black under the parchment skin, like India ink bleeding through airmail paper, and Isabel reaches out with a hand that, too, is showing the scars of age.

“‘Was she a good mother?' people will ask,” carries on Isabel as she tenderly strokes Daphne's face and tries to connect with the woman inside. “And I won't know what to say.”

“Mother,” sighs Trina, as Winifred brazenly stuffs the antique brass counter bell from the front desk of the Mitre into her handbag. “Please put it back.”

“What, dear?”

“Sorry,” says Trina turning to Imelda, the Latvian exchange clerk, after she has quit in a brief tug-of-war with her mother. “You'll have to charge me for it. Just put it on my bill.”

“Madam, it is zhe hotel bell,” croaks the young girl in astonishment, but Trina sloughs it off.

“It was old. Time you had a new one.”

“But, madam …” Imelda is still calling as Trina drags her mother to the car park and straps her in the back seat of the hire car.

“Are we going to El Camino?” asks Winifred while Trina scans the index of her private investigator's manual for the chapter on missing persons in preparation for her search for Daphne.

“Only if you give the bell back,” says the wannabe private eye as she spots the fierce-faced manager pounding in their direction.

“Identify precisely who is missing by compiling a subject profile,” Trina reads aloud, once the manager has left, and she begins to reel off a list of requirements: “Description; disabilities; deformities; name; birthdate; sexual orientation; marital status …” Then she pauses. “This is no good. It'll take forever.”

“Are we there yet?” inquiries Winifred from the back seat.

“Won't be long, Mum,” replies the young Canadian as she sets off for Daphne's house to see if she can pick up a track from there.

The trail of surveillance tapes has led David Bliss and his son-in-law to a quarter-mile stretch of urbanity where a growing sprawl of industrial units have spread like concrete fungi across a deer park that once backed onto the red brick Victorian terraces.

“I forgot to ask,” says Bliss as he and Peter Bryan slowly cruise an area of welding shops and industrial bakers. “Is everything all right, baby-wise?”

“Fine, Dave. No problems at all.”

“Problems,” muses Bliss to himself, and fiercely focuses on passing factories to avoid listing a catalogue of crises caused by his daughter when she was a baby.

“Although Samantha is beginning to worry that she might not be able to cope,” Bryan is saying as Bliss
concentrates on overflowing staff car parks and jammed side streets with the growing feeling that, unless God is on their side, they will never find the truck.

“All new parents worry about that,” answers Bliss in a reassuring tone, and he smiles inwardly in memory of the fragile young life that lay in his arms only yesterday, and who today is expecting her own baby — his grandchild.

“So … what's happening with Daisy?” inquires Bryan as they slowly tour row upon row of resting automobiles looking for one that sticks out.

“I've had so much on my plate,” says Bliss, conveniently excusing himself for not dropping everything to pursue the woman he calls fiancée. “But I've spoken to her a couple of times.”

The conversations have been as torturous as twentieth-century transatlantic telephone calls. “You go.” “No, you go.” “No, it's your turn,” they bickered in between periods of silence, and then they echoed each other. “I'm okay. And you?” “I'm okay.” “The weather's good.” “It's good here, too.” Bliss is still signing off with, “I love you,” but whatever has come between them is a festering sore that won't heal, and he would say “Just tell me the truth and get it over with” if he didn't already know how much suffering that would cause him.

“You must understand how hard this is for me,” Isabel Semaurino is saying as she talks to herself in Daphne's darkened room. “I wasn't prepared for this. I thought you'd be dead already. They didn't tell me … I guess they didn't know.”

“Is everything all right, miss?” asks Brenda, Amelia Brimble's replacement, as she puts her head around the door. “How is the old duck?”

“Still asleep.”

“You can take a break and get some tea if you want,” says Brenda as she clatters in with a stand for an
intravenous drip. “The nurse is coming to put a tube in to stop her getting dehydrated.”

“All right,” says Isabel, grateful to be given direction, grateful to be back on the script.
Exit stage left
, she muses internally as she gives Daphne's hand a squeeze and rehearses her lines one more time. “Bye, Mother. I'll come back later.”

“Mother,” she mouths, recalling the woman who authored and directed her life as she makes her way down the stairs. Do this; Do that; Come here; Go there; Don't do that … Pushed and shoved into piano and violin, singing and ballet — squeezed into a tutu and crammed into pointes against her will; shouted at and slapped when she outgrew her dancing shoes.

“She's just too tall and gawky to be a ballerina,” Mrs. Fairweather, her teacher, finally admitted — something she would have said after the first lesson if she could have afforded to.

“I didn't do it on purpose, Mum,” the fifteen-year-old cried, but she was already being thrust in a different direction.

“Never mind, Isabel, dear. There's plenty of tall women in Hollywood.”

Stagecraft, elocution, and deportment — years of auditions and humiliations, but she made it to Los Angeles eventually: a few walk-ons; endless propositions; even a couple of lines off-camera to Meryl Streep in the wilds of Africa. At least, Meryl Streep was in Africa — on location on the plains of the Serengeti amongst herds of wildebeest and elephants. Isabel Semaurino, a.k.a. Devonia Dressler, was on a sterile Foley stage in the back lot of an L.A. studio.