Deadly Sin (3 page)

It is low tide. The receding water has bared mud banks spattered with supermarket buggies and rusted bicycle frames, and a lone gull quietly worries at a bag of garbage. The guidebooks may trumpet the sighting of an occasional salmon, but the river still lacks the splendour of the Danube or the romance of the Seine, although Bliss knows well that the celebrated French river is no cleaner. Maybe Parisians see garbage differently, he surmises — like art nouveau — adding to the charm rather than detracting.

But just how much bluer is the Danube or sweeter the Seine? he asks himself as he gazes into the brackish water, then he picks up his feet, reminding himself that someone in France is waiting for a phone call.

“It's bloody hot here,” Bliss complains to his French fiancée once he's poured himself an icy lager, but Daisy LeBlanc is steps from the Mediterranean and shrugs it off.

“Did you have zhe good day?”

“Not really. I nearly killed the Queen.”

“I zhink zhat is good,
non
?” laughs Daisy. “Like Marie-Antoinette — zhe guillotine. Perhaps zhere are many ozher zhings you can learn from zhe French,
non
?”

“No,” he says, laughing. “But maybe zhe French can learn how to say ‘the.' Anyway, it was only an exercise. Just testing communications and testing me.”

“Did you pass?”

“Did I pass?” he echoes, unsure of the answer. Was he supposed to pass? “The real thing is next Friday,” he says without answering. “I've got a week to study the manual.”

“Too slow; too little; too late. You're gonna have to do better, much better,” Commander Fox bitched at the debriefing once the Secret Service squad left. “You're rusty, Bliss, that's your trouble. You've had a year off and you've gone soft.”

“I was writing a book,” he protested, but Fox didn't let up.

“Wake up, man. You're supposed to be a policeman, not a bloody author.”

I solved the mystery of the Man in the Iron Mask
, he wanted to complain, but he knew it wouldn't get him anywhere. Originality and creativity are not widely applauded in the police.

“Judges can be funny about policemen with overactive imaginations, Chief Inspector,” the commander admonished. “Stick to your job. Stick to irrefutable facts.”

But what facts are truly irrefutable? Bliss wondered and reflected on the times he witnessed the meltdown of a cast-iron case because a dozen dozy jurymen were befuddled by the mendacious shenanigans of a defence lawyer.

“You put her at risk. You took your eye off the ball. You'd better pray there's no sniper next week,” Commander Fox concluded.

A sniper! Bliss is still fuming inwardly. Why would anyone gun down a little grey-haired old lady without a penny in her purse?

“Are you all right, Daavid?” asks Daisy, sensing a vacuum, and Bliss straightens his thoughts.

“Sorry, dear. I was just wondering why someone would want to kill the Queen. It's not as though she has any real power. They'd just be aggravating an ancient theocratic wound.”

“What is zhis zheocratic zhing?” asks Daisy confusedly.

“Don't worry.” Bliss laughs. “I'm flying over next Friday after the Queen's visit, and I'm going to spend the whole weekend working on your tongue.”

“Oh, Daavid …”

“Fifty years old and still a bloody teenager,” sniggers Bliss to himself as he puts down the phone. It buzzes almost immediately.
She's remembered my birthday
, he thinks with a bounce, but he is quickly deflated. “Daphne?” he queries, recognizing the aging voice.

“I need a little help, David,” says Daphne Lovelace, calling from her home in Westchester, Hampshire.

“Help is what you usually give others, Daphne,” replies Bliss, having no difficulty recalling the times the eccentric spinster saved his bacon despite her advancing years.

Daphne Lovelace, O.B.E., a woman with a hat for every occasion and an adventure for every dinner party, is a lot closer to beating the longevity odds than she is willing to admit — unless it suits her. It suits her now.

“It's an utter disgrace, David,” she spits. “Someone of my age shouldn't have to put up with it.”

“Your age?” queries Bliss, though it is rhetorical and he knows it, so he skips, asking, “What shouldn't you have to put up with?”

“Listen,” she says and waves the phone in the air.

The thumping bass of rap music, the revving of motor-bikes, the barking of dogs, and a foul-mouthed woman screeching abuse coalesce into a cacophony that makes Bliss duck.

“Daphne,” he shouts. “Is that your Gilbert and Sullivan society or are you having a rave?”

“It's the new neighbours,” she protests angrily, then carries on carping about the family that has moved in next door: wall-shaking music, air-rending exhausts, loud people with even louder motorbikes who entertain a constant stream of unsavoury characters at unsavoury times, and two muscular terriers who throw themselves at the fence every time she ventures into her back garden.

“They've smashed my windows, peed on my gladiolis, and even pulled up the carrots I was growing specially for the horticultural fair,” she complains, although it's not the worst. The worst is the disappearance of her cat, Missie Rouge, and she is close to tears as she says, “They probably ate the poor thing.”

“You're exaggerating,” says Bliss. “Anyway, I thought it was an elderly couple next door. I met them.”

“Phil and Maggie,” she agrees with a loud sniff. “They died.”

“Not the heat —” starts Bliss, but Daphne cuts him off.

“Oh no. They were ever so old,” she says, as if aging is an affliction from which she is immune. “Maggie went first. She was in one of those church-run seniors' homes, Auschwitz-by-the-sea, and Phil just pined.”

“It happens,” suggests Bliss, ignoring the jibe, though Daphne can't understand how her new neigh-bours got the house.

“Phil and Maggie had no family — none worth speaking of. I'd do their shopping and get their prescriptions. And I cooked for Phil …”

I guess you were expecting a handout
, thinks Bliss uncharitably as Daphne continues with her list of
good-neighbourliness. But he finds it surprising that she didn't anticipate the existence of a relative in the woodwork. “Actually, I'm really busy,” he says, cutting her off eventually, and he suggests she take her complaint to Superintendent Donaldson at Westchester police station.

“Ted retired last month,” complains Daphne, as if he did it deliberately. “There's a schoolgirl running the place now, and she good-as-much told me to buy earplugs.”

Donaldson's replacement was clearly unaware of Daphne's record and status. Not only was the elderly spinster the station's charlady for more years than anyone could remember, she probably solved more crimes than many of the less inspired detectives. The number of criminals convicted in the five years since Daphne handed in the keys to Westchester police station's tea cupboard has decreased annually, though no one at the weekly C.I.D. meeting would dream of attributing the decline to her absence. However, no one would deny that whenever she slowly lowered her polished copper pot onto the detective inspector's desk, scratched her forehead, and mused, “That's funny — my milkman (or baker or butcher) was telling me about …” anyone with any sense would put down their tea and pick up a pen.

“I told little Miss Marple straight. I said, ‘I was cleaning the constables' toilets here before you pooped your first nappy.'”

“I bet that went down well,” mutters Bliss, but Daphne fails to see why diplomacy should trump the truth.

“Call themselves detectives,” she rants. “Most of them couldn't spot a turd in a toilet, and as for …” but Bliss tunes out her diatribe, knowing he'd probably agree and guessing that much the same would have been said of him and his peers in his early years.

“If I had neighbours like that in olden times I could have bribed a witch to put a hex on their virgins and poison their goat,” Daphne is concluding when Bliss comes back, and he laughs it off.

“Now don't go getting yourself in trouble. I've bailed you out often enough.”

“Bailed me out, Chief Inspector! I seem to remember —”

“All right, Daphne,” says Bliss, needing no reminder of the times the shoe was on the other foot. “Only you'll have to join the queue. I've already got one little old lady on my plate this week.”

“Old!” snorts Daphne indignantly, as expected, though she calms once he's revealed the identity of his other charge.

“I suppose I'll have to yield to royalty,” she says as she puts down the phone and refills the teapot. “Keemun,” she muses as she pours, knowing it is the Queen's favourite, and then she has an idea.

“Your Majesty,” she writes, after she has dug a monogrammed Sheaffer fountain pen and a bottle of India ink from her bureau.

“Subversion: the art of demoralizing the enemy by persistently undermining their morale,” writes Daphne in a notebook, once she has leant on the Queen for support, then she pours another tea, sits back, and closes her eyes in an effort to blot out the neighbours' noise.

Images from another lifetime take shape, images undimmed by more than six decades: corrugated iron huts draped with camouflage netting in the woodland behind a solid Victorian mansion; the air heavy with the stench of latrines, cigarettes, and cheap floor polish; a hundred keen and excited women in drab fatigues being groomed for death — young women, most barely in their twenties, who a year earlier would have been giddily choosing dresses for engagement parties and coming-out balls.

“Dishearten, demoralize, and discourage by destroying, disrupting, and denying,” ran the mnemonic of the psychological warfare officer as Daphne and her classmates were prepared to take on the Nazis in occupied France, and Daphne recalls it with a clarity that proves conclusively to
her that she's not coming down with Alzheimer's, but twenty minutes later she puts the kettle on again. It's not that she's entirely bereft of ideas for ousting the enemy on her doorstep; she simply has no way to get her hands on the necessary explosives, detonators, or strychnine. “I'll have to be subtle,” she tries telling herself, but in her mind she sees a plume of smoke rising from the rubble, while sombre-faced undertaker's men carry charred bodies to a black van and someone dumps the limp carcasses of two pit bulls into a hastily dug grave.

“That'll teach you for eating my poor little pussy cat,” she sniffles, but the mirage evaporates instantly as the dogs spy her peering out of her kitchen window and launch themselves against the wire fence.

“Shut up! Please shut up!” she says as she clamps her hands over her ears, but the pulsing thunder of a bass drum beats into her.

“Shut up! Shut up!” she yells as she escapes the kitchen with the teapot, but the noise tracks her through the hallway into the living room.

“Shut up! Shut up!” she screeches as she stands, rigid, in the centre of the room, then she lets go, drops the pot, and slumps onto the settee where she buries her head under a pillow and bursts into tears.

F
our unopened birthday cards lie on David Bliss's hall floor on Saturday morning, but none bear a French stamp.
Daisy's forgotten
, he tells himself, but resists the temptation to phone in case he is proved right. “She'll probably call later,” he muses as he drags himself to the kitchen for a coffee.

Samantha, his married daughter, called just as he was getting into bed. “Sorry, Dad, we thought you'd be going to visit Daisy in France,” she explained, after apologizing for the fact that she and Peter, her chief inspector husband, had made alternate plans for the weekend.

“Oh, don't worry, Sam. I'm far too busy to bother with birthdays at my age,” Bliss protested with a brave lilt, “and I've got a lot of work to do on the Queen's visit.” But sleep evaded him. “Hot and sticky,” the late-night forecaster had predicted, and Bliss's mind wandered the hallways of his life, peeking into rooms — some distant, full of warmth and smiling families, balloons, cakes, and candles; others,
more recent, empty and cold — as he sought a comfortable spot on the perspiration-soaked sheet.

“Fifty years,” he muses as he pulls a face in a grimy mirror and sees a bleak day ahead. At least nothing fell off or fell out during the night, he wryly tells himself, although cracks are beginning to appear. The crinkles may be laughter lines — nonetheless they are lines, and the morning stubble has a definite greyness.

The phone buzzes. “At last,” he sighs, but it is Samantha with another apology.

“Don't worry about me,” he repeats valiantly, “I've got masses to do.”

The fridge calls, but one glance reminds him that he hasn't found time to shop.
What am I doing?
he questions.
It's my birthday. I'll treat myself
.

Daphne Lovelace, in contrast, has shopped. Since the pan-demonic invasion next door she has become a frequent loiterer at Patel's corner store, and her larder would be more at home in Mumbai than Westchester. But it's Saturday morning and, unless she beards the beasts and ventures into the wilderness that until recently was her vegetable garden, she is hopeful that peace will reign until the neigh-bours surface around lunchtime.

It is barely nine-thirty when the spell is broken as Mavis Longbottom bangs on Daphne's back door and wakes the dogs.

“How on earth do you put up with it?” asks Mavis as she pushes her way into the kitchen and slams the door in the face of the snarling pit bulls. “It's like the Hounds o' the bloomin' Baskervilles.”

“It's worse,” says Daphne with her hands over her ears.

“Can't you do something?”

“Maybe,” replies Daphne, but her projected stratagem has stuck at blasting a broadside of Tchaikovsky or Strauss
from her stereo and incinerating a pan of vindaloo day and night. However, in her more rational moments, she realizes that if it comes to open warfare she has a limited arsenal. “I phoned the noise-abatement people at the council,” she complains as she drags her friend away from the window and picks up the pot to pour a second cup. “But they're useless. They couldn't hear a farter at a funeral. ‘Just listen to those damned dogs,' I said, holding the phone out, and little miss lug-ears said, ‘I 'spect they just want to play.' ‘Play,' I said, ‘Rip me to shreds is more like it. Just like my poor little pussy.'”