Deadly Sin (37 page)

Davenport's chair develops spikes, and he asks, “Why?”

“I'm asking the questions, sir,” says the Chief Superintendent, and he looks to Davenport for an answer.

“My sister's first husband was a Williams — Trevor Williams,” admits Davenport, although his face says that he would rather be having a lobotomy without anaesthetic.

“So, at that time — say, ten years ago,” carries on Malloy, knowing from the fingerprints found in Daphne's room that he owns the situation, “— your sister would have been known as Mrs. Hilda Williams?”

“I suppose so.”

“You suppose so?” Malloy questions, piling on the pressure.

“Yes. All right. That was her name.”

“And where do you suppose she was living at that time, Mr. Davenport?”

“All right. I know what this is about,” Davenport concedes to relieve the pain. “But it was nothing to do with Hilda. It was him — her husband. He did it.”

The question “What did he do?” is redundant, but Malloy asks anyway.

The answer sticks in Davenport's throat, so Malloy leans in to the squirming man, saying, “Mr. Davenport. Were you aware that your sister was wanted for questioning regarding the suspected murders of at least twenty-five senior citizens — possibly many more — in the home that she and her husband were operating at the time?”

L
ife is a labyrinth — a long, winding pathway full of experiences and challenges that eventually doubles back on itself to end at the place where it all began. And as Isabel Semaurino finally reaches the end of one circuit in her life and is about to begin anew, she steps out of a taxi and walks into the midst of Daphne's homecoming celebration.

Balloons, streamers, and flags festoon the street outside Daphne's house. An island of tables, dragged from outhouses and carried from dining rooms into the centre of the cul-de-sac, is decorated with flowers and topped with cakes, pies, sandwiches and pots of Daphne's favourite tea — Keemun.

Daphne herself is as vibrant and colourful as the decorations. Wearing a flowery printed cotton dress flounced with ribbons, a floppy straw hat with a taffeta bow, and a giant smile, she is fending off a dozen uninhibited urchins as they tug at her for attention. “I saw you in the paper …
Mum says you're famous … I bet you know the Queen.” And then one grabs a paper napkin off the table and starts an avalanche as they all push for autographs.

At the table, Misty Jenkins, wearing her best jeans, cuts Mavis Longbottom a slice of her banana cream pie, saying, “… and I told him straight. Either those friggin' dogs go or I will,” while her teenage sons — caught between childhood and whatever passes for maturity in their world — try to appear cool as they wash down pink-iced fairy cakes and raspberry marshmallows with cans of beer.

Trina Button is lying face-down on the pavement, demonstrating the one-armed vasisthasana pose to Angel Robinson and a group of women neighbours, saying, “This one hurts like hell … it's great … you'll love it,” while her wheelchair-bound mother strokes Camilla the cat as she mourns the ruination of her feet to anyone who will listen. And then, as if someone pulled the plug, the world stops and everyone's eyes go to the woman with Italian chic who is advancing on Daphne.

Sixty-nine-year-old grandmother Isabel Semaurino, wearing a slinky red dress and a broad-rimmed silk hat, has tears in her eyes as she cheerily calls, “Hello. Do you remember me?”

“You came back then,” steps in Mavis, restarting the world, then she turns to Daphne. “This was the lady I was telling you about. The one who was asking about you.”

“I don't remember …” Daphne is saying vaguely as the urchins sense a problem and fade away, while Trina, Misty, Amelia, and several neighbours nose in on the situation and collectively hold their breath.

With the weight of a dozen pairs of eyes on her, Isabel is under pressure and searches for a way out. “Maybe I shouldn't have come till later …” she starts, but Daphne steps forward.

“Well, you're here now, dear. So what do you want?”

Daphne's phone rings and breaks the tension.

“I'll get it,” yells Trina, and Isabel's walk into the future is momentarily postponed until the Canadian races back, gushing, “It's the police for you, Daphne. They've arrested Hilda Fitzgerald.”

“For beating me up?”

“No,” says Trina in shocked tones. “For murdering twenty-five old dears.”

“What!” exclaims Daphne, but her concern for John Bartlesham and the rest of St. Michael's residents is quickly assuaged as she takes the phone and learns that the deaths occurred in Liverpool ten years ago.

“I was just at St. Michael's,” explains Isabel, realizing that she is still in the hot seat as Daphne gets details from P.C. Joveneski. “The police wouldn't let me in, so I came here.”

“I said that woman was evil,” trumpets Daphne, once she has relayed the information that Fitzgerald and her ex-husband not only swindled dozens of seniors in their care but hastened the old-timers into the next world to ensure a speedy collection of the spoils. “They thought she drowned with her husband when their yacht sank,” she continues, “until they found her fingerprints on my bedside table.”

“So you were right all along,” trills Trina jubilantly, and then she uses her hands to write a headline in the sky. “Daphne Lovelace, of Lovelace and Button (International Investigators) Inc., cracks mass murder case.”

“Well, the police cracked it really …” Daphne is trying to say, but Trina won't hear of it.

“Crap!” she snorts. “Most of them couldn't crack an egg.”

The news of Fitzgerald's arrest has taken the spotlight off the gatecrasher for a few minutes, but Isabel Semaurino has been winding herself up for this moment for several months, and she finally snaps.

“Could we talk … inside … just us?” she asks, taking Daphne firmly by the arm, and the small crowd's exuberance
deflates as Daphne walks up the front path of her house like a woman being led to the gallows.

“I don't want to spoil your day,” starts Isabel as soon as they are seated in Daphne's parlour. “But when Mum died a few months ago I went through her papers and found this.”

The sepia-edged letter, now stained with Isabel's tears, is sixty-nine years old. There is no question of that. The date is clearly written in the top right-hand corner, underneath an address that is immediately recognized by Daphne.

“That's where we used to live,” she says, still not comprehending that the letter is signed by her parents, Alfred and Alice.

“It was hidden in a secret drawer inside my mother's wooden writing case,” explains Isabel, but Daphne is still in the dark as she begins to read.

“We want to thank you for taking Ophelia's baby …”

Daphne stops and pushes the letter away. “What is this?” she demands. “Some kind of trick. What are you playing at?”

“Ophelia Lovelace. That is you, isn't it?” says Isabel as she reaches out to the woman. “Did you have a baby when you were young?”

Daphne is watchful as she tries to fit the woman into the same mould as Hilda Fitzgerald by skimming through a catalogue of potential scams in her mind. “Who are you?” she wants to know, and Isabel points to the letter and tells her.

“If that was your address, and those were your parents, then I must be your daughter.”

But Daphne shoots straight back. “I don't have a daughter. My baby died. It was stillborn. We put it in a box and buried it in the woods.” The words come out. The same words she has used over the years to comfort herself whenever called upon to coo over someone else's baby. Yet,
deep down, she always knew there was no baby in the box. She heard her baby cry as it was whisked from her bedroom inside a blanket. Subconsciously, she even suspected that the young couple who appeared in her parents' life, and just as quickly disappeared, had arranged some kind of deal. But it was her parents' deal, not hers. She would have kept the baby, had it lived. But it died. Her mother told her so.

“Never mind, Ophelia,” Alice Lovelace said as she wept alongside her sixteen-year-old at the graveside of a heavy old firebrick. “It's probably for the best. And you're very young. You'll have plenty of opportunity for more.”

The ruse worked. The family closed ranks over Ophelia Lovelace's little indiscretion, and the world kept turning. But there was never another baby. The onset of war intervened in the natural rhythm of her young life, and she quickly sloughed off the childlike naïveté of her Shakespearean namesake to take her middle name, Daphne, and become the heroine that Hamlet's Ophelia never would.

“Your baby didn't die,” says Isabel plainly and firmly, as she invites the confused old lady to look into her eyes. “And when I saw you lying in that bed I knew straight away that you were my mother.”

“This isn't possible …”

“My parents never told me I was adopted,” continues Isabel, sensing that she must keep up the pressure. “They just registered me as their baby. I was a Whittaker before I married Marco and moved to Florence. I never knew — would never have known — if I hadn't found the letter.”

Outside in the street the children are partying on, but clouds are building, a storm is brewing and, with the birthday girl absent, the adults are growing anxious.

“Do you think she's all right?” asks Trina, and Mavis is eventually pushed in.

“Did you want some tea?” she questions nervously as she taps lightly and sticks her head around the parlour door.

“I think I need a large brandy,” says Daphne, and she hurriedly turns the letter over while she comes to grips with the past and looks for a way into the future.

David Bliss is firmly on another lap of his life's labyrinth as he heads into the future as an author and grandfather, although as he drove from Westchester to Heathrow he couldn't help but take a look over his shoulder at the fiasco of the Queen's visit.

“It's a classic Orwellian plot, Peter,” he says excitedly, calling his son-in-law while waiting for his flight to Nice. “Straight out of 1984: Big Brother, mind control, constant East/West wars, everybody lying.”

“Why?”

“Power … money … greed. Isn't it always the same?”

“But why stop the Queen?”

“Think about it, Peter,” says Bliss, having worked out the scenario in his own mind, concluding that religious harmony, however unlikely after more than two thousand years of constant war, could be catastrophic for Western defence industries and oil companies. “If the Queen got them all singing from the same hymn sheet, who would the Americans fight?”

“Do they have to fight?”

“Peter, history — the Nazis did the same. The best way to control the populace, make them obedient to government, and prevent civil uprising is to keep them terrified, keep warning them they are under attack. And if anyone says otherwise or complains about loss of freedom or civil liberties, label them unpatriotic and tell them they're putting their countrymen in danger.”

“And you think the American government is doing this?”

“Sure. They've been doing it for the last sixty years or more,” says Bliss, starting a long list beginning with the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia. “And when there was
no real enemy, they had drug wars or wars on terrorism, or they attacked their neighbours like Grenada and Panama.”

“I don't know …” starts Bryan, unconvinced, then he tries to throw a wrench. “Okay. Let's say I buy that. Why did they drop their objections the second time around?”

“Because,” says Bliss. “By that time they'd realized it caused less trouble for everyone if she went than if she didn't.”

“Paris on our starboard side,” sings out the captain on the P.A. as Bliss heads to Provence with a clear plan in mind. “Daisy,” he will say, “as much as I love you, it is time that we both moved on.”

The logo for the BBC's six o'clock news appears on Bliss's seat-back screen, and he is fully expecting another round of burning mosques and torched churches when the name
Westchester
takes him by surprise.

“After ten years on the run, Hilda Fitzgerald, wanted for questioning over the deaths of …”

“Well, I'm damned,” muses Bliss as he slots the arrested woman into place in his mind.

“It is believed that as many as forty senior citizens may have been murdered by the couple,” says the national news reporter as she stands outside Westchester Police Station, before explaining that, while apparently unconnected to the original crimes, Patrick Davenport and Robert Jameson are being interviewed in connection with possession of money from the victims' estates. Then, as the camera zooms in for a close-up, she concludes by saying, “Superintendent Anne McGregor of Westchester Police earlier confirmed that the arrest had come about due to their inquiries into a complaint of abuse at the home.”

“Well, well, well,” laughs Bliss to himself. “Daphne Lovelace strikes again. Will she ever give up?”

It is roughly two hours since Daphne was felled by her daughter's arrival, and with her mind already overburdened by the traumatic events of the past few weeks, she has been struggling to come to terms with the situation. Perhaps it's a trick, a dream — or even death.

“Two grandchildren?” she questions Isabel for the fifth time.

“Luigi and Maria,” says Isabel, nodding. “But they are both grown up and married now, Mother.”

Daphne's eyes begin watering again, and Isabel hands her a tissue, saying, “Is it all right if I call you ‘Mother'? Only I always called my other mother ‘Mum.'”

“Mother?” Daphne muses. Now this must be a dream. But it's a dream come true. How many times in her life has she heard a child call “Mother” and never once reacted. And how many times in her life has she wished that she could. Now she can.