Deadly Sin (9 page)

“I'll probably shoot them,” snarls Daphne under her breath, but Jenkins reads her lips and his face instantly darkens.

“Touch my dogs an' I'll beat the fuckin' —”

“Rob!” screeches Misty. “Leave the old biddy alone. She ain't worth it.”

“Well —”

“I said leave it.” And then she turns to Daphne with half a smile. “Sorry, luv. He can be a bit touchy at times.”

David Bliss is also experiencing touchiness at Daisy's home in St-Juan-sur-Mer.

“Ah, Madame LeBlanc,
bonjour
,” he trills, with a supermarket bouquet and an exaggerated bow. But his fiancée's mother recoils and tries to shut the door.

“Madame,” he calls confusedly, but the door is still closing.

“Madame,” he repeats, and sticks out a foot. The door stops, but Geneviève Leblanc uses it as a shield while she eyes him as if deciding between the Grim Reaper or a door-to-door Bible puncher.

“Daisy wasn't expecting me,” Bliss carries on chattily in French as he thrusts the flowers forward, hoping to warm the woman.

“
C'est évidente, monsieur
,” she replies, shrugging off the flowers.

“
Monsieur
?” queries Bliss. What is this “monsieur”? “It is David — remember?” he says while trying to hold her gaze.

“Daavid?” she questions vaguely with a heavy accent, and he is appalled at the apparent deterioration of the woman in the few months since her mother's death. Not only has she forgotten his name, she doesn't know where Daisy is, when she will be back, or whom she is with.

“I could try her friends,” suggests Bliss with a disarming smile, but Geneviève is still hiding and merely shrugs when it comes to names, addresses, and telephone numbers.

“I'll just come in and wait then …” he starts and makes a move, but she stands firm and he backs down. “She's probably shopping — Cannes, I expect,” he prattles on, still smiling, thinking,
It'll give me time to get a room at the Carlton and pick up a bouquet of roses
. “I'll come back at seven. Tell Daisy I'm taking her somewhere really special tonight.”

Geneviève Leblanc's silence tells a story, but Bliss isn't listening as the door slowly closes and the lock clinks into place.

The spare front door key to Phil and Maggie Morgan's old home has been calling Daphne ever since the Jenkins tribe blasted off to the beach.

“They would've changed the locks,” she assures herself for the
n
th time as she is drawn back to her hallway by the dull brass key hanging on the mahogany umbrella stand.

“For emergencies,” Phil said as he handed it to her nearly twenty years ago, when he and Maggie, in their early sixties, made their last serious effort to explore the world. But the travel agent's “Romantic Getaway Weekend of a Lifetime” turned into three days of hell in a frigid back street mausoleum at the end of November in Clacton-on-Sea, from which they never really recovered.

“This is an emergency,” Daphne finally convinces herself as she takes down the key and plops on the deerstalker hat that she bought, half-seriously, to mark the founding of an international investigation agency with Trina Button following a misadventure in the foothills of Washington's Cascade Mountains. Then she puts on a sad mien and apes to the umbrella stand's mirror. “It's quite possible that Missie Rouge, my poor little pussy, snuck in to visit Phil, not realizing that he has died, and has become trapped.”

She isn't convinced, so she tries it again with a tattered black beret, a smudge of mascara under each eye, and the hint of a tear. “Better,” she decides, but there is still something missing. And then she seizes on Missie Rouge's rhine-stone-studded collar — Christmas, Easter, and the Queen's official birthday only — and rushes to the kitchen to open her last can of Kat-O-Meat.

“N-n-nice … doggies,” she stutters two minutes later as she cowers in her own back garden while the dogs trampoline off the wire fence in front of her. “Here you are then,” she shouts, tossing the fish-caked collar over the top. The collar is shredded in seconds, scattering jewels and hardware across the garden. Then the pit bulls start on each other for the scraps.

“I wish I'd chucked in a handful of razor blades now,” she mutters as she heads to the Jenkinses' front door, then, as she fishes the key from her pinafore pocket, she puts a
crack into her voice as she polishes her defence. “See for yourself — my little kitty's collar is all over the garden. She must be here somewhere.”

With the hotel booked, champagne on ice, and roses bought, Bliss has an hour to kill.
She has to be here somewhere
, he constantly reminds himself as he sneaks around the swanky shops of the Rue d'Antibes in Cannes, hoping to leap out of the shadows to surprise her. But ten look-alikes have him running in circles, so he takes to a sidewalk café, orders Evian water, and hopes that the tide will eventually turn in his direction.

There is no way Daphne's key will fit — but it does, and the blood pulsing through her temples makes her pause for a deep breath.

“It definitely isn't going to turn,” she bets herself, but her hands shake and her knees wobble when it does.

Now what?

“There's no harm in just looking around; see what they've done to the place,” she tells herself, her thoughts full of nostalgia as nearly four decades flash through her mind, and the door slowly opens on a smiling middle-aged couple with Micky, their docile golden Labrador, at their feet.

“Let me show you around,” Maggie said as she invited her new neighbour to view her agglomeration of furnishings — lovingly polished family treasures, much like Daphne's own, that would give a Southeby's evaluator the giggles; knick-knacks and bric-a-brac that wouldn't raise an eyebrow at the weekly auction in the basement of the Corn Exchange; familiar old masters “painted” on cheap cardboard; and a collection of porcelain figurines. “Wedgwood, Meisson, and Royal Doulton,” Maggie
declaimed, circumnavigating the room with her pointing finger, adding smugly, “They're very valuable.”

But the
Antiques Road Show
snitched on her eventually.

“Could I have a little sugar, please,” Daphne asked innocuously on one rare occasion when she was invited into the front parlour for tea, but she had mischief on her mind and a magnifying glass in her purse.

“I thought you were sweet enough already,” quipped Maggie on her way to the kitchen.

“Oh, no. Not really,” replied Daphne with a Martha Stewart smile, and she had one of the porcelain dogs upside down in a flash.

“It is real you know,” insisted Maggie fiercely as she quickly popped her head back into the parlour.

“Oh! You startled me,” said Daphne, but she recovered quickly. “I can see that,” she said, pointing to the inscribed “Staffordshire” on the base, while knowing very well that, according to the TV expert, it had been stamped by a Chinese knock-off merchant in the early nineteen-hundreds.

Maggie Morgan's carpeted front parlour was not unlike Missy Rouge's bejewelled collar: generally reserved for glittering occasions like Christmas, weddings, Easter, and special events, but never humdrum anniversaries like birthdays. A funeral might qualify, but only if the vicar was in attendance, and then only under Maggie's strict supervision. Slippers, no pipes or cigars, nothing messy — cucumber and salmon sandwiches at a pinch, but never flaky mince pies or anything with jam or cream.

“I simply can't abide messy eaters,” Maggie would loftily proclaim, and everyone would sheepishly edge forward on their seats and take a firm grip on their false teeth, while she paraded around like a schoolmarm with a little silver-plated dustpan and brush behind her back.

“I wonder what happened to all her china,” Daphne is musing aloud as she finally sidles into the front hallway,
then she stops in horror at a scene reminiscent of Basra or Baghdad after a visit from a stroppy bunch of U.S. Marines.

“Oh my God,” she breathes and feels her blood draining at the junkyard jumble of scrapped motorbikes and dog-eaten furniture — Maggie's furniture and Maggie's prized figurines with dismembered ears, arms, and legs — set up like a fairground shooting gallery by a catapault-crazy fifteen-year-old. The kitchen, dining room, and parlour look much the same, with grease-spattered floors and walls, ripped curtains, and trashed furniture. Only the eye-popping plasma television and ear-rending stereo system rise above the chaos.

Daphne has suffered war at close quarters — parachuting into Normandy in advance of D-Day and fighting her way through enemy lines to Paris. She retched at the sight of Frenchmen's houses razed to rubble, their women and children, along with their precious belongings, pulverized into a sickening, fly-ridden morass of twisted bodies. She cried at the hurriedly dug graves of compatriots and foes, and she hid in shame for the role she played. But that was in a lifetime she left behind, until now, when the devastation inside her old friend's house shocks her back to the horrors of war, and she snaps.

“Let's see how you like it,” she hollers and picks up a crowbar.

Daphne Lovelace, the aging war veteran, is deafened by her fury, and the sound of a key turning in the front door doesn't register as she blindly takes revenge on behalf of a dying generation whose sacrifices no longer engender respect.

The sun is sinking into the Mediterranean, along with Bliss's dreams, as he paces outside Daisy's front door. And then his cellphone rings.

Daisy
, he thinks, but it's an English number that he doesn't recognize.

“Westchester Police Station, Anne McGregor,” says the superintendent. “I'm sorry to bother you on the weekend, Chief Inspector, but we are trying to trace the next of kin of a Miss Ophelia Lovelace of 27 …”

“Ophelia?” he says vaguely as the voice continues, then his brain kicks in. What did Daphne say about
Hamlet
's Ophelia when he first knew her? “Who would want to be named after a silly nincompoop who committed suicide because she thought her man didn't love her?”

“Are you still there, Chief Inspector?” queries Ms. McGregor.

“Oh, dear. I was expecting something like this,” says Bliss, his voice sinking. “What was it — heart attack, stroke?”

“No. Nothing like that.”

“Accident?”

“No. She's all right. It's just that she's in custody and we need a family member to take care of her because of her age and mental state.”

“They've got the wrong man, David,” yells Daphne in the background as she makes a grab for the phone. “I told you this lot couldn't find a turd in a toilet.”

“In custody?”

“Be quiet, Ms. Lovelace,” says McGregor, gently pushing Daphne away, but the commando inside the elderly woman escapes and she leaps forward with a kung-fu yelp and chops the phone from the officer's hand.

“Shit!” shouts McGregor as the handset hits her office floor, but as she stoops to retrieve it Daphne sends her flying with a hard shove.

“Daphne … Is that you?” Bliss is querying as the superintendent drags herself across the floor on her knees towards the phone, but Daphne beats her to it, scrabbles under the desk, and curls herself around it.

“Get out of there,” orders McGregor as she grabs a leg and pulls.

“They're beating me up, David. Call the press,” yells Daphne into the phone as she tries to kick off her attacker. “Police brutality.”

“Give me the phone,” demands McGregor, but Daphne is on a roll.

“Hundred-year-old woman attacked by a —”

“Daphne, you're not a hundred …” Bliss is saying as the superintendent manages to get a grip on the handset.

“Give it to me,” she orders as she tussles over the instrument, but her hand is in front of Daphne's face and the old soldier still has a good set of teeth.

“Bitch!” screeches the superintendent as she whips her hand away. “I'll bloody do you for that.”

“She's threatening me now, David. Police intimidation.”

“What on earth's going on?” tries Bliss, but Anne McGregor has had enough. Pulling herself upright she tries to re-establish dignity.

“All right, Ms. Lovelace. One last time,” she says. “Give me the bloody phone.”

“She's swearing at me now, David. Call the police. I want to lay charges.”

“Daphne —” starts Bliss, but Anne McGregor has finally snapped and she rips the phone line out of the socket.

“Oh,” complains Daphne testily as she slides from under the desk. “That wasn't very sporting of you.”

I
t is 9:15 p.m. in Cannes, and the palm-fringed promenade is already teeming. David Bliss sits apart from the bustle, on the Carlton Hotel's grandiose terrace bar, and considers dragging a complete stranger from the crowd with the promise of a no-strings feast.
I've bloody paid enough for it
, he tells himself,
someone might as well eat it. But who?

It takes him only a few minutes to scan the nightly parade of buff-bodied, pinch-bummed young men, pinch-faced old dames, and near-naked nymphets to realize that he is in the middle of a minefield. Adding up the potential cost, he concludes that it will be much cheaper to swallow the price of the meal. In any case, Daisy will come, he convinces himself. But he's left so many messages on her answering machine that he's drained his cellphone and he'll be out of reach once he leaves the hotel.

He tried Daisy's door a dozen times between seven and nine, and at first the faint shadow of her mother fell across
the curtains. But following his second visit, the tight steel shutters came down and the ghostly figure evaporated.

He stretched his reservation at the Carlton's beachside restaurant until time ran out. “Zhe final sitting is nine-thirty and zhere are no refunds,” the maître d'hotel haughtily insisted when he booked and paid. “Zhis evening is special for zhe fireworks only.”