The Dave Bliss Quintet (18 page)

“Oh! Sorry,” he says, “I was miles away.”

“It's OK,” says Daisy as another bomb bursts overhead. “I ask if you will take some more wine.”

“
Merci
— thanks.”

“By zhe way,” she asks, “did you take zhe donkey in Corsica?”

“I didn't find any,” he admits.

“Oh zhat is zhe shame,” she says. “It is zhe
spécialit
é
de la Corse.”

A momentary groan from Bliss as his stomach heaves is stifled by the
finale spectaculaire.
A hundred gigantic fireworks simultaneously take to the air from three separate
barges, drown the music in a thunderous blitz, and set the sky afire. Then the applause of the crowd and the blaring sirens of every ship in the bay pick up the deafening chant and carry it on and on in a spontaneous joyous outburst that leaves Bliss slumped in his chair with barely controlled tears.

“Wow! That was
incroyable
,” he murmurs.

Daisy's face sinks when Bliss excuses himself on arrival in St-Juan. It is barely midnight, but he needs to find Marcia Grimes as soon as possible.

“I come,” Daisy says, but he is firm.

Natalia did not surface on the deck of the
Sea-Quester
, and he kept watch until the vessel took off from the bay with its cargo. Has she already returned to her mother?

“Why you see that woman?” demands Daisy, and he pulls her up harshly, annoyed at her presumptuousness.

“Daisy, I've had a very nice time, but now I have to go.”

That was a bit rough, he scolds himself as he walks along the promenade. She's really very nice; why did you do that? But he knows why — it isn't her fault. It's him. With too many impossible relationships under his belt, too many painful memories, he is determined to keep his hands in his pockets. In any case, he only has another day or two — three at the most.

The promenade at St-Juan-sur-Mer is alive with Bastille Day revellers, but L'Escale has lost some of its sport without Hugh and his followers. Hopefully Jacques will
be back. He's probably giving the
gargali
a little more time to show up, thinks Bliss, as he sits and signals Angeline for his usual tipple. In the meantime he will just have to make do with the v
ent de midi,
which still arrives unfailingly at around eleven o'clock daily, ruffling the warm water and starching the beachside flags.

A giant “Happy Bastille Day” balloon escaped from a kid at eleven-thirty and he's still screaming half an hour later. What would the eighteenth-century French
aristos
have thought of that? Bliss wonders, as three lardy English women, looking tarty in their skin-tight skirts and T-shirts, hobble past in stilettos.

“Watch your purse, dear,” says one. “You can't trust these bloody foreigners.”

Bliss looks around, observing, “Half of these foreigners are English.”

Grimes must be in his usual spot, he realizes, seeing a particularly pretty girl pass, proudly displaying a very large and elaborate pot in both hands, as if she had thrown it herself.

“
Merde!
A double blocker,” he mumbles, and watches to see which seafront hotel is going to suffer. She could do a whole sewer with that one, he is thinking, when she trips on the corner of the Napoleon memorial, falls, and splats the wet pot across the promenade.

“Probably for the best, luv,” he mutters, as her face crumples.

“David Bliss, I presume,” says a voice at his shoulder, and he cracks his neck, with Edwards on his mind and “Burbeck” on his lips.

“Peter Marshall, Chief Inspector at the Yard,” the voice introduces itself.

“Ah …”

“Commander Richards said I'd find you here,” continues the voice, as Bliss is still trying to sort out his mind. Richards has sent someone to check up on me, he guesses, and flies off angrily, “He could've phoned.”

“What are you bleating about, Dave?” Marshall starts, but Bliss lays into him.

“How dare you spy —”

“Hey, Dave — cool it,” soothes the chief inspector, easing himself into a chair. “No one's spying. I just happened to be on my way down here with the wife and kiddies for a week and he pulled me aside and said you were here convalescing — that's all.”

Bliss sinks back, now fearful his outburst has blown his cover. “Convalescing. Is that all he said?”

Marshall's face suggests he knows more, but he answers, “Yes.”

“Guv. Level with me, please,” says Bliss, looking over the other man's shoulder, wondering just how much he knows of Johnson or Edwards, still hoping to find out whether or not the case is genuine or just an excuse to keep him out of the way.

Marshall pulls his chair closer and admits sheepishly, “OK. He told me you'd had a really rough time in that Canadian affair. But everyone knows that. Edwards really did a number on you.” What he doesn't say is that Commander Richards's face blanched at the prospect of Bliss's presence in St-Juan being uncovered by another officer.

Bliss tones himself down and drops the other man's rank. “Sorry, Peter, I just thought he might have phoned, that's all.”

“Probably didn't have a chance. I was just clearing up a few things in the office yesterday, and I bumped
into him and Edwards chatting in the mess.”

Bliss's brain shoots back into overdrive. “Does Edwards know I'm here?”

Marshall shrugs. “I couldn't say. Like I said, Richards sort of pulled me to one side. Maybe — I don't know. Is that a problem?”

Why am I worried? thinks Bliss, I'm going home in a day or so. “No — no problem.... So, Richards didn't send any message or anything?”

“No — not really. Just said I should keep mum about you being here. Wouldn't want the troops getting uppity if they thought one of the officers was getting a special deal — you know what they're like. But that's not a problem for me. It's about time us officers got a bit of gravy.”

However, there is a problem — a big problem, in Bliss's mind. Edwards is suspended. What would he be doing at the Yard, especially on a Saturday, talking to Richards? And he's still trying to decide what to say when Marshall leaps out of his seat, breathing, “Oh my God!”

Then Angeline appears, unscathed as always, from behind a fleeing bus and nonchalantly delivers drinks to a nearby table.

“I thought she'd been swatted,” Marshall admits, taking a breath and sitting down.

“You need a few tips,” says Bliss, orders the chief inspector a double Scotch, then fills him in on the local customs, ending with a warning about the shiftiness of Jacques's wind, finally adding, “Always tip well or you'll get a sneezer next time.”

“I'll remember,” he says with a hard swallow.

“So where is your missus?” asks Bliss.

“Down the other end trying to charm a free pot off a bloke,” Marshall scoffs, rising to leave, and Bliss resists
the temptation to say she's wasting her time — unless she's got a six-hundred-degree kiln in her suitcase.

Grimes is a right charmer, thinks Bliss a few minutes later, as a bright little girl offers him a view of her newly struck potpourri dish. “
C'est très joli,
” he says, and she beams a toothy smile before lumbering her father with the wet pot.

Women — always women. Women and girls. He checks out each one and draws them in like the Pied Piper, Bliss decides, then wonders how many of them might end up dancing the night away with him. That would certainly explain his wife's attitude. But where the hell do they live? And where is Marcia? he is thinking as Jacques slips unseen into the seat opposite. “You are waiting for someone. A woman, perhaps?”

“
Bonsoir
, Jacques,” he says, pretending not to be startled. “No — no one, not a woman,” he says, just a touch too vehemently.

“You watch like zhis,” Jacques says, raising himself and sticking his head in the air as he parodies Bliss.

Am I that obvious? he thinks, sinking lower as people passing stare at Jacques.

“So,” demands Jacques, “who is she?”

Hugh and Mavis save him answering.

“I don't believe it,” Bliss says, rising with a genuine smile and waving them to the adjacent seats. “I thought you'd gone home.”

Hugh is not smiling. “This is your fault, Brubeck. Mavis and I aren't stopping, thank you. We just wanted you to know that, thanks to you, we're still here.”

“Still here,” trills Mavis.

“It's Burbeck,” corrects Bliss, but then he's lost for words. “Um … I'm not with you.”

“I thought you'd deny it,” says Hugh sternly, and turns to Jacques for support. “Fortunately we have a witness.” Then he pauses to put emphasis behind his words. “Sunstroke,” he declares, adding accusingly, “Your fault, Brubeck. Keeping on about the beach all the time. You should be more careful about what you say.”

Bliss shouldn't have guffawed. It was Jacques's fault — creased in laughter under the table.

“You might laugh,” complains Hugh, “but now we're stuck in this pestiferous hole for another two weeks.”

“Why two?” enquires Bliss, straightening his face a notch.

“We couldn't move on Saturday — had to call the doctor — the only thing to do was to take the next booking. Now we've paid we might as well stay.”

“You're in luck.” Jacques smirks. “The pesky winds of zhe last few weeks have blown away completely. Now zhe easterly wind,
la levantade,
will bring us zhe peaceful weather and sunny skies.”

“I thought he was going to thump you,” says Bliss, after Hugh and Mavis have stormed away.

“He is
un couillon
,” laughs Jacques.

“A what?”

“No matter,” he says. “Buy yourself a dictionary.”

Bliss's attempt to follow Grimes again fails at the first hurdle. Taking the same path to the edge of town has been easy, with the Bastille Day drunks still thick on the ground, but the guards of the hillside villas are on high alert. The first hulking shadow steps straight out in front of Bliss, demanding a light for his cigarette. Feigning deafness,
Bliss sidesteps and walks into a roadblock. “What you want?” demands the second man.

“This is a public road —” he starts, but the first man cuts him off.

“You live here?”

“No,” he admits under the weight of the demand.

“Then go.”

Heavily outweighed, he turns, but at least he now knows the potter must live there. The guards obviously recognized him, he reasons, as he slinks back to the promenade on his way home, and Grimes would never be able to buy these guys off with a gooey look and a wet clay pot.

The Monday morning blues for Bliss are the azure sea and the navy sky, and he dances around the apartment with Brubeck blaring “Blue Rondo a la Turk” while tossing his dirty laundry straight into his suitcase — marking time until England catches up.

At ten o'clock precisely, though still only nine in London, he phones New Scotland Yard and gushes while Richards struggles out of his raincoat. “That's him, Guv. I've nailed him positively. He's on his yacht the
Sea-Quester
.” Then he relaxes, home clear and free, thinking, I'll probably stay on for a day or two to finish research for the book; I've definitely got to take a peek into the château, one way or another, and probably fit in another trip to Île Ste-Marguerite, just to confirm the viability of my theory — Frederick Chapel's theory — of the identity of the masked prisoner.

“So that's it, Sir,” he says, thinking: And any devious plan you and Edwards hatched to keep me quiet has just come unstuck, because I shall tuck myself away at
home and write my novel. And, apart from an occasional trip to a good library — the British Library, probably — to confirm a few things my schoolboy history could be a bit wobbly on, I'll keep my head down until Edwards's disciplinary hearing in September.

“OK,” says Richards. “Stay with him. I've gotta call a few people. See what we're going to do.”

What's this, “Stay with him?” Bliss is wondering when the vagueness in the commander's voice begins ringing bells. “I thought you said you'd get a warrant,” he starts.

“We will, Inspector … probably. Just takes time, that's all.”

“This is not on, Guv,” he complains. “I've been here three bloody weeks. I've got black rings around my eyes.”

“Not enough sleep, Dave. You wanna watch that.”

“No,” he spits, close to insubordination, “peering through effin' binoculars trying to spot bloody Johnson.”

Richards's voice rises warningly. “You're getting paid, aren't you? Don't go all girlie on me, Dave. I told you it's a delicate job. You'll just have to hang on for a bit.”

“A day or so.”

“All right.... Now where exactly is he?”

“I've no idea.”

The strangled, “What the fu —?” is in response to the steaming coffee Richards has accidentally dumped in his lap, but Bliss, unaware, remonstrates tetchily, “My job was to confirm his identity — that's all you said.”

“Don't be a bloody idiot, man,” shouts Richards, and then reigns back. “Sorry, Dave, but use your loaf. We need to know where he is now — where to send the troops.”

Bliss's monosyllabic explanation is intended to be as rude as it sounds. “Sir. This guy is on a boat in the sea.
But I don't have a boat, Sir, so I can't keep up with him 'cos I can't walk on water.”

“All right, Dave, you've made your point. But surely he's not always on the move?”

“Ninety percent of the yachts here never go anywhere, as far as I can tell,” he explains, calming. “They're just floating gin palaces. But Johnson is on the go all the time. I thought you'd know that. That's what drug smugglers do.”

“Who said anything about drugs?” enquires Richards, throwing Bliss completely off balance.