The Dave Bliss Quintet (24 page)

Get out, Dave! screams his inner voice, but he stands his ground.

No wonder the locals are petrified — no one mentioned ghosts. Though no one mentioned people having their limbs chopped off, either. What's moving? Something is definitely moving, he decides, and tries to remain rational as he listens to the ghostly dry whisper. Isolating the sound, he's drawn to the old mattress and gingerly edges forward to tap it with his foot, then he shrinks away as it comes to life. The ancient horse-hair mattress heaves and writhes for a few seconds, then slowly settles as the nest of lizards calms. “
Merde,
” he breathes. “Grimes obviously wasn't sleeping on that.”

So what was the potter doing down here? Bliss asks himself, looking around the virtually bare cellar and wondering why Grimes risked the rats. He should have been able to walk, until the blood loss weakened him anyway, he thinks, then wonders: where is the blood?

Scouting for the precise crime scene doesn't take long. The blood-soaked wooden chopping block on a stone work table tells a nightmarish tale, but there's no sign of the knife — or did he use an axe?

He? Bliss's inner voice questions critically. Not making assumptions again, are we, Dave?

But the thought of a woman deliberately slicing off a living hand seems somehow more ghoulish. I might expect it of a man, he reasons. In any case, it would take considerable strength to hold a screaming man down while carving off his hand at the wrist.

Another rat scrabbles across the floor and he recoils again, thinking of Grimes with the stump of his arm leaking sticky fluid that would drive the shady creatures into a feeding frenzy. The cloying smell of blood is still in the air, and he retches at the image of the potter fighting off the vicious rodents day and night — though down here there is only night. So why stay here? Water, he realizes, as he turns the lime-encrusted tap and is amazed when it flows. That must be why Grimes stayed by the sink — to bathe the raw stump and replenish lost fluids.

Leaving the main chamber, Bliss has no idea what he's expecting as he follows a trail of candle stubs down a tunnelled passageway, the flagstone floor echoing each footstep. Doors leading off the tunnel beg to be opened — but every closed door is a plug on hell. What horror lurks behind? What gruesome sights might await? What skeleton might leap out and scare the daylights out of him? How many Greg Grimeses weren't fortunate enough to have someone searching for them?

Why the hell am I bothering to do this? he stops to demand of himself. Grimes obviously isn't going to name his attacker; Marcia clearly knows a lot more than she's letting on; Richards is playing footsy with Edwards; and I'm just the bloody ball. It's attempted procrastination and he knows it. Oh well. I'm here now.

The first dank, dark chamber laughs at his timidity, and he is about to shut the door on the empty dungeon when his hand freezes in shock. It isn't empty at all. The musty air is heavy with occupation — the room is crowded. His eye catches on the rusted chains and he feels his resolve sinking as he realizes the significance of what he sees. This is a torture chamber, and the tormented spirits of men are still hanging in the wicked shackles fastened to
the walls with rusted steel bolts. He balks at entering; the chains and manacles tell him more than he wants to know. Grimes obviously wasn't the first man tortured here. And now that he's prised the lid off this particular hell he feels the anguish and hears the screams. This isn't a nicely sanitized historical recreation. This is authentic. This is where real men suffered and died.

A few shreds of old clothing are nestled in one corner, and, steeling himself against the expected rush of rodents, he uses a long screwdriver from his work bag to prod the small heap. “Snakes,” he shudders, as he pulls out the remains of a shirt and sees the creatures slithering deeper into the pile. The tattered shirt puzzles him — it's old, though not old enough to have lost the memory of its owner.

Ten minutes later he's slammed open another six doors and uncapped six equally horrifying hellholes. Manacles, leg irons, and shackles speak so vividly of sickening horrors that his mind suddenly curdles and he flees back to the kitchen, up the stairs, and out to the patio with the shirt.

Outside, he hyperventilates on the clean air and feels his head swimming. Slumping on the top step of the grand entrance flight with his head between his knees, he stares into the past. If the images of a fully conscious man having his hand chopped off in the château are bad, the thought of what might have happened to the others is a thousand times worse. A rough calculation by his shell-shocked brain tells him that a hundred or more people could have been shackled to the walls at a time. But what people? At what time? And what happened to them eventually? If the stains on this shredded shirt could talk, he thinks, as he braces to examine the remains of the gar
ment more closely, though its abandonment in the dungeon tells its own pitiful story.

Maybe that's why the locals don't talk about the place, he surmises. Maybe they don't want the world digging into their dirty laundry. But that doesn't make sense — this whole area is a tourist mecca. A Frankenstein house of horrors — particularly a genuine one, with spooky dungeons filled with real tormented souls — would delight L'association des hôteliers and have St-Juan-sur-Mer on every travel agent's tongue. Consider the popularity of the prison block over there, he thinks, eyeing the island's fortress in the distance, and just how many tourists flock to the torture chamber of the Tower of London each year?

Yet, as he turns the old shirt over on the end of the screwdriver, he begins to see a difference. Wide stripes and soft tones give the shirt a modern appearance, despite the fact that it is dirty, old, and worn. The cracked brown buttons seem old-fashioned. “Bakelite,” he murmurs in memory of the brittle plastic of his childhood as one of the buttons falls in half under his fingers. Puzzled, he decides to brave the rats and other horrors and return to the cellars, but his nerves are in rags and he shelves the idea at the last moment. Firmly shutting the door to the basement he concentrates on the main floor. But no more horrors await as he sweeps through the lofty-ceilinged rooms. The entire floor, with its ornate baroque mouldings and extravagant fireplaces, boldly proclaims its innocence and is alive with joyful images of courtly
dames
, stiff with crinolines and coiffures, lightly bantering with flamboyantly costumed bewigged French aristocrats. Just twenty feet below, prisoners might have hung on the walls as lifeless as the sides of wild boar and venison in the well-stocked larders, but
up here the seventeenth-century counter-reformation of Louis XIV was dancing with gay frivolity.

The bedrooms and dressing rooms upstairs are equally easy on his mind, once he's conquered the rotten thirty-foot staircase. And even the dingy attic rooms don't reflect the terrors of the basement. A few broken windows have let small birds and bats slip through cracks in the shutters, and the ledges are deep with dropping — the air acrid with ammonia. Many floorboards need attention, but otherwise the château is in remarkably good condition.

A door to the roof is what he seeks, and finds, and as he carefully steps out onto a rooftop balcony the view that rewards him virtually wipes out the horrors in the chambers below. The entire bay expands at his feet, and the Castle of Fort Royal on Î le Sainte-Marguerite stands out like a beacon.

“Well, Sherlock Holmes, I guess you've solved yet another case,” he says to the air with the realization that, as fictional as he may be, Frederick Chapel could have stood on this spot three centuries earlier and solved the riddle of the man in the iron mask.

I guess Grimes was just taking a shortcut through the grounds to wherever he's living, he thinks to himself a few minutes later, back on the patio, as he carefully packs the old shirt into his bag with his flashlights. And, with more than a sigh of relief, he heads for the fence.

Guessing that Daisy will be furious with him if she finds he's visited the château, Bliss gives her office a wide berth as he walks back to his apartment mid-morning, still in workman's garb. The shirt in his bag torments him all the way. The assumption that the last occupant of the vestment had not given it up willingly plays on his mind to the point where he begins to regret taking it, feeling he has somehow desecrated a grave.

“Where you been?” demands Daisy, skulking around the apartment lobby and catching him by surprise. Then her face screws in confusion. “What are you doing?”

“You'd better come up,” he says, trying to usher her into the elevator, readying to bite the bullet, but she shies away.

“No — I must go. I have zhe work. But I come to warn you zhat Monsieur Johnson telephoned again. He is still crazy. He say you must leave his wife alone.”

“I haven't touched her,” he protests, reddening, but is thankful when she just shrugs it off. “I see you tonight at L' Escale.”

“Phew,” he breathes, then, with plenty of time to come up with an explanation, decides to pay a visit to Greg and Marcia Grimes before they start giving him the runaround again. A shower first, he thinks, fighting his way out of the dirty workman's overalls, then a quick phone call. He needs information and knows who can get it for him.

“I'm really busy, Dad,” complains Samantha as soon as she answers.

“No. Seriously. I will pay,” he says, but his offer of the standard rate for legal work brings only a sardonic laugh.

“All right. What do you need, Dad?”

Bliss gives her the gory details of Grimes's mutilation before asking her to drive out to the picturesque Suffolk village where his pottery had been located. “The locals must know something about them,” he tells her. “They lived there long enough. Find out what you can about them, would you?”

“This sounds like an attempted murder case. Why don't you get the force to do it?”

“I'vetold you. I think Richards and Edwards have set me up.”

“It doesn't sound so Machiavellian now, though, does it?” she says, making a good point.

“Machiavellian or not, I wasn't sent here to investigate the mutilation of an irritating potter.”

“OK,” she agrees. “If I can find the time.”

At least Bliss knows where to find Grimes and his wife, and a little later he sits over a coffee with Marcia in the
waiting room at the hospital in Cannes — but she's no more helpful than her husband when it comes to fingering the offender.

“What about Morgan Johnson?” he queries, and she flies at him.

“Morgan would never do anything like that.” That's rich, he thinks, taking up his policeman's baton and getting rough. “From what you tell me, Johnson had no qualms about getting into your knickers, then he dumped you to bonk your daughter and turn her into a junkie. Now you're protecting him.”

“It wasn't like that,” she protests.

“That's what it looks like from here.”

“OK,” she concedes, her indignation cooling.

“But he had no reason to do this to Greg.”

“But he was here Saturday night when it happened, wasn't he?”

“Maybe.”

“Don't ‘ maybe' me,” he barks. “I'm fed up with this crap, Marcia. This isn't a bloody game. Greg would've been dead by now if I hadn't stuck my neck out. You told me Johnson was here at the weekend. Was he?”

Visibly startled, she stutters, “I … I think so. But even if he was, he wouldn't have done this. He didn't need to.”

That's an interesting perspective, he thinks. He's already wrenched out the man's heart; therefore, he no longer needs to lop off his hand? “Well, who did it then?”

“Greg has upset a few people ...” she admits.

“Not the hoteliers,” says Bliss, cutting in disbelievingly. “Surely they wouldn't go that far.”

“No, not the hoteliers,” she agrees.

“Who, then?”

Tight-lipped, she puts on a blank face.

“I'd better turn up the heat on Greg, then,” he says, starting to rise, hoping to jog her conscience.

Marcia brightens visibly. “You can't. He's in the operating theatre. They say there's a chance they can reattach his hand. It'll never be the same, of course, but luckily the French are world leaders in the techniques.”

Sitting down again, he takes on a softer tone. “Don't you want the offender caught, Marcia?”

“It's not that simple, Inspector,” she says, leaving a distinct impression he's working on today's crossword with yesterday's clues, leading him to suggest, “This does involve Johnson in some way, though, doesn't it?”

With the feeling Marcia is jerking him around, Bliss heads off to the museum to solicit the aid of the friendly curator.

“Did you find out about zhe château?” She smiles, emerging from her cubicle behind the information desk, clearly remembering him and his quest.

“Not really,” he replies, now even warier of divulging his interest since his discovery.

Ten minutes later, with the shirt laid out on a table in a backroom overstuffed with racks of military costumes and bundles of swords, the young woman inspects it with a professional eye and uses a magnifying glass on an ominously dark splotch. “Blood stays forever,” she remarks, comparing the stain with those on some clothing taken from Napoleonic battlefield corpses. “See — it is
très similaire
,” she says, offering him the glass. “Zhough zhe style of zhis shirt is much later. Early twentieth century, I would zhink. Where did it come from?”

“I think you're right,” he says, concentrating on the stain and ignoring her question. “And these buttons look like Bakelite. What do you think?”

Shaking her head, she apologizes. Her expertise ends in the middle of the nineteenth century. “I'm fairly sure zhis is a twentieth-century shirt,” she repeats. “Nineteen-twenties, maybe, but,” she warns, “zhat's only a guess.”