A Year Less a Day

by James Hawkins

  “Trust Trina,” says Bliss. “But what have you got on our man here?”

  “Nothing solid—not enough for an arrest warrant. Anyway, what’s happening there? What’s this about Daphne?”

  Bliss catches Donaldson just before the senior officer goes to bed, and a few minutes later a couple of patrol cars speed to take up static positions close to the manor’s gates while a third tours the surrounding area, but they are fractionally too late. The Range Rover has returned and the gates are closing behind it.

  “Well,” demands Waghorn, meeting the vehicle at the stables, “did it go all right?”

  Liam is shuffling his feet while Marky, the driver, taps the steering wheel and stares at the floor.

  “What’s going on?” demands Waghorn, and Marky speaks up.

  “We finds a real quiet road and this Irish pillock unties her and gets her gag off. Then he gives her her handbag and the bloody old bat takes out a little bag of chocolate f’kin biscuits and gives ’em to him, sayin’ ‘Here. You look like a nice young man. You ’ave ’em ’cuz I won’t need ’em where I’m goin’.’ And the next thing—he’s bawling his f’kin eyes out.”

  “So? Why didn’t you drop her, for chrissake?”

  “John ... Like, she’s an old lady, you know ...”

  “Oh, what a pair of wussies. Give me the keys, for chrissakes. Do I have to do everything around here?”

  Waghorn is back at the stables in less than five minutes, and is dragging Daphne out of the Rover’s trunk, shouting for Liam and Marky to help.

  “What’s up, boss,” says Liam. “You didn’t fall for the biscuits, did you?”

  “Shuddup, for chrissakes. The bloody place is crawling with cops. Get everyone together, we’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  Cops are also on the move in Vancouver. Cruisers from all over the city are converging on the black BMW as it speeds south toward the US border. The flapping trunk lid catches the attention of every passed motorist, and cellphone calls jam the emergency switchboards of half a dozen police districts, as drivers and passengers alike recoil in horror at the ghastly sight.

  Jeremy Maxwell, alias Mort, is desperately cleaning out his safe when Dave, his trusty cameraman, shows up for work with half a dozen well-armed friends. And the one-handed Englishman is still pleading both ignorance and innocence when Dave morphs into Constable Vern McLeod, takes the concealed digital recorder from his camera, plugs it into a speaker, and turns up the volume.

  It’s a little before five a.m. in Westchester, when Minnie Dennon bustles around Daphne’s kitchen making tea for Bliss. She’s wearing Daphne’s cardigan and slippers again, but Bliss is too preoccupied to notice, as he daubs his face and hands with black shoe polish and struggles into the black overalls that one of Donaldson’s officers had delivered to Daphne’s doorstep overnight.

  Donaldson sends a car for Bliss at five-fifteen and greets him at a roadblock about a mile from Thraxton Manor.

  “We thought this would be the best place for it,” says Donaldson, sweeping his hand around the collection of officers and vehicles while checking Bliss over. “Here’s a radio—just squawk and we’ll come running.” Then he queries, “Are you carrying?”

  “No, guv,” says Bliss. “I didn’t plan on doing this today.”

  “Here, take this,” says Donaldson handing him a loaded police special.

  Bliss hefts the piece meditatively for a second. “You realize that you’ll be writing reports ’til the day you get your pension if I have to use it.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Dave. I could retire tomorrow if I wanted.”

  The driver of the truck, on his way from the docks with yet another container bound for the manor, is on schedule until he comes around a bend and is surprised to find a commercial vehicle inspection team at a police roadblock.

  “Just a routine stop, driver,” says Donaldson, climbing up to the cab. “Can I see your driver’s and carrier’s licenses, please?”

  “Sure. You blokes are out early this mornin’, aren’t you?”

  “We’re going fishing,” muses Donaldson. “Early birds and all that,” before asking, “What’s your destination, driver?”

  “Thraxton Manor—I got a load of plywood.”

  “We won’t keep you long,” carries on Donaldson as he gives a nod to a group of officers, and four of them move in to inspect the tires and brakes.

  Bliss also gets the nod, and he’s shielded by a posse of officers as he crouches low to scuttle under the container, where he crawls on top of a substantial girder and clings on, thinking that he’s lucky it’s not far to the manor.

  The whirr from the manor’s big gates is lost amidst the thunder of the giant truck’s engine a few minutes later, but Bliss knows he is inside the Maxwell estate as soon as the vehicle starts bouncing along the rutted gravel driveway, threatening to throw him off the girder.

  The workshops and barns are dark and silent as the vehicle comes to a halt, and Bliss is just about to slip quietly from underneath the trailer when Liam approaches with his dog.

  “There’s an empty to go back,” the Irishman calls to the driver as his mastiff tries to pull him under the container. “Get outa there,” he yells, yanking on the animal’s collar, while the driver protests, “No one told me about a return.”

  Liam shrugs. “Not my fault, mate.”

  Bliss stealthily drops from under the container as Liam wanders away, and, in seconds, he is slipping into the dark stables.

  “Nice horsey,” he whispers, as the stallion under the hayloft’s trapdoor snorts restlessly. Now what? Bliss asks himself, knowing that his last encounter with the equine kingdom was at the age of nine, riding a holiday donkey on the beach in Brighton—and even that had landed him in the Red Cross tent with a scraped knee.

  Liam’s guard dog has Bliss’s scent, yet the Irishman keeps him on a tight rein, shouting, “Shuddup. It’s only a horse,” as he concentrates on making sure that the driver doesn’t leave without taking the container. But the whinnying horse is both a blessing and a curse as Bliss stumbles around in the murky corners of the stable, feeling for a bag of feed, or some rope. He finds the feed first and tips a pile onto the ground outside the animal’s stall before opening the door.

  The hayloft’s trapdoor creaks open a few minutes later, just as the truck drives away, with Liam and his dog alongside the driver in the cab.

  “I ain’t s’posed to take passengers,” the driver had complained when Liam had stated his intentions, but the look in the Irishman’s eyes had been enough to persuade him.

  “Daphne?” whispers Bliss into the darkness of the hayloft, and he switches on his flashlight, fearful of what he may find. But there is no sign of Daphne, although his light glints on something in the hay.

  “Keemun ... I knew it,” he muses, once he’s unscrewed the stopper of the stainless steel vacuum flask, then he throws caution to the wind, pulls out his gun, flicks off the safety, and crashes through the door into the apartment.

  “Waghorn ... Armed police. Come out with your hands up,” he shouts to the room, but nothing happens.

  “Waghorn, I know you’re in here,” he yells, dashing frantically from room to room, breaking all the rules, building himself up to shoot first and sort out the mess later. “Waghorn. Come out.”

  It only takes Bliss a minute or so—just long enough for the truck to drive out of the gates and head for the Southampton Road—before he catches on, and shrieks into his radio, “Stop the lorry. Stop the lorry. Armed men in the container.”

  There is also a very large stash of marijuana, and one gutsy old lady lying bound and gagged on the floor, as Donaldson finds out a few minutes later when he throws open the container’s doors, shouting, “Armed police. Put down your weapons.”

  “They wouldn’t have lasted two minutes in the war,” Daphne tells Bliss a short while later, after he has helped her out of the container. “‘Here. Have my chokky bickies,’ I said, and the big soft Irish twerp j
ust burst into tears.”

  “Oh, Daphne,” laughs Bliss, close to tears himself as he hugs her.

  “Is Missie Rouge all right?” she asks as he holds her.

  “Minnie’s feeding her at the moment, but I think she’s getting used to being abandoned,” he says as he pulls out his cellphone and calls Phillips in Vancouver.

  Inspector Wilson takes Bliss’s call. Sergeant Phillips is in the midst of interviewing Monty Maxwell’s son, who is boasting, “I ain’t done nuvvin. You can’t nail me—know what I mean?”

  “We already did, Jeremy,” says Phillips confidently. “We got you on tape blowing your cousin away.”

  “He was already dead.”

  “Won’t wash,” says Phillips shaking his head. “Plus, Dingo isn’t too happy about taking the full rap for wasting Tom Burton.”

  With a whisper in Phillips’ ear, Wilson steps in. “Good news, Jeremy—though not so good for you, I’m afraid. We’ve just busted your entire operation in England, and John Waghorn’s singing your name.”

  “All I do is the porn. And that ain’t illegal,” persists Maxwell. “I just gave him the flicks and if he liked what he saw, then we’d fix him up.”

  “And he’d bump ’em off.”

  Maxwell shrugs. “When do I get my lawyer?”

  “We know what you were doing Jeremy,” carries on Phillips as if he hasn’t heard. “Your friend who runs the crematorium tells us that you’ve kept him pretty busy for years.”

  “You can’t pin that on me. It was Waghorn, the perv. He’d get carried away—string ’em up too tight, get a bit rough, pump ’em full of dope, smack ’em around a bit too hard. I mean, they were all scrubbers and druggies. They were used to it. It’s a rough trade.”

  “They weren’t used to dying, though.”

  “Hey. Happens—know what I mean?”

  “So, when it happened, you and your boys would clean up his mess?”

  “Prove it.”

  “We will. So, why did Waghorn leave the country?”

  “The heat was on.”

  “So you sold him your cousin’s ID.”

  “So what? Snitchy f’kin Jordan didn’t need it.”

  “He certainly doesn’t now,” admits Phillips.

  “Back to the hospital with you,” says Bliss as he helps Daphne into a police car.

  “Not bloody likely,” she replies haughtily. “There’s nothing wrong with me that a good drop of vintage brandy won’t cure. Come on, David. Take me back to the manor. I know where he keeps his stash.”

  “Daphne—you can’t do that. It’s theft,” he says, as he jumps in beside her.

  “Are you joking, David? After what he did to me?”

  Superintendent Donaldson greets them outside the stables as he turns a small corner of broken plywood over in his hands.

  “How did you know it was drugs?” Donaldson inquires of Daphne as they drive up.

  “Elementary, my dear Superintendent,” replies Daphne, in a Holmesian tone. “It was the way that they unloaded it that got me thinking. All the stacks from the back of the container were taken to that old barn over there, where nothing was happening, but all the others went into the barn that had been renovated. ‘Why are they different?’ I asked myself, ‘They look the same.’”

  “Because they have a different filling in the middle of the sandwich,” says Donaldson as he splits apart the layers.

  “Precisely, Superintendent. A thin sheet of highly compressed grass—I think that’s what it’s called today—between cedar veneers.”

  “And you could smell it?” Donaldson queries in surprise.

  “No,” laughs Daphne. “All I could smell was the cedar and the glue, but I knew he was up to no good and called his bluff.”

  “I still don’t know why you didn’t trust him.”

  “If you must know, Superintendent, I simply could-n’t see any man with an appreciation for wood throwing a can of the most expensive wax polish into the rubbish bin.”

  “Daphne Lovelace, you are a genius,” says Bliss, though he is still puzzled over how she had gotten into the estate.

  “I’ll show you,” she says, starting to rise. Then she gives him a scowl as he puts out his hand to help. “I can manage, David.”

  A sea of white wood-anemones scattered with little bouquets of sunny primroses and vibrant splashes of violets greet the three of them as they make their way into the copse behind the ruins of the old manor.

  “We used to play here before the war,” says Daphne, as she leads them along an overgrown path for a few hundred feet. Then she stops. “See anything?” But neither Donaldson nor Bliss catches on.

  “Over there,” she points with a nod to a low grassy hillock, but it is only when they are right on top of it that they see and old wooden door set deep into the side of the mound.

  “It’s a tunnel,” says Daphne, pulling her flashlight out of her old canvas bag; seconds later they are inside a limestone cavern last used as a D-Day ammunition dump in World War II. “It comes out in the basement of the old church,” she explains, her voice echoing as she ushers them through the long, narrow gallery. “It was pretty scary coming in here after all those years, but at least I didn’t have to worry about East German border guards popping up and blowing my head off.”

  “Waghorn nearly did, though,” Bliss reminds her, and she stops to upbraid him with a reproachful look. “You should have listened to me, David. I told you something wasn’t right about him.”

  epilogue

  It’s almost a year since Jordan Jackson went home knowing that he was about to rip out his wife’s heart with his tale of woe, but he could never have imagined that all he might do was cut out those parts that were rotten. Under the tutelage of Trina Button, and the kindness of others, Ruth Crowfoot is now a trendy thirty-something who has spent her summer days feeding the ducks in Stanley Park, and the evenings and nights feeding her lover.

  Mike Phillips has won a permanent transfer to Canada’s Pacific coast, and, across the Atlantic in London, David Bliss is back at work, his leg fully healed, when Daphne Lovelace phones.

  “Did you get one as well, David?” she wants to know, and Bliss catches on immediately.

  “I guess you mean the wedding invitation—yes. Are you going?”

  “Naturally. September in Vancouver sounds wonderful. You are coming, aren’t you?”

  “Well, I’m fairly busy ...” teases Bliss, then he relents. “Yes. Of course I am. Mike’s asked me to be his best man. It’s a funny time of day, though. Eleven in the morning?”

  “That’s what I thought. Maybe that’s the way they do it over there—after all, they do drive on the wrong side of the road and eat banana omelettes for breakfast.”

  “September the ninth,” muses Bliss as he pores over the invitation in front of him. “I’ve got a feeling that’s about the time when all that baloney started with her husband.”

  September the ninth in Vancouver starts propitiously enough, with a brilliantly clear blue sky, and a fresh frosting of snow on the highest peaks. But at street level, where the summer’s sun still warms the patrons on the patios of the city’s myriad coffee shops, Daphne Lovelace is taking her new hat for a walk and is headed to the seafront along with Bliss.

  “You don’t think it’s too green, do you, David?” she worries, as she clamps the feathery creation to her head against the soft ocean breeze.

  “It looks sort of blue to me,” replies Bliss perplexedly, and receives a snort of disdain.

  “Hah. Men!”

  Trina Button is experiencing similar feelings about her husband as she puts the finishing touches on the banquet table in her expansive dining room.

  “Who says you can’t have banana cream pies at a wedding?” she demands, and Rick backs off. “Whatever you say, dear.”

  Ruth Crowfoot has no such disharmony with the men in her life, and she stands checking out her nicely-shaped figure in the mirrored walls of Trina’s bathroom, wondering when her
world will finally stop spinning and she’ll wake up.

  “Fifteen minutes to makeup, Ms. Ruth,” yells Trina, tapping on the door, and Ruth laughs—like she does every day—like she has done every day since March, when Jordan had finally been put to rest, and Mike Phillips had taken her by the hand and walked her to a neat little apartment building overlooking the harbour at False Creek.

  A small dog had started yapping as Phillips had rung the bell, and the owner had calmed it as he’d opened the door.

  “Mr. Sanderson? Geoffrey Sanderson?” Phillips had asked, as the grey-haired man’s little poodle had rushed out to greet Ruth.

  “That’s right,” the old Liverpudlian had replied cagily, then his face had lit up at the sight of Ruth. “Oh, hello, lass. We feed the ducks together don’t we?”

  “Can we come in for a moment?” Phillips had continued, well aware that neither Ruth nor the other man had any idea what was happening, and Sanderson had happily stepped aside.

  “Of course you can. Come in; come in. I don’t very often get visitors.”

  “This is Ruth Crowfoot. I think you knew her mother once—at the Beatles’ concert at Empire Stadium,” Phillips had said as they’d sat in Sanderson’s tidy little apartment.

  Phillips had felt Ruth’s pulse quicken under his fingertips, and he’d sensed her questioning look, but he had kept his gaze on Sanderson and watched as the aging man’s face had slowly warmed with the memory.

  “Do you mean Nellie?” he had queried, and Ruth had nodded in a daze.

  “Yes. She called herself Nellie.”

  “I looked everywhere for your mother, lass,” he had carried on, giving Ruth’s arm a gentle pat. “She was a lovely woman, lovely colour—like a nice piece of mahogany. And her eyes were pitch black—not unlike yours. I even left the boys in the lurch for the rest of the tour. I mean, Vancouver’s a beautiful place and all that—I might have stayed anyway. But it was your mother who kept me here.”