Lovelace and Button (International Investigators) Inc.

by James Hawkins

  “Edwards has given me the rest of the week off.”

  “Then you should visit Daisy. You’ve wasted enough time on me,” says Daphne, and he’s immediately torn between spending a wet weekend in Westchester or flying to the Côte d’Azur for a few days in the sun with the current love of his life. It has been a month since he’s seen her, and he’s beginning to worry that his next phone bill might be delivered in a truck considering the number of nights he’s lain in bed like a teenager, whispering, “Jet’adore,” into the phone, while listening to her quirky articulation and her inability to sound th without adding a zed. “I zhink you are so ‘andsome, Daavid, and I love you also,” she would say, and he’d chuckle in warm memory of the first time they had met in Provence, when she had asked, in all seriousness, “What can I do you for?”

  “I think I will light the fire…” Bliss starts again, but Daphne is determined and stands sentinel at the sitting-room door. Now what? he wonders, finding himself in a standoff with an aging toothless tiger. “Okay,” he says with a deadpan face, and he makes a convincing feint for the front door before doubling back to the sitting room, muttering, “I think I left my pen…”

  If the state of the kitchen had taken Bliss by surprise, the sitting room sinks him. Incriminating evidence is strewn all over the table and floor. Daphne has turned her filing cabinet inside out and has obviously been putting her affairs in order; she has even labelled a few of her more treasured items with names of beneficiaries.

  “What’s this all about?” Bliss wants to know sternly.

  Daphne employs another flood of tears to duck the question and he guides her gently back to the kitchen chair as she mumbles through snivels, “She did it for me, David.”

  “That’s nonsense. She did it because she’d got herself into a tight spot and didn’t know how to escape.”

  “But if I’d got that letter on time, none of this would have happened.”

  “That wasn’t your fault,” he protests, but Daphne doesn’t want to hear, and rambles on. “That’s the trouble with life’s lottery, David. Everyone thinks you’re the winner if you outlive all your peers, but actually you’re the loser. Every death leaves a deeper wound, and every funeral is just another painful rehearsal for your own. Well, I think I’ve just about got the hang of it now.”

  “Daphne! You’ve got to snap out of this, now,” Bliss insists firmly.

  “Oh, don’t worry. As silly as it may seem, I don’t think I’m as brave as Minnie. Anyway, the thought of that poor train driver — he probably dreamt of being on the railways from his first train set and never imagined he’d end up pulverizing an old woman —”

  “Okay,” interrupts Bliss roughly. “Enough of this. I’m going to clear up the kitchen while you get washed and tidied. I am taking you somewhere really posh for dinner, so you’d better put on a decent hat or we’ll get thrown out.”

  “But —”

  “No buts or I’ll have to arrest you for disobeying a lawful order.”

  A wry smile, the first in a week, puffs out Daphne’s cheeks. “Roger, wilco, sir,” she says, then she pauses as she heads for the stairs. “Oh, by the way, Trina called from Vancouver. No one seems to have heard of CNL Distribution.”

  In truth, Trina Button hasn’t made any enquiries beyond the phone book and the Western Union office in White Rock. She has been too busy with her training schedule, and she spends much of each day raising eyebrows in the ritzy area of West Vancouver where she lives by puffing up the hills on a rattle-trap of a bicycle while wearing a stencilled T-shirt saying, “Wanted — Your Kidneys. Dead or Alive.”

  Daphne also wants kidneys an hour later at The Limes, but she chooses hers flambéed in cognac, to be followed by tenderloin of wild boar on a pear purée, while confessing to Bliss that she’s been so down since Minnie’s death that she’s hardly eaten.

  The fresh memory of a busload of burnt bodies is enough to put Bliss off charred flesh for a week, so he flipflops between a Dover sole and the vegetarian’s platter as he looks up to say, “But this isn’t the Daphne Lovelace that I know.”

  “Sometimes I feel myself slipping,” admits Daphne. “The crazy thing is that when you get to my age the only thing you have to look forward to is memories of the past. I mean, take Phil and Maggie next door; they’ve been dead for nearly twenty years, but they just can’t afford a decent burial, so they carry on.”

  “I know what you mean,” laughs Bliss, thinking of his own parents slowly mouldering in front of a television as they wait for the Reaper’s knock.

  “You’ve seen the poor old souls in senior’s homes, David. Those places are just undertakers’ waiting rooms. The Eskimos have the right idea: stick granny on an ice floe and wave her goodbye.”

  “I doubt if they still do that.”

  “Well, they should. It would save the Canadian health service a fortune.”

  The probable savings in geriatric care costs as the number of suicides mount has not been lost on the public or the media in England, neither has it been ignored by more than a few families who have watched their long-anticipated inheritances being gobbled up by nursing homes and pharmacies, and Bliss isn’t the only person wondering how many old folks might be being pushed, in one way or another.

  “Talking of money,” he says as their entrées arrive, “I suppose I should put in a formal request through Interpol to find out why Minnie sent that money to Canada, although I’m going to be near there next week. Edwards is trying to butter me up with a trip to Seattle, though God knows when he thinks I’ll have time to write my speech.”

  “Trina invited me over to Vancouver for a break,” continues Daphne lethargically, “but I don’t have anyone to go with now that Minnie’s passed on.”

  “You should go. I bet the Rockies in autumn are fabulous,” Bliss begins, then pauses with an idea. “In fact, I could take you.”

  “Oh, you needn’t —”

  “No arguments. It’s just as easy for me to fly into Vancouver, but can you afford it?”

  “Well, I had put some spending money aside for the trip with Minnie.”

  “Good. Start packing. I’ll arrange the flights for Monday.”

  Friday morning starts on Thursday night for Bliss as he takes advantage of the clear road and races back to London. The last of the late-night drunks are still being hauled off the streets as Bliss sets to work on the mountain of reports that a couple of clerks had spent the evening culling from central records.

  “The illicit trafficking in human beings,” he types onto a clean screen and works his way through a million miserable lives as he catalogues the tides of poverty-stricken Southeast Asians braving the Pacific in rust buckets to reach North America; Iraqis and Afghanis desperate to be anywhere but the ruins created for them by their supposed liberators; North Africans trekking across the Mediterranean to Turkey seeking a better life, while the Turks trudge northward to Germany for the same reason; Moroccans swimming the Strait of Gibraltar searching for Spanish gold, while Sub-Saharan Africans flee despotic rulers and the desertification of their land; and South Sea Islanders sailing away to an uncertain future as their homes sink under a slowly rising ocean.

  “Christ! The whole bloody world is on the move,” Bliss muses at one point as he reads of the millions of impoverished Mexicans flooding the United States to join the thousands of persecuted Cubans who’ve risked everything on the leaky boat of a trafficker or a rubber-tire raft, and he can’t help but marvel at the roll of the dice that put him in a white skin in a safe, warm land.

  After five hours he has ten pages of notes, but if the conference organizers are expecting him to come up with a solution they’ll be disappointed. “As long as multinational corporations collaborate with a handful of powerful Western governments to maintain a thousand-fold disparity between the incomes of the rich and the poor for their own self-aggrandizement, there will always be a trade in people trafficking,” he concludes, and is tempted to add that it might be a lot simple
r to bump everyone off and start from scratch.

  It’s seven-thirty a.m. and Bliss heads to the canteen for a quick coffee, but he finds himself ensnared by the breakfast television show as the latest suicide figures are trotted out on hastily generated scoreboards.

  “Here’s the situation at a glance,” says the presenter with the same tone he’d used to announce the results of the general election, and it’s immediately apparent to Bliss that the railways have continued to bear the brunt of the crisis, with fourteen jumpers in the past twenty-four hours. However, when James Temple’s busload of elderly victims is included in the equation, the roads take the top spot with twenty-three deaths, while household poisons, car exhausts and prescription drugs vie for third place and bring the total to a round fifty.

  As with any new disease, the public and press are well ahead of the authorities, and numerous gerontologists and psychiatrists specializing in the elderly have warned that mass hysteria may cause an unstoppable tide of death.

  “We’re starting to see the lemming effect in action,” one studious doomsayer reports, totally ignoring the fact that, over the years, numerous scientific studies have completely debunked the mass suicide theory of the arctic rodents.

  “I think we are witnessing the first manifestations of the coming Armageddon,” a freaky religious guru promulgates, and the idea is certainly picking up steam as more and more deaths are reported.

  “Doctors are reporting a major increase in the number of people requesting prescriptions for tranquilizers,” reads an editorial in the Financial Times, prompting an immediate run on the shares of certain drug companies. While the wives of stockbrokers with holdings in undertakers, funeral parlours, crematoriums, florists, limousines and law firms are already choosing colours for their new Porsches.

  Chief Superintendent Edwards is surprised to find Bliss already at his desk when he arrives a little before nine.

  “Ah, nice of you to come back, Chief Inspector,” he starts with a smile, then he spots the pile of paperwork on Bliss’s desk and puts on a darker face. “I hope you haven’t started on that lot yet.”

  “Finished,” announces Bliss triumphantly.

  “Actually, David,” begins Edwards, in a tone that Bliss immediately recognizes as a precursor to disenchantment, “I’m going to have to cancel your trip. The Home Secretary has asked the Commissioner to set up a squad to look into this suicide nonsense, and I’ve recommended that you be appointed to head it.”

  “Well, thank you for your consideration, sir,” says Bliss, sweeping his hand over the papers on his desk, “but I’m already prepared for Seattle.”

  “Chief Inspector, you know the score,” continues Edwards with his ears closed. “Ten thousand snuff it in an earthquake in Turkmenistan or Timbuktu and nobody gives a toss, but if a few crumblies in Tower Hamlets are considerate enough to bump themselves off to save the taxpayers a few quid, the public expects a bloody special squad.”

  “But I’ve already booked the tickets,” lies Bliss.

  “Well, cancel them — what d’ye mean, ‘tickets’?”

  “I’m taking Daphne Lovelace,” Bliss explains, careful not to mention that he’d also planned on inviting Daisy.

  “You’re not still granny-sitting that batty old bird, are you?” scoffs Edwards. “Christ, she was prancing around like a bloody head banger at Peter Bryan’s wedding.”

  “Well, she’s not prancing around now,” Bliss protests. “She needs a bit of a change of scenery.” But it gets him nowhere.

  “Cancel, Bliss,” orders Edwards as he stomps off. “And I’ll expect a preliminary report on the suicide situation by nine Monday morning.”

  How quickly the veneer of niceness slips from the face of the insincere, thinks Bliss as he picks up his phone and hits the first number on his speed dial.

  “Allô?” answers a familiar voice as a phone rings in a real-estate agent’s in the quaint Provençal resort of St. Juan-sur-Mer.

  “Bonjour, Daisy,” replies Bliss, “Comment allezvous, ma petite pucelle?”

  “Daavid,” she laughs, “you are still speaking zhe French like zhe Spanish cow — Tu parles français comme une vache espagnole.”

  “Zhank you,” mocks Bliss with a laugh before inviting her to join him for a week’s holiday in Seattle.

  chapter six

  October is sliding towards winter in the mountains corralling Vancouver, and the grizzlies are stocking their caves. But down in the wide estuary of the Fraser Valley, where concrete blocks and blacktop ribbons sprawl across a dozen Pacific islands, the balmy sea breezes spread a warm blanket over the city and will continue to do so until the full sun returns with the coho salmon in spring.

  “This is the scary part,” whispers Bliss to Daphne as they aim for the airport on Sea Island, and he watches nervously as they skim ever lower over the Strait of Georgia until the undercarriage of their 747 seems certain to catch in the tall masts of yachts sailing the smooth waters.

  “I love it,” enthuses Daphne with her face stuck to the window. “And look at all those log rafts. They must be miles long; thousands of trees all pulled by those funny little tugboats — and look at all the trawlers.”

  Bliss smiles at his old friend’s re-found bounce, and a few seconds later he’s thankful for the reassuring jolt as the indigo water solidifies into tarmac and they glide to a standstill.

  “I hope Trina’s here to meet you,” he murmurs worriedly as they taxi to the terminal. “I’ve got to be in Seattle in a couple of hours to meet Daisy.”

  “Oh, she’ll be here,” answers Daphne confidently, and she is correct. However, Trina is not actually in the arrivals building. The sparkly young woman is outside, in the loading zone, where she is verbally dancing with a blue-suited security guard who is attempting to give her a ticket for illegal parking.

  “Where does it say ‘No Bikes?’” demands Trina as she sits in the cockpit of the Kidneymobile with her arms folded, while bemused travellers crowd around.

  “Madam — ‘No Parking’ means no parking. Look at the signs,” he says as he finishes writing the ticket and fruitlessly searches for a licence plate.

  “No. You look at the signs, young man,” she ripostes. “There are pictures of vans, cars, buses and trucks, but where is there a picture of a four-wheeled kidney-shaped bathtub complete with shower unit and duck figurehead, eh?”

  “Can I take a photo, Miss?” asks an intrigued passer-by, attracted by the gaily coloured nautical bunting strung from stem to stern.

  “Sure,” starts Trina, and she primps herself up, but the security guard needs to win at least one battle and spits, “Put the camera away, sir. This vehicle is breaking the law.”

  “Come and look at this,” yells a teenage footballer to a busload of his buddies. “This is cool.”

  “Stand back!” cries the guard in desperation, and he tries to make a cordon with his outstretched arms, but he’s instantly swarmed. “Stop that!” he screeches as the photographer flashes off a dozen shots. Then he gets serious and pulls out his radio.

  “Watch this,” says Trina to the growing crowd, and she stands up in her tub to unfurl the makeshift sail from the top of the mainmast. Splashed across the cerulean blue shower curtain dotted with frolicking dolphins is a banner in six-inch-high fluorescent yellow lettering which reads, “Canada welcomes Lady Daphne.”

  “Assistance needed arrivals concourse,” a desperate voice is bleating into a walkie-talkie as a motor coach pulls up alongside the Kidneymobile and disgorges fifty home-bound Chinese tourists.

  “I’s a Lady Daphanee,” calls one of the visitors, deciphering the sign, and out come more cameras.

  “This is an emergency!” pleads the security guard as the burgeoning crowd blocks the traffic and motorists start abandoning vehicles to rubberneck.

  “It’s for charity,” Trina announces loudly, and the Chinese party’s interpreter translates to her superstitious flock that a substantial donation will guarantee a safe flight
back to Beijing.

  “Oh, my!” exclaims Trina as coins and bills begin flooding into the bathtub.

  “You can’t collect for charity without a permit,” yells the guard, feeling on safer ground, but Trina shrugs. “I’m not collecting — it’s the Kidneymobile, not me.”

  The crowd intensifies as Bliss and Daphne clear immigration and customs and unsuccessfully search the sea of faces in the arrivals hall for Trina, and five minutes later money from all corners of the globe is pouring into the bath as the English visitors emerge inquisitively onto the concourse. One tourist from Los Angeles wants to know if Trina can break a Canadian hundred-dollar bill, then changes his mind and hands it to her with a smile, saying, “It’s only good for Monopoly back home.”

  “I could arrest you for taking that,” warns the security guard as he threatens Trina with his pen, but he’s elbowed aside by the throng as more and more travellers empty their pockets and purses.

  “But who is Lady Daphne?” queries one of the bystanders as the same question is being asked upstairs in the airport’s press office and a reporter is hastily despatched to the scene.

  Daphne is wearing one of her hats, a hat of such proportion that it had caused a commotion at the check-in desk at Heathrow because, in its bag, its dimensions had far exceeded the permitted size for carry-on luggage. “No problem,” Daphne had trilled, whipping it out of the bag and plonking it on her head, explaining, “There, dear. Now it’s not luggage.”

  Trina spots the telltale polka-dot creation and stands in her bathtub to rise above the crowd while she furiously waves a giant Union Flag. “David… Daphne… Over here!” she shouts, and the crowd turns as one and parts.

  Daphne takes the sight of a couple of dozen bowing Chinese men in her stride and reciprocates with a series of polite nods as she makes her way through the throng, while Bliss keeps his head down as he trails behind her with the baggage cart.