Lovelace and Button (International Investigators) Inc.

by James Hawkins

  “Suits me,” says Bliss. “But what about Miss Lovelace and Mrs. Button?”

  “Our position remains the same. The two women left the country of their own free will last night.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “Prove it.”

  The solidity of the two women in the monastery gives proof to the lie as they duck under a tent of bedclothes for a strategy session.

  “I think Spotty Dick is starting to bend a little,” whispers Daphne, and Trina lightens up a notch as she giggles, “Perhaps we should change his name to Wilting Willy.”

  “The snobby one talks as though this is official,” carries on Daphne, “but it can’t be, or the British consul would be banging on the gates.”

  “Which means?”

  “That they’re probably a lot more scared than we are,” she suggests, not adding that it also makes them much more dangerous.

  However, downstairs in the surveillance room, Spotty Dick and Bumface don’t look particularly threatening as they slumber, exhausted, in front of the monitors.

  “Keep an eye on those two,” John Dawson had said, tapping the screen before leaving to get some sleep, and he made it clear that he expected a solution by the time he returned. “You two clowns started this circus. You’d better think of a way to stop it.”

  “So what are we going to do?” asks Trina, thinking Daphne has a plan.

  “Hum,” sighs Daphne, feeling herself sinking. “Maybe we should get some shut-eye and see what happens in the morning.”

  Meanwhile, in nearby Bellingham, Bliss finally succumbs to fatigue and unthinkingly uses the phone in his room to call the Button household to say good night to Daisy.

  “I’m sorry about all this,” he says, though she claims not to mind.

  “It is exciting, no?”

  “No,” says Bliss positively. “It isn’t. Well, certainly not the kind of excitement I’d had in mind when I invited you.”

  “Never mind, Daavid. I will see you in zhe morning and maybe we will find zhem.”

  “Maybe.”

  “That was Daavid,” says Daisy, finding Rick Button in his office, struggling to keep his eyes open, fearing sleep to be an admission of the hopelessness of the situation.

  “I zhink you should go to bed, no?” she says gently, but Rick has no such thoughts. In fact, he’s determined to stay awake until Trina is found, and he has turned on almost every light in the house, emptied his briefcase, filing cabinet and car’s glove compartment of business cards, and is frantically emailing Trina’s photo and description to everyone he’s ever met.

  “Would you like a sandwich, perhaps?” asks Daisy, and he looks at her as though she is demented.

  “How can I eat?” he asks through the tears, and she understands, saying, “I will see if zhe children are hungry.”

  “She would have called if she could,” he sobs with total despondency as Daisy starts to leave.

  “Oh, you should not worry. I zhink she will come back,” she says, returning to place a comforting hand on his shoulder.

  “No,” he says positively. “Not alive, anyway.”

  John Dawson is close to accepting the same conclusion, but he lies awake praying for an alternative when his phone rings and a voice harshly whispers, “He’s in Room 227, Bellingham Suites Hotel.”

  “You’re good,” says Dawson. “Thanks. I owe you.”

  Now what? he puzzles, and he wrestles with projected scenarios that all end nightmarishly in the electric chair, until his brain finally freezes and he falls unconscious.

  Daphne wakes him at five in the morning as she tries to suffocate him with her giant polka-dot hat, and he surfaces, screaming, to fight off the sweat-soaked sheets. Then he reaches for the bedside phone and calls the surveillance room.

  “Get up here, Steve. We need to talk.”

  “Okay, John.”

  “And bring some coffee.”

  “You know what we’ve got to do, don’t you?” says Bumface a few minutes later, but Dawson is still reluctant.

  “It’s not like you can dig ‘em up, brush ‘em off and say sorry if the balloon goes up.”

  “Look, this is crazy, John. What the hell — we lose, what… two or three a week, every week.”

  “That’s different. They never existed in the first place. We could lose the whole damn lot and no one would ask any awkward questions. But if someone starts digging and comes up with these two…” his voice trails off, his point made.

  “We’ll just have to make sure they’re mighty deep.”

  “And what about him?” says Dawson, with an allusive nod to Bumface’s colleague asleep in the basement. “He won’t like it.”

  “It was his damn fault. He was the one who convinced me to let them in. Anyway, once they’re gone there’s not a lot he can do about it.”

  “When?”

  “It’ll be getting light soon. We’ll have to leave it to tonight.”

  “Nothing messy, okay?”

  “Sure, John.”

  “Get something from the pharmacy, so they won’t feel anything.”

  “ ‘Kay.”

  “And what about that snoopy cop?”

  “Leave him to me, John.”

  chapter ten

  Wednesday morning begins before six for Bliss, with the insistent ringing of the hotel’s automated wakeup service forcing him out of one nightmare into another, and he’s on the phone to Mike Phillips by six-fifteen.

  “Dave, there’s absolutely nothing in the American papers,” complains his Canadian colleague.

  “I know,” bleats Bliss despondently. “They were all over it yesterday. I did half a dozen interviews before a couple of heavies showed up and put the bite on me.”

  “So much for freedom of expression,” breathes Phillips, “though God knows what their problem is.”

  “What’s the Canadian press saying?” asks Bliss.

  “They’ve rerun the photo of the pair of them in the Kidneymobile,” he says, neglecting to add that Maureen Stuckenberg has backpedalled with more zeal than a trick cyclist and is now suggesting that the Kidney Society actually considered the whole scheme foolhardy from the beginning. “Rick’s offering a reward for their safe return,” Phillips continues, “though I don’t see much point. From what I know of those two I should think that a kidnapper would be more than happy to get rid of them.”

  The second morning of captivity is also beginning early for Daphne, following a restless night spent dodging bullets and border guards as she slipped back and forth under the Iron Curtain with little more than a dubious diplomatic passport and a winning smile for protection, and she stirs to the sound of the electronic door lock.

  “I’ve brought you something to eat,” says Spotty Dick as he gently places a tray on the table. She slips out of bed, still fully clothed, and casts a wary eye over the bacon and eggs.

  “I brought you tea as well as coffee,” he adds, “and you can have more if you want.”

  This is a change, Daphne muses to herself, hesitating as she reruns her survival training course.

  “H’eat when h’ever you get a chance,” the expert had advised. “If they is gonna bump you off, they will. And arsenic h’aint ‘alf as painful as having your fingernails ripped h’out one by one.”

  Spotty Dick senses Daphne’s caginess and encourages her with a smile. “Don’t worry,” he assures her, “there’s nothing wrong with it. Honestly.”

  “Thanks,” she says, softly laying a hand on his arm and holding his gaze for a long second, before tucking in.

  “What about Mrs. Button?” he asks with a nod to the sleeping woman.

  “Goldilocks,” corrects Daphne. “Oh, she’s all right. She’s found the baby bear’s bed.”

  Bliss, on the other hand, slept on a bed of nails, and by the time Daisy delivers Trina’s Volkswagen, a little after eight, he’s fallen captive to a comfortable armchair in the hotel lobby.

  “Did you have any trouble at the border?” he a
sks, once she’s woken him and they are headed south towards Seattle. But Daisy has her eyes and mind on a black Cherokee a few cars behind them.

  “Daavid, I zhink zhat we are being followed,” she says worriedly. “I zhink zhat Jeep, he is behind us when we left zhe hotel also.”

  “I know,” says Bliss with one eye on the mirror. “There’s at least two cars on our tail, and I’m not sure about that white Ford ahead of us, either.”

  “What is it zhat zhey want?”

  “Let’s find out, shall we?” he says as he slams on his brakes and slides to a halt at the curbside.

  “Now watch,” he says as the driver of the first trailing car, a blue Honda, drives past with an air of apparent indifference, while in Bliss’s rearview mirror the Jeep Cherokee makes a rapid turn onto the forecourt of a gas station.

  “Now for the runaround,” says Bliss as he waits for a gap in the approaching traffic and pulls a U-turn to neatly slot into the northbound lane.

  The Jeep is already nosing back out of the fore-court, ready to pick up the northerly chase, when Bliss suddenly veers back across the road and dodges into the gas station behind it.

  “Bastard,” swears Bumface, at the wheel, as he is forced to continue north, while Bliss and Daisy pop out of the gas station’s entry ramp and head south again at full speed.

  “Now for the coup de grâce,” announces Bliss, and he resists the temptation to wave to the drivers of the white Ford and the blue Honda — now also headed in the wrong direction — as they zip past, while he makes a hard right into a side street and disappears into the underground parking garage of a hotel.

  “Time for breakfast and a strategy session, I think,” he says as he casually locks Trina’s Jetta and guides Daisy to the restaurant.

  Bumface is back at the monastery twenty minutes later, bemoaning his luck to Dawson. “Some damn woman picked him up and he gave me the slip,” he complains, though Dawson seems unconcerned.

  “Look, it’s Thursday. You might as well leave him alone. He has to be out of the country by this evening.”

  “And you think he’ll leave, knowing that we’ve got the dynamic duo in there?”

  “He doesn’t know that for certain,” says Dawson. “All he knows is that the old buzzard dropped a handkerchief in the road outside. That doesn’t prove squat.”

  “And what if he gets up at that conference and starts spouting off about this place?”

  “Then someone will shut him up real quick.”

  “How?”

  “I’ve taken care of it.”

  Bliss is also concerned about his upcoming speech as he sits with his back planted firmly against a wall.

  “I’m due to speak at three,” Bliss tells Daisy in French, as he keeps watch on the door while the waitress tops up their coffees. “But they’re obviously trying to stop me.”

  “Pourquoi célà?” asks Daisy. “Why is zhat?

  “J’ne sais pas. I wish I knew,” he says. “Although I’m not sure that I want to stand up there and talk about people trafficking when Daphne and Trina are missing.

  I really should be in Canada helping to search for them, although I’m still convinced that they’re here.”

  “In zhe monastery?”

  “One of the basic rules of investigation, Daisy,” he says, switching back to English as the waitress moves off, “is that when you have eliminated all other possibilities, the answer is whatever remains.”

  The look on Daisy’s face suggests he’s overstretched her linguistic ability, so he explains. “We know they were seen on the road to the monastery, and we know they were at the monastery gates. Now the Americans insist they left the country, but the Canadians didn’t see them. Isn’t that odd?”

  “Oui,” says Daisy, catching on. “Because zhey never care when you leave a country. It is only when you come.”

  “Quite.”

  “But the machine. It was in Canada, was it not?”

  “It was,” he agrees, “but nothing else was,” and then he leaps up excitedly and heads for the pay phone in the lobby, muttering, “I’ve got to catch Mike Phillips before he leaves the station.”

  “Mike,” Bliss asks, as soon as he is put through, “was Daphne wearing that stupid great polka-dot hat when she left Canada?”

  “Yeah,” laughs Phillips. “You can hardly see her face in the newspaper photos.”

  “So where is it, Mike? No one’s suggesting that she tramped off through the forest wearing it, are they?”

  “Their overnight bags are missing, too,” Phillips reminds him, though Bliss doesn’t find that strange.

  “They wouldn’t go far without makeup and stuff,” he says, “But there’s no way she would have stuck to that monstrous hat. And you know as well as I do that the absence of evidence is evidence itself. No scent, no tracks and no hat means only one thing: they were never there — full stop.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “Forget the search team. You’re looking in the wrong place. Get a forensic squad to go over the contraption with a fine-tooth comb. Someone must have dropped it off from a truck; it’s too big to fit in a car. Check it for fingerprints —”

  “We’re ahead of you there, Dave,” interjects Phillips. “I had the fingerprint gal look at it yesterday. It was clean.”

  “Just the women’s —”

  “No. Clean — clean… Absolutely, totally clean.”

  “Well that’s kind’a fishy for a start. Who would have wiped it? I mean, it’s hardly a Jag or a souped-up Jetta. No one’s gonna hot-wire it to pull off a heist or go for a joyride.”

  “I hear you, Dave,” says Phillips. “I’ll get the forensic boys on it right away.”

  “Check the tires, Mike. If it was wheeled off a truck there are bound to be some residues in the treads.”

  “Okay, Dave,” Phillips is saying as Bliss responds to an insistent tug on his sleeve.

  “Daavid,” whispers Daisy. “Quickly. Zhey are here looking for you.”

  The stakeout is tight. Double-manned cars — one at each end of the side street, plus a backup vehicle on the main road — while the driver of the blue Honda has slipped into the restaurant and is interrogating the waitress.

  “Sure they wuz here,” she says, nodding to the vacated table. “And they haven’t paid yet.”

  “Thanks,” says the burly man as he digs a twenty-dollar bill from his pocket. “Here. Keep the change,” he adds, then he dashes off, sounding like a ventriloquist as he mutters into his lapel microphone, “Okay, guys. They’re on the move.”

  However, in the nearby monastery, Daphne and Trina are clearly going nowhere, and the younger woman is rapidly falling apart under the strain as she snivels over her breakfast.

  “All day yesterday I kept telling myself it was just a silly dream, and you just kept smiling and pretending it was a fairy tale. But it’s not, is it?” Then she leaps up and screeches at the camera, “Why are you doing this? Why don’t you let us go?” before flying across the room and viciously kicking at the door.

  “Listen, Trina,” says Daphne, as Trina limps back across the room and crumples into a blubbering ball onto the bed. “When Minnie died I looked into my future and all I saw was dementia, diapers and death. Then you and David gave me something to look forward to.”

  “But there’s nothing to look forward to in here,” Trina is saying as the door opens and Bumface scoots in, looking as though he’s ready to strangle her before backing down and putting on a concerned look.

  “Please stop shouting and kicking, Mrs. Button,” he says gently. “We don’t want you hurting yourself.”

  “I wann’a go home! I wann’a go home,” howls Trina, and Daphne rushes to throw a comforting arm around her while appealing to Bumface.

  “Why are you doing this? Can’t you see she’s frantic to see her family?”

  “Well, she should behave herself then,” says Bumface as he leaves.

  The Bellingham back street is virtually clear of tra
ffic by the time Daisy, alone, gingerly nudges Trina’s car out of the underground garage.

  “Just take it easy,” Bliss told her. “Remember: they’re after me, not you.” But her hands are fiercely locked to the wheel as she emerges into the daylight and catches sight of the blue Honda.

  “Don’t be scared,” Bliss had said, but Daisy’s foot is shaking as she squeezes the throttle and eases the VW onto the quiet street.

  The Honda driver is making a performance of folding his newspaper as Daisy passes, and she might have smiled at his ineptness if she weren’t so terrified.

  “Once they see I’m not with you they’ll back off,” Bliss assured her, but as she nears the main road the Honda is already creeping closer, and a black limousine with an official state licence plate is edging off a hotel’s forecourt half a block away.

  “Head north, back into the city centre,” Bliss instructed, and as Daisy turns onto the main road she is so nervous that she misses the red light and nearly nails a speedy cyclist.

  “Oh! Pardon… Pardon,” she cries as the cyclist glowers and swerves around her. Then she checks the mirror, spots the white Ford speeding towards her, and hits the gas in alarm.

  “Don’t race, whatever you do,” Bliss warned, but with three cars on her tail she panics and reverts to her Gallic driving habits.

  “Goddammit,” spits the Honda driver as he realizes what’s happening, and he yells into his radio’s microphone, “Unit two — Unit two! Try to head her off.”

  “Ten-four,” responds the driver of the black limo as he slams his foot to the floor. But Daisy is already gaining on her pursuers as she zips Trina’s sporty little Volkswagen around the streets — weaving from lane to lane with Mediterranean panache, leaving startled American drivers in her wake.

  “Unit three!” yells the director. “Go north on Twentieth and try to get ahead of her.”

  “Ten-four,” calls the driver of the white Ford, though he’s barely finished speaking when Daisy slams her car broadside across the road and slips into a narrow service alley.