Crazy Lady

by James Hawkins

  Eleven years he waited. Day after day peering hopefully across the bay to the prize that awaited his dream woman, yet he was to be not just disappointed but totally destroyed by her rejection. He pined to death.

  “Ah. The agony of true love,” muses Bliss with total empathy, and then a feeling of presence sharpens his senses.

  He felt it before, on a previous visit, and knows that it isn’t just the tormented ghost of the owner still waiting, still hoping, still praying. It’s the ghosts of the thousands of prisoners, resistance fighters and others, who succumbed in the building’s torture chambers. When the Château Roger was commandeered by the Nazis it became the first stop on the pipeline that led to the gas chambers, though many never made it beyond the evil edifice’s basement.

  “Here goes,” he says to himself as he slips through the aediculated doorway into a cavernous hall from which a couple of giant staircases curl off into the upper floors.

  The three-hundred-year-old building has been abandoned for the past six decades; one more year has had little effect. Nothing has changed since his previous visit, but the hackles on the back of his neck still prickle.

  “This is crazy,” he tells himself. “It’s broad daylight.” Although he knows that beneath him, in the basement, it is permanent night. Looking upwards, he steels himself to try one of the rotten staircases, but a flustered pigeon takes off in an explosion of wingbeats and startles him.

  “Pull yourself together,” he tells himself, then decides to head down to the basement, where he is already prepared for the rats and lizards.

  One day this will be a shrine like the extermination camps, he thinks as he plays his flashlight ahead of him down the flagstone steps. One day, when my novel is finished and the truth about the Man in the Iron Mask is finally revealed.

  Murderous shackles and chains still festoon the walls in the torture chambers. It could be the setting for a Halloween dance, but Bliss knows it’s not.

  “What was that?” he questions at the sound of a soft footfall and he holds his breath. “This place could drive you mad,” he muses, then seriously questions whether he is thinking of himself or another jilted lover — the Man in the Iron Mask. “I wasn’t jilted. She died,” he protests, but what of all the other ghosts that surround him, all the men who died here. Is there a difference?

  It’s one thing to have a flaming row and to have a lover walk away saying, “I hate you. I never ever want to see you again,” he reasons as he fingers the rusted shackles. But what of the man who looks into the eyes of his lover as he is being dragged away on the end of a rifle, still yelling, “I love you. I love you. I’ll love you forever.” And what of those who still see the love burning brightly in their partners’ eyes, wanting to yell, “Tell me you don’t love me. Please tell me you don’t love me. I can live with that. How can I live knowing you still love me as much as I love you?”

  Bliss stops at the thought, realizing that he is no different from the widows of St-Juan; he is completely stuck, unable to move forward and unable to go back, in limbo for the rest of his life, knowing that he can never love another.

  Think about it: one look into each other’s eyes and you were both hooked — then she left you.

  She didn’t leave. She died.

  Is there a difference?

  The creak of a door opening sharpens him again. But this time he’s sure. It’s the door above him — into the basement.

  “Shit!” he mutters under his breath as he flicks off his flashlight and flattens himself behind a brick pillar. Footfalls slowly clatter down the stone steps.

  Bliss balances the cheap torch in his hand as a potential weapon, although it’s plastic — useless — and he tries to control his breathing as the steps slowly descend.

  Just walk out and confront him, he tells himself, guessing that the guard will be as scared as he, but he hangs back knowing that he is the intruder, and a jumpy sentry might be trigger happy. But the château itself holds him back. The building seems to love death, has revelled in death. In addition to the thousands of wartime victims it has already killed Daisy’s one-time lover, Roland, and its builder, the Man in the Iron Mask.

  “Hello, anyone here?”

  Bliss steels himself to run, then stops. It’s a woman’s voice — a female guard — and he is readying to raise his hands and shout, “Don’t shoot,” when he has another thought. English? Why is she speaking English? He waits, holding his breath, sweat pouring down his forehead, his fingers taut around the flashlight.

  “Hello,” the woman tries again into the darkness.

  “Hello,” responds Bliss, stepping out and snapping on the light.

  “Agh!” she screams, then stands her ground, demanding, “Who are you?”

  “Chief Inspector Bliss, Scotland Yard,” he says, hoping his voice sounds even. “Who are you?”

  Her gasp of amazement hits him. “I asked, who…” he begins to reiterate as he raises the beam, but her hands fly to her face.

  “No, no, no,” she cries. “Who are you? Why are you doing this to me? You’re dead.”

  “Yolanda?”

  The few moments it takes them to escape from the gloom of the basement are fear-filled for Bliss as he worries that the beautiful spectre will evaporate in the brilliant light of day; suspicious that she is as ethereal as the rest of the ghosts in the château’s basement, he keeps up a nervous banter as they climb the stone steps, his voice cracked by laughter and tears.

  “They said you were dead; I love you; what happened; I never stopped thinking of you…”

  Yolanda stops at the top, suddenly aware that in the confusion they have missed a vital step, and she turns to silence him with a kiss.

  “Oh my God,” breathes Bliss as a million sweet memories flood back, and they dance, lips locked, through the expansive hallway until they are standing, crushed together, on the tiled patio in the warm sunshine.

  Three difficult and pain-filled years take the resurrected couple twenty minutes to stitch together in between bouts of kissing and fondling, then, as they break for breath, Bliss wants to know, “What brought you here?”

  “I really don’t know —” she starts, but he stops her with a suspicious look at the masked man’s island across the serene bay.

  94

  “It was the Man in the Iron Mask — his spirit.”

  Yolanda’s puzzled frown is expected, and he briefly explains the legend.

  “He wanted me to write his story,” he continues. “I knew it the moment I walked into his cell. But I got it wrong. I believed the records, believed that he had been transferred to the Bastille in 1698.”

  “And he hadn’t?”

  “I’m beginning to think that someone, probably a common thief, was taken in his place so that he could be free.”

  “But what about the woman of his dreams; the one he built this château for?” asks Yolanda as she sweeps her eyes over the seemingly malevolent monolith.

  “I don’t know,” admits Bliss. “Maybe she found someone else. Maybe she didn’t love him.”

  “So after all this, he didn’t get her. There was no happy ending.”

  “Life doesn’t always end happily, Yolanda,” says Bliss, then he breaks into an enormously grateful smile and grasps her tightly to his chest. “But maybe he’s happy now.” Then he kisses her tenderly and whispers, “I love you with all my heart. I am overjoyed that I have found you.”

  chapter seven

  Raven is a sleek-bodied, black-haired channel who has a benevolent guide in the spirit world — Serethusa, a voice from beyond, who, as far as the young psychic knows, has never led her astray.

  “Serethusa says you have to be slain in the spirit of God in order to be resurrected on the dawn following the third night of death,” Raven explains seriously to Trina, once the wannabe private eye has expressed her interest in angels as she tries to fathom out Janet and prepare for her infiltration of Beautiful.

  “You see,” carries on Raven, “Spenta
Armaita is the feminine angel of the earth who is the mother of Daena — the astral body of each of us which manifests herself to the soul.”

  “I think I’ve got it.”

  “While the six Zoroastrian archangels, three male and three female, who surround Ormazd, the light of God and Wisdom…” Raven stops at the total confusion on Trina’s face. “You haven’t a clue, have you?”

  “Not really,” admits the other woman, so Raven cuts to the end.

  “Daena, your Daena, isn’t a real angel.”

  “Thank God for that,” says Trina, tongue in cheek.

  “There’s a bunch of freaks who’ve got a place in the boonies they call Beautiful. All the women are called Daena. And the chief freak has got about thirty wives, although most of them are probably his own kids. Apparently he treats them like his personal slaves, but they’re dead loyal.”

  “I don’t understand what it is with some women,” admits Trina. “So desperate they just keep going back for more.”

  “Psychological abuse,” agrees Raven. “Some jerk dumps me and I’m out the door. I’m damned if I’ll beg. But some women, the more they’re pushed away the harder they try to get back.”

  “It’s the mothering instinct,” suggests Trina. “The bigger the kid, the more some women will try to straighten him out — just like his mummy should have done.”

  “Hey. We all like to feel needed. Don’t knock it.”

  “I’d rather have a real man like my Rick than a wimp any day.”

  “Read the books, Trina. Some women just can’t handle good guys. Anyway, don’t ask me what it is with Browning; maybe it’s what he’s packing under his cassock.”

  Amelia Drinkwater is someone who never felt the need to read books on psychological abuse or its effects.

  “She managed to suppress it,” Ted Donaldson confides in Daphne Lovelace, talking of the suicide of the magistrate’s son, Simon. “The coroner was quite obliging. It wouldn’t have reflected well on the judiciary in general — loss of faith if it got out that the chief magistrate had abused her son.”

  “Abused?”

  “Oh, I doubt she hit him, but she knocked him about in other ways, kept him a boy instead of turfing him out and making him grow up.”

  Simon Drinkwater caught on eventually, when he found that his immaturity and insecurity turned most women off, so he tied himself a noose.

  “Peter Pan,” says Daphne knowingly. “But how did they cover it up?”

  “Claimed he was painting the hall ceiling, slipped, rope caught in banister on the way down — could have happened.”

  “If not for this,” she says as she scans Simon Drinkwater’s suicide note, which Donaldson excavated from a sealed envelope in the bottom of the file.

  “You’ll get me shot one of these days, Daphne Lovelace,” Donaldson says and laughs.

  Amelia Drinkwater isn’t in such a jovial mood an hour later. Daphne has splurged on a taxi, but the flower lady isn’t anxious to see her. It’s only Daphne’s Order of the British Empire holding the front door open.

  “I suppose you’d better come in,” says Mrs. Drinkwater. “I’ve just made tea. Although if you’ve come about Janet you’re wasting your breath. I told you, I don’t gossip.”

  “No,” says Daphne before pinning the woman down with the information gleaned from Donaldson with the skill of a welterweight: dancing lightly, jabbing and prodding.

  Amelia gets the point and flares. “My son’s accident has nothing to do with you.”

  Daphne takes a sip and screws up her face. “You should try Keemun. It’s the Queen’s favourite.” Then she pauses to fix the woman with a stare. “I’m writing a book about Dewminster’s characters, so, in a way, it could be my business.”

  “That’s a threat.”

  “Yes. I believe it is.”

  Amelia sizes up Daphne and decides to give a little. “Stay there,” she orders. “I might have something about Janet.”

  “Edwards!” Bliss screeches into the phone as soon as the senior officer answers his phone.

  “Chief Super —” he begins, but Bliss cuts him off.

  “Don’t pull rank on me, you nasty little turd.”

  “Who the hell?”

  “Bliss. David Bliss. Remember me? Remember that Iraq job: crashed aircraft, escaped hostages? Of course you do, you lying bastard. Well, it turns out that Ms. Pieters — the Dutchwoman you gave me crap for bonking — is very much alive.”

  “Exigencies of the service, old boy,” claims Edwards, immediately catching on.

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “Not my decision. The higher-ups thought it better that way.”

  “Better for who?”

  “If I told you that I’d have to kill you.”

  “And if you don’t, I’ll kill you.”

  “OK. Let’s grow up. It’s probably best if you don’t see her.”

  “Are you crazy,” spits Bliss, wanting to say, Have you the faintest idea what it’s like to find true love — the stuff of movies and songs? “Not only will I see her, I will get to the bottom of this. You lied to her as well.”

  “Not me, her people.”

  “And you never thought we’d find out?”

  “It was a chance.”

  “Well, if you’re worried that we might go public with what we know about the computer super-virus, worry away.”

  “Don’t even think about it. The Americans will shut you down in a flash.”

  “So that’s who was yanking your chain.”

  “I didn’t —”

  “You didn’t need to.”

  Amelia Drinkwater is taking her time. Whether she is stalling or simply having difficulty locating whatever she has in mind regarding Janet, Daphne Lovelace has no way of knowing, so she takes off her black veiled hat and carefully arranges it on the Sheraton sideboard as an indication of her determination to stay until she has some answers.

  The majestic room in the vine-covered mock-Tudor mansion is gracefully furnished with unostentatious antiques, and while she waits Daphne sizes up the owner as being a woman who never let her husband’s fortune get in the way of good taste.

  “Oh. There you are,” says Amelia on her return, as if she inwardly wishes that Daphne may have vanished in the interim, and she takes a scratched photograph from an old album and places it on the tea table. “That’s me and Joe,” she continues as she points to two teenagers in front of a group of youths. “Brighton Beach, 1958,” she adds, and Daphne puts on her glasses to look at the smiling youngsters holding hands under a grey sky.

  “Joe?” questions Daphne.

  “Joseph Crispin Creston Jr. That’s a mouthful isn’t it?”

  “Janet Thurgood’s husband?”

  “The garden is such a mess at this time of the year, don’t you find,” says Amelia quickly as she looks for a way out of a tight spot.

  Daphne stares at the picture and it takes her a few seconds to come to terms with the fact that the withered crone in front of her is barely in her sixties. That’s what a lifetime of summers does to you, Daphne is thinking as the other woman sits staring into the picture, reliving her past. Then she looks at Daphne and spits angrily, “He loved me. He loved me. Not her. Do you know what that does to you?”

  Daphne knows; she’s taken that bus before.

  “I was just sixteen. He was a bit older. We’d planned everything: wedding, honeymoon. We had the family fortune. We were meant for each other. We had class.”

  So, why did he marry Janet? is the question on Daphne’s lips, but she doesn’t need to ask as the other woman continues acidly, “She was a trollop. Got herself knocked up by some lout working on the travelling fair; didn’t even know his name. Her father chucked her out and quite rightly. But Joe was a soft touch — not like his father. He used to watch her in church. I saw him. He didn’t know. But I saw him ogling her. She was a tart: tight skirts, more cleavage than a plumber’s mate. He married her just to annoy his father, I th
ink. Just jilted me and eloped with her.”

  Amelia stares out of the window at the manicured lawn that slopes past a ha-ha to the willows overhanging a lazy stream, but it is more than the swirling mist in her eyes as she continues, “It scarred me for life. I never got over it. He loved me.”

  “So why didn’t he come back to you after she left?”

  Because he still loved her, and always loved her in a way, would be the correct answer, but Amelia can never bring herself to that admission. “I married Drinkwater,” she says, skipping the intervening years when she lay awake night after night waiting for Joseph’s call following Janet’s departure. “I didn’t really love Cecil, but I guess he loved me. He bought me things — had money. In any case, Joe never divorced her. He’s too bloody religious for that.”

  The Creston empire was also a factor, and with Janet out of the way, Joseph Creston Sr. had wasted no time in inculcating his son into every aspect of the business.

  “Money,” continues Amelia snootily, as if it is a dirty word. “That’s all he thinks about. I see him on TV smiling, giving millions to charity, everyone clapping, and I think, ‘He’s still got my heart.’ More than forty years and he’s still got it. But he doesn’t care.”

  Daphne allows the emotion to subside for a few seconds as she sips her tea, then she digs. “You said Janet killed the children.”

  “Did I?” queries Amelia absently, her mind still on her ex-lover. “Probably just the jealousy talking. He was mine and she… Well, never mind. It was a long time ago.”

  But Amelia Drinkwater does mind. Daphne can see that in the pain on her host’s face as the other woman continues. “I read somewhere that everyone is entitled to one great love. I suppose he was mine.”

  “But the children?” pushes Daphne. “What happened?”