“And brief the guard on Janet’s room,” he adds. “I don’t want him left alone with her for a second.”
“Try Robert Davies,” persists Trina as she begins checking hotels again. But this time she’s at the Ohana on Kuhio Avenue.
“Robert Davies,” repeats the female desk clerk loudly, and a man stops in his tracks as he passes. “That’s right… Robert Davies,” reiterates Trina as Craddock takes in the scene and is in the elevator and on the way to his sixteenth floor room within seconds
“Shit! Shit! Shit!” mutters the cornered PI as he wills the elevator to speed up, and when a couple of Korean women try to get in on the twelfth floor, he roughly pushes them out and stabs the “close door” button.
Craddock is down the fire escape and out into the searing light of the mid-morning sun in less than a minute, while Trina is running in the opposite direction, intent on finding Daphne as quickly as possible.
It is early afternoon in Vancouver and still raining, though Joseph Creston doesn’t seem to notice as he peers across the city from his wife’s room with a hint of a tear in his eye.
“How did she get like this?” he questions, turning to the doctor who is checking Janet’s pulse.
“Years of neglect probably,” the doctor suggests, though he steps back, admitting that it could well be self-induced.
“Self-induced?” questions Creston.
“Eating disorders; depression; general mental problems; self-loathing,” the white-coated medic suggests, running off a list of possibilities. “Anything ring a bell?”
“Probably,” admits Creston. “I don’t think she really thought she was good enough for me.”
“And was she?”
The question seems to take forever to sink in. “Good enough?” repeats Creston eventually, and then finally answers, “Financially, we were miles apart. It didn’t bother me, but I think she found my family a little daunting.”
“Well,” shrugs the doctor. “It’s not unusual to find the in-laws overwhelming. Was there anything else?”
The death of the children seems to have slipped Creston’s mind as he seriously ponders the question, leaving Mike Phillips, who has quietly sidled into the room behind the visitor’s back, shaking his head perplexedly.
“Ah, Mr. Creston,” says the officer seeming to arrive with his notepad in hand. “I was hoping to catch you.”
“Is there something I can help you with, Inspector?”
“Yes. I just need a statement.”
“But I don’t know anything.”
“Formality, sir. I’m sure you understand.”
“In case she dies, Inspector,” says Creston harshly. “Is that what you’re saying?”
Phillips’ cellphone saves him. “Excuse me a moment,” he says, taking the call.
It’s Trina, breathless. “Mike, he’s in Hawaii,” she shouts excitedly. “Craddock is in Hawaii using the name Robert Davies.”
“Hang on,” says Phillips with a wary eye on Creston, and then he excuses himself, saying, “I’ll be back in a second, sir.”
“You are brilliant, Trina Button,” says Phillips once he’s in the corridor. “Now go to the nearest police station, tell them what you know, and get them to call me, all right?”
“Right, sir. Roger, wilco, sir.”
“It’s Mike, Trina. Don’t get carried away.”
“OK, Mike.”
“Now, sir,” says Phillips returning to question Creston. “You were telling me how you knew that your wife had been at Mr. Craddock’s house. Would you mind explaining that again — just for the record?”
While Inspector Phillips waits for Creston to try to worm his way out of that question, he is mentally preparing the next: “Are you psychic, or was it just a very lucky coincidence that you happened to arrive in Vancouver before we knew that Craddock had kidnapped her?”
It takes half an hour for Trina and Daphne to get through to the smartly dressed Polynesian officers that a wanted man is in their midst, thanks largely to Trina’s over-excited inability to focus on one thing at a time. Beautiful, Craddock, guinea pigs, dead babies, banana sandwiches, and religious freaks all get confused in a gushing tale that runs the officers around in circles.
In the end, Daphne shuts Trina up with a scowl and starts from the beginning.
It take another hour for enough men to be rounded up to surround the inexpensive hotel, and by the time that a passkey opens the private eye’s door, the fugitive is on a small plane bound for the volcanoes of Hawaii’s Big Island.
“Now what?” questions Daphne, surveying the hastily abandoned room.
“We could always go catch some breakers,” suggests Trina with a grin.
Almost half a world away, not far from the Eiffel Tower, David Bliss is dreaming of Yolanda as his mind prepares for his return to St-Juan-sur-Mer. But the anguished spectres of past centuries surrounding the beautiful, though seemingly malevolent, Château Roger become entangled with her image and drive him out of bed much earlier than his alarm clock planned.
“I don’t really want to go back,” he told Samantha the previous evening. “There’s too many memories there.”
“Warm memories?” queried his daughter.
“Very,” he said.
“In that case go back; think of the good times, remember what you had. It’ll spur you on to finish your book and get her back again.”
“Thanks, Sam,” he said, cheering, and he meant it.
Now, with his bags packed and — unlike Craddock — his hotel account settled, he still has two hours before the first southbound train. His suitcase drags heavily as he struggles along the deserted platform, tempting him to turn north and walk away from his ghouls — the masked man, the massacred resistance fighters, and even Yolanda — but he shakes off his fears, driven by the knowledge that their souls will be forever lost should he fail in his resolve.
As Bliss’s day begins in France, another marathon is winding down for Mike Phillips in Vancouver.
“There is something very odd going on here,” he confesses once he’s gathered his team together for a late-night debrief. “This big-shot Creston knows a lot more than he’s letting on.”
“He hasn’t left her room all day,” pipes up one of the surveillance officers.
“I know,” says Phillips. “But he’s on the phone non-stop.”
“Can we bug him?”
“Cellphone,” says Phillips throwing his hands wide, knowing the difficulty of tapping into digital radio waves. “Anyway, we’d need a warrant and we’ve got nothing to go on.”
“So,” asks one of the sergeants, “what’s his connection with that religious joint up in the mountains?”
“That’s what I’d like to know. Get onto it in the morning will you? Have a word with Zelke, the cults and sects guy, see what he’s managed to dig up.”
Wayne Browning may have a vault full of skeletons, but unearthing them will take more than a lone specialist officer. Since Trina’s visit to Beautiful the pharisaic religionist has been weeding out all reference to Creston and his enterprises and building a pyre.
“What about Craddock, boss?” pipes up another officer as the debriefing closes in on midnight.
“He’s on the run again. Honolulu was the last sighting, but he could be anywhere by now.”
“And the Thurgood woman?”
“I suppose she’s technically the Creston woman now,” explains Phillips. “She’ll probably make it.”
“Some good news then.”
“Yeah. Although I’ve given orders that she’s not to be left alone, even for a second, with her husband.”
“You think he might pull the plug?”
“There’s something fishy about him,” admits Phillips, although he has nothing solid. However, the late-night call from a Scotland Yard chief superintendent, apparently acting on the executive’s behalf, doesn’t take away any of the smell. “This guy has got clout,” Phillips continues to his crew. “Big clout, but I’
m just not sure which side of the fence he’s on.”
Joseph Creston has lost steam and has finally fallen asleep, slumped into an armchair by his wife’s bed in a luxury room. “I want her to have the very best at whatever cost,” he told the hospital administrator earlier, but the man shook his head.
“This isn’t America, Mr. Creston. Everyone gets the same treatment here regardless of ability to pay.”
“Right, I understand,” he replied, but the administrator coughed to indicate that he wasn’t finished.
“The only problem is that, legally, it seems your wife is not registered as a Canadian resident.”
“She’s been here forty years.”
“I’m aware of that, but she’s never registered or made contributions.”
“What are you saying?”
“Well, naturally we’ll treat her, but there may be a question of payment.”
“Oh,” said Creston catching on. “Maybe I could make a small charitable donation.”
“You could, but only if you want to.”
“Say a quarter of a million dollars? How does that sound?”
“Qua… qua… quarter of a million?” the administrator stuttered.
“All right,” Creston cut in and watched the man choke, “let’s make it a half million. I’m sure there’s some vital piece of equipment you could use in Janet’s care.”
Nothing has changed in Bliss’s apartment on his return. The warm memories of Yolanda in his bed are instantly chilled by the knowledge that she is no longer here and may never be here again. “What if she marries him?” he worries as he peers over the balcony and finds the single lemon still on the grass, but then he pulls himself together. She wouldn’t do that, he tells himself. She admitted that he didn’t really love her, not like me. But what if he insists, just to spite me, just to make sure I can’t have her?
“Keep writing,” Samantha’s voice in his mind tells him. “Keep writing and do it quickly. Get it done and send it to her before she makes the biggest mistake of her life.” Craddock, alias Robert Davies, has slipped under the radar of the Hawaiian police department and is working his way towards the very edge of Polynesia as Daphne and Trina take the evening off in Waikiki.
A grassy beachside stage, overhung with banyans and loaded coconut palms, hosts a ukulele band and a trio of hula dancers as the sun turns to a fireball and burns a hole in the Pacific. The fiery spectacle stops the musicians and they turn, together with the audience, to applaud the celestial show before picking up their swaying rhythm again.
“Who would like to hula?” cries the bandleader, and Daphne is not at all surprised when Trina is plucked out of the crowd to end up on stage in a grass skirt.
“Come on, Daph,” shouts the exuberant Canadian as she takes the spotlight with a perversion of hula that somehow combines elements of breakdancing, the Twist, and kick-boxing. The audience goes wild, but the band-leader throws up his arms and his ukulele in despair.
“Boy, that was great,” screeches Trina with her baseball cap on backwards as she comes off stage, and the two women head to the international market where vendors switch back and forth between English, Cantonese, and the local pidgin as they push “local” souvenirs made almost entirely in China.
Fendi, Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, and Armani all have glitzy stores backing on to the beach, but carbon copies of most of their products can be found on the market stalls just a pebble’s throw away. Ten-dollar RayBans, twenty-dollar Rolexes, and a thousand other glassy knock-offs sit side by side with glossy fool’s gold and tempt the wary and unwary alike.
The pearls are real, though mainly seeded, and buckets of live oysters wait to be sprung by gamblers willing to risk a few dollars to discover a little gem.
And after the market the two women share a pineapple-laced pizza before taking a late-night stroll along Kalla Road where much of the entertainment is provided by the tourists themselves.
“Oh my God, look at this,” Trina laughs, pointing Daphne towards a man welded into a metal straitjacket.
“It’s fake,” said Daphne with hardly a glance, but she acknowledges to herself that many of the freakily attired show-offs are just misguided people living in a fantasy land.
By midnight, scantily dressed hookers are out in full force along with the panhandlers and the drunks who are starting to fall out of the bars.
“Time to go home,” Daphne says when she has sidestepped one too many inebriates, but they spend another hour laughing at their experiences over pina coladas in the bar of the Sheraton before finding their way to their room.
“We really ought to be looking for Craddock,” Daphne suggests tiredly around 2:00 a.m. as she gets into bed, but Trina isn’t concerned. “It’s an island,” she says. “He can’t have gone far. The police will soon pick him up.”
Joseph Creston is still asleep when Mike Phillips checks in at the hospital on his way to the office the following morning.
“He hasn’t left the room all night,” the guard on Janet’s room whispers to Phillips when he inquires.
“Phone calls?”
“He switched it off.”
“How’s Janet doing?”
“Still the same, I think,” replies the young woman officer. “She sort of drifts in and out.”
“Saying anything?”
“She mumbles things about ‘God’ and ‘Our Lord Saviour’ and ‘Sorry.’ She says ‘Sorry’ a lot, but nothing else.”
“Stick with it,” Phillips is saying as Creston surfaces.
“Ah, Inspector. Glad I caught you,” says the drowsy man. “I wanted your opinion. I was thinking of having my wife flown back to England.”
“Nothing to do with me,” says Phillips putting up his hands to block the man. “That will be up to the doctors.”
“Only I could charter an air ambulance. She wouldn’t suffer.”
“Like I said, not my department.” Then he checks his watch. “Sorry must dash… meeting… we’ve found Craddock.”
Creston’s face falls, but he quickly picks himself up. “Oh. Good show. Where?”
“State secret,” says Phillips on his way out of the door. “State secret.”
Now let’s see what happens, muses the inspector as he heads for his car and the police station.
Chief Superintendent Edwards is clearing his desk for the day when Mason calls.
“I need something else, Mike,” says Creston’s right-hand man.
“Not at the office,” spits the police commander, knowing that all lines in and out of the headquarters are recorded. “I’ll call you back in thirty minutes.”
“Make it ten.”
Half an hour later Mike Phillips takes the call he’s expecting from his English counterpart. “That didn’t take long,” he muses under his breath as he checks his watch and puts on a sweet voice. “Chief Superintendent Edwards,” he trills. “Pleasure to hear from you again — and so soon. What can I do for you?”
“Just wondering how things were progressing?”
“Fine, thanks.”
“Any developments?”
“Developments?” queries Phillips, playing the British officer along. “What did you have in mind?”
“Weren’t you looking for a private dick?”
“Were we?”
“Look, Mike,” says Edwards, suddenly aware that he’s hitting concrete. “Mr. Creston is in the big league.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Anyway. I just thought you should know that. So, if there’s anything he should know…”
“I’ll be sure to tell him.”
“Good. Good. And if I can help in any way.”
“Actually, you can,” says Phillips, pausing for a second before pushing a red button. “I’d like copies of the files relating to the deaths of his three children.”
Edwards stalls, “Oh. I don’t think…”
“Well, you did ask.”
“I… I know, but I don’t have access,” continues Edwards
trying to backtrack. “It was a different force… long time ago. Doubt we could find them now.”
“OK,” says Phillips, seemingly letting the other man off the hook. “I’ll call you if I need anything else.”
Mike Phillips puts the phone down before Edwards has a chance to reply and mutters, “Sucker,” before gathering his team around him for a briefing.
“OK,” he says. “I may be wrong but it looks to me that Creston hired Craddock to snatch his wife.”
“Because?” asks one of the officers, leaving Phillips in a mental vacuum.
“Still working on that,” he says after a few seconds. “But I don’t buy that he loves her so damn much that he rushed here to be by her side. I might have done forty years ago, but it’s a bit lame now. Christ, I’m amazed he even remembers her name.”
Phillips is wrong about Creston in some ways. The words “Till death do us part” have always held him locked to Janet, but so has the advice of a specialist lawyer hired by his father after the death of the third child.
“My suggestion would be to keep her as far away as possible,” the white-haired family law expert opined. “But never divorce her. That way you’ll always retain control.”
“And that’s important?” Joseph Creston the younger questioned.
“Yes it is, young man. Very important,” the lawyer continued sagely. “Get her into a convent or similar sort of place where she’ll be isolated from the rest of the world and from the temptation to talk.”
The remote community of Beautiful was just as far from leafy Dewminster as the North Pole, and not a lot warmer, and it fitted the lawyer’s criteria. “It’s for the best,” the elder Creston told his son’s wife as he and Peter Symmonds ushered her aboard his executive jet while his son sat at home and wept.
“But it wasn’t my fault,” Janet cried as she was escorted up the plane’s steps. “I loved him. I loved them all.”
“I know,” Creston Sr. soothed. “Maybe you loved them too much.”
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