“No.”
“Maybe you smothered them with love.”
“No. No I didn’t,” she protested, but it made no difference. The sedative that Symmonds injected kicked in, and by the time she awoke, Wayne Browning was inculcating her into his sect, flagellating her into submission, and feeding her drugs and whacky notions in equal proportions until she no longer knew her own mind; she no longer knew for certain what happened to her children.
“Creston is anxious to get her out of the country,” explains Phillips as he continues briefing his staff. “Now why would that be?”
“Worried about her,” gets a young female officer nowhere.
“Worried she might talk now she’s not under Browning’s control,” tries another.
“Could be,” agrees Phillips pointing at the officer who made the suggestion, asking, “What have we got on that Beautiful place? Who was digging into it?”
“Me,” says another officer putting up his hand. “It’s early days but the finances of the place don’t seem to stand up.”
“In what way?”
“Off the record,” says the officer, “but our man in Mountain Falls, the nearest town, reckons that Browning and his harem keep the whole town afloat.”
“Big spenders?”
“Big laundry is more like it. Apparently the banks up there handle millions for him, but most of it doesn’t stay long.”
“Where does he get it?”
“Pot growing possibly,” suggests the officer, “but I’m only guessing. We’d need a warrant to look at his records.”
“And we don’t have grounds,” says Phillips knowingly. Then he has an idea. “What about the tax man. Look into it. See if they know what’s happening.”
“What about Craddock?” asks the woman officer.
“Still on the lam in Hawaii,” admits Phillips and gets six volunteers to immediately go in search of him.
“Very funny,” laughs Phillips “but actually I’ve already got two of my best men out there.”
Phillips’ “men” in Hawaii are sleeping in this morning. In fact there’s a very good chance they’ll sleep until lunchtime.
Craddock, on the other hand, is wide awake. I could always live rough, he tells himself as he saunters along a black volcanic beach lined with shady coconut palms under a tropical sky, thinking that life would be just peachy if there weren’t a storm brewing over the horizon.
The wayward PI has gone as far as he can get without dropping off the Hawaiian archipelago into the Pacific, but the volcanoes and legendary sunsets of the Big Island hold no interest for him. His only concern is surviving for as long as possible without using either his own or Davies’ credit card.
“I’ll pay cash,” he insisted the first night in a backstreet hotel in the capital, Hilo, but he knows that the money he hurriedly withdrew from a few ATMs before leaving Honolulu won’t stretch more than a couple of weeks, and he knows he can never risk using the card again.
David Bliss is also walking a palm-fringed beach, but the only storm clouds on his horizon are quickly evaporating as he realizes that his manuscript is coming together faster and better than he could ever have anticipated
The Château Roger is now complete, the lovelorn Prince’s passionate plea to the woman of his dreams is written and already in the hands of a courier, and the mask is fitted.
Will the plan work? Will he succeed?
Yes, Bliss adamantly decides as he sits on the promenade at St-Juan-sur-Mer with both the château and the fortress in view, preparing to write the final chapters of his novel. Because if he fails so will I. And I have no intentions of failing. This is the biggest challenge of my life. I cannot let Yolanda go — I will succeed.
“Good for you, Dad,” he imagines Samantha saying, and he pens his own feelings in the words of the newly incarcerated prince.
“I will permit no other images but yours into my mind. Your spirit is forever conjoined with mine. The silence of my cell rings with your joyous laughter; the air is scented by your sweet breath; the softness of your voluptuous body washes in on the gentle Mediterranean breeze and soothes my troubled heart.
“The velvet-surfaced alabaster of these walls enfolds and protects me as if I am encased by your womb; your heat warms me; your inner glow lights my path. I am nourished by memories of you and encouraged by the certainty that, when I am reborn, it will be into your sweet bosom. Until that time I will countenance neither sunrise nor sunset, for here is but a single solitary night that will break into a glorious dawn when you return to me. And I will not countenance failure.”
“How is zhe writing?” questions Angeline as she strolls benignly across the deserted road from the bar L’Escale to peer over his shoulder.
“Good, Angeline,” he says with a broad smile. “It is very, very good.”
“And your friend… zhe woman you love. She comes back, no?”
“Soon, Angeline,” he replies with more conviction than he’s had for a long time. “Very, very soon.”
A message awaits Bliss on the answering machine at his apartment, and he’s surprised to hear the Canadian voice of Mike Phillips.
“Daphne Lovelace gave me your number,” says Phillips, once he’s introduced himself. “Could you give me a call, Dave? I’m getting a bit of interference from someone in Scotland Yard and wonder if you have anything that I could use?”
“Michael Edwards,” exclaims Bliss as soon as Phillips has put him in the picture. “Do you mean that scumbag chief superintendent who’s made everyone’s life a bloody misery for the last god knows how long?”
“I guess so,” laughs Phillips.
“Oh, boy,” says Bliss. “Have you come to the right person. In fact, I’ve just made him the main villain in my novel.”
“Novel?” queries Phillips.
“Long story,” admits Bliss, “but you’ve got big problems if Edwards is on your case. He’s shittier than a cesspit — specializes in black book diplomacy.”
“He’s got nothing on me.”
“Then you’re about the only one,” says Bliss. “Although he’s never been able to pin anything on me either — though he’s tried.”
“I need something, anything,” carries on Phillips, “especially if I can link him to Creston.”
“I’m really busy, Mike,” starts Bliss with his mind on his almost completed manuscript and Yolanda’s anticipated return, but then he realizes that he has made the demolition of Edwards an important element of his script, and should he fail in that, his entire plan may crash. “I’ll get hold of someone,” he says, and five minutes later he’s talking quietly to his son-in-law, Chief Inspector Peter Bryan.
“How’s the book coming on, Dad?” asks Bryan and gets a rebuke.
“Cut out this ‘Dad’ stuff, Peter,” he snaps, then softens. “Actually it was Sam’s idea, but it’s going to work. You’ve got a brilliant wife.”
“I know that. But what can I do for you? Need a few tips in the bedroom department for when the lovely lady comes back?”
“Not from you, I don’t,” he bites, then lets it go. “Actually, Peter, I need your help to nail Edwards’ bollocks to the floor once and for all.”
“Breakfast under the banyan tree again,” trills Daphne as she peers out over the ocean watching the early morning surfers catching breakers that have rolled across a thousand miles of open water.
“Minnie and I were going to come here on our world tour,” she adds wistfully, recalling an old friend who threw herself under a train in a fit of depression.
Trina reaches across the table to gently stroke her elderly partner’s hand. “I remember. That was a terrible thing. Are you OK now?”
“OK,” repeats Daphne as if she is trying to work out what the expression means. Then a few tears dribbles down her cheeks. “Do you know, you never fully realize how much you really love someone until they’re gone.”
“Pave paradise and put up a parking lot,” sings Trina and Daphne gives her a quizzi
cal look. “From the sixties,” explains Trina. “Joni Mitchell I think. You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”
Daphne pauses in thought for a few seconds as she drinks some fresh local pineapple juice, and then she puts down the glass. “Actually that’s not really true. Minnie may have been a bit of a silly old woman, and I could get pretty cross with her at times, but I think I did know what I had. I think you do know when, deep down, you really truly love someone.”
Joseph Creston stopped shedding tears for Janet long ago, but now, as he sits by her bed in Vancouver, he still conjures images of the perky teenager he could never take his eyes off. Janet may be a hollow shadow, barely a ghost of the young woman he remembers, yet her spirit, her essence, has never left his mind.
“What do you think about me taking her to England, doctor?” he asks as the physician does his daily round. But Mike Phillips has already spiked that idea, and the medic shakes his head firmly. “Absolutely not possible. Not at the moment.”
“But you said you would consider it,” pushes Creston, seeing his plan unravelling.
“And I have, Mr. Creston. And I’m saying no.”
“Maybe I should speak to the administrator?”
“You could call the Lord himself, sir, but it’s my decision and I’m saying she’s not fit to go anywhere.”
Creston, unused to hearing “No” from anyone, rises quickly. “I could get a second opinion.”
“Naturally.”
Then he backs down and takes a different path. Putting on a smile he places a warm hand on the doctor’s shoulder. “Maybe there’s something I could do for you? I mean, how much do they pay you here? Not a lot if our National Health Service is anything to go on. What if I took you on to look after Janet? A couple of hundred thousand to start — we could call it a ‘golden hello’ and then —”
Doctor Jurgen shakes off Creston’s hand and looks fiercely into the other man’s eyes. “I said she is not fit to travel.”
“I know, but —”
“Look… sir…” the doctor starts, then changes his mind and picks up Janet’s wrist, searching for her pulse.
“So?” questions Creston hopefully.
“So,” the doctor repeats glowering fiercely. “You decide what’s more important, Mr. Creston: your wife’s well-being or you getting your own way.”
“I’ll get another opinion,” Creston yells after the doctor as he closes the door behind him.
chapter fifteen
“Time for prayers,” says Mike Phillips as he rounds up several members of his gang a few days after Christmas, but it’s a couple of weeks since Craddock slipped his noose and the entire investigation has stalled over the holidays. Trina and Daphne have returned from paradise to a drizzly Vancouver winter. Janet Thurgood is making a slow recovery, and Creston has been forced back to London by a flare-up of civil unrest in Côte d’Ivoire.
“We’ve got to get our people out of there,” Mason told his chief in a panic. But in Creston’s eyes “his people” include only the white traders and buyers. The indigenous farmers will have to fight for themselves.
“We’ve got the DNA back from the lab,” reports one of Phillips’ men as they sit around an untouched box of Christmas chocolates, but the positive results change nothing. They already know that Janet was confined in Craddock’s van and bedroom, that he gagged her with duct tape, and that she was with him at the airport hotel. But the forensic evidence, though crucial in a criminal trial, will end up on the cutting room floor unless the villain of the piece can be found.
“Anything more on the money trail?’ asks Phillips with a nod to the officer he asked to track down Beautiful’s books.
“Have you ever tried to deal with Revenue Canada?” spits the constable. “More red tape than a Valentine’s bouquet.”
“Nothing at all?” queries Phillips.
“They’re looking into it, boss,” she says, but her tone suggests she knows different.
“Keep on them,” says the inspector, then he looks around the room at the officers with the realization that the time is fast approaching when he’ll be forced to stand them down and move on to more current matters. “Anything else… anyone?” he asks hopefully.
“Maybe the Thurgood woman will give us something when she’s stronger,” suggests one officer, but Phillips shakes his head. “Not if her husband is around. He’s already hired that dick-shit lawyer Rudy Clayton to represent her, and he’s warned me to expect a lawsuit if I even break wind within earshot of her without his permission.”
“What’s Creston scared of?”
Phillips is well aware of the allegations concerning Janet’s dead children — Daphne and Trina have given him the full picture — but he sees no point in blackening the woman. Whatever happened in England forty years ago, Janet is today’s victim in Canada. “I wish I knew,” he says slowly. “I wish I knew.”
Joseph Creston’s fears over his wife are on his back burner with a high-priced lawyer standing guard over her bed. The inter-religious fighting in Abidjan and other cities of Côte d’Ivoire are playing havoc with cocoa supplies, though he’s already shifting his staff and resources to neighbouring countries.
“The futures are up again,” John Dawes tells him at the weekly progress meeting, but it doesn’t bring the expected smile.
“And the good news?” queries Creston, knowing that higher prices at one end mean lower sales at the other.
The accountant is more bullish. “Overall we could still be up two or three percent on the year.”
“What about financing? Have we covered the situation left by Canada?”
“Yes. We’ve got a place in Nicaragua offering a similar deal — fifteen percent.”
“Still cheaper than Inland Revenue. Set it up,” orders Creston, knowing that Dawes has probably already done so.
“Any news on Janet, J.C.?” asks Mason once Dawes has left.
“Yeah. I wanted to talk to you about that. I want to bring her back. That man of yours at the Yard has squared everything hasn’t he?”
“As far as I know.”
“Did we pay him?”
“Four big ones.”
“Then let’s assume it’s done. Start making arrangements. She’s going to need a passport and stuff.”
Creston’s four thousand pounds may have filled a hole in Michael Edwards’ pocket, but he doesn’t have a smile on his face as he sits, shuffling papers, in his office at Scotland Yard. A sense of unease has been gnawing at him for a while, thanks largely to the very guarded response he received from Ted Donaldson, Daphne’s friend, at Westchester Police Station.
“Just cleaning up old files,” Edwards told his opposite number when he asked for anything relating to the Creston deaths. “I’ve got a mandate from God,” he carried on chat-tily, referring obliquely to the Home Secretary. “I’m supposed to feed the whiz-bang fact eater with every suspicious death case going back fifty years.”
“That damn computer of yours is taking over everything,” moaned Donaldson, complaining about the Police National Computer, then he joked, “I tried to do a wanted person check the other day and it asked me if I’d had my morning crap.”
“Funny,” Edwards said, forcing a laugh, then he pushed harder. “Anyway, Ted, these Creston cases. We don’t seem to have anything recorded, and I don’t want to have to send it upstairs on paper.”
Donaldson shrugged off the threat, recalling his search through the records with Daphne. “You can send it to God herself if you like,” replied Donaldson. “It won’t make any difference. There’s no paperwork. It was natural causes times three.”
But Ted Donaldson has worn his superintendent’s crown long enough to know when he is being taken for a ride and eventually calls David Bliss.
“It certainly sounds iffy to me,” admits Bliss as he sits under the warm midwinter sun outside the bar L’Escale sipping a cappuccino while finishing his novel. “I’ll find out and get back to you.”
Kno
wing Edwards I bet it’s something tricky, Bliss tells himself, then realizes that the chief superintendent’s cunning antecedent, Louis XIV, was equally renowned for his deviousness. By the time he starts a second cappuccino, he has found a suitable anecdote to include as a vignette in an earlier chapter.
“Come, my dear marquis,” said the king, writes Bliss, referring to the French monarch’s gaming partner, the Marquis of Dangeau.“I have word the Maréchal de Gramont intends to prostrate himself at my feet to seek a favour for one of his idiot nephews and I wish to groom you in the sport of diplomacy.” Then, with Dangeau at his back, Louis bustled out of his chamber as if in a great rage and burst upon Gramont, who pulled up short and made his obeisance.
“Ah. My dear Gramont,” bellowed the king. “Just the man I seek.” Then he thrust a paper at the maréchal, saying, “Take a look at that. ’Tis supposedly a sonnet. Though ’tis in my view one of the worst I have yet seen.”
“I must agree,” said Gramont scanning the few lines. “The absolute worst.”
“’Tis utter rubbish,” continued the king, snatching back the paper and tearing it to shreds.
“’Tis true, Sire,” said the maréchal, sensing that he was on the winning side.
“Childish nonsense,” carried on the king, still in high dudgeon as he threw it to the ground and stomped upon it.
“One of the most puerile poems yet devised,” pressed Gramont, then he sensed that he might gain some leverage if he knew the author.
“The author!” exclaimed the king, upon Gramont’s inquiry. “Why it was me of course. I wrote it… Now what is it that you wished to ask of me?”
With a satisfied smirk and an eye on the clock, Bliss finally folds his manuscript and phones his son-in-law at home.
“Enemy action, Peter,” he says, using code, despite the fact that the chief inspector is on his cellphone. “A certain chief super is trying to get his hands on documents relating to the Creston murders.”
“Murders?” echoes Bryan. “That’s only what Daphne reckons.”
Crazy Lady Page 22