“Hope you like your birthday present, Dad,” says Samantha as she hugs her father.
“Present?” he asks.
“The suit.”
“I bought you the tie,” chirrups Daphne as Daisy gives him a kiss that brings a cheer and a round of applause from the room.
“And I bought zhe shoes in Italy especially for you. You like, non?”
“I like, no,” he parodies, but the biggest surprise of the evening comes after the cake and the port, when Samantha proposes a toast to her father then casually turns to him, adding, “A really great dad who is soon to become a grandfather.”
The congratulatory cheer is immediately superseded by ageist quips, and one wag slips out to borrow the restaurant’s wheelchair. “This is for you, granddad,” he yells as he pushes it into the room. Half a dozen strong hands grab Bliss and drop him into the chair, and while he is still struggling to find the right pigeonhole in his brain for the information, he is shot out of the door and boisterously raced around the restaurant under the noses of the glitterati. Greasy’s upper lip quivers as he steps in to stop the fracas, and his French takes a dive as he mutters, “F’kin idiots.”
“Zhat is good news, non?” says Daisy on Bliss’s return.
“Yes. That is good news, no,” he agrees ambiguously, with a feeling that he is on the verge of another huge step on the road to eternity.
Daisy’s visit is short-lived. “I have to go back to France tomorrow for my mozher,” she explains as they are driven home by Samantha after the birthday dinner, but Bliss has his own surprise.
“Never mind. I’m taking the week off after the Queen’s visit on Friday. We could go to Venice.”
Daisy turns up her nose. “Venice — in August?”
“Corsica then,” he suggests, then snuggles close. “Anywhere, as long as I’m with you.”
“It is zhe festival of fireworks in Cannes on Saturday,” she reminds him excitedly, and he happily makes it a date.
By midweek the heat has sparked a rash of mini riots as short-tempered drinkers spill out of bars and find nothing to dampen their spirits. Lexicographers perspire as they try to keep pace with the superlatives of exuberant meteorologists. “We’re experiencing a superthermic episode,” enthuse TV weathermen, as yet unable to invent a simple antonym for “ice age,” and the words deforestation, desertification, and de-glacierization crop up daily.
The ill-tempered rhetoric over the impending visit is exacerbated by the relentless hot spell, and Bliss is taking heat from some of his colleagues.
“It’s all right for some,” sneers one chief inspector at Wednesday morning’s site visit, as he sees himself frying by the roadside for hours on Friday while Bliss sits in air-conditioned comfort. “Some pinky-assed people get a year off the job to live in France and write a poxin’ book while the rest of us sweat our bollocks off.”
“So?” Bliss questions.
“Well, where is it then?” Lester Clarke demands angrily. But it’s not the book that is bugging him. It is the fact that Bliss has been parachuted into the driver’s seat ahead of him.
“I thought writing it was hard enough,” admits Bliss. “But apparently it’s almost impossible to get published.”
“Waste of bloody time if you ask me,” snorts Clarke as he storms off, and Bliss is beginning to wonder if his colleague doesn’t have a point.
“Prime targets,” says Commander Fox, directing his clutch of senior officers to the relevant page as they stand on the spot where the Queen will be presented to the imams and mullahs. “Toilets — and not necessarily a bomb. What if someone snuck a mini surveillance camera into a loo? A bootleg video of the royal backside hitting the seat and the sound of a royal tinkle would be priceless.”
Across the road from the mosque, a team of eight workers tart up the façade of the public library. The days of whitewashing coal heaps and erecting hoardings around public toilets and other unseemly sights to spare the Queen’s sensibilities may be over, but savvy councillors still know that the best way to get potholes fixed and a new coat on a public building is to host a royal walkabout.
“I bet she thinks that fresh air smells like wet paint,” cracks Bliss under his breath as he watches a couple of painters atop a cherry picker artistically decorating a lamp standard that no one will ever see from the ground without binoculars.
“I don’t want too many uniforms lining the streets,” carries on Fox, knowing that the easiest way to get a poke in the eye from the palace is to be visibly heavy-handed. “Her Majesty expressed concern at the cost …” a rebuke to the commissioner, copied to the Home Secretary, will begin, and he’ll be writing apologies for a month. “Hide them round the back; stuff them into buses; take off their uniforms and try to make them look human.”
A pickup truck laden with paving stones and sand pulls onto the pavement and two workers begin unloading tools as Fox goes through the manual: parade times; radio call signs; plainclothes officers’ identification badges; code names; refreshment facilities; prisoner handling; use of deadly force protocols … the list appears endless, and Bliss tunes out, knowing the details by heart.
The sound of a pickaxe punctuates Fox’s orders and draws Bliss to the curbside where the Queen is due to dismount from the royal car.
“Aw’right then, guv’nor,” says one of the workmen as Bliss takes an interest in the truck’s contents.
“What are you doing?” asks Bliss.
“Ain’t you ‘eard, guv? The bleedin’ Queen’s comin’ Friday. Can’t ‘ave her Ladyship trippin’ over, can we?”
“No,” agrees Bliss, “we can’t.” But he watches worriedly for a few minutes as he realizes how easy it would be for the men to slip a remotely activated mine under the stones that they are realigning.
By Wednesday afternoon desperation has drawn Daphne Lovelace back to the labyrinth, a wide-peaked red hat plonked fiercely over her forehead. Sunday tea was a disaster: they came, they ate, they went, Misty and Rob Jenkins and the little Jenkinses — three teenage thugs, in Daphne’s eyes, with tattoos and metal rings in every painful place and iPods that were never off. “The dogs?” they said. “Just puppies.” The stereo? “Ignore it.” Late-night revelries? “Boys will be boys.” Motorbikes? “A Yammy and a Kawasaki,” said Rob Jenkins as if Daphne should be impressed. “And I’m savin’ up for a Harley,” piped up one of the lesser Jenkinses, and at that point Daphne decided she might as well keep the second Victoria sponge for herself.
The spectre of a long-haired woman drifts out of nowhere as Daphne circles the labyrinth with her eyes down, seeking inspiration, or at least some peace and quiet.
“Oh dear. I can feel your pain,” says the woman as she slowly passes on an adjacent path.
“Aren’t we supposed to keep silent?” whispers Daphne a touch harshly from under her hat.
“I could hear you from over there,” insists the woman, bringing Daphne to a confused halt, protesting, “I haven’t said anything.”
“Not you — your soul. Crying out; searching for answers; seeking salvation before you journey into the next world.”
Daphne steps back and lifts her hat to take a close look at the spindly, barefoot, and obviously bra-less middle-aged woman, thinking, A peony in her hair and a guitar and she could have walked straight here from Woodstock.
“Let me help you, Daphne,” the woman continues as she takes the older woman’s hand and peers into her eyes.
“How do you know my name?” shoots back Daphne, forgetting that she signed the visitors’ book at the entrance.
“The Lord is all-seeing. He has sent me.”
“That’s good of him,” she says as she looks around praying for help from a less ethereal source. Then the woman hands her a business card and echoes the information.
“Angel Robinson, spiritual guide and psychic,” she says, adding, “Give me a call when you’re ready,” as she drifts away.
“I should get her to contact Maggie and Phil,” muses Daphne h
alf-seriously. “Perhaps she can find out what I did to upset them.”
“I expect nothing — I repeat, nothing — to mar today’s proceedings, Chief Inspector,” Fox warned Friday morning before leaving to conduct operations at the scene, and as noon approaches, Bliss makes a final check to ensure that everyone is in place.
“It’s in the lap of the gods now,” he says to Sergeant Williams as the pageant begins and he hears the BBC welcoming listeners to “this monumental occasion” while reminding them that it was only recently that the Queen was described as the enemy of Islam by some of the more radical imams.
The procession is flawless. The cameras work. There are no stray aircraft, no rooftop snipers, and few rubber-neckers along the route.
“So far so good,” Bliss sighs as the motorcade makes it through the centre of London unhindered, and by the time he checks back with the BBC they have wheeled in an expert to dissect the body theocratic.
“This is a difficult time for the Crown,” admits the sage. “Not only are we seeing a growing rift between Christianity and Islam as well as outbreaks of ethnic violence between Hindus and Sikhs, but there are splits within the Anglican Church itself over the ordination of women, same-sex unions, and voluntary euthanasia. In addition, there is a rise in anti-Semitism, continuing sex scandals in the Catholic Church, not to mention the growing movement of radical evangelism.”
“That just about says it all,” says Bliss as he switches his focus to the front of the mosque, where Commander Fox awaits the royal car. Behind Fox, the reception party are beginning to find their places at the top of the marble staircase, while the discordant wailing of a muezzin calls to the faithful and unfaithful alike.
The crowds are smaller and quieter than he anticipated, driven underground by the midday sun, and a few hard-liners are easily marked and hustled away. A number of placards suggesting that either Jesus or Mohammed should perform physiologically impossible sexual feats have been “accidentally” knocked from protesters’ hands by plain-clothes gorillas and trodden into the ground KGB-style, and as the motorcycle outriders reach the destination, Commander Fox’s voice comes over Bliss’s radio: “Everything’s in order here, Chief Inspector.”
Bliss checks the clock, and the royal car glides to a stop as the second hand touches the top.
“Bang on time,” says Williams.
“Guinevere and Lancelot arrived safely at Point Omega,” sings Bliss into his microphone, and hundreds of men and women lower their shields and tear gas guns to light up cigarettes or dash to port-a-loos, but the rooftop marksmen are still on high alert. The walk from the heavily armoured car up the steps to the mosque — lined either side by a throng of hand-picked flag-wavers — is the only time that the royal personages are actually exposed, and Bliss flicks constantly from camera to camera, making sure to check in with the eye in the sky. Marksmen on rooftops, each with an identification tab clearly visible, scan their allotted areas through scopes. The radio chatters constantly as they check in: “All clear … All clear … All clear …”
“Don’t get complacent. Don’t let your guard down,” mumbles Bliss on the edge of his seat as the imams and mullahs wait, still smiling at their coup — even if they are risking their necks and have driven away some of their more fervent congregants.
The Bishop of London, wearing a colourful frock, and a handful of cassocked lesser clerics are also in attendance, Bibles in hand, ready to undo any theological damage that the Islamists may do, even though the royals will take no part in the proceedings and will simply walk in the front door and then be shunted into a back room with the women and girls. But the Christians stand well apart from the followers of Mohammed and mistrustfully eye the dignitaries in their drab grey galabiyyas and dishdashas.
“Her Majesty is wearing an ivory …” begins the commentator, and Bliss fades him out in momentary panic as he realizes that he never ordered anyone to specifically check the repaved area under the Queen’s feet. Seconds stretch to eternity as Bliss waits for a blast, and then he takes a breath as she is escorted to the steps by Commander Fox.
“Prince Philip is resplendent in his field marshall’s ceremonial uniform,” says the BBC reporter, seemingly as surprised as everyone else as the Duke of Edinburgh alights from the royal limousine.
“I thought this was supposed to be informal …” mumbles Bliss as he frantically flicks through the orders of the day.
“Maybe he’s losing his marbles,” suggests Sergeant Williams with little concern.
Bliss has found the page, stabs at the words civilian dress, and fumes, “His bloody aide-de-camp should’ve picked up on this.”
“You know how stubborn the old bugger can be,” responds Williams. “He’s making a statement. What does it matter?”
“Because, Sergeant, protocol is protocol,” explains Bliss fiercely. “Not every Arab goes around singing ‘Rule Britannia’ and wants to be reminded that our army’s been crapping on their doorstep since the Middle Ages.”
“Nothing we can do about it now,” shrugs Williams as the Duke returns Commander Fox’s salute before following his wife up the steps towards the reception party.
“Hurry up … hurry up,” encourages Bliss in a tense whisper. This was the only bit he objected to during the initial briefings. “Why not have the official greetings inside — out of danger?” he asked. But the Queen’s equerry was adamant.
“Everyone must see the respect accorded by each side. You must appreciate, Chief Inspector, that this visit has great historical significance.”
Historically significant or not, a touch of comedy is creeping in a few steps behind the Queen, where Prince Philip appears to have gotten into a fight with his ceremonial sword.
“What’s his bloody lordship up to?” sniggers Williams in Bliss’s ear as Prince Philip struggles with his scabbard.
“No idea, Sergeant,” says Bliss. “First he shows up dressed like a —”
“Do you know,” cuts in Williams. “He once saw the Nigerian president in his Muslim robes and said, ‘God, man. You look ready for bed!’”
“Really.”
All eyes and cameras switch to the aging Duke of Edinburgh as the protection officer steps in and takes hold of Philip’s sword arm.
Williams smirks, saying, “Unhand me, you varlet,” in a Shakespearean tone as Philip angrily waves off his guardian and, with a sharp tug, draws his sword.
“What the hell is he doing now?” mutters Bliss.
The midday sun flashes off the brilliantly burnished weapon, and the imams shrink back in unison as Philip lunges towards the lineup. The Queen finally catches on and spins with a confused look.
“What on earth are you doing?” she mouths and takes a step towards her husband as he raises the sword. “Philip!”
“Oh my God,” breathes Bliss as the sword begins its descent, then the Queen’s protection officer takes a flying leap. The blade slashes downward as the aging woman falls under the weight of her bodyguard, but the tip slices into a bony calf.
“Jeezus,” spits Williams as the Duke’s man grabs the weapon and the Queen tumbles backwards down the marble steps in the embrace of her saviour.
Commander Fox is on the radio in a flash. “Get an ambulance, Chief Inspector.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And a bottle of Aspirins.”
“For the Queen?” queries Bliss.
“No, you fool. For me.”
chapter three
Deny, deny, deny. Everyone from the Prime Minister down is singing from the same page.
The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, KG, KT, OM, and a Scrabble bag of other official abbreviations, did not attempt to run his wife through with his ceremonial sword. He simply stumbled while trying to free his scabbard.
“Free it from what?” is the question on everyone’s lips. It wasn’t as though he could have gotten it caught in his fly. But the only other possibility is that he made a deliberate thrust at the Queen, and that is an option no on
e is prepared to consider — other than Internet bloggers, tabloid journalists, the foreign press, and a very large chunk of the populace who viewed it live on the BBC.
“You do realize that attempting to harm the monarch is high treason,” the assistant commissioner says to Bliss at a hurriedly arranged debrief while they wait for other senior officers to be rounded up. “I’ve got a feeling it still carries the death penalty.”
Don’t blame me, thinks Bliss, suggesting, “Maybe he’s going a little senile, sir. Apparently his mother went completely dotty in her old age.”
“Wake up, man,” spits the A.C. “He’s been round the bloody twist for years. Remember when he asked that blind woman if she knew where he could get an eating dog for an anorexic ‘cos he wanted one for Princess Diana.”
Bliss doesn’t bite. “How is the Queen, sir?” he asks coolly as Commander Fox and several of the field officers arrive from the scene of the skirmish.
“Not amused,” laughs Fox on his way in. “One stab wound, some bumps, some scrapes, and a very sore bum. She’d probably have carried on, but the medics aren’t taking chances — they’re going to keep her in for a few days’ observation.”
“And the Duke?”
“Heatstroke can be a terrible thing, especially in the elderly, Chief Inspector,” says Fox, putting on a deadpan face as he pulls up a chair and starts building an alibi for Prince Philip. “Surely you’ve been reading the papers. There’s been all kinds of weird goings-on.”
So that’s the official tack, thinks Bliss, as the A.C. nods approvingly. “Heatstroke, Commander. Yes. That would explain it nicely. His Highness, realizing he was about to faint, pulled out his sword and stumbled as he was overcome.”
“Why did he pull out his sword, sir?” digs Bliss, then wishes he hadn’t as Fox takes his head off.
“Don’t be a fool, man. If we don’t come up with a cast-iron defence some lefty pinko on the front bench is going to demand a trial. And where would that leave us?”
Deadly Sin Page 4