Deadly Sin

by James Hawkins

  “Daisy wasn’t expecting me,” Bliss carries on chattily in French as he thrusts the flowers forward, hoping to warm the woman.

  “C’est évidente, monsieur,” she replies, shrugging off the flowers.

  “Monsieur?” queries Bliss. What is this “monsieur”? “It is David — remember?” he says while trying to hold her gaze.

  “Daavid?” she questions vaguely with a heavy accent, and he is appalled at the apparent deterioration of the woman in the few months since her mother’s death. Not only has she forgotten his name, she doesn’t know where Daisy is, when she will be back, or whom she is with.

  “I could try her friends,” suggests Bliss with a disarming smile, but Geneviève is still hiding and merely shrugs when it comes to names, addresses, and telephone numbers.

  “I’ll just come in and wait then …” he starts and makes a move, but she stands firm and he backs down. “She’s probably shopping — Cannes, I expect,” he prattles on, still smiling, thinking, It’ll give me time to get a room at the Carlton and pick up a bouquet of roses. “I’ll come back at seven. Tell Daisy I’m taking her somewhere really special tonight.”

  Geneviève Leblanc’s silence tells a story, but Bliss isn’t listening as the door slowly closes and the lock clinks into place.

  The spare front door key to Phil and Maggie Morgan’s old home has been calling Daphne ever since the Jenkins tribe blasted off to the beach.

  “They would’ve changed the locks,” she assures herself for the nth time as she is drawn back to her hallway by the dull brass key hanging on the mahogany umbrella stand.

  “For emergencies,” Phil said as he handed it to her nearly twenty years ago, when he and Maggie, in their early sixties, made their last serious effort to explore the world. But the travel agent’s “Romantic Getaway Weekend of a Lifetime” turned into three days of hell in a frigid back street mausoleum at the end of November in Clacton-on-Sea, from which they never really recovered.

  “This is an emergency,” Daphne finally convinces herself as she takes down the key and plops on the deerstalker hat that she bought, half-seriously, to mark the founding of an international investigation agency with Trina Button following a misadventure in the foothills of Washington’s Cascade Mountains. Then she puts on a sad mien and apes to the umbrella stand’s mirror. “It’s quite possible that Missie Rouge, my poor little pussy, snuck in to visit Phil, not realizing that he has died, and has become trapped.”

  She isn’t convinced, so she tries it again with a tattered black beret, a smudge of mascara under each eye, and the hint of a tear. “Better,” she decides, but there is still something missing. And then she seizes on Missie Rouge’s rhine-stone-studded collar — Christmas, Easter, and the Queen’s official birthday only — and rushes to the kitchen to open her last can of Kat-O-Meat.

  “N-n-nice … doggies,” she stutters two minutes later as she cowers in her own back garden while the dogs trampoline off the wire fence in front of her. “Here you are then,” she shouts, tossing the fish-caked collar over the top. The collar is shredded in seconds, scattering jewels and hardware across the garden. Then the pit bulls start on each other for the scraps.

  “I wish I’d chucked in a handful of razor blades now,” she mutters as she heads to the Jenkinses’ front door, then, as she fishes the key from her pinafore pocket, she puts a crack into her voice as she polishes her defence. “See for yourself — my little kitty’s collar is all over the garden. She must be here somewhere.”

  With the hotel booked, champagne on ice, and roses bought, Bliss has an hour to kill. She has to be here somewhere, he constantly reminds himself as he sneaks around the swanky shops of the Rue d’Antibes in Cannes, hoping to leap out of the shadows to surprise her. But ten look-alikes have him running in circles, so he takes to a sidewalk café, orders Evian water, and hopes that the tide will eventually turn in his direction.

  There is no way Daphne’s key will fit — but it does, and the blood pulsing through her temples makes her pause for a deep breath.

  “It definitely isn’t going to turn,” she bets herself, but her hands shake and her knees wobble when it does.

  Now what?

  “There’s no harm in just looking around; see what they’ve done to the place,” she tells herself, her thoughts full of nostalgia as nearly four decades flash through her mind, and the door slowly opens on a smiling middle-aged couple with Micky, their docile golden Labrador, at their feet.

  “Let me show you around,” Maggie said as she invited her new neighbour to view her agglomeration of furnishings — lovingly polished family treasures, much like Daphne’s own, that would give a Southeby’s evaluator the giggles; knick-knacks and bric-a-brac that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow at the weekly auction in the basement of the Corn Exchange; familiar old masters “painted” on cheap cardboard; and a collection of porcelain figurines. “Wedgwood, Meisson, and Royal Doulton,” Maggie declaimed, circumnavigating the room with her pointing finger, adding smugly, “They’re very valuable.”

  But the Antiques Road Show snitched on her eventually.

  “Could I have a little sugar, please,” Daphne asked innocuously on one rare occasion when she was invited into the front parlour for tea, but she had mischief on her mind and a magnifying glass in her purse.

  “I thought you were sweet enough already,” quipped Maggie on her way to the kitchen.

  “Oh, no. Not really,” replied Daphne with a Martha Stewart smile, and she had one of the porcelain dogs upside down in a flash.

  “It is real you know,” insisted Maggie fiercely as she quickly popped her head back into the parlour.

  “Oh! You startled me,” said Daphne, but she recovered quickly. “I can see that,” she said, pointing to the inscribed “Staffordshire” on the base, while knowing very well that, according to the TV expert, it had been stamped by a Chinese knock-off merchant in the early nineteen-hundreds.

  Maggie Morgan’s carpeted front parlour was not unlike Missy Rouge’s bejewelled collar: generally reserved for glittering occasions like Christmas, weddings, Easter, and special events, but never humdrum anniversaries like birthdays. A funeral might qualify, but only if the vicar was in attendance, and then only under Maggie’s strict supervision. Slippers, no pipes or cigars, nothing messy — cucumber and salmon sandwiches at a pinch, but never flaky mince pies or anything with jam or cream.

  “I simply can’t abide messy eaters,” Maggie would loftily proclaim, and everyone would sheepishly edge forward on their seats and take a firm grip on their false teeth, while she paraded around like a schoolmarm with a little silver-plated dustpan and brush behind her back.

  “I wonder what happened to all her china,” Daphne is musing aloud as she finally sidles into the front hallway, then she stops in horror at a scene reminiscent of Basra or Baghdad after a visit from a stroppy bunch of U.S. Marines.

  “Oh my God,” she breathes and feels her blood draining at the junkyard jumble of scrapped motorbikes and dog-eaten furniture — Maggie’s furniture and Maggie’s prized figurines with dismembered ears, arms, and legs — set up like a fairground shooting gallery by a catapault-crazy fifteen-year-old. The kitchen, dining room, and parlour look much the same, with grease-spattered floors and walls, ripped curtains, and trashed furniture. Only the eye-popping plasma television and ear-rending stereo system rise above the chaos.

  Daphne has suffered war at close quarters — parachuting into Normandy in advance of D-Day and fighting her way through enemy lines to Paris. She retched at the sight of Frenchmen’s houses razed to rubble, their women and children, along with their precious belongings, pulverized into a sickening, fly-ridden morass of twisted bodies. She cried at the hurriedly dug graves of compatriots and foes, and she hid in shame for the role she played. But that was in a lifetime she left behind, until now, when the devastation inside her old friend’s house shocks her back to the horrors of war, and she snaps.

  “Let’s see how you like it,” she hollers and pi
cks up a crowbar.

  Daphne Lovelace, the aging war veteran, is deafened by her fury, and the sound of a key turning in the front door doesn’t register as she blindly takes revenge on behalf of a dying generation whose sacrifices no longer engender respect.

  The sun is sinking into the Mediterranean, along with Bliss’s dreams, as he paces outside Daisy’s front door. And then his cellphone rings.

  Daisy, he thinks, but it’s an English number that he doesn’t recognize.

  “Westchester Police Station, Anne McGregor,” says the superintendent. “I’m sorry to bother you on the weekend, Chief Inspector, but we are trying to trace the next of kin of a Miss Ophelia Lovelace of 27 …”

  “Ophelia?” he says vaguely as the voice continues, then his brain kicks in. What did Daphne say about Hamlet’s Ophelia when he first knew her? “Who would want to be named after a silly nincompoop who committed suicide because she thought her man didn’t love her?”

  “Are you still there, Chief Inspector?” queries Ms. McGregor.

  “Oh, dear. I was expecting something like this,” says Bliss, his voice sinking. “What was it — heart attack, stroke?”

  “No. Nothing like that.”

  “Accident?”

  “No. She’s all right. It’s just that she’s in custody and we need a family member to take care of her because of her age and mental state.”

  “They’ve got the wrong man, David,” yells Daphne in the background as she makes a grab for the phone. “I told you this lot couldn’t find a turd in a toilet.”

  “In custody?”

  “Be quiet, Ms. Lovelace,” says McGregor, gently pushing Daphne away, but the commando inside the elderly woman escapes and she leaps forward with a kung-fu yelp and chops the phone from the officer’s hand.

  “Shit!” shouts McGregor as the handset hits her office floor, but as she stoops to retrieve it Daphne sends her flying with a hard shove.

  “Daphne … Is that you?” Bliss is querying as the superintendent drags herself across the floor on her knees towards the phone, but Daphne beats her to it, scrabbles under the desk, and curls herself around it.

  “Get out of there,” orders McGregor as she grabs a leg and pulls.

  “They’re beating me up, David. Call the press,” yells Daphne into the phone as she tries to kick off her attacker. “Police brutality.”

  “Give me the phone,” demands McGregor, but Daphne is on a roll.

  “Hundred-year-old woman attacked by a —”

  “Daphne, you’re not a hundred …” Bliss is saying as the superintendent manages to get a grip on the handset.

  “Give it to me,” she orders as she tussles over the instrument, but her hand is in front of Daphne’s face and the old soldier still has a good set of teeth.

  “Bitch!” screeches the superintendent as she whips her hand away. “I’ll bloody do you for that.”

  “She’s threatening me now, David. Police intimidation.”

  “What on earth’s going on?” tries Bliss, but Anne McGregor has had enough. Pulling herself upright she tries to re-establish dignity.

  “All right, Ms. Lovelace. One last time,” she says. “Give me the bloody phone.”

  “She’s swearing at me now, David. Call the police. I want to lay charges.”

  “Daphne —” starts Bliss, but Anne McGregor has finally snapped and she rips the phone line out of the socket.

  “Oh,” complains Daphne testily as she slides from under the desk. “That wasn’t very sporting of you.”

  chapter five

  It is 9:15 p.m. in Cannes, and the palm-fringed promenade is already teeming. David Bliss sits apart from the bustle, on the Carlton Hotel’s grandiose terrace bar, and considers dragging a complete stranger from the crowd with the promise of a no-strings feast. I’ve bloody paid enough for it, he tells himself, someone might as well eat it. But who?

  It takes him only a few minutes to scan the nightly parade of buff-bodied, pinch-bummed young men, pinch-faced old dames, and near-naked nymphets to realize that he is in the middle of a minefield. Adding up the potential cost, he concludes that it will be much cheaper to swallow the price of the meal. In any case, Daisy will come, he convinces himself. But he’s left so many messages on her answering machine that he’s drained his cellphone and he’ll be out of reach once he leaves the hotel.

  He tried Daisy’s door a dozen times between seven and nine, and at first the faint shadow of her mother fell across the curtains. But following his second visit, the tight steel shutters came down and the ghostly figure evaporated.

  He stretched his reservation at the Carlton’s beachside restaurant until time ran out. “Zhe final sitting is nine-thirty and zhere are no refunds,” the maître d’hotel haughtily insisted when he booked and paid. “Zhis evening is special for zhe fireworks only.”

  “Please follow me, Monsieur,” says the portly head waiter as Bliss finally gives in. The penguin-like man in his tailed morning coat waddles across the beach, weaving his way through candlelit tables of picnickers who are slumming it on Beluga caviar, truffled trifles, and lobsters while they swig Cristal champagne at five hundred a bottle.

  “Five hundred what?” any ordinary person might ask, but not the Carlton’s lofty guests, most of whom will shrug off five hundred as easily as five thousand or even five million.

  Bliss’s table for two, as requested, is at the water’s edge, with an unobstructed view of the island of Ste. Marguerite and, when the time comes, a grandstand seat at the waterborne fireworks display. But now, as he sits alone staring at his bouquet of roses, he has an army of diners looking through him as they studiously survey the armada of mega-yachts manoeuvring into position for the show. Size matters in this bastion of the mega-rich. Reputations rise and fall by the metre.

  “He’s only got a pokey thirty-metre job,” the owner of a fifty-metre cruiser will sneer. Then a hundred-and-fifty-metre leviathan carrying a chopper and a mini-sub steams majestically into the bay and they all squirm.

  Bliss has neither a yacht nor yacht envy. But he does envy the other diners — fashionable newlyweds, elegant mature couples, and flashy short-term cheaters — who can, at least, reach across the table and find reassurance in the kiss of skin on skin. As he sits alone on the very fringe of the sand, he feels like King Canute urging the tide to turn in his favour. “C’mon, Daisy. Where are you?”

  The lobster and oysters may be superb, but fish, chips, and mushy peas in newspaper might be more comforting, and as he eats he feels the pitying stares of the other guests and almost expects someone to sidle up and say, “Hello, granddad. All on your own, are ya?”

  “It’s not what you think,” he wants to say. “She’s just a bit late, that’s all.” But as ten o’clock approaches and the three gargantuan barges anchored in the bay prepare to launch their exuberant cargo high into the sky, he slips out of his front-row seat and slogs his way up the soft sand beach to the exit.

  “Bienvenue mesdames et messieurs …” the commentator is calling enthusiastically as she welcomes visitors to the Cannes international fireworks festival, but Bliss keeps his eyes on the ground and makes for the hotel lobby with Daisy’s bouquet of roses in hand.

  “Messages?” he asks hopefully, not bothering with French, but the concierge shakes his head.

  “Pardon, monsieur. Mais non.”

  “I’ll be in my room,” he says as he heads for the elevator.

  Daphne Lovelace should be in the cell block, but the Custody Officer hadn’t the heart — “She is eighty-five for gawd’s sake.” So he has put her in the medical room, complete with a comfortable examination couch and an unmonitored telephone marked, “Strictly For Doctor’s Use Only.”

  David Bliss is first on her list, followed by his daughter, Samantha. Neither answers, so she tries Trina Button in Canada. It may be midnight in Westchester, but in far-off Vancouver the slanting rays of the sun glint golden on the windows of waterfront condominiums and turn the distant snow-capped peak
s into a glittering coronet.

  “I tried calling you,” yells Trina as she zips in and out of the afternoon traffic in her Jetta, but Daphne shushes her then puts her in the picture.

  “Great — good for you. That’ll teach ’em,” cries Trina, but she’s only been listening to the best bits. Her mind is on her mother, a woman of similar age to Daphne who acts at least twenty years older. “I’m thinking of putting her into a home,” she explains as her mother sits alongside with a pair of headphones clamped to her ears and a sublime expression on her face. “She keeps stealing things, and she doesn’t know what she’s doing or saying half the time,” carries on Trina. Then she lifts one of the headphones and yells, “It’s Daphne,” above the din of the Smash.

  Winifred Goodenow’s face clouds instantly, but rapture returns with the headphone. She is deaf to the conversation but would argue vociferously if she knew what her daughter was saying. In her own mind she is coherent, veracious, and very fit. “I’m in training for the El Camino trail,” she tells everyone she meets, but she’s spent a lifetime on pointed stilettos and can hardly hobble to the end of the street.

  “Gotta go,” babbles Trina as she slams her foot to the floor to beat a light. “I’m taking mum to the chiropodist, then I’m going to yoga. I’ll call you.”

  “All right,” whispers Daphne. “Just don’t make a fuss and don’t come rushing over. But I might need you to bail me out later on.”

  “Roger wilco,” trills Trina, still unaware of her friend’s plight. “Just give me a shout. Trina Button, international investigator, to the rescue.”

  However, Daphne shouldn’t need help. “Lock the old cow in solitary for a few hours to teach her a lesson,” Anne McGregor instructed as she left for the day, “then give her bail.”

  But it’s only half a dozen years since Daphne swept the halls, cleaned the toilets, and made the tea, and she still has friends.

  “Hello, Daph. How’r’ya doin’?” inquires one officer after another as they pop by to show concern. And, each time, Daphne puts on a brave smile that fades as soon as the door closes.