Deadly Sin

by James Hawkins

  “Oh, go to bed, Daphne, I’ll come and visit next weekend,” he says eventually and puts down the phone. Five minutes later, now wide awake with concern, he angrily mutters, “You’re a bloody nuisance at times,” checks his call display, and phones back.

  “Now it’s engaged,” he snorts, and drags himself to the kitchen to put on the kettle.

  Daphne is still on the phone, calling for international assistance.

  “Mum. Is that you?” says Trina Button breathlessly as she grabs the phone, and for a few moments Daphne’s garbled rant has her convinced. The truth unravels slowly as the Englishness of the accent comes through, but Daphne is sinking fast. Exertion and the residual effects of the soporific weigh her down, and she leaves Trina hanging as she struggles back to her bedroom.

  The room rotates giddily around Daphne as she slumps onto the bed, while, in another part of the old mansion, Hilda Fitzgerald is being rousted from her upstairs quarters to speak to David Bliss.

  “Sorry to bother you, Hilda,” says one of the night staff. “But there’s a man on the phone about Miss Lovelace, and I don’t know what to tell him.”

  By the time Hilda reaches the office she has her mind in gear and she puts Bliss in the picture: “… not taking her medication … caused a little trouble … started wandering — not uncommon in cases like hers … Doctor’s given her a sedative … she’s very confused.”

  “She certainly seemed strange the other day,” agrees Bliss. “Not at all sparky — not able to hold a conversation.”

  “That’s not unusual,” Hilda assures him. “A lot of our guests repeat themselves over and over, as if they’re stuck in a loop. It’s a type of obsessive behaviour. Just like Miss Lovelace’s obsession with walking in circles. That’s what happens when areas of the brain deteriorate.”

  “Oh, dear. Poor Daphne.”

  “It’s very sad,” agrees Hilda. “But don’t worry. We’ll do our very best for her.”

  “Thank you,” says Bliss, dropping back onto his bed. “I shall sleep easier now.” But his phone is buzzing by the time his head hits the pillow.

  It’s Trina Button, panicking. “David. You must do something. Daphne’s being kept prisoner by a religious cult.”

  “No she’s not. She’s in an old people’s home,” replies Bliss, but Trina isn’t listening.

  “They’ve drugged her —”

  “A sedative.”

  “— stolen her shoes —”

  “To stop her running.”

  “— brainwashed her —”

  “What?”

  “With religion. Aren’t you listening? It’s a cult.”

  Bliss stops her eventually. “I’ve just got off the phone with them,” he explains. “They’re very nice people. They’re very concerned about her and they’re doing their best.”

  But “nice people” is not an image that equates with reality as Hilda Fitzgerald crashes into Daphne’s room and stands over her, shouting, “Don’t you dare get out of bed in the night again. And don’t you dare use the office phone for personal calls. Do I make myself clear?”

  “If you’re so worried about her, then come over and see for yourself,” suggests Bliss, irritably. “I’ve got a job to do and an important meeting in the morning.”

  “I can’t,” croaks Trina as tears start to flow. “My mother’s missing again. She’s been gone all day. And the police are useless.”

  “Well, I’m not sure about that,” says Bliss defensively, but Trina is.

  “This lot in Vancouver couldn’t find the hole in a donut,” she snivels, and Bliss softens.

  “I’ll visit Daphne again as soon as I can. But she’s perfectly safe where she is.”

  Safety is on Daphne’s mind as well as she cowers under the bedclothes, whimpering, “I want to go home. I don’t like it here.”

  “Shuddup, you stupid old bag,” yells Hilda, and then she rips back the sheet and slaps the crying woman viciously across her face. “Shuddup, shuddup, shuddup,” she screeches as she slaps, and then she drags Daphne from the bed and forces her to her knees. “Now you’d better start praying, lady, ’cos you need all the help you can get.”

  “Ungodly Warfare,” proclaims Wednesday’s Daily Mirror, headlining a report on the continuing violent clashes across the country. And while the weather takes some of the heat, there is no question that ethnicity and religion are playing the largest role.

  Smiling gangs of skinheads, with swastika tattoos and pierced lips, wrap themselves in Union flags and sport crucifixes on gold chains as they adopt thuggish poses for the paper’s centre spread.

  “Christian Warriors???” questions the caption, but the photos leave no doubt that, in some minds, nationalism, Nazism, and a solid conviction that Christianity was founded by the British can be fused into a tritheistic doctrine that justifies heavy-booted advocates seeking out anyone worthy of a kicking.

  “And the Queen, God bless her cotton socks,” snorts Commander Fox, tossing the newspaper onto the table in disgust at the Wednesday morning planning meeting, “believes that her rescheduled visit to the mosque will help calm the situation.” But Lefty and Pimple, the American president’s henchmen, don’t look convinced either. The glum-faced CIA operatives are not officially present, as the minutes will clearly show, but they sit in plain view and make notes as Fox runs his eye around the room and takes a mental roll call of his senior officers and staff.

  “Right,” he says, apparently satisfied with attendance. “Michael Edwards, the Home Secretary’s security advisor, has asked me to stress his boss’s determination to put an end to this nonsense, but, to be frank, I’m worried that this visit might make it worse.”

  Judging by the faces of the Americans, the President takes a similar view, and several members of the British Parliament have risked the ire of the Prime Minister and the palace by going public with their criticisms.

  “My guess is that her people are censoring what she sees,” suggests Fox as he carries on. “She probably believes it was the heat and that it’s likely to cool off a bit in the next week or so.”

  David Bliss yawns and slumps in his chair as the meeting gets underway. He won’t be in the hot seat this time; someone else will be staring at the surveillance screens while he is purportedly preventing Prince Philip from becoming a recidivist. But he is still devoid of any realistic strategies, and, as he drifts off, he reminds himself that he’s not expected to do anything; he’s just the fall guy.

  It’s been more than a week since the attack, and for most of that time the Queen has been at one end of the country with Philip at the other. And if the palace schedulers do their job, it will stay that way until the day of reckoning — the day that he will again walk up the steps to the mosque, in a complete reversal of Muslim custom, one regulation pace behind his wife. Supermarket tabloid editors may be upset by the arrangement, but the owners of hotels, pubs, and restaurants surrounding Balmoral Castle are booking cruises and refurbished kitchens on the backs of an army of camera-wielding paparazzi who daily scour the fortress’s walls in the hope of catching Philip with his pants down.

  However, the Duke of Edinburgh’s reclusion within the Scottish stone bastion is in itself the subject of caustic amusement. “Prince Doing Porridge in Scotland!” laughs the caption under a computer-generated image of the Duke wearing stripes and a ball and chain in today’s Times.

  Daphne Lovelace also feels the weight of chains as she sits, staring fixedly out of her bedroom window at the lawn where her feet have traced a labyrinth during the past nine days. She hasn’t moved since Hilda Fitzgerald and Patrick Davenport visited with her breakfast and stuck the papers granting Robert Jameson power of attorney over her affairs under her nose.

  “Sign,” said Davenport, grabbing Daphne’s hand and fitting a pen between her fingers.

  “I don’t —” was as far as she got.

  “Do you want another one?” warned Hilda with her hand at the ready, and Daphne signed.

 
; Amelia hustles in with mid-morning mugs of tea for Daphne and her new companion. “Ooh. You haven’t touched your breakfast …” she is saying when she grinds to a stop. “Oh my God!” she cries. “Whatever happened to your face, Daffy?” And she quickly puts down the mugs and crouches at Daphne’s feet. “Did you bump yourself in the night?”

  “Sleepwalking,” Daphne claims in a monotone without taking her eyes off the lawn.

  “Is that what happened yesterday when you was goin’ round and round?” Amelia burbles on. “Did you just sorta wander off like you wuz asleep?”

  “Something like that,” Daphne replies, then she turns to the young girl and asks, “How did I set off the alarms?”

  Amelia has a nervous glance over Daphne’s shoulder before confiding, “I ain’t s’posed to tell anyone, but they put thingies in your clothes.”

  “Thingies?”

  “Yeah, little tiny electronic thingies. Here, I’ll show you,” she says, standing to open Daphne’s wardrobe door. “Oh. Where’s all your clothes, Daffy?”

  Trina Button’s mother could also use some clothes, but since her return from Vancouver Island in the back of Sergeant Brougham’s police cruiser, Winifred has hobbled around her daughter’s house in a luminous pink housecoat.

  “You won’t get very far in that,” Trina told her as she exchanged it for her tablecloth, but after a day on the run Winifred’s feet are in such a state that it will be some time before she makes another bid to escape.

  An invitation to dinner from Peter Bryan to “celebrate our first successful ultrasound” offers Bliss a respite from an evening of phone-gazing as he wrestles over his future with Daisy and promises him a juicy steak, although he can’t get his mind off Daphne.

  “I told her I’d visit this weekend,” he tells Samantha in the kitchen, once the baby stuff is dealt with and he has recounted his early-morning phone conversations with the folks at St. Michael’s. “But I’ve promised Daisy for Friday, and I’m supposed to be taking care of the Queen.”

  “So many women, so little time,” laughs his son-in-law from the dining room as he opens a bottle of claret.

  “None for me, Peter,” calls Samantha, meaningfully patting her midriff.

  “That’s the trouble. I’ve got lots of time,” says Bliss as he follows his nose to the Bordeaux. “Edwards is in Washington — God knows why — and I’m sitting around like a bridesmaid at a funeral.”

  “A what?” asks Bryan.

  Bliss rolls his eyes. “I’m at the wrong church,” he says, then explains. “I should be in France, but Fox slapped a moratorium on all leave until after the visit. So here I am, with bugger all to do as long as the warring Windsors are kept apart.”

  “So what are you going to do about Daisy?” calls Samantha from the kitchen.

  “I’ll just sneak a poet’s day on Friday and slip back Sunday evening. Fox will never know. And Daphne will have to wait a week. It’s not as though she’s going anywhere in a hurry.”

  “A what day?” queries Bryan.

  “Oh, come on Peter, wake up,” he says, then spells, “P-O-E-T-S: piss off early tomorrow’s Saturday.”

  “Just don’t get caught,” says Samantha as she sashays in with the main course, but Bliss takes a sideways look at his plate and pulls a face.

  “Organic spinach salad with goat feta, green olives, and hummus,” she details, adding, “We have to think of the baby now, Dad.”

  The meal could have been worse, thinks Bliss, over the fresh fruit salad sans cream, but he makes a mental note to have a fat-lover’s lunch in the canteen beforehand the next time he is invited.

  “You could always write another book if you’re bored,” suggests Samantha as she collects the dessert plates. “You’ve already written about the Man in the Iron Mask.”

  “Fat lot of good that’s done me,” he complains. “I haven’t heard a dicky from any of the publishers.” However, his bulky manuscript has not been shoved to the bottom of every publisher’s slush pile. One publisher, at least, is using it as a prop for the window of his dingy garret in a laneway off Leicester Square.

  “But what if you solved a whole series of historical mysteries?” Samantha carries on enthusiastically. “Wouldn’t that get you noticed?”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t know. There must be dozens … what about the Bermuda Triangle, the Mary Celeste, or the lost Ark?”

  “Be sensible,” he protests. “I don’t know anything about them.”

  But she is not deterred. “You didn’t know anything about the Man in the Iron Mask till you found his island.”

  “That’s true —” he is saying, when she cuts him off with a triumphant yelp.

  “I know — Jack the Ripper.”

  “Why?”

  “Firstly, it was in the same area as the mosque: Whitechapel.”

  “That’s just a coincidence.”

  “Of course it is. But wasn’t it one of Philip’s relatives who was supposed to have done it?”

  “Was it?” asks Bliss with a glimmer of interest.

  “Yes,” jumps in Peter Bryan. “It was the Duke of Clarence.”

  “All right,” says Bliss with little intent. “I’ll think about it.”

  With nothing important on his desk, David Bliss takes a detour to work on Thursday morning. However, he isn’t seeking clues about the notorious Victorian-era murders of a string of prostitutes as he walks the streets of Whitechapel in East London. He is back at the mosque, and he is not alone. Since the Queen’s ill-fated visit the richly ornamented building, with its gold-plated dome, has become a morbid curiosity on the tourist maps and now ranks with the Dealey Plaza book depository in Dallas and the pavement outside John Lennon’s apartment in midtown Manhattan.

  “I bet you can still see some of her blood,” a ghoulish ten-year-old tells his mother excitedly as he drags her up the steps, but he is quickly disappointed.

  “Never mind,” says the woman. “We’ll go to the Tower, where they chopped off loads of queens’ heads.”

  “Brilliant, Mum!”

  But amongst the knot of sensation seekers are crucifix wearers, staring with a mixture of wonder and hostility at the opulent new building, questioning why their ancient churches continue to crumble while mosques, synagogues, and Hindu temples seemingly spring up daily across the country.

  “They reckon there’s five million quids’ worth of gold on the roof alone,” sneers one in a combination of jealousy and awe, while another queries aloud, “Do you think they’ll put a plaque on the mosque saying ‘Queen Elizabeth fell here’?”

  Will anyone ever put a plaque on my wall saying “David Bliss was here,” Bliss wonders as he stares at the enormous building and questions what legacy he might leave. A handful of lifers will still be doing time, he guesses, then rebukes himself. What do you expect — immortality? You tried that. You spent years turning up the truth about Louis XIV’s nefarious machinations, and another year writing a novel, and where did it get you? But he actually has Daphne in mind as he ponders the insignificance of a human life: years of struggling, learning, and working; triumphs and failures; heartaches and tears; laughter, joy, and love. Then your heart or brain fails, or you take a wrong turn and walk into a mugger’s knife or a hit man’s gun, and it’s all gone. Perhaps a few snippets remain, Bliss tells himself, running over the personal items in Daphne’s house: photographs and letters; certificates and awards; a painting or two; and a few pieces of embroidery.

  “Not much to show for eighty-five years,” he mourns aloud as he realizes that, by the time the wreaths have been taken off Daphne’s grave and dumped on the compost heap, almost everything else will have vanished.

  At least you will have a grandchild to carry your genes into the future, he is telling himself as he wakes up to the fact that he is standing on the exact spot where Prince Philip froze to the pavement. Maybe he saw something, maybe he spotted some kind of danger that made him freak, Bliss thinks as he spins around lookin
g at the various buildings surrounding him. Then he glances down at the paving slab he’s standing on. “Got it,” he breathes and rushes into the road to flag a passing cab. “Scotland Yard,” he calls to the driver as he leaps in, and his tone says and step on it.

  “Do we have general coverage of the front of the new Whitechapel mosque?” Bliss gushes as he races into the surveillance unit’s office and grabs the videographer.

  “Yeah — all mosques and Muslim centres since 9/11, sir. We have them all covered.”

  “Great,” says Bliss thinking quickly. “The day before … no … two days before the Queen’s visit, on the Wednesday. I want everything you’ve got. Any angle; any quality. My office ASAP.”

  “Peter,” Bliss says with a call to his son-in-law an hour later. “I could use a second pair of eyes.”

  The surveillance footage is black and white and washed out with bright sunlight. “Best I can do,” said the videographer when Bliss complained. “These cameras are good, but we’re not the bloomin’ BBC.”

  “Watch,” Bliss instructs his son-in-law, once he has isolated a segment. “That’s me walking down the steps of the mosque to talk to two blokes who turned up with a truck-load of concrete slabs.”

  The camera is positioned directly across the street, on the front of the public library, but the men’s pickup truck blocks a full view as the overall-wearing workers unload pickaxes and shovels and begin work.

  “And there’s us talking,” continues Bliss as he points to a gauzy image of his head and upper torso as he converses with the men. “They reckoned they were relaying the paving slabs so the Queen wouldn’t trip,” says Bliss, while the silent conversation continues on the screen. “But they looked smooth enough to me.”

  Bliss’s figure drifts back up the steps to Commander Fox’s briefing as the two men continue digging up paving stones.

  “I can’t see properly,” complains Bryan. “I can’t see their faces at all.”

  “One was stocky and darkish with a goatee and glasses and the other was about my height with blue eyes and bad teeth,” says Bliss. “But just watch what happens. You can see enough.”