Deadly Sin

by James Hawkins

  “I’m sure he has his reasons,” says Oswald as he rises to leave. “Why don’t we go together tomorrow morning. I’ll call and make an appointment.”

  The speed at which Michael Edwards arrives to view the video, as well as the degree of interest shown by his ex-boss, surprises Bliss as he runs and reruns the grainy clip of the two workmen and their pickup.

  “Stop … rewind … slow … back again,” sings out Edwards, time after time, as he presses his face against the monitor.

  “It must be a tool or something,” he pronounces confidently as he finally pulls away, but Bliss won’t bend and loudly counts the tools as they come off and are thrown back on the truck as he reruns the clip again.

  “One wheelbarrow, two pickaxes, two shovels, one trowel, and a long metal bar that they were using to line up the slabs. And that’s it.”

  Edwards shrugs off the evidence. “I still reckon it’s a tool or something.”

  “I don’t think it could be,” persists Bliss, and he makes a point of stopping the recording to show that nothing was left behind. “What happened to it?”

  But Bliss is pushing the wrong man, and Edwards pushes back.

  “So. Did you get their names?”

  “No, sir.”

  “What about the licence plate number?”

  “I didn’t notice —”

  “You were suspicious enough to speak to them,” breaks in Edwards pointedly. “But you didn’t take the number?”

  “That’s valid, sir,” admits Bliss. “But they seemed genuine.”

  “Let’s get this straight, Chief Inspector. Just for the record. You interviewed the two men and were satisfied that they were bona fide workmen.”

  “Well, at the time —”

  “No. Were you satisfied? ’Cos if you weren’t I’m sure Commander Fox would want to know why you were derelict in your duty in not recording the number on the back of the fucking truck — get me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So. You were satisfied. Yes?”

  Bliss’s answer is in the form of a hostile stare that invites Edwards to perform an impossible act of self-abasement.

  “Good, Chief Inspector. Glad we agree,” says Edwards in ignorance of Bliss’s thoughts. “So, let’s just concentrate on protecting Her Majesty from now on and forget about any silly misjudgements you may have made in the past.”

  London’s architects turned their backs on the sluggish slate grey Thames for centuries and used it as a sewer, but today, as David Bliss strolls along the flower-bedecked embankment on his way home, he stops to watch the timeless waters and wonder how many bags of quick drying cement it might take to permanently sink Edwards.

  His cell phone snaps his daydream. It is Daisy reminding him that he hasn’t called in several days.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, although whether he was punishing her or pushing so that she would bounce back, he doesn’t know. “But I’ll definitely get a flight tomorrow evening.”

  “Daavid …”

  A moment’s hesitancy warns him to expect the worst and it comes.

  “Not zhis weekend please. I cannot explain, but …”

  “All right,” he says curtly. “I’ve got plenty to do anyway.”

  “But, Daavid —”

  He is not listening. He doesn’t want to hear “cousin” or any other excuse. If she stops now before the lie it will be easier to forgive her — if he chooses to.

  “Daisy,” he cuts in calmly. “It’s okay. I really do have a lot to do, and I promised a little old lady that I would visit her. So, you have a good weekend and I’ll call next week.”

  Utter relief cracks Daisy’s voice as she whimpers, “Zhank you, Daavid. I love you.”

  Now what? he questions as she waits, but the words come out ahead of him. “I love you too.”

  With one pack of Marks and Spencer’s pork pies eaten and another secreted behind the drawer in Esmeralda’s bedside table while her roommate was visiting the toilet, Daphne is in survival and escape mode.

  Life, such as it is in St. Michael’s, is going on around her as the undertaker’s van comes and goes, Amelia Brimble bustles in and out cheerily calling, “Hi Daffy,” while Esmeralda Montgomery’s gleeful eyes watch expectantly for Satan’s lightning strike. But Daphne Lovelace, O.B.E., is in another place altogether.

  “Eat and you might be drugged or poisoned. Don’t eat and you will starve. The choice is yours. The end result’s the same,” says the voice in Daphne’s mind as she stares at the tuna sandwich on her untouched tea tray. But it’s not her voice. It’s a voice from another life in another world — a world that Hilda Fitzgerald and Esmeralda Montgomery could never imagine.

  In Daphne’s mind it is Paris in the summer of 1946, and it has been two years since the cobbled streets crunched under the weight of German jackboots. She’s a young woman on the run — not from the Nazis but from England and her home, from the need to face her family and herself with blood on her hands. She has been on the run ever since D-Day, when she saw death at close quarters and knew that she’d had a hand in it.

  “Daffy, dear,” Amelia tries. “I’ve brought some scrambled egg for your supper ’cos you didn’t eat tea.” But Daphne barely surfaces as she waves the plate away.

  “Just don’t tell Mrs. Fitzgerald,” she whispers, before returning to the sepia-edged movie in her mind.

  “You must start escaping the moment you are captured,” instructs the voice, but now she has an image to go with it. He is tall, six feet or more, with the face of a choir-boy, the charm of a charlatan, the cunning of a Shakespearean fool, and the fearlessness of a musketeer. She loved him. But everyone loved him — he was that kind of man.

  “Never assume that anyone is going to attempt a rescue mission,” Michael Kent says as he lectures her in the art of espionage. “Never hope that your captors are simply going to let you go. It’s the same as being in a shipwreck — if you wait to be rescued, you will be too weak to save yourself when help doesn’t arrive.”

  “Amelia,” calls Daphne, reaching out to the girl as she returns for Esmeralda’s tray.

  “Yes, Daffy.”

  “I need some more money, dear,” she whispers as she slides her bank card from her purse.

  “Oh. I couldn’t, I’m not allowed …”

  But Daphne holds an ace as she forces the card into Amelia’s young hand. “We wouldn’t want Mrs. Fitzgerald to know about the Tums and the pork pies or what happened to her lovely fish, would we?”

  “Do I make myself clear?” continues Kent once Amelia has pocketed the card and memorized Daphne’s PIN number. “There will be no rescue. We can’t afford to lose you, but we won’t risk losing others to get you back.”

  But Kent isn’t talking about snatching Daphne from the grip of a few fanatical Waffen SS officers who are still holding out in the mountains and forests of Bavaria in the belief that Hitler will be resurrected from the grave. A new and even deadlier enemy is rising.

  “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the continent,” said Winston Churchill in March of 1946, and by that autumn, with a smattering of Russian and a couple of dodgy passports, Daphne Lovelace and a handful of others were being readied to pierce holes and drag Soviet dissidents to the west. But, hidden by the curtain, Stalin’s ferocious lapdogs waited like the multi-headed hydra.

  “Never put up a fight if the Reds catch you,” warns Kent in Daphne’s mind. “The stronger you fight the harder they fight back, and never forget that when the thumb-screws come out even your best friend will change the colour of his shirt. Give as much as you can afford to give. Don’t antagonize. They will be looking for any excuse to kill you.”

  “Miss Lovelace,” calls a voice from outside, and Daphne snaps herself back to the present as Hilda Fitzgerald roughly shakes her. “Time for your nighty-night pills.”

  Daphne winces as the woman hands her the powerful tranquilizers then stands over her like a schoolm
arm. But Daphne has no Tums now, and Hilda isn’t a pushover like Amelia.

  “I’m waiting,” snorts the dragon while Daphne reaches for a glass of water and makes a play of swallowing. Then she orders, “Open wide,” before turning tail and hitting off the lights. “There — that wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  Not bad at all, thinks Daphne as she retrieves the tablets from underneath her bottom dentures before rinsing out the residue.

  “Stay alert to stay alive,” Kent is telling her in her mind as she closes her eyes and looks for a way out. “Successful escape is timing,” his voice continues. “There are always opportunities as long as you still have the strength,” he says, before adding ominously, “Miss one chance or mess one up and you might never get another.”

  But she escaped. Her innocently pretty face and disarming smile opened chinks in the curtain on more than one occasion.

  “Of course, you have certain advantages if you are caught,” Kent made clear with a leer, and she was willing, very willing, to rehearse escape tactics with him. Although, he was very quick to warn, “Don’t assume that because you let a guard sleep with you that he won’t kill you.”

  “And the disadvantages?” she queried.

  Kent shrugged. “He’ll sleep with you whether you let him not.”

  Daphne’s face has weathered well. However, eighty-five years of sun and storms have opened a few crevices and taken off the sheen, and Hilda Fitzgerald’s livid handprint hasn’t helped. But Daphne has no plans to use her looks to evade captivity and incarceration now. Once she escapes she has no intention of being caught, and as she lies back in bed in the moonlight, she traces a rudimentary left-handed labyrinth on the ceiling and meditates her way out of it in preparation for the real attempt.

  It is the left-handedness of the pattern that is crucial. Her first abortive attempt, intended only to test defences, had taken a right-hand turn away from the front of the building — the core — in order to reach the gate. To the left lies a seemingly impenetrable line of six-foot fences bordering the gardens of half a dozen Victorian villas. It is the path that Daphne knows she must take, despite the obstacles, but before she starts the journey she has one more task to perform at the core, and she sets her internal alarm clock for 2:30 a.m. and prays that Davenport hasn’t started locking his office since her previous incursion.

  chapter eleven

  A creaky floorboard awaits every footstep as Daphne gingerly creeps from her room in the moonlight. This time her mind is sharp. Dr. Williamson hasn’t paid a visit with his hypodermic since her brush with Hilda Fitzgerald’s hand, and, one way or another, she has ducked the daily regimen of drugs that was intended to keep her docile.

  Saturnine scenes of heroic religious battles filled with limbless bodies spurting blood are barely visible in the blue lunar glow as Daphne descends the stairs. But whether the gloomy sacred paintings lauding crucifixion, immolation, and sacrifice are meant to be uplifting to the elderly residents or drive them to suicide, Daphne can’t decide.

  “I have fought a good fight. I have finished my course. I have kept the faith — Timothy 7,” says a caption under the image of a seventeenth-century horseman waving a bloody sword as he rides to heaven, and beside it is a parchment with a quote from the Book of Revelations: “Behold, I come as a thief in the night …”

  It has been a particularly busy night for the staff working the graveyard shift. The reaper has struck twice, and his victims, together with their belongings, bed linen, and clothes, had to be gathered, bagged, and tagged to await collection in the morning.

  “I’m bloody glad to see the back of her,” utters one of the middle-aged female attendants as she finally slumps into an armchair with a Cornish pasty and can of Coke at 3:00 a.m., but Iris, her co-worker, had a soft spot for the other deceased resident.

  “I’ll miss old Charlie,” she reminisces with a smile. “Mind you, you had to watch the old bugger. He could be a bit happy-handed at times. I remember when …”

  Patrick Davenport’s office lies off the entrance hall, just beyond the wide-open doors of the common room where the attendants are dissecting the newly departed. Daphne freezes against the wall and melts into the shadows as she seeks a way to pass unnoticed. She’s been here before, though not for over fifty years: dodging itchy-fingered border guards with a petrified Belarusian scientist or top-ranking Russian turncoat in tow. And, while neither of the care attendants may have Kalashnikov’s, in the aging adventuress’s mind the stakes are just as high and the penalty for failure the same.

  “Create a diversion,” the voice in her head whispers, and a minute later the alarm monitor on Iris’s belt goes off. “Damn,” says the caregiver. “It’s old mother Laver in nine. I bet she’s having another bloody panic attack.”

  Daphne slinks out of the shadows as soon as the two assistants have hustled past, and by the time they have woken the confused woman in Room 9 and reset the alarm button, she has tiptoed into Davenport’s office and squeezed under his knee-hole desk.

  “I got your money,” whispers Amelia as she nervously slips in before breakfast and slides it into Daphne’s purse. “But I shouldn’t do it again. Mr. Davenport wouldn’t like it.”

  “This is for your trouble,” says Daphne with a knowing smile as she takes out one of the crisp twenty-pound notes and drops it into the girl’s pocket. “But I would like you to get me a few more bits and pieces.”

  “I don’t —”

  Two fifty-pounds notes follow, together with a scrap of paper. “I’ve made a little list.”

  “What are you doing here, Amelia?” grunts Hilda Fitzgerald sharply as she barges in, red-faced, unannounced.

  “She’s a lovely girl,” says Daphne as she gives the teenager’s hand a conspiratorial squeeze. “She always pops in to say good morning.”

  But Amelia colours up and bumbles around, brushing imaginary crumbs off the bed, spluttering, “Yeah …umm … G’mornin’ Daffy … umm.”

  “Well, you can leave now,” Fitzgerald carries on, with a menacing eye on Daphne. “I’ll deal with Miss Lovelace this morning.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Fitz—”

  “And take Mrs. Montgomery with you. Give her a bath or something.”

  “Oh, it’s not her bath day today —”

  “I said give her a bloody bath, girl. Are you deaf or just plain daft?”

  “Now,” spits Fitzgerald to Daphne as she slams the door behind the fleeing girl and her patient. “You and me are going to have a little chat.”

  Peter Bryan has a confused look as he wanders into David Bliss’s office mid-morning.

  “I’m having trouble with that pickup truck, Dave,” he says as he scans the notes in his hand. “I checked the Council again — they definitely didn’t authorize or order it to be done. I think your only chance is with cameras in the surrounding areas — red-light cameras, speed cameras.”

  “What about the congestion charge cameras — all vehicles coming in and out of the city?” suggests Bliss as he pours a couple of coffees from a Thermos.

  “Whitechapel is outside the zone.”

  “I know that,” Bliss carries on thoughtfully, offering a biscuit. “But couldn’t he have come through there on his way?” But then he shakes his head. “That won’t do us any good. Those cameras only take the plate number. We’ve got to see the whole vehicle to match it against the pickup at the scene.”

  “Sorry, Dave,” says Bryan, tossing his notes onto Bliss’s desk. “But this one’s down to you. I’ve already got half a dozen blaggings on my plate thanks to our Muslim mates.”

  “What’s that got to do with the Muslims?” queries Bliss in surprise.

  “Nothing directly,” admits Bryan before explaining that the six armed robberies of Pakistani convenience stores and Indian curry houses were carried out under cover of running battles between feuding fundamentalists. “By the way,” he asks, as he downs his coffee in a couple of gulps. “What did Edwards want yesterday afternoon?”

&
nbsp; “He wanted me to lay off this,” replies Bliss stabbing at the pickup truck on his computer screen. “Told me to forget it. He even threatened to set his Rottweiler on me.”

  “And what Rottweiler is that, Chief Inspector?” asks Commander Fox with raised eyebrows as he slinks in without warning.

  “Nothing, sir,” says Bliss, but Fox isn’t paying a social call. He is on a mission.

  “Is that the pickup truck you told Mr. Edwards about?” he says as he puts on his reading glasses to peer at the screen.

  “Yes, sir,” Bliss starts, and is explaining the difficulty he is having in tracing the vehicle when Fox takes off his glasses and holds up his hand.

  “Dave,” he says. “Cards on the table. I’ve had Edwards bending my ear on the blower about arrangements for next Friday. I told him about the pickup, and he said there was nothing to it. He reckons he told you to lay off it.”

  “But I don’t work for him, sir. I work for you.”

  “Precisely, Chief Inspector,” says Fox, halfway out of the door. “And this is from me. Lay off it. That’s an order.”

  I guess he threatened to set his Rottweiler on you as well, thinks Bliss as Fox disappears down the corridor, then he turns to Peter Bryan with a serious face. “This is war, Peter. If Edwards wants it dropped that badly, it must be dodgy.”

  “So, what do you do now?”

  “I drop it, of course. You heard the man. It was an order.”

  Bryan looks askance. “Seriously, Dave. Just like that. You’re going to drop it. That’s not like you.”

  “I’m getting too old for this malarkey, Peter,” Bliss sighs as he swings an arm around his son-in-law’s shoulders and leads him to the door. “I’m tired of carrying people around who haven’t got the bottle to stand up for themselves. I’ve lost it. You, on the other hand, are just a virile young man with a glittering future ahead of you. So you, my dear boy, are going to do it for me.”