Deadly Sin

by James Hawkins

  “Oh, come on, granddad. Don’t get me involved,” says Bryan, breaking free.

  “Stop that granddad stuff and get to work. We’ve got to find that truck and damn quick.”

  “You’ve got mail,” sings out the postman, dumping a fistful of letters on the hall table as he makes his morning delivery to St. Michael’s Church of England Home for the Elderly in Westchester. Then he unlocks the residents’ mailbox and dumps the outgoing post in his bag.

  “Thanks,” says Patrick Davenport, looking up momentarily from his desk as he frantically searches the drawers, desperately trying to work out the relevance of certain papers that have disappeared during the night.

  “Hello, Patrick?” calls Tony Oswald, with a polite knock on the manager’s partially open door, and Davenport’s face clouds as he looks up.

  “Tony … sorry … I should’ve called you,” he says, abandoning his task for a few moments. “Miss Lovelace isn’t seeing anyone today.”

  “Oh …” begins Oswald in confusion, but Mavis Longbottom steps from behind the giant social worker, grousing, “That’s not fair. Mr. Oswald made an appointment especially.”

  “Sorry,” Davenport shrugs before going back to his search. “She absolutely refuses to see anyone. Maybe Sunday or Monday.”

  “Something funny’s going on there. I can feel it in my bones,” mutters Mavis as she and Oswald walk back to his car. “Have you seen her recently?”

  “Not for a week or so,” admits Oswald. “Although she did seem pretty confused when I saw her last. According to the young woman who looks after her, all she does is walk round and round in circles all day.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Daphne. She usually knows exactly where’s she’s going.”

  “She was like a little clockwork mouse, according to the girl, although, to be honest, my job was finished when I handed her over.”

  “So what happens to your patients afterwards?” Mavis questions. “Who’s responsible for them?” But she spots the undertaker’s van pulling away from the back door and doesn’t push for an answer.

  Patrick Davenport’s face is drawn as he firmly shuts his office door, picks up his phone, and calls Robert Jameson, his lawyer. “Get over here, Bob. We’ve got a problem,” he says succinctly before resuming his search. Upstairs, Hilda Fitzgerald keeps up the pressure on Daphne.

  Iris spotted the nocturnal nomad by fluke as Daphne slipped back into her room, and even hailed along the corridor to her. “Are you all right, dear?”

  “Cramp,” complained Daphne, quickly rubbing a leg. “Didn’t want to disturb Esmeralda.”

  But it was only when Iris was at home in bed, and Hilda phoned and questioned her about the damaged locks on the office desk, that she saw any significance in Daphne’s wandering.

  “She could’ve been downstairs, I s’pose,” Iris admitted, and since then Hilda has been trying to corner her main suspect. But just as the end of every labyrinth is also the beginning, and the beginning is also the end, Daphne’s answers have led Hilda Fitzgerald in circles at least a dozen times already.

  “Why were you out of bed?”

  “Couldn’t sleep.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Nowhere.”

  “Why couldn’t you sleep?”

  “Cramp.”

  “Why didn’t you call the staff?”

  “Didn’t want to make a fuss.”

  “Then, why were you out of bed?”

  “Couldn’t sleep.”

  Room 27, Daphne’s room, looks like a drug dealer’s den after a heavy-handed police raid. As soon as Esmeralda, together with her bedside cabinet and her belongings, had been shunted to one of the newly vacated rooms, Fitzgerald and Davenport turned Daphne and her temporary abode upside down, but came up empty-handed.

  Now, as Daphne sits amidst the turmoil of upended beds and lifted carpets, she knows that the woman leaning over her wants to ask what happened to the patients’ drug records, copies of powers of attorney, and records of their valuables that disappeared from Davenport’s desk. But she also knows that Fitzgerald hasn’t a scrap of evidence linking her to the crime, so she closes her eyes and plays dead.

  “Hey,” prods Fitzgerald harshly. “Wake up. I’m talking to you.”

  Daphne smiles inwardly, but has no intention of answering.

  “An unconscious agent won’t tell very much,” Michael Kent made clear when they got onto the perils of being caught and tortured, and Daphne knows that is the reason why Doctor Williamson hasn’t been brought in with his little bag of knockout drops.

  “Wake up — wake up,” shouts Fitzgerald, shaking Daphne roughly as Davenport and Jameson slip in, black-faced. But Daphne has turned off her senses and spun herself back to Paris, where Michael Kent is playing rough as he tries to inoculate her against the sadistic practices of the Communists.

  “Who are you working for?” demands Kent, over and over, as he lashes at her naked buttocks with a leather belt while she hangs by her ankles, her arms pinioned behind her, a canvas bag over her head.

  “What’s your name? Who are your handlers?” he screams as he hits.

  Three days and nights — beaten and harangued; starved and abused; spat at and kicked, until she begged for mercy. Then he started on her mind: offering rewards; proposing compromises; suggesting he will let her go — then switching, menacing her with electrodes and threatening mutilation, but never death.

  “Every tortured prisoner prays for death; pleads for death; begs for death,” he told her when he finally let up and lovingly bathed her bloodied body and soothed her battered mind. “If you’re dead you can’t tell them a damn thing,” he added, making it very clear that if she was captured and someone stole into her cell in the middle of the night with a knife, it was much more likely to be a friend than a foe.

  “Miss Lovelace. Will you please open your eyes. I wish to ask you some questions,” demands Robert Jameson in his courtroom voice, but Daphne has played to better interrogators than Jameson will ever encounter — and she has won.

  A pall of unease has spread throughout the home — carried from room to room on the morose faces of staff as they go about their morning duties with the knowledge that there is trouble in Room 27 — and Amelia Brimble has hovered outside Daphne’s door a few times with the hundred and twenty pounds and a shopping list that includes a one-way train ticket to London burning in her pocket.

  “Lovelace. Open your bloody eyes,” screeches Hilda Fitzgerald as she finally comes unglued, and the sound of another slap echoes like the crack of a whip along the corridor and sends Amelia scurrying for cover.

  Misty Jenkins is laden with the weekend’s groceries when she is stopped outside of her neighbour’s house by the sight of a middle-aged woman knocking on Daphne’s door.

  “She ain’t there anymore,” yells Misty, and the tall stranger leaps at the voice. “She’s in a home.”

  “Oh. You startled me. I was looking for Ophelia …” starts Isabel Semaurino with an accent that places her in the distant past — the British Raj or Rangoon in the 1930s, perhaps.

  “Nah. Wrong house, luv,” jumps in Misty. “Her name was Daphne. But she ain’t comin’ back.” Then she puts down a bag, screws a finger into her temple, and laughs. “She’s totally round the bloomin’ twist. You shoulda seen what she did to my telly.”

  “That’s very strange,” says Isabel as she examines a piece of paper. “I was definitely given this address, and the woman I saw the other day said she lived here.”

  “Sorry, luv,” shrugs Misty, picking up her groceries and heading for her own door. “Someone’s buggerin’ you about. Like I said … she ain’t ever comin’ back.”

  “What are you going to do about her, Pat?” questions Robert Jameson as he sits at Davenport’s desk while they try to work out where Daphne could have secreted the missing documents.

  “I don’t bloody know what she’s up to. I’m beginning to wonder if she’s as daft as she makes out.”
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br />   “Not her,” spits Jameson. “Not the old lady. I meant Hilda — your stupid bloody sister. Christ, you can’t have her smacking patients about like that. What if the old bird croaks and someone puts in a word to the Coroner?”

  Patrick Davenport slams his hand on the desk. “Bob. Just help find the bloody papers and let me worry about Hilda, all right?”

  “But what if it wasn’t Lovelace? What if it was an outside job?”

  “So what?”

  “Well, it won’t look good if they show up somewhere and the police start wondering why you didn’t report it.”

  The Metropolitan Police videography department at Scotland Yard constantly buzzes with the hum of computers and the whine of tape decks as a dozen men and women scan the sins of the world through glass eyes.

  “What have you got?” questions Bliss excitedly, following a summons from the senior man.

  “This what you were looking for?” gloats the technician with a wide grin, and Bliss sits at a console while a familiar pickup truck pulls up to the curb outside the Whitechapel mosque and two recognizable figures begin the process of digging up the pavement. But this time, there is no posse of officers standing at the top of the steps, and Bliss doesn’t see himself walk down to talk to the workmen.

  “The Monday following the incident,” points out Hoskins, the videographer, as he taps the time and date recorded on the bottom of the screen, and as Bliss watches, something wrapped in a blanket is squirreled back into the pickup’s cab, the paving slab is replaced, and the vehicle takes off.

  “Newton was right,” breathes Bliss. “What goes down must come up.”

  But what is it, and where is it? These are the questions he has now.

  “I can’t help you with that,” says Hoskins, adding smugly, “But you might be interested in this.”

  “What the hell are you and Bliss up to?” yells Commander Fox as he slams into Peter Bryan’s office mid-afternoon with a printout from the brains of the organization, the Police National Computer, showing that Bryan has instituted a search of the vehicle index for the workmen’s truck. “I specifically ordered Bliss to drop it.”

  “Then you’d better talk to him, sir.”

  “Don’t pull that innocent crap with me. You two are in this together. Like father like son-in-law. You did the search. Now, where did you get this number?”

  Peter Bryan pulls a blank face, but the visit is not unexpected. The number, spotted by the videographer on the pickup truck as it sped through a junction near the mosque, rang alarms when he phoned for information. The clerk in the vehicle licensing office backed up faster than a politician caught with his pants down in a public loo. “No. Sorry. My mistake. No trace — unregistered,” he said only seconds after confirming that he had a match. “It must be a stolen motor or something.”

  “I think the guy’s jerking me around, Dave,” Bryan told his father-in-law a few minutes later, so Bliss tried and found himself talking to a different clerk.

  “Classified!” Bliss queried in disbelief, but the clerk quickly distanced himself. “But I never told you that.”

  “Fox on the prowl,” warns Peter Bryan by phone the moment the commander leaves his office with Bliss in his sights.

  “Meet me at the mosque,” says Bliss, and he is out of the building faster than a cockerel out of a coop.

  Friday afternoon passes peacefully for Daphne. Three sleeping pills rammed down her throat by Hilda Fitzgerald ensure that she will miss the search.

  “Check everywhere,” Davenport instructed at a hastily called staff meeting, although he was very circumspect about the object of the hunt. “I seem to have misplaced a few important papers.”

  However, young Amelia Brimble is not participating. The heart-rending sound of her kindly confidante being abused sent her flying home on her bicycle to vomit, and now she is pacing her bedroom with a handful of money and a shopping list that includes a dress, shoes, a train ticket, and a paperback copy of Paul Brickhill’s epic wartime adventure, The Great Escape.

  “So, why meet here?” questions Peter Bryan as he and Bliss are surrounded by worshippers dawdling to discuss next week’s rescheduled royal visit.

  “I just had to get away,” admits Bliss. “And it was the first place that came into my head. Although I can’t help feeling that we’ve missed something here.”

  “ You’ve missed something,” Bryan reminds him forcefully. “I told you — count me out. You’ve caused me enough …”

  But Bliss tunes him out as he spots the lamp standard across the road and remembers thinking it strange that, on his first visit, he saw two workmen atop a cherry picker painting something that no one would ever see.

  “Peter?” he questions, when he figures Bryan has wound down sufficiently. “Was that right that you and Samantha went mountaineering in Wales?”

  “Yeah. It was great,” admits Bryan cagily. “Why?”

  “Just checking,” he says as he wonders where he might be able to borrow a cherry picker. “So … You’re okay with heights then, are you?”

  chapter twelve

  Five high-backed armchairs sit ominously centre stage alongside Samuel Fitzgerald’s ersatz altar at St. Michael’s Sunday service. But it is the fourth Sunday in August, and the portly Reverend Rollie Rowlands of St. Stephen’s-in-the-Vale has taken back the reins from his stand-in for his monthly visit.

  “St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in the day of battle,” recites Rowlands in a sonorous tone as he puts his hands together and lifts his eyes to the stained ceiling, and then he spurs his elderly flock to war against Satan with a hymn. “Fight the good fight with all thy might …” he begins lustily, in a rumbling bass voice that reverberates around the common room like rolling thunder, but he soon becomes a lone crusader as his aging band of battle-weary warriors run out of breath.

  Patrick Davenport and his entourage are not in the congregation this morning. Nearly two days of relentless hunting for the missing documents, coupled with the strain of the situation, have worn the distressed manager to the point of exhaustion. He would happily offer Daphne a deal to recover his missing papers, if only that were possible.

  “This past week has been a joyous time for our Dear Lord,” carries on Rowlands sanguinely as he puts on a courageous face and points to the empty chairs strategically placed to the right of the altar. “Four of our beloved sisters, and one brave brother, have joined the Almighty in heaven, and for that, we give praise.”

  “Amen,” mutter a scattering of voices as Rowlands begins reading out names.

  “Emily Mountjoy, spinster of this parish, whom I am sure we all remember as the moral face of Westchester Library; a brave woman who fought so valiantly for so many years to keep the heretical ramblings of blasphemers and perverts off the shelves.”

  “Amen,” says a lone voice at the back.

  “Charles Edward Lacy …” Rowlands continues, pointing to the next chair as he works his way towards the holy sacrament of bread and wine, symbolizing the body and blood of Christ, which sits on the altar.

  Upstairs in Room 27, Daphne’s room, there is neither her body nor any trace of the blood that poured from her nose following Hilda Fitzgerald’s Friday attack, leaving two Westchester police constables scratching their heads.

  “Let’s go over this again, ma’am,” says P.C. Joan Joveneski as she tries to get Hilda Fitzgerald to look her in the eye. “Because, quite frankly, unless she’s Houdini, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

  Whilst it may not make sense to Joveneski, the fact is that, sometime between 10:15 Saturday night and 7:00 Sunday morning, when Patrick Davenport arrived to find his elder sister stomping around, swearing, “She can’t have gone; the bloody door was locked,” Daphne Lovelace vanished from her room.

  Hilda Fitzgerald was right. The door to Daphne’s room was locked. The manager’s sister locked it herself on Friday and pocketed the key, and since that time, for good reason, only she and Davenport have entered.

&nbs
p; “You can leave that blasted woman to me,” she plainly told each and every staff member with sufficient venom to quell any dissent, although more than one of the care assistants gave her a sideways look. Amelia Brimble even confided her fears to her boyfriend Friday night, when he wondered aloud if her period was due.

  “No,” protested the young woman, before explaining that her lack of interest was due to her concern over Daphne. “I reckon Hilda’s killed the old dear,” she whispered morosely as they lay on the grass under the stars in the cathedral’s grounds. “You shoulda heard her. The way she wuz carryin’ on. Then, smash!”

  “She smacked her one?”

  “Yeah. An’ it’s not the first time, neither.”

  “Did you see it? Like, did she smack her in the gob?”

  Amelia shook her head. “I dunno. But I heard it aw’right. D’ye reckon I should tell someone?”

  “Nah … Don’t worry,” said Matt after a few moments’ thought, although he didn’t have Daphne’s interest at heart as he slid his hand up the inside of Amelia’s thigh and purred, “I ’spect she’ll be okay. She’s prob’ly tough as nails.”

  “She’d have to be a flipping commando,” says P.C. Joveneski as she peers at the ground from Daphne’s second-floor window and checks out a rusty drainpipe. Then she turns back to the room, rereads her notes, and confronts Hilda Fitzgerald. “Now, ma’am, you said she’d run away, but according to you, she was heavily sedated and locked in her room.”

  Hilda doesn’t have an explanation, and neither does Patrick Davenport. But the worried manager does have a wary eye on his elder sister as she attempts to sweep Daphne into a dark corner.

  “We had to sedate her. We couldn’t do a thing with her,” grumbles Hilda before cataloguing a litany of ungodly afflictions and mental infirmities including senile dementia and devilish possession. “She could’ve took off on a bloomin’ broomstick for all I know,” she continues with a black brush, before adding forebodingly, “If you want my opinion, she’ll prob’ly reckon we were mistreating her. I wouldn’t put it past her to knock herself about and make up all kinda stories. She could do herself a lotta damage.”