“And others,” agrees Joveneski, explaining, “We’re actually well aware of the lady’s mental condition, ma’am. She nearly bit the new superintendent’s finger off.”
“Really … I didn’t know,” steps in Davenport.
“Oh. Yes, sir. And she went totally berserk in her next door neighbours’ place. Christ, you should have seen the bloody mess … Oh! Sorry, sir,” she says, giving a nod to the crucifix on the wall.
“No problem,” says Davenport, cheering a touch.
“We’ve got a good description, photographs, and fingerprints on file,” carries on the constable as her partner examines the door lock. “But we’ll need to know what she was wearing and what she might have taken …”
A cough from the officer’s partner gets Joveneski’s attention. “Hang on, Joan,” says Kevin Scape. “We’re talking about a sedated old woman who was locked in. There’s no way she could have got out on her own. Someone must have used a key.” Then his face darkens as he realizes the implication of his words. “Now, you’re absolutely sure you’ve searched the whole place properly,” he asks, nodding to Davenport.
“Absolutely, officer.”
“And she couldn’t have got hold of a key.”
“That’s correct.”
“Then there can only be one conclusion,” he pronounces solemnly. “She must have been abducted.”
There is another possibility, and it’s one that Patrick Davenport is forced to contemplate as he fiercely eyes his sister and wonders why she so vehemently begged him not to report Daphne’s disappearance to the police.
The Reverend Rollie Rowlands has wrapped up his Sunday service and is waiting in Davenport’s office for his cheque when Mavis Longbottom shows up with a champion.
“I’ll come with you, and I won’t take no for an answer,” said Angel Robinson, Daphne’s mentor, when she spotted Mavis walking the cathedral’s labyrinth in search of a shoehorn to slip her past the defences at St. Michael’s. “I often wondered what had happened to the old lady. I haven’t seen her in weeks.”
“Oh dear,” says Rowlands gravely when Angel inquires about Daphne. “I think you may have had a wasted journey. I do believe Miss Lovelace has left us.”
“Gone!” exclaims Mavis, and the arrival of a glum-faced Davenport in the company of two police officers immediately seals Daphne’s fate in her friend’s mind. “What have you done with her?” she demands, flying across the room at Davenport. “I knew there was a reason you wouldn’t let me see her.”
“Madam …” starts Davenport, but Kevin Scape steps in.
“What do you mean, they wouldn’t let you see her?”
David Bliss checks the clock on Westchester’s Elizabethan Town Hall as he drives along the tree-lined High Street, thronged with Sunday sightseers. It is a little before one o’clock, and he turns into the carriage entrance of the Mitre Hotel, the headquarters of the old school tie and blazer brigade, with lunch in mind.
The quintessentially straitlaced city of Westchester, set amidst the watercress meadows and dairy farms of southern England, is the final pastureland for many of the nation’s elite. Knackered warhorses and clapped-out colonials graze leisurely each day in the Mitre and snort disdainfully about Sunday interlopers and “damned foreigners” as they jostle for a table in the packed dining room. Bliss considers a quick bar lunch, but he has time to spare. If he arrives at St. Michael’s for three, he tells himself, the residents’ afternoon tea bell will save him from Daphne at four, and so he tags onto the lunch line until he spots a familiar figure talking earnestly with the manager. “Ted,” he calls, and ex-Superintendent Donaldson spins.
“David. Thank goodness. You got my message, then.”
“No …” he starts, but Donaldson has him by an arm and is hustling him out of the door in a second.
Despite the fact that Superintendent Anne McGregor is still smarting from her encounter with Daphne, she has taken command and is coordinating search efforts from Patrick Davenport’s office by the time Bliss and Donaldson arrive.
A forensic team, together with a fingerprint expert and several dog handlers, are on scene and are scouting for scents and leads, while nearly thirty officers from surrounding towns and villages have been bussed in and are strung out across the lawns and grounds as they search for clues. Local officers, armed with hastily photocopied mug shots of the missing woman, are scouring the streets and quizzing passersby throughout the city, while a team of detectives interview staff members.
“Well, if it isn’t Ted Donaldson,” smiles Anne McGregor as her predecessor walks in. “I might have known you’d soon get wind of this.”
“This is Westchester,” he reminds her. “The abduction of an eighty-five-year-old from a seniors’ home is just about as big as it gets. I’m surprised the BBC haven’t shown up.”
“They have,” she says. “They’ve just left to get some local reaction.”
“There’ll be plenty of that,” says Donaldson before introducing Bliss as another of Daphne’s close friends.
“Oh. A detective chief inspector of the Grand Metropolitan Police Force no less,” says McGregor with a touch of cynicism and the hint of a disingenuous curtsy, but Bliss is in no mood for territorial rivalry. He wants information and he wants to help.
“We haven’t got much to go on as far as abduction is concerned,” admits McGregor, firmly closing the door before explaining that, while she could understand someone smuggling an elderly relative into St. Michael’s, it was difficult to see why anybody would want to spirit one away.
“So?” questions Bliss, sensing that there is more.
“I don’t know,” she begins vaguely, and then lays out a list. “Number one: my nose always twitches when a complainant’s lawyer shows up at the scene ahead of me. Two: the staff are jumpier than Michael Flatley and the whole Lord of the Dance shemozzle. Three: Patrick Davenport, the guy in charge, didn’t say a dicky-bird to us, but one of the wrinklies let drop that there was a break-in a few nights ago.”
“What was taken?”
“I don’t know yet,” she says as she points to the desk drawers where Daphne used a brass letter opener to wrench out the locks. “But whoever did it knew what they were doing.”
“Have you asked Davenport?”
“I’m saving that,” she says, then continues. “Four: a friend of the missing woman, Mavis Longbottom, reckons they’ve been keeping the old turkey under wraps and wouldn’t even let her social worker in to visit her.”
“That’s interesting,” admits Bliss, recalling Trina Button’s frantic phone call. “That’s what she told a friend in Canada last week.”
It is barely six o’clock Sunday morning in Vancouver. The buzz of Trina’s bedside phone can mean only one thing.
“Oh, no. Not again,” grumbles Rick Button as he pulls the duvet over his ears, but it’s not the Mounties chasing a semi-naked wrinkly this time. It’s David Bliss on a similar mission.
“No. Daphne hasn’t called again, why?” asks Trina and he explains, then stands back from the phone as the zany Canadian lets fly.
“I warned you, David. Drugs, I said. Brainwashed, I said. Locked up, I said. But would you listen?”
“Trina —”
“No. Don’t ‘Trina’ me. You lot are as useless as our lot. You couldn’t sniff out a skunk in scent shop. I told you … Oh, never mind. I’m coming over.”
“No!” It’s Rick Button and Bliss together, but Trina hears neither as she slams down the phone and leaps out of bed, yelling, “They’ve got Daphne. I’ve gotta go.”
“Who’s got Daphne?” Now it’s only Rick as he wakes to the nightmare scenario of catering for two teenagers and a nutty mother-in-law.
“God’s squad,” says Trina as she looks up a number for Air Canada. “A bunch of Bible freaks like those idiots up at Beautiful who tried messing with me last year.”
“But what about your mother? Who’s gonna look after her?”
“Sorry,” says Bli
ss to Anne McGregor as he puts down the phone, knowing that Trina’s arrival is likely to add to the young superintendent’s woes if Daphne hasn’t been found. “But it’ll take her a couple of days to get here.”
“So, Detective Chief Inspector,” queries McGregor. “You obviously knew Miss Lovelace a lot better than I. What do you think could have happened to her? Is there anyone who would want to snatch her?”
Bliss shakes his head. “I doubt it. Although she didn’t get the O.B.E. for being a Girl Guide leader.”
“That’s what I was told,” admits the superintendent, although she dismissed most of the superwoman legends as junior officers’ inventions intended to make her squirm.
“Just don’t underestimate her survival instincts,” carries on Bliss, explaining animatedly, “She once broke into, and back out of, a highly secret CIA establishment in Washington State and brought the whole dodgy enterprise down.”
“Well,” laughs McGregor, “we all do crazy things when we’re young.”
“Yes, we do,” he agrees, then puts on his serious face. “But this was the year before last.”
“Really!” exclaims McGregor as Bliss has a thought.
“Talking of young — there was a chatty teenaged girl looking after Daphne when I visited …”
“Amelia Brimble,” McGregor quickly steps in, proving that she has done her homework. “She’s on our radar, but it’s her day off. Her mother says she’s at the beach with her boyfriend, but doesn’t know which one.”
“Which beach or which boyfriend?” queries Bliss unnecessarily, but a knock at the door interrupts and Anne McGregor sings out, “Come in.”
“You might want to have a look, ma’am,” says P.C. Scape excitedly. “We’ve found a ladder thrown behind some bushes by the fence.”
Amelia Brimble and her boyfriend also know about the ladder, but they are not at the beach. They are skulking in Mathew’s father’s Ford van, and like millions of teens worldwide, they watch her parents’ house in nervous anticipation, with their eyes set firmly on her snug little bedroom.
“C’mon. Hurry up,” sighs Mathew as he drums his fingers on the steering wheel. “You said they’d be gone by two and it’s ten past already.”
It was only last year that Amelia accompanied her parents to the annual church fête at Moulton-Didsley, albeit with a twisted arm. But her metamorphosis from a fifteen-year-old churchy bookworm to a sixteen-year-old bubbly caregiver (with a car-owning boyfriend) has dropped one-legged egg and spoon races and decorated tea cozies into the same category as the pavement pizza she left on her boyfriend’s mother’s driveway after forcing down what was described as, “The best jellied eels this side of Margate.”
“They gotta go in a minute or they’ll miss the cow shit–tossing contest,” giggles Amelia as she sits alongside Mathew, stroking his thigh. “But they won’t be back till late ’cuz they’re going to a cheese and bicky do in the church hall afterwards.”
“Did I tell you about the time I saved my life with a packet of chocolate digestives?” calls a muffled voice from under an old carpet in the back of the van.
“Yes, Daffy,” chuckles Amelia. “An’ you told us the one about the monkey’s skeleton you dug up cuz it was a murdered baby.”
“It wasn’t a joke,” insists Daphne, but Amelia gives her boyfriend a sly wink.
“I know,” she says. “An’ you parachuted into Germany —”
“France,” jumps in Daphne. “During the war.”
“Right,” laughs Amelia. “You parachuted into France and blew up the Germans.”
“Not all of them,” snaps Daphne, and then she mouths, “Teenagers,” with the feeling that the world is moving in reverse and has left her stuck in the future. But when she begins, “When I was your age, young lady …” Amelia spots her parent’s car backing out of their driveway.
“Geddown,” she shouts to Mathew, and the young couple shrink in their seats until the car has passed.
“Let’s go,” says Mathew, turning the ignition, and moments later the youngsters are carrying a loosely rolled Axminster rug into Amelia’s bedroom.
“I’m going to get something to eat,” Bliss whispers to Ted Donaldson when he realizes that he has nothing constructive to offer at St. Michael’s, and five minutes later he is waiting to order a snack alongside a glum-faced woman leaning over an empty gin glass in the Crusader’s Bar of the Mitre Hotel.
“Having a bad day?” questions Bliss jokingly, but Isabel Semaurino has had a bad week. Westchester is a long way from her home in Tuscany, and she has had a wasted journey.
“Is that meant to be a pickup line?” questions the sixty-nine-year-old with a wan smile. “If it is, I think that I might be profoundly flattered.”
“Sorry,” laughs Bliss, shaking his head, but, despite the twenty years between them, he sees a spark of recognition and warns himself to be careful. “I’m already spoken for, but I’ll happily buy you a drink,” he carries on, guessing that it was nothing more than the fleeting hope of a lonely heart.
“Isabel Semaurino,” says the woman, neither accepting nor refusing as she questions soberly, “Do you believe in reincarnation or resurrection or life after death or something like that?”
“You’re asking the wrong person,” Bliss jokes as he nods to the barman, who is visibly flagging after a hectic lunch rush. “I don’t even believe in life before death in many cases.” Then he gives her and the empty glass a critical look. “You’re not thinking of …”
“Oh, Good Lord, no,” she says and laughs. “It’s just that I’ve waited forever to meet someone and now it looks like I’ll have till my next life.”
“I know what that’s like,” claims Bliss. “I’ve been trying to see my fiancée for the past two …” He stops at the look on Isabel’s face. “Yeah. I know,” he says. “Fiancée at my age — I should know better.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You should’ve seen your face.”
“Sorry,” she says, and she thrusts out a hand as the barman finally arrives. “I’ve got an early flight, so I’d better get packed. Goodbye and good luck.”
“And the same to you,” he says, shaking the hand, but as he watches her walk away he has the urge to call out, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”
“D’ye wanna order summink or not?” spits the barman, and Bliss turns his back on Isabel and picks up the menu.
“Maybe … I’m thinking about it.”
“What’ya thinking about, Daffy?” questions Amelia as Daphne sits with a tear running down her bruised cheek as she gently strokes Camilla, the young girl’s long-haired tabby.
“I used to have a cat,” she sniffs. “Missie Rouge. She was ever so pretty.”
“Did she die?” questions Amelia gently, but Daphne pauses as if she has to think back a very long way.
“No,” she says firmly, once she has wiped her eyes. “She was murdered.”
“Oh, Daffy …”
“The neighbours’ dogs got hold of her,” she is explaining when Amelia crouches on the bedroom floor in front her, looks her straight in the eye, and demands the truth.
“Daffy — you’re not really going loopy, are you?”
“No, dear.”
“Then why do you pretend?”
“I didn’t at first,” replies Daphne, casting her mind back to the time when all she wanted was a little respite from the neighbours’ continual hubbub. “But when people think you’re crazy, and keep saying you’re crazy, then everything you do seems crazy.”
“I never thought you wuz crazy.”
“I know.”
“But when you make up stories about parachuting and escaping and saving your life with biscuits and stuff, people don’t know what’s right and what isn’t.”
“Have you ever done anything exciting in your life, Amelia?”
“Not really.”
“What about last night?” asks Daphne, mindful of the insistent tapping on her window that fin
ally penetrated her torpid mind, of the heaviness of her limbs as she dragged herself across the room, and of the relief at the sight of Amelia’s smiling face atop the ladder with Mathew waiting below.
“Yeah, I know,” agrees Amelia. “But my mum’ll kill me if she finds out.”
Daphne strokes the teenager’s face. “When I was your age, well, a couple of years older, I volunteered to go to war, and I thought my mum was going to kill me.”
“She didn’t.”
Daphne shakes her head. “No, of course not. It wouldn’t make sense, would it? But I soon learnt that nothing is ever as bad, or as good, as you first think it’s going to be.”
“Is that true?”
“Usually,” she says, then casts her mind back over eight decades in search of contradictions. Michael Kent might have been an exception had he not been captured, tortured, and executed. “I’ll love you eternally,” he said so many times, and he may have done so had he found his way home. There were others, but the first flush of romance never flourished as promised. “I guess the answer is to never expect too much in the first place.”
“Daffy …” starts Amelia diffidently, and Daphne thinks she sees what is coming.
“Don’t worry,” she says, laying a hand on the young girl’s shoulder. “I’ll be as quiet as a mouse tonight. I’ll sleep under your bed, and tomorrow morning, I promise you, everything will be all right and I’ll be able to go home. Your mum will never know.”
“No. It’s not that,” says Amelia, and then she tries again. “It’s just that Matt, my boyfriend, well … he wants to do it with me … you know … he wants to go all the way. But God says it’s wrong cuz we’re not married.”
Daphne drops Camilla gently to the floor and strokes the young woman’s hair instead. “Have you asked your mum?”
Amelia jumps as if electrified. “I couldn’t …”
“All right,” soothes Daphne. “But do you want to do it with Matt?”
“I think so.”
“Well then. You could always change gods.”
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