Deadly Sin

by James Hawkins

  “I expected that,” says Bliss. “I bet Fox nicked the thing from my cupboard and dropped it on Edwards’ desk, and he gave it back to the dynamic duo.”

  “What do we do now?” asks Bryan, and Bliss makes him wait a few moments while he rips open the envelope.

  “You’d better dump the damn thing on Fox’s doorstep,” Bliss replies eventually, but his mind is in turmoil as he reads and rereads the note, and he is barely able to keep his voice straight. “They won’t quit till they get it back.”

  “You’re giving up?” Bryan says in amazement, but his father-in-law is uncharacteristically blasé, explaining that his twenty-eight years of fighting criminals and idiots on both sides of the thin blue line officially ends in just six hours and he can’t be bothered to pursue the matter for another moment.

  “D’ye know, Peter,” says Bliss resignedly, “I’ve been trying to pin something on Edwards for years, and each time I was sure I’d nailed him he pulled a dodge and I ended up back where I started. Everyone knows he’s a sack of you-know-what, but when he looks in the mirror he sees a rose, and I’ll just have to accept that.”

  “Are you sure that you are all right, Dave?”

  “Yes, Peter. I know it’s difficult to believe,” says Bliss. Then he nonchalantly adds, “In any case, I’ve just sold my first book.”

  “What?”

  “We believe that your historical narrative, The Truth Behind the Mask, has bestseller potential,” Bliss reads at speed, before saying that the publisher wants a meeting to discuss terms as soon as possible.

  “Bestseller! That’s brilliant, Dave.”

  “I know. I can’t believe it myself,” admits Bliss as he continually rereads the note. Then he has an idea. “Why don’t you borrow Hoskins’s screwdriver, take the thing apart, and lose one or two pieces before you give it back.”

  “That’s sneaky,” laughs Bryan, but he agrees, guessing that it might give Fox and Edwards a headache once they’ve returned it to the CIA.

  “That’ll make up for the headache they gave Phil and me,” says Bliss as he puts down the phone to take another look at the publisher’s letter.

  “Bestseller potential,” he muses, and he is still rolling the title of his book off his tongue ten minutes later when he has waded through the wreckage to find enough clothes for his trip.

  “The Truth Behind the Mask, by David Anthony Bliss,” he recites again and again as he drives half a dozen hefty screws into the frame of his front door, then, with a hastily packed bag and a broad grin, he takes off to Westchester en route to an entirely new world.

  The report of the recovery of the Mk-Ultra equipment reaches Lefty and Pimple in Langley, Virginia, just as Bliss pulls into the entrance of Westchester General, and their euphoria will last until someone switches it on.

  “I just made a few alterations,” Bryan tells Bliss when he calls his son-in-law to find out what happened, explaining that no one could accuse him of stealing if he merely rejigged some of the wiring. “I had a few bits and pieces left over from when I tried fixing my computer, so I thought, why waste them?”

  “David,” calls Daphne, taking off her broad-rimmed sun hat and gaily waving to him from a chair in the hospital garden as he gets out of his car.

  “You soon got your memory back,” he says, hugging her warmly. “You’re just a big fraud.”

  “I know,” she says as she buries her nose in the bouquet of roses he presents to her. “But I was so sure they were up to no good at that St. Michael’s place.”

  “You should have told me.”

  “I did,” she reminds him reproachfully. “I tried telling everyone, and no one would listen.”

  “Sorry. I had a lot on my mind,” he says. “But Samantha tells me that nothing was going on at the home after all.”

  “This was,” replies Daphne, pointing to the fading bruise on her face. But she has already been advised by P.C. Joveneski that, because of the lack of corroborative evidence, they won’t be taking any further action.

  “Amelia heard that woman knocking me about,” continues the elderly patient bitterly, suggesting that she doesn’t agree with the verdict, but Bliss can only commiserate, knowing that the defence would have a field day with the young girl in the witness box, accusing her of sour grapes because she was fired.

  “It’s very annoying,” he says in sympathy, guessing that his nose will soon be the colour of his elderly friend’s cheek and he will be equally robbed of legal recourse.

  “At least I managed to get out of there alive,” she carries on with a note of triumph, knowing that she succeeded where so many others have failed.

  “I’m not surprised,” chuckles Bliss. “If I recall rightly, you once saved your neck with a packet of chocolate digestives.”

  “You remembered,” she laughs, and then she has a quizzical look in her eye as she says, “You seem very chirpy today. Did you win the lottery or something?”

  “In a way —” starts Bliss, with both his retirement and his book deal on the tip of his tongue, but Amelia Brimble interrupts.

  “Hi, Daffy,” calls the young girl excitedly as she rushes across the lawn. “I brought a visitor to cheer you up.”

  Camilla, Amelia’s tabby, leaps from her arms straight into Daphne’s lap and begins washing.

  “Oh. She loves you, Daffy,” burbles the teenager as she simultaneously strokes Daphne and her cat, and then, as if entirely unplanned, she says, “Why don’t you keep her for a while, Daffy?”

  “Oh. I couldn’t …”

  “Just until Missie Rouge comes home.”

  “I’m not sure …”

  “I could visit …” she chatters on, and Bliss stands back and smiles at the happy tableau. Then Trina Button shows up and digs him in the ribs.

  “Look at Daphne’s face. See what they did to her. You wouldn’t listen to me. I told you they were keeping her prisoner and drugging her. Nobody ever listens … Oh! What happened to your nose?”

  “I fell over,” Bliss is trying to say as Trina ditches him in favour of Amelia’s cat.

  “Oh, what a pretty pussy,” she coos.

  “Daffy’s gonna look after her, aren’t you?” says Amelia proudly, and Bliss feels himself fading from the picture as three generations of women come together over the purring young tabby.

  “I suppose I’d better be off,” he says. “I’ve got to be at Heathrow in an hour. I just wanted to tell you …”

  “Ooh, look at her little tiny white feet,” mews Daphne as the others sigh in unison, and Bliss comes to the realization that being an author can’t compare with having whiskers and a fluffy tail, so he slips away to catch his flight.

  “Time to get you home,” says Trina, once Daphne has been given her freedom, and she puts out an arm for the old warhorse.

  “I can manage on my own, thank you,” says Daphne, levering herself out of the chair. “She didn’t break my legs.”

  “Okay,” says Trina, leading the way to her car. “Amelia and Camilla in the back and you can drive.”

  “I can’t …” starts Daphne, then she laughs. “Very funny, Trina.”

  “I don’t even wanna look at that place,” says Amelia as they approach St. Michael’s on their way home from the hospital, and Daphne is in agreement.

  “I still can’t understand it,” she mutters aloud. “I’m not usually wrong about people.”

  “How could I have been so wrong?” Anne McGregor asks herself for the nth time since Hilda Fitzgerald’s file hit her desk at breakfast time, and then she smartens herself up at the sound of a knock on her office door.

  “Detective Chief Superintendent Malloy from Liverpool, ma’am,” says Joan Joveneski as Malloy and four of his most senior detectives enter.

  Malloy is young for his rank, barely forty, and he bristles with enthusiasm as he shuns the offer of coffee and scans the fingerprints and photographs that McGregor lays out for him.

  “Well, well, well,” he muses contentedly as he passes
the evidence to his juniors and turns to McGregor. “So what’s the plan, Superintendent?”

  In the six hours since Hilda Fitzgerald set off the alarm on the Police National Computer, a team of social workers have been assembled and briefed, twenty off-duty officers have cursed the invention of cellphones and pagers, and a dozen detectives have wandered up and down the streets surrounding St. Michael’s looking like lost tourists.

  It’s exactly 3:00 p.m. when Daphne arrives home. Her celebrity as the pensioner who was kidnapped from St. Michael’s has not been tarnished by the suggestion that she engineered her own escape, and more than half of the street’s residents have turned up for the victory party.

  “Welcome Home, Daphne,” reads the banner outside her freshly painted home, while young couples who previously took little notice of the dapper lady with a hat for every occasion now conjure up fond memories as they stand with their children beside tables laden with cakes, sandwiches, and banana cream pies and applaud her arrival.

  “I never realized she had the O.B.E. till I saw it in the paper,” admits one, while others recall the way that she would always stop to smell their roses or say hello to the children.

  As a beaming Daphne steps out of Trina’s car in Westchester, David Bliss plonks his bag on the check-in scales at Heathrow Airport, while in the same terminal Isabel Semaurino, arriving from Florence, is collecting her bag from a carousel. And at St. Michael’s Church of England Home for the Elderly, a cavalcade of police and social services cars draw up to the front door.

  “Mr. Davenport. Do you know a woman by the name of Hilda Williams?” asks D.C.S. Malloy, head of the Merseyside Police, Criminal Investigation Department, once the home’s manager has been cornered in his office.

  Davenport’s chair develops spikes, and he asks, “Why?”

  “I’m asking the questions, sir,” says the Chief Superintendent, and he looks to Davenport for an answer.

  “My sister’s first husband was a Williams — Trevor Williams,” admits Davenport, although his face says that he would rather be having a lobotomy without anaesthetic.

  “So, at that time — say, ten years ago,” carries on Malloy, knowing from the fingerprints found in Daphne’s room that he owns the situation, “— your sister would have been known as Mrs. Hilda Williams?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “You suppose so?” Malloy questions, piling on the pressure.

  “Yes. All right. That was her name.”

  “And where do you suppose she was living at that time, Mr. Davenport?”

  “All right. I know what this is about,” Davenport concedes to relieve the pain. “But it was nothing to do with Hilda. It was him — her husband. He did it.”

  The question “What did he do?” is redundant, but Malloy asks anyway.

  The answer sticks in Davenport’s throat, so Malloy leans in to the squirming man, saying, “Mr. Davenport. Were you aware that your sister was wanted for questioning regarding the suspected murders of at least twenty-five senior citizens — possibly many more — in the home that she and her husband were operating at the time?”

  chapter twenty

  Life is a labyrinth — a long, winding pathway full of experiences and challenges that eventually doubles back on itself to end at the place where it all began. And as Isabel Semaurino finally reaches the end of one circuit in her life and is about to begin anew, she steps out of a taxi and walks into the midst of Daphne’s homecoming celebration.

  Balloons, streamers, and flags festoon the street outside Daphne’s house. An island of tables, dragged from outhouses and carried from dining rooms into the centre of the cul-de-sac, is decorated with flowers and topped with cakes, pies, sandwiches and pots of Daphne’s favourite tea — Keemun.

  Daphne herself is as vibrant and colourful as the decorations. Wearing a flowery printed cotton dress flounced with ribbons, a floppy straw hat with a taffeta bow, and a giant smile, she is fending off a dozen uninhibited urchins as they tug at her for attention. “I saw you in the paper … Mum says you’re famous … I bet you know the Queen.” And then one grabs a paper napkin off the table and starts an avalanche as they all push for autographs.

  At the table, Misty Jenkins, wearing her best jeans, cuts Mavis Longbottom a slice of her banana cream pie, saying, “… and I told him straight. Either those friggin’ dogs go or I will,” while her teenage sons — caught between childhood and whatever passes for maturity in their world — try to appear cool as they wash down pink-iced fairy cakes and raspberry marshmallows with cans of beer.

  Trina Button is lying face-down on the pavement, demonstrating the one-armed vasisthasana pose to Angel Robinson and a group of women neighbours, saying, “This one hurts like hell … it’s great … you’ll love it,” while her wheelchair-bound mother strokes Camilla the cat as she mourns the ruination of her feet to anyone who will listen. And then, as if someone pulled the plug, the world stops and everyone’s eyes go to the woman with Italian chic who is advancing on Daphne.

  Sixty-nine-year-old grandmother Isabel Semaurino, wearing a slinky red dress and a broad-rimmed silk hat, has tears in her eyes as she cheerily calls, “Hello. Do you remember me?”

  “You came back then,” steps in Mavis, restarting the world, then she turns to Daphne. “This was the lady I was telling you about. The one who was asking about you.”

  “I don’t remember …” Daphne is saying vaguely as the urchins sense a problem and fade away, while Trina, Misty, Amelia, and several neighbours nose in on the situation and collectively hold their breath.

  With the weight of a dozen pairs of eyes on her, Isabel is under pressure and searches for a way out. “Maybe I shouldn’t have come till later …” she starts, but Daphne steps forward.

  “Well, you’re here now, dear. So what do you want?”

  Daphne’s phone rings and breaks the tension.

  “I’ll get it,” yells Trina, and Isabel’s walk into the future is momentarily postponed until the Canadian races back, gushing, “It’s the police for you, Daphne. They’ve arrested Hilda Fitzgerald.”

  “For beating me up?”

  “No,” says Trina in shocked tones. “For murdering twenty-five old dears.”

  “What!” exclaims Daphne, but her concern for John Bartlesham and the rest of St. Michael’s residents is quickly assuaged as she takes the phone and learns that the deaths occurred in Liverpool ten years ago.

  “I was just at St. Michael’s,” explains Isabel, realizing that she is still in the hot seat as Daphne gets details from P.C. Joveneski. “The police wouldn’t let me in, so I came here.”

  “I said that woman was evil,” trumpets Daphne, once she has relayed the information that Fitzgerald and her ex-husband not only swindled dozens of seniors in their care but hastened the old-timers into the next world to ensure a speedy collection of the spoils. “They thought she drowned with her husband when their yacht sank,” she continues, “until they found her fingerprints on my bedside table.”

  “So you were right all along,” trills Trina jubilantly, and then she uses her hands to write a headline in the sky. “Daphne Lovelace, of Lovelace and Button (International Investigators) Inc., cracks mass murder case.”

  “Well, the police cracked it really …” Daphne is trying to say, but Trina won’t hear of it.

  “Crap!” she snorts. “Most of them couldn’t crack an egg.”

  The news of Fitzgerald’s arrest has taken the spotlight off the gatecrasher for a few minutes, but Isabel Semaurino has been winding herself up for this moment for several months, and she finally snaps.

  “Could we talk … inside … just us?” she asks, taking Daphne firmly by the arm, and the small crowd’s exuberance deflates as Daphne walks up the front path of her house like a woman being led to the gallows.

  “I don’t want to spoil your day,” starts Isabel as soon as they are seated in Daphne’s parlour. “But when Mum died a few months ago I went through her papers and found this.”


  The sepia-edged letter, now stained with Isabel’s tears, is sixty-nine years old. There is no question of that. The date is clearly written in the top right-hand corner, underneath an address that is immediately recognized by Daphne.

  “That’s where we used to live,” she says, still not comprehending that the letter is signed by her parents, Alfred and Alice.

  “It was hidden in a secret drawer inside my mother’s wooden writing case,” explains Isabel, but Daphne is still in the dark as she begins to read.

  “We want to thank you for taking Ophelia’s baby …”

  Daphne stops and pushes the letter away. “What is this?” she demands. “Some kind of trick. What are you playing at?”

  “Ophelia Lovelace. That is you, isn’t it?” says Isabel as she reaches out to the woman. “Did you have a baby when you were young?”

  Daphne is watchful as she tries to fit the woman into the same mould as Hilda Fitzgerald by skimming through a catalogue of potential scams in her mind. “Who are you?” she wants to know, and Isabel points to the letter and tells her.

  “If that was your address, and those were your parents, then I must be your daughter.”

  But Daphne shoots straight back. “I don’t have a daughter. My baby died. It was stillborn. We put it in a box and buried it in the woods.” The words come out. The same words she has used over the years to comfort herself whenever called upon to coo over someone else’s baby. Yet, deep down, she always knew there was no baby in the box. She heard her baby cry as it was whisked from her bedroom inside a blanket. Subconsciously, she even suspected that the young couple who appeared in her parents’ life, and just as quickly disappeared, had arranged some kind of deal. But it was her parents’ deal, not hers. She would have kept the baby, had it lived. But it died. Her mother told her so.

  “Never mind, Ophelia,” Alice Lovelace said as she wept alongside her sixteen-year-old at the graveside of a heavy old firebrick. “It’s probably for the best. And you’re very young. You’ll have plenty of opportunity for more.”