Crazy Lady

CRAZY LADY

Also by James Hawkins

INSPECTOR BLISS MYSTERIES

Missing: Presumed Dead

The Fish Kisser

No Cherubs for Melanie

A Year Less a Day

The Dave Bliss Quintet

Lovelace and Button

(International Investigators Inc.)

NON-FICTION

The Canadian Private Investigator's Manual

1001 Fundraising Ideas and Strategies for
Charities and Not-for-Profit Groups

A Chief Inspector Bliss Mystery

James Hawkins

A Castle Street Mystery

Copyright © James Hawkins, 2005

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

Editor: Barry Jowett
Copy-editor: Andrea Pruss
Design: Andrew Roberts
Printer: Marquis

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Hawkins, D. James (Derek James), 1947-
   Crazy lady: a Chief Inspector Bliss mystery / James Hawkins.

ISBN-10: 1-55002-581-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-55002-581-1

   I. Title.

PS8565.A848C73 2005   C813'.6   C2005-904873-5

1  2  3  4  5   09  08  07  06  05

We acknowledge the support of the
Canada Council for the Arts
and the
Ontario Arts Council
for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the
Government of Canada
through the
Book Publishing Industry Development Program
and
The Association for the Export of Canadian Books
, and the
Government of Ontario
through the
Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit
program.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

J. Kirk Howard, President

Printed and bound in Canada
Printed on recycled paper
www.dundurn.com

CRAZY LADY

Every man deserves to know one true love in his lifetime.

This book is dedicated with love and gratitude to Sheila, my true love, and is in loving memory of her sister, Elizabeth Khanna.

With particular thanks to all the wonderful women in my life, especially my publicist and mentor, Sandra Baird, and her sister, Barbara.

“
I
n the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.”

“Yes, I'm aware of that, ma'am.”

“And the Word became flesh and lived amongst us…”

“If you say so.”

“… and we have seen his glory.”

“Well, you may have seen it, lady. But all I see is a busload of ticked-off passengers who wanna go home to their wives and kiddies. Now have you got the fare or not?”

“The Lord Saviour says it is better to give than to receive.”

“Look, lady, I'm a bus driver, not a charity. Now either pay the fare or get off.”

“Peace is my parting gift to you. Set your troubled heart at rest.”

“Get off! Freak.”

Now what? It's pouring and it's getting dark. Oh, God. Mummy'll be cross if I'm late for tea again.

“You'll have to walk,”
the woman's God tells her.
“Do you know where you're going?”

Yes. It's 255 Arundel Crescent, Dewminster, Hampshire, England, The World, The Universe —

“Have you got any spare change?” A voice breaks into Janet Thurgood's musings, and she leaps. The sixty-one-year-old's eyes dart around, seeking escape from Vancouver's near-deserted Chinatown and the dull-eyed, prickly-haired youth who has cornered her in the bus shelter.

“Turn to Our Lord Saviour and he will provide —” she starts, but the panhandler backs her against a glazed advertisement featuring a busty perfume vendor.

“Get a life, lady. I just wanna buck for a coffee, not a freakin' lecture.”

The Lord Saviour is my shepherd. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil,
Janet prays inwardly, saying, “I'm sorry. I haven't got any —”

“Don't give me that crap. I've got a knife.”

It's a poor excuse for a knife, stolen, like everything else in Jagger Jones's world — including his name. But the ten-cent table knife, filched from Giorgo's Corner Coffee & Souvlaki, has been honed to a stiletto by Jagger (a Hollywood substitute for Davy, the forename thoughtlessly given by his teenage mother while she had more pressing matters on her mind than registering the birth of an unwanted child).

Janet Thurgood turns to her faith for defence, but her words are hollow as she warns, “The Lord Saviour's sword will protect me…”

“Oy. Punk. Leave the lady alone,” cautions a scurrying businessman with his head down against the rain. But he has no more clout than Janet's God, and he's not big enough to step in to ensure that his instruction is heeded.

“I said, don't give me no crap,” continues Jones, unfazed by the warning, as his knife goes to his victim's throat.

“My Lord Saviour is with me,” chants Janet with the certainty of a televangelist as she is stretched onto her toes. “His rod and staff comfort me…” she continues as her eyes go to the darkening heavens and the palms of her hands join in supplication.

“I mean it,” threatens Jones as the sharpened blade hollows a dimple in Janet's neck.

“… and I will dwell in the house of the Lord Saviour forever.”

“Shuddup, you crazy old bat. Shuddup and give me the money,” spits the young addict as he flattens Janet against the wall on the end of his knife and rubs her down. However, his anticipation turns sour as he realizes that beneath the rain-soaked mackintosh the aging woman is wearing only a flimsy nightdress, and she clearly has no purse. Despite the four decades between them, the youth's hand momentarily idles on Janet's naked thigh, and his face and tone soften as he sneers, “Mebbe you've got something else to give me, eh?”

“Help me, my Lord Saviour,” intones Janet as she feels the hand sliding between her legs. “Help me resist this,” she is saying as the brake lights of a passing police cruiser shimmer brightly on the rain-slick asphalt. Jagger Jones, ever-watchful, spies the slowing vehicle, pockets his knife, and melts into the gloom, leaving barely a pinprick on his victim's neck. Janet slowly opens her eyes with the realization that she has been spared, spots the police car, now quickly reversing in her direction, and scurries out of the shelter.

“Are you all right, ma'am?” shouts Constable Montgomery from the dry comfort of his cruiser, but Janet slips into a laneway and wades through a mud puddle, while constantly reminding herself of her intended destination. “255 Arundel Crescent, Dewminster, Hampshire, England,” she mutters repeatedly as she runs barefoot through the garbage-strewn back alley.

The flashing red and white lights of the pursuing cruiser spur her on as she jinks through the labyrinth of Chinatown's narrow lanes. However, as Constable Montgomery catches glimpses of the fleeing woman, he questions his motives. Was that a knife at her throat? It was just a glint of streetlight — perhaps a cigarette lighter that Jones was holding up for her to light a toke. And knowing Jones as well as Montgomery does, it would certainly have been a toke.

She's probably just another hooker working for a fix, the street-hardened cop wants to believe, but he can't escape the feeling that something is different. The lack of stiletto heels — of any heels — is certainly unusual for a sex worker, as is her drab raincoat, but there is more, although Montgomery can't put his finger on it and would be loath to admit it to his colleagues. It was a feeling of fear — vibes coursing through the ether — that had alerted him to the woman's plight. But now she is running.

“Wait a minute,” yells Montgomery as he skids to a halt and cuts Janet off at the exit from a narrow lane, but she spins and is headed back down the lane as he leaps from his cruiser while calling into his radio for a missing person's check.

“Five foot, six inches… Caucasian… late fifties… no shoes… grey raincoat and brown head scarf…”

Blood pours from Janet's shredded feet, but she feels no pain. She's an adrenaline-driven vixen with a baying pack on her tail as she streaks through the maze with Montgomery's laboured footfalls pounding through the mire in her wake.

“255 Arundel Crescent, Dewminster, Hampshire, England,” she incants continuously as she runs blindly through Vancouver's tight laneways, but she is nearly five decades and an entire continent from her childhood home. However, Janet views the foreign landscape through the eyes of an eleven-year-old and seemingly recognizes familiar features through the miasma of rain and murk.

Not far now,
she thinks, mistaking a dark alleyway for the overhung Dewminster lane where, it was rumoured amongst her pre-teen peers, Jack the Ripper kept a spooky cottage and lay in wait to deflower young virgins.

“Don't be silly. Mr. Smeeton is a very nice man,” Janet's mother told her when she tearfully insisted on taking the long way home from school to avoid passing the disabled soldier's thatched cottage. “And he always goes to church,” her mother added to bolster her assertion, but she sidestepped the question of “deflowering,” and for several years Janet had an image of herself as Red Riding Hood creeping past the veteran's front gate with a basket of roses, desperately praying that the old man wouldn't leap out and steal them.