Crazy Lady (23 page)

“I did everything for that damn woman,” he might fume bitterly, but what he did for Janet was provide for her as long as it suited his business, care for her as long as it fitted his timetable, and think of her when time permitted. And if questioned as to why he never divorced her or sought out another, he could always fall back on the Church. “Whosoever God joins together in holy matrimony,” he would recite haughtily, “let no man put asunder.”

Trina and Daphne have no intention of waiting another forty years to rescue Janet Thurgood, although as the evening drags by without any sign of movement in Craddock's dark house, they are beginning to wonder if they might not already have missed their chance.

“Perhaps he climbed over the back,” suggests Daphne for the
n
th time, but Trina is skeptical.

“No. He's scared. I bet he's creeping around like a cockroach hoping no one turns on the light. We could bust in and stomp him into the woodwork.”

“You've been watching too many movies,” laughs Daphne, but Trina seems to have a plan.

“OK,” she continues positively. “Let's just flush him out.”

“How?”

“I don't know. I was hoping you'd have some idea. Didn't you train for this kind of thing?”

“Not exactly,” says Daphne, although her cogs are spinning as she whips back through her wartime training days trying to come up with a similar scenario. After a few minutes recalling lectures about sabotage, explosives, and escape manoeuvres, she spends several more replaying a series of real-life incidences before shaking her head negatively. “The problem is that we need him to lead us to Janet. He won't risk that as long as he thinks we're following him.”

“But if we don't follow him we won't know where she is,” explains Trina unnecessarily. “He'll never go to her as long as we're here. He'll be checking every car, pulling U-turns, racing. We'll never keep up and chances are he'll just drive in a circle.”

“Wait,” says Daphne with a remembrance from the past. “‘Always keep the enemy guessing,' they said. ‘Never do the expected.' We've got to out-think him, Trina, not out-race him. We know he's stupid, so let's give him some rope and wait for him to tie a granny knot.”

“You're the boss,” says Trina, starting the engine.

“Oh… Oh!” exclaims Craddock seeing the Jetta's lights flare. “What the hell are they playing at now?”

“Home,” declares Daphne. “There's more than one way to skin a rabbit.”

“I was hoping for a nice piece of steak,” says Trina as they drive slowly past Craddock's house, both staring fixedly ahead.

“That'll get to him,” says Daphne, laughing, as they reach the end of the road and Trina steps on the gas.

“I've got to get out of here,” Bliss says to himself when he finally wakes, fuzzy-headed, and realizes that even his alcohol-driven dreams have solely featured Yolanda, and he phones Samantha.

“I'm going to Paris for a while,” he tells his daughter. “I need to do some research in Versailles and the Louvre.”

“You're not running away are you?” she questions.

“No,” he insists, thought he knows he is partially lying. “Look,” he protests vociferously, “you told me to script into my novel all the things I want in my life. Well I am. But this isn't just about Yolanda anymore.”

“You don't have to convince me, Dad.”

“I know what you're thinking,” he carries on without listening. “But I really do need to spend time in Paris. Don't worry, I'll be back here in a couple of weeks.”

Will I ever return?
Bliss deliberates a couple of hours later as the speedy SNCF electric train, the luxurious
Train Grand Vitesse,
accelerates almost silently out of StJuan's station while he stands at a window scanning the narrow streets as they whip past, still hoping for a glimpse of blonde hair, still wondering if the entire episode has been either a dream or a nightmare, still thinking that he might simply wake at his destination and find himself at Waterloo railway station on his way to a normal day at Scotland Yard.

But nothing has been normal since Yolanda's hurried departure and he questions his true intentions, knowing that his suitcase is straining with all his clothes and personal possessions. As the speeding streets begin to blur and the train smoothly gathers speed along the coastal track, he catches glances of the Château Roger, then the austere cliff-top fortress on the island of Ste. Marguerite across the tranquil azure bay, and he knows the answer.

“Yes,” he says to himself
sotto voce
, knowing that he has an obligation to a man who surrendered his liberty and his voice in the name of love. “I will come back to finish the novel. I will tell your story. And I will get Yolanda back, however long it takes.”

“Janet,” calls Craddock softly in the early hours, once he's satisfied that the coast is clear, but as he opens the old van's door he's knocked back by the stench of stale vomit.

“Janet,” he calls louder, shining a flashlight into her face, but her eyes won't open and she lays as listless as a dropped doll.

“Shit!” exclaims the ex-cop, blaming Daphne and Trina in his mind as he desperately searches for a pulse. “Wake up. C'mon, wake up,” he mutters frantically as his mind whirls with dark thoughts. Then he drags the limp body from the van and hacks at her wrist bindings with a blunt craft knife.

“Wake up. Wake up,” he calls frantically, seeing his own life rapidly drifting into darkness as he massages her dead hands. Then she lets out an exhausted gasp and he almost faints in relief.

“We could always tip off the police,” Daphne suggests over the supper table at Trina's, but the other woman isn't easily convinced.

“I tipped them off about Osama Bin Laden once and they threatened to arrest me for being a public nuisance.”

“Osama Bin Laden in Vancouver?” queries Daphne incredulously.

“Well it could have been,” replies Trina shortly. “He looked like him. He had a beard and everything. Anyway, what I'm saying is that I wouldn't trust that lot to pick up a two-bit hooker let alone a wanted kidnapper.”

“In that case we have to come up with a plan,” says Daphne, then she yawns and checks her watch. “Goodness, I must be getting past it. It's only ten o'clock.”

“We'll start first thing tomorrow,” agrees Trina as she clears away the plates.
Craddock watches his clock and waits for midnight to roll around before picking up the phone to call England.

“Mr. Creston isn't in yet,” the early shift receptionist at Creston Enterprises tells him, but she's wrong. The company president hasn't left the building all night. Concern over Janet kept him up until three when a security guard spotted a light and poked his head around the door to make sure there were no intruders.

“Only me,” Creston assured the watchman as he waved him away, and an hour later he finally fell asleep on a deeply cushioned settee. Mason wakes him at eight-thirty, just as Craddock is phoning back.

“I'll check,” the receptionist tells the anxious Canadian caller, “though I haven't seen him come in yet.”

“It's for you J.C.,” says Mason, taking the call, and Creston signals for his henchman to leave as soon as he recognizes Craddock's voice.

“We're a bit worried about your wife,” says the Vancouver private eye, temporarily forgetting his hard man act while trying to share some of the responsibility with a non-existent partner.

“What are you saying, Craddock?”

“We think she should maybe see a doctor.”

“Well do it, then.”

“But — they'll ask questions.”

“Oh, for Lord's sake,” spits Creston. “I thought you were supposed to know what you were doing.”

“I do.”

“Then tell 'em not to ask questions, you idiot,” Creston screeches.

“Everything all right, J.C.?” queries Mason sliding back into the room.

Creston slams down his phone. “Not it's not,” he seethes. “You told me he was a professional; professional what — babysitter?”

“Sorry, J.C. He's an ex-cop. Came recommended by Browning.”

“And what the hell does that freak know? Find someone else.”

“Yes, J.C.”

“And while you're at it get me a flight. Shit. Do I have to do everything myself?”

“Flight, J.C.?”

“To Canada.”

“You could take the Lear.”

“Oh, right. Wake up, man. Do you think I want everyone knowing my business? Clear my schedule for three days and book me business class; and don't use Creston. What was that passport you got me?”

“Smythe.”

“Yes — Smythe. And call Craddock. Tell him to get one of his people to meet me at the airport.”

“Yes,” says Mason, half out of the door. “And tell him that Janet better be in one piece when I arrive or I'll break his fucking neck.”

“Right, J.C.”

“Oh. One more thing. You've got a good contact in the police haven't you?”

“Mike Edwards, chief superintendent at the Yard,” Mason nods. “We were at school together.”

“Right. Get onto him. I want someone to make sure that everything to do with the children's deaths is destroyed — every note, every record, every scrap of paper.”

“Um. He might not…”

“John. I'm not asking, OK. I don't give a monkey's fart what it costs — and don't give me any crap about duty. He's got his price the same as anyone else.”

“I'll try.”

“No. You will,” spits Creston nastily. “I might have to bring her back here and I can't risk anything going wrong — understand?”

“Yes, J.C.”

“Good.”

The news of Creston's visit hits Craddock with the force of a fly ball in the forehead. “Oh Christ, that's all I need,” he says as he puts down the phone and looks at the frail woman asleep in his bed. Then he stares at his watch as he tries to calculate out how much time he has to work a miracle.

Bliss has more time to achieve success than Craddock, much more time, and as he begins a tour of Louis XIV's great palace on the outskirts of Paris, he is beginning to wonder if it might not take him as long as his predecessor to entice back his lost love.

“The Palace of Versailles was originally a royal hunting lodge,” explains the cropped-haired student guide in perfect English as Bliss tries to takes notes, but he is now a long way from the Mediterranean and he can't stop shivering.

“King Louis XIV, who was later known as the Sun King, always said that the mark of a man was his fortitude to all things — heat, cold, hunger, and thirst,” explains the young woman, pointing out the paucity of fireplaces and the draughtiness of the doors and windows in the
Salon de la Guerre
, the monarch's oft used war room, before continuing into the great gallery, the magnificent Hall of Mirrors, which stretches seventy-five metres across the west end of the building.

“The ceiling was painted by Le Brun,” she continues, sweeping a hand the length of the great room. “And the mural pays tribute to of the king's valiant defeat of the Dutch…”

I can see where the designer of the Château Roger got his ideas
, thinks Bliss, tuning out the young woman as he surveys the ornately decorated stateroom with its giant windows that overlook the sculpted gardens and the ornamental canals and fountains.

“Approximately ten thousand people lived in the palace during the height of the Sun King's reign…” the guide continues to the little knot of tourists as she leads them into the king's private rooms. Bliss hangs back in the mirrored gallery for a few seconds, on the spot where the devious monarch's throne sat on a raised dais, imagining the scene as hundreds of bewigged and outlandishly costumed courtiers milled at Louis' feet, desperate to catch his eye. It was all about control, Bliss knows from his research, and he has no difficulty combining the malevolent psyche of the French king with his present-day adversary.

“Keep your friends close, but your enemies even closer,” may be Chief Superintendent Edwards' maxim, but he is not the first dictator to understand the dictum's importance, and Bliss can't keep Klaus out of the equation either. He didn't really want Yolanda, he tells himself as he pictures Louis carefully noting the absence of any nobles from his audience. He just couldn't stand the thought of someone else having her.

Maybe that's not fair.

Of course it's not fair, but what she did to me wasn't fair either. Now I'm the one in the cage while she is free? Or is every moment with Klaus torture as she tries to focus on him when all she sees is me? Does she close her eyes in bed and imagine that it is me inside her?

“
Monsieur
…” calls the young shepherdess, realizing that she has lost one of her sheep, and Bliss quickly closes his pad to catch up, but now he knows how easily the besotted man suckered himself into being masked and shackled while his sovereign sat on his throne laughing at his dupe's misfortune.

“Remember — sacrifice!” exclaimed the king to Prince Ferdinand
, writes Bliss, finding a quiet corner in Louis' bedroom while the guide tells of the king's legendary sexual appetite.
“Even the plainest, ugliest old crow — one who
should rightly be on her knees pleading and begging — expects you to lay down your life in order to get between her sheets. How would she know that you would not hide in the closet were a burglar come to visit if you have not proved yourself on the field?”

“Then I fear that I will be a lonely bachelor,” said the lovelorn man, but the king offered a smile. “Come, come, my young prince. Do not give up so easily. I have a scheme that may enable you to woo this noble woman without risk to your limbs.”

“A scheme, my liege?” queried the prince with light in his eyes.