Deadly Sin (18 page)

The two night attendants have finished their rounds — thirty-seven patients and one cadaver, none of whom, they hope, will give them any more trouble — and they have turned down the lights and are both flat out on settees in the common room.

Daphne creeps past in the dimness and has gently picked the phone off its cradle before realizing that she has no coins. “Reverse the charges,” her mind tells her, but it doesn't give her instructions.

“Hello … hello,” she whispers when a woman asks her to insert a coin, but the sound of her own voice makes her jump, and she drops the phone and scuttles to a dark corner.

“C'mon. Pull yourself together. You can do it,” she tells herself as her mind spins, but she's woken one of the orderlies.

“Who's there?” calls the woman as a tinny voice joins in.

“Please hang up and try your call again … Please hang up ….”

“Who is it?” demands the orderly, hastily straightening her hair and her bosom as she emerges from the common room.

Daphne cringes into the doorway of Patrick Davenport's office and feels it give behind her.

“Who's there?” continues the orderly, and then she spots the phone. With a puzzled look she replaces the receiver, shrugs, and heads back to sleep.

Inside the office, Daphne lays on the floor fighting for breath.
You're too old for this
, she tells herself.
You can't do
it. Go back to bed.
But she has the labyrinth in her head now, and the voice of Angel Robinson encouraging, “So, you learnt that it was up to you to fight your way through.” So she hauls herself up to Davenport's desk and grabs his phone.

The only light is from a security lamp outside the window, and the numbers swim on the page of her address book. Four wrong numbers in succession — all irate at being disturbed in the early hours — but she gets Bliss on the fifth.

“David,” she whispers, but his sleepy mind warns him it could still be a dream.

“Hello — who is this?” he asks as he tries to surface. “Daisy, is that you?”

She tries again. “It's Daphne …” she says, and although the words start off sensibly in her mind they're tangled by the time they reach her mouth.

“I don't know what you're saying,” Bliss interjects irritably as Daphne rambles about religious zealots, labyrinths, angels, and forced injections. But he is still half asleep himself.

“Oh, go to bed, Daphne, I'll come and visit next weekend,” he says eventually and puts down the phone. Five minutes later, now wide awake with concern, he angrily mutters, “You're a bloody nuisance at times,” checks his call display, and phones back.

“Now it's engaged,” he snorts, and drags himself to the kitchen to put on the kettle.

Daphne is still on the phone, calling for international assistance.

“Mum. Is that you?” says Trina Button breathlessly as she grabs the phone, and for a few moments Daphne's garbled rant has her convinced. The truth unravels slowly as the Englishness of the accent comes through, but Daphne is sinking fast. Exertion and the residual effects of the soporific weigh her down, and she leaves Trina hanging as she struggles back to her bedroom.

The room rotates giddily around Daphne as she slumps onto the bed, while, in another part of the old mansion, Hilda Fitzgerald is being rousted from her upstairs quarters to speak to David Bliss.

“Sorry to bother you, Hilda,” says one of the night staff. “But there's a man on the phone about Miss Lovelace, and I don't know what to tell him.”

By the time Hilda reaches the office she has her mind in gear and she puts Bliss in the picture: “… not taking her medication … caused a little trouble … started wandering — not uncommon in cases like hers … Doctor's given her a sedative … she's very confused.”

“She certainly seemed strange the other day,” agrees Bliss. “Not at all sparky — not able to hold a conversation.”

“That's not unusual,” Hilda assures him. “A lot of our guests repeat themselves over and over, as if they're stuck in a loop. It's a type of obsessive behaviour. Just like Miss Lovelace's obsession with walking in circles. That's what happens when areas of the brain deteriorate.”

“Oh, dear. Poor Daphne.”

“It's very sad,” agrees Hilda. “But don't worry. We'll do our very best for her.”

“Thank you,” says Bliss, dropping back onto his bed. “I shall sleep easier now.” But his phone is buzzing by the time his head hits the pillow.

It's Trina Button, panicking. “David. You must do something. Daphne's being kept prisoner by a religious cult.”

“No she's not. She's in an old people's home,” replies Bliss, but Trina isn't listening.

“They've drugged her —”

“A sedative.”

“— stolen her shoes —”

“To stop her running.”

“— brainwashed her —”

“What?”

“With religion. Aren't you listening? It's a cult.”

Bliss stops her eventually. “I've just got off the phone with them,” he explains. “They're very nice people. They're very concerned about her and they're doing their best.”

But “nice people” is not an image that equates with reality as Hilda Fitzgerald crashes into Daphne's room and stands over her, shouting, “Don't you dare get out of bed in the night again. And don't you dare use the office phone for personal calls. Do I make myself clear?”

“If you're so worried about her, then come over and see for yourself,” suggests Bliss, irritably. “I've got a job to do and an important meeting in the morning.”

“I can't,” croaks Trina as tears start to flow. “My mother's missing again. She's been gone all day. And the police are useless.”

“Well, I'm not sure about that,” says Bliss defensively, but Trina is.

“This lot in Vancouver couldn't find the hole in a donut,” she snivels, and Bliss softens.

“I'll visit Daphne again as soon as I can. But she's perfectly safe where she is.”

Safety is on Daphne's mind as well as she cowers under the bedclothes, whimpering, “I want to go home. I don't like it here.”

“Shuddup, you stupid old bag,” yells Hilda, and then she rips back the sheet and slaps the crying woman viciously across her face. “Shuddup, shuddup, shuddup,” she screeches as she slaps, and then she drags Daphne from the bed and forces her to her knees. “Now you'd better start praying, lady, 'cos you need all the help you can get.”

“Ungodly Warfare,” proclaims Wednesday's
Daily Mirror,
headlining a report on the continuing violent clashes across the country. And while the weather takes some of the heat, there is no question that ethnicity and religion are playing the largest role.

Smiling gangs of skinheads, with swastika tattoos and pierced lips, wrap themselves in Union flags and sport crucifixes on gold chains as they adopt thuggish poses for the paper's centre spread.

“Christian Warriors???” questions the caption, but the photos leave no doubt that, in some minds, nationalism, Nazism, and a solid conviction that Christianity was founded by the British can be fused into a tritheistic doctrine that justifies heavy-booted advocates seeking out anyone worthy of a kicking.

“And the Queen, God bless her cotton socks,” snorts Commander Fox, tossing the newspaper onto the table in disgust at the Wednesday morning planning meeting, “believes that her rescheduled visit to the mosque will help calm the situation.” But Lefty and Pimple, the American president's henchmen, don't look convinced either. The glum-faced CIA operatives are not officially present, as the minutes will clearly show, but they sit in plain view and make notes as Fox runs his eye around the room and takes a mental roll call of his senior officers and staff.

“Right,” he says, apparently satisfied with attendance. “Michael Edwards, the Home Secretary's security advisor, has asked me to stress his boss's determination to put an end to this nonsense, but, to be frank, I'm worried that this visit might make it worse.”

Judging by the faces of the Americans, the President takes a similar view, and several members of the British Parliament have risked the ire of the Prime Minister and the palace by going public with their criticisms.

“My guess is that her people are censoring what she sees,” suggests Fox as he carries on. “She probably believes it was the heat and that it's likely to cool off a bit in the next week or so.”

David Bliss yawns and slumps in his chair as the meeting gets underway. He won't be in the hot seat this time; someone else will be staring at the surveillance screens
while he is purportedly preventing Prince Philip from becoming a recidivist. But he is still devoid of any realistic strategies, and, as he drifts off, he reminds himself that he's not expected to do anything; he's just the fall guy.

It's been more than a week since the attack, and for most of that time the Queen has been at one end of the country with Philip at the other. And if the palace schedulers do their job, it will stay that way until the day of reckoning — the day that he will again walk up the steps to the mosque, in a complete reversal of Muslim custom, one regulation pace behind his wife. Supermarket tabloid editors may be upset by the arrangement, but the owners of hotels, pubs, and restaurants surrounding Balmoral Castle are booking cruises and refurbished kitchens on the backs of an army of camera-wielding paparazzi who daily scour the fortress's walls in the hope of catching Philip with his pants down.

However, the Duke of Edinburgh's reclusion within the Scottish stone bastion is in itself the subject of caustic amusement. “Prince Doing Porridge in Scotland!” laughs the caption under a computer-generated image of the Duke wearing stripes and a ball and chain in today's
Times
.

Daphne Lovelace also feels the weight of chains as she sits, staring fixedly out of her bedroom window at the lawn where her feet have traced a labyrinth during the past nine days. She hasn't moved since Hilda Fitzgerald and Patrick Davenport visited with her breakfast and stuck the papers granting Robert Jameson power of attorney over her affairs under her nose.

“Sign,” said Davenport, grabbing Daphne's hand and fitting a pen between her fingers.

“I don't —” was as far as she got.

“Do you want another one?” warned Hilda with her hand at the ready, and Daphne signed.

Amelia hustles in with mid-morning mugs of tea for Daphne and her new companion. “Ooh. You haven't touched your breakfast …” she is saying when she grinds to a stop. “Oh my God!” she cries. “Whatever happened to your face, Daffy?” And she quickly puts down the mugs and crouches at Daphne's feet. “Did you bump yourself in the night?”

“Sleepwalking,” Daphne claims in a monotone without taking her eyes off the lawn.

“Is that what happened yesterday when you was goin' round and round?” Amelia burbles on. “Did you just sorta wander off like you wuz asleep?”

“Something like that,” Daphne replies, then she turns to the young girl and asks, “How did I set off the alarms?”

Amelia has a nervous glance over Daphne's shoulder before confiding, “I ain't s'posed to tell anyone, but they put thingies in your clothes.”

“Thingies?”

“Yeah, little tiny electronic thingies. Here, I'll show you,” she says, standing to open Daphne's wardrobe door. “Oh. Where's all your clothes, Daffy?”

Trina Button's mother could also use some clothes, but since her return from Vancouver Island in the back of Sergeant Brougham's police cruiser, Winifred has hobbled around her daughter's house in a luminous pink housecoat.

“You won't get very far in that,” Trina told her as she exchanged it for her tablecloth, but after a day on the run Winifred's feet are in such a state that it will be some time before she makes another bid to escape.

An invitation to dinner from Peter Bryan to “celebrate our first successful ultrasound” offers Bliss a respite from an evening of phone-gazing as he wrestles over his future with
Daisy and promises him a juicy steak, although he can't get his mind off Daphne.

“I told her I'd visit this weekend,” he tells Samantha in the kitchen, once the baby stuff is dealt with and he has recounted his early-morning phone conversations with the folks at St. Michael's. “But I've promised Daisy for Friday, and I'm supposed to be taking care of the Queen.”

“So many women, so little time,” laughs his son-in-law from the dining room as he opens a bottle of claret.

“None for me, Peter,” calls Samantha, meaningfully patting her midriff.

“That's the trouble. I've got lots of time,” says Bliss as he follows his nose to the Bordeaux. “Edwards is in Washington — God knows why — and I'm sitting around like a bridesmaid at a funeral.”

“A what?” asks Bryan.

Bliss rolls his eyes. “I'm at the wrong church,” he says, then explains. “I should be in France, but Fox slapped a moratorium on all leave until after the visit. So here I am, with bugger all to do as long as the warring Windsors are kept apart.”

“So what are you going to do about Daisy?” calls Samantha from the kitchen.

“I'll just sneak a poet's day on Friday and slip back Sunday evening. Fox will never know. And Daphne will have to wait a week. It's not as though she's going anywhere in a hurry.”

“A what day?” queries Bryan.

“Oh, come on Peter, wake up,” he says, then spells, “P-O-E-T-S: piss off early tomorrow's Saturday.”

“Just don't get caught,” says Samantha as she sashays in with the main course, but Bliss takes a sideways look at his plate and pulls a face.

“Organic spinach salad with goat feta, green olives, and hummus,” she details, adding, “We have to think of the baby now, Dad.”

The meal could have been worse
, thinks Bliss, over the fresh fruit salad
sans
cream, but he makes a mental note to have a fat-lover's lunch in the canteen beforehand the next time he is invited.