Deadly Sin (26 page)

“So would you if they'd done this to you,” she says, whipping off her glasses and making a stab at her swollen eye.

“Is that why wouldn't they let me see you?”

Daphne puts back her glasses and takes a careful look around before pulling Mavis closer. “They wouldn't let you in,” she whispers darkly, “because they were going to kill me.”

A
major storm is brewing as Bliss meanders back to his office, his mind whirling with ideas as he focuses on the miniature apparatus that he carries as delicately as a bomb. It could be a receiver, he surmises as he walks along the riverbank, his eyes tracking the sky as if searching for an orbiting satellite. But the sky is perfectly clear and, despite the persistent haze of pollution, remarkably blue. However, ahead of him, an ominous black cloud is descending over the soaring concrete block of New Scotland Yard.

“Gentlemen,” announces the assistant commissioner gravely as he looks around the conference table at his upper echelon. “Her Majesty has refused to cancel Friday's visit.”

“Fuck!” swears Commander Fox, and the table erupts in a cacophony of objections as officers and visitors spit out headlines from the past few weeks: British flags aflame throughout the Middle East; chanting mobs; torched
embassies; ransacked trade missions; tourists roughed up in Turkey; cartoons of Philip dressed as a suicide bomber in Iran.

“And what about what's going on here?” questions one chief superintendent, mindful of the continuing riots, anti-Semitic graffiti, desecrated graveyards, burned churches, and angry voices within the Church of England demanding that the Reformation be reformed and the Queen dumped in favour of someone less anxious to throw themselves at the feet of Mohammed.

“This isn't getting us anywhere,” sighs Michael Edwards in exasperation. “You'd think the Muslims would be pleased.”

“You'd think the Christians would be pleased,” Commander Fox is responding when one of the American representatives, “Pimple” to David Bliss, quietly assumes the floor.

“The President is now of the opinion that the visit should proceed despite the protests,” says the CIA man with calm authority.

“That's flippin' nice of him,” mutters Fox, and Pimple colours up and spins.

“It's called democracy, Commander,” he explains as if he personally invented it. “Freedom of speech … freedom to disagree. And the point is, Commander, that we have reached a new understanding of popular dissent.”

“Really?”

“Sure,” he says flippantly. “We don't give a damn what they think anymore.”

“I think it's some sort of radio receiver,” suggests Bliss as he hands the device to the technician in the video lab.

“Leave it with me. I'll take a look-see when I've got a minute,” says Hoskins with a screwdriver already in his hand. “By the way, did you trace that pickup truck?”

“Not exactly,” replies Bliss, unwilling to admit to a civilian that he isn't high enough in the tree to peek through the “Classified” window. “But I've been thinking,” he carries on, wondering aloud if it might be possible to find out where the vehicle was going by checking successive surveillance cameras. “After all,” he says. “We know which way it was headed when it drove away from the mosque, and we know the exact time it left.”

“It's possible,” says Hoskins, scratching his ear with the screwdriver. “But it would be a helluva lot of work.”

“You find the videos and I'll do the legwork,” Bliss offers and gets a nod of agreement.

The crypt of Westchester cathedral has preserved the bodies and memories of its richest and most powerful benefactors for nearly a thousand years, whilst its nave is home to the sarcophagi of kings, knights, and warriors who fought on God's side from the Crusades onwards and whose tattered standards and battle honours glorify their conquests from on high.

Westchester City cemetery, in contrast, has no fan-arched roof from which to fly flags, but at a time in history when death was more commonplace, and burial more fashionable, it was proud of its position in society. However, Georgian and Victorian statues and headstones have been dissolved by more than a century of pollution and rain, and now celebrate generations of nameless, faceless people.

Daphne Lovelace hopes that she is faceless as she wanders amongst the gravestones and monuments with her head down while she waits for Mavis to retrieve her envelope from the post office.

The sight of a straggle of black-hatted mourners heading into the chapel gives her an idea, and she slips in behind them hoping to glimpse the records of the most recent burials.

“Are you family?” questions a gatekeeper, looking her over with a jaundiced eye.

“Not exactly. More a friend,” lies Daphne, but the tightly knitted, glum-faced congregants swing as one in her direction, and she backs out.

“Sorry. I must be early … Wrong funeral.”

Familiar names make Daphne pause from time to time as she saunters past freshly mounded graves, some still bearing wreaths and cards, and she stops for a few moments where she laid a wreath only a couple of months ago. Phil and Maggie Morgan — “Philip and Margaret — Together Eternally,” she reads off the plaque — who bailed out and left her at the mercy of the Jenkinses. And Minnie Dennon, another deserter, whose spectacular demise on the front of an express train caught the attention of the nation and packed the cathedral. How few would have shown up if they knew she jumped, Daphne wonders, recalling the public outcry over her supposed murder, and as she meanders from grave to grave, checking out the ages of her contemporaries, Daphne can't help but notice that she has easily beaten the odds.

Detective Chief Inspector David Bliss is less lucky. With Edwards on his back, Commander Fox has been nosing around for more information about Bliss's imaginary surveillance camera, and he stalks into Bliss's office mid-morning, snarling, “Are you trying to make me look stupid in front of Edwards, Chief Inspector?”

“No, sir,” says Bliss as Peter Bryan tries to shrink his head into his father-in-law's coffee percolator.

“Well, how come no one in Surveillance knows a damn thing about another camera for Friday?”

“That's true,” confesses Bliss. “We were just checking out the possibilities.”

Fox's face is a picture of disbelief as he points a warning finger. “You two better not be up to something,”
he cautions. “I've got enough problems with Edwards without you.”

“Problems?” probes Bliss, but Fox won't bite.

“Just watch it,” he says on his way out, but the arrival of Hoskins stops him. “You can take that back,” he scowls, stabbing at Bliss's gizmo in the technician's hands. “We're not putting up any more cameras.”

“It's not a camera. It's a microwave transceiver,” declares the startled video technician as he swivels the miniature dish in demonstration. “It's designed to pick up a concentrated radio signal, give it a boost, and retransmit it.”

“I don't care if it's an ejection seat. Mr. Bliss doesn't need it,” Fox sneers as he stomps away.

“Where does it send the signal?” questions Bliss, fingering the device speculatively.

“Anywhere you point it. It's entirely directional, like the beam of a flashlight.”

“That's interesting,” says Bliss, turning to his son-in-law. “Have you ever heard of labyrinths, Peter?”

“Is it a computer game?”

“Not unless Bill Gates was an ancient Greek,” laughs Bliss. “No. I'm told they've been around forever. Apparently King Minos had one in Crete where they sacrificed their most beautiful virgins to a monster.”

“What a waste,” mumbles Bryan facetiously as Bliss continues.

“They're sort of circles on the ground that are supposed to have magical powers. They're all over the world, apparently.”

“Magical,” echoes Bryan, summoning an imaginary wand. “Hocus-pocus frogs and locusts and that kind of thing?”

“That's what I thought,” agrees Bliss. “But I saw one of these labyrinths yesterday, at the cathedral in Westchester, and this airy-fairy kind of woman reckoned that the core gave out a bolt of energy that zapped people's minds, and
it got me thinking.” Then he picks up the electronic unit. “What if this satellite dish directed a beam that zapped him — you know, when he stopped and looked as though he was having a good clear-out?”

“You're asking the wrong person,” says Bryan as he nods to the technician.

“Nah,” snorts Hoskins dismissively. “That thing couldn't zap a cockroach at ten paces with the amount of power it gives out.”

The buzz of Bliss's cellphone cuts the air as if on cue.

“Okay,” says Trina Button without waiting for a greeting as she picks up an Avis car at Heathrow. “We've arrived. Any news? Have they found her?”

“Arrived?” queries Bliss blankly. “Who? Where?”

“I brought my mother,” carries on Trina as she firmly straps Winifred in. “She's exactly the same age as Daphne, so she might be able to help track her down.”

“That's just what I need — a pair of loonies,” mutters Bliss once he has put Trina in the picture. “Although I don't suppose she can do any harm.”

Trina flicks off her cellphone and starts the engine as her mother questions, “Where are we, Treenie?”

“England, Mum,” shouts Trina as she lifts one of her mother's earphones and catches a blast of U2.

“Great! Are we going to do the El Camino?”

“Yeah. Why not?” says Trina, as she heads off to Westchester.

The cemetery is wearing Daphne down with its irrefutable and particularly pertinent omens. Headstone after head-stone remind her that after a lifetime of skirmishes and battles, heartaches and triumphs, lovers and leavers, aches and pains, good times and bad, the only prize for winning is a carved chunk of Carrara marble instead of a lump of polished concrete.

“Not if you believe in heaven,” says a seductive voice in Daphne's mind, but it's a voice that she has been ignoring ever since the consecrated bombs of England desecrated Hitler's Teutonic heathens and left her seeking answers in the Bible, the Qu'ran, the Talmud, and even the Bhagavadgita. But by the time she finished doing the rounds of prophets, messiahs, and evangelists, she had as much respect for John Frum and the Cargo Cult of Vanuatu as she did for any of the mainstreamers.

The cathedral's clock takes hours to strikes eleven, by which time Daphne has visited so many old friends and acquaintances that she is seriously contemplating turning herself in and joining them, but the sound of voices from a blackberry bush stop her. Behind the bush, in an ancient wooden tool shed with a sway-back roof, a couple of gravediggers are making tea on a camping stove.

The earthy smell of dry rot and decayed timber induce memories for Daphne as she pokes her head through the open door — childhood memories of carefree play in the copse surrounding her home; teenage memories of illicit trysts in neglected barns; exhilarating wartime memories of foxholes and shell-shattered hovels.

“The chapel's over there, m'dear,” calls Dennis, one of the gravediggers, cutting into her memories and reminding her that she is in a cemetery. Then he sizes her up and scratches his head. “You ain't here for a funeral dressed like that, are you?”

“No,” she admits, then explains she was hoping to find out if one of her friends was buried recently.

“The proper records is kept in the office,” explains Dennis, while lighting a cigar from the stove. “But they ain't open Mondays.”

“Never mind,” she says, turning away.

“Hang on,” he says moving a copy of the
Gazette
off an old car seat. “Take the weight off … I might be able to help.”

“Can you …” she starts, but her mouth drops as she spots a very familiar face on the front page. “Um … thanks,” she mumbles, hoping they haven't noticed her surprise, or her likeness to the picture, but a glance at the shiny kettle would have told her not to worry: while the image in print might have mirrored her a few weeks ago, Hilda Fitzgerald's hand has moulded her a new face.

“Have you bin knocking yourself about, luv?” asks Dennis rhetorically before offering her a tea.

“I'd love one,” she says, immediately unwinding in their cozy niche with a feeling that the dilapidated hut is a lifeboat in a world of death and that they have come to her rescue. “It's a bit depressing out there,” she adds with a shiver.

“Nah, luv,” pipes up Dennis's partner, Michael, as he lies back in a wooden rocking chair. “You've got it wrong. You wait. In a minute that lot in the chapel will be out here saying, ‘Good old Uncle Fred, Gawd bless his soul, he's gorn to an 'appier place,' and then they'll bawl their bloomin' eyes out with bloomin' joy while they divvy up the old bugger's life savins'.”

“So. Do you believe in heaven?”

“Mebbe, luv. But trust me, most of the stiffs that we drop in the hole here just keep on going down an' down an' down.”

“Life stinks and then you die, is what I believe,” chirps in Dennis mournfully as he hands Daphne a cracked mug. “And then, once you're gorn, you stink a helluva lot more.”

“That's not very cheerful.”

“That's me, miserable Denny. ‘Miserable as sin,' me mother always said. Well, I've had my share of sin and I can tell you … Well, maybe I shouldn't. But if I believed in some sort of beautiful heaven I wouldn't 'a stuck around in this dump for the past forty-odd years, I can tell ya that.”

The tea is not Keemun, but after two weeks of avoiding anything but water from the bathroom tap, the sweet milky liquid is honey.

“Now,” says Dennis as he carefully washes his hands in a rusty enamel basin. “You wuz asking about recent interments.”