Lovelace and Button (International Investigators) Inc. (23 page)

“I wish I knew,” says Phillips, pouring himself a second coffee. “Rick Button is doing a nationwide
appeal at ten this morning, though God knows how the poor guy's gonna manage. I can't picture what he's going through.”

“I can. But it's the wrong nation he's appealing to,” rages Bliss. “Why is no one listening to me? Have I become the invisible man?”

“I'm listening, Dave. But as long as the Americans maintain they're in Canada, what can we do?”

“Just ‘cos they say it, doesn't make it so. Christ Almighty, they insisted the Iraqis had chemical weapons when anyone with half a brain knew they didn't.”

“I've passed on all the information about the place through Interpol,” continues Phillips as he adds milk and sugar, “and they're promising a full investigation.”

“Or another whitewash,” scoffs Bliss.

“Why?”

“Because there is obviously something very fishy going on there,” says Bliss, and he makes another stab at peering through the darkness as if trying to see through the chimera surrounding the monastery and connect with Daphne. However, in the pre-dawn gloom he finds only the dreariness of another anxiety-filled day, where even the navigation lights of a trawler departing from the harbour under the nose of the waterside hotel are lost in the murk.

“I can't see a damn thing through this,” admits Bliss, giving up, while beneath him at sea level, Vincent Kelly, the trawlerman, edges his boat forward with his eyes glued to the radar.

The muscular Kelly is still considered a greenhorn in the tradition of west coast trawling — a mere thirty-eight years of age, but unlike many of his peers who have given up their family's seafaring businesses in favour of more dependable work ashore, Kelly has apparently thrived. However, while he may have taken
over the boat from his father, he did not inherit the ocean's abundance of salmon, cod and herring which had originally paid for it.

“You know, back in my day, son, I can remember when…” bearded old men with whisky-veined noses and nicotined fingers often reminisce as they sit on Vancouver's fisherman's wharf watching their final years slip past. But if anyone ever did walk across the bay on the backs of salmon, capsize with the weight of his nets or sink under his catch, it was long before Vincent's time.

“Hah! Call them fish?” an oldtimer will grumble, surveying today's measly haul. “We wouldn't a' fed the cat with them in my time.”

But today, somewhere off the southernmost tip of Vancouver Island, close to the entrance to Puget Sound, Vincent Kelly has a catch already lined up for him. So, despite the dense fog and the torrents of rain tattooing the ocean's surface that will keep most sailors in the bar, he'll allow satellites to guide him and radar to protect him as he steers a well-worn path.

However, the fish with Kelly's name on it is still a long way from being landed, and as soon as the trawler hits deep water, he kicks up the throttles and listens with satisfaction to the comforting sound of twin diesels burbling richly beneath his feet.

“Hey, Mick,” he calls to the wiry deckhand who is making coffee in the cramped galley behind the wheelhouse. “Hurry up. I need you on lookout.”

“Coming, Vince,” says the hand.

“Don't forget your binoculars,” continues Kelly as he jams his face to the windshield, searching worriedly for a glimpse of any of the semi-submerged logs that bedevil boaters off the forested shoreline of the Pacific northwest.

Thirty miles west, on the far edge of Kelly's radar's horizon, Captain Hwang of the South Asia Steamship Company has no such concerns as he stands on his bridge with his mind on Seattle's ritzy fish restaurants and dockside strip clubs. With nearly a hundred thousand tons of ship and cargo under his feet it would take an entire raft of floating logs to put a dent in his hull. However, before he can relax over a cold beer, a warm lobster and a hot hooker, he will have to navigate the narrow strait that separates Vancouver Island from the rugged coastline of northern Washington, then thread his way through a string of forested islands at the entrance to Puget Sound. He will also have to rendezvous with Vincent Kelly's little trawler without attracting the attention of the Coast Guard.

A third of the way around the globe, in London, it's already mid-afternoon, though it's not much brighter than Vancouver. “Thank God it's Friday,” mumble millions of disheartened office and bank workers as they wish away the gloomy afternoon surfing the Internet for dreams in Barbados or Barcelona, while many others have already locked their desks and made a bolt for freedom.

Maurice Joliffe, a brittle eighty-two-year-old with little substance to show for his longevity, is also making a break for freedom, and he pedals his creaking bicycle along Kensington High Road, head down against the rain, with a loaded pistol in his pocket.

Joliffe and his steed are of similar age, both seeing their first daylight sometime between World War I and the Great Depression, and both suffer from arthritic joints and fatigued parts from which they are unlikely to recover without expensive surgery. The rusty springs of the pushbike's saddle squeak at every bump in the road,
and the cracked leather seat bites into Joliffe's bony backside, but he willingly suffers the pain, telling himself that a new saddle now would be an unnecessary expense. It's not as though he's ever going to need the bicycle again after today, and he has already mentally pledged it to the Salvation Army.

Maurice Joliffe, “Jolly” to many who have known him as the man who empties ashtrays at the Lucky Seven Bingo Hall in Balham, stops obediently at a pedestrian light while a couple of zippier cyclists take it as an opportunity to get ahead of the traffic. But now is not the time to get hauled in by an inquisitive cop who might question the bulge in his mackintosh pocket, so Jolly takes the opportunity to re-evaluate his plan while he waits for a wet-footed bunch of office girls to struggle across the road in front of him.

It's the gun that concerns him most, and he continues to wonder whether there might not be a better way. But it's a question that's been torturing him for two days, and he already knows that no other weapon is as reliable or dependable for his purpose — no other weapon can be guaranteed to achieve his ultimate goal.

The handgun, an officer's service revolver dropped by a clumsy captain during a military exercise at the end of the Second World War, had become Joliffe's property in a barrack-room poker game, and he has polished and oiled it weekly ever since, though he has never once fired it. The heavy pistol, now with the initials MJ carved into its walnut stock, is the only souvenir of his two years' conscription as a national serviceman, and he has kept it squirreled away from his wife and kids for more than fifty years, somehow knowing that a day would come when his care would finally be repaid.

Today is that day, and as he pedals determinedly towards his objective with an entire tube of mentholated analgesic rubbed into his joints, his mind is finally at rest
with his decision, and he can't help but feel that it was always destined to be this way.

“Just look at the rain,” says Bliss gloomily, as torrents wash against the dining room's windows. “I just hope that they're not outside somewhere…” Then he pauses in astonishment at his own words. “What am I saying? What am I saying?” he questions. “I'd love them to be outside.”

“Well, we wouldn't be able to search much in this, even if we knew where to start looking,” admits Phillips, although Daisy isn't letting anyone give up as she turns to Bliss. “But you must find zhem,
Daavid.
Poor Rick will have — how you say — a heart attack if he does not go to sleep soon.”

“I wish I could put his mind at rest,” admits Bliss, while Phillips continues to stare out of the window, musing, “I have this feeling that if I could focus my mind just a tiny bit more, I'd work out what happened.”

Bliss has no such dilemma. “This is crazy,” he says. “It's bloody obvious what happened. I bet they bumbled into that place late at night, and those trigger-happy jerks gunned them down thinking they were terrorists. Knowing those two, they were probably climbing the gates or trying to cut a hole in the fence.”

“So, why not own up and just say it was the women's own fault?” asks Phillips.

“They can't. Not without giving away the nature of the place — whatever that might be.”

“You could be right.”

“Which explains the way they dumped the bathtub thing back in Canada, and why they were so keen to get shot of me.”

“So. Where do we go from here? They obviously can't admit it now.”

“Not unless someone turns up the heat in the press,” agrees Bliss.

“Thank God there's nothing in the papers,” says Bumface, as he and Dawson breakfast on large coffees in the surveillance room.

“I bet there is in Canada,” moans Dawson sullenly. “And knowing our luck, somebody will see it.”

“Deny, deny, deny,” Bumface reminds him. “They wuz never here, remember?”

“Oh. Don't be so f'kin naïve,” spits Dawson. “The guards saw them, half the friggin' patients saw them, and they're splattered all over the surveillance tapes.”

“Maybe we should… you know… just get it over with right now,” says Bumface, hanging himself with an imaginary noose.

“That's very clever, Steve. Then if someone really starts digging and we can't produce warm bodies, we can always say that they sprouted wings and did a Harry Potter over the fence.”

“Just trying to be helpful, John.”

“Well, you ain't,” fumes Dawson. “This is your neck I'm trying to save here and don't forget it. You were the duty officer when that prick Wallace let ‘em in.”

“It's a bit late now, though, isn't it,” cautions Bumface. “You're in it as deep as us.”

Jolly Joliffe stops his bicycle a block short of his chosen destination to look at his watch. It's five minutes before four — five minutes to zero hour — time for final preparations. And without taking the revolver from his pocket, he clicks the chamber into place and checks that the safety catch is on, then reaches inside his jacket
to ensure that the single page of his hand-printed will hasn't fallen from his wallet.

Hah! Won't they be surprised when they get the news?
he says to himself with thoughts of his five children on his mind, then he waits until the minute hand of his watch shows three fifty-seven before pushing off the curb to continue painfully along his path.

It's two minutes to four by the time the old man's destination comes into view, and he's relieved to discover that everything looks as it should.

Ahead of him, at the top of a short hill, lies a solid Georgian building that has changed so little since its inception that only the illuminated sign over the doorway would have startled an eighteenth-century costermonger or his mule. “Barclay's Bank,” proclaims the sign, although the words are illegible to Joliffe through his rain-fogged spectacles as he parks his bicycle against the curb.

Joliffe checks that the bank doors are still open before removing the trouser clips from his ankles and unhooking his backpack from the rear carrier. Then he gives his gun pocket a reassuring pat, straightens himself on the polished brass handrail and pulls himself up the short flight of stone steps.

“You only just made it,” laughs the young assistant manager as he stands at the door with keys in his hand.

“Thanks, mate,” mutters Joliffe, and he pauses momentarily to regain his breath before entering the old building.

The door closes with a solid “clunk” behind Joliffe, and the teak floor echoes with his footfalls as he makes his way towards the polished mahogany counter. Only two of the tellers' windows remain open, and the bevy of last-minute customers are punished for their tardiness by being forced to wait. But Joliffe is in no hurry, and he hovers for a few minutes at a rack of brochures promising lifelong
financial stability to anyone who can afford it, while deciding which of the young clerks to approach.

Kim Kramer, a puppy-faced blonde with a dozen rings through her eyebrows, easily wins out over the uncompromising Janice Smith, who, with her thick-rimmed glasses and screwed-back hair, appears to have practised looking like a bank clerk from birth.

It is five after four. The last-minute customers have been as anxious to escape as the staff, and Joliffe is on his own as he shuffles towards Kim.

“Ah, my final customer of the week,” she says with relief as she puts on a broad smile, though her nose turns up at the strong odour of mentholated rub commingled with the wet-dog stink of a sodden raincoat. “And what I can do for you today, sir?” she asks, quickly bringing back the smile.

Joliffe checks left and right, ensuring that the other clerks are busy cashing up and that the last of the customers have left. He wants no heroes, no interference, no one to wreck his moment, and he leans forward and places his sopping backpack on Kim's desk, calmly stating, “I want you to put ten thousand pounds in here please, Miss.”

“What?” questions Kim as her smile morphs into a look of puzzlement. She knows the drill — knows she should nudge the panic button with her knee, knows that as soon as she pulls a wad of bills from a special compartment in her money drawer she will trigger an alarm. But she hesitates — surely this toothless geriatric is pulling her leg.

“Sorry?” she queries, still convinced that she has misheard the grandfatherly figure.

“I've got a gun,” continues Joliffe, doing his very best to put on an “I-can-be-violent” face as he slowly pulls it from his pocket and draws her eyes to it. “But
don't worry. I won't hurt you — not if you put ten thousand pounds in my bag.”

Kim hits the alarm with a shaky knee, then opens her drawer and begins to count out the money. But she pauses, still questioning her senses, and looks up, desperately wanting to say, “Please don't be silly. Just leave and I won't tell anyone.” But Joliffe's gun hand is shaking worse than her knee, and she's too terrified to speak.