Lovelace and Button (International Investigators) Inc. (5 page)

Ronnie Stapleton is another player yearning for the immediate invention of time travel as he's forced out of the phone box by the evening's chill and he seeks some warmth from the window lights of a small street of dingy shops. A car slowly rounds the bend behind him. “Cops,” he breathes, and he instantly turns to use the window as a mirror as he pretends to peer at the wigs in a hairdressing salon.

They must have changed the one-way system,
Bliss is thinking, not recognizing the street, and then he is alerted by the loiterer's suspicious movement.

“Turn around… let's see your face,” mumbles Bliss, as he cruises slowly past, but Stapleton's face is frozen to the window display. Then Bliss's lights catch the offensive logo on the back of the boy's jean jacket.

“Got you,” breathes Bliss in amazement, stepping on the brake pedal.

The car's brake lights bounce off the window and Stapleton hits the pavement at a run. Seconds later he is jinking down a side alley like a startled gopher.

Bliss is out of his car in a flash, but he wastes time as he ducks back inside to grab his cell phone. He should call for assistance, but he knows he'll lose his quarry if he does. And he still hasn't seen the youngster's face.

Stapleton is already racing down the littered alley, leaping boxes, abandoned bikes and rusty garbage bins, as Bliss takes up the chase. With his eyes firmly on the youth, Bliss lurches from obstacle to obstacle and curses the long tails of his morning coat as they snatch at passing junk and threaten to snag him.

A discarded supermarket buggy trips Bliss and sends him sprawling as Stapleton shoots from the lane into the High Street where the Odeon cinema is turning out.

“Police — stop!” yells Bliss, spurring his quarry on, and a group of youngsters neatly part to let the fleeing man through, then they jeer Bliss as he passes with shouts of “Let him go, Pig!”

The fleeing youth gains ground as a couple of drunks try playing catch with Bliss, and he's slowed further as he grapples with his cell phone.

“Which service do you require?” the emergency operator says for the third time before Bliss catches his breath sufficiently to screech, “Police!”

Encouraging yells from the cinema crowd still ring in Bliss's ears as Stapleton swings off the High Street and runs into the ancient stone perimeter wall of the cathedral grounds. “Got you,” breathes Bliss, rounding the corner and finding himself in a blind alley, and he is just weighing up his chances of taking on the fit-looking youth when Stapleton, with age and adrenaline on his side, heaves himself up and over the wall with the aid of the iron spikes set into the top.

“Bugger,” swears Bliss, and he scans unsuccessfully for an entrance or some kind of ladder before grappling
for a toehold in the wall. His cell phone drops from his hand and lands in the scrub.

“Damn!” he mutters, scrabbling to retrieve it, and is considering giving up when he hears a groan from the other side of the wall and realizes that Stapleton hasn't yet escaped.

“Softlee, softlee, catchee monkey,” Bliss tells himself as he gingerly scales the six-foot wall and quietly hauls himself up on one of the iron spikes.

Beneath him, Stapleton cowers under a small tree and massages an ankle.

“Just stay there, lad,” calls Bliss firmly, and Stapleton leaps to his feet with a yelp and hobbles into the gloom of the cemetery.

“Oh, Christ!” exclaims Bliss as he struggles onto the wall and hears a rip as his tail catches in a spike. But now he's stuck. It's a six-foot drop either way and Stapleton is getting away.

“Police… How can we help?” calls a desperate voice from his pocket and Bliss whips out his cell phone, but it's too late. A snivelling figure limps out of the graveyard's murk and stands under him at the base of the wall.

“I wanna give myself up,” whimpers Stapleton.

“Hang on a minute,” says Bliss into the phone, then questions his prisoner.

“What's your name, son?”

“Ronnie Stapleton,” he mumbles, adding tearfully, “I didn't do it, honest. I wuz with my girlfriend all afternoon.”

“Exactly what didn't you do?” asks Bliss, and he might have laughed if not for the seriousness of the situation.

“Talk about stitching himself up,” says Bliss a few minutes later as Mainsbridge and twenty other officers help him down from the wall.

Ronnie Stapleton sits in a police car, tears still streaming down his face, while he is read his rights by a constable. “Let's see what's in your pockets, shall we?” says D.I. Mainsbridge once the officer has finished, and no one is surprised when a little old lady's purse is discovered.

A posse of press have arrived, flashbulbs popping, and Mainsbridge should be gloating over the successful arrest, but the look on his face says something is wrong as he begins to open the purse.

“Fourpence! Is that it?” he cries in disbelief. “Where's the rest of the money?”

“That's all there was, honest. I ain't spent any of it,” replies Stapleton as the cameras click, not realizing that he's guaranteed himself a place in history as the country's most incompetent robber.

Also guaranteed are tomorrow's front pages in half a dozen dailies; a 1954 wedding picture of Minnie under the headline, “Murdered for a Widow's Mite.”

Superintendent Donaldson has been hoisted out of the Feedlot Steakhouse with a phone call and he arrives, breathless, within minutes.

“Christ, David. You've only been back half an hour and you've already nailed a murderer — are you sure I can't interest you in a transfer?”

“No, thanks,” says Bliss with a smile. “But I could do with something to eat now. All that exercise has given me an appetite.”

Donaldson checks his watch and his stomach. “Well, most places are closing now, but we could probably get something at the bar of the Mitre Hotel; although you
look as though you need something stronger than a sausage roll. And look at the state of your coat. I thought you said it was rented.”

Phil and Maggie Morgan are still at Daphne's, both fast asleep on her settee in front of the fire. “I didn't like to wake them,” Daphne tells Bliss as she lets him in and shushes him with a finger to her lips. “I think they were frightened of being alone with a murderer on the loose.”

“He's not on the loose any longer,” says Bliss, and Daphne seizes his meaning immediately.

“You've caught him already,” she breathes and Bliss nods, underplaying his hand as he adds, “He was only a kid. He gave himself up.”

“Oh, that's brilliant…” she starts, but her face falls. “Not that it will bring Minnie back.” Then her eye catches the jagged tear in the tail of his coat. “Oh my gosh! Look what you've done! And look at the mud on your trousers.”

“It was raining,” he says, childlike. “Don't worry. Mr. Donaldson says he'll pay for it out of petty cash. Talking of which, have you got a key to Minnie's place?”

A rough voice greets them as they open the street door to Minnie's building and triggers a shrill alarm. “Who-are-ya? I'm calling the cops.”

“Mr. Ransom,” yells Daphne, “it's me, Daphne. Minnie's friend.” Then she whispers to Bliss. “He's deaf. I knew we should have left this to the morning.”

“What d'ya want at this time o'night?”

“Oh God. He doesn't know,” whispers Bliss, and is taken aback as the pyjama-clad old man shuffles out of
his flat, saying, “She's been done in. The police and the newspapers was here earlier and I let them in.”

“It's funny, but it's only just sunk in that she's gone,” Daphne says as she opens Minnie's door. “I can feel the emptiness. It's as if Minnie took something with her.”

Ten minutes later, Bliss has no choice but to agree with her. “Every single penny she owned, I'd say. So either young Mr. Stapleton is lying, or she was down to her last fourpence.”

“But she paid for the trip,” insists Daphne. “That was more than thirty thousand —”

“I just hope she took cancellation insurance,” says Bliss, rechecking Minnie's bank book, “because according to this, she owes the bank three grand.”

“Are you sure?” asks Daphne, peering over his shoulder and quizzing, “But why would she book a world tour if she couldn't afford a bus ticket to Bognor Regis, let alone a boat to Bombay?”

The solidly constructed cathedral in Westchester is close to bursting with a volume of congregation rarely seen since its completion at the end of the eleventh century. Politicians, aristocrats and other show-offs vie for seats in the spotlight of the television cameras, while most of Minnie's elderly friends are lost in the crowd. However, Daphne Lovelace has muscled herself a front-row seat alongside David Bliss, though her earlier musings that she would have to take financial responsibility for Minnie's funeral have turned out to be entirely false. The cost should have been astronomical, but with the cameras and eyes of the nation on Minnie, several leading undertakers had tripped over each other on Daphne's doormat.

“I just hope someone chucks me in front of a train when my time comes,” Daphne said, as she and Bliss pored over a pile of glossy brochures following pitches from a procession of salesmen offering their services for free.

“Minnie would have loved this,” Daphne whispers to Bliss as they sit squeezed between the city's mayor and the chief constable. “She was born the same day as Princess Margaret, you know: August the twenty-first, nineteen-thirty.”

“I noticed that in the program,” admits Bliss. “But what difference does it make?”

“Well. She once told me that she was convinced there had been some sort of cosmological mix-up with their spirits at birth.”

Bliss's guffaw brings a cautionary glance from the chief constable, and he turns it into a sneeze and covers his mouth with his handkerchief as Daphne continues, “That's why Minnie never used bad language or got drunk. She thought that would prove that she was rightfully the Queen's sister in place of Margaret.”

“You'd better stop,” laughs Bliss under his hand, “or I'm going to have to leave.”

It's Wednesday, and in just five days Minnie Dennon has become the nation's best friend and everybody's feeble old granny, and her passing has pricked the conscience of an entire generation. Retirement centres and homes for the elderly across the country have been inundated with visitors. Florist's deliverymen and personal-alarm salespeople have lined up at the doors. Her gruesome death has been detailed, debated and discussed by a host of social activists in the press and has been held by every right-thinking media personality to signify the ills of today's society. Whilst, on the other hand, Ronnie Stapleton has been soundly vilified as a drug-addicted, Internet-obsessed freeloader who was more than happy to bump off some penniless old woman for the price of a box of matches to light his tokes.

However, the penniless part of the equation is a conundrum not easily resolved by Bliss, or any of the investigation team headed by Detective Inspector Mainsbridge. And Sandra Piddock, the travel agent holding Minnie's tickets, had been little help.

Sandra had spent the evening of Minnie's demise at the Odeon cinema with her boyfriend, Lenny, and when she arrived at work the next morning she was still inwardly chuckling about the crazy man in a wedding suit marauding his way down the High Street after the movie.

“Oh my God,” her colleague laughed, shoving the
Daily Express
under Sandra's nose. “Was that him?”

While Ronnie Stapleton's face had been pixelled out of the front-page photo to protect his rights prior to him being charged, David Bliss, in his tattered tailcoat, was clearly identifiable. However, Sandra failed to connect the name of the murder victim with Minnie, the customer whose commission was going to buy her a diamond bracelet for Christmas, and had no idea that the sweet little old lady would not be collecting her tickets — until the man in the photograph, accompanied by Daphne Lovelace, walked into her office a few minutes later.

“Mrs. Dennon only paid the three thousand deposit,” Sandra told them, once Daphne identified herself as Minnie's prospective travelling companion, then she took on a hopeful look. “Have you come to pay the balance, Mrs. Lovelace?”

“I'm afraid we won't be going,” Daphne replied with the trace of a tear. “Mrs. Dennon's had a very serious accident.”

“Accident” is a nice euphemism, thought Bliss, but it doesn't begin to explain the traumatic manner of Minnie's
demise. Nor did their visit to the travel agency explain how Minnie had somehow eaten through nearly thirteen thousand pounds in the past few weeks.

“I'd like to know what she did with it,” Bliss said to Mainsbridge the morning after Minnie's death, but the other officer still had Stapleton in his sights.

“I reckon the little tow-rag stashed it before you nabbed him. He had plenty of time.”

“I'm not so sure…” Bliss replied vaguely, having repeatedly watched the tape of Stapleton's initial interview, in which the young man blubbers continuously while denying that Minnie's purse contained anything more than the four pennies found in his possession.

“It was a bunch of bullshit. She didn't have squat,” Stapleton whimpers as he massages his bloodshot eyes. “All that crap about proper teapots… it was all bullshit.”

“Are you trying to say that there was no money in Mrs. Dennon's bag?” Mainsbridge questions in disbelief.

“Fourpence, that's all. You know that already.”

“I don't know that. In fact, I think there's a lot you're not telling me.”

“It wouldn't have happened if she hadn't been so f'kin poncy.”

“So, it was her own fault she died. Is that what you're saying?”

“I didn't push her, honest.”