Crazy Lady (6 page)

While Chief Inspector David Bliss might grumble about interruptions to his work, he is not at all ungrateful. In fact, he is quickly discovering that, in common with most authors, he will do absolutely anything other than write. After nearly three months of counting lemons on the tree beneath his balcony, luring gulls with tidbits, and staring for hour upon hour at the undulating sea, he is grateful for a valid excuse to put down his pen and get his teeth into an investigation.

“So what have you got?” asks Daphne excitedly when Bliss calls back in less than half an hour.

“Does the name Joseph Crispin Creston mean anything to you?”

“You mean the Creston chocolate guy?”

“That's the one,” says Bliss, then puts on a deep tone to emulate a fifties TV commercial and adds, “We make the best chocolates in the universe. Just ask J.C. himself.”

“That takes me back a bit,” laughs Daphne.

“Well, I think that was actually Creston Sr. His son is the big boy now when it comes to worldwide chocolate trading. And I mean big. Though it seems he's been switching stock to diet products since the flab-fighters took over the world.”

“He can't lose then, can he?” laughs Daphne. “But what's his connection to Trina's lost woman?”

“Janet Thurgood,” muses Bliss aloud. “And I have no way of knowing if it's the same Janet Thurgood for sure, but Joseph C. Creston Jr. married someone of that name in the late fifties, early sixties. I could probably get someone to dig up the marriage records. Get Trina to find out the date of birth or parents' name of the woman in Vancouver —”

“Too late, David,” cuts in Daphne. “The woman's on the run again.”

“That's it then.”

“But what about the dead babies?”

“Oh yeah. Well, that's the clue. Creston Jr. and his wife had three children in four years and they all died of cot deaths.”

“Cot deaths?” breathes Daphne.

“Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, it's called now, and doctors are pretty hot at trying to establish the cause, but back in the fifties and sixties it was just accepted that babies sometimes died for no apparent reason.”

Daphne feels a shiver up her spine as the words of Amelia Drinkwater come back to her. “I was told that she murdered them,” she says with a suitably sinister tone, but Bliss has no knowledge.

“There's no record either of them were ever charged with any offence,” he says. “But you could ask Superintendent Donaldson to dig up the files locally — if they haven't been destroyed.”

“So, what happened to her? Creston's wife,” Daphne wants to know.

“You'd have to ask him.”

“I might just do that,” Daphne replies, her mind beginning to whirl with possibilities as she puts down the phone and searches for Trina's number again.

David Bliss's number is on the radar screen in London. A criminal record search originating from a foreign source has raised a flag in the criminal intelligence section at Scotland Yard, and he gets a call from the duty commander, Chief Superintendent Michael Edwards.

“I thought you were supposed to be on a leave of absence,” snorts the senior officer.

“That's correct, sir, working on my novel.”

“Writing a book!” It could be a question, but it's not. It's a sneer, an unspoken disparagement that Bliss catches
onto immediately:
Whatever next? We're supposed to be running a f 'kin police force not a cultural establishment.

“New trend, sir, police intelligence,” explains Bliss, knowing the other man will steam at the implied oxymoron.

“How come you're doing criminal record checks then?” snaps the chief superintendent, and Bliss waffles for a few minutes about the possibility of the Creston family being somehow involved in his plot before cutting the call short.

“Sorry. Must get on,” he says as he starts to put down the phone. “Anyway, I was wrong. It had nothing to do with Joseph Creston.”

“Joseph Crispin Creston Jr. Now that's a name destined for greatness,” the chocolate magnate's father trumpeted at his son's christening party, apparently ignorant of the fact that he bore the identical moniker. “It's powerful, memorable, suggestive of aristocracy,” the suave executive pompously declared at London's Grosvenor Hotel in the run-up to war with Hitler. Shortly thereafter, with Londoners frantically digging Anderson shelters and preparing to hunker down in the Blitz, most men of Jospeh Creston Sr.'s age strapped on Sam Browne belts and officer's pistols. But the cocoa tycoon, together with his family and entourage, slipped aboard a two-hundred-foot private yacht registered in Casablanca and slunk off to his estates on the west coast of Africa.

“Chocolate is essential for the morale of our troops,” he declared in a letter of justification mailed to the
Times
as they put into Lisbon for refuelling en route, though, as records later showed, it was never completely clear in Creston's mind as to which side's troops needed boosting most.

But Creston's empire wasn't the only one that profited even-handedly from the global hostilities. He was even able to justify it in his own mind. “Should the sins of the fathers be visited on their sons?” he questioned of anyone in the
know. “Why shouldn't poor little German kids have a treat? And what of the thousands of workers in the plantations who can't read and have no radio? What do the crazy politics of a feudal Europe have to do with them? They just want to make enough money to feed their families.”

Little has changed in more than fifty years; chocolate is chocolate, as alluring and addictive as ever, though penny for penny it is cheaper than it's ever been.

“It's all a question of supply and demand,” the younger Mr. Creston will happily tell anyone interested today, and he is proud of the fact that his empire controls both. He might also concede, with a beam of self-satisfaction, that the Creston empire is richer and more powerful than it has ever been, though he may be more reticent in admitting that the policies of his company have broken the backs, and the dreams, of the West African farmers who labour alongside their children to provide his factories with their raw material.

“Two dollars a day may not seem a lot to some people,” insists Joseph Creston as he addresses his weekly board meeting atop his glass tower in the centre of London. “But if only these people would stop warring, we'd probably be able to pay more.”

It's a lie, and Creston knows it; he knows that constant conflicts prevent the subsistence farmers from ever forming any kind of stable collective.

“They'd only waste it on the demon drink if they had more,” sneers Robert Dawes, Creston's company accountant, oblivious to the fact that he has supped his way through half a bottle of single malt in the past twelve hours.

It's 10:00 a.m. in one of the richest square miles of real estate in the world: the City of London. The British Empire may have crumbled, but echoes of its power still reverberate around the world, and in the boardroom of Creston Enterprises, a boardroom where “morning prayers” actually means morning prayers and where the teachings of the Bible take precedence over the balance sheet — but never
over the bottom line — Joseph and his congregants discuss current business trends.

However, one contemporary movement has never, and will never, be discussed: “Just how many of the Disciples were women?” The Crestons, both senior and junior, might challenge anyone who suggested such apparent sacrilege, as the staid portraits around the boardroom walls show. The most recent — Joseph Crispin Creston Jr., the man of the moment — depicts a face that falls somewhere between the dour sagacity of Prince Charles and the virginal boyishness of Richard Branson: a man of the past trying to look into the future.

But Creston Jr. is struggling with the future as he sits at one end of the table that his father cut from a single West African mahogany. “It was the biggest damn tree in the world,” Creston Sr. proudly insisted as he added the enormous hardwood to his trophy collection, alongside tigers and elephants.

“Organics and Fair Trade,” advocate the research papers on the giant table in front of the board members, and Creston immediately scoffs.

“Fair… we are fair. Let's face it, who's going to pay five dollars for a bar of chocolate so some Ivory Coast cocoa farmer can hammer around his fields in a Hummer?”

“It's definitely a growing fad,” observes John Mason, Creston's second-in-command and company lawyer. But the man at the head of the table is unimpressed.

“Yes. And we will remain fair within the context of the average wage. Anyway, like Robert says, they'd only drink it. Surely it's better for us to use the profits to fund the development of churches than to let them piss it down the drain.”

“Steal from the poor and give to the rich,” could be Creston's motto; after all it's the rich who need the money to buy his products. “In any case,” he continues to preach, “how will it benefit them if we fail to make a profit?”

The poor may inherit the earth in the freely distributed Creston Bibles, but with the world's raw cocoa market concentrated in the hands of just a few powerful manufacturers, Creston and his fellow moguls will dine on the fat.

The cream of Joseph C. Creston's personal holdings includes Creston Hall, his mansion in Dewminster, and Daphne Lovelace, armed with the scant information obtained from David Bliss, has taken the bus back to the town and peeps through the wrought iron gates like a Dickensian waif peering wistfully at the grand Victorian house, wondering what great treasures and what dreadful secrets may lie therein.

The estate was built at the turn of the century by Joseph's father on the backs of peasant cocoa farmers, and has been supported similarly ever since. Creston Sr., a man who, to listen to him, tamed the tropics of Africa to bring chocolate to the masses, was, he claimed, a compassionate, God-fearing man, but whether a slave is subjugated by a whip or a Bible the result is much the same.

Janet Thurgood's family estate at 255 Arundel Crescent bears no comparison to Creston Hall, though Daphne gets a friendly reception at the front door of the modest house in the twitchy-curtained neighbourhood. The butter-coloured sandstone houses, solidly constructed just before the Great Depression, were built in a pastoral landscape that soon turned to Tarmac. Skylarks and nightingales were silenced by the roar of Spitfires and Lancasters, and despite assurances to the contrary, no sheep would ever peacefully graze again. Once the wartime debris was cleared, concrete council houses and towering flats blocked the surrounding sky.

“Long before my time,” Jean Bentwhistle, the present owner, claims as she bounces one baby while a toddler clings to her legs. “I wasn't even born till sixty-one, dear. But you're welcome to come in and look around.”

With little to be gained from an inspection, Daphne decides to try the neighbours and hits an elderly couple at number 259.

“The Thurgoods?” questions Mrs. Jones loudly as she shouts the name to her husband.

“I'm not sure…” starts the man as he tries ineffectually to hold up his sagging trousers, but the tone suggests a tacit awareness and Daphne pushes on.

“Janet Thurgood. She lived at 255 until she married Mr. Creston.”

“Oh… her,” sneers Mrs. Jones. “The so-called religious one.” And Daphne doesn't need to ask more.

Now David Bliss is back on Daphne's target list.

“Do you know how difficult it is to write a book?” he asks angrily when she wants him to find out more about Janet.

“You had a perfectly good job in the police,” she reminds him.

“And I'll have to go back to it if you don't stop pestering me. Although I doubt they'll take me if I keep getting caught doing unauthorized searches.”

“Oh, David…” she begs sweetly.

“I'll see what I can do,” he says, and secretly he's delighted to shelve his manuscript. It has been more than a week since he's written anything of note. The true identity of the Man in the Iron Mask still evades him. He is even beginning to lose faith in his hypothesis that the prisoner was a seventeenth-century aristocrat who had his head encased in iron just to prove how much he loved a woman. Surely it's too far-fetched for a man to declare, “I will build you a dream château and I will sit in this cell for eternity if necessary, but no one will ever speak to me or look upon my face until you agree to be mine.”

It is bizarre, Bliss admits to himself, but he can't get away from the fact that literature and histories are full of
parallels: I'll climb the highest mountain, swim the widest ocean, throw myself to the waves, build you the Taj Mahal.

It was the exuberant era of Louis XIV when the lovestruck man locked his heart away and turned his back on all temptations; a time when, for those rich enough or corrupt enough, anything was possible. It was a period of grandiose architecture and lavish design, clothes and footwear so elaborate and ostentatious women couldn't move in them, outrageous food like lark's tongue pie and roast peacock. Above all, it was a time of great romanticism.
My theory is still valid
, Bliss tells himself, despite the fact that it has some major holes. The Château Roger was certainly built in 1687, according to the inscription on the gate pillar, the same year as the masked man's incarceration, and the geographic location puts it directly across the strait from the fortress. The size of the famous prisoner's cell suggests that he was not an ordinary inmate, and the murals on the wall, presumably penned by him, depict a joyous gathering, like a wedding.

But with more than half of the manuscript piled on to his desk, Bliss has hit a sold wall: why wasn't the seventeenth-century romantic successful? Who was the woman and where was she?

A similar question is being asked of Janet Thurgood in Vancouver, where the missing woman still tops the wanted person's list.