Deadly Sin (24 page)

“Really!” exclaims McGregor as Bliss has a thought.

“Talking of young — there was a chatty teenaged girl looking after Daphne when I visited …”

“Amelia Brimble,” McGregor quickly steps in, proving that she has done her homework. “She's on our radar, but it's her day off. Her mother says she's at the beach with her boyfriend, but doesn't know which one.”

“Which beach or which boyfriend?” queries Bliss unnecessarily, but a knock at the door interrupts and Anne McGregor sings out, “Come in.”

“You might want to have a look, ma'am,” says P.C. Scape excitedly. “We've found a ladder thrown behind some bushes by the fence.”

Amelia Brimble and her boyfriend also know about the ladder, but they are not at the beach. They are skulking in Mathew's father's Ford van, and like millions of teens worldwide, they watch her parents' house in nervous anticipation, with their eyes set firmly on her snug little bedroom.

“C'mon. Hurry up,” sighs Mathew as he drums his fingers on the steering wheel. “You said they'd be gone by two and it's ten past already.”

It was only last year that Amelia accompanied her parents to the annual church fête at Moulton-Didsley, albeit with a twisted arm. But her metamorphosis from a fifteen-year-old churchy bookworm to a sixteen-year-old bubbly caregiver (with a car-owning boyfriend) has dropped one-legged egg and spoon races and decorated tea cozies into the same category as the pavement pizza she left on her boyfriend's mother's driveway after forcing down what was described as, “The best jellied eels this side of Margate.”

“They gotta go in a minute or they'll miss the cow shit–tossing contest,” giggles Amelia as she sits alongside Mathew, stroking his thigh. “But they won't be back till late 'cuz they're going to a cheese and bicky do in the church hall afterwards.”

“Did I tell you about the time I saved my life with a packet of chocolate digestives?” calls a muffled voice from under an old carpet in the back of the van.

“Yes, Daffy,” chuckles Amelia. “An' you told us the one about the monkey's skeleton you dug up cuz it was a murdered baby.”

“It wasn't a joke,” insists Daphne, but Amelia gives her boyfriend a sly wink.

“I know,” she says. “An' you parachuted into Germany —”

“France,” jumps in Daphne. “During the war.”

“Right,” laughs Amelia. “You parachuted into France and blew up the Germans.”

“Not all of them,” snaps Daphne, and then she mouths, “Teenagers,” with the feeling that the world is moving in reverse and has left her stuck in the future. But when she begins, “When I was your age, young lady …” Amelia spots her parent's car backing out of their driveway.

“Geddown,” she shouts to Mathew, and the young couple shrink in their seats until the car has passed.

“Let's go,” says Mathew, turning the ignition, and moments later the youngsters are carrying a loosely rolled Axminster rug into Amelia's bedroom.

“I'm going to get something to eat,” Bliss whispers to Ted Donaldson when he realizes that he has nothing constructive to offer at St. Michael's, and five minutes later he is waiting to order a snack alongside a glum-faced woman leaning over an empty gin glass in the Crusader's Bar of the Mitre Hotel.

“Having a bad day?” questions Bliss jokingly, but Isabel Semaurino has had a bad week. Westchester is a long way from her home in Tuscany, and she has had a wasted journey.

“Is that meant to be a pickup line?” questions the sixty-nine-year-old with a wan smile. “If it is, I think that I might be profoundly flattered.”

“Sorry,” laughs Bliss, shaking his head, but, despite the twenty years between them, he sees a spark of recognition and warns himself to be careful. “I'm already spoken for, but I'll happily buy you a drink,” he carries on, guessing that it was nothing more than the fleeting hope of a lonely heart.

“Isabel Semaurino,” says the woman, neither accepting nor refusing as she questions soberly, “Do you believe in reincarnation or resurrection or life after death or something like that?”

“You're asking the wrong person,” Bliss jokes as he nods to the barman, who is visibly flagging after a hectic lunch rush. “I don't even believe in life before death in
many cases.” Then he gives her and the empty glass a critical look. “You're not thinking of …”

“Oh, Good Lord, no,” she says and laughs. “It's just that I've waited forever to meet someone and now it looks like I'll have till my next life.”

“I know what that's like,” claims Bliss. “I've been trying to see my fiancée for the past two …” He stops at the look on Isabel's face. “Yeah. I know,” he says. “Fiancée at my age — I should know better.”

“I didn't say that.”

“You should've seen your face.”

“Sorry,” she says, and she thrusts out a hand as the barman finally arrives. “I've got an early flight, so I'd better get packed. Goodbye and good luck.”

“And the same to you,” he says, shaking the hand, but as he watches her walk away he has the urge to call out, “Don't I know you from somewhere?”

“D'ye wanna order summink or not?” spits the barman, and Bliss turns his back on Isabel and picks up the menu.

“Maybe … I'm thinking about it.”

“What'ya thinking about, Daffy?” questions Amelia as Daphne sits with a tear running down her bruised cheek as she gently strokes Camilla, the young girl's long-haired tabby.

“I used to have a cat,” she sniffs. “Missie Rouge. She was ever so pretty.”

“Did she die?” questions Amelia gently, but Daphne pauses as if she has to think back a very long way.

“No,” she says firmly, once she has wiped her eyes. “She was murdered.”

“Oh, Daffy …”

“The neighbours' dogs got hold of her,” she is explaining when Amelia crouches on the bedroom floor in front her, looks her straight in the eye, and demands the truth.

“Daffy — you're not really going loopy, are you?”

“No, dear.”

“Then why do you pretend?”

“I didn't at first,” replies Daphne, casting her mind back to the time when all she wanted was a little respite from the neighbours' continual hubbub. “But when people think you're crazy, and keep saying you're crazy, then everything you do seems crazy.”

“I never thought you wuz crazy.”

“I know.”

“But when you make up stories about parachuting and escaping and saving your life with biscuits and stuff, people don't know what's right and what isn't.”

“Have you ever done anything exciting in your life, Amelia?”

“Not really.”

“What about last night?” asks Daphne, mindful of the insistent tapping on her window that finally penetrated her torpid mind, of the heaviness of her limbs as she dragged herself across the room, and of the relief at the sight of Amelia's smiling face atop the ladder with Mathew waiting below.

“Yeah, I know,” agrees Amelia. “But my mum'll kill me if she finds out.”

Daphne strokes the teenager's face. “When I was your age, well, a couple of years older, I volunteered to go to war, and I thought my mum was going to kill me.”

“She didn't.”

Daphne shakes her head. “No, of course not. It wouldn't make sense, would it? But I soon learnt that nothing is ever as bad, or as good, as you first think it's going to be.”

“Is that true?”

“Usually,” she says, then casts her mind back over eight decades in search of contradictions. Michael Kent might have been an exception had he not been captured, tortured, and executed. “I'll love you eternally,” he said so many
times, and he may have done so had he found his way home. There were others, but the first flush of romance never flourished as promised. “I guess the answer is to never expect too much in the first place.”

“Daffy …” starts Amelia diffidently, and Daphne thinks she sees what is coming.

“Don't worry,” she says, laying a hand on the young girl's shoulder. “I'll be as quiet as a mouse tonight. I'll sleep under your bed, and tomorrow morning, I promise you, everything will be all right and I'll be able to go home. Your mum will never know.”

“No. It's not that,” says Amelia, and then she tries again. “It's just that Matt, my boyfriend, well … he wants to do it with me … you know … he wants to go all the way. But God says it's wrong cuz we're not married.”

Daphne drops Camilla gently to the floor and strokes the young woman's hair instead. “Have you asked your mum?”

Amelia jumps as if electrified. “I couldn't …”

“All right,” soothes Daphne. “But do you want to do it with Matt?”

“I think so.”

“Well then. You could always change gods.”

“Oh, Daffy.” laughs Amelia. “There's only one God.”

“Really,” says Daphne. “And is that the same one that Mrs. Fitzgerald worships before she hits people around?”

“Yeah. I s'pose so.”

“And the same one that all these riots and church burnings are about?”

“I guess so.”

“Well. Maybe you should make up your own mind, dear. I'm not sure I'd trust someone who wants his followers to do things like that.”

Amelia drops her voice to a whisper and even checks out the ceiling to make sure no one is watching before she asks, “Don't you believe in God, Daffy?”

“Ah. Now that is a very good question,” sighs Daphne. “But if he is up there somewhere, I wish he'd hurry up and get down here and stop all the fighting and killing.”

“Oh, Daffy. You'll never go to heaven if you say things like that.”

Stone angels and archangels ascend heavenwards on the façade of Westchester cathedral, but Bliss takes no notice as he scours the grounds in search of Daphne. The bells are ringing for Evensong, and tardy congregants clasp their Sunday hats to freshly washed hair as they scurry towards the fifteenth-century carved doors.

Mavis Longbottom is there, together with Angel Robinson in her flounciest printed cotton, but not inside the cathedral.

“I bet she'll be walking the labyrinth at the cathedral if she's still alive,” Mavis loudly pronounced to Anne McGregor when the search of St. Michael's was winding down without a trace of her missing friend. And the superintendent gave her a sharp look. “What do you mean, if she is still alive?”

“Don't look at me,” said Mavis. “It's this lot you should be looking at. I've said it before and I'll say it again, there's something funny going on here.”

Blood on the floor in Room 27 is the best, albeit most alarming, verification of Mavis's claim, notwithstanding Hilda Fitzgerald's efforts to wash it away, but it will take a few days for the Home Office's forensic science laboratory to analyze the samples and several more to match the DNA with Daphne's.

“Chief Inspector?” queries Mavis in surprise, spotting the familiar figure of David Bliss as he stops to wonder at the sight of twenty people walking in circles with their eyes on the ground. “You're Daphne Lovelace's friend, aren't you?”

“Umm …” hums Bliss as he tries to come up with a name.

“Mavis Longbottom. Christmas at Daphne's a couple of years ago. You'd been shot … she disappeared … ”

“I remember,” says Bliss. Then his face darkens worriedly. “Do you know she's missing again?”

Mavis nods. “It's my fault. She was all right until I brought her here.”

“Here?” queries Bliss, then Angel Robinson jumps in. “It's the labyrinth,” she explains. “Daphne was having a few problems at home, then she came here and was energized to action.”

“Hang on,” says Bliss skeptically, watching the slump-shouldered devotees shuffling their way around the meandering paths. “What do you mean, energized?”

“It's all my fault, David,” Mavis continues muttering in the background.

Bliss's face screws in confusion, and he focuses on Angel. “I don't know what you're talking about,” he says. “How was she energized?”

“The labyrinth is one of the most powerful symbols on earth,” lectures the flowery woman. “Examples can be found from ancient Greece to Peru and Scandinavia …”

But Bliss doesn't want history. He wants facts. And he stops her with a hand. “What do you mean — energized?”

“Well,” says Angel. “It's like this powerful bolt of energy that rises up from the core of the labyrinth — it sort of zaps your mind.”

“Say that again,” says Bliss.

“It rises up out of the ground and zaps your mind?”

T
he sandstone Georgian façade of the Mitre Hotel, complete with its fluted columns, balustraded balconies, and mullioned windows, has changed little in nearly three hundred years, but the lobby has suffered at the hands of several owners.

Isabel Semaurino, with suitcases packed, is wearing a linen suit and a simple pillbox travelling hat as she takes a final wander around the laminate-panelled foyer, idly checking out the magazines in a plastic display rack. The desk clerk is arranging for a cab to take her to the railway station as she leafs through a three-year-old copy of
Horse and Hounds
, when the front door bangs open.

“Papers,” sings out the perky pigtailed delivery girl, tossing a bundle of
Gazettes
on the desk and sneaking off with a handful of mints.

“May I?” asks Isabel, dropping the magazine and picking up the top copy of the daily newspaper as the desk clerk comes out of the back office.

“Certainly, madam,” says the girl. “And your taxi will be here in five minutes.”

The police mug shot of Daphne, front and centre under the one-word headline “Kidnapped?”, was snapped when she was still boiling over the iniquity of her treatment compared to the real offenders and could have been culled from the “Britain's most belligerent” edition of
Twentieth-Century Villains.