The Dave Bliss Quintet (20 page)

Surprise, surprise, he said to himself, then shrugged his unconcern on both counts and carried on writing as he listened to Brubeck's jazzy version of “These Foolish Things.”

The case of Johnson's wife and the man in the cage was resolved in a way — they disappeared. It wasn't a particularly satisfactory resolution and left Bliss with a bad taste and Daisy with a headache.

Daisy had agreed to knock on the ground-floor apartment door one day, fawning, “Just want to make sure everything is all right,
Madame
,” while Bliss skulked behind the lemon tree, then slipped in the kitchen from the back garden, excusing himself. “Sorry — my mistake — wrong door. Are you OK?”

The young man, cradling the dog in terror, leapt into his cage, screamed, and continued screaming until
Johnson's wife broke away from Daisy, crashed into the kitchen, and bundled Bliss out of the back door, shouting, “Get out — get out.”

“What will Morgan Johnson say?” worried Daisy, as they held an inquest in a nearby coffee house, but Bliss calmed her. “It was nothing to do with you; I was the one in the kitchen.”

An hour later, Johnson's wife and the strange man cleared out, and Morgan Johnson was on the phone to Daisy, bullying her to reveal the identity of the person who'd broken into his wife's kitchen.

The hastily convened extraordinary meeting of L'association des hôteliers de St-Juan-sur-Mer falls apart fairly soon after the chairman advises the eight attendees that both the town's mayor —
le maire
— and
l'inspecteur de police
have refused to take action against Grimes, stating that whilst his soggy pots might cause offence, he himself did not.

“I wish Jacques was here,” Bliss confides to Hugh. “I'd love to know what they're going to do.”

But Jacques's interpretation becomes superfluous as one of the hoteliers reaches out, snatches a passing pot from the hand of a startled nymphet, and pancakes it onto the table with a fist.

“Punch-up,” mutters Bliss, as the young girl's father hurtles across the promenade and, in a single movement, scrapes the clay into a ball and thwacks it into the offender's face.

The fracas turns into a debacle and ends in a general melee, with other pot recipients getting dragged into the fray as their treasures are snatched and trampled.
Bliss is rising with the word “Police” on his lips, when Angeline pries the priest out of the bar to restore order.

“Disgraceful,” mutters Hugh, but Bliss sits back, relieved he hasn't revealed his true vocation.

Sunday morning sees Bliss back at L'Escale for coffee and croissant, as Angeline mops away the last traces of clay from the pot fight.

A chic young woman, in Sunday skirt and a flouncy red hat, sashays along the promenade with everything in perfect rhythm — makeup, clothes, handbag, shoes, and attitude all in tune. Snubbing Bliss, she sidesteps Angeline's mop and stubs her toe on a corner of the Napoleon memorial.

“Napoleon landed there in 1815,” Bliss explains, but her scowl says “Leave me alone,” and she scurries into a nearby laneway.

“Just trying to be friendly,” he mutters, as a female turtledove alights on the seawall, eyeing his plate, and he quickly tears a small hunk off his patisserie. Then, while his mind darkens in memory of the drowned duck, a male dove lands on the hen's back and has his way with the surprised bird. “At least that won't kill you,” Bliss muses, eating the croissant himself.

Relaxing on the promenade, shaded by one of L'Escale's giant parasols, Bliss casually glances over the seawall into the still harbour, and his eye is taken by a spooky aberration. Amid the fringe of flotsam drawn to the harbour wall is what appears to be an industrialstrength latex glove, with the ochre fingers clawing upwards as if Neptune is reaching out to grasp an
unwary fisherman and drag him to a watery grave. With an involuntary shudder Bliss returns to his writing, but a few moments later he is drawn back to the glove with the nagging feeling he's seen movement. Probably just the current or wavelets, he tells himself, staring intently, but ends up grappling with the fact that the only ripples are those caused by the glove's movement. “It is moving,” he breathes.

Wondering if it could be the hand of a diver carrying out underwater maintenance on the seawall, he saunters inquisitively down the short flight of steps to the quay, peers deeply, and realizes it is the frenzied attack of small fry giving the glove life, jiggling it around in the water as they scythe, piranha-like, in silvery waves. But these Mediterranean midgets are no piranhas, and, satisfied there is no partially stripped skeleton attached to the glove, Bliss lets it go and returns to his writing. Thirty seconds later, he looks back at the water, the words: “Why would fish attack an old glove?” playing on his mind. Rushing back down the steps he confirms his worst fears, then heads to the bar for assistance.

Ten minutes later, in answer to Angeline's call, a minibus of
la gendarmerie
screams down the bustling main street and heads west on the promenade.

“Where are they going?” Bliss demands in disbelief, but gets no answer from the small crowd of rubberneckers craning for a peek at the dismembered hand in the water. Thirty seconds later the police chief in his Renault takes the same route to the promenade, but turns east.

“Christ!” swears Bliss as the minibus roars back along the promenade, screaming
pin-pon, pin-pon
, overshoots, and heads east in pursuit of the chief.

“I don't believe this,” he mutters incredulously, watching as a minute later the chief and his braves head west once more and screech up outside the bar. He's still trying to work out the French for “Keystone Cops” when Jacques pulls up on his shoulder and immediately catches on. “
Les flics sont cons
,” he complains, giving Bliss his answer.

Bliss drops back into the shadows and waits as the policemen shoo away the small crowd, share cigarettes, and, he judges by their laughter, joke about the appendage in the water coming in handy.

The delicate task of retrieving the hand from the harbour is discussed and debated for nearly fifteen minutes before a passing fisherman, who's wandered unconcernedly through the invisible cordon, scoops it out with one sweep of his net and plonks it at the policemen's feet with a wet thud.

“Oy — you can't do that,” screams one of the policeman in French, but the old fisherman throws up his hands and moseys off, as if saying, “If you don't want it — chuck it back.”

A flurry of silvery fish wriggle home across the quay as Bliss wanders forward to take a peek. One of the gendarmes glowers in professional disapproval, but is at a loss to explain why a solitary severed hand should require a fifty-metre exclusion zone.

“Oh God,” Bliss breathes to himself, immediately recognizing the hand. It is the potter's right hand — no glove, just ruddy brown clay ingrained in the pores and caked around the nails. There is no doubt. He'd recognize Greg Grimes's hands anywhere. Even the shape is still evident — the cupped palm and the crooked index finger from years of moulding and crimping the delicate pots.

L'association des hôteliers immediately springs to Bliss's mind, but this surely is an exceptionally draconian method of keeping their plumbing unclogged. Then darker thoughts drag him down. This wasn't the hoteliers' doing. This is a warning. This is somebody's very unsubtle way of saying, “Keep your hands off.” But a warning from whom? And — more importantly — for whom?

It takes a few moments for him to get his mind in gear and he stands, immobile, until he's jerked into action by the realization that he's been so concerned about the hand, and who may be responsible, he's overlooked the rest of the man. “Oh my God! Where is Grimes and what sort of shape is he in?” he breathes with his hand to his mouth.

Jacques appears undisturbed as he sips espresso on the promenade and reads the Sunday paper.

“It's the potter's hand,” Bliss enlightens him breathlessly as he sits.

“Zhat'll please zhe
hôteliers
.”

“Yes — but where's the rest of him?” he asks, and gets the nonchalant shrug and the indifferent “
bof!
” he expected in response.

Peering thoughtfully towards the enclave of nosebleed villas stretching up the hillside behind the town, Bliss muses, “He lives up there somewhere.”

“I don't zhink so,” Jacques replies, checking out the paper's weather forecast.

“Yes — I know he does.”

With a thoughtful glance, Jacques takes in a sweep of some of the world's most expensive real estate, asking, “How do you know?”

Quelling a temptation to admit following Grimes, Bliss lies, “He told me.”

“And you believed him?”

“Why not?”

The reason is simple, claims Jacques, dismissing the idea of a mere potter like Grimes affording even a dog kennel in the lofty heights above the town. “Up zhere lives
la crème de la crème
,” he says, then he reels off a star-studded cast of musicians, film stars, and mega-rich sports personalities.

What happened to the gangsters, fraudsters, and corporate raiders? wonders Bliss, thinking Jacques should get a PR job with the tourist board. But Jacques is still proselytizing. “We have an expression for zhese people,” he says, his tone resolute with admiration. “It is ‘
la grande servitude
.' It means zhose who have great wealth also have great slavery.
Oh là là!
how
le gratin
suffer.”

“
Le gratin?
”

“
Oui
— zhe top crust,” he says with great solemnity. “Zhe responsibility of such wealth weighs heavily upon zhem.”

Looks like it, thinks Bliss, sweeping his gaze across the flotilla of multi-million-dollar yachts and up into the hills, to the hideouts of the seriously rich and the laundries of the seriously naughty.

The gendarmes, backed up by a posse of
police nationale,
still stand perplexed around the severed hand, and Bliss is itching to put them in the picture, but realizes that as a foreign novelist he would have little credibility.

Should he break cover? he wonders, and considers calling Richards for guidance. But it's Sunday morning. He checks his watch — a little before ten; still not nine in England. The duty officer at the Yard would give him the commander's emergency contact number if pushed, although he would take some convincing — but the image
of Richards grumpily reaching from beneath the duvet is enough to dissuade him. Jacques still has his head in the paper, so, using his inadequate grasp of French as an excuse, Bliss primes Angeline to fill the police in on the hand's provenance and slips away in search of Daisy.

I'll get her to check the hospitals first, he's planning as he heads towards her office. She should be in, he hopes, remembering her complaining that summer Sundays were always crowded with Saturday's new arrivals, carping about their apartments' noisy neighbours or blocked plumbing. At least Grimes can't get the blame for that in future, he thinks, and then stops with the realization that the promenade will be a duller place without the nightly convoy of happy pot carriers. As useless as the little pots might have been, St-Juan-sur-Mer will be a poorer place without them, he decides, then muses, “What if Grimes is not in hospital? What will you do then?”

Step back, he tells himself. This isn't your problem. Let the local police deal with this. It has nothing to do with you.

Are you sure? What was it you said to Samantha about people having a habit of getting killed when you become involved?

Greg Grimes isn't in hospital — any hospital. Even as far away as Cannes, Nice, and Antibes. No one has heard of Greg Grimes.

“You don't know he is dead. His hand could have been chopped off by accident,” suggests Daisy after she has foisted off a few complainers with promises of immediate action and phoned all of the medical institutes she can think of.

“He's a potter, Daisy, not a lumberjack,” Bliss tells her. “The sharpest tools he uses are a wet rag and a wooden spatula. But there are other ways.”

“How?”

“It could have been chopped off by a propeller in a boating accident.”

“OK,” says Daisy, “zhen why is he not in zhe hospital?”

“Let's get some lunch,” suggests Bliss, rather than admitting that he has no palatable answer.

“
Moules et frites
,” says Daisy, ordering the local favourite on the quayside patio of one of the fish restaurants a few minutes later.

“Mussels and chips,” mutters Bliss, preoccupied with concern over Grimes. “I'll have the same,” he says, unable to escape a pinprick of guilt that he really invited her to pump her for information, but the necessity of quickly tracking down Grimes, or his wife, overrides the self-reproach, and he has to admit he quite enjoys her company. He needs someone to confide in, particularly someone in the real estate business who might have access to all kinds of confidential information about the ownership and tenancy of local properties.

He tried looking up Grimes in the local telephone directory while waiting for Daisy to deal with a particularly vociferous complainant, though he wasn't surprised to come up blank, guessing that the names of few, if any, of the owners of the villas on the hill would appear in any phonebook, anywhere. In fact, he would be willing to bet his pension that most of the property ownerships would be buried in companies registered in
islands so far offshore they wouldn't appear in any other kind of book, either.

If Daisy knows or has guessed his credentials she certainly doesn't give any indication. “So what you do here?” she asks, when he finally confesses to being a British policeman.

“I am writing a book,” he admits. “But I'm also here secretly to investigate a very important case. But I can't tell you any more.”