Lovelace and Button (International Investigators) Inc.

by James Hawkins

  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?”

  chapter three

  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 wit
h 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.”

  “Then why didn’t you stay at the scene? Why didn’t you phone the police?”

  “With my form, who would’ve believed me?”

  Stapleton’s form — a year’s probation for indiscreetly lighting up a reefer in a bus shelter occupied by a young constable aiming for a spot on the Drug Squad — has been kept from the press to ensure an unbiased jury, but his guilt has already been sealed. There is not a person in Westchester who doesn’t claim to know the young villain, and there are few who believe that the gallows are too good for him.

  Stapleton’s shell-shocked parents have been besieged in their tomato-spattered home since the morning papers dropped the news on neighbour’s doormats, and uniformed officers have been standing guard around the clock, though they have been unsuccessful in stopping the occasional missile. A tearful televised appeal by the accused teenager’s father, Reginald, for his son to be given a fair trial was soundly booed by a lynch mob in his local pub, and the builder for whom he subcontracted had been on the phone, though not to offer support.

  “I’m sure you understand, Reg,” he said, without saying anything. “If it was up to me. But the clients won’t like it. I’ve had calls already.”

  “Are you firing me?”

  “Let’s just say we’re giving you time to sort out a little domestic problem.”

  The feeding frenzy had become insatiable by mid-afternoon on the day following Stapleton’s arrest, when a raucous throng had lined the route from the police station to the courthouse as he was transferred for his first appearance. Thousands of keening women threw eggs and hammered their fists on the armoured truck carrying the young prisoner. Reporters, rushing out of the crowd with cameras held high, attempted to scoop a candid picture, and several television stations had cut into regular programming to show the event. “I am the resurrection and the life…” begins the mitred bishop solemnly, and the cameras home in on him as he proselytizes to Minnie over her flag-shrouded coffin.

  The Union Flag, normally reserved for the high and mighty, symbolizes the extent of public feeling and the shrewdness of the church in aligning itself with the proletariat. But the nationwide television coverage has more to do with speculation that a low-grade Royal will put in an appearance rather than any need to appeal to the masses.

  “… He that believeth in me, thou he were dead, yet shall he live,” continues the bishop, leaving Daphne muttering under her breath, “Minnie’s got a problem, then. She gave up on him years ago.”

  The tumultuous public gnashing of teeth that has swept the country since Minnie’s death has been driven by the persistent press coverage. For the first few days following the incident, the sight of Minnie being physically sucked off the end of the platform by a two-hundred-ton monster proved infinitely more captivating than the inert body of some eighty-year-old who’d been splattered to death in her bed by a lunatic with a cricket bat.

  The digitally enhanced moment of Minnie’s spectacular evaporation would certainly win a prize in any competition for the world’s funniest video, were it not so macabre, and most television presenters have done their best to make sure that the majority of people watched, by warning them not to. “Viewers may find the following pictures disturbing,” they say in apparent seriousness, and macho teens, inured to video violence, email and text their friends — “Hey. Did you see the old biddy get zapped by a train?”

  The major television news networks capitalized on Minnie’s spectacular demise ad nauseam, until public indignation eventually shut them down. But the contentious decision to show the video in the first place, as much as the sight of Minnie being whipped away on the front of the express, has galvanized public opinion. The storm over the bootlegging and leaking of the video has given the government a headache which, by the morning of Minnie’s funeral, has become a fullblown depression for the chief constables of the two police forces involved. Yet, despite exhaustive enquiries by both the Hampshire and British Transport Police, the culprit has not been found.

  Another government headache, though less agonizing,
has arisen over Ronnie Stapleton’s treatment in the remand wing of the local prison. The televised image of Minnie’s sensational downfall incensed many of the more respectable prisoners. Burglars, bank robbers and everyday car thieves bandied together in their revulsion — deciding that Stapleton’s crime was on a par with diddling little children — and arranged a welcome party for him in the prison’s shower room.

  By Monday morning, when Stapleton had been due to appear in Magistrate’s Court for a further remand hearing, Bliss was at Westchester Police Station conferring with Inspector Mainsbridge.

  “I’ve just heard that your prisoner’s had a very nasty accident in jail,” said Mainsbridge, meeting his colleague in the foyer.

  “Oh God! I feared that might happen,” admitted Bliss as they made their way to Mainsbridge’s office. “I bet every old lag in the country has a granny like Minnie, or they’d like to have one. The screws should have realized that was a possibility. They should have put him in segregation, or on the hospital wing.”

  “The trouble is that the guards have all got grannies as well, Dave,” Mainsbridge said as he motioned Bliss to a chair, adding, “I thought you would have been glad to be back at the Yard this morning,”

  “I’d cleared my desk to make way for Samantha’s wedding,” Bliss explained, “so a few extra days won’t make a great deal of difference. And I can’t help feeling we’ve missed something, Mick,” he continued. “It just doesn’t make sense for Stapleton to have legged it with that much money and then wander the streets in the rain. Why wasn’t he getting pissed with his mates or beetling off to Paris for the weekend?”

  Bliss and Mainsbridge got an answer, of sorts, a few minutes later when Stapleton’s lawyer raised himself to a lofty five-foot-three in front of the cameras outside the empty courtroom.

  “My client saw the deceased, Mrs. Minnie Elizabeth Dennon, in a very distressed state,” Goldsmith meticulously explained. “He was concerned about her, so, in a spirit of altruism rarely seen in young people today, he followed her to the railway station to simply make sure she was all right. When he realized that she was standing too close to the edge of the platform for safety, he rushed to restrain her, to save her life, but unfortunately he only managed to grab hold of her bag.”