Lovelace and Button (International Investigators) Inc.

by James Hawkins

  “I haven’t decided.”

  “But you promised my mother zhat you would not.”

  “I know, Daisy. But sometimes you have to lift the veils from the past to move forward into the future,” he says, recalling the torture that Daisy’s family had suffered at the hands of the Nazis, and the fear that his exposé could reignite the torment. However, the look on Daisy’s face suggests that he is close to sleeping on the settee for the rest of the week, so he quickly softens. “But I won’t write it if she really doesn’t want me to.”

  “Chief Inspector Bliss?” calls a voice from a police cruiser, and twenty minutes later Bliss is accompanied, with Daisy in tow, into the briefing room of Bellingham’s police station by Captain Roddy Prudenski.

  “Five foot two, blue eyes, grey hair…” Bliss begins to a hastily assembled audience of thirty officers and state troopers, though he can’t help feeling he’s wasting his time, and theirs, thinking, How many eccentric English geriatrics would you expect to find cycling the backwoods of Washington state in a kidney bathtub at two in the morning? But he carries on: “She’s accompanied by Trina Button…”

  “We’ve already checked all hospitals and hotels,” says the captain once Bliss has completed his descriptions. “The last reliable sighting was a little after midday yesterday when they crossed the border from Canada. And they were apparently seen a few hours later heading inland towards the foothills of Mount Baker, though that’s not confirmed.”

  “I can confirm that,” says Bliss recounting the woodman’s sighting, “though I’ve already checked the area where he says he saw them — nothing.”

  “There’s that monastery place, sir,” suggests one officer sharply from the back, and Bliss picks up a certain disdain in the man’s expression which is immediately echoed by Prudenski.

  “It’s a bunch of aging hippies with a place up in the Cascades,” snorts the captain. “They call themselves missionaries, though God knows what they do there. To be honest, we kind’a learned our lesson after the massacres at Jonestown and Waco, so we don’t trouble them and they don’t trouble us.”

  “It might be worth a look,” suggests Bliss, though Prudenski is noncommittal. “Mebbe,” he says, then continues with the briefing as officers make notes. “Current temperature is thirty degrees and considerably colder at higher elevations. The chopper is already up; highway patrols are on full alert.” Then he turns to Bliss. “Anything else you can tell us about the ladies, sir?”

  “Miss Lovelace has been missing on previous occasions,” admits Bliss, adding, unnecessarily, “Though she’s always shown up eventually.”

  “Let’s hope that’s the case this time,” says the captain. “That’s a mighty big chunk of real estate to get lost in up there.”

  However, the size of the search area is quickly whittled down once the sighting by the logger and the probable average speed of the Kidneymobile have been factored in. Large areas of virtually unscalable mountains and inaccessible forests have also been discounted so that, by the time Rick Button arrives from Vancouver, most of the possible terrain has already been covered.

  “I checked with the immigration people at the border,” says Rick, “and they definitely haven’t slipped back into Canada. So it shouldn’t be too difficult to find them.”

  But three hours later, as the first rays of dawn creep over the mountains in the east to sparkle on the blush of frost that dusts the treetops, there is still no sign of the missing women. Bliss and Daisy have aimlessly driven the back roads of Washington all night, and have repeatedly tripped over police cars doing the same thing, while a searchlight from the force helicopter has flashed across their path on more than one occasion.

  “They certainly don’t mess about here,” Bliss says, speculating on how long it might take to get as many men on the ground in similar circumstances in rural England, and he looks to Daisy for a response. But she has reclined the passenger seat and is fast asleep.

  “You poor thing,” he breathes, and realizes that he too is close to exhaustion. Perhaps I should stop for a snooze, he is thinking, when he spots the Mission of Mercy’s signboard.

  “That must be the ‘monastery place,’” he muses, and Daisy surfaces as he bumps onto the gravel shoulder to use the entryphone.

  “Hi. I’m Chief Inspector Bliss of Scotland Yard,” he says after waiting several minutes for the phone to be answered. “I’m sorry to bother you so early, but we’re searching for a couple of missing women.”

  “There are no women here, sir.”

  “They were riding in a funny kind of bicycle thing…”

  “Like I said, sir, there are no women here.”

  “I just wondered if they might have stopped by here last night, seeking shelter.”

  “Daavid, look,” says Daisy, slipping out of the car and tugging anxiously at his arm.

  “What is it, Daisy?” he asks, as the voice from the entryphone is saying, “Sorry, sir. But we have no knowledge of any such women. Now if that is all…”

  It takes twenty minutes for Captain Prudenski and a posse to arrive at the scene, by which time Bliss has parked discreetly down the road, with the gates of the monastery some distance away in his rearview mirror.

  “Look,” says Bliss as he leaps from his car and holds out a mud-stained white handkerchief to his American colleague. “It’s one of Miss Lovelace’s,” he adds with absolute certainty. “See the embroidered initials,” he carries on, pointing out the D.O.L. neatly stitched into the corner. “It was right outside the missionary place back there.”

  “What do they say?” asks Prudenski with a nod to the monastery’s gates.

  “They deny any knowledge,” says Bliss. “But I don’t believe them.”

  “Let me try,” says Prudenski. However, he gets a similarly polite cold shoulder from the man answering the entryphone a few minutes later, though when he requests a face-to-face meeting with someone in authority, the voice noticeably hardens.

  “Do you have a search warrant, Captain Prudenski?”

  “No.”

  “Then there is nothing to discuss. Please be good enough to leave us in peace.”

  “Now what?” questions Bliss, though with memories of the eighty-four deaths during the Branch Davidian debacle at Waco in 1993 in mind, Prudenski is backing off faster than a grizzly hunter with a jammed gun.

  “She may have just dropped it as they passed,” he suggests, and Bliss reluctantly admits to the possibility, though he questions, “So where were they going? Where does this road lead?”

  The road leads nowhere, coming to an abrupt end just two miles further on, where it runs into a small mountainside lake.

  “This doesn’t look good, Captain,” says Bliss a few minutes later, as he carefully scans the soft mud of the lakeshore but finds no trace of bicycle tires amongst the pad marks of bears and wolves. Then he turns worriedly to Prudenski. “If they’d doubled back towards the main highway we would have found them last night, and they most certainly didn’t come this way.”

  “But there are no other roads,” admits Prudenski, scratching his head as he checks his map.

  “In that case; that only leaves the monastery,” pronounces Bliss positively.

  chapter eight

  By the time Trina and Daphne have been escorted to an austere windowless room on the building’s ground floor, the ecclesiastical aura of the Mission of Mercy Monastery has vanished.

  “It smells more like a hospital,” Trina whispers as soon as the door closes and an electronic bolt slides firmly into place.

  “I know,” Daphne whispers back. “But why are we whispering?”

  Because, though neither will admit it for fear of spooking the other, they have both been rattled from the moment the giant double gates had swung open, revealing two deeply hooded men carrying a couple of burka-like shrouds which they insisted the women should wear.

  “We wouldn’t want to drive the monks crazy with desire,” Trina giggled as she struggled into
the shapeless gown, but then she shrieked in alarm. “Help! I can’t see a thing.”

  “Neither can I,” Daphne agreed, feeling such unease that she purposefully dropped her monogrammed handkerchief.

  “We don’t usually permit anyone to see our faces or hear our voices,” one of the men explained in a gravelly tone, then informed the women that they would have to remain in the dark until they were ensconced inside the monastery. And thereafter, every attempt by Trina to garner information from their guide was silently rebuffed.

  Several minutes of stumbling led them to the monastery, where doors opened and closed automatically as they processed through the building, until finally, following the hum of the electronic door lock, a metallic voice instructed them to remove their gowns, and continued, “Your presence has already greatly disturbed our community, and we now require you to remain in your room and fully respect our privacy.”

  “That’s pretty snotty,” Daphne mutters as she pulls off the robe, and she follows up with a half-hearted suggestion that the monks might ritually sacrifice young virgins.

  “No fear for us, then,” Trina laughs. However, her laughter rings hollowly a moment later when she spots a surveillance camera high up on the wall of the small bedroom. “Don’t look,” she cautions, but Daphne immediately spins to confront the device.

  “There’s something very funny going on here,” Trina says a few minutes later, after unsuccessfully testing her shoulder against the solid steel door. “I heard a telephone ringing when we came in.”

  “I know,” Daphne admits. “And he said they didn’t have baths, but there’s a bathroom right here.”

  “He lied. I didn’t think they were supposed to lie,” says Trina, slumping onto one of the hard beds and asking, “And did you notice the shoes they were wearing?”

  “Well they certainly weren’t rope-soled sandals,” Daphne replies, going on to speculate that they had looked more like the gleaming shoes of army officers. But it was the sound of voices that had taken her most by surprise. Despite several rather obvious attempts by their escort to “shush” other inhabitants at their approach, Daphne had clearly picked up the high-pitched chattering of Chinese. “I knew a bit of Mandarin once,” she tells Trina, and demonstrates with a few words before admitting that she had been unable to decipher what she’d heard.

  “I’m sure I heard some pop music,” Trina recalls excitedly as they continue piecing together the puzzle, like escaped hostages trying to lead the police back to their kidnappers.

  “I’m sure I smelt perfume at one time.”

  “There was swimming pool — I definitely smelt chlorine.”

  “And a garage — there were petrol fumes.”

  “And somebody had been smoking outside the first door,” Trina gabbles with the elation of a game winner. “I know because I can always tell when Rick’s been to a bar.”

  “I smelt cigarette smoke on the hands of the bloke who gave me the robe,” Daphne adds, before concluding, “I don’t think this is a monastery at all.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Look around,” she suggests with a sweep of her hand. “All this furniture looks like standard government issue, there’s surveillance cameras and electronic door locks, and there’s better security than Buckingham Palace.”

  “What’re you saying, Daphne?”

  “I think it’s some sort of top-secret base where they carry out weird experiments on unsuspecting volunteers,” the Englishwoman replies seriously, then adds a cautionary note: “Which means they are probably listening to everything we say.”

  “Oh, for Jesus Christ’s sake. That’s all we need,” a man wearing headphones and a gleaming pair of military-issue shoes sighs, before yelling to his colleague, “Wally! Get in here!”

  “Yeah, Steve?” responds Allan Wallace as he races into the surveillance room in the building’s basement.

  “You remember the two totally harmless old dames we let in just now cuz you wuz worried they wuz gonna freeze to death?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, you’d better start praying for divine intervention P.D.Q., cuz they’ve just rumbled the whole damn scene.”

  “What?!”

  The raucous dawn chorus of ravens and crows is wasted on Bliss and Trina’s anxious husband as Captain Prudenski and the night officers sign off watch at the main police station in Bellingham, leaving them in the hands of a more sanguine officer.

  “It’s almost daylight now,” says Matt Larson, a straight-backed, no-nonsense captain, once he’s paraded his officers and instructed them to keep a lookout for the missing women. “It won’t be long before they show up, perky as sunflowers,” he adds with a smile that’s supposed to be comforting. “And they’ll be asking what all the commotion was about.”

  But Rick Button is unconvinced and is becoming frantic. “Trina would not do this. Something’s happened to her,” he insists, though Larson is unmoved, and just two minutes later his optimism is vindicated when he’s handed a communiqué by a clerk.

  “Gentlemen,” he says, beaming with good news. “The Kidneymobile has been found.”

  “Where?” demand Bliss and Rick Button simultaneously.

  “Back in Canada. Just as I predicted.”

  You didn’t predict that, Bliss muses to himself, but he is too thrilled to challenge the man.

  “Is Trina okay?” asks Rick, but Larson has no specifics. “They must have recrossed the border last night when they couldn’t find anywhere to stay,” is all he can add as he hands Bliss the report. “You’d best check with the Canadian Mounties for more information.”

  But disappointment awaits. The machine has been discovered, dumped in a wooded area just north of the U.S. border, but there is no sign of the women.

  “We’d better get back there quickly,” Bliss tells Rick Button, and he catches Daisy’s arm and drags her towards the parking lot. “They can’t be far away.”

  Trina and Daphne are considerably closer than Bliss imagines, though they look more like wilted dandelions than perky sunflowers following a sleepless night spent worrying what the morning would bring.

  “We’re ready to leave now,” Trina calls, as she jumps up and down in front of the surveillance camera, as she has done for the past twenty minutes. But she gets no response and is close to tears as she declares, “I wish I’d brought the guinea pig now.”

  “Why?” puzzles Daphne.

  “Cuz he’d find a way out. He can escape from anywhere.”

  “This reminds me of when I was captured by an East German Stazi officer in Berlin after the war,” Daphne muses as she assesses the situation.

  “What happened?” breathes Trina.

  “I had to sleep my way out,” she admits sheepishly, without mentioning that she had actually fallen for the strapping Kapitan, though she refrains from suggesting a similar course as she ponders a possible escape plan. “I’ve got an idea,” she says, and motions for Trina to follow her into the bathroom as she surreptitiously slips her penknife out of her handbag, telling herself, “I always knew this would come in handy one day.”

  “What’re you doing?” Trina starts, but Daphne shushes her with a warning look as she turns on the bath taps and flushes the toilet as noisily as she is able. Then she whispers in Trina’s ear, “Create a diversion. I want to see what’s next door.”

  “Let us out, you bastards! We want to leave now,” Trina rages a minute later as she furiously bangs on the handleless steel door with a metal chair, while behind her, Daphne has slipped under one of the beds and is busily working the pointed nose of the penknife’s stone remover into the plaster wallboard.

  “Please be quiet. You are disturbing our devotions,” the tinny voice of the intercom cautions as Daphne furiously works at creating a hole.

  “Let us out, then!” Trina continues shouting. “Let us out! Let us out!” Then she begins kicking.

  “Stop that. You may leave in the morning,” says the voice testily as the gravelly-v
oiced operative desperately scans the monitor looking for Daphne. “Please stop that noise.”

  “It’s morning already. Let us out. Help! We’ve been abducted! I’m going to report you,” Trina screeches as she continues kicking.

  “Keep going,” Daphne pushes. “I’m getting through.” But although the first layer of wallboard gives easily enough, her digging tool is too short to penetrate beyond the cavity into the wall of the adjacent room. “Bugger,” she mumbles, then she scuttles from under the bed just as the electronic bolt slides back and the door starts to open.

  “What seems to be the problem, ladies?” asks a hooded one, pushing Trina roughly back onto the bed, while a bulky figure blocks the doorway behind him.

  “We’d like to leave now, please,” says Daphne as she picks up her handbag and stalwartly makes for the door with her head down, but he firmly grabs her as she passes.

  “Sorry, ladies. No can do,” he says. “In fact we’re going have to ask for your co-operation for a little while longer.”

  “How long?” demands Trina, though she gets no answer as their captor holds out his hand and demands their passports.

  Bliss and Daisy are also readying their passports as they follow Rick Button north at breakneck speed towards a small border crossing, and Bliss muses, “I hope they don’t want to search me again.” But his British passport carries him across unscathed this time, and a smiling face greets him on the Canadian side.

  “As soon as I heard you were in town I knew there’d be trouble,” laughs Inspector Mike Phillips with his hand out.

  “Hi,” calls Bliss, as he strolls up to the RCMP officer. “How was Hawaii?”

  “Hot,” replies Phillips, then his face drops and he spreads his empty hands in a gesture of despondency. “No sign of the women, Dave.”

  The Kidneymobile lies in a small woodland clearing just off the main highway, a few miles north of the border, but the sight of tracker dogs showing more interest in sniffing each others’ genitals than following a scent tells Bliss a disappointing story.