Crazy Lady

by James Hawkins

  But nothing has been normal since Yolanda’s hurried departure and he questions his true intentions, knowing that his suitcase is straining with all his clothes and personal possessions. As the speeding streets begin to blur and the train smoothly gathers speed along the coastal track, he catches glances of the Château Roger, then the austere cliff-top fortress on the island of Ste. Marguerite across the tranquil azure bay, and he knows the answer.

  “Yes,” he says to himself sotto voce, knowing that he has an obligation to a man who surrendered his liberty and his voice in the name of love. “I will come back to finish the novel. I will tell your story. And I will get Yolanda back, however long it takes.”

  “Janet,” calls Craddock softly in the early hours, once he’s satisfied that the coast is clear, but as he opens the old van’s door he’s knocked back by the stench of stale vomit.

  “Janet,” he calls louder, shining a flashlight into her face, but her eyes won’t open and she lays as listless as a dropped doll.

  “Shit!” exclaims the ex-cop, blaming Daphne and Trina in his mind as he desperately searches for a pulse. “Wake up. C’mon, wake up,” he mutters frantically as his mind whirls with dark thoughts. Then he drags the limp body from the van and hacks at her wrist bindings with a blunt craft knife.

  “Wake up. Wake up,” he calls frantically, seeing his own life rapidly drifting into darkness as he massages her dead hands. Then she lets out an exhausted gasp and he almost faints in relief.

  “We could always tip off the police,” Daphne suggests over the supper table at Trina’s, but the other woman isn’t easily convinced.

  “I tipped them off about Osama Bin Laden once and they threatened to arrest me for being a public nuisance.”

  “Osama Bin Laden in Vancouver?” queries Daphne incredulously.

  “Well it could have been,” replies Trina shortly. “He looked like him. He had a beard and everything. Anyway, what I’m saying is that I wouldn’t trust that lot to pick up a two-bit hooker let alone a wanted kidnapper.”

  “In that case we have to come up with a plan,” says Daphne, then she yawns and checks her watch. “Goodness, I must be getting past it. It’s only ten o’clock.”

  “We’ll start first thing tomorrow,” agrees Trina as she clears away the plates. Craddock watches his clock and waits for midnight to roll around before picking up the phone to call England.

  “Mr. Creston isn’t in yet,” the early shift receptionist at Creston Enterprises tells him, but she’s wrong. The company president hasn’t left the building all night. Concern over Janet kept him up until three when a security guard spotted a light and poked his head around the door to make sure there were no intruders.

  “Only me,” Creston assured the watchman as he waved him away, and an hour later he finally fell asleep on a deeply cushioned settee. Mason wakes him at eight-thirty, just as Craddock is phoning back.

  “I’ll check,” the receptionist tells the anxious Canadian caller, “though I haven’t seen him come in yet.”

  “It’s for you J.C.,” says Mason, taking the call, and Creston signals for his henchman to leave as soon as he recognizes Craddock’s voice.

  “We’re a bit worried about your wife,” says the Vancouver private eye, temporarily forgetting his hard man act while trying to share some of the responsibility with a non-existent partner.

  “What are you saying, Craddock?”

  “We think she should maybe see a doctor.”

  “Well do it, then.”

  “But — they’ll ask questions.”

  “Oh, for Lord’s sake,” spits Creston. “I thought you were supposed to know what you were doing.”

  “I do.”

  “Then tell ’em not to ask questions, you idiot,” Creston screeches.

  “Everything all right, J.C.?” queries Mason sliding back into the room.

  Creston slams down his phone. “Not it’s not,” he seethes. “You told me he was a professional; professional what — babysitter?”

  “Sorry, J.C. He’s an ex-cop. Came recommended by Browning.”

  “And what the hell does that freak know? Find someone else.”

  “Yes, J.C.”

  “And while you’re at it get me a flight. Shit. Do I have to do everything myself?”

  “Flight, J.C.?”

  “To Canada.”

  “You could take the Lear.”

  “Oh, right. Wake up, man. Do you think I want everyone knowing my business? Clear my schedule for three days and book me business class; and don’t use Creston. What was that passport you got me?”

  “Smythe.”

  “Yes — Smythe. And call Craddock. Tell him to get one of his people to meet me at the airport.”

  “Yes,” says Mason, half out of the door. “And tell him that Janet better be in one piece when I arrive or I’ll break his fucking neck.”

  “Right, J.C.”

  “Oh. One more thing. You’ve got a good contact in the police haven’t you?”

  “Mike Edwards, chief superintendent at the Yard,” Mason nods. “We were at school together.”

  “Right. Get onto him. I want someone to make sure that everything to do with the children’s deaths is destroyed — every note, every record, every scrap of paper.”

  “Um. He might not…”

  “John. I’m not asking, OK. I don’t give a monkey’s fart what it costs — and don’t give me any crap about duty. He’s got his price the same as anyone else.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “No. You will,” spits Creston nastily. “I might have to bring her back here and I can’t risk anything going wrong — understand?”

  “Yes, J.C.”

  “Good.”

  The news of Creston’s visit hits Craddock with the force of a fly ball in the forehead. “Oh Christ, that’s all I need,” he says as he puts down the phone and looks at the frail woman asleep in his bed. Then he stares at his watch as he tries to calculate out how much time he has to work a miracle.

  Bliss has more time to achieve success than Craddock, much more time, and as he begins a tour of Louis XIV’s great palace on the outskirts of Paris, he is beginning to wonder if it might not take him as long as his predecessor to entice back his lost love.

  “The Palace of Versailles was originally a royal hunting lodge,” explains the cropped-haired student guide in perfect English as Bliss tries to takes notes, but he is now a long way from the Mediterranean and he can’t stop shivering.

  “King Louis XIV, who was later known as the Sun King, always said that the mark of a man was his fortitude to all things — heat, cold, hunger, and thirst,” explains the young woman, pointing out the paucity of fireplaces and the draughtiness of the doors and windows in the Salon de la Guerre, the monarch’s oft used war room, before continuing into the great gallery, the magnificent Hall of Mirrors, which stretches seventy-five metres across the west end of the building.

  “The ceiling was painted by Le Brun,” she continues, sweeping a hand the length of the great room. “And the mural pays tribute to of the king’s valiant defeat of the Dutch…”

  I can see where the designer of the Château Roger got his ideas, thinks Bliss, tuning out the young woman as he surveys the ornately decorated stateroom with its giant windows that overlook the sculpted gardens and the ornamental canals and fountains.

  “Approximately ten thousand people lived in the palace during the height of the Sun King’s reign…” the guide continues to the little knot of tourists as she leads them into the king’s private rooms. Bliss hangs back in the mirrored gallery for a few seconds, on the spot where the devious monarch’s throne sat on a raised dais, imagining the scene as hundreds of bewigged and outlandishly costumed courtiers milled at Louis’ feet, desperate to catch his eye. It was all about control, Bliss knows from his research, and he has no difficulty combining the malevolent psyche of the French king with his present-day adversary.

  “Keep your friends close, but your enemies even
closer,” may be Chief Superintendent Edwards’ maxim, but he is not the first dictator to understand the dictum’s importance, and Bliss can’t keep Klaus out of the equation either. He didn’t really want Yolanda, he tells himself as he pictures Louis carefully noting the absence of any nobles from his audience. He just couldn’t stand the thought of someone else having her.

  Maybe that’s not fair.

  Of course it’s not fair, but what she did to me wasn’t fair either. Now I’m the one in the cage while she is free? Or is every moment with Klaus torture as she tries to focus on him when all she sees is me? Does she close her eyes in bed and imagine that it is me inside her?

  “Monsieur…” calls the young shepherdess, realizing that she has lost one of her sheep, and Bliss quickly closes his pad to catch up, but now he knows how easily the besotted man suckered himself into being masked and shackled while his sovereign sat on his throne laughing at his dupe’s misfortune.

  “Remember — sacrifice!” exclaimed the king to Prince Ferdinand, writes Bliss, finding a quiet corner in Louis’ bedroom while the guide tells of the king’s legendary sexual appetite. “Even the plainest, ugliest old crow — one who should rightly be on her knees pleading and begging — expects you to lay down your life in order to get between her sheets. How would she know that you would not hide in the closet were a burglar come to visit if you have not proved yourself on the field?”

  “Then I fear that I will be a lonely bachelor,” said the lovelorn man, but the king offered a smile. “Come, come, my young prince. Do not give up so easily. I have a scheme that may enable you to woo this noble woman without risk to your limbs.”

  “A scheme, my liege?” queried the prince with light in his eyes.

  “Indeed,” said the king, taking the young man aside. “But first you must promise that you will keep it a great secret until you are ready to spring the trap. For, assuming that the woman of your dreams has the cunning of her gender, if she were to scent an intrigue then she would immediately wish to take it over and make it her own. Believe me, there is nothing more dangerous to the plans of a man than permitting a woman to peek into the architect’s drawing house.”

  “The water gardens and the Grotto of Thetis were designed by the Sun King himself,” the cicerone continues as she points out of a window to the landscaped grounds, and Bliss is happy to escape from the group as he goes in search of material to bolster his manuscript.

  “The Grotto of Thetis, an ornamental cavern filled with mythological allusions, signifies the place where Apollo takes his rest at the end of a busy day flying across the heavens,” Bliss’s guidebook tells him as he stands alone in the marble chamber, imagining it as it was when water cascaded from gilded fountains and chandeliers of solid gold lyres set with pearls cast a romantic glow. I wonder how many of his concubines Louis managed to mount in here, ponders Bliss, thinking that this has to be the ultimate love nest on a warm July night. But now, on a wintry December day, there is no warmth, and mental images of heated sexual encounters merely drag him down.

  “I might have killed myself for all she cares and knows,” he says aloud, hearing his words echo hollowly around the deserted stone room. “‘I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone else in my life,’ you told me,” he carries on nostalgically. “‘And I know that you love me in every possible way.’”

  “I do,” he replied, not needing to ask what Yolanda meant, knowing that at times he was a lover, while at others he was a father, a brother, and a son.

  “I was everything to you, Yolanda, and you know it,” he says to the walls. “And you were everything to me… you are everything to me.”

  chapter thirteen

  “It could be a long day,” warns Trina as she crams lunch into a wicker hamper for herself and her English counterpart. “I did creamed banana sandwiches,” she adds, but Daphne has experienced enough of Trina’s experimental cuisine not to inquire what other ingredients might be included in the mix.

  “I was thinking of wearing this,” the visitor says, modelling a deerstalker she bought as a joke when the idea of being a private detective first came up. Trina turns up her nose. “It’s a bit obvious,” she says and quickly switches it for a neon green baseball cap.

  “So, let’s go through this again,” says Daphne a little nervously as they head off in Trina’s car.

  “It’s called overt surveillance. I read it in the manual,” explains the animated woman. “First we hire another car. Something really honky that he can’t possibly miss — a snazzy big red number. You can drive that one.”

  “Umm,” murmurs Daphne, indicating a problem. “I don’t think I brought my licence with me.”

  “No sweat,” says Trina. “I’ll hire it in my name. You just follow me to Craddock’s place, but I’ll park round the corner and we’ll drive up in the rental. Then I’ll slip back to mine.”

  “Then?” asks Daphne, still somewhat uncomfortable.

  “Then I’ll phone him and pretend I’m a friend of friend who’s tipping him off about a police raid.”

  “And he runs.”

  “Yeah — and you take off after him.”

  “But I lose him after the first couple of blocks.”

  “And he goes, ‘Great, I’ve shaken them off.’ But I’ll be right there on his ass. It’s textbook.”

  Trina’s plan may be according to the text, but Craddock hasn’t read the book. With Creston on his tail he’s already flown, together with his charge, and booked himself into one of the cookie-cutter tourist hotels clustered around the airport.

  “You’ll be all right here,” he told Janet as he carried her into the threadbare room under cover of darkness, but she was too weak to reply.

  “Oh drat. His flipping car’s gone,” says Daphne with a sigh of relief as she and Trina roll around the corner in their souped up Mustang, but Trina isn’t fazed.

  “Great,” she says, already half out of the car. “Let’s break in and see what we can find.”

  “Trina, we might get caught,” complains Daphne, sitting tight, but Trina is unsympathetic as she forges up Craddock’s driveway with his garage in sight

  “Hey. You got me arrested at the doctor’s place.”

  A few minutes later, once they have pried open the garage door and found the mattress in the back of the van, Trina exclaims, “Oh my God, she was here! Look,” she carries on, holding up the roughly cut lengths of duct tape as evidence, “he tied her up.”

  “We don’t know that,” cautions Daphne, but five minutes later, when Trina spots a familiar sweater on the floor of Craddock’s bedroom, there is no doubt.

  “Now what?” asks Daphne, and Trina’s study of the private investigator’s manual comes in handy again.

  “Redial,” she says, hitting the button on the bedroom phone, and is not totally surprised when an English voice answers, “Creston Enterprises. How may I direct your call?”

  “Sorry, wrong number,” says Trina as she puts down the phone, then she turns to Daphne and quotes from the manual. “Golden rule,” she explains. “Never just cut off a pretext phone call. That’s too suspicious.”

  “Very interesting,” says Daphne, “but what do we do now?”

  “Put ourselves in the mind of the villain of course,” replies Trina without the faintest idea of what she’s talking about.

  Bliss on the other hand has no difficulty imagining the world of his villain — King Louis XIV, Duke of Normandy and King of France from 1643 to 1715 — as he wanders the regimented gardens of the great palace at Versailles and spins his mind back nearly three hundred and fifty years to the time when Louis le Grand delighted in showing off his designs to visitors. “The fountains, waterfalls, and canals were the king’s personal favourites,” the guidebook tells Bliss, but the waters have turned to ice and even the statues that surround the ornamental ponds seem particularly lifeless in the frosty northern air.

  “The King’s insatiable appetite for all things ostentatious is symbolized in the gra
nd design of his great palace and the statuary in the surrounding grounds,” the guidebook continues as Bliss eyes a marble nude who leaves nothing to his imagination.

  “I bet the old lecher loved this one,” says Bliss as he runs his hand over a silky smooth thigh, but he recoils at the snakelike coldness of the damp stone and can’t help lumping the women currently in his mind, if not actually in his life, into a slippery heap. “Yolanda had no right to do this to me,” he fumes under his breath. “I was happier thinking she was dead.” And what of Prince Ferdinand’s reluctant paramour? How callous or careless was she of her suitor’s heart?

  “I give up,” admits Trina after she and Daphne have watched Craddock’s house for a couple of hours without success. “I guess we’d better tell Mike Phillips what we’ve got. Maybe they can track him with dogs. Although I suppose I could try Raven and ask her to use her psychic powers.”

  “I think Mike Phillips would be the answer,” suggests Daphne, having been somewhat leery of the scheme to beset Craddock in the first place.

  “OK,” says Trina leaping out of the sports car and heading for her own. “Race you back to the rental place.”

  “No!” yells Daphne.

  “Spoilsport.”

  RCMP Inspector Mike Phillips listens attentively to their story, though he pretends to clamp his hands over his ears when Trina admits breaking into the private investigator’s house. “You’re gonna end up in jail one of these days.” He laughs as he shakes his head in disbelief, and then he spends a few seconds mulling over the name. “Craddock, Craddock…” he muses. “I’m sure I’ve heard that name before. Hold on,” he adds and he phones Dave Brougham of Vancouver’s City Police.

  “Craddock, PI,” repeats Brougham vaguely, apparently deep in deliberation, then he questions guardedly, “Who wants to know, Mike?”

  Phillips hesitates for a thoughtful second before answering. “Friend of mine. He just wants to know if he’s on the level… thinking of hiring him for a job.”