Queen Anne of Austria, he begins, finding a striking similarity between the magistrate’s pious disposition and that of Louis XIV’s mother, was a woman whose knees, it was said, got far more practice than her more feminine parts. Indeed, according to the king’s valet de chambre, Pierre La Porte, after many years of being rebuffed in his desire to produce a son and heir, His Majesty, Louis XIII, had turned his attention, and his weapon, to pink-bottomed footmen. So, one might imagine the incredulity in the royal household when, after a barren decade, it was suddenly claimed that the king had made a single lunge at his consort and not only found his mark, but had done so at the precise moment when the fruit was ripe.
“Sorry we’re late, Dad,” gushes Samantha with a hurried peck on his cheek, exclaiming, “Traffic!”
“Hello, Peter,” Bliss says, offering a hand while pointing to his manuscript. “I was just writing about the conception of a right royal bastard.”
“Speaking of which,” says Bryan. “Our man Edwards has apparently come into a regal fortune.”
“Really,” says Bliss. “What a surprise.”
“New beemer — top of the line,” carries on Bryan, but Bliss is cagey.
“I bet he’s covered his ass. Proper receipts and stuff. “Of course. He even bleated about the price.”
“What are you saying? It was clean?”
“Dave. Does Edwards ever do anything clean?”
“But —”
“He chopped in his old motor, dropped a couple of grand on the counter, and took a six-month holiday on the balance,” says Bryan, but the smug look on his face tells Bliss there’s more and he waits.
“Forty newly minted fifty-pound notes,” continues Bryan, slapping a photocopy of the bills under Bliss’s nose. “And guess what? The very same folding stuff that one of Mr. J.C. Creston’s maggots withdrew from Lloyd’s Bank, Bond Street a few weeks ago.”
“We’ve got him,” breathes Bliss, but Peter Bryan is less certain.
“Hang on, Dave. This is Edwards we’re talking about. He’s more slippery than Bill Clinton. We’re gonna need more than this.”
“Yeah. You’re right,” admits Bliss and he sits back to study the menu for a few minutes while he gives some thought to this situation.
“Any news from Yolanda?” asks Samantha during the hiatus.
“Not yet,” says Bliss. “Give her time.”
“What about the book?”
“Last chapter, Sam.”
“The fairytale ending?”
“That’s the one. Every man’s dream: the love of a perfect woman.”
“And every woman’s dream,” she says reaching out to caress her husband’s face. “The love of a perfect man.”
“Well I don’t know about perfect,” protests Bliss, but Samantha cuts him off.
“You were perfect to Yolanda.”
“Then why did she go back to Klaus?”
“Guilt, Dad. She just felt obligated to him. But that’s not love. Love is what you two had together. You know that.”
“But does she really love me?”
“Of course she does. She’ll come to her senses. Mark my words.”
Details of Bliss’s afternoon encounter with Amelia Drinkwater fills the time while they nibble pita and wait for their food, but neither Samantha nor her husband have any concrete suggestions.
“She was obviously lying about something,” explains Bliss. “I’m damned if I know why.”
“What did Daphne think?”
“No idea,” admits Bliss, “but knowing her she’s got something up her sleeve.”
“Sounds like the Drinkwater woman is covering for someone,” says Peter Bryan after some thought. “Maybe Creston has bought her as well.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised,” admits Bliss, “but what are you going to do about Edwards?”
“‘We,’ Dave,” his son-in-law corrects him. “What are we going to do?”
“Not me,” says Bliss. “I’m doing my part. He’s just about to get his comeuppance in my novel. Real life is up to you.”
The warmth has returned to the Côte d’Azur by the time that Bliss’s flight touches down at Nice International Airport close to midnight, and he opens the cab window to inhale the scent of the Mediterranean as he returns to his apartment in St-Juan-sur-Mer. Then, despite the hour, he sits on his balcony and continues work on his literary revenge.
The sight of a thousand candles illuminating the windows of his great château caught the attention of Prince Ferdinand as he peered longingly across the strait from his island home. “Perhaps she is come,” he told himself with excitement, imagining that festivities were being prepared for his triumphal unification, and his heart took flight. But across the bay, the multitude of aristocratic guests who danced and made merry in the beautiful building knew nothing of the poor man’s desperate plight.
“So. My dear marquis,” said the king, addressing the Marquis of Dangeau from his throne in the great hall of the Château Roger. “What do you say of my beautiful new palace?”
“I bow to your superiority, Sire. I would say that you are truly a worthy adversary.”
“That is most true,” agreed the king holding out his hand.
“However, I fear that you may one day be called to account by a higher power for the wrong you have worked upon that poor prince,” continued Dangeau as he paid his dues.
“That is also true,” said the king. “However, while it may be useful to die in God’s grace, it is exceedingly boring to live in it.”
Satisfied, Bliss puts down his pen and peers over the balcony in the bright clear moonlight. He looks down to the lemon tree, expecting to find the lone lemon on the ground, and then he breaks into a broad smile. In his absence, the warm southwesterly sirocco has swept up from the Sahara and now a hundred golden lemons dot the grass.
“If that’s not an omen I don’t know what is,” he tells himself and decides it is finally time for revenge.
“Louis XIV, the so-called king, is a bastard and a fraud and I can prove it,” he writes in the voice of Prince Ferdinand. “ Louis XIV, the man who pretentiously calls himself Louis le Grand, is nothing but the son of a jumped-up commoner, and once my great love returns to be at my side for eternity, I will shout to the four corners of the French Empire, ‘Louis, the man you call king, is a usurper and pretender. Depose him and right the terrible wrong that has been worked upon this proud nation of France.’”
“That’s better. Now we’re getting there,” muses Bliss, and he goes to bed confidently anticipating a night of pleasant dreams.
Chief Superintendent Michael Edwards is also dreaming as he drives his new BMW home from his regular Freemasonry meeting. The soft hum of a herd of horses under the hood and the smell of real leather and freshly polished wood transport him to a world of leisure that he could never have envisioned as he grew up the son of London dock worker. “You gotta be f’kin tough in this world,” his father told him whenever he complained of being picked on at school. “Beat the f’kin crap out of them bastards, son,” he often said, and Edwards beams at the knowledge that his father would be proud of him if he could see him now. “I beat the bastards, Dad,” he is musing woozily to himself as the Volvo driver ahead of him spots a red light.
“Fuck,” says Edwards, sharpening his brain, but his brake foot takes longer to catch on.
“I’m requesting that you blow into this machine,” a hot-footed young constable says to Edwards ten minutes later, and the chief superintendent makes his second mistake of the evening.
“Don’t be f’kin stupid son,” he says knocking the Breathalyzer away. “I’m a f’kin chief super,”
“I don’t care if you’re the commissioner, sir. You’ve been involved in a road traffic —”
“C’mon, son,” says Edwards. “Use your loaf, man. You can see I ain’t been drinking.”
“Actually, sir, I believe that you have.”
“Just a couple,” admits Edwards, and then he makes hi
s third mistake. “But look. Let me just sort it out, OK. I’ll just pay for the damages.”
“Sir, I require you to blow —”
“Wait, wait, wait,” says Edwards going for his wallet and extracting a crisp £50 note. “Let’s just keep it between ourselves, shall we.”
“Well, I suppose…” starts the officer, giving Edwards more line, and he bites.
“OK, let’s make it a round hundred,” he says adding a second fifty. “And I’ll square off the other driver.”
“Thank you, sir,” says the constable taking the proffered notes, then he hollers for his partner, who is taking the details from the other driver. “Get some backup, Jim. We’ve got a prisoner.”
News of Edwards’ arrest reaches Bliss the following morning, and he repeatedly rereads the last entry in his manuscript and shakes his head in disbelief. “Well I’m buggered,” he says, and then he runs down four flights to the apartment garden, scoops up a handful of lemons, and makes himself a jug of lemonade for breakfast. “Now for Yolanda,” he says as he sits on the balcony, opens his writing pad, and picks up his pen.
The arrest of a senior Metropolitan police commander for attempted bribery and drunken driving is enough to knock most other headlines off the front page of London’s morning paper. The withholding of Edwards’ name is only to be expected, especially as he is yet to be charged, but news of his arrest has been toasted with raised coffee cups throughout the force.
Peter Bryan smiles smugly as he studies the nightly incident log, and even the commissioner might admit a degree of satisfaction were it politically correct to do so.
“Nothing’s proven yet,” the deputy commissioner cautions the other commanders at morning prayers. “Chief Superintendent Edwards is entitled to the same presumption of innocence as everyone else.”
“Just like every other villain,” mutters one of the officers under his hand and gets a titter of agreement from his neighbours.
“Morale is the name of the game,” the deputy continues. “Justice must be seen to be done.”
“And about time,” suggests another officer, and the deputy decides it might be prudent to move onto other matters.
Mike Phillips and his team in Vancouver moved on from the Janet Thurgood abduction case more than a week ago now. Craddock is still on the loose in Hawaii, though his options are narrowing as his wallet shrinks. Trina is back to wiping bottoms and washing dirty old men, and while the fresh snow may have brightened Wayne Browning’s grubby compound in the mountains north of Vancouver, the old pretender is beginning to feel the pinch. Without Creston’s largesse, and with the banks in Mountain Falls under pressure from Revenue Canada to open their books, his utopian world is rapidly coming adrift.
“We must be strong and vigilant in the face of those who would destroy us,” he preaches to his devotees. “The devil is trying us… tempting us… testing our resolve. Do not let him into your hearts. Do not be tempted.”
The woman and girls kneeling obediently at his feet have no idea of the trials that may await them, and as far as Browning is concerned, they need not know. “Just follow God’s commands through me,” he says, “and we will reach the Promised Land.”
The arrest of Edwards doesn’t land on Creston’s desk until late in the day when Mason is tipped off by the chief super-intendent’s defence lawyer. The warning, shrouded in doublespeak, heavily hints that Edwards has no intention of admitting the source of the large bills that he used for his car, but neither he nor his lawyer have any idea that Peter Bryan and the internal investigation team are only too aware of the money’s provenance.
“We’ll keep that up our sleeves for now,” Peter Bryan tells the select group of trusted officers he has been seconded to lead.
“You might as well do the footwork on this,” the assistant commissioner in overall charge of the investigation told him. “It seems that you’re already up to speed.”
Keeping up with Edwards and his high-priced help is one thing, but Peter Bryan knows that getting ahead of him and his lawyers is the trick. It should be possible to make the charges of attempting to pervert the course of justice and refusing to take a breath test stick on the evidence at hand, but Bryan is not alone in wanting the big one — the acceptance of a bribe by a public official.
“Neither Creston nor Mason are likely to cough,” Peter Bryan carries on to his four officers, “and the only link we have is flimsy. We know that Edwards tried to squeeze info out of the Canadian Mounties, but I’m sure we’ve all called in favours from other forces at times.”
“How much was he paid?” asks one of the officers, but Bryan shrugs. “Creston’s bank is being co-operative. They paid out twenty big ones — four thousand quid altogether — but we’ve no idea how much Edwards pocketed.”
“What about a warrant? Do his place over looking for the rest.”
“Difficult,” admits Bryan. “His mouthpiece will scream harassment. He’ll say, ‘Show us the evidence,’ and we don’t have a lot.”
Daphne Lovelace is looking for evidence at Creston Hall, and with the estate’s laird tied up in London, she has persuaded the groundsman to take her on a guided tour.
“You picked the wrong bloomin’ time of the year fer it, missus,” Grainger, the old retainer, said when Daphne found him in the Black Swan and explained her upcoming book about local places of interest. “Everything’s in such a bloomin’ state at present.”
“Don’t worry. I’m not taking photos,” she explained to the cheerful little man and sealed the arrangement with a beer and a slice of pork pie.
Now, with notebook in hand, Daphne shows interest in everything.
“Rhodeedendrums, wisteria, oaks, willows,” he says, waving at various trees and bushes with his walking stick. “And over there is the walled garden.”
“Is that a cemetery?” questions Daphne pointing out a row of small headstones.
“Pets,” he spits, clearly unimpressed at the waste of fertile land. “Dogs, cats, parrots, even a bloomin’ monkey.”
“What about the family’s graves?”
Grainger uses his stick as a pointer. “Over there in the chapel,” he says, leading her to view a doll-sized church topped with an elaborate wooden spire surmounted by a gilded cross.
“Oh my!” exclaims Daphne, and she is already marching across the lawn when the gardener stops her.
“It’s sorta private,” he calls nervously, but Daphne spins with a comforting smile.
“Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone.”
Grainger scratches his nose with his stick for a second, and then capitulates. “Can’t do no harm I s’pose,” he says, catching up. “None of the family are here at present.”
The walls of the tiny chapel are adorned with an array of religious paintings, but it is a genealogical chart cataloguing the growth of the Creston family since the mid-eighteenth century that immediately takes Daphne’s eye.
“Oh,” says Daphne in surprise as she runs her finger down the tree to the 1960s. “I thought Mr. Creston Jr. had three children.”
“Nah. Just the two,” says the gardener unconcernedly. “And they both died.”
“Oh. You saw them then, did you?”
“Yeah. O’course I’ve been here nigh on fifty years; man and boy.”
“So the babies were sickly?”
Grainger carefully checks over his shoulder then pulls Daphne to a number of stone tablets set into the adjacent wall.
“This one,” he says pointing to a plaque bearing Giuseppe’s name, “he was a runty-looking little thing. Nothing but trouble from the day he were calved.”
“And this one?” questions Daphne, pointing to Johannes.
The old man’s face warms in memory, and with a toothless smile he says, “He was a bonnie little lad. Chubby cheeks and arms like plump little vegetable marrows.”
“But he died as well,” says Daphne with her finger on the date.
“Yep. Same thing: cot death. That were a bloomin’ shame.
Bonnie little thing.”
“Not sickly,” Daphne continues, egging him on.
“Not him. Gawd knows how the missus kept him fed. He would a’ been a bloomin’ bigun if he’d lived — shame.”
“Shame,” agrees Daphne.
“Cot death,” reiterates Grainger, his face saddening.
Michael Edwards’ first court appearance is not one of his happiest moments. He and his legal mouthpiece are well aware that the knives are out.
“Anyone else would have been granted police bail to appear at a later date,” complains Martin Shaw as they wait for the magistrate to be robed.
“Your point?” Bryan replies gleefully.
“In my client’s opinion you are deliberately humiliating him.”
“Really?”
“And he wishes me to make a formal complaint.”
“Right,” says Bryan firmly sitting and taking out his notebook with an air of determination. “Let me get this down Mr. Shaw and see if I’ve got it correct. Your client, who is charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice, wishes to complain about the justice system he was attempting to pervert.” Bryan looks up mischievously. “Would you say that’s an accurate assessment of the situation, sir?”
The lawyer throws up his hands in disgust, but in deference to the reputation of the force rather than his errant client, the corps of baying pressmen are led in a circle by a wild goose while the still defiant senior officer is paraded backstage in the magistrate’s chamber.
“I am not guilty,” he insists when the charges are read, but the magistrate, specially chosen because of his straightforwardness, looks Edwards in the face and says, “This is a bail hearing, Mr. Edwards, as a man in your position should know. You’ll have plenty of opportunity to enter a plea in the appropriate court at the appropriate time.”
“That took him down a few pegs,” laughs Peter Bryan once Edwards has been released and told to hand in his warrant card.
Crazy Lady Page 24
