Crazy Lady

by James Hawkins

  Symmonds doesn’t answer but his face says that he agrees as he drains his glass.

  “Would that include looking the other way to avoid getting the family bad publicity?” tries Bryan, and Symmonds bends.

  “It might,” he agrees, shamefaced for his father.

  Would he have gone so far as to cover up a murder, Bliss wants to ask, but he already knows the answer; knows that it is only a matter of time before Amelia Drinkwater has her day in the dock.

  “We’d like your medical opinion on a delicate matter,” says Peter Bryan, leaning on the doctor’s vulnerability, and half an hour later they are all back at Daphne’s.

  “It’s definitely human,” pronounces Symmonds. “Young male I’d guess, though I can’t be sure.”

  “And the cause of death?” insists Bliss.

  Symmonds knows he’s in a corner and dithers for a second as if trying to find an easy way out. “The skull is fractured,” he says eventually. “Although you’d need a forensic pathologist to tell you conclusively whether that occurred pre- or post-mortem.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” says Bryan, stepping in as if the consultation is over, but Symmonds is now the one with questions.

  “Is this official? I mean… where did you get this body?”

  “Just leave it with us, Doc,” Bryan carries on. “We’ll run you home now.”

  “I could call Superintendent Donaldson —” Symmonds begins, but Bliss cuts him off.

  “And tell him what? That your dad covered up a couple of murders? That you falsified medical records and fixed death certificates?”

  Symmonds freezes while his mind churns, then he looks questioningly into Bliss’s eyes, asking, Just how much do you know?

  “Maybe you’d like to come into the sitting room,” suggests Daphne, breaking the moment.

  A warm front sweeping in off the Atlantic has clouded the sky and brought back the mist by Sunday morning as Bliss and his son-in-law tamp down the mound of earth over the replaced coffin.

  “We’ll have to dump what’s left,” whispers Bliss, seeing that they still have a pile of earth as they stand back to check their handiwork.

  “It’ll be all right as long as it keeps raining all day,” says Bryan, and then he goes back to poke at the turf while Bliss shovels the excess soil into the hedgerow.

  “Let’s just hope that Symmonds keeps his story straight,” says Bryan as they stick Daphne’s spade into the car’s trunk and head to the doctor’s house.

  An hour later, Doctor Peter Symmonds sits in front of Ted Donaldson at the Friar Tuck restaurant — “The only place where you can get a breakfast worth a damn,” according to the superintendent — and explains, “So, I’ve discovered that some of my papers… actually my father’s papers… appear to be missing.”

  “Really,” says Donaldson in mock surprise.

  “And,” carries on Symmonds with the script prepared for him by Daphne and the two London officers, “I suspect that the documents in question may contain false information regarding some medical examinations that my father carried out before his death.”

  If Symmonds’ confession sounds rehearsed to Donaldson he doesn’t mention it, nor does he let on that David Bliss has already put him in the picture.

  “Just act dumb,” Bliss told him by phone when he arranged the meeting with an early morning phone call.

  “So,” questions Donaldson, picking over his pile of pork sausages to get at the bacon, “these examinations. Did they perhaps relate to the deaths of certain people connected to the Creston family?”

  “I knew it, I knew it,” trills Daphne when the superintendent reports his findings an hour later, and Donaldson gives her a knowing look.

  “The strange thing is,” he says with a suspicious eye on the entire ensemble, “that the good doctor can’t explain why he thinks we might find the child’s body in a monkey’s grave.”

  “The big question is, who did it — who smashed his skull?” suggests Bliss, moving quickly on, and Daphne immediately flies to Janet’s side.

  “According to Trina, Janet didn’t do any of it.”

  “And you believe her?” queries Bliss. “The woman who nearly killed you in a mobile bathtub?”

  “I know,” agrees Daphne. “She seems a little crazy at times, but her heart’s in the right place.”

  “Amelia could have done it,” suggests Samantha, but her husband has other ideas.

  “I bet it was old man Creston, ticked off that his son had been lumbered with a little bastard, worried that his empire would fall into the gutter.”

  “He wouldn’t be the first,” agrees Bliss, and he can’t wait to get back to finishing his novel to expose the bastardly lineage of Chief Superintendent Edwards’ cunning predecessor, the Sun King, Louis XIV of France.

  Peter Bryan’s cellphone rings as they crawl through the rush hour traffic into London on Monday morning with Samantha at the wheel. He grabs it, says, “Hello,” then claps his hand over the mouthpiece and offers it to Bliss. “It’s for you,” he says with a straight face. “It’s Oprah. She wants you on next week’s show.”

  “Piss off,” says, Bliss pushing it away.

  Bryan laughs as he takes the call from his office. “Sorry,” he says. “Just went through a tunnel.”

  “Good weekend?” greets the assistant commissioner at the eleven o’clock meeting, and Bliss shrugs nonchalantly.

  “Quiet,” he says. “Visiting old friends, digging up a few old skeletons.” Then he asks hopefully, “Do you need me anymore, sir?”

  “I’m not sure…” starts the senior officer scanning an email on his screen. “Creston’s legal beavers were requesting a meeting, probably hoping for a deal. ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours’ kind of thing, but now they’ve postponed — something about an urgent matter in Hampshire. You’d better stick around for a day or so.”

  Bliss’s face drops, and the assistant commissioner holds up a couple of fingers. “Two at the most, Chief Inspector… promise.”

  Now what? Bliss asks himself and is tempted to take off. It’s been well over a month since Yolanda left, and despite the fact that her image and her smile are with him every moment, awake and asleep, he feels her slipping away. Then he thinks, Perhaps I should speed things up a bit.

  Tracy, the president’s personal receptionist, emerges from Creston tower’s front entrance on her lunch break, and Bliss, with a newly purchased trilby hat over his eyes, sets off in pursuit.

  “Remember me?” he says, sliding alongside her as she walks to a deli in the next street, and she stops with a quizzical look.

  “Dave?” she queries when he lifts his hat. “What happened? They said you were a policeman.”

  “I am,” he says taking out his police ID, adding, “This is very hush-hush, Tracy, but we’re investigating a possible terrorist plot to kill your boss.”

  “Oh my goodness,” she gasps. “He went to Hampshire this morning. Will he be all right?”

  “The Hampshire police are keeping an eye on him today,” continues Bliss entirely truthfully, wondering what arguments Creston and his legal team are using to convince the magistrate not to issue a warrant to send in a team of excavators. “We don’t want to alarm him because we think it might involve someone close to him.”

  “Is this to do with the Ivory Coast?” asks Tracy in a conspiratorial whisper, well aware of the volatile situation in West Africa.

  “We think so,” says Bliss darkly. “But the trouble is we don’t know where Mr. Creston’s wife is.”

  “And you think they might get to her?”

  “They just might,” agrees Bliss with a deeply worried tone, “unless we can get to her first.”

  The duty sister at the nursing home in ritzy St. John’s Wood checks Bliss’s ID for the third time, saying, “I wish I could get hold of Mr. Creston. He specifically said that his wife was to have no visitors.”

  “Don’t worry,” replies Bliss with a disarming smile. “I promise not
to tire her.”

  “How is Trina?” Janet wants to know as soon as Bliss has bitten his tongue and introduced himself as a friend of the zany homecare nurse.

  “She’s fine,” he tells her; considering the reports he received from Daphne concerning Janet’s mistreatment, he is pleasantly surprised at the woman’s chirpiness.

  “And Clive?”

  Clive? he wants to question, but doesn’t. “Oh yes. I think he is all right.”

  “I miss him,” she admits.

  Bliss has a rough idea of what’s happening when he asks, “Are you happy here, Janet?” and her face pains before she simply nods obediently.

  “Trina was asking about your children,” he carries on with a note of sympathy, using the Canadian woman as a shield.

  “They died.”

  “I know.”

  “It was my fault. I didn’t look after them properly,” Janet says as her face begins to drop. “I said sorry to God, but I don’t think he was listening.”

  “Do you remember what happened to the children?”

  “The doctor said I was a really bad mother,” she starts, as tears begin to dribble down her cheeks, “but I loved my babies.”

  “Are you all right, Mrs. Creston?” asks the sister poking her head around the door, still concerned about her position.

  Bliss waves her away. “Mrs. Creston’s fine, thank you.”

  “Hit the bell if you need me, dear,” she continues to her patient while making a point of ignoring Bliss.

  “What happened to little John?” presses Bliss as the door begins to close, but then he notices that it has been left ajar so he stands to shut it.

  “The doctor said he just died in his sleep,” says Janet as Bliss finds the sister’s foot jamming the door. He is momentarily tempted to trap it, but something is happening to Janet and he is drawn back to the bed by her inner cries as she relives the moment when she cradled her dead baby in her arms and realized that her life had forever changed.

  “Did you go to John’s funeral?” asks Bliss as he tries to get into her thoughts.

  “They said I’d be upset,” she says shaking her head as the tears flow. “I wanted to but they were afraid I’d be too upset.”

  “And the second one, Giuseppe?”

  “He was always ill.”

  “But what about Joe-Joe, Janet? Mr. Grainger… you remember the gardener… he said Joe-Joe was a fine little lad.”

  Memories flood back, and seconds later Janet is loudly blubbering, “I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it. They said I did, but I didn’t.”

  The sister barrels back in, red-faced, yelling, “You’ve upset her.”

  “Not me,” says Bliss.

  “Out,” orders the sister, and Bliss starts to leave, but he turns back.

  “Where was John buried, Janet?”

  “I don’t know,” she cries. “They wouldn’t tell me. I kept saying, ‘Where’s my baby? Where’s my baby?’ But they wouldn’t tell me.”

  “Out,” howls the sister again, and Bliss makes a feint for the door, then he tries a desperate final stab.

  “Joseph killed your baby, Janet.”

  The moment stops, the sister freezes, then Janet grabs her bronze crucifix and clasps it to her chest, mumbling, “He said he’d kill me if I ever told.”

  The tense atmosphere deflates like a punctured balloon as Janet slumps back on the pillow with her taut face softening as if she has finally been exorcised.

  “I’m getting security,” says the sister, but Bliss roughly grabs her arm and hisses, “Stay.” Then he turns back to Janet and speaks softly. “How, Janet? How did Joseph do it?”

  “With my Jesus,” she says clasping her icon tighter. “He hit him with my Jesus.”

  “Creston and his people are fighting the exhumation,” Donaldson tells Bliss when he phones the superintendent ten minutes later to give him more ammunition. “Good lad,” enthuses Donaldson. “Creston is beginning to look like that Dutch kid who tried plugging a leaky dyke.”

  Dermot Barnes, QC, the leading mouthpiece of Barnes, Worstheim and Shuttlecock, believes that the Magistrate’s court in Dewminster is beneath his dignity, so Malcolm Jackson is trying to plug a leak on behalf of his client by badgering the Crown Prosecutor to reveal the name of the person or persons who trampled on Mr. Creston’s rights and grounds.

  But whatever the prosecution lawyer may suspect, he knows only what he’s been told, and he shrugs to the justice of the peace. “Your worship, this application is based solely on the information contained in the statement of Dr. Peter Symmonds.”

  “Someone’s been digging around…” complains Jackson, but it gets him nowhere.

  “I’m inclined to accept the doctor’s word,” says the lay magistrate who doubles as the town’s soccer referee and finds a certain delight in red-carding a team of London barristers. “I hereby issue a search warrant.”

  “We could appeal,” suggests Jackson as he and his team mill around Creston in the foyer. “But it might make it look as though we have something to hide and will only delay matters.”

  “Long enough to move the body?” questions Creston hopefully, and he gets an immediate reprimand.

  “What body, sir?” asks Jackson. “I thought we agreed that we knew nothing about a body.”

  “Right, sorry,” says the executive, but Donaldson was correct: he is a man trying to plug leaks and a deluge is heading his way.

  “Mr. Joseph Crispin Creston?” queries a uniformed inspector from Dewminster police station.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m arresting you on suspicion of murder,” continues the officer, placing a hand on Creston’s shoulder. “And I must warn —”

  “Murder, what murder?” spits Creston, throwing off the hand. “You haven’t even dug up the bloody body yet.”

  “And what body would that be?” queries the inspector.

  “Shut up, Mr. Creston,” Jackson hisses to his client through clenched teeth, but J.C. is under too much strain to listen.

  “You can’t prove it,” he yells into the officer’s face and lashes out with a fist as a constable tries to slap on handcuffs. “You can’t prove a bloody thing.”

  “I’m just waiting for one of the local lads to show up with some statement forms,” Bliss tells Donaldson from the nursing sister’s office when he gets the news.

  “Are you sure you don’t want a job?” asks Donaldson, but Bliss already has his hands full.

  “Sorry, but I’ve got a book to finish and two women to woo,” says Bliss with both Yolanda and his prince’s paramour in mind. “I’ll check in at the Yard, fax you a copy of the statement, and see if I can get a flight out this evening, whether the assistant commissioner approves or not.”

  It is after one in the morning by the time that Bliss hails a cab outside Nice airport, and nearly two before he hits the pillow in his apartment. His manuscript of more than five hundred handwritten pages will wait until the morning, and so will the letter sitting in his mailbox in the concierge’s office.

  Daphne wakes him at nine. “Damn,” he says, glancing at the clock as he reaches for the phone. “I wanted to be writing by seven.”

  “Trina’s on her way over,” Daphne explains, as if he should care. “She’s bringing a visitor to see Janet.”

  “Clive?” he questions, and Daphne laughs.

  “Apparently he’s quite smitten with her.”

  “I don’t know what her husband will say about that,” says Bliss, but Daphne is unconcerned. “According to Ted he isn’t going to be saying much at all for a very long time.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure…” starts Bliss, but he doesn’t know that Creston’s dyke has finally ruptured now that Peter Symmonds has seen the light.

  “His old dad must’ve been worried that the wheel would fall off the Creston charity bus one day,” Daphne tells him. “So he kept two sets of notes.”

  “About John’s murder?” Bliss questions.

  “Yep, Peter fou
nd them in his dad’s papers after he died. It’s all there: smashed skull, blunt instrument, and — and this is the best bit — J.C. Creston Jr. so cut up about it that he had to shoot him full of a sedative.”

  “Doesn’t prove he did it, though,” cautions Bliss, although he admits that it will corroborate Janet’s testimony.

  “You’re right, David. But he’s going to have a job explaining why he was so upset about the death of another man’s child.”

  “So where’s Creston now?”

  Joseph Creston is still in a cell at Westchester Police Station, despite his lawyers’ attempt to get him bail, and is facing further charges of resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer.

  “Life begins when you’re in love,” sings Billie Holiday as Bliss puts down the phone and looks across the azure bay to the island of the Man in the Iron Mask. “Time for you to finally get the woman you deserve,” he says, speaking of both himself and the besotted prisoner, and he gaily plucks his pad and pen off the table with a croissant and café au lait in mind.

  It’s time the world woke up to the fact that true love always triumphs, he tells himself as he shuns the elevator and bounds down the stairs.

  “Ah, monsieur. Bonjour, you have returned,” sings out the concierge as he wafts a letter in Bliss’s direction.

  “Ms. Yolanda Pieters,” Bliss reads from the return address, and it takes no more than a second for the information to sink in.

  “Oh my God,” he breathes. “It’s worked. She’s coming back.”

  Bliss rips open the letter with the enthusiasm of a birthday boy and starts, “Dear David…,” then he stops as his eyes scan the single sheet. The words married, Klaus, and sorry leap off the page, and he feels his knees buckle.

  Daphne is first in the fining line. “It’s your damn fault,” he complains bitterly. “If you hadn’t dragged me back to nail Amelia none of this would have happened.”

  “David… I’m so sorry,” she starts but he cuts her off and lashes out at his daughter instead.