Deadly Sin

by James Hawkins

  “Fifty years,” he muses as he pulls a face in a grimy mirror and sees a bleak day ahead. At least nothing fell off or fell out during the night, he wryly tells himself, although cracks are beginning to appear. The crinkles may be laughter lines — nonetheless they are lines, and the morning stubble has a definite greyness.

  The phone buzzes. “At last,” he sighs, but it is Samantha with another apology.

  “Don’t worry about me,” he repeats valiantly, “I’ve got masses to do.”

  The fridge calls, but one glance reminds him that he hasn’t found time to shop. What am I doing? he questions. It’s my birthday. I’ll treat myself.

  Daphne Lovelace, in contrast, has shopped. Since the pan-demonic invasion next door she has become a frequent loiterer at Patel’s corner store, and her larder would be more at home in Mumbai than Westchester. But it’s Saturday morning and, unless she beards the beasts and ventures into the wilderness that until recently was her vegetable garden, she is hopeful that peace will reign until the neigh-bours surface around lunchtime.

  It is barely nine-thirty when the spell is broken as Mavis Longbottom bangs on Daphne’s back door and wakes the dogs.

  “How on earth do you put up with it?” asks Mavis as she pushes her way into the kitchen and slams the door in the face of the snarling pit bulls. “It’s like the Hounds o’ the bloomin’ Baskervilles.”

  “It’s worse,” says Daphne with her hands over her ears.

  “Can’t you do something?”

  “Maybe,” replies Daphne, but her projected stratagem has stuck at blasting a broadside of Tchaikovsky or Strauss from her stereo and incinerating a pan of vindaloo day and night. However, in her more rational moments, she realizes that if it comes to open warfare she has a limited arsenal. “I phoned the noise-abatement people at the council,” she complains as she drags her friend away from the window and picks up the pot to pour a second cup. “But they’re useless. They couldn’t hear a farter at a funeral. ‘Just listen to those damned dogs,’ I said, holding the phone out, and little miss lug-ears said, ‘I ’spect they just want to play.’ ‘Play,’ I said, ‘Rip me to shreds is more like it. Just like my poor little pussy.’”

  “They didn’t?” Mavis questions in alarm, but Daphne shrugs.

  “She never disappeared before that lot came.”

  The screech of a woman’s voice yelling “Shuddup” momentarily quells the baying animals, and Daphne mutters, “Thank God for that” only seconds before the rumpus begins anew.

  “I can’t think with all this noise,” snaps Daphne, slamming down the teapot.

  “You need a labyrinth,” suggests Mavis.

  “I’m confused enough without getting stuck in a bloomin’ maze.”

  “No, not a maze. Labyrinths are pathways that lead you to a new understanding. At least, that’s what they’re supposed to do.”

  “I don’t understand —”

  “Precisely. That’s because you’ve never walked one,” insists Mavis, then she grabs Daphne’s arm. “Come on. I’ll show you. There’s a famous medieval one at the cathedral.”

  “Wait a minute,” says Daphne, breaking free. “I’m not dressed — not for a cathedral. And I’m certainly not going there without a proper hat.”

  Daphne’s chosen hat, a cardinal calotte with a single silk rose, which she created especially for Princess Diana’s memorial, hasn’t seen daylight for nearly a decade.

  “Black would probably be more suitable,” she glumly admits to Mavis as they slide out the front door and head for the bus stop, “but I’ve had my fill of funerals of late.”

  Hardly a week in recent years has passed without a familiar name cropping up in the obituary column of the Westchester Gazette. Most, like neighbours Phil and Maggie Morgan, slipped into eternity with just a few lines, while some demanded a column inch or even two. A few even hit the headlines, though none as spectacularly as Minnie Dennon, Daphne’s closest friend, who rode out of town and off the planet on the front of a hundred-mile-an-hour express train after she was defrauded of her life’s savings.

  “It must be terrible being old,” suggests Mavis with a sympathetic glance in Daphne’s direction. “Losing all your friends like that.”

  “At least I haven’t lost my eyesight and my teeth,” retorts Daphne, well aware that Mavis would never find her dentures without her glasses.

  “Here’s the bus,” says Mavis, feigning deafness, but as she reaches out to steady her friend, Daphne snatches her arm away.

  “I can manage, thank you.”

  Only five years separate the two women, but in many ways they are from different worlds, and it is only lately that Mavis has climbed Daphne’s social ladder as others have fallen off the top. Mavis was still playing hopscotch at the outbreak of the Second World War when eighteen-year-old Ophelia Lovelace changed her name to Daphne and catapulted herself into adulthood by signing up to be parachuted into France to aid the resistance. The closest Mavis ever got to France was the perfume counter at Boot’s the Chemist and a French Tickler she once bought “just for a giggle” on a girls’ day out in Brighton.

  When Daphne was entrenched behind enemy lines the day after D-Day, Mavis was entrenched in the bar of the White Swan with a young Canadian corporal who had missed his boat. And, when the war ended, Daphne turned her smile to the east and used it to open chinks in the Iron Curtain for fleeing dissidents, while Mavis primarily used her smile to prise open various husbands’ wallets — some, though not all, her own.

  “It’s a classical left-handed seven-circuit labyrinth,” enthuses the cathedral’s lofty sexton, with the raciness of a commentator describing the Derby course at Epsom, but Daphne sees only an unkempt spiralled path of cracked flagstones and screws her face in confusion.

  “What’s it supposed to do?”

  “It!” snaps the sexton, as if she has just called Jesus a Jew. “It!” Then he softens reverently. “Madam, the labyrinth is an ancient and sacred design given to us by the Lord himself.”

  “Oh —”

  “And,” he carries on, with a warning finger, “you would be wise never to underestimate its power.”

  Daphne gives a critical eye to the circular pattern of stepping stones laid into the scraggy, scorched grass, but her face betrays her skepticism.

  “The labyrinth will help you find answers, find your centre,” explains the tall man solicitously as he reaches down to take Daphne’s hand and lead her around the looping path under Mavis’s watchful eye. “Just clear your mind …”

  Daphne abruptly halts and jerks her hand free. “I think I can find my own way, thank you very much,” she says, and the sexton backs off.

  “Have faith in your prayers and all will be revealed,” he calls confidently as he walks away, clearly ignorant of the fact that the only prayer Daphne has in mind is for divine guidance in the manufacture of dynamite and the making of rat poison.

  The tightly knitted pathway takes Daphne in circles, and after fifteen minutes she reaches the centre but is no nearer a solution. However, the tranquility of the cathedral’s sanctified grounds has mollified her, and, as she unwinds, she has an idea.

  “I shall invite them for Sunday tea,” she tells Mavis with a note of triumph as they walk back to the bus stop. “Homemade scones and a Victoria sponge. Then I’ll lay it on thick about my insomnia and stress-related arthritis.”

  “Arthritis?” says Mavis disbelievingly.

  “I could have,” retorts Daphne. “For all they know I could have a pacemaker and a spastic colon. Lots of people do at my age.”

  “But you don’t.”

  “That’s not the point. I will if I have to put up with their racket much longer.”

  The morning drags for Bliss as he tries to concentrate on preparations for the royal visit with one eye on the telephone. Every pot boils eventually, he tries telling himself as his mind constantly drifts to the Provençal port of St-Juan-sur-Mer and Daisy. Maybe it’s her mother again.

  D
aisy’s mother has no objection to her middle-aged daughter’s relationship that she can articulate in Bliss’s presence, but that doesn’t stop her griping about the British betrayal at Dunkirk behind his back. “ Les cochons anglais — the pigs left our men on the beaches and ran off like les poules mouillées — like wet chickens,” she complains whenever she has the chance, and she is always quick to add the question of hygiene in Britain, where, she has heard, bidets are rarer than in the Bastille.

  However, it is the recent death of her nonagenarian mother that has hobbled her daughter, Daisy, to her side.

  “I suppose I could manage on my own if I had to,” she has mournfully acknowledged a thousand times, though never without questioning aloud why Daisy couldn’t find a nice Frenchman.

  “Les hommes!” Daisy’s mother snivelled after the funeral. “Men — they are all the same. They steal your heart then run off and leave you to cry alone to the grave.” But the plaint wasn’t for her mother, whose husband was marched away at the end of a Nazi bayonet and tortured to death in the dungeons of the infamous Chateau Roger. It was for herself, abandoned with a young daughter over forty years ago. And now that her mother is gone she mourns the fact that un sale étranger has turned her daughter’s head towards la perfide Albion — the perfidious Albion.

  The suggestion that Britain is faithless is not shared by Bliss as he studies the risk assessment for the Queen’s visit and sees that it is off the charts. Crusading Christians of all stripes are invoking damnation on the House of Windsor, while in Tehran and Mecca, where the spectre of a woman entering a mosque during prayers could cause mass conniptions, fatwas are being drawn up against anyone involved.

  However, the meticulously prepared manuals attempt to cover every potential risk: bomb squads with panting dogs sniffing into sewers and garbage bins; marksmen staking out rooftops; traffic teams towing abandoned cars and keeping the streets moving; an army of constables manning barricades; mounted officers grooming their steeds for battle; public order squads encased in riot gear readying their shields and rubber bullets; marine units patrolling the river in inflatables; and the airborne unit patrolling the skies in choppers. Two thousand three hundred and six officers, assuming they all show up, and Bliss has the job of synchronizing them all to protect one woman — a year’s preparation for a thirty-minute visit. But this isn’t any visit. This isn’t Her Majesty cutting a ribbon or kissing a baby.

  This is impossible, Bliss tells himself as he follows the route with his finger and speculates on the number of buildings that could conceal a terrorist — a fanatic bent on martyrdom with an anti-tank mortar capable of immolating the armour-plated Rolls and its occupants in Allah’s name before a marksman could draw a bead. And what if the evangelical doomsayers are right? What if God in His wrath sends a bolt of lightning to cremate the heretics?

  It is 2:00 p.m., and the buzzing of Daphne’s telephone barely breaks through the thunderous music threatening to shatter her glassware.

  “You’ll have to speak up. I can’t hear myself think,” the elderly woman shouts, forcing Samantha Bliss to repeat, “You haven’t forgotten, have you, Daphne?”

  “Forgotten …” she starts vaguely, then she wakes up. “Oh, it’s you, Samantha. No. Of course not.”

  Bliss gets the next call. “I thought you were going away, Sam,” he says testily.

  “We are. I just wanted to make sure you were all right.”

  All right? Bliss questions to himself then runs a quick check: physically fit-ish; mentally stable; financially sound; emotionally …?

  “I still haven’t heard from Daisy.”

  “Oh, Dad. Did you call her?”

  “‘Leave a message’ was all I got. She’s at the beach I expect. I don’t blame her. If it wasn’t for this royal visit that’s where I’d be.”

  “I’m sure she’ll remember,” says Samantha as she hangs up.

  The number of Muslim officers scheduled for duty occupies Bliss for much of the afternoon. “Screen everyone,” will be the order of the day, but who will screen the screen-ers? What if one of the helmeted firearms specialists is a sleeper just biding his time, then bang as he spins from the crowd and blasts the Queen?

  “Daisy — finally,” muses Bliss, without bothering to check the call display when the phone buzzes at 5:00 p.m., and he’s tempted to let his answerphone take revenge.

  “Hello,” he says coldly at the third buzz, but it takes a few seconds to get his mind to switch gears at the sound of a man’s voice.

  “How are you getting on with the manuals, David?” demands Commander Fox gruffly.

  “Updating, improving, plugging loopholes,” answers Bliss unenthusiastically, well aware that trying to stop a fanatical terrorist with martyrdom on his mind is as difficult as stopping a gambling addict on a winning streak. “I do have one major concern regarding —”

  “Not on the phone, David,” warns Fox. “Meet me at seven — no, make that six-thirty — in my office. Let’s see where we stand.”

  It’s Saturday and it’s my fiftieth bloody birthday, he wants to shout, but lets it go — anything beats midsummer reruns and Chinese takeout.

  The heat drives Bliss off the tube at Charing Cross, but the flowing river has a cooling effect as he retraces his steps to the Yard along the wide Thames embankment. It’s relatively quiet — even the tourists are flagging — but the impending royal visit has forced the extremists out of the shadows, and Bliss is repeatedly accosted by evangelists of all colours pressing pamphlets on him.

  “The rapture is upon us …” begins one leaflet, and before he can screw it into a ball and bin it, an earnest sixteen-year-old disciple is on his arm, pleading, “Please, sir. You must have faith and repent now or you’ll be left behind.”

  “Left behind where?” queries Bliss, and he stops while the wide-eyed young girl warns of the impending eschato-logical moment when God will take all his believers to heaven while leaving all the skeptics to suffer the hellish nightmare of life on earth.

  “You go and enjoy yourself, dear,” laughs Bliss as he walks away. “I’ve got more chance of being taken out by an alcoholic Santa on a powered lawnmower than being whisked off to heaven on a fiery chariot.”

  “But, sir …” she is still begging as another leaflet is thrust at him.

  “Only through Jehovah can you find true salvation,” yells the girl’s competition, so Bliss shoves his hands into his pockets and picks up his pace.

  “Chief Inspector,” calls the duty desk clerk, stalling Bliss as he heads for the elevator. “Message for you.”

  “7:00 p.m. La Côte d’Or on Park Avenue — Fox,” reads the note, and Bliss would ignore it and go home to bed if it weren’t for the possibility of wrangling a steak out of his senior officer’s platinum expense account.

  “How old are you?” he asks the young clerk, but doesn’t wait for a reply. “Do yourself a favour, mate,” he says as he walks to the door. “Don’t wait till you get old to enjoy yourself.”

  A cruising cab screeches to a halt. “What a way to spend your birthday,” he grumbles. “Lugging a bloody briefcase all round London on a Saturday night.”

  “Where to, guv’nor?”

  “La Côte d’Or,” he says and sees an uncertain look on the cabby’s face. “Park Avenue,” he adds, before he catches on and takes a look at himself — golfing shirt, walking shorts, and a pair of rope-soled sandals; so much for the steak.

  The gatekeeper at La Côte d’Or has a pencil-thin greased moustache and slicked-back hair. He wishes he could speak French but contents himself with a heavy accent as he gazes through Bliss, saying, “Bonsoir, Monsieur. Have you zhe reservation?”

  Bliss is tempted to produce his warrant card and muscle his way in, but he hasn’t the energy. “I’m meeting a friend — Mr. Fox.”

  “Perhaps he is expecting you, oui?”

  Bliss rolls his eyes, telling himself, This is crazy. It can wait till Monday.

  “Have you zhe tie and zhe jack
et, sir?” continues Greasy as he focuses into the space above Bliss’s head.

  “Does it look as though …” Bliss starts, then mellows. “Never mind. Please tell Mr. Fox that I’ll see him on Monday morning as scheduled.”

  “Just one moment, sir,” says Greasy, dropping the accent, then he snaps his fingers at a skinny youth who is trying unsuccessfully to fill the pants of his predecessor. “John will find something suitable for you if you’d care to follow him.”

  “These look brand new,” muses Bliss a few minutes later as he takes the linen jacket and slacks from the boy, and then he spots the designer’s label and gives a low whistle. “No wonder you charge so much for dinner,” he quips as he slips on the coat and knots an Armani tie.

  “Shoes, sir,” says John, handing Bliss a pair of hand-made Italian slip-ons without questioning his size.

  “You’re good,” replies Bliss as he steps comfortably into them.

  “Commander Fox has taken zhe private dining room zhis evening,” explains Greasy, leading Bliss past some of London’s hottest celebrities who are basking in the cool of a monumental ice carving of the Trevi fountain centred in the main room.

  “He would,” mutters Bliss, and mentally ups his order from Tournedos Rossini to Lobster Newburg, although he knows he’ll be lucky if he gets a nibble at the olive bowl.

  Candlelight glitters off diamonds and quartz alike, and as Bliss sweeps the glitzy restaurant he is unable to pick out the real from the fake. A few faces have a certain familiarity; movies or television, he assumes, though he rarely watches either and is at a loss for names.

  Greasy stops, hands on double doors, and turns to give Bliss a quick final inspection before pulling.

  “Bon anniversaire, monsieur ,” he says as he swings open the doors, and Bliss stands mute for a second before bursting into laughter.

  “You bastards,” he says through the laughter as fiancée Daisy, daughter Samantha and her husband, Peter, Daphne Lovelace, and a host of colleagues stand with raised glasses, singing “Happy Birthday.”