Deadly Sin

by James Hawkins

  “I was in Cannes,” he says. “It was supposed to be a surprise. But your mother said she didn’t know where you were.”

  Now Daisy is surprised. “You saw my mozher?” she questions confusedly.

  “Oui,” he says, then leaves her an opening. The silence deafens him after a few seconds. The crushing pain of disappointment he felt Saturday night at the Carlton is nothing compared to his anguish as he waits for the lies.

  He doesn’t have to wait long. “I went to Corsica for zhe weekend wiz my cousin,” she explains. “Didn’t my mozher tell you?”

  Play it cool. Tread carefully. “Your cousin?” he counters.

  “He works on zhe ferry …”

  “So, why didn’t your mother know?”

  Again the silence — longer this time. Maybe she’s waiting for me, he thinks. Maybe she’s put the phone down.

  “Daisy,” he calls.

  “Oui. I am here,” she says, but she still doesn’t have an answer.

  “I asked you —”

  “Daavid. I know,” she says with tears in her voice. “But zhis is very hard for me. I cannot … I cannot …”

  “Well, call me when you can,” he snaps and drops the phone.

  That was unnecessary, he tries telling himself, and reaches for the handset. Then he pulls back, thinking, Cousin — that’s a good one. He’s probably some garlic-breath’d, Gitanes-smoking, pot-bellied plonker with a puny little Renault.

  Daphne Lovelace is at home, packing — just one small suitcase, as per Tony’s instructions.

  “Christ, that was quick,” says Anne McGregor as she meets Tony Oswald at her office door.

  “She wanted to go to St. Mike’s,” says Tony as he shakes the superintendent’s hand. “They usually have vacancies, and this heat has certainly made a big difference. Anyway, not everyone wants to spend their last few days repenting before they get the sky-shuttle.”

  “Hah! That’s rich,” spits McGregor, still peeved. “I let her off for burglary and assault and she wangles a free pass to the Almighty.”

  “Well, it’s not particularly free,” he stresses, suggestively rubbing a thumb and forefinger together. “That’s the main reason why they usually have spaces. That, and the fact that most of them are halfway out the back door before they get in the front.”

  “Well, that’s that then,” says Anne McGregor resignedly as she pulls Daphne’s charge sheet from her in-tray and writes, “No further action — Divine retribution,” in the box marked “Outcome and disposal.”

  “So, did you have to twist her arm?” she inquires as she drops the charge sheet in the out tray.

  “No,” he laughs. “Far from it. I usually take them in kicking and screaming, but she’s got no family or friends — none close, anyway — so I think she’s happy to go.”

  David Bliss is one person Daphne would call a friend, but he has been so wrapped up with Edwards and his messed-up weekend that he still hasn’t tried to contact her.

  He is in his office, on his computer, checking his emails every ten minutes, waiting for Daisy to pop up with a good excuse while hoping she doesn’t. Lies are his life. He has spent a career face to face with transgressors, victims, and witnesses and has often been bamboozled by all three. But he can’t get away from the screen and the hope that she just might come up with a plausible story, and he doodles around until he follows links that take him down a worm-hole in cyberspace, where he finds himself in a world as mind-boggling as Middle Earth.

  Pastor Paul Robinson is there, on digital TV — bouffant hair, rubbery lips, tombstone teeth, and an Aston Martin in the parking lot — proselytizing against the evils of Islam and preaching that the Duke of Edinburgh has been possessed by the Devil at the behest of Allah to punish the Queen for daring to defile a holy site.

  “What a load of rubbish,” Bliss mutters, then digs deeper, reading the maniacal ramblings of otherwise intelligent men; scholars of all stripes, vehemently and sincerely debating such ethereal matters as the precise location of heaven, the cubic capacity of the Ark and the exact number of animals Noah crammed aboard, and whether or not Allah really does have an unlimited supply of virgins at his disposal to dole out to martyrs — seventy-two to a bed — and what happens to them once they’re deflowered.

  The phone buzzes. Daisy, he thinks, grabbing it quickly, but it’s his daughter, Samantha.

  “I still haven’t been able to get back to Daphne.”

  “Neither have I,” he lies, and immediately feels a pang of guilt. “I’ll try again in a minute.”

  “What about Daisy?” she asks, and he wishes she hadn’t.

  “My own fault,” he says, guessing she’ll catch on from the tone of his voice.

  “Oh, Dad.”

  “I should just quit my job and pack my bags for France …” he begins, then quickly changes tune. “Have you seen this Pastor Paul idiot on satellite?”

  “Careful, Dad. He’s got a bigger following than Céline Dion.”

  “He’s also got more hair. But I just don’t get it.”

  “It’s called free speech, Dad,” says Samantha, ever the defence lawyer.

  “No, it’s not what he says that bugs me,” explains Bliss. “It’s that people believe it. That they believe all this ‘love thy neighbour’ stuff, then go round slitting each other’s throats.”

  “They can believe what they want.”

  “Not when it hurts other people,” he insists. “Anyway, doesn’t it strike you as odd that it’s always the ones who pray the hardest who get clobbered the worst?”

  “That’s just God’s way of testing them,” she says, playing Devil’s advocate.

  A buzz cuts into the line. “Got another call,” he says, and quickly switches.

  “Daavid,” whimpers a voice hoarse from crying. “I have to talk wiz you.”

  “Go on, then.”

  “No …” she sniffs wetly. “I cannot talk on zhe telephone. Can you come back?”

  “You’re kidding …”

  “Please, Daavid.”

  Now what? “I’ll call you back,” he says. “I have to think, and I’ve got someone on the other line.”

  “Promise.”

  “Yes. Oui — je promesse.”

  That’s the problem with long-distance dating, he reminds himself as he pauses before cutting back to Samantha. What is she trying to tell me? “It was just a fling; I was lonely; you let me down; you promised me a romantic break and I waited for you; he meant nothing to me; I want you.”It’s all about trust, he tells her in his mind. How can I trust you now? The first time I let you down, you rush off with your “cousin” for a dirty weekend in Corsica.

  “Dad?” says Samantha.

  “Sorry, love. Where was I?”

  “You were profaning the Almighty.”

  “Who, Paul Robinson?

  “No — well, yes. I suppose you could include him, but I meant the other one.”

  “Oh, Him,” emphasizes Bliss, then returns to his rant. “What gets me is that they all claim that they’re right, that God is on their side, and that they’re the only ones who’ll go to heaven.”

  “Maybe —” tries Samantha, but Bliss steamrolls her.

  “And the worst thing is that they’ve spent two thousand years killing anyone who disagreed with them.” Then he launches into a lengthy list of religiously inspired programs that were designed to wipe out the Muslims, Cathars, Catholics, Huguenots, Quakers, and Jews, before concluding, with a sardonic laugh, “If they don’t stop killing each other soon there won’t be room in heaven for the rest of us.”

  “But …” is all that Samantha has time to say when a messenger rushes into Bliss’s office without knocking.

  “Commander-Fox-wants-you-now-sir,” gushes the boy in a single breath, and he is gone before Bliss can quiz him.

  “Gotta go,” he calls to Samantha as he drops the phone, and a minute later he is in the control room watching the monitors as hundreds of officers descend on the scene of a
traffic accident at Hyde Park Corner.

  “It’s the Queen’s Rolls,” explains Fox, stabbing a screen, and the air is alive as controllers call in units to cordon streets, set up barricades, and escort ambulances. “She was on her way home from hospital.”

  “That’s all I need …” Bliss is sighing as a telephone operator hands him a phone and makes it worse.

  “Mr. Edwards at the Home Office for you, sir.”

  “This better not be what it looks like,” spits Edwards into Bliss’s ear.

  “Bugger,” mouths Bliss, then clamps a hand over the mouthpiece while he turns to Fox.

  “Where’s the Duke, sir?”

  “Balmoral — shooting grouse or something. The season’s just started, apparently.”

  “Thank goodness … Shooting?”

  Ten minutes later Bliss is back on the phone with Samantha.

  “False alarm. One of the paparazzi broadsided her limo on his motorbike.”

  “Let’s face it, Dad,” says Samantha. “If he bumped her off it’s not as though the House of Windsor would fall — it would just get a facelift.”

  “Not a particularly attractive one, though,” adds Bliss, before explaining that he phoned Ted Donaldson in Westchester and discovered that Daphne had been arrested.

  “What on earth for?”

  “Being slightly loony as far as I can tell. I think she’s finally lost her marbles,” he says, then gives a blow-by-blow account of her savage attack on the Jenkinses’ television set and Superintendent McGregor’s index finger. “It was quite a bite, apparently,” he says as Samantha steps in, seizing an opportunity to headline.

  “I’ll happily defend her. I could make mincemeat of —”

  “Calm down. They’re not prosecuting,” says Bliss. “Ted came to her rescue. But she is going into an old people’s home.”

  “Oh no,” sighs Samantha, knowing the connotation. “But she was as fit as a fiddle the last time I saw her.”

  “In body, yes …”

  “Alzheimer’s?” questions Samantha, but Bliss doesn’t know.

  “She must be pushing ninety — she’s eighty-five at least.”

  Trina Button’s mother is also in her mid-eighties, but Winifred Goodenow is fit in neither body nor mind. However, that is not her assessment as she shuffles along the side of a busy Vancouver highway in the fluffy pumpkin bedroom slippers she stole from the bargain bin at Wal-Mart after last year’s Thanksgiving.

  Tornadoes whisked up by flying trucks and buses threaten to whip her into the ditch, but she struggles on with her sights firmly set on the distant mountains.

  “I’m practising for the El Camino,” she yells to concerned motorists as she mistakes the forested mountains of British Columbia for the stark peaks of the Pyrenees, while her daughter is at Vancouver’s central police station tying knots in the duty officer’s brain as he attempts to fill out a missing person report.

  “Colour of hair?”

  “Brown,” replies Trina with absolute conviction.

  “Good.”

  Then Trina vacillates. “Well — brownish. More like the colour of banana cake if you accidentally leave it in the oven for four hours — know what I mean?”

  “Not really, ma’am.”

  “Okay. Imagine a Starbucks latte — the regular one, not the double-shot, dark roast, French vanilla.”

  “Right …”

  “Now add a couple of extra teaspoons of cream — real, not that synthetic stuff.” She leans in conspiratori-ally. “Java-Bean puts that stuff in their coffees. It tastes like …”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” sighs Constable Merchant, screwing up the form and pulling out a fresh one. “I can’t write all that.”

  “Well, is this really necessary?” inquires Trina. “Can’t you just tell your people to look for her? I mean, how many loopy old ladies with fluffy pumpkins on their feet do you have on the loose at any one time?”

  “I’m sorry, but it’s essential, Mrs. Button,” explains the officer officiously. “I can’t put out a bulletin until I’ve got all the information.”

  Trina swings her arms high above her head and takes a deep breath as she calms herself with the tadasana yoga pose, saying, “I understand perfectly.” Then she slowly exhales. “You are just doing your job, officer.”

  “Precisely, ma’am. So if I was to put that your mother’s hair was on the slightly creamier side of a cappuccino, would that be right?”

  Trina slowly relaxes her arms and brings her hands together in front of her in the namaste pose. “Yes. That’s absolutely correct, officer.”

  “Great. Now we’re getting somewhere,” says Merchant with a wan smile as he starts to write. But Trina drops her arms and grabs his pen in alarm.

  “That’s not her colour now, of course. She’s just sort of battle-axe grey now. That was the colour when she had colour.”

  Merchant loses it. “For goodness’ sake, woman,” he shouts. “According to you your mother is a banana-shaped, peach-skinned, coffee-headed …”

  “What’s going on?” demands the duty sergeant, Dave Brougham, as he barrels out of his office.

  “Sergeant Brougham,” yells Trina, spotting a familiar face. Then she rushes across the room and grabs him by the lapels, shouting. “You’ve gotta find her. She’ll get run over. You’ve gotta find her.”

  “Don’t tell me your bloody guinea pig’s escaped again,” snarls Brougham as he peels her off. “I’m fed up with you — always complaining …”

  “Guinea pig?” echoes Trina thoughtfully, then lightning strikes. In her panic over her mother’s disappearance she has forgotten to lock the creature into its cage. “Oh my God. Yes,” she shrieks and rushes back to the duty officer, yelling, “Quick. Get out another form.”

  Brougham is right behind her, and he grabs her harshly, shouting, “Shuddup. I’ve warned you before about wasting police time. Now get out before I have you arrested.”

  “But Serg—”

  “Get out.”

  “But Serg—” It’s the duty officer now.

  “And you can shuddup too,” Brougham shouts over his shoulder as he hustles the squirming woman towards the front door. Then she drops from his grasp and curls into a ball on the floor.

  The front door opens, and Inspector Mike Phillips of the RCMP marches in then stops dead.

  “Trina?” he says, recognizing the bundle at his feet as a woman he has known for several years. “What on earth are you doing?”

  “The balasana pose,” she explains. “It’s yoga.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, I had to give up kick-boxing cuz I kept kicking myself in the head and giving myself concussions.”

  chapter seven

  “Let us offer a prayer to our patron saint,” intones Samuel Fitzgerald in a sacerdotal whine as Daphne Lovelace shuffles into the common room wearing her favourite Sunday hat and expecting sloppy porridge and a plastic mug of stale tea.

  “St. Michael the Archangel. Defend us in the day of battle,” Fitzgerald passionately implores, raising his eyes reverently to the brown stain on the ceiling where a blocked upstairs toilet has overflowed. “Be our safeguard against the wickedness and snares of the Devil …”

  Daphne stops and searches for a seat. Four empty high-backed upholstered chairs have been arranged to one side of the altar (a collapsible picnic table covered with a disposable mauve tablecloth from Marks and Spencer’s “Trendy” collection, supporting a silver-plate candelabra and a brassy crucifix with a wobbly base). But as Daphne heads for one of the vacant seats, Fitzgerald’s wife, Hilda, blocks her path, whispering, “Go to the back, Daphne.”

  “This week we have said farewell and Godspeed to four of our dear, dear friends,” continues Fitzgerald, with a crack in his voice that belies his brutish appearance as he gestures to the empty chairs. Then he walks behind them, meaningfully laying his fight-gnarled hands over the back of each in turn as he ascribes to the furniture the identity of its recently departed occu
pant.

  “Petunia Rickworth of this parish, aged eighty-two; Nathaniel Wentworth of Mouton-Didsley, aged seventy-nine; Martha …”

  Daphne tunes out the Sunday preacher, who on the other six days is the gardener and general factotum, while she looks around the room at the shells of seventeen women and four men, slumped in their seats like inadequately propped scarecrows, and wonders which of them will be next.

  “And Pricilla Grantley, ” Fitzgerald carries on, as Daphne attempts to elbow herself between two women seemingly asleep on a settee.

  “Bugger off,” swears one of the women with one eye open as she spreads herself.

  “Those of you who wish to may come forward for a blessing,” invites Fitzgerald, and a few struggle out of their seats and shuffle forward so that the gardener-cumplumber can lay his enormous soil-stained hands on their heads, but at the back of the room, Daphne crumples into a flood of noisy tears.

  “I don’t like it here. I wanna go home,” she snuffles loudly, and Hilda Fitzgerald comes running.

  “What is it, dear?”

  “There’s nowhere to sit and I wanna go home,” cries Daphne as she stands, slump-shouldered, with tears dripping onto the floor.

  “Have you taken your tablets this morning?”

  “Yes,” sniffles Daphne. “But I don’t want to stay.”

  “C’mon, then. Let’s get you back to your room,” says Hilda, offering a Kleenex and a guiding hand, and Daphne meekly follows.

  It has been nearly a week since Daphne packed her suitcase and said a tearful goodbye to the only home she has known for more than forty years, but she still gags on the stench of stale urine and boiled cabbage as she drags her feet back to the room she shares with the bodily remains of Emily Mountjoy.

  Hilda Fitzgerald, a fifty-five-year-old care assistant who doubles as the residence’s cook, guides her aging charge firmly along vinyl-floored corridors, passing other residents who are now just shadows of the people they once were — creatures of the twilight, both haunted and haunting — as they shuffle silently like phantoms caught halfway between day and night, waiting for the light to go out and the reaper’s scythe to strike.