Crazy Lady (28 page)

The pearls are real, though mainly seeded, and buckets of live oysters wait to be sprung by gamblers willing to risk a few dollars to discover a little gem.

And after the market the two women share a pineapple-laced pizza before taking a late-night stroll along Kalla
Road where much of the entertainment is provided by the tourists themselves.

“Oh my God, look at this,” Trina laughs, pointing Daphne towards a man welded into a metal straitjacket.

“It's fake,” said Daphne with hardly a glance, but she acknowledges to herself that many of the freakily attired show-offs are just misguided people living in a fantasy land.

By midnight, scantily dressed hookers are out in full force along with the panhandlers and the drunks who are starting to fall out of the bars.

“Time to go home,” Daphne says when she has sidestepped one too many inebriates, but they spend another hour laughing at their experiences over pina coladas in the bar of the Sheraton before finding their way to their room.

“We really ought to be looking for Craddock,” Daphne suggests tiredly around 2:00 a.m. as she gets into bed, but Trina isn't concerned. “It's an island,” she says. “He can't have gone far. The police will soon pick him up.”

Joseph Creston is still asleep when Mike Phillips checks in at the hospital on his way to the office the following morning.

“He hasn't left the room all night,” the guard on Janet's room whispers to Phillips when he inquires.

“Phone calls?”

“He switched it off.”

“How's Janet doing?”

“Still the same, I think,” replies the young woman officer. “She sort of drifts in and out.”

“Saying anything?”

“She mumbles things about ‘God' and ‘Our Lord Saviour' and ‘Sorry.' She says ‘Sorry' a lot, but nothing else.”

“Stick with it,” Phillips is saying as Creston surfaces.

“Ah, Inspector. Glad I caught you,” says the drowsy man. “I wanted your opinion. I was thinking of having my wife flown back to England.”

“Nothing to do with me,” says Phillips putting up his hands to block the man. “That will be up to the doctors.”

“Only I could charter an air ambulance. She wouldn't suffer.”

“Like I said, not my department.” Then he checks his watch. “Sorry must dash… meeting… we've found Craddock.”

Creston's face falls, but he quickly picks himself up. “Oh. Good show. Where?”

“State secret,” says Phillips on his way out of the door. “State secret.”

Now let's see what happens
, muses the inspector as he heads for his car and the police station.

Chief Superintendent Edwards is clearing his desk for the day when Mason calls.

“I need something else, Mike,” says Creston's right-hand man.

“Not at the office,” spits the police commander, knowing that all lines in and out of the headquarters are recorded. “I'll call you back in thirty minutes.”

“Make it ten.”

Half an hour later Mike Phillips takes the call he's expecting from his English counterpart. “That didn't take long,” he muses under his breath as he checks his watch and puts on a sweet voice. “Chief Superintendent Edwards,” he trills. “Pleasure to hear from you again — and so soon. What can I do for you?”

“Just wondering how things were progressing?”

“Fine, thanks.”

“Any developments?”

“Developments?” queries Phillips, playing the British officer along. “What did you have in mind?”

“Weren't you looking for a private dick?”

“Were we?”

“Look, Mike,” says Edwards, suddenly aware that he's hitting concrete. “Mr. Creston is in the big league.”

“So I've heard.”

“Anyway. I just thought you should know that. So, if there's anything he should know…”

“I'll be sure to tell him.”

“Good. Good. And if I can help in any way.”

“Actually, you can,” says Phillips, pausing for a second before pushing a red button. “I'd like copies of the files relating to the deaths of his three children.”

Edwards stalls, “Oh. I don't think…”

“Well, you did ask.”

“I… I know, but I don't have access,” continues Edwards trying to backtrack. “It was a different force… long time ago. Doubt we could find them now.”

“OK,” says Phillips, seemingly letting the other man off the hook. “I'll call you if I need anything else.”

Mike Phillips puts the phone down before Edwards has a chance to reply and mutters, “Sucker,” before gathering his team around him for a briefing.

“OK,” he says. “I may be wrong but it looks to me that Creston hired Craddock to snatch his wife.”

“Because?” asks one of the officers, leaving Phillips in a mental vacuum.

“Still working on that,” he says after a few seconds. “But I don't buy that he loves her so damn much that he rushed here to be by her side. I might have done forty years ago, but it's a bit lame now. Christ, I'm amazed he even remembers her name.”

Phillips is wrong about Creston in some ways. The words “Till death do us part” have always held him locked to Janet, but so has the advice of a specialist lawyer hired by his father after the death of the third child.

“My suggestion would be to keep her as far away as possible,” the white-haired family law expert opined. “But never divorce her. That way you'll always retain control.”

“And that's important?” Joseph Creston the younger questioned.

“Yes it is, young man. Very important,” the lawyer continued sagely. “Get her into a convent or similar sort of place where she'll be isolated from the rest of the world and from the temptation to talk.”

The remote community of Beautiful was just as far from leafy Dewminster as the North Pole, and not a lot warmer, and it fitted the lawyer's criteria. “It's for the best,” the elder Creston told his son's wife as he and Peter Symmonds ushered her aboard his executive jet while his son sat at home and wept.

“But it wasn't my fault,” Janet cried as she was escorted up the plane's steps. “I loved him. I loved them all.”

“I know,” Creston Sr. soothed. “Maybe you loved them too much.”

“No.”

“Maybe you smothered them with love.”

“No. No I didn't,” she protested, but it made no difference. The sedative that Symmonds injected kicked in, and by the time she awoke, Wayne Browning was inculcating her into his sect, flagellating her into submission, and feeding her drugs and whacky notions in equal proportions until she no longer knew her own mind; she no longer knew for certain what happened to her children.

“Creston is anxious to get her out of the country,” explains Phillips as he continues briefing his staff. “Now why would that be?”

“Worried about her,” gets a young female officer nowhere.

“Worried she might talk now she's not under Browning's control,” tries another.

“Could be,” agrees Phillips pointing at the officer who made the suggestion, asking, “What have we got on that Beautiful place? Who was digging into it?”

“Me,” says another officer putting up his hand. “It's early days but the finances of the place don't seem to stand up.”

“In what way?”

“Off the record,” says the officer, “but our man in Mountain Falls, the nearest town, reckons that Browning and his harem keep the whole town afloat.”

“Big spenders?”

“Big laundry is more like it. Apparently the banks up there handle millions for him, but most of it doesn't stay long.”

“Where does he get it?”

“Pot growing possibly,” suggests the officer, “but I'm only guessing. We'd need a warrant to look at his records.”

“And we don't have grounds,” says Phillips knowingly. Then he has an idea. “What about the tax man. Look into it. See if they know what's happening.”

“What about Craddock?” asks the woman officer.

“Still on the lam in Hawaii,” admits Phillips and gets six volunteers to immediately go in search of him.

“Very funny,” laughs Phillips “but actually I've already got two of my best men out there.”

Phillips' “men” in Hawaii are sleeping in this morning. In fact there's a very good chance they'll sleep until lunchtime.

Craddock, on the other hand, is wide awake.
I could always live rough
, he tells himself as he saunters along a black volcanic beach lined with shady coconut palms under a tropical sky, thinking that life would be just peachy if there weren't a storm brewing over the horizon.

The wayward PI has gone as far as he can get without dropping off the Hawaiian archipelago into the Pacific, but the volcanoes and legendary sunsets of the Big Island hold no interest for him. His only concern is surviving for as long as possible without using either his own or Davies' credit card.

“I'll pay cash,” he insisted the first night in a backstreet hotel in the capital, Hilo, but he knows that the money he
hurriedly withdrew from a few ATMs before leaving Honolulu won't stretch more than a couple of weeks, and he knows he can never risk using the card again.

David Bliss is also walking a palm-fringed beach, but the only storm clouds on his horizon are quickly evaporating as he realizes that his manuscript is coming together faster and better than he could ever have anticipated

The Château Roger is now complete, the lovelorn Prince's passionate plea to the woman of his dreams is written and already in the hands of a courier, and the mask is fitted.

Will the plan work? Will he succeed?

Yes
, Bliss adamantly decides as he sits on the promenade at St-Juan-sur-Mer with both the château and the fortress in view, preparing to write the final chapters of his novel.
Because if he fails so will I. And I have no intentions of failing. This is the biggest challenge of my life. I cannot let Yolanda go — I will succeed.

“Good for you, Dad,” he imagines Samantha saying, and he pens his own feelings in the words of the newly incarcerated prince.

“I will permit no other images but yours into my mind. Your spirit is forever conjoined with mine. The silence of my cell rings with your joyous laughter; the air is scented by your sweet breath; the softness of your voluptuous body washes in on the gentle Mediterranean breeze and soothes my troubled heart.

“The velvet-surfaced alabaster of these walls enfolds and protects me as if I am encased by your womb; your heat warms me; your inner glow lights my path. I am nourished by memories of you and encouraged by the certainty that, when I am reborn, it will be into your sweet bosom. Until that time I will countenance neither sunrise nor sunset, for here is but a single solitary night that will break into a
glorious dawn when you return to me. And I will not countenance failure.”

“How is zhe writing?” questions Angeline as she strolls benignly across the deserted road from the bar L'Escale to peer over his shoulder.

“Good, Angeline,” he says with a broad smile. “It is very, very good.”

“And your friend… zhe woman you love. She comes back, no?”

“Soon, Angeline,” he replies with more conviction than he's had for a long time. “Very, very soon.”

A message awaits Bliss on the answering machine at his apartment, and he's surprised to hear the Canadian voice of Mike Phillips.

“Daphne Lovelace gave me your number,” says Phillips, once he's introduced himself. “Could you give me a call, Dave? I'm getting a bit of interference from someone in Scotland Yard and wonder if you have anything that I could use?”

“Michael Edwards,” exclaims Bliss as soon as Phillips has put him in the picture. “Do you mean that scumbag chief superintendent who's made everyone's life a bloody misery for the last god knows how long?”

“I guess so,” laughs Phillips.

“Oh, boy,” says Bliss. “Have you come to the right person. In fact, I've just made him the main villain in my novel.”

“Novel?” queries Phillips.

“Long story,” admits Bliss, “but you've got big problems if Edwards is on your case. He's shittier than a cesspit — specializes in black book diplomacy.”

“He's got nothing on me.”

“Then you're about the only one,” says Bliss. “Although he's never been able to pin anything on me either — though he's tried.”

“I need something, anything,” carries on Phillips, “especially if I can link him to Creston.”

“I'm really busy, Mike,” starts Bliss with his mind on his almost completed manuscript and Yolanda's anticipated return, but then he realizes that he has made the demolition of Edwards an important element of his script, and should he fail in that, his entire plan may crash. “I'll get hold of someone,” he says, and five minutes later he's talking quietly to his son-in-law, Chief Inspector Peter Bryan.

“How's the book coming on, Dad?” asks Bryan and gets a rebuke.

“Cut out this ‘Dad' stuff, Peter,” he snaps, then softens. “Actually it was Sam's idea, but it's going to work. You've got a brilliant wife.”

“I know that. But what can I do for you? Need a few tips in the bedroom department for when the lovely lady comes back?”

“Not from you, I don't,” he bites, then lets it go. “Actually, Peter, I need your help to nail Edwards' bollocks to the floor once and for all.”

“Breakfast under the banyan tree again,” trills Daphne as she peers out over the ocean watching the early morning surfers catching breakers that have rolled across a thousand miles of open water.

“Minnie and I were going to come here on our world tour,” she adds wistfully, recalling an old friend who threw herself under a train in a fit of depression.

Trina reaches across the table to gently stroke her elderly partner's hand. “I remember. That was a terrible thing. Are you OK now?”