Lovelace and Button (International Investigators) Inc. (14 page)

“Dave, believe me. She would have phoned. She
lives
on the phone. In fact, she's just waiting for the day when she can have one implanted.”

“Maybe her batteries are dead?”

“Dave… She'd walk up to a complete stranger in the street and ask to use their phone.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. She often does it. And she's so damn cheeky about it that they always say yes.”

“I guess I'd better call the local police, then,” concedes Bliss, before arranging a rendezvous with the anxious man in nearby Bellingham. A few minutes later he suffers a mild rebuke from the city's duty officer.

“Mebbe you should'a called us earlier,” says Captain Prudenski of the Whatcom County force. “It's pretty damn cold out tonight.”

“I know,” says Bliss as he and Daisy stand shivering in the booth. “Though I still think they've probably snuck in somewhere toasty.”

“Wait there,” instructs Prudenski. “I'm on my way.” Bliss uses the time to call his daughter in England, illogically persuading himself that Daphne might have phoned her. But his son-in-law answers and skips the pleasantries.

“Dave, what the hell's going on? Edwards has put me in charge of the suicide squad until you get back.”

“At least he's keeping it in the family.”

“You've really pissed him off this time. He told the commissioner you were on the case, and the next thing you're on the front page of this morning's
Daily Express
in a frickin' bathtub.”

“Oh, no!”

“The old man wants blood — yours or Edwards'.”

“As if I care,” says Bliss, leaning on his letter of resignation and knowing that Edwards is no longer the only person with entries in a little black book. “But if Edwards drops me in it, I'll make sure he turns up as a villain in my novel.”

“Anyway. What are you doing out of bed at this time? I thought you'd arranged to have a little French hen over there to keep your naughty bits warm.”

“That's no way to talk to your father-in-law,” jokes Bliss as he snuggles closer to Daisy, though his tone darkens as he adds, “Actually, Peter, we are waiting for the local law to show up. Daphne's gone missing.”

“Missing?”

“Yeah. Though I'm sure she'll surface — she always does. Anyway, anything new on the suicide front?”

“Well it seems that at least half of the old dears sent their life savings to Canada in the weeks leading up to their deaths.”

“CNL Distribution?” queries Bliss.

“Most, but a load of different companies as well, although they're all in British Columbia. And the money was always transferred through Western Union.”

“Okay, Peter. Get me specifics — names, dates, amounts, et cetera — and I'll get hold of Mike Phillips in Vancouver. He should be back from Hawaii any day now. Do we know how much?”

“Probably half a million quid in total.”

“Phew!”

“Mind, it could be more.”

“Okay. Well, let me know. And tell Edwards that I'll deny any knowledge if he tries to claim that he pulled me out of the conference.”

“I think you'd better tell him that yourself.”

“So is zhat true,
Daavid?
Are you are going to write your book about zhe man in zhe iron mask —
l'homme au masque de fer?
“ Daisy asks with alarm in her voice as he puts down the phone.

“I haven't decided.”

“But you promised my mother zhat you would not.”

“I know, Daisy. But sometimes you have to lift the veils from the past to move forward into the future,” he says, recalling the torture that Daisy's family had suffered at the hands of the Nazis, and the fear that his exposé could reignite the torment. However, the look on Daisy's face suggests that he is close to sleeping on the settee for the rest of the week, so he quickly softens. “But I won't write it if she really doesn't want me to.”

“Chief Inspector Bliss?” calls a voice from a police cruiser, and twenty minutes later Bliss is accompanied, with Daisy in tow, into the briefing room of Bellingham's police station by Captain Roddy Prudenski.

“Five foot two, blue eyes, grey hair…” Bliss begins to a hastily assembled audience of thirty officers and state troopers, though he can't help feeling he's wasting his time, and theirs, thinking,
How many eccentric English geriatrics would you expect to find cycling the backwoods of Washington state in a kidney bathtub at two in the morning?
But he carries on: “She's accompanied by Trina Button…”

“We've already checked all hospitals and hotels,” says the captain once Bliss has completed his descriptions. “The last reliable sighting was a little after midday yesterday when they crossed the border from Canada. And they were apparently seen a few hours later heading inland towards the foothills of Mount Baker, though that's not confirmed.”

“I can confirm that,” says Bliss recounting the woodman's sighting, “though I've already checked the area where he says he saw them — nothing.”

“There's that monastery place, sir,” suggests one officer sharply from the back, and Bliss picks up a certain disdain in the man's expression which is immediately echoed by Prudenski.

“It's a bunch of aging hippies with a place up in the Cascades,” snorts the captain. “They call themselves missionaries, though God knows what they do there. To be honest, we kind'a learned our lesson after the massacres at Jonestown and Waco, so we don't trouble them and they don't trouble us.”

“It might be worth a look,” suggests Bliss, though Prudenski is noncommittal. “Mebbe,” he says, then continues with the briefing as officers make notes. “Current temperature is thirty degrees and considerably colder at higher elevations. The chopper is already up; highway patrols are on full alert.” Then he turns to Bliss. “Anything else you can tell us about the ladies, sir?”

“Miss Lovelace has been missing on previous occasions,” admits Bliss, adding, unnecessarily, “Though she's always shown up eventually.”

“Let's hope that's the case this time,” says the captain. “That's a mighty big chunk of real estate to get lost in up there.”

However, the size of the search area is quickly whittled down once the sighting by the logger and the probable average speed of the Kidneymobile have been factored in. Large areas of virtually unscalable mountains and inaccessible forests have also been discounted so that, by the time Rick Button arrives from Vancouver, most of the possible terrain has already been covered.

“I checked with the immigration people at the border,” says Rick, “and they definitely haven't slipped back into Canada. So it shouldn't be too difficult to find them.”

But three hours later, as the first rays of dawn creep over the mountains in the east to sparkle on the blush of frost that dusts the treetops, there is still no sign of the missing women. Bliss and Daisy have aimlessly driven the back roads of Washington all night, and have repeatedly tripped over police cars doing the same thing, while a searchlight from the force helicopter has flashed across their path on more than one occasion.

“They certainly don't mess about here,” Bliss says, speculating on how long it might take to get as many men on the ground in similar circumstances in rural England, and he looks to Daisy for a response. But she has reclined the passenger seat and is fast asleep.

“You poor thing,” he breathes, and realizes that he too is close to exhaustion.
Perhaps I should stop for a snooze,
he is thinking, when he spots the Mission of Mercy's signboard.

“That must be the ‘monastery place,'” he muses, and Daisy surfaces as he bumps onto the gravel shoulder to use the entryphone.

“Hi. I'm Chief Inspector Bliss of Scotland Yard,” he says after waiting several minutes for the phone to be answered. “I'm sorry to bother you so early, but we're searching for a couple of missing women.”

“There are no women here, sir.”

“They were riding in a funny kind of bicycle thing…”

“Like I said, sir, there are no women here.”

“I just wondered if they might have stopped by here last night, seeking shelter.”

“
Daavid,
look,” says Daisy, slipping out of the car and tugging anxiously at his arm.

“What is it, Daisy?” he asks, as the voice from the entryphone is saying, “Sorry, sir. But we have no knowledge of any such women. Now if that is all…”

It takes twenty minutes for Captain Prudenski and a posse to arrive at the scene, by which time Bliss has parked discreetly down the road, with the gates of the monastery some distance away in his rearview mirror.

“Look,” says Bliss as he leaps from his car and holds out a mud-stained white handkerchief to his American colleague. “It's one of Miss Lovelace's,” he adds with absolute certainty. “See the embroidered initials,” he carries on, pointing out the
D.O.L.
neatly stitched into the corner. “It was right outside the missionary place back there.”

“What do they say?” asks Prudenski with a nod to the monastery's gates.

“They deny any knowledge,” says Bliss. “But I don't believe them.”

“Let me try,” says Prudenski. However, he gets a similarly polite cold shoulder from the man answering the
entryphone a few minutes later, though when he requests a face-to-face meeting with someone in authority, the voice noticeably hardens.

“Do you have a search warrant, Captain Prudenski?”

“No.”

“Then there is nothing to discuss. Please be good enough to leave us in peace.”

“Now what?” questions Bliss, though with memories of the eighty-four deaths during the Branch Davidian debacle at Waco in 1993 in mind, Prudenski is backing off faster than a grizzly hunter with a jammed gun.

“She may have just dropped it as they passed,” he suggests, and Bliss reluctantly admits to the possibility, though he questions, “So where were they going? Where does this road lead?”

The road leads nowhere, coming to an abrupt end just two miles further on, where it runs into a small mountainside lake.

“This doesn't look good, Captain,” says Bliss a few minutes later, as he carefully scans the soft mud of the lakeshore but finds no trace of bicycle tires amongst the pad marks of bears and wolves. Then he turns worriedly to Prudenski. “If they'd doubled back towards the main highway we would have found them last night, and they most certainly didn't come this way.”

“But there are no other roads,” admits Prudenski, scratching his head as he checks his map.

“In that case; that only leaves the monastery,” pronounces Bliss positively.

By the time Trina and Daphne have been escorted to an austere windowless room on the building's ground floor, the ecclesiastical aura of the Mission of Mercy Monastery has vanished.

“It smells more like a hospital,” Trina whispers as soon as the door closes and an electronic bolt slides firmly into place.

“I know,” Daphne whispers back. “But why are we whispering?”

Because, though neither will admit it for fear of spooking the other, they have both been rattled from the moment the giant double gates had swung open, revealing two deeply hooded men carrying a couple of burka-like shrouds which they insisted the women should wear.

“We wouldn't want to drive the monks crazy with desire,” Trina giggled as she struggled into the shapeless gown, but then she shrieked in alarm. “Help! I can't see a thing.”

“Neither can I,” Daphne agreed, feeling such unease that she purposefully dropped her monogrammed handkerchief.

“We don't usually permit anyone to see our faces or hear our voices,” one of the men explained in a gravelly tone, then informed the women that they would have to remain in the dark until they were ensconced inside the monastery. And thereafter, every attempt by Trina to garner information from their guide was silently rebuffed.

Several minutes of stumbling led them to the monastery, where doors opened and closed automatically as they processed through the building, until finally, following the hum of the electronic door lock, a metallic voice instructed them to remove their gowns, and continued, “Your presence has already greatly disturbed our community, and we now require you to remain in your room and fully respect our privacy.”

“That's pretty snotty,” Daphne mutters as she pulls off the robe, and she follows up with a half-hearted suggestion that the monks might ritually sacrifice young virgins.

“No fear for us, then,” Trina laughs. However, her laughter rings hollowly a moment later when she spots a surveillance camera high up on the wall of the small bedroom. “Don't look,” she cautions, but Daphne immediately spins to confront the device.

“There's something very funny going on here,” Trina says a few minutes later, after unsuccessfully testing her shoulder against the solid steel door. “I heard a telephone ringing when we came in.”

“I know,” Daphne admits. “And he said they didn't have baths, but there's a bathroom right here.”

“He lied. I didn't think they were supposed to lie,” says Trina, slumping onto one of the hard beds and asking, “And did you notice the shoes they were wearing?”

“Well they certainly weren't rope-soled sandals,” Daphne replies, going on to speculate that they had looked more like the gleaming shoes of army officers. But it was the sound of voices that had taken her most by surprise. Despite several rather obvious attempts by their escort to “shush” other inhabitants at their approach, Daphne had clearly picked up the high-pitched chattering of Chinese. “I knew a bit of Mandarin once,” she tells Trina, and demonstrates with a few words before admitting that she had been unable to decipher what she'd heard.

“I'm sure I heard some pop music,” Trina recalls excitedly as they continue piecing together the puzzle, like escaped hostages trying to lead the police back to their kidnappers.