Читать книгу Crazy Lady - James Hawkins - Страница 11

The West African rainy season is the subject of jubilation around the boardroom table at Creston headquarters in London.

"Looks like the crop from Ivory will be above expectations," croons Dawes, surveying the latest data from the man on the ground.

Joseph Creston is less optimistic. "Assuming the Muslims don't invade and destroy it."

"Why worry," retorts Dawes, ever the accountant. "It'll just push up the price of our Ghanaian and Nigerian output."

November in the coastal rainforests of southern Côte d'Ivoire may mean constant downpours, but along the southerly coast of mainland Europe, where the French Alps stumble heavily into the Mediterranean, brilliant sunshine still turns the beaches to gold and the clear cobalt sea mirrors the sky.

Detective Chief Inspector David Bliss is walking — hour after hour, mile after mile — seeking inspiration to complete his novel.

"Well, just how hard can it be?" he chastised Samantha, his lawyer daughter, when she questioned both his ability and his sanity. But now, as he wanders home along the deserted promenade in St-Juan-sur-Mer, he peers across the bay to the island of Ste. Marguerite and wonders whether or not he will ever be able to convince skeptical readers that he really has discovered the secret of the island's most notorious prisoner — the Man in the Iron Mask.

Despite the touch of warmth in the limpid afternoon air, the quays and beaches are silent, apart from the occasional screech of a hungry gull; the restaurants and beach-side bars are padlocked and boarded up. The transient workers of summer have been drawn north into the alpine ski resorts by the scent of money, and only a few arthritic and bronchitic Brits, desperate to escape the lugubrious English winter, wander in search of a fish and chip shop and a recent copy of the Daily Mirror.

Most of the apartments in Bliss's building in St-Juan-sur-Mer are as vacant as the beaches, and since his arrival at the beginning of September he has only twice spied another occupant. The whirring of the elevator usually signals the arrival of Daisy, the bubbly Provençale real estate agent whose company and bed he has been sharing for a while. Isn't this what you wanted? he has asked himself a dozen times. Somewhere where you won't be disturbed.

"I 'ave just zhe place for you," Daisy enthused with a glint in her eye. "No one will know you are here — except for me," she added, and at first the arrangement seemed perfect.

The sound of the elevator signals Daisy's approach — the third time today — and Bliss can't help thinking that he would have had more privacy had he stayed in London. But this is where it happened; this is where Louis XIV's legendary prisoner spent eleven years of his life locked in solitary confinement with his guards forbidden to see him or speak to him on pain of death.

"Maybe he was trying to write a book," muses Bliss wryly while he waits for Daisy's cheerful greeting as she lets herself in, although he knows that was not the case; he knows that the wretched man was consumed day and night by one thing alone: the love of the woman who owned his heart. He was waiting, day after day, month after month — waiting and praying that she would come to set him free.

"Hello, Daavid," Daisy calls in her heavily accented English. "I 'ave brought you zhe dinner."

"In here," he calls from the airy room that leads onto the balcony, the room where he has set up his writing station and where he can keep in view the masked prisoner's island fortress across the bay.

"Terrine de volaille," Daisy announces triumphantly as she places the dish of chicken on the table. Then she drapes herself around his neck, asking, "How iz zhe book today? Good, no?"

"No… yes… I don't know," answers Bliss despondently. "I'm beginning to think this was a huge mistake."

"Never mind," Daisy trills with a suggestive kiss. "Maybe we can do somezhing else."

Distractions, distractions, distractions, he muses to himself as he picks at the food, but at least he's grateful that he has escaped the television. "You must have satellite," Daisy insisted when he complained that more than ten minutes of translating the quickly spoken French on the local stations gave him a headache. "You can have maybe two hundred American channels."

"Terrific," he replied, but came to his senses within the hour.

"What is zhe matter, Daavid?" queries Daisy, sensing tension, and Bliss wishes he had a sensible answer; he wishes he knew why his enthusiasm is draining, why he has lost his drive.

"I don't know…" starts the English detective, then he scuttles to the balcony and peers at the distant verdant islands. The fortress — the Fort Royal on the island of Ste. Marguerite — stands out sharply and appears strikingly forbidding as the wintry sun slips behind the island and heads for the depths of the Mediterranean. The wind is shifting to the north, kicking up whitecaps and darkening the sea from warm azure to bleak indigo, and goosebumps suddenly pepper his thighs as the chill hits.

The sound of Daisy's breath spins him. "What is wrong, Daavid?"

"It's getting cold," he says, though knows that is not the real reason for the goosebumps. "He is still there," he adds after a moment's thought as pulses of energy make a whooshing sound in his brain and raise his hackles.

"Who?"

"The Man in the Iron Mask — l'homme au masque de fer."

"Daavid, zhat was three hundred years ago."

"This is really weird," he carries on as he focuses on the fortress. "If I told anyone in the force about this they'd have me in front of a shrink and out on mental disability in a week."

"Daavid, zhere is nothing zhere," says Daisy, pointing across the bay to the island. "It is just a museum now."

Bliss knows different, though he still can't explain the powerful feeling that washed over him the first time he entered the cell that housed the famous prisoner. "It was like he was talking to me… guiding me… begging me to write his story," he explains, as he has explained many times before. "But now I've lost it. I don't what I'm doing anymore… don't know how it ends."

"It will be all right —" she starts, but he cuts her off, shaking his head.

"No… no… no," he says, and then he spots the lemon tree in the garden below. "Watch," he commands, dragging Daisy to the edge of the balcony and pointing to the loaded tree.

"What?"

"Nothing happened, did it?"

She peers intently, thinking, I missed somezhing. "What is it, Daavid?"

"The first time I looked a lemon dropped off."

"They drop all the time."

"No, they don't. That's my point. I've been watching it for weeks now and I've never seen another, not while I was actually watching. But the first time, at the instant I looked, a lemon fell."

"But what does zhat mean?"

"It was like a signal, the start: a green flag, a cannon shot, a whistle."

"Start what?"

"The race — my race — to discover the identity of the Man in the Iron Mask. Everything here has been guiding me…" he pauses as he loses direction and searches across the bay for his bearings.

"Are you all right, Daavid?"

"See, even you think I'm going mad now."

"No," she says, but her concerned mien tells him something else as he turns away from the island to look into her eyes.

"I have to go," he says quietly. "I have to go now."

"But, zhe dinner…"

"I'm sorry… " he says as the apartment's door closes behind him, and Daisy wipes a tear from her cheek before turning back to the island with a sinking feeling.