Читать книгу The Dave Bliss Quintet - James Hawkins - Страница 8

Away from the boisterous promenade and the rapt throng surrounding her husband, Marcia drags her feet on the beach. Every attempt on Bliss’s part to get her talking is rebuffed as, head down, she scuffs along the edge of the gently fizzing surf away from the lights of the town.

Be patient, he tells himself as he drags behind, knowing only too well the vexations of dealing with informants, remembering the hours he’s spent doing a dance of a thousand veils with smelly stool pigeons in smoke-filled back rooms of seedy bars, as he pried off each shroud with promises, threats, and rewards. Many proved to be time-wasters, with nothing of substance to offer, holding onto useless snippets with the desperation of a superspy, while others were nothing more than publicity-seeking nutcases. Then there were the altruists, divulging information out of a sense of public duty, throwing off veil after veil with the enthusiasm of a nymphomaniac playing strip poker.

But he also knows, only too well, of the blind alleys, false leads, unwarranted conjecture, and score settling that might turn any informant into a slippery eel, one who could end up writhing around and giving its handler a nasty nip. So it isn’t just the information he seeks — it is the motive behind its disclosure. And there is always a motive. Without a clear knowledge of the motive the information is useless.

Marcia, whatever her information and motive, strings him along until he finally digs in his heals.

“Where are we going?” he demands eventually, and she stops and sits decisively.

“Here.”

She tests his patience for nearly an hour as they sit on the shadowy beach — using the darkness as another veil, making it impossible for him to read her as she dances back and forth between disclosure and concealment. Eventually, stumbling through tears — pain or fear? he wonders, knowing that almost every informant has fear: the fear of exposure and retribution — she twists a rambling trail out of broken promises and wrecked dreams.

Through her tears, Bliss pieces an image of a charismatic young artist barely out of art college, with his young wife and newborn daughter, fêted by the community and the bank, setting up a pottery in a quaint Cotswold backwater — but the idyllic lifestyle they envisioned gradually soured over the years as the bills repeatedly outweighed the receipts.

Working harder, faster, and longer each day, Greg, her potter husband, tried to outrun a tide of cheap imports and domestic oversupply. Slaving sixteen hours or more a day he turned out pots that, together, they painted, glazed, and fired, but he barely kept their heads above water.

“Ooh! Isn’t that lovely,” visitors to the studio would coo, watching with fascination as he threw another masterpiece out of a dull mound of clay, but in the showroom their enthusiasm would quickly wane as they pored over the price tag.

Marcia breaks down completely as she reveals the torture of disenchantment with life — the years of struggling to make ends meet.

“Your husband is so clever. I love his work,” potential clients would enthuse.

“Why don’t you buy it then?” she’d scream inside, knowing that was unfair, knowing her husband’s work was so much more valuable than the mass-market products stamped “Hand painted” by some barefoot kid in a sub-Saharan mud hut.

Marcia’s snivelling continues as she explains how the stack of bills grew over the years, and the banks, initially so enthusiastic in support of such potential, gradually lost confidence and closed in. The cost of heating a kiln, expensive paints and glazes, rent, taxes, gas, advertising, and the expense of driving around the country with an old Volkswagen van full of pots visiting stores, craft markets, and fairs swallowed everything they ever made. There was never enough, until finally she hit on an answer — a way out of the hole they’d slowly sunk into.

The promenade at St-Juan-sur-Mer. No studio to rent, no light and heat to pay for, none of the expensive materials — only clay, costing little more than the price of digging it out of the ground, and each tiny pot used only a few ounces. No breakages in the kiln — no kiln. No shelves of unsold stock in the showroom — no showroom, and no sticker shock at the exorbitant prices, for there were no prices. “It’s absolutely free,” he would declare with a sly smile, yet everyone paid.

However, there is obviously something amiss in nirvana. Marcia’s attitude towards her husband tells Bliss that the apparently flawless resolution of their problems somehow backfired. Is she jealous? he wonders, his mind on the fawning horde of females wilting under her husband’s spell on the promenade. Isn’t jealousy so often the spur that finally forces an informant’s hand? But if that’s the case, what is she trying to tell him? What information can she have that would interest the upholders of Her Britannic Majesty’s Law? That her husband isn’t paying income tax? Of course he isn’t — who would? Bliss thinks, doing a quick mental calculation. Three euros a pot, two pots a minute, he estimates conservatively — all cash, coins, and untraceable bills. No tell-tale receipts or embarrassing credit card slips. That’s nearly four hundred euros an hour, he is staggered to realize, not counting the hundreds of tips dropped into the craftsman’s begging bowl by the hopeful and grateful whose hearts he touched with a glance or a smile.

But what has this to do with Johnson? he wonders, realizing that, in their three brief meetings, Marcia has never mentioned his target by name. Suddenly, concerned that he may have duped himself into singling her out as the informant when she is just a disenchanted expatriate looking for a convenient shoulder, he catches her arm and demands, “So precisely who is Morgan Johnson? And what’s he got to do with you?”

Wrenching her arm free, she covers her face with her hands and scrunches herself into a sobbing ball. “He’ll kill me. He’ll kill me. He’ll kill me,” she repeats constantly through the tears, leaving Bliss searching his memory for clues in his briefing with Commander Richards as he tries to figure out what Johnson could possibly be wanted for that would so terrify her.

“Morgan Johnson has our daughter,” Marcia finally concedes, her knees protectively clasped to her chest as she sits on the sand staring straight out over the bay, making Bliss gulp at the thought that the girl has been kidnapped.

“And he’s demanding a ransom?” he opines, trying to forward the conversation while immediately understanding the reason for so much reticence and secrecy.

“Ransom,” she echoes, clearly lost. “What makes you think he wants a ransom?”

The sudden clarity with which he’s seen the situation has blinded him to other possibilities, and he finds himself stranded. “I … I thought you meant she’d been kidnapped,” he stammers, but she cuts him off.

“Kidnapped.... No. She’s eighteen. Technically old enough to do what she wants.”

“So she’s not a hostage?”

The answer seems stuck in her throat as she queries, “Hostage?” before admitting in afterthought, “In a way, I suppose she is a hostage,” then sheepishly adding, “Hostage to the big H. If you understand me.”

“Heroin,” he breathes. So, Samantha was right. It is drugs.

But what is he doing here? What has this to do with Scotland Yard? So Johnson is a dealer — even a major player. So what? The back streets, even high streets and executive boardrooms, of London are awash with enough drug barons to keep half the force busy. Why would the Yard push out the boat for this one? There must be more to Morgan Johnson, but Marcia clams up and sits sobbing quietly as she stares out to sea.

With nothing to offer, none of the usual incentives — immunity from prosecution, reduced sentence, money, protection — he can only ask her what she expects of him. What is her motive — revenge?

“Revenge?” she asks vaguely, as if it has never occurred to her.

Bliss has taken two weeks to pin her down and now she’s playing a guessing game. As an informant she is as much use as an anonymous tipster. What is in it for her? The return of her daughter? She might get her daughter back physically, but Bliss knows from previous experience that she’ll probably end up regretting it.

“Perhaps I should talk to your husband,” he suggests finally, realizing he is getting nowhere.

A slap across her face might have brought a less violent reaction. “Don’t you dare!” she screeches. “You leave that pig out of this.”

“So where is Johnson?” he asks. It is the only question open to him.

“He’s gone,” she cries, tears streaming down her face and glistening on her cheeks in the moonlight. “I told you this morning. Didn’t you see his boat leave?”

“The big one?”

“Yes — the big one,” she spits.

“Well, where is he going?”

“Treasure hunting, he reckons.”

“But where? How can I find him if you don’t tell me where?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know. The only thing I know is that he said he was following the winds.”

“Going to see a man about a dog,” Bliss muses, recalling the expression his father always used whenever he was being secretive about his destination. “And what about your daughter?”

“Haven’t you been listening to anything? I told you — Morgan’s got her.”

The glow of the waning moon lights a path across the Mediterranean and greets the rising sun as Bliss is drawn to the balcony. Caught in the half-light between the celestial bodies, the lemon, on the grass beneath his apartment, is illuminated by both, and beckons.

With Marcia finally out in the open, though hardly out of mind, he seeks a distraction, and the temptation to seize the fallen lemon re-engages him. Not that he needs a lemon — it’s the principle, he tells himself, knowing it is probably bloody-mindedness — but the thought that the only lemons he’s previously picked were neatly stacked in a supermarket gondola spurs him on. Who will know or care? he thinks, his determination strengthening as he takes the stairs.

The fallen lemon glints golden in the early morning sun and lures him across the park until he closes in on the tree. Bending, arm outstretched, he is startled upright by the sight of a woman with straggly blond hair and baggy pants, hunching as she shuffles from the ground-floor apartment to the garden, carrying a bundle in her arms.

Caught in the open, only yards from her garden and the tree, Bliss bluffs it out. “Excusez-moi,” he says, pointing to the lemon, hoping she may tell him to help himself, but she spins on him in such alarm that he jumps. “It’s a man,” he breathes, and the certainty of the gender surprises him. It is definitely the person he had glimpsed through the crack in the apartment door — the same hair and eyes — but he’s stunned to find a man — a fairly young man at that — twenty-five, he guesses — and in his arms a small spaniel, being cradled face upwards like a baby.

With a shriek of terror the man brings the dog up as a shield in front of his face and scurries across the lawn back to the apartment.

“Sorry — pardon,” Bliss calls after him, but the door slams. Sorry for what? he wonders.

Slinking back to his apartment, still lemon-less, he pauses briefly before entering the elevator and has difficulty resisting the temptation to knock on the young man’s door to tender a proper apology. If it was a woman, he thinks, I could buy her flowers, even offer a meal — but what to say to a guy?

The weirdness of the young man’s appearance and curious behaviour still absorb him, but only as a diversion from deeper thoughts, as he picks up a couple of croissants from the boulangerie and heads to the promenade for a morning stroll.

The whisper of a dawn breeze gently wakes the yachts in the marina and sets halyards against masts as he swings his legs over the quayside, bites into a croissant, mulls over his meeting with Marcia the previous evening, and wonders why he has been sent here.

“All you have to do is find him and positively ID him. That’s it,” Commander Richards instructed. “We’ll take out an international warrant and the French can lift him.”

Lift him for what? Bliss wondered, skeptically suggesting, “It sounds like you’re sending me on a taxpayer-funded holiday.”

If Richards had similar thoughts he wasn’t sharing. “You happen to be the right man for the job.”

“So what are my qualifications?” Bliss pushed, determined to find out what was really behind such an apparently cushy posting.

“You’re well travelled.”

“That wasn’t my fault,” he responded, thinking of his previous escapade, which ended disastrously in Canada.

“You’re intelligent — got smarts,” Richards said, trying flattery, but making Bliss laugh.

“What’s funny?” queried Richards.

“Nothing, Guv,” lied Bliss, knowing he was laughing at himself for all the times in his life he’d thought everyone else knew more than he and worried about the day he might be found out.

“You look the part,” Richards continued, as if reciting a prepared list. “Distinguished, mid-forties — old enough to be wealthy, young enough to be a playboy.”

“Plus the fact that it will keep me nicely out of the way while that bastard Edwards does his Houdini impersonation.”

“Chief Superintendent Edwards will get what he deserves,” Richards replied calmly. No outburst of refutation; no denunciation of Bliss for insubordination; no pulling of rank.

With the realization that Richards was bending over backwards, and figuring he had little to lose, Bliss lounged back in his chair and tried a hot button. “He’ll probably get promoted again — but isn’t that the way he always gets on? Stirs up enough shit to be a pain in the ass until someone recommends him for promotion, then he climbs on someone else’s back and bites their bum.”

“And finally — you’re single,” Richards said, pretending not to have heard, sticking to his script.

“That’s not an achievement, Guv.”

“I didn’t say it was, but for an operation of this kind it’s a definite advantage.”

This is a misuse of police resources, Bliss thinks, as he dangles his legs over the harbour wall. Cracking down on drug dealers in suburban Surrey might make sense, but sending him to stake out a high-rolling renegade in the South of France only confirms his suspicions that they want him out of the country while Edwards slips his noose.

I bet Edwards orchestrated this whole thing, he reasons, knowing that where other people pull strings, Edwards twists testicles. He must have his hooks into somebody close to the top of the tree for a commander to get the authority to approve this, he is thinking, when he is struck with a mind-blowing realization. What if Richards hasn’t got anyone’s authority? What if I am actually on convalescent leave? Maybe this important and totally secret undercover job is just a cover; maybe no one really wants Morgan Johnson and no one is going to swear out a warrant for his arrest and extradition; maybe his name has simply been picked out of a hat of international villains for no other reason than he’s known to be out of the country.

No wonder Richards was so adamant that no one else should know what I was doing. It had nothing to do with security or the possibility that someone might tip off the suspect; Richards’s only concern was that someone might tip off the commissioner — the Grand Vizier of London’s metropolitan police force — that one of his most senior commanders was playing hide and seek with a lowly detective inspector.

In that case, who’s paying for all this? he asks himself. At the briefing, Richards gave him a shiny American Express card with an unlimited credit balance in the name of John Smith. And the apartment he is staying in is already paid for.

So, how far will Edwards and his cronies go to keep me out the way — assuming that is the plan? he wonders, and considers sticking a hundred-thousand-euro motor yacht on the card as a tester. He could always sell it if the balloon went up.

Wake up, he tells himself. It would be cheaper to have you bumped off.

Would Edwards do that?

He might.

The certainty of the realization stings with the sharpness of a paper cut, then he shakes his head. No, he wouldn’t … I don’t think.

With many more questions than answers, he strolls the town streets half-heartedly seeking Johnson, though concentrating more on gathering ideas for his book. It’s the contrasts here that make it interesting, he realizes, seeing a shrivelled grey crone, cross-legged on the pavement, with her hand out to an expensively designed woman whose lipstick allowance would feed her for a year. Though it’s not just the disparity between rich and poor, he decides, it’s the beauty and the beast.

Everything and everyone has a front, he is thinking, as he tours a smelly, garbage-littered back alley and sees a sleek-haired Madonna, sporting breast implants and slinky leather, emerge from a house with peeling paint and sagging brickwork. Then the clack of her Italian stilettos on cracked flagstones echo off the abandoned dust-filled stores where the faded signs of boulangers, traiteurs, and charcutiers are epitaphs to their stolen dreams. Hurrying past abandoned cars with smashed windows and bicycle wheels chained to posts, she turns onto the glitzy shopping street and picks up her head as she passes the storefronts of purveyors and designers whose names and logos fill the glossies of the world.

“It’s not exactly Hollywood,” Bliss muses, looking around and realizing the streets and stores are filled with local people going about their daily chores. How confusing it must be for them, he thinks, living out their lives in a land of vice-versa, where international villains are lauded and pampered while the odd unemployed bum, unfortunate enough to be of no fixed abode, is roughly rounded up and thrown in jail; where giant yachts, costing more than the Madonna girl could earn in ten lifetimes, sit idle in the harbour, their owners preferring the comfort of their villas after a night at the casino, club, or bordel, while the crews busy themselves preparing for another day of idleness.

Rich and poor, good and evil, beauty and ugliness, greed and compassion, all co-exist here in equilibrium, but overall it’s the obsession with possession that strikes him most. Flashy yachts, cars, motorbikes, and jewellery may be the preserve of the rich, but even the poorest shop workers and student waiters race around on motor scooters; the girls, with their skirts and hair flying, sit boldly upright for all to see, while the young men, revving their aggressively black 50 cc machines up to 250, crouch low over the puny fuel tanks and dream.

Trapped by indecision, absent-mindedly plucking at his nose hairs, Bliss spends the afternoon on his balcony picking up and putting down the phone. But whom to call? Who would not only know the truth about his assignment, but be prepared to put him in the picture? Any of his regular colleagues at HQ will know only the official line. “You’re on convalescent leave, you lucky devil,” they’ll chirp, and if he pushes them to check in his personal file he’ll get the same reply. “Yup. You’re on leave all right.”

He could try Commander Richards, but to what end? “I thought I made myself clear, Inspector …”

Only the commissioner himself might be privy to his true status, and he smiles at the thought of calling the Yard and demanding to be put through to him — a man commanding a force of thirty thousand, with an entire division of administrators and lackeys whose sole purpose is to isolate him from the riff-raff on the front line.

OK. Just supposing he takes your call — then what? You probably don’t remember me, Sir, he mentally practises, but I just wondered if you happen to know that I’m in the South of France chasing a drug smuggler.

And what if the case is genuine? What if his suspicions are totally unfounded and the commissioner is not only well aware of his mandate, but receives a daily progress report from Commander Richards in person?

“Weren’t you specifically ordered that under no circumstances were you to reveal your involvement in this case, Inspector?” the commissioner will bark and slam down the phone. Fifteen minutes later he’d be relieved of duty and ordered home pending disciplinary charges for disobeying a lawful order, breach of confidence, and jeopardizing a major investigation. Not to mention the fact that Edwards’s defence team will make mincemeat of him on the witness stand at the upcoming hearing.

“Isn’t it correct, Mr. Bliss,” Edwards’s smarmy lawyer will jab, pointedly refraining from using his rank, “that you yourself are currently facing numerous disciplinary charges?”

Then what?

Though, if Edwards’s defence team is as devious as their client, they’ll apply for a deferment of the charges against their man, pending the outcome of the trial against the key witness. By which time the civilian address of “Mr.” might be entirely appropriate.

Picking up the phone eventually, he decides the only person he can safely call is Samantha.

“I haven’t had much chance —” she starts defensively.

“It’s OK. Don’t bother. I know who he is,” he says, adding, “But I’m pretty sure they’re trying to buy my silence on the Edwards case.”

“It sounds like a pretty fair price to me,” says Samantha, well aware of the situation.

“But Edwards might get off the hook.”

“So what?”

“Do you know what he did to me?”

“Dad, as far as I remember you broke his wrist,” she says, recalling his violent reaction as Edwards tried to save his own skin by taking Bliss off a controversial case.

“Trust you to bring that up. I was provoked. He was trying to save his neck — you know that.”

“OK. But it didn’t help his wrist, did it? So, if you want my professional advice, I’d say take it — a few months in the sun will do you good.”

“Don’t you want to know what Johnson’s been up to?”

“Not particularly,” she says.

“You were right — drugs.”

“Did I say drugs?” she asks, confused. “That isn’t what I was told.”

“I thought you said you haven’t had much chance.”

“I haven’t — but rumour is he may have done a runner with a fair wad of investments.”

“How big a wad?”

“About a hundred million quid or so. Though it’s just a whisper — pure speculation. He’s probably innocent.”

“Innocent!” scoffs Bliss. “You’re telling me that this guy may have scarpered with more than one hundred million pounds in investments — a hundred million! — and you say he’s innocent. What did they think they were investing in — a gold mine?”

“Sunken treasure,” she tells him.

“Sunken dreams, more like it.”

“Humph,” she snorts. “And just where did these investors get that sort of money in the first place?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they worked hard — life savings, that sort of thing.”

“Don’t be naive, Dad. People who knock their guts out for fifty years to keep themselves in dentures and diapers in their dotage don’t usually risk it on a dubious treasure hunt. I bet most of it was dodgy lolly. Serves them right.”

“That’s your trouble. You’re a defence lawyer.”

“Don’t blame me. You sent me to law school.”

“My fault again,” he says, thinking: You’re beginning to sound more and more like your mother every day. Then he asks, “What about Edwards?”

“Dad. I’ve got a lot on …”

It’s an excuse; he can tell from the drag in her tone.

“Why not call him yourself?”

Telling her he is concerned about phone taps won’t wash. “Use a pay phone,” she’d say, but the truth is that he doesn’t know how far Edwards is prepared to go, and imagines his lawyer lodging a counter-complaint of making nuisance calls.

“Maybe you could try for me, Samantha.”

“Maybe.”

“Please.”

The parade of pots has taken on a new significance as Bliss strolls the promenade to the bar L’Escale after dinner.

Despite Marcia’s admonition against it, he is tempted to confront her husband, and stands amid the throng of beguiled women watching the genial potter spinning off tiny ceramic heartwarmers. Many of the faces in the crowd are familiar — groupies, he guesses, and figures he would find them there most evenings.

On the edge of the crowd is another familiar face: one of the hoteliers, scowling at the procession of little wet pots headed off along the promenade towards his hotel.

Jacques is back, though he seems to be keeping a distance.

“So — what happened to the mistral yesterday?” Bliss grunts with phony chilliness.

Jacques shrugs as he lights a cigarette, then blows out his answer with an accompanying cloud. “Putain — we were so lucky. It was just ten kilometres away.”

“Not here, though, was it,” Bliss continues to grumble, as if he had been looking forward to the refreshing blast of mountain air in place of the smoke.

“Ah, vous enculez les mouches,” Jacques spits. “You are parting zhe hairs.”

“It’s splitting hairs, Jacques. Not parting hairs. We say: splitting hairs.”

“Zhere — you are parting zhe hairs again.”

Bliss turns in frustration and finds four pasty-faced individuals shuffling seats.

“So — no beach today?” greets Bliss, tongue in cheek, as they finally sit.

“No. Not today,” pipes up Jennifer with a mutinous edge to her voice. “We had to do the laundry today, didn’t we. We’re going to the beach tomorrow.”

Hugh shakes his head sadly. “Probably not — they spoke of rain.”

“Who spoke of rain?” cuts in Jennifer in outright insurrection.

“The BBC World service last night,” he ripostes authoritatively. “They say there’s a big depression headed this way.”

Jennifer’s scowl suggests it has just arrived.

“What do they know?” Bliss puts forward conciliatorily, his mind still on Edwards as he searches the moonlit sky for trace of a cloud. “They’re a thousand miles away.”

“Well we never watch the French telly,” whines Mavis. “The weather forecast’s never very accurate, is it Hugh?”

“Les Anglais sont complètement dingues,” scoffs Jacques, tapping his temple suggestively.

Hey, we’re not all crazy, thinks Bliss, though has no intention of defending the mental state of Hugh and Mavis. “Don’t worry,” he says, turning to Jennifer, “I’m sure the weather will be perfect for the beach tomorrow.”

“Non, non, non,” says Jacques. “Not tomorrow.”

“What is this — a bloody conspiracy?” Bliss mumbles angrily to the sky. “What has everybody got against the weather? There hasn’t been a bloody cloud in more than two weeks.”

“It is not zhe cloud of which I speak,” explains Jacques. “It is zhe wind.”

“Not the damn mistral again,” spits Bliss, sitting resignedly.

“Non, Monsieur. Le mistral was a pet de lapin. Tomorrow la tramontane will give you zhe wind up.”

Notwithstanding Jacques’s indecorous assessment of the mistral as nothing more than a rabbit’s fart, Bliss has to agree with him. “La tramontane?” he queries.

“Oui, Monsieur,” says Jacques, then explains in lurid detail how the icy blast is already gathering its battalions and winding itself up, ready to sweep down from the permanently snow-capped Alps of Switzerland and Austria.

“That’s it then,” says Hugh, in apparently cheerful resignation.

However, memories of the misplaced mistral spur Bliss to lean across to a glum Jennifer and whisper a message of hope. “I should wait and see if I were you.”

Leaving L’Escale, Bliss wanders homeward along the promenade weighed with concern — worrying that he may be the reason for Morgan Johnson’s sudden departure. If Marcia had smoked him out so easily, could not Johnson or one of his people? But there is a difference — Marcia had been expecting him. Was Johnson?