Lovelace and Button (International Investigators) Inc.

LOVELACE AND BUTTON (INTERNATIONAL INVESTIGATORS) INC.

Also by James Hawkins

INSPECTOR BLISS MYSTERIES

Missing: Presumed Dead

The Fish Kisser

No Cherubs for Melanie

A Year Less a Day

The Dave Bliss Quintet

NON-FICTION

The Canadian Private Investigator's Manual

1001 Fundraising Ideas and Strategies for Charities and Not-for-Profit Groups

A Chief Inspector Bliss Mystery

James Hawkins

A Castle Street Mystery

Copyright © James Hawkins, 2004

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

Editor: Barry Jowett
Copy-editor: Lloyd Davis
Design: Andrew Roberts
Printer: Webcom

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Hawkins, D. James (Derek James), 1947-
Lovelace and Button (International Investigators) Inc. / James Hawkins.

ISBN 1-55002-541-4

I. Title.

PS8565.A848L69 2004     C813'.6     C2004-905470-8

1  2  3  4  5     08  07  06  05  04

We acknowledge the support of the
Canada Council for the Arts
and the
Ontario Arts Council
for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the
Government of Canada
through the
Book Publishing Industry Development Program
and
The Association for the Export of Canadian Books
, and the
Government of Ontario
through the
Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit
program.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

J. Kirk Howard, President

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For Nancy … with love

“Samantha Anne Bliss: do you take Peter Sebastian Bryan to be your lawful wedded husband, to have and to hold, from this day forward…”

“That's it, then,” mutters David Bliss, Samantha's father, thinking that he is talking to himself. “The poor sucker hasn't got a clue what he's taking on. I just hope he doesn't blame me.”

“Who's going to blame you?” whispers an enquirer, her voice barely audible above the rain hammering on the church's ancient copper roof.

“… till death ye both shall part?” continues the pastor.

Oh God! Was I talking aloud?
“Sorry, Daphne,” whispers Bliss.

“I do,” replies Samantha, without hesitation.

No mention of honour or obey.

Did you expect there to be? She's a lawyer, not an office flunky. Anyway, when did she ever do what she was told?

There's a first time for everything.

“Peter Sebastian Bryan: do you take Samantha Anne Bliss…”

David Bliss feels a slight tug and has to bend a long way to question the giant toadstool hat on his left.

“What is it, Daphne?”

“Don't they usually ask the man first?”

“Not the one who's marrying my daughter, apparently.”

An indignant “Shush!” comes from the woman on Bliss's right and he briefly cranes around as if trying to locate the talkative culprit.

“I meant
you,
David,” says Sarah, Bliss's ex-wife, as she digs him in the ribs.

“Sorry…”

“In sickness and in health,” drones the clergyman, “till death ye both shall part?”

“I do.”

“I now pronounce you man and wife.”

“I'm surprised Samantha didn't insist on changing that to, ‘I now pronounce you woman and husband,'” Bliss mutters to Daphne as he shields his elderly friend against the deluge while leading her to the limousine.

“Weddings always make me so happy,” snivels the grandmotherly figure under the hat, but Bliss's mind is on his ex-wife as he offers Daphne a Kleenex, saying, “That's ‘cos you've never had one of your own, Daphne.”

Daphne Lovelace, a lifelong spinster by sheer determination, haughtily waves off the proffered tissue with her own monogrammed silk handkerchief. “Well, it's never too late, David. ‘Marry in haste, repent at leisure,' my mother always said. And you needn't look at me like that. I may not be a spring chicken but I've had offers.
Anyway, it couldn't have been too bad — aren't you planning on doing it again?”

“Whoever gave you that idea?” laughs Bliss, though he knows it would be easier to cart water in a sieve than keep a secret from Daphne.

“Samantha mentioned a certain little French hen,” she replies cryptically, but Bliss refuses to play.

“Take off the umbrella, Daphne. You'll never get into the car wearing that.”

“Huh. Cheek! Chief Inspector,” she snorts, but complies, saying, “If Minnie had shown up you would have had someone else's hat to pick on. You should've seen the millinery creation I tarted up for her. I'm quite put out that she didn't even phone me to say she wasn't coming.”

Bliss vaults into the car behind the aging woman and gazes intently through the windshield, questioning whether or not the chauffeur can see the road. “More suitable for a funeral?” he whistles, but it's an avoidance tactic immediately rumbled by Daphne as they drive off gingerly towards the Berkeley Hotel.

“I know you find Minnie a bit irritating at times, but we're going on a trip around the world together, you know.”

“Yes. You've already told me — three times,” he says testily, feeling he's heard sufficient eulogizing of Minnie Dennon, Daphne's overly amorous septuagenarian friend, to last a lifetime. “Though God knows how she can afford it.”

Fifty miles away, in Daphne's hometown of Westchester, Minnie Dennon has a similar concern as she takes a contemplative look around her tacky little flat and spends a few moments thinking how different her life may have been without fate's malevolent hand.

“Some people have all the luck,” she muses, as she checks that she has turned off the gas stove and the single-element electric fire, then quietly closes the front door behind her and listens for the latch to drop, before sliding the key under the doormat. “That's it, then,” she mutters and, head down, pushes out into the rain. She has an important engagement — one of the most important in her life — and in veneration of the occasion she is wearing the drab olive suit she'd bought for her Alfred's funeral.

“Thirty-five years with the same man deserves some respect,” she'd fumed at the time, nearly twenty years ago, when Daphne had suggested that the suit was perhaps a trifle sombre considering the flippancy with which she'd treated her marriage. “Anyway, it'll come in handy for your funeral,” Minnie had added acerbically.

The smell of mothballs surrounds Minnie as she makes her way down Watson Street, then she takes a few moments to pause at the top of the High Street and compare it with the childhood view she fondly retains.

The picture in her mind may be faded and sepia-edged, but apart from some remodelling carried out by Hitler's flying circus, little has outwardly changed. A hotchpotch of wooden-framed Tudor buildings on one side of the street is mirrored in the windows of a few Victorian monstrosities, housing banks and a department store, on the other. The traffic is different; dozens of zippy little cars have replaced the monstrous traction engines that belched steam and smuts, though the gentle Clydesdales of the brewery's dray still clip-clop from pub to pub.

Minnie juggles a few coins in her coat pocket and eyes the sweetshop on the corner of Mansard Street. A KitKat or Mars bar, perhaps? But, knowing there is no point in recounting her cash, she shakes her head. Her
path is set and she moves on past the butcher's, and the Mitre hotel, to a small café crushed under the insensitive shadow of a 1950s multi-storey car park.

Ye Olde Copper Kettle's front door leads Minnie into the past and, as she shakes off her coat, she winces at the huddle of youngsters crowding around the Internet terminals at the back of the room, so she closes her eyes and looks back. Stiffly starched white tablecloths match the aprons of the pink-faced young waitresses, their hair pleated up under lacy caps. The glow of a coal fire reflects warmly off the bone china crockery and polished silverware. Businessmen and bankers in blue mingle with tweedy farmers, and the town's Ladies sit in one corner poring over Paris chic in
Tatler
while they chat of Ascot and exotic holidays in Bournemouth or Brighton. But the depression of the late ‘20s has bitten deeply, and the genteel Edwardian tea-room is already fading.

A coarse voice shakes Minnie out of her memories. “Yeah. What-can-I-get-ya?”

“Just a cup of Earl Grey, please.”

“Sorry, luv. We've only got regular.”

“I remember coming here with my mother in the thirties,” Minnie says, though it washes over the young woman.

“Nice… Did you want the regular, then?”

Minnie takes a deep breath; concerned that her plans are already unravelling.

“I suppose so,” she says, resisting the temptation to run as she scans the plastic furniture and industrial china, “but please can I have a proper teapot, with a cup with a saucer.”