The Dave Bliss Quintet (15 page)

The answer exploded through Bliss's mind with the force of a hurricane, and he couldn't help but blurt out, “He wasn't a prisoner.”

“Precisely, my dear Doctor,” the voice in his mind said, but Bliss was already racing ahead as he surveyed in the scene.

Everything extant in the room spoke of grandeur and opulence: the size, the proportionate dimensions, the enormous window overlooking the bay, the murals. This was no dungeon; neither was it a cell designed for a single prisoner. An equally capacious adjacent cell had housed twelve dissident Huguenots for many years, and an entire rank of more modest cells were cramped into a second corridor.

So what manner of prisoner could command, not just a cell, but a prince among cells? he questioned, then understood where every previous investigator and chronicler had been deceived. They had ignored the fundamental tenet of criminal investigation: that a detective should never assume or dismiss anything. Most, if not all, had erred in both respects — assumption and dismissal.

Firstly — because of the relative sumptuousness of the cell — it had been universally accepted that the occupant, male or female, was either a member of the monarchy or in some way connected to the aristocracy. And secondly, everyone had dismissed, without consideration, the notion that the tenant could have been anything but a prisoner.

With the distant castle now fading in the dying rays of the sun, Bliss puts his binoculars down on the balcony, takes a swig of wine, picks up his pen, and returns to his journal, taking up the story of Frederick Chapel, alias François Couperin, where he left off.

Frederick Chapel was still sitting on the beach at St-Juan-sur-Mer as the sun faded over the humble fishermen's hovels, across the headland, in the paltry settlement of Cannes-sur-Mer.

“Jean le Pêcheur,” a local sardine fisherman introduced himself, as he slumped to the sand and bellowed across the cart track for Angélique to bring him a “gobelet” of wine.

“I would like to cross to Île Sainte-Marguerite,” said Chapel, once he had gained the other man's confidence.

“Zhen you will cross alone,” Jean scoffed. “And if you cross, you will never return,” he warned, then added, expressively, “
Zip, boum,
you will have zhe raccourci.”

“What is
raccourci?”

“It is, as you say, zhe shortcut.” He laughed, slicing a hand expressively across his throat.

Chapel didn't give up. He couldn't afford to give up. Whilst the guillotine might chop short his life in France, if he failed, the English hangman was readying to stretch his neck.

“If I cannot be transported to the island with a warranty of safe passage, perhaps you would tell me of some person who might bring me knowledge of what I seek there. It is very important,” he pleaded, giving Jean a despairing look.

The silence, brokered by Jean as he stared resolutely across the azure bay towards the offshore island, as if in a trance, was broken by the yelp of a carriage driver as he yanked the reins to veer his stallions clear of Angélique, who was dashing across the cart track with another flagon for the two men on the beach.

“Putain,” swore the driver, and Angélique gave him a friendly wave.

“Perhaps I can help,” Jean relented, as Angélique slipped back to the inn under the nose of a cartload of manure hauled by a plodding ox.
“Merde,”
the fisherman muttered, and began, “It will not be easy, but I have a friend …” then explained that, for a substantial fee — “The finest gold,
naturellement” —
his friend might be able to obtain the desired information. “But what exactly is it zhat you wish to know, Monsieur Couperin?”

The merest mention of the man in the iron mask had the Frenchman struggling to his feet. “You are
crazy, Engleesh. I go before we are both raccourcis.”

“Sit down and keep quiet, man,” ordered Chapel. “No one must know that I am English — we are at war.”

“Bof.” Jean shrugged, flopping back to the sand. “We are not at war — our crazy kings and zheir crazy generals are at war. Me — my war is out zhere with zhe sea and zhe sardines. And you, Monsieur Couperin — if zhat is your real name — where is your war? Who is your enemy?”

Frederick Chapel had only one enemy. A man who had clawed his way to power and left barbs in many of his victims, so that, when the need arose, he need only twist the hook. And now the need had arisen, because, though he had no ambition of divulging it to Jean, there were certain people in the loftiest echelons of English aristocracy and commerce who were looking for their pound of flesh. And the pound they sought was borne on the person of the miscreant Richard Cromwell, elder son of the deceased Lord Protector of England, Oliver Cromwell, whose relatives, proving themselves more insidious and less pious than he, had not only inveigled themselves into important government circles during his period of royal usurpatory, but had also inveigled themselves into other men's pockets.

Richard Cromwell, more commonly branded “Tumble Down Dick,” in recognition of his celebrated ability to repeatedly fall flat on his face, was chief amongst these rogue relatives, and his ability to plunder purses had been improved by a short, though ill-conceived, spell in his father's seat — if not in his shoes — following the old Roundhead's death in 1658.

Richard Cromwell's impecuniousness had grown proportionately to his unpopularity, so that, when he
finally plummeted into the mire, his hands were so deeply pocketed that he had no hope of saving himself, and he scarpered to Paris and lived it up under the name of John Clarke.

However, the downfall of inveigling in other men's pockets is that when they catch on to the ruse, they tend to develop very long arms. And now that there was a new king on the English throne and war had been declared on France, some of those long arms were reaching out to recover that which was inveigled — either in hard cash or in “Dirty Dick's” hide.

Doesn't anybody ever use their real name? questions Bliss, as he takes a breather from writing to follow the spectacular sunset that has smeared the colour of his wine from horizon to horizon in a heavenly display.

A knock on the apartment's door brings him down to earth. Still engrossed in the past, he has a fleeting vision of a troop of
légionnaires,
with a guillotine erected under the lemon tree, but then he pulls himself up smartly. No one knows I'm here, he reminds himself. And there's a security lock on the street door.

He vacillates as he recalls Commander Richards's warning that precipitous action in the Johnson case could prove fatal — advice he'd sloughed off at the time, before he knew he was dealing with a big wheel.

Realizing that drug bosses can get pretty antsy about people sniffing in their cesspools, he stands well away from the door and wonders if they have someone in the garden lest he should go for the roof or fire escape. The big boys usually play for keeps, he is worrying as the knock is repeated, and, judging by the size
of his yacht, Johnson is certainly in the biggest league.

“Monsieur Bliss,” demands the visitor.

He deflates in relief. “Daisy
—
I might have guessed,” he says, opening the door.

“Is it a ghost you have seen?” she questions, peering concernedly into his pallid face.

“No,” he says, though feels she may be more on the mark than he's willing to admit.

“I am sorry to shake you up, but zhere is a woman at
le bar
. She asks everyone for you.”

“For me?” he queries, knowing that Daisy is the only person who uses his real name.

“She doesn't give your name, but she says, ‘Zhe tall handsome Engleesh who comes here each night.' And I know it must be you.”

“Zhank you.” He smiles, flattered and relieved.

“‘I know him,' I says. And I come fetch you.”

It has to be Marcia, he thinks, as Daisy catches his hand and bounces him along the promenade like a fiveyear-old who's found a seaside pal.

“Are the four English people there?” he asks, hoping not.

“Zhey were, but zhey have gone now. Zhey were like zhe lobsters, zhe poor zhings — zhey were at zhe beach today, I zhink.”

He can't help laughing, though he stops abruptly as Marcia rushes along the seafront to greet him.

“They're in Corsica,” she blurts. “Hurry or you'll miss them.”

Daisy listens intently to the conversation between Bliss and Marcia, though she picks up little as Marcia circumspectly explains to Bliss that her daughter, Natalia, has decided to leave her boyfriend in Corsica. “And I was wondering,” she asks with an eye on Daisy, “if you'd care to go over to make sure she is all right. Only I remember you saying you were interested in visiting the island.”

So, Bliss thinks, Natalia Grimes has seemingly seen the light at last — or has she? Although he listens pokerfaced to Marcia enthusing on the prospects of her daughter's expected return, he knows the stated aims of drug addicts are generally as capricious as Jacques's wind.

Daisy, completely in the dark, is ecstatic. “Your little girl comes home, yes? Zhat is good, no?” But on the subject of Bliss taking off for Corsica she is more taciturn.
“Why you go?” she bemoans, still in the dark, after Marcia leaves.

“My book ...” he explains, feeling that is explanation enough, but Daisy rebounds. “I come with you. I translate.”

Although he tries to quash the idea with a flat, “No,” she reels off a dozen reasons in favour, until eventually he pulls her plug by announcing he will probably be away for weeks. “That's the trouble with literary research,” he notes. “It's boundless.”

Her face falls sharply. “You have forgotten?”

“No,” he protests, then is forced to surrender. “Forgotten what?”

Dinner at La Scala
—
Sunday evening — as guests of the general manager, or
“une grosse légume,”
as Daisy described him. Amidst his excitement over his book, the masked man, and now Johnson's re-emergence, he's put everything else on the back burner.

“Sorry,” he says, promising to make it up to her on his return.

The early morning ferry from Nice to the northern Corsican port of Calvi leaves gulls floundering as it zips across the 150-kilometre gap. This is fast, thinks Bliss, as he reclines in the aircraft-like cabin of the super-sleek, jetpowered craft, which skates over the silky surface at seventy kilometres per hour.

With less than three hours to Calvi, the current haven of the
Sea-Quester
according to Natalia, who phoned her mother the previous day, Bliss takes advantage of the smooth ride and settles down with a meaty writing block to transcribe his notes into a manuscript.

The coastline of France is rapidly shrinking as he begins, then, with barely a word written, he stops in momentary concern.

“I've forgotten my passport,” he explains to the smart-suited purser a few minute later.

“
Bof. Ben quoi?
So what?” says the dark-skinned, cow-eyed beauty as she explains, “Corsica is French — for zhe moment.”

The smugness of her tone as she adds “for zhe moment” leaves him thinking she knows something others have yet to discover, but, with his mind at ease, he heads to the bar for coffee and a croissant.

With the plot of his novel finally fleshing out, he sits in the lounge surveying his surroundings, his mind full of seventeenth-century intrigue, thinking how, at a time of sail and oar, Frederick Chapel would have put the wind up the
légionnaires
on the island of Sainte-Marguerite if he'd screamed into the bay at the helm of a snorting sea monster like this one. He would have had no difficulty strolling ashore and demanding they hand over the jailed man, he decides, then pauses, questioning where his storyline is headed. No, he concludes, that wasn't Chapel's mandate. To save his neck, all he had to do was conclusively identify the prisoner as Dirty Dick Cromwell, then leave it to the masked man's aggrieved victims to winkle him out of jail and spirit him back to England to recoup their pounds — of one kind or the other.

A couple of hours later, with several pages under his belt, Bliss breaks off to view the fast-approaching peaks and orients himself with the aid of the map he's brought from the apartment. The jutting pinnacles, glowing golden in the morning sun, cut into the royal blue sky like spikes of a coronet, and he realizes Corsica isn't so
much an island as one big mountain plopped into the sweeping corner of the Mediterranean, where France leaps past Monaco and rounds the bend into Italy.

The mountainous nature of the isle really impresses itself on him when, a short time later, he struggles up flight after flight of steep stone steps, heading for the summit of the castle overlooking the small harbour of Calvi.

“You must take zhe donkey on Corsica,” Daisy burbled as she dropped him in Nice earlier, and he looks around before he starts his climb. BMWs and Ferraris dot the quayside, but there are no donkeys as far as he can see, so he makes do with Shank's pony.

Bliss reaches the castle's battlements and uses his binoculars to check the rugged coastline and wide ocean — to no avail. There is no trace of the
Sea-Quester
in the town's port or anchored off the beach on the other side of the inlet, leaving him to conclude that either Natalia Grimes lied to her mother or they've sailed on.

Jogging back down to the port, he is tempted to simply put up his feet in one of the bright quayside cafés and concentrate on his book, then realizes he's only one step away from his plan to disappear. This looks a neat little place to live, he thinks, assessing the tiny terraces of medieval houses and the colourful displays of touristy stores, but he shrugs off the notion, knowing it has a fatal flaw — Daisy. Already disappointed at missing dinner at La Scala, it wouldn't be long before she'd panic and phone Richards, or whoever made the apartment's reservation, and set the hounds on him. In any case, he decides, eyeing the scores of holidaymakers in the popular spot, someone's bound to recognize me.