The Dave Bliss Quintet (23 page)

A team of men with dogs would take the best part of a day to search this place properly, he is thinking,
when his already frazzled nerves take a severe jolt as the door swings shut behind him with a loud
click
.

Run, says his inner voice, but nothing happens as he waits for his legs to get the message. “Who's there?” he calls weakly once his mouth thaws.

I should have brought Marcia with me, he tells himself, and, gripping the can of pepper spray firmly in one hand and the flashlight in the other, he starts towards one of the movie-set staircases.

He begins up the stairs, then balks. Three very creaky steps snap his nerve, and he scuttles out to the patio to calm himself in the moonlight, while he paces and seeks a new strategy. The lights of the castle across the strait on Île Sainte-Marguerite flicker indistinctly through the trees, and he finds himself thinking of the man who'd spent eleven years of his life in a cell there, with his head caged in a heavy iron helmet, and how Frederick Chapel could have got to him. It's like a Houdini escapology illusion in reverse, he concludes. Instead of Houdini getting out, Frederick Chapel has to figure a way to get in — to invade the island, break into the prison, divert some guards, immobilize others, crack open the cell, and unmask the prisoner.

Now is not a time to be thinking of abstracts, he reproaches himself, then freezes in thought. The abstract is the answer. “Thank you, Frederick Chapel,” he mouths in relief, quickly plays it over in his mind a second time to iron out any flaws, then goes on the offensive.

Ten minutes later he's ready; everything is in place. Now he's backed up with an entire division of men. He's got a man ready at the back door, others to go upstairs, some to go down; then there are the dog teams — specialist cadaver sniffers as well as tracker
dogs; and, finally, a group of officers for general searching duties.

He starts with a battering against the back door, shouting, “Police! Open up. Police.” Then he dashes around the side, up the steps, and through the front, stomping across the floor, slamming open doors and shutting others, shouting and prattling on in nonsensical French, dropping lumps of wood and flopping hunks of steak. Then, swivelling both flashlights furiously around the huge hall, he shouts, “Right — you two. Get the dogs ready. Those of you ...” he starts, then loudly shuffles his feet before shouting, “Stand still at the back. That's better. Now those of you who speak English translate for the others. Remember — the man we're looking for is English. We know he's hurt. We must find him quickly.”

“Yes, you — what is it?” he demands loudly in response to his own mumbling. “Yes, we've got lots more officers coming. But you twelve are going to make a start. I want you to bring in the dogs and check everywhere. Wait a minute!” he hollers at the top of his lungs. “Before we start …” Then he pauses to shuffle his feet noisily and shriek, “Stand still that man! Before we start I want everyone to stay perfectly quiet and listen for any sounds Mr. Grimes might make.”

An hour later, with Greg Grimes in intensive care in Cannes General Hospital, Bliss slumps over a Scotch in an all-night bar, wondering if the concept of a phantom invasion force would fly in his novel to uncover the identity of the masked man. Daisy doesn't care. She's just happy to hold his hand.

“I was worried about you,” Commander Richards claims when Bliss answers his early morning telephone call.

Yeah, I bet you were, Bliss yawns to himself. “You needn't worry, Guv, I found him,” he says aloud as he struggles out of bed.

“Is he all right?”

“I can't imagine there are many happy one-handed potters in the world, but he'll live. I found him slumped under a stoneware sink in a kitchen below the château's great hall.”

“Who did it?”

“I thought you wanted me to stay out of it, Guv.”

“Sounds as though you're already in it.”

He is in it, but has no idea who might have amputated Grimes's hand. And any help in that direction that the potter himself may have given has been pre-empted
by his wife. Marcia made a very solid point of warning her husband to keep quiet as she and Daisy manhandled the injured man through the gap in the fence. “Mr. Bliss is a police inspector from England, dear,” she pointedly proclaimed, though whether or not the potter took it in, he couldn't know.

“He's not saying anything — not to me, anyway,” Bliss tells Richards as he yanks the phone cord out to the balcony.

“Do you think it was our man?” asks Richards, with Johnson in mind.

“It could have been almost anyone,” Bliss replies, stretching himself on the lounger in the sun “Though I'm pretty certain it wasn't his wife. The way she cried over him; even the way he looked at her. It was quite touching, really, considering what they've been through.”

“Who else could it have been?” Richards wants to know, as Bliss picks up his binoculars and strains to pick out the château's roofs in the distance.

“I've no idea, to be honest. I don't know a lot about him, although he's certainly upset the local hoteliers pretty badly.”

“Doing moonlight flits,” suggests Richards.

“No,” Bliss laughs before explaining the saga of the wet pots.

As for the question of Bliss's next step: “I'm not sure at the moment,” he explains, though now with the château in his sights he knows his first priority is to get back inside. There's bound to be some evidence in there somewhere, he tells himself, though he is careful not to give Richards the impression he has plans.

“I don't even know where it actually happened, Guv,” he adds, then complains about Grimes being
uncooperative. “Anybody would think he was the villain the way he clammed up.”

With nothing further to report, Bliss is about to hang up and return to bed when Richards takes him by surprise. “About that boat you wanted, Dave … ”

“You're kidding!” Bliss exclaims.

“No. I've had a word in the right place. I need you to get some quotes — nothing flashy, but big enough to do the job — then we'll have another meeting and take a look at it.”

I might have guessed, Bliss thinks, quickly deflating as he recognizes the time-honoured stalling tactics. Start with meetings, requisition proposals, submissions, suggestions, estimates, and quotes, then have more meetings to discuss, etc., before asking for revised quotes, etc., then … etc., etc., etc. He's been around that circle before.

“All right, Guv,” he replies with little enthusiasm as he peers over the balcony at the shrivelled lemon in the garden below and is reminded he never told Richards about Johnson's wife. Who, he is certain, is back. The caged boy is back, at any rate. Bliss saw him at daybreak when he returned from Grimes's bedside. He spotted him in the garden, passionately kissing the dog — French kissing the dog, as far as he could tell.

“I've got to do something about that,” he sniggered to himself, no longer dumbfounded. “That dog could get all sorts of germs.”

That must mean Johnson's wife is back, he thought, and immediately jumped to the conclusion that her return was somehow related to the potter's injury. Maybe the hand was a warning to stop me from meddling, he thought.

Once he gets off the phone with Richards he deliberates the situation and concludes that, assuming Grimes didn't chopped off his own hand, whoever did it clearly meant it to be found — otherwise they would have left it in the château with the rest of the body. And with that thought, he goes back to bed, planning his next assault on the old building.

Wednesday morning broke as cleanly as every other morning, and as the sun picked itself out of the sea, Bliss was already on the château's grounds. A workman's tool bag and a frayed pair of plasterer's overalls he bought from a guy on the construction site just off the promenade walked him past the sleepy guards on the hill without question. The worker — the only one in his group approaching six feet — had been confused, then amused, at the strange Englishman who was willing to buy his clothes and bag of oldest tools for triple the price of new.

“
C'est un vrai cinglé, ce type
, ” he laughed to his mates, accusing Bliss of being a real nutcase, but Bliss was steadfast, proffering a large wad of cash with an open expression.

In the warm light of the reborn sun the patina of centuries shadows the once-bright marble, and the elaborately carved waisted balusters surrounding the south-facing patio and balconies at the front of the building have split and spalled in the twin ravages of sun and salt air. The scrolled acanthus leaves on the capitals of the Corinthian columns that form the entrance portico and support the enormous canopy have not fared well either, though the massive pillars themselves appear firm as he stands on the patio taking a few deep breaths.

The continued absence of guards and dogs is a comfort, although the property owner — whoever that is — has done a great job of scare-mongering in the local community. Daisy was so alarmed by his intention to return that she refused to assist in any manner. In fact the mere suggestion had her jittery. “You no go back,” she implored staunchly. But now that he knew the secret of the entrance he could risk it in broad daylight under the noses of the goons, he explained to her, appealing, “Just drop me off at the right spot and I'll be out of the car and through the fence in seconds.”

“No. Zhe château is
dangereux
.”

“Don't be silly,” he retorted. “There's nothing to be scared of. It's just an abandoned old house.” But he was quite unprepared for her emotional outburst.

“I no want you to go,” she cried, and continued crying, despite every effort on his part to calm her.

“But why?” he asked repeatedly.

“Zhe dogs — ” she blubbered eventually, but he cut her off sharply.

“There are no dogs or guards.”

Nothing he said made any difference. She wouldn't help and she wanted him to promise not to go back.

“I promise,” he said, fingers crossed.

Now, standing on the patio with its symmetrical octagonal tiles, he still worries there may be guard dogs. He knows that a properly trained dog will smell his anxiety and go for him despite the lump of steak and the canister of pepper spray he carries. He also knows that once inside the building he'll be easily cornered, and, even armed with a couple of battery-powered floodlights, a
dozen candles, and a bagful of sharp tools, he still has to steel himself to re-enter.

Daisy's intuition rings true as he faces the door and the hairs on the back of his neck rise. “What the hell is it?” he asks, feeling a shiver, and then he talks himself forward, “It's just a decrepit old mansion — now get on with it.”

Slender beams of early morning light, sieved through the thick wooden shutters and filthy windows, dance with midges and motes as he enters the great hall, and he shudders at the chill of the marble. Up or down, he deliberates, warily eyeing the jagged cracks in the twin sweep of stone staircases ahead. He'll need to venture upstairs eventually for the sake of his novel, although he was fairly satisfied on the basic viability of his theory during his previous visit. Standing on the patio of the château in the early hours of Tuesday morning, while drumming up the guts to search for Grimes, he saw the lights of the castle on Î le Sainte-Marguerite and he knew that if he could see the lights, then an incarcerated person could have looked from the window of the cell of
l'homme au masque de fer
and seen him.

Frederick Chapel, alias Franço is Couperin, would have been delighted to know that in 1687, he thought later, as he spent an hour updating his manuscript with a gripping description of the adventure of Franço is Couperin the night he finally plucked up the courage to get into the château's grounds. In his novel, Bliss wrote of Couperin trailing a group of construction workers as they sneaked back into the grounds through a hole in the fence one dark night, having visited the village to satisfy themselves at the inn and at the various wells of Venus. Apparently Jean the fisherman had been right about the sleeping guards, and the steaks Couperin had
hacked from a dead donkey he'd found on the roadside had easily quieted the dogs.

Leaving behind the dusty shafts of daylight, Bliss descends to the basement — to the kitchen where he found Grimes — but now his way is lighted by a powerful floodlight that throws ghostly shadows off the forest of stone pillars and sends creatures scurrying in all directions. The workman's bag is stuffed with builder's weapons, and he quickly pulls out a lethal-looking chisel when a couple of large rats challenge him, making him understand why Grimes scrunched himself into a protective ball under the sink with a lump of wood in his remaining hand.

The poor bastard must have been terrified, thinks Bliss as he lights candles, frightening himself silly as the flickering lights bring ghosts to life. But what the hell was Grimes doing down here?

“
Merde —
this is really scary,” he mouths, as he systematically searches the vaulted dungeon. “You shouldn't have come alone.” But neither Marcia nor Daisy would join him in the escapade, and he was reluctant to admit to Jacques or Hugh that he'd hoodwinked them for nearly a month. In any case, who would believe he couldn't simply take his suspicions to the local police?

Apart from an ancient iron stove and some heavy metal stacking chairs — circa 1940s, he guesses — the only furnishing of interest is a tatty mattress covered with stains he'd rather not dwell on. Then his light catches the edge of movement.

“Who's there?” he calls, whipping around.

A sinister rustling sound spins him as it echoes off the walls.

“Who is it?” he demands, and his own voice bounces back and shakes him.

“Shit,” he exclaims, startled.