The Dave Bliss Quintet (31 page)

“Oh, I see,” he says, adding, “But I thought you didn't like him.”

“I don' t. He is
un phallocrate —
a dirty chauvinist pig. He always wanted me to go with him when we were at school, but I say no. Zhen, when he becomes a police
man, I zhink I should tell him about Roland swimming to zhe château.”

“What did he do?”

“He say he find nothing at zhe château. But it is perhaps two years after it happened zhat I tell him.”

“But you didn't tell anyone you'd been in the château with him.”

“No. I never tell,” she says, and for more than thirty years the château had kept the secret with her.

“I still don't understand why you didn't tell anyone at the time it happened.”

“I was young. I was scared,” she replies, though doesn't distinguish between the fear of pregnancy, the risk of bringing down an entire religion, or even apprehension of being accused of killing the boy.

It's August the sixteenth. Summer has officially ended, though no one has told the sun. But the heat of excitement has gone, and Bliss slowly wanders along the harbour front, listening to his Walkman playing Brubeck's “All by Myself” as he summons the fortitude to inform Greg Grimes of his brother's death. The serious holidaymakers are winding down, although the less affluent, together with the physically and geographically challenged, will remain for a few more weeks. The stars of summer have moored their yachts, locked their villas, and jetted home for a few weeks of rest before hitting the ski slopes. Even the cut-rate backpackers are on the move — further south with the sun or north into the approaching snows.

The wind picks up a few notches as he walks the harbour side, catching a wheeled rack of wetsuits and
water skis by surprise, threatening to dump the whole lot off the quay into the Mediterranean.

“
Merde
,” shouts the rental equipment's owner, struggling to hang onto the wind-borne rack as it races to the edge. Rushing to his aid, Bliss grapples with the stand and wrestles it to the ground.

“
Merci. Merci, Monsieur
,” mutters the puffed-out old man in thanks.

Boats and buoys bob furiously as they struggle against their moorings, and the sea darkens to indigo while a small powerboat drags its anchor across the bay. Cumulous clouds billow over the alps behind him, but the sun is in the south and still shines on the sea where sailboarders skim the surface like demented water-boatmen. A couple of kite-boarders soar off into the air and fly across the bay in the steady wind. The serious sailboats are out today as well — enough wind for the first time in two months. The southwesterly sirocco playfully plucks out the gay spinnakers of a hundred yachts and sends them scooting off to Nice and Monte Carlo, and, with luck, will speed them back, close-hauled under a jib.

“It's a good day for a sail,” says Bliss to a salty looking character sitting on the quay in front of L' Offshore Club reading
The Times
.

“Been a terrible summer,” complains the wine-gutted greybeard in a captain's shirt. “Not enough wind to whip up a skirt,” he adds, laughing wildly, then roars at what is, for him, another gem. “Blow the man down — ha, ha, ha.”

A leaf, exhausted by the summer's heat and flogged by the wind, falls from a plane tree and lands on Bliss's table as he stops for a whisky at L' Escale, on his way to break the bad news to Grimes. He looks up in time to see Angeline miss her footing with a heavily laden tray, then
slip off the edge of the curb into the path of a teenager's open-topped Mercedes. Saving her life with a desperate left-handed shove on the windshield, she is still off balance and ends up deftly passing her tray to the startled front-seat passenger as she fights to stay upright.

“
Espè ce de salaud
— you bastard!” she screams as the driver slams his foot on the throttle and heads off with enough sundaes and cocktails for a beach party.

“
Merde
,” she mutters, stomping back to the bar for replacements.

One whisky may not be enough, Bliss decides, with his mind on the hospital in Cannes where Grimes waits unsuspectingly, and he rattles through similarly taxing situations in his mind trying to figure out the easiest way of breaking the news. It only takes a minute or so to decide his best option is to pray a relative or friend may have already phoned. Telling a recovering amputee his brother is dead is one thing, but who wants to hear that his sibling popped open his skull with a shotgun because he'd been caught with his hand in a hundred widows' purses?

Maybe I should ask Daisy to come with me, he thinks, realizing Grimes might need comforting and is unlikely to want his wife sticking around once he knows she was the one who loaded his brother's gun. But Daisy has her own problems — twenty-four hours to tell the local police what she knows of the death of Roland or he'll do it for her.

“Oh well. Here goes,” he says, slugging down the second Scotch as the taxi Angeline summoned for him pulls up outside the bar. The imprint of the Harley Davidson stands out clearly on the front wing of the cab, although the damage is unremarkable in a land where everyone drives by touch. “Tut-tut,” says Bliss as he starts to climb in, then stops in surprise as he spots the
Sea-Quester
nos
ing its way into the harbour. “Thank Christ,” he mutters, and heads off to the hospital with a packed agenda.

Marcia is at her husband's bedside, stroking his good hand and staring lovingly into his eyes, when Bliss arrives. “Hello, Inspector,” she gabbles. “Greg's feeling a lot better today, aren't you, dear?”

He won't be in a moment, Bliss thinks, as he put on a funereal mien and asks Marcia if she would leave them for ten minutes.

“No. It's all right, Inspector. Anything you have to say to me, you can tell my wife,” Grimes replies with a smile in her direction.

“Just give us a few minutes please,” he repeats to Marcia forcefully.

“I'll stay,” she starts, trying to hang on, when Bliss grasps her elbow and hisses in her ear, “I said, leave.”

One look at Bliss's face warns her that whatever is coming is unlikely to bolster the relationship she's been rebuilding for the past few days, but she covers her apprehension with a parting smile. “Won't be long, dear.”

Greg does not take the death of his brother Gordon any better than Bliss anticipated. The cause of the suicide, and the fact that Johnson seems to be bent on destroying his entire family, has him fighting to get out of bed. Holding him down, Bliss promises they are doing whatever they can — primarily recovering the widows' and orphans' five million pounds — although he acknowledges that anything he does won't help Grimes get his wife, daughter, brother, and livelihood back.

With Grimes bent on vengeance, Bliss seizes the opportunity to quiz him over the amphorae in the château
and learns the potter has been fascinated with Roman ceramics from his childhood. Intrigued by the strength and sophistication of a design that enabled them to survive unscathed for two thousand years, he had spent most of his career toiling to emulate the work of the ancients until he could make exact replicas. It was then that Marcia told her employer, Morgan Johnson, whose eyes lit up at the prospect of a fortune. Marcia, seeing a way out of their continual impecuniousness, badgered and nagged him for months to make amphorae that Johnson could sell until one day she apparently gave up. Eventually he discovered she'd copied his research material and given it to Johnson. He threw her out and she threw herself at Johnson. Later he found that she was paying her rent by fundraising from friends and relatives, although he had no idea she'd got her hooks into his brother, Gordon.

“He was hardly likely to tell you he was investing the widows' mites in your wife's boyfriend's bent business,” Bliss tells him, before enquiring about the amphorae in the château's tunnel.

“A man can only take so much, Inspector, and Morgan fucking Johnson had taken pretty much everything. So I was taking some of it back.”

“And he caught you smashing the pots — ”

“It was pitch black,” Grimes cuts in, and Bliss's “You should go to the local police” has him shaking his head.

“Not until I can get Natalia away from him.” Both men look at the bandaged stump and understand the implication.

“By the way,” Bliss says, as he turns to open the door. “Have you ever owned a Dave Brubeck T-shirt?”

Catching Marcia in the hallway, Bliss drags her roughly outside and spins on her, pulling no punches
as he tells her about her brother-in-law's brains being pulped.

“Morgan was going to give the money back — he promised,” she protests.

“Yeah. Neatly parcelled with Greg's hand and the the remnants of Natalia.”

“I told you. He had nothing to do with that.”

“Who did, then?”

“I've no idea.”

“Wait a minute,” he calls, but she storms off.

Less than an hour later Bliss is on the phone to Richards, gaining permission to charter a yacht.

“Just don't go mad,” Richards implores, limiting his personal liability.

Shopping for the boat is easier than Bliss expected.

“The season is finished,” yawns the young Englishwoman in the shipbroker's office in St-Juan. “Take your pick,” she says, uninterestedly sweeping her hand over a wall of flattering photos as she polishes a nail. “Most of them are available.”

The sense of power is almost overwhelming as Bliss gapes at the array of yachts. In the pictures the vessels all frolic on a pancake sea and beam in the sun, but whether they can match Johnson's yacht, he has no clue. So, turning to face the harbour, he points to the
Sea-Quester
and puts his hand in his pocket for his credit card. “I'd like something similar to that — for a week to start?”

Tired of dealing with a summer season of fender kickers, the woman senses seriousness and smartens herself up. “Yes, Sir — I have exactly what you're looking for, and you've hit the market at precisely the right time.”

You should be flogging real estate or cars, he thinks, watching her plump herself up and preen her face into a selling mode.

A few minutes later, after a couple of phone calls, she waltzes him down the quayside, past the
Sea-Quester,
to a similar-sized yacht.

“She's a little under forty metres,” the familiar-faced captain explains, the three-day-old copy of
The Times
neatly stowed under his arm, as he straightens himself up and meets them on the gangway. “Come aboard, Mr. … ?”

“Smith,” says Bliss, thinking, this is definitely going on the credit card. “John Smith.”

“Nice to meet you again, Mr. Smith,” greets the captain. “So. Let's show you around the
Mystè re
.”

“That's an interesting name,” comments Bliss, stepping onto the teak deck.

“It's a mystery to me,” the old man roars.

“It'll do nicely,” says Bliss ten minutes later as they sit in the lounge over a cognac, but the sales pitch isn't quite over as Susan sums up, “She's a particularly fine vessel — a little snug for ten, perhaps.”

“Snug,” echoes Bliss, still reeling from the opulent sights of gold-plated staterooms and bathrooms that would accommodate fifty at a squeeze, and a hundred at a push. “And the price?” he asks, without particular concern.

“That's where you are in luck,” Susan explains, as the captain tactfully excuses himself with the bottle of brandy. “The bare-boat charter is just twelve thousand dollars, American, plus expenses, of course.”

“Sounds reasonable,” he says, then asks, “Expenses?”

“Fuel, berthing fees, all the usual things, plus food, of course.”

“Of course — but I won't need a lot of food.”

She laughs, “You have to feed your crew, Mr. Smith. This isn't a slave ship.”

“No. Right,” he says, pulling out his credit card, “So, how much?”

Sitting at L' Escale a little later, he takes out his cell-phone, takes a deep breath, and calls Richards.

“I got that quote for you, Guv,” he says, his eye on the
Sea-Quester
across the harbour.

“Just go ahead,” Richards says, then senses something amiss. “How much?”

Bliss laughs; he can't help it. The twelve thousand dollars, which at first he thought was for the week, was per day. The captain and five crew would swallow another thousand, and the cost of fuel made him gag — thirty dollars a mile if he didn't push it. “I can probably do it on about a hundred and five thousand dollars a week, Guv.”

“What's that in English?” asks Richards, not immediately concerned.

“About eighty thousand quid.”

“Bloody hell! Bliss — I said rent it. Don't buy it.”

“Quite, Sir,” he chuckles. “That's what I thought.”

“I'll get back to you,” Richards says, telling him to do his best to keep tabs on Johnson in the meantime. “The commissioner's still deciding what to do in light of Gordon Grimes's death.”

I bet he is, thinks Bliss, as he orders his usual glass of wine from Angeline. Since the theft of her tray, Angeline
has adopted a more determined approach, and he watches, fascinated, as she steps smartly into the road, holding both hands high and walking like a hostage. It seems to work as confused motorists slide to a halt and look to see if someone's pointing a gun at her back.

The promenade is cheerless without the bustle of the high-season throngs, and the glum-faced trickle of hoteliers assembling for their end-of-season inquest seem even more dispirited than usual.

All twelve, together with the black-robed priest, show up by eight o' clock. But now they have time — the ten-week tornado of summer is winding down. Their rooms are half empty and toilets unblocked. Like the Provençal lavender farmers, their harvest is almost over for the year, and, just like the farmers, their crop will never fulfill their expectations: never enough clients, never enough staff, never enough ancillary sales. “
Merde
— they snacked all day in the snack bars and beach cafés and raided the supermarkets,” they'll complain, running their eyes down the meagre restaurant takings.