The Dave Bliss Quintet (6 page)

Bliss is looking around the mesmerized crowd of women, wondering how many of them will be rinsing out their underpants when they get back to their hotels, when, almost magically, a perfectly proportioned candle holder complete with crenulated drip tray seems to form itself from the ductile material. Seemingly without taking his eyes off the crowd, the potter lifts the work onto a cardboard disk and stands — teasingly.

“Me, me, me,” call the younger girls who've elbowed their way to the front — but he is seeking a bigger catch,
and locks eyes with a dark-haired teenager hanging onto her mesmerized mother. With the faintest of nods, he signals that she is the chosen one. Blushing fiercely, she forges a path through the crowd and beams with the bashful joy of a supplicant dragged out of the congregation in St. Peter's to kiss the Pope's hem.

For a second the crowd deflates and a few disappointed souls trail away. Others take their place and gravitate towards the wheel as it starts to spin once more.

Over and over the spinning wheel draws the crowd in, until they are glued by the potter's eyes and hands. Two pots a minute spin off his wheel — vases, mugs, candle holders, egg cups, ashtrays — each as perfect and elaborate as the next, each one warming the heart of the recipient. There's going to be a lot of blocked toilets tomorrow, Bliss is thinking, when Marcia catches his eye — she is hovering outside the circle and immediately turns her back as he moves to extricate himself from the throng.

“Do you see the way the women watch him?” she hisses, grabbing his arm and steering him away, marching staunchly from the brightly lit quayside towards the moonlit beach. “Doesn't it make you sick,” she spits, “the way they grovel? He gives them a lump of clay that'll dry and crack in a few hours, and they treat him like some sort of god.”

“He is giving them more than a pot,” starts Bliss defensively. “He is giving them expectation — that they will be the chosen one. He gives them hope.”

“Huh! And I know what they're hoping for,” she counters angrily.

“What's your problem?” he asks, pulling her up sharply. “You don't own a hotel, do you?”

“Oh, I know all about the hoteliers and their toilets.” She laughs dryly. “No, no hotel.”

“So why do you care?”

“He's my husband.”

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.