Thirty minutes later, with the dust settled, Daphne and Trina are back in their room nursing their wounds after an abortive escape bid, while Bliss is back at Bellingham police station wondering how the hire-car company will react to their vehicle’s shredded tires and the ragged line of bullet holes across the trunk lid.
“They sure as hell get touchy about trespassers up there,” the desk officer explains as Bliss recounts the moment when a row of vicious spikes had sprung out of the roadway in front of him, a dozen sirens had screeched overhead, and a couple of hooded men had jumped from behind trees with sub-machine guns. “You’re lucky to have got out alive.”
“But what are you going to do about it?” demands Bliss angrily.
“I suppose I should give you a ticket for trespassing…” the sergeant begins as he scratches his head, though is saved further deliberation by the appearance of Captain Prudenski.
“Chief Inspector Bliss, there’s a couple of people who need to talk to you,” he says without ceremony.
“People?” queries Bliss, but the captain clams up and ushers Bliss into a room where two smart-suited, smart-mouthed, executive types wait with painted-on smiles.
“Look, David — you don’t mind if we call you David, do you?” asks one, his tone as clipped as his brush-cut hairstyle.
“Who are you?” queries Bliss.
“That’s not important, David,” starts the other, a beefier version.
“In that case, I think I’d prefer you to call me Detective Chief Inspector,” says Bliss coldly, sensing that he holds the higher ground, guessing that their desire for anonymity means they are probably walking on quicksand.
“Dave…”
“Detective Chief Inspector.”
“Look, how long are you going to keep this up?”
“Until I start getting some straight answers.”
“If that’s the way you wann’a play it…” says Brush-head. “In which case, we’ve come to tell you that the search has been officially called off. We’re satisfied that the two ladies in question left the United States of their own free will sometime late yesterday evening.”
“But that’s not true,” spits Bliss.
“Choose your words wisely, Chief Inspector. We do have the documents to prove what we’re saying.”
“Then how come the Canadians have no record?” demands Bliss.
“Sloppy record-keeping,” continues Brush-head. “They’re renowned for it.”
“I don’t believe this.”
“Look, David — excuse me,” says the muscular one, switching on a smile and putting a hand on Bliss’s shoulder. “But you have to understand what you’re dealing with here.”
“I think I’m dealing with a couple of jerks who’ve been watching too much television,” Bliss says as he shakes off the hand and heads to the door. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have two women to find.”
Brush-head beats him to the door and holds it shut with his back. “Sir. We’re not asking. You should understand that you are only here as a guest. Your visitor’s visa can be revoked immediately.”
“You’ve already tried that once.”
“We can do it again.”
“And what do you think Her Majesty’s government would say about that?”
“They’ll say whatever we tell ‘em to say, Davie boy,” he scoffs. “Just like they always do.”
Talk about Big Brother, Bliss is fuming as he steps outside and confronts Prudenski. “Who the hell are they?”
“Way above my pay scale,” admits the captain, “but they’ve got more clout than the governor. He’s called off all search efforts and put out a press release sayin’ that the women were just fine and dandy when they crossed the border last night.”
“But this is a load of nonsense,” insists Bliss. “We checked all the border posts this morning. They did not leave the country.”
“Dave, I hate to tell you this, but an immigration officer has remembered seeing them pedalling home.”
“When? Where?” demands Bliss.
“Last night around ten. At the sleepy border crossing on the back road, near where the machine was found.”
“This is ridiculous. They couldn’t possibly have pedalled that far. What do the Canadians say?”
Prudenski shrugs. “Maybe they were asleep, Dave. Like I say, it’s a dozy little place.”
Doziness has also become a problem for Trina and Daphne after their break for freedom during the confusion caused by Bliss’s unscheduled arrival, when Spotty Dick and Bumface raced to investigate the cacophony of sirens, gunfire and shouts of alarm and inadvertently left their door unlocked. The women were out of the room in a flash, but their flight came to grief at the end of the first corridor where Dawson had stood with his arms folded.
Soon after, Trina finally succumbed to more than thirty-six hours of wakefulness, and Daphne helped her onto a bed and covered her with a blanket before continuing her imaginary knitting.
“Is she all right?” Spotty Dick asks Daphne as he brings a tray of food early evening.
“She’s worried about her poor little children. All alone, bawling their hearts out…”
“Yes — cut that out.”
“Have you got any little kiddies at home?”
“Leave it alone, will ya. I meant — she’s not sick or anything?”
“Oh, no,” says Daphne breezily. “She’s Sleeping Beauty and I’m Snow White. And you could be one of the little dwarves. You can be Dopey if you want.”
“Look, will you stop this nonsense,” he says as Daphne picks up an imaginary broom.
“What are you doing now?” he demands in frustration.
“I’m sweeping, of course,” she says as she nudges him roughly aside. “C’mon, out of the way. Got to get this place cleaned up. The wicked queen’s coming for tea.”
“This won’t work, you know…”
“Just move that chair, would you?” she asks as she keeps up her mime.
“No.”
“Oh, you are a naughty boy.”
“Maybe you should be Grumpy, then,” she says cheekily, and she catches the glimmer of amusement in his eyes before he slips out.
The day has also been long and sleepless for Bumface and his boss John Dawson, and as Spotty Dick shakes his head at Daphne’s antics and returns to the surveillance room, the strain has them at each other’s throats.
“Look,” says Dawson, “we’ve got to do something. This is a situation that is not going away on its own.”
“Take it easy, John,” replies Bumface. “The heat’s off as long as no one saw Buzzer dump the stupid bathtub thing north of the border this morning. I’d say we have a credible level of deniability.”
“You aren’t thinking straight here, Steve,” replies Spotty Dick. “Those are two real live women in there who know damn well where they are. And the moment they get out and blab…”
But Bumface is slowly shaking his head. “They ain’t getting out, Allan. Not in the same state as they came in, anyway.”
“Shit! You aren’t serious?”
“Okay,” says Bumface, “what the hell are we supposed to do? Let them blow ten years of hard graft? Not to mention my pension. And who’s gonna tell them upstairs? Huh? Not me.”
“Okay, okay. So who knows they’re here?” steps in Dawson.
“No one who doesn’t have to,” replies Bumface. “Even Buzzer doesn’t know where the damn machine came from. And no one knows officially. In fact, officially they left the country at ten last night. We couldn’t bring them back now even if we wanted to.”
“And what about the other patients?”
“They’re hardly gonna say anything, are they?”
“Okay. But what about that British cop?”
“He’s just blowing smoke. Anyhow, he’s out’a here in twenty-four, sooner if he doesn’t put a lid on it.”
“It’s not that easy,” snorts the senior man, well aware that even a blast from a machine gun had failed to silence Bliss, and he storms around the room, seething, “You knew the rules: no one gets in.”
“In that case, John,” says Bumface with a wide-eyed expression of innocence, “no one got in.”
“Can’t you get one of the docs to pump ‘em full of something to make ‘em forget?” asks Dawson with a glimmer of hope.
“Oh, I could do that myself,” says Bumface with his hand on his gun, but Spotty Dick is backing off, just saying, “Look, they’re nothing but a couple of nut-bars —” when the deafening squeal of an alarm fills the room and they look up at the monitor to see the smudgy images of Trina and Daphne leaping up and down, screaming, “Fire! Fire!”
“Oh-my-God!” yells Spotty Dick and all three race for the women’s room expecting a smoky inferno.
“Where’s the fire?” questions Dawson as they rush in and find the two women casually reclining on their beds.
“What fire?” asks Daphne with blank-faced innocence.
“You pressed the fire alarm.”
“Oh, yes,” she says with an apologetic air. “So careless of me. It was just smouldering. It must have been all that wool we left lying around. But it’s out now.”
“There is no wool,” spits Bumface and, with a curious eye on the surveillance camera, he climbs on a chair and wipes a finger across the clouded lens. “Hairspray,” he announces as he sniffs the sticky translucent coating and gives Trina a poisonous stare.
“Ladies,” sighs Dawson in desperation, “will you please stop this. We are trying to regularize the situation, but you’re not making it easy for us.”
“I wasn’t aware that we were required to,” says Daphne, then she leaps out of bed, puts on her polka-dot hat, and says to Trina, “Come along, Dorothy. We’re off to see the wizard.”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” groans Dawson, and he ushers the other two men out, with Daphne’s shout of “You can be the Tin Man if you like” echoing down the corridor after him.
“You are going to get us into a lot of trouble,” laughs Trina as the door closes, but Daphne sloughs it off with a shrug. “They’re a bunch of amateurs. Anyway, how much worse can it get?”
But the pain has only just started for Rick Button, and he already sees a long dark tunnel in his future. David Bliss isn’t having a good day, either, and he is calling the Vancouverite from a pay phone in the lobby of a Bellingham hotel, fearing that the phone in his room might be tapped after several calls he’d made to the press in which he’d virtually accused the local police of a cover-up.
“They’re scaling back the search, Dave,” bleats Trina’s husband with a mixture of desperation and despair, and Bliss allows the distraught man to carry on rambling mournfully about the meaningless of life without her. “Who cares how many cars are in the garage? What’s my golf handicap, or how many stock options I get? I’d give up the whole damn lot right now to find her. I mean, take it — take it all, Dave. I’ll start from scratch, live in a tent, eat garbage. I don’t care.”
“Rick —”
“Keep busy, they say. Keep your mind off it. But I don’t want to keep my mind off it,” he continues to blubber. “I don’t want to stop thinking of her for a second. I’m scared, Dave; scared that if I stop thinking about her, it’ll be like I’ve acknowledged that something’s happened to her.”
“I understand,” says Bliss.
“How can you?” asks Button, forgetting in his self-pity that Bliss is also mourning a loss. “It’s like nothing matters anymore. Like it was all for zilch. All those years we spent bringing up the kids, saving for houses, holidays and cars, all the times we laughed, and cried. It’s all gone.”
“You still have the memories, Rick…” starts Bliss, then regrets it as the distressed man picks up on the finality of the words.
“That’s it. That’s all I have got left, Dave. It’s not much to show for twenty years, is it? Just the memories and a bunch of old photos.” Then he chokes up completely and hands the phone to Daisy.
“Hello, Daavid. Have you found anything?” she asks as Rick Button continues keening in the background, and Bliss has to admit that he’s stumped.
“I zhink we all need some sleep,” says Daisy, and Rick Button pulls himself together a tad and is back on the phone. “I’ve seen them on the TV, Dave. Snivelling wrecks barely able to hold their heads up after days without sleep. Pleading, begging, praying for the kidnappers to let their kids or their wife go. Well, that’s me now. And they say I should keep strong for the children’s sake — why? So they can look back later on and call me an insensitive bastard?”
“Where are the children?” asks Bliss, with no answer for the distraught man.
“Trina’s mum’s looking after them downstairs in the rec room,” he replies before asking, “What’s happening there?”
“Well, I’ve run into a few roadblocks,” confesses Bliss, and he considers explaining his explosive imbroglio with the inhabitants of the monastery but changes his mind, saying only that he’d had an accident before taking a more pragmatic approach. “I’ve worked it all out,” he explains. “From the time they were spotted by the lumberjack till ten p.m., when they were supposedly seen crossing into Canada, was less than three hours. It’s forty-two miles — and that doesn’t include the six miles that they would have gone in the wrong direction for Daphne to have dropped her handkerchief at the monastery.”
“How fast —” begins Button, but Bliss already has the calculation to hand.
“Fourteen miles an hour — eighteen if we include the hanky. Could they have done that kind of speed?”
“You kidding? Not even if it was downhill all the way with a strong gale behind them.”
“Quite. So where does that leave us?”
“You know where, Dave,” says Rick Button, his voice cracking. “There’s some real weirdos living up in the mountains.”
“No. No. No. Don’t even consider it,” says Bliss. “Even if Daphne was dead I doubt if she’d lie down.”
“So what are planning to do, now?”
“I’ve got a slight problem,” he admits. “The hire-car people have dinged me five thousand dollars for the damage and they won’t rent me another motor.”
“You can borrow Trina’s,” starts Rick Button. Then he breaks down completely as he adds, “I don’t think she’ll ever be driving it again.”
“Stop that,” insists Bliss. “I’m sure it won’t be long before we find them.”
However, in the tangled rainforest close to the scene of the abandoned Kidneymobile, the Canadian searchers are losing hope as the moon rises for the second time without a sighting of the women. In any case, without witnesses, clues, trails or even the sniff of a scent, they’ve been stumbling around in the dark all day.
“We’ve had to call off the search for tonight, Dave,” says Mike Phillips when Bliss phones him for news. “It’s too risky to have people wandering about in the dark, especially with bears and cougars about. We’ll go back at daybreak — though to be frank, I don’t see them surviving a second night.”
“I’m still convinced that monastery joint is involved,” says Bliss, detailing his ill-fated incursion before scoffing, “They might call themselves monks, but that place is tighter than Fort Knox.”
“So was Waco,” Phillips reminds him, “but the Americans are adamant that the two women are in Canada.”
“There’s no way they could have got back, Mike.”
“They could have hitched a ride —”
“No…” interjects Bliss.
“Well, it’s possible, Dave. Trina is certainly cheeky enough to have flagged down a trucker.”
“So is Daphne,” admits Bliss, “but U.S. Customs reckoned they’d pedalled back.”
“Sure. No trucker would have risked carrying them over the border; too much red tape. He would have dropped them one side, then picked them up again on the other.”
“Okay, so why didn’t the dogs pick up a trail? And that still wouldn’t explain why the authorities are on my back. According to the British consul I’ve trodden on some very tender toes.”
And the extent of Bliss’s clumsiness is brought home to him a minute later, when he phones his son-in-law England.
“Christ. It’s four o’clock in the morning,” moans Peter Bryan before adding, “Boy, are you in the khaki. Someone’s tipped off the commissioner that you’re running drugs into the States.”
“Oh, that’s brilliant.”
“Edwards has pencilled you in for suspension.”
“I bet he has,” says Bliss, though he knows that his resignation letter will easily trump any hand that Edwards can draw.
“So, what’s happened to Daphne?” asks Bryan, and Bliss takes a few minutes to vent his anger and irritation over his treatment by his American counterparts. “I don’t know what they’re playing at,” he concludes, “but I’m going to keep believing she’s alive until someone shows me a body.”
“So, do you really think they’re in that monastery place?” queries Bryan, and Bliss can only sigh in exasperation. “If they are, then the longer they keep them, the more difficulty they’ll have letting them go.”
John Dawson is facing that same dilemma as he paces the surveillance room with his eye on the clock. “Look, we gotta do something real soon,” he tells Bumface and Spotty Dick. “That English cop, Bliss, ain’t stupid. God knows how he knew where to find them, but he knew all right. And the chances are he’ll try again.”
“All we gotta do is deny it,” insists Bumface as he lays back and confidently splays himself. “There’s no photos, no inconvenient bodies — yet — and there’s nothing in the press that we can’t handle.”
“And what’re you gonna do — waste the pair of them? Cuz we sure as hell can’t keep them forever,” asks Dawson.
“It may come to that.”
“You’re crazy,” says Spotty Dick. “Anyway, what about Bliss?”
“Maybe he’ll have a nasty accident.”
Bliss isn’t planning anything accidental. In fact his motives are quite deliberate — to cause enough of a stench in Wednesday’s press to stink out anyone with information about the women’s disappearance. But at nine o’clock, when he answers a knock at his hotel room door, expecting a reporter from the Seattle Times, his face falls as he recognizes Brush-head and his sidekick from his morning encounter at the Bellingham police station.
“Oh, it’s you again,” he sighs, and he would have slammed the door if he’d been more alert.
“Dave —” says Brush-head as he saunters in.
“Chief Inspector.”
“Okay, have it your way, Chief Inspector. Bottom line: we ain’t askin’. We’re tellin’ ya: back off.”
“Who are you?” Bliss demands with a quizzical eye, though he gets no answer and is forced to conjecture FBI, CIA, DEA, or some other group of testosterone-hyped college boys hiding behind a once-respectable set of initials. “You guys are a bunch of cowboys,” he says dismissively.
“Dave, you don’t understand.”
“Oh, I think I do,” replies Bliss venomously. “It might have been called fascism, Nazism, communism, Stalinism and various other isms at different times, but it all amounts to the same thing: Big Brother — the end justifies the means. It’s sanctioned state terrorism and the suppression of any form of public dissension.”
“Well, I wouldn’t expect you to understand them.”
“Have you quite finished?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Good. Then I have great pleasure in informing you that unless you cease your attempts to make slanderous accusations in the media, you will be placed on our register of undesirable aliens and will never — I repeat, never — be permitted to enter the United States of America again.”
“Suits me,” says Bliss. “But what about Miss Lovelace and Mrs. Button?”
“Our position remains the same. The two women left the country of their own free will last night.”
“That’s a lie.”
“Prove it.”
The solidity of the two women in the monastery gives proof to the lie as they duck under a tent of bedclothes for a strategy session.
“I think Spotty Dick is starting to bend a little,” whispers Daphne, and Trina lightens up a notch as she giggles, “Perhaps we should change his name to Wilting Willy.”
“The snobby one talks as though this is official,” carries on Daphne, “but it can’t be, or the British consul would be banging on the gates.”
“Which means?”
“That they’re probably a lot more scared than we are,” she suggests, not adding that it also makes them much more dangerous.
However, downstairs in the surveillance room, Spotty Dick and Bumface don’t look particularly threatening as they slumber, exhausted, in front of the monitors.
“Keep an eye on those two,” John Dawson had said, tapping the screen before leaving to get some sleep, and he made it clear that he expected a solution by the time he returned. “You two clowns started this circus. You’d better think of a way to stop it.”
“So what are we going to do?” asks Trina, thinking Daphne has a plan.
“Hum,” sighs Daphne, feeling herself sinking. “Maybe we should get some shut-eye and see what happens in the morning.”
Meanwhile, in nearby Bellingham, Bliss finally succumbs to fatigue and unthinkingly uses the phone in his room to call the Button household to say good night to Daisy.
“I’m sorry about all this,” he says, though she claims not to mind.
“It is exciting, no?”
“No,” says Bliss positively. “It isn’t. Well, certainly not the kind of excitement I’d had in mind when I invited you.”
“Never mind, Daavid. I will see you in zhe morning and maybe we will find zhem.”
“Maybe.”
“That was Daavid,” says Daisy, finding Rick Button in his office, struggling to keep his eyes open, fearing sleep to be an admission of the hopelessness of the situation.
“I zhink you should go to bed, no?” she says gently, but Rick has no such thoughts. In fact, he’s determined to stay awake until Trina is found, and he has turned on almost every light in the house, emptied his briefcase, filing cabinet and car’s glove compartment of business cards, and is frantically emailing Trina’s photo and description to everyone he’s ever met.
“Would you like a sandwich, perhaps?” asks Daisy, and he looks at her as though she is demented.
“How can I eat?” he asks through the tears, and she understands, saying, “I will see if zhe children are hungry.”
“She would have called if she could,” he sobs with total despondency as Daisy starts to leave.
“Oh, you should not worry. I zhink she will come back,” she says, returning to place a comforting hand on his shoulder.
“No,” he says positively. “Not alive, anyway.”
John Dawson is close to accepting the same conclusion, but he lies awake praying for an alternative when his phone rings and a voice harshly whispers, “He’s in Room 227, Bellingham Suites Hotel.”
“You’re good,” says Dawson. “Thanks. I owe you.”
Now what? he puzzles, and he wrestles with projected scenarios that all end nightmarishly in the electric chair, until his brain finally freezes and he falls unconscious.
Daphne wakes him at five in the morning as she tries to suffocate him with her giant polka-dot hat, and he surfaces, screaming, to fight off the sweat-soaked sheets. Then he reaches for the bedside phone and calls the surveillance room.
“Get up here, Steve. We need to talk.”
“Okay, John.”
“And bring some coffee.”
“You know what we’ve got to do, don’t you?” says Bumface a few minutes later, but Dawson is still reluctant.
“It’s not like you can dig ‘em up, brush ‘em off and say sorry if the balloon goes up.”
“Look, this is crazy, John. What the hell — we lose, what… two or three a week, every week.”
“That’s different. They never existed in the first place. We could lose the whole damn lot and no one would ask any awkward questions. But if someone starts digging and comes up with these two…” his voice trails off, his point made.
“We’ll just have to make sure they’re mighty deep.”
“And what about him?” says Dawson, with an allusive nod to Bumface’s colleague asleep in the basement. “He won’t like it.”
“It was his damn fault. He was the one who convinced me to let them in. Anyway, once they’re gone there’s not a lot he can do about it.”
“When?”
“It’ll be getting light soon. We’ll have to leave it to tonight.”
“Nothing messy, okay?”
“Sure, John.”
“Get something from the pharmacy, so they won’t feel anything.”
“ ‘Kay.”
“And what about that snoopy cop?”
“Leave him to me, John.”