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.
The whisper of a dawn breeze gently wakes the yachts in the marina and sets halyards against masts as he swings his legs over the quayside, bites into a croissant, mulls over his meeting with Marcia the previous evening, and wonders why he has been sent here.
“All you have to do is find him and positively ID him. That’s it,” Commander Richards instructed. “We’ll take out an international warrant and the French can lift him.”
Lift him for what? Bliss wondered, skeptically suggesting, “It sounds like you’re sending me on a taxpayer-funded holiday.”
If Richards had similar thoughts he wasn’t sharing. “You happen to be the right man for the job.”
“So what are my qualifications?” Bliss pushed, determined to find out what was really behind such an apparently cushy posting.
“You’re well travelled.”
“That wasn’t my fault,” he responded, thinking of his previous escapade, which ended disastrously in Canada.
“You’re intelligent — got smarts,” Richards said, trying flattery,