Whipped: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel(35)

“Frank, it’s a private eye’s wet dream.”

Sierra seemed shocked. He had the prudishness of English gentry.

Arthur pressed on. “A missing video and a missing reporter, possibly dead. Scandalous behaviour in the highest councils of our land. A dominatrix bribed to be silent.”

“I am especially enjoying the sunny blooms of my miniature polyanthas, which seem born to our West Coast climate. Let us eat. I am famished.” He tucked into his omelette.

“And I can throw in a damsel in distress. My wife.”

Sierra had been a guest at Blunder Bay and knew Margaret well. “But it appears she is not distressed. She remains unscathed, gracias a Dios.”

Arthur nibbled his meal, depressed that this astute investigator was not seeing this case as the crowning event of his career.

“How grows your garden, Arthur?”

“Much neglected.”

“Perhaps because you are too often drawn away from it. Each year since your purported retirement — when was that? a decade ago? — you have defended some dastardly villain. You do not know how to retire. I do.”

“Matters got in the way, Frank. But you’ll be fascinated to know that I was re-invigorated every time I walked into a courtroom. There was a feeling of being fully alive again. At our age, with our wisdom and experience, our skills are at their apogee. What a shame not to use them.”

“I recommend the Puhl Agency. Sam Puhl. Top notch. They’re in Ottawa, and know their territory.”

“All disbursements would be covered. Airfare, hotels, a car. A reasonable daily fee. My office has a slush fund for such adventures.” Scandal leading to the fall of the Conservatives would be much appreciated by Tragger, Inglis, a Liberal firm. Old Bullingham, the skinty senior partner, might have a word to say about this one, though.

Sierra dabbed his lips with his napkin. “A little weak on the mushrooms, that omelette.”

Arthur pulled out his wallet.

“No, I must insist.” Sierra’s wallet was out too, a credit card already plucked from it.

“It was I who invited you for breakfast.”

Sierra signalled the waiter with his card. “Come, come, Arthur. This is negligible recompense for the enjoyment of your company. I’m sorry to have disappointed you, but . . . alas.”

Arthur let him pick up the bill. “I understand. A rose is a rose is a rose.”

“Exactly.”

§

There were pigs rooting in his garden and emus eating his beans and lettuce, and he could only watch: helpless, sluggish, voiceless, tangled in sheets and blankets. The neighbours watched too: ghosts, immobile, expressionless, waiting for their orders. Overcome with loneliness, Arthur reached out to Margaret, but she too was without substance, another ghost, lost to him.

Prompted by the need to pee, Arthur awakened to sunshine streaming through his bedroom window. His visit to Starkers Cove had stayed with him, so the dream seemed self-explanatory. Except for the part about Margaret — he missed her, that’s all it was saying. He wanted her. Physically. He was still, uncharacteristically, in heat.

It was Saturday, and he had just returned from Seattle. He’d been shocked, on walking off the ferry, to find his Fargo waiting for him. The keys were in an ashtray along with a roach clip and some loose pot. A peek under the chassis revealed a new muffler. He could only assume Stoney had had a crisis of conscience.

He disentangled himself from the sheets and looked out to make sure there were no pigs or emus in his garden. The only encroachers were thistles and creeping buttercups, and horsetails in the strawberries. No sign of Niko and Yoki, who had promised to help weed that garden. There, parked out front, was his Fargo. He was not imagining it. He had actually driven it here yesterday.

He checked his bedside clock. Nearly ten! A rare long sleep. He had a misty recall of being invited to a major event tomorrow, Sunday, June 23. A function he wasn’t looking forward to, that he’d intended to shun. Yes, an open house at Starkers Cove. A chance to meet and commune with the great Baba Sri Rameesh. Music. Fun, frolic, free food and refreshments. Their famous gupa.

Arthur would be tending his garden all Sunday. Enjoying real peace. Not the artificial kind that the dreaded happiness drug delivers. He wondered if gupa was the key to Silverson’s control over innocent minds. Reverend Al, though, had claimed to have tried it without effect — it was all in the mind. Al preferred to believe that Silverson, with his certificate in “humanistic hypnotherapy,” was utilizing some form of post-hypnotic suggestion on his adherents.

Arthur took a luxurious sit-down pee — this was happiness — and was pulling up his pyjama bottoms when he heard an engine, tires crunching on gravel. From the window, he saw the Transformers’ Econoline van rolling down the driveway to the Woofer house. Niko and Yoki came out the front door, carrying buckets of what looked like cleaning supplies.

This smacked of a kidnapping, the girls enticed in some unearthly way into a state of mindlessness. Still in pyjamas, Arthur found his slippers, scrambled downstairs, and raced outside to see the two Woofers being ushered into the van by Morg Baumgarten and a starry-eyed woman acolyte armed with one of the Transformers’ ubiquitous video cameras.

Waving, hollering, he clambered over a snake fence to the Woofers’ yard, losing a slipper in his haste.

He gasped: “What . . . what’s all this, where are you going?”