Read Online Crazy Lady by James Hawkins - Free Book Online

into the Mediterranean, brilliant sunshine still turns the beaches to gold and the clear cobalt sea mirrors the sky.
    Detective Chief Inspector David Bliss is walking — hour after hour, mile after mile — seeking inspiration to complete his novel.
    â€œWell, just how hard can it be?” he chastised Samantha, his lawyer daughter, when she questioned both his ability and his sanity. But now, as he wanders home along the deserted promenade in St-Juan-sur-Mer, he peers across the bay to the island of Ste. Marguerite and wonders whether or not he will ever be able to convince skeptical readers that he really has discovered the secret of the island’s most notorious prisoner — the Man in the Iron Mask.
    Despite the touch of warmth in the limpid afternoon air, the quays and beaches are silent, apart from the occasional screech of a hungry gull; the restaurants and beach-side bars are padlocked and boarded up. The transient workers of summer have been drawn north into the alpine ski resorts by the scent of money, and only a few arthritic and bronchitic Brits, desperate to escape the lugubrious English winter, wander in search of a fish and chip shop and a recent copy of the
Daily Mirror
.
    Most of the apartments in Bliss’s building in St-Juan-sur-Mer are as vacant as the beaches, and since his arrival at the beginning of September he has only twice spied another occupant. The whirring of the elevator usually signals the arrival of Daisy, the bubbly Provençale real estate agent whose company and bed he has been sharing for a while.
Isn’t this what you wanted?
he has asked himself a dozen times.
Somewhere where you won’t be disturbed.
    â€œI ’ave just zhe place for you,” Daisy enthused with a glint in her eye. “No one will know you are here — except for me,” she added, and at first the arrangement seemed perfect.
    The sound of the elevator signals Daisy’s approach — the third time today — and Bliss can’t help thinking that he would have had more privacy had he stayed in London. But this is where it happened; this is where Louis XIV’s legendary prisoner spent eleven years of his life locked insolitary confinement with his guards forbidden to see him or speak to him on pain of death.
    â€œMaybe he was trying to write a book,” muses Bliss wryly while he waits for Daisy’s cheerful greeting as she lets herself in, although he knows that was not the case; he knows that the wretched man was consumed day and night by one thing alone: the love of the woman who owned his heart. He was waiting, day after day, month after month — waiting and praying that she would come to set him free.
    â€œHello, Daavid,” Daisy calls in her heavily accented English. “I ’ave brought you zhe dinner.”
    â€œIn here,” he calls from the airy room that leads onto the balcony, the room where he has set up his writing station and where he can keep in view the masked prisoner’s island fortress across the bay.
    â€œ
Terrine de volaille
,” Daisy announces triumphantly as she places the dish of chicken on the table. Then she drapes herself around his neck, asking, “How iz zhe book today? Good, no?”
    â€œNo… yes… I don’t know,” answers Bliss despondently. “I’m beginning to think this was a huge mistake.”
    â€œNever mind,” Daisy trills with a suggestive kiss. “Maybe we can do somezhing else.”
    Distractions, distractions, distractions
, he muses to himself as he picks at the food, but at least he’s grateful that he has escaped the television. “You must have satellite,” Daisy insisted when he complained that more than ten minutes of translating the quickly spoken French on the local stations gave him a headache. “You can have maybe two hundred American channels.”
    â€œTerrific,” he replied, but came to his senses within the