Deadly Sin Read Online Free

zheocratic zhing?” asks Daisy confusedly.
    â€œDon’t worry.” Bliss laughs. “I’m flying over next Friday after the Queen’s visit, and I’m going to spend the whole weekend working on your tongue.”
    â€œOh, Daavid …”
    â€œFifty years old and still a bloody teenager,” sniggers Bliss to himself as he puts down the phone. It buzzes almost immediately.
She’s remembered my birthday
, he thinks with a bounce, but he is quickly deflated. “Daphne?” he queries, recognizing the aging voice.
    â€œI need a little help, David,” says Daphne Lovelace, calling from her home in Westchester, Hampshire.
    â€œHelp is what you usually give others, Daphne,” replies Bliss, having no difficulty recalling the times the eccentric spinster saved his bacon despite her advancing years.
    Daphne Lovelace, O.B.E., a woman with a hat for every occasion and an adventure for every dinner party, is a lot closer to beating the longevity odds than she is willing to admit — unless it suits her. It suits her now.
    â€œIt’s an utter disgrace, David,” she spits. “Someone of my age shouldn’t have to put up with it.”
    â€œYour age?” queries Bliss, though it is rhetorical and he knows it, so he skips, asking, “What shouldn’t you have to put up with?”
    â€œListen,” she says and waves the phone in the air.
    The thumping bass of rap music, the revving of motor-bikes, the barking of dogs, and a foul-mouthed woman screeching abuse coalesce into a cacophony that makes Bliss duck.
    â€œDaphne,” he shouts. “Is that your Gilbert and Sullivan society or are you having a rave?”
    â€œIt’s the new neighbours,” she protests angrily, then carries on carping about the family that has moved in next door: wall-shaking music, air-rending exhausts, loud people with even louder motorbikes who entertain a constant stream of unsavoury characters at unsavoury times, and two muscular terriers who throw themselves at the fence every time she ventures into her back garden.
    â€œThey’ve smashed my windows, peed on my gladiolis, and even pulled up the carrots I was growing specially for the horticultural fair,” she complains, although it’s not the worst. The worst is the disappearance of her cat, Missie Rouge, and she is close to tears as she says, “They probably ate the poor thing.”
    â€œYou’re exaggerating,” says Bliss. “Anyway, I thought it was an elderly couple next door. I met them.”
    â€œPhil and Maggie,” she agrees with a loud sniff. “They died.”
    â€œNot the heat —” starts Bliss, but Daphne cuts him off.
    â€œOh no. They were ever so old,” she says, as if aging is an affliction from which she is immune. “Maggie went first. She was in one of those church-run seniors’ homes, Auschwitz-by-the-sea, and Phil just pined.”
    â€œIt happens,” suggests Bliss, ignoring the jibe, though Daphne can’t understand how her new neigh-bours got the house.
    â€œPhil and Maggie had no family — none worth speaking of. I’d do their shopping and get their prescriptions. And I cooked for Phil …”
    I guess you were expecting a handout
, thinks Bliss uncharitably as Daphne continues with her list ofgood-neighbourliness. But he finds it surprising that she didn’t anticipate the existence of a relative in the woodwork. “Actually, I’m really busy,” he says, cutting her off eventually, and he suggests she take her complaint to Superintendent Donaldson at Westchester police station.
    â€œTed retired last month,” complains Daphne, as if he did it deliberately. “There’s a schoolgirl running the place now, and she good-as-much told me to buy earplugs.”
    Donaldson’s replacement was clearly unaware of Daphne’s record and status. Not only was the elderly spinster the