Crazy Lady by James Hawkins Read Free Book Online Page B

It’s a sneer, an unspoken disparagement that Bliss catchesonto immediately:
Whatever next? We’re supposed to be running a f ’kin police force not a cultural establishment.
    â€œNew trend, sir, police intelligence,” explains Bliss, knowing the other man will steam at the implied oxymoron.
    â€œHow come you’re doing criminal record checks then?” snaps the chief superintendent, and Bliss waffles for a few minutes about the possibility of the Creston family being somehow involved in his plot before cutting the call short.
    â€œSorry. Must get on,” he says as he starts to put down the phone. “Anyway, I was wrong. It had nothing to do with Joseph Creston.”
    â€œJoseph Crispin Creston Jr. Now that’s a name destined for greatness,” the chocolate magnate’s father trumpeted at his son’s christening party, apparently ignorant of the fact that he bore the identical moniker. “It’s powerful, memorable, suggestive of aristocracy,” the suave executive pompously declared at London’s Grosvenor Hotel in the run-up to war with Hitler. Shortly thereafter, with Londoners frantically digging Anderson shelters and preparing to hunker down in the Blitz, most men of Jospeh Creston Sr.’s age strapped on Sam Browne belts and officer’s pistols. But the cocoa tycoon, together with his family and entourage, slipped aboard a two-hundred-foot private yacht registered in Casablanca and slunk off to his estates on the west coast of Africa.
    â€œChocolate is essential for the morale of our troops,” he declared in a letter of justification mailed to the
Times
as they put into Lisbon for refuelling en route, though, as records later showed, it was never completely clear in Creston’s mind as to which side’s troops needed boosting most.
    But Creston’s empire wasn’t the only one that profited even-handedly from the global hostilities. He was even able to justify it in his own mind. “Should the sins of the fathers be visited on their sons?” he questioned of anyone in theknow. “Why shouldn’t poor little German kids have a treat? And what of the thousands of workers in the plantations who can’t read and have no radio? What do the crazy politics of a feudal Europe have to do with them? They just want to make enough money to feed their families.”
    Little has changed in more than fifty years; chocolate is chocolate, as alluring and addictive as ever, though penny for penny it is cheaper than it’s ever been.
    â€œIt’s all a question of supply and demand,” the younger Mr. Creston will happily tell anyone interested today, and he is proud of the fact that his empire controls both. He might also concede, with a beam of self-satisfaction, that the Creston empire is richer and more powerful than it has ever been, though he may be more reticent in admitting that the policies of his company have broken the backs, and the dreams, of the West African farmers who labour alongside their children to provide his factories with their raw material.
    â€œTwo dollars a day may not seem a lot to some people,” insists Joseph Creston as he addresses his weekly board meeting atop his glass tower in the centre of London. “But if only these people would stop warring, we’d probably be able to pay more.”
    It’s a lie, and Creston knows it; he knows that constant conflicts prevent the subsistence farmers from ever forming any kind of stable collective.
    â€œThey’d only waste it on the demon drink if they had more,” sneers Robert Dawes, Creston’s company accountant, oblivious to the fact that he has supped his way through half a bottle of single malt in the past twelve hours.
    It’s 10:00 a.m. in one of the richest square miles of real estate in the world: the City of London. The British Empire may have crumbled, but echoes of its power still reverberate around the world, and in