“It’s no big deal,” he replied with a dismissive shrug, knowing that he was lying, knowing that it was a big deal — a very big deal — and he quickly changed the subject with a note of triumph. “I told you Dauntsey was cunning, Pat. I saw it in his eyes the moment I met him.”
“Not cunning enough for you though, Guv.”
Bliss picked up the sarcastic vibe and brushed it aside. “Nothing to do with me, Serg — it’s just Lady Luck.”
“I guess he wasn’t supposed to get away with it.”
“Cunning though — what a place to hide a body. Who would ever think of looking in a grave, especially when there’s another occupant?”
“D’ye realise we would never have found it, even with an infra-red from a helicopter. The detector would have picked out a new grave alright — even the body …”
Bliss nodded. “And the Vicar would have said, ‘That’s old Mr. So and So. We buried him this morning.’”
“Talk about a close call, Guv.”
“That’s Lady Luck for you — even moaning old clerics have their uses.”
“It’s not getting the luck, Sergeant; it’s knowing what to do with it that counts.”
Bliss drove to the churchyard, explaining, “I may as well get to know my way around, Pat.”
But no sooner had they pulled out of the car park than Patterson started digging for more information. “So where were you stationed last?”
“Various nicks … I got around a fair bit.”
“Which ones?”
“What is this, Pat, the third degree?”
“No. I just wondered why you chose to come here, that’s all.”
Why am I here? he wondered, letting his mind drift, driving on autopilot.
“Watch out!” yelled Patterson, suddenly realising that Bliss had missed a fast approaching red light.
“Shit,” shouted Bliss, standing on the brakes, slewing to a halt with the bonnet nosing into the junction. A cyclist, head down against the drizzle, skimmed across the front bumper, then turned in her saddle to give Bliss a pugnacious glare and stab a rude finger in the air.
“Little cow,” said Patterson, then gave Bliss an accusatory look. “You nearly clobbered her.”
“Sorry,” he said, his voice strained by anxiety, his hands frozen so hard to the wheel he could feel the vibration, his pulse racing through the roof.
“I thought you’d seen the light,” continued Patterson, unaware of the turmoil in the mind of the man next to him.
“Sorry,” he said again then excused himself with a mumble about the unfamiliar roads, the lousy weather and his pre-occupation with finding the Major’s body.
It only took a couple of minutes to the churchyard. The vicar was ahead of them, sheltering under the thatched lych-gate, his black robes and white collar standing out sharply against the fuzzy backdrop of the Norman church, its squat square tower drifting in and out of the murky grey drizzle like a castle’s keep in a fairy tale.
Under the vicar’s direction, Bliss and Patterson tiptoed toward the freshly dug grave, examining the ground ahead, skirting every depression that bore the least resemblance to a footprint or tyre mark. Bliss took the lead, warning the other two of potential evidence with the dedication of a shit-spotter leading a party of ramblers across a cattle field.
“Watch out there … Mind that … And there …”
“I thought you said it had been filled in,” Bliss said with annoyance, reaching the grave, and sensing the presence of the vicar as he peered into the seemingly normal grave.
“It has,” he shot back belligerently. “It should be eight feet deep. It was yesterday. I checked it myself after communion. Mrs. Landrake, the widow, came with me. ‘Want everything to be just right for my Arthur,’ she said. Anyway, it had to be eight feet to give enough depth for her to go on top of him when her turn comes.”
Bliss wasn’t listening, his mind had wandered into the past, into another churchyard, standing by another grave, thinking of another body, but the vicar was unaware and prattled on. “I even fetched my measuring pole to be sure. Old Bert, the gravedigger, can be a bit spare with his measurements at times — tries to get away with the odd six inches if he thinks he can. Anyway, look at it now, it’s barely six feet, and the bottom looks like a ploughed field. I want my internees to rest easy … well, as easy as they deserve, but look at that. Like a ploughed field,” he repeated. “That’d be like sleeping on a crumpled sheet …”
With his mind miles away, an eighteen-year-old memory was consuming Bliss, edging him toward the grave, threatening to topple him into the pit. Patterson grabbed his arm. “Look out, Guv!” he called, pulling him from the brink.
Persuaded by the iron grip, he stepped back onto the duckboard, but his thoughts were still in the past, in a grave with a young woman’s coffin.
“I thought you was gonna faint, Guv,” said Patterson with a note of apology.
“No — No. I, I’m alright,” he stuttered. But Patterson was too pre-occupied with the arrival of the search team’s mini-bus to notice the shaking hands and perspiration-soaked forehead.
“We’re gonna need a ladder, Vicar,” said Patterson, heading off toward the mini-bus, leaving Bliss alone with the grave and his eighteen-year-old memories. He tried to break away, to take off after Patterson but the images in his mind were too strong and kept him glued to the grave. He peered in, almost expecting to see a coffin. He knew which coffin: not a flashy one, little more than a plywood box with brassy handles.
“We bought it with the honeymoon money,” the occupant’s husband-to-be explained at the little gathering in the local pub afterwards — sausage rolls, pickled onions and pints of best bitter ale around a pool table shrouded in a white bed-sheet.
“I would willingly have paid …” started Bliss but the young victim’s grieving mother had cut him off.
“It’s alright, Constable. Very thoughtful of you, but there was no need.”
Why was she so damn nice? he wondered. He’d killed her daughter, hadn’t he? Hadn’t he? But they didn’t see it that way. They never had.
“It wasn’t your fault, Mr. Bliss … Dave, isn’t it?” said Mrs. Richards, putting a chubby hand consolingly on his arm while dabbing her puffy red eyes with a Kleenex.
“Yes. It’s Dave.”
“Thought so,” she continued, still dabbing. “Anyway, Dave, the family don’t blame you. You wuz only doin’ yer job. There wuz nuvving else you could’ve done.”
I could have kept my bloody mouth shut, he thought, but found it more consoling to agree. “You’re right, Mrs. Richards, but I still feel responsible for Mandy’s …”
Mrs. Richards crumpled in a gush of weeping, and the family led her to a corner couch and poured more gin into her.
“At least it was quick,” said Mandy’s serious-faced intended, still not fully grasping the fact that he was attending his fiancee’s funeral on the same day he’d planned to marry her.
“Yes. It was quick,” agreed young Constable Bliss, and he found himself repeating the old joke about a Scotsman who’d drowned in a whisky vat. “Was it quick?” the mythical coroner asked the investigating officer hoping to allay the relatives fears that their loved one lingered in agony. “Och no,” replied the policeman. “He got out twice for a pee.”
“I don’t get it.” Mandy’s ex-fiance had said, leaving Bliss praying for an earthquake or other calamitous event to cover his embarrassment.
“Sorry,” he said when it became obvious that God was not on his side. “Bad joke — tasteless … I need another drink.”
Sergeant Patterson was back, a straggly line of uniform and civvy raincoats snaking along behind him. “Better rope off that area with the footprints and tyre tracks first,” he called.
The line stopped, and Bliss felt the piercing stares as the men checked him out. Patterson’s told them who I am, he realised, and quickly pulled himself upright and straightened his thoughts.
The first of the men dro
pped, uninvited into the pit as soon as the ladder was lowered. “Throw me a shovel,” he shouted, with the enthusiasm of a treasure seeker — but wasn’t that what it was, thought Bliss, treasure — to a policeman. He won’t be so bloody keen when he’s seen as many mutilated bodies as me.
“Somebody give me hand,” called the man in the grave.
One look down into the slab-sided pit was enough for most of the men, and a dissenting jeer spread through the crush as some inched away. Sergeant Patterson volunteered a six-foot two-inch hulk who unwittingly drew his attention by attempting to disappear inside a five-foot ten-inch overcoat. Murmurs of derision, coupled with relief, rippled back through the crush.
“Good ol’ Jacko … Shall I ’old yer coat?”
“Get stuffed.”
“At least Dauntsey gave his old man a decent funeral — more than most murderers do,” said Patterson as soggy clods of earth started to land with wet thuds at their feet. “Almost seems a shame to dig him up; we could just leave the poor old beggar in peace.”
Bliss stepped back, pretending to avoid the flying dirt while trying to get the memory of Mandy Richards out of his mind. You’ve hardly thought of her for years, he remonstrated with himself, forget it. “Messy business … murder,” he mumbled, attempting to keep the conversation alive. “Thought I’d be getting away from all this down here.”
“Tell me to mind me own business if you like, Guv, but is that why you’re here — to get away from summat?”
Bliss stared back into the grave looking as if he might divulge his reasons, but a shout from the grave saved Bliss from answering, not that he had an answer — not a particularly plausible one anyway.
“I think there’s something down here,” called one of the men in the pit, and D.C. Jackson took it as a sign to quit.
“Keep diggin’, Jackson; what’s up wiv ya?” shouted the sergeant.
“It’s me back, Serg. You remember,” he said, with a poorly executed expression of pain.
Sergeant Patterson chuckled. “Yeah, I remember Jacko, but I heard it got better after the Chief Super’s visit last week.”
Poorly stifled laughter animated the bystanders. Jackson turned pink and bent to his shovel.
“What’s that about?” Bliss whispered to the sergeant.
“I’ll tell you later, Guv,” said Patterson, hearing the approaching vicar.
“Those men shouldn’t be trampling over …” the vicar was whining, but was cut off by an excited voice from the grave.
“Got it!” shouted one of the diggers.
“Got what?” asked the vicar, his voice lost in the press of men straining to peer into the pit.
“Get back,” shouted Bliss, shouldering a couple of constables aside for a clearer view. “What is it? What’ve you found?”
The vicar’s scrawny body slipped easily through the gap and he tugged at Bliss’s sleeve. “What exactly did you expect to find, Inspector?”
Bliss, feeling exonerated, shot back confidently. “What else would you expect to find in a grave, Sir, but a body?”
“A body?” breathed the vicar, then he had a revelation. “Do you mean the Major’s body?”
“Precisely, Vicar — no wonder Jonathan Dauntsey was so cocksure we’d never find his father. He figured that if he put it under …”
“Sir, Sir,” Jackson’s voice was calling him urgently from the grave. “It ain’t the Major, Sir. It’s just some old bones.”
“How old? Show me.”
Jackson used the discovery as a means of escaping the pit and quickly clambered up the ladder with a handful of bone shards. “There’s a load of ’em,” he said, handing Bliss the fragments that had aged to a dark sepia.
“Ancient burials,” said the vicar, dismissing the human remains with little more than a glance. “The church was erected in 1145 on the site of a Saxon burial site. The Normans commonly built on sacred ground.” His eyes glazed and he took on a faraway look as if in personal remembrance of medieval Britain. “Do you know, Inspector, the Normans gave us some of our most magnificent Cathedrals and …”
“You were saying about the ancient burials?” Bliss butted in gently, steering the vicar’s historical sermon toward more relevant matters.
“Oh … Yes. Well, people have been buried on this site for centuries, and bones have a habit of migrating under the ground. I sometimes think it is because they are unhappy where they have been placed — like uneasy spirits always wandering …” Seemingly realising that he, too, was wandering again he paused and succinctly explained. “We clear the gravestones every few hundred years and start all over again, so wherever you dig you will probably find some remains. It’s wonderful to think that all the ground we are standing on was once the mortal bodies of parishioners — the wonder of God, eh, Inspector? — dust to dust.”
“Wonderful,” repeated Bliss, fearing he might retch.
“There’s something else,” called the other digger still hard at work.
Jackson slipped back down the ladder, keener now, and two minutes later a blood stained duvet had been dredged out of the mud in the bottom of the grave and hauled to the surface.
“Any bets that this is the one from the Black Horse,” said Patterson.
“Nobody will bet against it,” said Bliss peering expectantly into the hole, waiting to see the Major’s body emerge.
“That’s it, Guv,” Jackson called a few minutes later. “We’ve hit rock bottom. He ain’t here.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
“What’s that?” called Bliss, pointing, having noticed a small blob with an unnatural shape.
“Just a lump of rock,” said Jackson slamming his shovel into it.
The “rock” sheared in two with a dull thud and took him by surprise. “It’s soft, he said, bending. “It’s metal I think, Guv,” he added brushing away some of the mud. “It’s an old kid’s toy. A mangled horse with a rider.”
“I think it’s a tin soldier, Guv,” said Patterson, reaching into the pit and taking it from Jackson.
“Lead, I would say,” said Bliss, feeling the weight as he took it from the sergeant. “Where was it, Jackson?”
“Don’t rightly know, Sir — under the duvet, I s’pose. I never noticed it ’til you mentioned it.”
“It was probably dropped by one of the kids that play in here,” suggested the vicar. “They’re a bit of a nuisance to be honest. Or a grieving parent may have placed it in a child’s coffin — favourite toy, that sort of thing.”
“Why was it flattened then?”
“Jackson and his clumsy boots probably did that,” said Patterson.
“Possibly,” mused Bliss. “Anyway, this doesn’t help us. Where on earth is the Major’s body?”
Chapter Two
The press officer at Headquarters was on the phone when Bliss and Patterson arrived back at the station. Pat Patterson picked up the call then, realising Bliss had strolled into the office, smiled in relief. Sticking his hand over the mouthpiece he held it out like a gift. “Just in time, Guv, the press are fishing for some sort of statement — want to know how come we solved this one so quickly.”
“You tell me,” said Bliss slinging his wet macintosh over a chair and flopping down, making it clear he wasn’t anxious to seize the phone.
“It was pure bloody luck to be honest.”
“I’m not sure we should say that,” Bliss frowned with disapproval. “We wouldn’t want to dispel the public perception that we actually know what we’re doing.”
Daphne, rounding up dirty mugs, grunted, “You might know what you’re doing, Chief Inspector, but this lot couldn’t detect a bad smell in a sewage works.”
Patterson ignored the quip and held the phone away from him as if it were venomous. “Will you give a statement, Guv?”
Bliss shrank back into the chair, waffling about insufficient local knowledge; lack of information; inadequate material data, leaving Patterson no option other than to
release his hand from the mouthpiece and shape his mouth ready to reply.
“Wait,” said Bliss, leaping forward, clamping his hand over the instrument. “I’d rather you didn’t mention my name either.”
“If that’s what you want,” Patterson said, his face clearly struggling with the intrigue of an ex-metropolitan police officer shunning publicity.
“Yeah, just stick to a few basic facts — suspect in custody — enquiries continuing — no names, no pack drill — you know the score.”
Feigning disinterest, Bliss wandered across the room and busied himself with a large-scale wall map of the area. The sergeant gave a series of carefully crafted “no comment” type remarks, then put down the phone, joined him and explained the strategy. “We’re concentrating on the woods and fields around the Dauntsey place … here,” he said, stabbing a finger at a spot on the outskirts of the town. “The Black Horse is just off the Market Square … here, and the cemetery’s about halfway between the two. The men we pulled off the search for the cemetery were doing the stables and outbuildings at Dauntsey’s house but they’d been at it since six o’clock this morning and were pretty much finished.”
“I’m a bit concerned we might be putting too much focus on Dauntsey’s place,” said Bliss, trying to keep his tone uncritical. “What makes you think he took the body back to his place? Surely it would make sense to get rid of it as far away as possible.”
“It would — but the Super figured it might be a question of familiarity. On the assumption it wasn’t premeditated murder, he would have had to act quickly and take the body to the first place that came to mind; somewhere local; somewhere on or near his own turf probably.”
Bliss was nodding, “There’s a degree of sense in that.”
“Even more so,” continued the sergeant, “Now we know where he took the duvet. The cemetery’s on the flight path from the Black Horse to his place — he must have dropped it off en-route.”
“That would have taken him awhile, to stop, find the open grave, throw in the duvet, scoop a load of dirt back in — it all takes time — and he still had to get rid of the body.”
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