Missing: Presumed Dead ib-1

by James Hawkins

  “What did you want to tell me?” he asked as Samantha led Daphne reluctantly away.

  “Jonathon didn’t kill Major Dauntsey — don’t listen to him. He’s a very silly boy. He thinks he’s protecting me but no good will come of it,” she said, leaving Bliss intrigued to note her avoidance of the word father.

  “I know that, Mrs. Dauntsey, I worked that out already. But the question now is …” he leant close, “Who did kill him?”

  Technically, he should’ve cautioned her. She was, after all, the prime suspect, though the evidence was shaky to say the least.

  “He was shot you know,” she said distantly, as if recalling some character from a play or book.

  “Yes, I know, Mrs. Dauntsey. But who shot him? That’s the question.”

  “Oh — I’ve no idea,” she said, shaking her head as if she’d got a nasty taste. “A German, I guess, although I couldn’t be sure.”

  Bliss’s face clouded in bewilderment. “Let’s start again,” he said. “I think you’re a bit confused.” Then he looked her carefully in the eye and articulated precisely. “Your husband came back from the war badly wounded — right?”

  A sudden sharpness in her eyes turned her instantaneously into both hunted and haunted. Her face drained to white so rapidly that, for a moment, he wondered if she’d died, then her hand flew to her mouth and she started eating away at a nail.

  Realising there was a problem, he gave her a few seconds to recover before asking, “Shall I try that again?”

  “No … No … No … I understood you,” she muttered, then changed her face, and the subject, so fast he presumed she’d had some sort of seizure. “The doctor told Jonathon I should go to Switzerland for treatment. Can you believe that, Inspector?”

  “Yes … but … ” he started, then his mouth froze in indecision as an important, though elusive, thought gnawed into his mind.

  “Wouldn’t that be something — Switzerland,” continued Doreen, with a faraway look.

  “Yes — It would …” he said, but wasn’t listening. What was it that she had said?

  “I think I’d like a fresh cream meringue,” said Doreen, cutting into his thoughts, spying a refrigerated display case. “With a real maraschino cherry on top. Would you mind, Inspector? Only the food at the home is … well, I’m sure you know.”

  “Sorry,” he said, giving himself a shake. “Did you say meringue?” But his mind was still miles away. He’d found what he was looking for and was puzzling over it.

  “With a maraschino cherry,” she reminded him.

  “Oh yes. Of course you may,” he said, signalling to a waif in a waitresses uniform.

  “Mrs. Dauntsey …” he started questioningly, but she held up a spidery hand, indicating that the meringue was next on her agenda, and they sat in silence awaiting its arrival; Bliss checking his watch, wondering what Superintendent Donaldson was doing; wondering what plans were being concocted to oust him; wondering how long it would take Jonathon to track them down; wondering when the killer would strike again.

  The slender young woman was back with the meringue in a few seconds and Doreen eyed her critically. “Skinny as a cheap chicken,” she muttered as soon as the girl was out of earshot, then took a bite. The confectionary exploded in a sugary snowstorm, dusting the bodice of her navy blue dress and giving her a coughing fit. Daphne sprang to Doreen’s side with surprising agility, towing Samantha in her wake, giving Bliss an accusatory stare. “Oh look at the mess,” she moaned, and set about cleaning up her old friend.

  Doreen was still coughing but Bliss couldn’t contain himself any longer. “When I asked what happened to your husband,” he began, “you said the Germans shot him. But how did he get home with a hole in his skull …?”

  Doreen creased in another convulsion of coughing and Daphne roughly pushed him aside. “Now look what you’ve done.”

  Backing away, he focused on the diminutive grey-haired figure, a plethora of thoughts bombarding his mind, then all the cherries clinked into place and the jackpot came out so fast he had a job to keep up: The returning Major was unrecognisable; barely able to talk; refused to see Patrick Mulverhill the reporter; was in possession of another man’s dog-tags; and, finally, most decisively, had been shot by a German. Bingo!

  “The man in your attic wasn’t Major Rupert Dauntsey, your husband, was he?” he breathed, astounded by the clarity of his own revelation.

  Doreen’s head went down, her hands flew to cover her face and she gave a startled cry.

  “Now see what you’ve done,” said Daphne rebukefully, as her friend burst into floods of tears. “Are you alright, Doreen?”

  Doreen was anything but alright.

  Chapter Fifteen

  A storm was brewing at Westchester police station. Superintendent Donaldson had pressed the panic button a little before ten in the morning. Exhausted of ideas, nerve and executive toys he called the Assistant Chief Constable with rising concern about Bliss, the death threat and the goat. Detective Sergeant Patterson, summoned by phone, strolled cockily into the superintendent’s office, coffee cup in hand. “You wanted something, Guv?” he said, with enough political savoir faire to know that indispensability outranks rank, and flopped into a comfortable looking leather armchair.

  “Yeah, Pat. There’s still no sign of D.I. Bliss — you’ve no ideas have you?”

  “Like I said on the phone, Guv. I ain’t his social secretary.”

  No need to be like that, thought Donaldson. “Well, you’d better get the men together in the parade room at eleven for a briefing … The Assistant Chief’s coming to lead the enquiry,” he added as he picked flakes of chocolate from the groin of his trousers. “Bloody biscuits,” he mumbled. “Well … what are you waiting for?”

  “Thought we were supposed to be searching for Dauntsey’s victim,” grumbled Patterson with no attempt to move, “Not poncing around after Bliss.”

  “I don’t give a shit about Dauntsey at the moment,” Donaldson’s voice rose as he stood, snowing crumbs onto the floor. “Everything is on hold until we find D.I. Bliss — do I make myself clear?”

  Patterson, seeing himself as unofficial envoy for the world, pushed for more information. “What’s he supposed to have done, Guv?”

  “What on earth makes you ask that? The man’s missing for God’s sake — might be murdered for all we know.”

  Patterson’s face contorted. “Murdered?” he echoed.

  “Why?”

  Bliss was anything but dead. In fact, in the charged moments following his revelation about the identity of the body in Doreen’s attic, he found himself widely alert to his surroundings. Previously unnoticed objects now appeared as if through a lens, and he was surprised to find the coffee shoppe walls deep in bric-a-brac: polished horse brasses, gleaming like old gold, hung on black leather straps; shiny copper kettles and silvery samovars with ivory handles filled every niche; a weird collection of papier-mache masks adorned the wainscotting: white-faced Pierrots; red-nosed clowns; devilishly horned Satans with flaming vermilion hair; grotesque, gruesome and macabre masks; whimsical, fanciful and capricious masks. And, although every mask differed, each facial image was tortured by a pair of eye holes into which, and out of which, came only darkness, and, through which he saw a mirror of Doreen Dauntsey.

  Doreen had sunk into a torpor, staring rigidly into the middle distance, trying to see both into the past and future at the same time, while mentally fighting against hideous images of the body in her attic. The intensity of her mental battle spun off brain-waves that disquieted every head in the room; drawing the sour-faced woman in black from her window seat to hover, nosily, unladylike, just six feet from the wheelchair; causing a group of elderly patrons to wrap shawls and summer jackets tightly about them; dragging the spindly waitress back to their table.

  “Something wrong with the meringue?” she enquired.

  “No, no — it’s fine,” said Bliss, waving her off.

  Daphne, peering unselfconsc
iously into Doreen’s sightless eyes muttered, “I think the old turkey’s snuffed it.”

  Samantha put her hand on Doreen’s pulse. “No, she hasn’t, Daphne — don’t exaggerate.”

  Daphne, unconvinced, furiously fanned a hand in front of Doreen’s stony face. “Well, she looks fairly dead to me,” she said, measuring death by degrees.

  “Be quiet,” hissed Samantha, then softened her tone. “Doreen love. Squeeze my hand if you can hear.”

  The spidery fingers tightened a fraction.

  “She squeezed,” declared Samantha with relief and Bliss bent over her shoulder, whispering, “It could be a stroke — I’d better get an ambulance.”

  Doreen’s thin voice whistled through taut lips. “No. I’ll be alright. Please don’t make a fuss.”

  The sinister looking woman snorted, catching everyone’s attention, then returned to her table, her veiled face giving nothing away.

  “Maybe she was an undertaker’s scout,” Samantha joked later when she and Bliss were snuggling warmly together on her couch, and, although he laughed, he couldn’t help wondering if the old witch hadn’t had a walkie-talkie linked to a funeral home in her black clutch-bag.

  Doreen went back inside her mind: seeing a dapper little Major with a sharp brain and no chin getting married and going to war, and a ragged bundle of bandages coming home — still chinless; asking herself the questions that had tormented her for half a century: So — Just when did you realise the major wasn’t himself? When did you know the pompous little toad hadn’t come back? Was it days; weeks; months or even years?

  It wasn’t years. I was still pregnant when he … when “the thing” came back. It couldn’t have been years.

  You weren’t expecting him to come back at all were you? That was your plan, wasn’t it?

  No, it wasn’t.

  Don’t lie, Doreen.

  I’m not.

  Bloody liar — you’ve always been a bloody liar.

  Have not.

  Why did you get expelled from school then? Why did your dad chuck you out of the house then?

  “Mrs. Dauntsey — can you hear me?” asked Bliss, on the outside, but the words couldn’t cut through the nagging voice in Doreen’s mind.

  No-one would ever have known Jonathon wasn’t Rupert’s son if he hadn’t come back, would they?

  He didn’t come back smart-ass. Not in person anyway.

  But you didn’t know that at the time did you? You should’ve seen your face when the ambulance rolled up at the front door and you thought Rupert was going to pop out and point at your belly saying, “Whose is that then?”

  “Mrs. Dauntsey, Mrs. Dauntsey,” Samantha broke through the haze. “Can you tell us what happened?”

  “I was shocked when I saw him,” she said, breaking back into the real world for a second, trying to escape the voice.

  Thunderstruck would be more accurate, said the voice, reminding her she would never escape. You spewed your guts up remember; couldn’t bear to look at him for weeks. She remembered, only too well, and her face showed the pain as she thought of the nights she’d lain awake in the cold lonely bed, Jonathon swelling inside her, as she listened to the anguished whimpering of the tormented man in the turret room next door.

  “I used to lie awake at night praying for him,” she said, sounding compassionate, her downcast eyes looking for sympathy.

  Now say that again with a straight face, sneered the voice.

  I did pray for him.

  Yeah — prayed he would die; prayed for ways you could bump him off without getting caught; prayed he’d cut his wrist.

  That would’ve have been a bit tricky wouldn’t it — with only one arm? Anyway, would it have been so terrible? What was life for him? — trapped inside a useless body; pretending to be someone else; mourning his lost love; stuck in the turret room all day and night — alone most of the time.

  “Doreen … Doreen,” Daphne was nagging at her sleeve. “Doreen, dear. Do you think we should call a doctor?”

  “Doctor?” she asked vaguely. “No — why? There’s nothing wrong with me.” Doctors! she swore under her breath — Bloody crooks the lot of ’em. Like Doctor Fitzpatrick, pleading poverty in his leather patched tweed jacket and cloth cap; doing his rounds in a beatup Ford Popular — his gleaming black Bentley reserved for weekends in the city. Doctor Fitzpatrick — long dead now — the only other person to know the truth about the creature in the turreted room.

  “The radiographer must have mixed up the pictures, Mrs. Dauntsey …” the old doctor had said, pouring over the x-rays perplexedly after being called upon to examine the returned hero — expected to certify the extent of his wounds for his pension. But there had been no mistake and he had caught on eventually.

  Bliss, his senses alert to the slightest shift in the atmosphere, found himself drawn to a grandfather clock which someone had appliqued with millions of multicoloured seeds. The tasteless timepiece was wheezing noisily as it wound itself up to deliver the hour, and, under his gaze, it stopped, a tick short of eleven and, at that precise moment, the parade room at the police station jumped to attention.

  “At ease,” barked Donaldson, entering with the assistant chief on his shoulder, then he faltered, seeing the measly turnout. “Christ — is this the best we can do?”

  “Short notice, Guv,” explained Patterson, failing to mention that he’d not put himself out; that the twenty or so men and women he’d rounded up had, in large part, been swanning around the police station in search of an excuse for swanning around the police station.

  “We’ll just have to manage, I suppose,” said Donaldson, going on quickly to explain that their new detective inspector had not spent the night at his hotel and had been missing for the past three hours.

  “Probably got lost,” quipped Patterson, fixing his tombstone teeth into a ventriloquist’s smile.

  Donaldson, recognising the voice, directed his words at the detective sergeant, thinking — let’s see if you think this is funny. “D.I. Bliss received a death threat yesterday morning,” he began, straight-faced. “And last night someone stole some of his personal property and set fire to it in the car park behind the Mitre Hotel — outside his window — obviously intended as a portent.”

  “As a what?” asked Patterson.

  “As a warning — to scare the shit out of him,” explained the assistant chief, thinking: Get yourself a dictionary — moron.

  Sniggers ran around the room but Donaldson barked, “This ain’t funny.”

  D.C. Dowding wasn’t so sure — he’d heard about the goat. “Can I ask what exactly was cremated, Sir?” he said with barely suppressed humour.

  “It was a stuffed goat,” admitted Donaldson and got the expected gale of laughter. “O.K.” he shouted angrily. “This ain’t Alabama — it’s not the Klu Klux Klan burning crosses. This is Westchester — nobody is going to run one of our men out of town. I repeat — nobody!”

  Patterson, sullen-faced, appeared serious. “It sounds more like a prank to me — kids probably …”

  “Oh for God’s sake, Pat. Haven’t you been listening? I said he received a death threat yesterday morning.”

  But Patterson sloughed it off. “I wouldn’t mind a quid for every little punk who’s threatened to put me in a concrete overcoat.”

  “Sergeant Patterson,” said the A.C.C. “Have you any idea why D.I. Bliss was transferred here from the Met?”

  “Haven’t a clue, Sir,” he replied honestly, despite all the strings he’d pulled to find out.

  None of them knew — until Superintendent Donaldson filled them in.

  The bizarre grandfather clock, in the Coffee House, summoned enough energy to strike only the first four beats of eleven, and time moved forward for Bliss as a pair of clacking stiletto heels announced the manageress’s approach, shattering the petrified atmosphere. “Is there some sort of problem here?” she demanded, alerted by the waitress and the epidemic of worried expressions infecting her other cust
omers.

  Talk about uptight, thought Bliss, appraising the woman’s clenched buttocks, over-strung brassiere and tightly permed hair. “There’s no problem,” he said, brushing her off.

  “Well — Is madam alright?” she continued, pointedly peering for signs of life in Doreen’s wheelchair.

  “Yes,” said Doreen weakly, “I’m alright.”

  “She’s just had a bit of a shock,” confided Bliss, leading the woman out of the old lady’s earshot, fearing she was on the verge of asking them to remove Doreen for causing a disturbance. “Her husband’s died,” he added, not untruthfully, and watched the woman scuttle back to the kitchen.

  “Maybe you and Daphne should go back to the other table,” he said, turning to Samantha, concerned that Daphne’s presence might be intimidating her old friend.

  “I didn’t have to help get her out of the home …” complained Daphne, her feathers ruffled, but Doreen held up a hand, saying through the tears. “You might as well stay, Daphne. I quite relish the idea that I’m still worth gossiping about.”

  “Just keep quiet then,” whispered Bliss to Daphne, “and don’t mention that damn goat again.”

  “I didn’t realise at first,” Doreen sniffled. “It wasn’t as though I knew him well.”

  “Didn’t realise what?” interrupted Daphne immediately, drawing an angry “shush” from Bliss.

  “A nurse came in everyday and did his bandages,” continued Doreen. “His face was such a mess that it never occurred to me.”

  “What about his father … ” Bliss began, then corrected himself, “I mean Rupert’s father — the old Colonel. Didn’t he realise it wasn’t his son?”

  “His eyes were bad — chlorine gas in the trenches at Ypres. He died a few months later … heart attack.” She paused in memory of the proud old man slumped, blue-faced, at the feet of his son’s impersonator — his hands clawing at his chest in rigor.

  “I’ll put it down to the gas, Mrs. Dauntsey — shall I?” the wily old doctor had said, ceremoniously taking the stethoscope from around his neck and placing it into his bag in a gesture of finality, while giving her a knowing wink.