Missing: Presumed Dead

by James Hawkins

  “Sir,” Bliss tried again, more forcefully. “Please tell me exactly what has happened.”

  “Like I said, Constable, someone’s driven over the grass and ...”

  “No. What did you say about a grave?”

  “Filled it in – that’s what I said. During the night. What I want to know is what you intend doing about it. The funeral starts at eleven.”

  “I’ll send a team of men to dig it right away, Sir.”

  “Please be serious, Constable ...”

  “Actually, Sir, I’m an Inspector and I am quite serious. If you’d care to return to the churchyard we’ll be along in a few minutes. You can show the men where to dig; we’ll have it out for you in no time.”

  “Well, I never,” said the vicar, shuffling toward the door, his faith restored, muttering his intention of writing to both the Chief Constable and The Times.

  Sergeant Patterson pulled Bliss to one side as soon as the old man was out of earshot. “Guv, we can’t let that funeral go ahead. It’s a crime scene – Forensics will be there for hours scavenging for clues.”

  “I know that – but I’m not going to get into an argument with the local bishop yet. As soon as we find the body we’ll look as surprised as anything and we’ll have no choice but to postpone the funeral and cordon off the entire area. He’ll be more than happy to co-operate, but if we suggest it now he’ll start bloody moaning.”

  “Good thinking, Guv ... And didn’t I tell you he wouldn’t have taken the body far?”

  “Get the car warmed up; I want a quick word with our man,” said Bliss, angling himself back toward the cells, refusing to offer hasty praise.

  “We’ve found your father’s body,” he said, poking his head round Dauntsey’s cell door, not bothering to enter fully.

  “I somehow doubt that, Inspector,” replied Dauntsey with a polite cockiness that immediately annoyed Bliss.

  “Are you going to tell me where it is then?”

  “Inspector! If you think I’d fall for a silly trick ... I don’t play those sort of games.”

  “Suit yourself. I’m off to church.”

  Dauntsey’s face remained impassive. “Say one for me.”

  “I have a feeling you’re going to need it,” he retorted.

  No sooner had they got into the car than the question which had hovered on Patterson’s lips for the past hour sprang out. “So what brings you to the sticks, Guv?”

  “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 fiancée’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-fiancé 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 dropped, 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.”