Missing: Presumed Dead

by James Hawkins

  “Daphne – What on earth are you rambling about? All I wanted to know was what you did during the war.”

  With a final stroke of the cat she seemed to make up her mind. Fixing Bliss with a hard stare she stunned him. “I killed people.”

  Bliss choked – seriously choked. He’d taken a sharp involuntary breath at the wrong moment and inhaled a flake of pastry from a cheese stick.

  “Water,” he coughed, and took several slurps before trying to speak through the spluttering – “You ... killed ... people?”

  “I knew I should have lied ... Here, have some more water, you’re going red.”

  The waiter was back. “Something wrong, Madam?”

  “He’s choking.”

  “Don’t make a fuss,” Bliss pleaded, gasping for air.

  “More water, Sir?”

  He waved the glass away and doubled over with coughing and retching. The lights were going out – fading into a fuzzy haze, his eyes were streaming, his oxygen-starved brain was struggling for a solution and all he could think was – this sweet little old lady’s a killer.

  A dozen pairs of hooded eyes sneaked a look, conversations drifted to a standstill. Time held it’s breath. Waiting for what? Then Daphne leapt out of her chair, ran around the table and smashed her fist into his back. Bliss exploded in a fit of coughing, panting and wheezing as he forced his lungs to inhale, but the obstruction had cleared and he gasped himself back to normality.

  “You nearly choked to death,” said Daphne, her voice full of concern as she re-sat.

  “What d’ye expect after what you just told me?” he replied accusingly.

  “I’m not proud of what I did. And quite honestly I’d rather you kept this just between us.”

  “But who did you kill? When? Why? – I don’t understand.”

  She shut him out again, going back to the cat, then reminding him. “We came to talk about the Major.”

  “You can’t do that – You can’t give me a heart-attack then change the subject. This isn’t the Women’s Institute – ‘You can finish the crochet at home ladies, now we’re starting the strawberry jam.’”

  “You are funny, Chief Inspector.”

  “No, I’m serious. I want to know.”

  Daphne spent a few moments brushing crumbs off the table then her eyes locked onto one of the table’s growth-rings and she followed it around until it disappeared under Bliss’s left hand. “People do things in wars,” she began sombrely, concentrating on his fingers. “Disgusting things; things they’d never dream of doing normally; things they’d never admit having done ...” The turmoil of indecision slowed her speech. “I wish I hadn’t said anything ...” she paused then looked up, pleading with her eyes. “Don’t say anything, will you?”

  He wouldn’t, he assured her.

  “I belonged to a special unit during the war,” she began, explaining calmly. “French-speaking men and women trained for a specific mission during the invasion of France. The Allies were concerned the French would side with the Germans after D-Day and turn on our troops.”

  “Why should they?”

  “Fear mainly – the Gestapo had rounded up many Frenchmen and sent them to concentration camps. Almost every family had at least one member who’d been arrested and imprisoned and the threat was clear – cooperate or they die. But the French had other reasons.”

  “What reasons – surely we were liberating them?”

  “That’s true, though some still hadn’t forgiven us for deserting them at Dunkirk and don’t forget we’d destroyed their fleet at Oran – killed thousands of sailors to stop the Vichy Government handing the ships over to the Germans.” Checking to make sure she wasn’t being overheard, she lowered her voice a couple of notches. “And they never liked us very much in the first place.”

  “I still don’t understand. What were you expected to do – kill Frenchman before they could kill our people?”

  “No – of course not. We were trained to prepare the way for the invading forces – let the French know we were coming as allies to free the country, not turn it into a British colony like the Germans claimed in their propaganda; to warn them to keep away from the coast; persuade them to dig in or hide in the cellars. We were supposed to galvanise the resistance to co-ordinate the blowing up of bridges, derailment of trains, blocking roads, that sort of thing. But the main task was to get behind enemy lines and vector artillery fire onto concentrations of German troops. Once the battle started our people wouldn’t have a clue where the fleeing Jerries were and the danger was we could have wiped out the local population without even scratching the enemy. So you see, it was my job to kill people.”

  The first course arrived and the interruption gave Bliss an opportunity to get his thoughts together.

  This wasn’t bad, he thought, this wasn’t the admission of some deranged old biddy who had wiped out half the inmates of an old peoples home with arsenic in the soup; this wasn’t a rampaging granny mowing down the queue in the post office because her welfare cheque hadn’t arrived; this wasn’t a mobster in a mask ...

  “It was wartime – people die. You said so yourself,” he began, offering absolution, but she sliced into a mushroom with such fierce concentration that he backed off and centred on his pâté.

  “How did you get there?” he tried conversationally after a few minutes.

  “Parachute.”

  “You parachuted into France?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wasn’t that dangerous?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it during the day or at night?”

  “Night.”

  “Did you have a reserve?”

  “No.”

  “Are you going to keep this up all evening? … I said, are you …”

  “I heard you, Chief Inspector, but sometimes it’s best to leave old skeletons in the cupboard.”

  “That’s exactly what Jonathon said.”

  “He was right then.”

  Bliss sat back with an admiring smile. “I can’t get over that. You – parachuting out of a plane over enemy territory in the middle of the night.”

  “I sometimes wonder if it was a dream myself.”

  Bliss took a few moments to finish his pâté’ and used the hiatus to study her with deepening respect, realising that if it were anyone but Daphne talking he’d probably not believe a word of what they were saying. But there was something so totally sincere in her manner. “So what happened?” he asked eventually.

  Daphne toyed indecisively with the remaining mushroom – shunting it back and forth across her plate.

  Then she edged it onto the rim and started working it around.

  “Daphne – I said, what happened?”

  The mushroom went round and around the plate rim, faster and faster, but there was no way out.

  “Daphne?”

  She stopped, stabbed the mushroom angrily with her fork and looked straight through him, focusing somewhere far off in the distance – somewhere in the past. “I was cold, wet , miserable and scared to death. My partner ... my friend ... hit a power line. Electrocuted – dead. He had the maps. I wandered – lost, disorientated, hungry for two or three days – then the guns started.” Her eyes closed as the barrage went off in her mind and she sat silent until the noise had faded.

  “A young French woman, my age, was lying by the side of the road covered in blood, screaming,” she said as she re-opened her eyes, but her voice was as distant as her gaze. “She’d been shot or hit by shrapnel.”

  Mandy Richards was back, her crimson chest stippled with shreds of green blouse. And her killer – blood and snot dribbling out of his nose – his face more ghastly than the mask that had been pulled off. And now another face had got stirred into the horrific mental morass – the Major’s face, or what was left of it: half a shattered jaw strung up with wire and a few rotten teeth set at crazy angles.

  But Daphne was having her own nightmare.

  “When I bent down to see if I cou
ld help I realised she had a baby, wrapped in a fluffy blue blanket soaked in blood. ‘Take my baby – please take my baby,’ the poor girl was screaming.’ ‘Where to?’ I said. ‘To my mother – Mama – she will take care of him. Please, please take him.’ She paused and stared over Bliss’s shoulder at a blank wall, waiting for the pain to abate – hoping she might wake before the worst. ‘Where is your mother?’ I asked,” – the horror movie refusing to stop in her mind. “And she gave me the name of the town ... I couldn’t believe my luck. It was the town where I was supposed to be and it was still behind enemy lines. I was desperate ... I had to get there ... I still had my job to do. Without me our artillery would just destroy the whole place.”

  Burying her head in her hands Daphne tried shutting out the images, then gave up and confronted herself with the facts. “I took her bicycle and put my radio in the wicker carrier, you know the sort that all French bikes have ... and ... ” she paused again, fighting off the memory, hoping it had never happened – hoping it was only a movie. “And ...” she tried again. “And ... I wrapped her baby in my shawl ... and ...” The words wouldn’t come.

  Bliss shook off his own demons and helped out. “And the baby ...?” he asked.

  “I put him in the basket on top of the radio.” There, I’ve said it. Now finish the story. “And I rode away. ‘Good luck,’ she called, ‘Bon chance – Bon chance. Tell my mother I’ll be home in a day or so,’ she cried. ‘I’ll be home as soon as the guns have stopped. Tell her not to worry.’”

  She sat silent for a few moments, still staring through the wall as images piled up in her mind and she sorted them in order. “A British soldier tried to stop me at a checkpoint. He was sure I was French. Of course, I looked French – that was all part of the training. We had French instructors – girls our own age who had escaped or been in England at the start of the war. With the French it’s not just the language, it’s the way you stick out your bum and pout; the way you sniff everything; the way you use your hands to talk.

  “‘Cor blimey, Miss, you sound as though you’ve just come off Brighton beach,’ he said.

  “‘Let me through or I’ll ...’” She paused, “Well, you can imagine what I said.

  “‘Ere,’ he said, ‘You’re English, ain’t you?’

  “‘Of course I’m English you bloody little twerp,’ I said, though I wasn’t quite so polite.

  “‘Well I’m blowed,’ he said. ‘But you can’t go through there, Miss. The h’enemy’s up ahead. They’ll mow you down,’ he said.

  “‘Get out the way,’ I said, shoving him off.

  “‘I’ll shoot,’ he shouted.”

  Then she smiled in memory. “‘What’s your name?’ I said. “‘Corporal something-or-other,’ he said.

  “‘Right Corporal,’ I said. ‘If you shoot me, I’ll wrap that gun round your bleedin’ head and when I get back home I’ll tell your mother what you did. Now bugger off.’” Bliss’s broad grin ended in a chuckle as she continued.

  “I couldn’t believe how quiet it was as I cycled up that road, as if the guns were holding their breath, I even heard a bird singing – in the middle of a battle, a bird – incredible.” She paused at the memory, re-creating the sound in her mind. “Then I saw my first Germans, camouflaged, scuttling into the ditches and aiming. I stopped and got off – didn’t know what to do, then I thought ... wave something white. I had to use my knickers in the end, I didn’t have anything else white. ‘Achtung! Achtung – Stoppe,’ they shouted. But I just kept going until a machine gunner took out my front wheel. I couldn’t leave the bike – the baby and my radio were in the basket, so I got up and pushed it with one hand, waving my knickers in the air with the other – what must they have thought of me – a desperate prostituée with a wobbly front wheel I guess. I kept shouting ‘Let me through’ in French. ‘My baby needs his father.’”

  Bliss was breathless with anticipation, “What happened?”

  “There were six of them, only boys really – young hoodlums. Today they’d be spraying graffiti on bridges or dealing grass in the Hauptstrasse Burger Bar, but somebody had got them up as soldiers and given them real guns with live ammo, so they felt pretty big. One of them spoke French, badly. ‘What do you have in there?’ he asked, pointing his gun at the basket. ‘My baby,’ I said. ‘I live over there and I want to go home, my husband is waiting for his dinner and my baby needs feeding.’ I don’t think he understood, and one of the others kept screaming, ‘Shoot her – just shoot her.’ Then one of them said something crude. My German wasn’t very good but I knew what he was suggesting ‘Look,’ he said, ‘She’s got her knickers off already.’”

  The main course arrived, served on wooden platters, and Bliss started to eat, silently, dying to tell her to continue, but, sensing the fragility of her condition, left her to choose the moment. Daphne had yet to start her turkey and was pushing pieces of it around her plate, then she slammed her knife and fork onto the table making him jump. “I don’t know why I feel I have to explain ...” she began, her fists clenched in fierce anger.

  “You don’t,” he said soothingly, and reached out to comfort her. But they both knew that she did have to explain – that she would explain – that she needed to explain.

  “I wish they had raped me – all of them,” she began again, her voice subdued, and with the words came tears. She wiped them with her napkin then carried on crying and talking at the same time. “It wouldn’t have mattered – not really. I would have got over it in time.”

  “They didn’t rape you?” he asked kindly as she paused to wipe her eyes again.

  “No,” she sniffled. “They took the baby. One of them picked it out of the basket. I thought they’d see the radio – I couldn’t let them see the radio, so I started screaming, ‘Donnez-moi mon bébé – Give me back my baby – Give me back my baby.’”

  “‘Do you want your baby?’ he said, holding it high in the air, taunting me.”

  “‘Give me my baby,’ I cried.” And her eyes found the distant spot again as she fought back the tears.

  “He threw the baby – not at me – at one of the others, but a shell exploded and he turned just at the wrong moment. He wasn’t looking.” She paused to wipe her eyes and blow her nose, then looked right into Bliss’s eyes. “They just walked away – ‘It doesn’t matter – we’ll all be dead tomorrow,’ one of them said.” She hesitated for a moment to compose herself, then, more calmly, continued. “I was surrounded by death yet that baby meant everything to me – I’d promised his mother you see.” The tears came again and she started to get up. “You’ll have to excuse me, Dave,” she snivelled. “I’m just a silly old woman. I’ll be back in a minute – fix up my face.”

  He rose with her. “Will you be alright?”

  She patted him back down. “I’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”

  Bliss was on the verge of seeking her out when she returned, dry-eyed, though her face was flushed.

  “I didn’t come back to England after the war,” she explained. I couldn’t face my mother and her snotty friends. ‘And what did you do in the war, little Ophelia?’ they would have asked, their little pinkies poking the air as they sipped Earl Grey and pretended to be posh. What would I have said? You nearly choked to death when I told you – imagine what they would have said, ‘Oh how dreadful,’ she put on a plummy accent, ‘How could you, Ophelia?’ Then they would have asked for another cucumber sandwich.”

  Bliss found himself laughing – nervous relief, he assumed. Relieved she’d got over the worst – that she was able to make light of it, however dreadful it had been. But the worst was to come.

  “It’s not funny. You were shocked because you assumed I’d been a nurse. It’s so stereotypical – men maim and women mend. But that wasn’t me. That wasn’t cheeky-faced Ophelia Lovelace from Westchester Church of England School, and Mrs. Fanshawe’s ballet class for the daughter’s of gentle folk. This was Daphne Lovelace – murderer. I killed people, Dave – hundreds of peop
le. I picked up the dead baby, wrapped it in the shawl, put it back in the basket, then went into that town and found a whole garrison of Germans frantically packing to withdraw. And I got on my little radio and told them to bomb the fuck out of the place – don’t screw up your nose like that, I was saying fuck before you were born – I wanted shells raining down on the Germans, pulping them into the ground, pulverising the life out of them. I wanted to kill every last one of them. And do you know – it felt good. It felt so good after what they did to my baby. It felt so good I didn’t care anymore. If my radio hadn’t worked, I would have stood in the middle of the town waving my knickers at the bombers, screaming, ‘Down here – the fucking Krauts are down here – bomb the bastards to pieces.’”

  “Is everything alright, Sir?” interrupted the waiter noticing they weren’t eating.

  Bliss testily shooed him away. “Fine, fine.”

  Daphne sat, eyes glazed into the distance, flicking back and forth as if she were watching the battle going on behind them. As if every flash and blast were being replayed in her brain. “And the bombs came,” she carried on, with powerful emotion. “The shells came, and I was in the middle of it. It was like God had turned the volume up to 11. The noise was so loud I could see it – each new bomb or shell sending shockwaves of sound smashing into the columns of smoke, tearing them apart. Everything was shaking – buildings; trees; the ground. One earthquake after another and I was right in the middle of it. I was the bull’s-eye and I didn’t care.”

  Her eyes drifted to a close as the battle raged in her mind, then they popped open as if she had remembered something really important. “It was in colour – that was the strangest thing really. Not black and white like the documentaries and movies. More colour than I’d ever seen. Not ordinary colours – colours so vivid I wanted to shout, ‘Cor look at that!’ Brilliant white and yellow flashes that hurt my eyes, glowing reds and oranges like mini sunsets, spring-green fields and freshly leafed trees. And the sky – the clearest, brightest, warmest blue. It was as if God didn’t know there was a war going on. I remember thinking, over and over, why doesn’t God stop this – he doesn’t care, he couldn’t even make the day miserable. It wouldn’t have been so bad if it had been drizzly and cold. Nobody wants to die on a lovely summer’s day. I was so mad with God for doing that I never really made it up with him. I suppose I shall find out soon enough whether or not he ever forgave me.”