Missing: Presumed Dead

by James Hawkins

  She capitulated, slumped back into the chair and started with Hugo, in Paris, near the end of the war.

  “Hugo?” he queried vacantly, his mind tied up with dead goats and skeletal Majors.

  “Hugo, the French artist,” she reminded him, taking him back to their first evening together: pork chops and treacle pudding with custard; the portrait of a beautiful young woman; the framed O.B.E.; the stuffed goat in her hallway – forget the damn goat, he said to himself as he tried to recollect the picture and the painter. What had she said about him? he asked himself. “I loved Hugo, but he loved his painting.” I wonder what she meant?

  “Yes, I remember Hugo,” he said in an encouraging tone.

  “I was with him for two years,” she began, pain, pleasure, longing and regret all coalescing into a mien that, if anything, came down on the side of happiness. But then she froze, focusing somewhere into the distance, and her face took a roller coaster ride through her emotions as she thought about what to tell. How she had wandered penniless, lonely and confused into a Parisian bar and fainted from hunger. How she’d woken to the stench of smoke and garlic in Hugo’s studio as he sat, naked to the waist, quietly studying her face while he sketched.

  “Cigarette?” he had said, offering one of the foul Galloises as she stirred, but she needed food and told him so.

  He cut her a hunk of greasy dried sausage and broke a baguette in two, then, with hardly a word, she offered herself in exchange. What did it matter? The Frenchwoman’s baby was dead; the German soldiers she had rained shells upon were all dead; millions more on both sides were dying or dead. Who would know, or care, if two strangers found a few moments relief from the abomination of everyday existence in each other’s bodies.

  “In a way it was Rupert Dauntsey’s fault,” she went on, catching Bliss completely off balance.

  “Rupert Dauntsey – the Major?” he asked incredulously.

  Her eyes went down to the floor as if in search of a memory, but when she looked up they were swelling with tears and her voice was barely audible as she bit back the sobs. “I heard on the grapevine that a Major from Westchester was in a French hospital ...” She paused, snivelling loudly into a white handkerchief pulled from her sleeve. “I didn’t know it was Rupert at first, but I desperately needed something to cling on to, anything to wake me from the nightmare and return me to reality ... and I thought a friendly face from home ...” Her voice failed as the tears welled up and overcame her.

  “It’s alright, Daphne,” said Bliss rushing to comfort her, but it wasn’t alright. The horrific memories had not faded with time, nor had they become any easier to bear, and she bit her knuckles furiously as the vivid scenes forged their way to the surface: an American troop truck ... six G.I.s on 24 hours R&R, and a dozen or so others going on eternal leave.

  “Don’t look at the stiffs, Miss,” warned the driver as he stopped to pick her up at the roadside on the outskirts of a bombed town. Clambering in beside him she ignored the warning and turned instinctively, then found herself wondering whether the “stiffs” were the dozen or so corpses on the floor, or the six haggard-faced soldiers staring into the clear blue sky. Following their gaze she found a screeching skylark wheeling above a moon-scaped cornfield and envied it its freedom, but looking back at the men, she realised they had not seen the bird – they were just staring.

  For more than an hour decimated villages rumbled by, the ruins still quaking from the distant thunder of canon fire, and stoic-faced Normans turned their backs, burying their dead or staring in disbelief at their wrecked homes.

  “Good luck, Miss,” the driver shouted as she dropped down from the cab outside the hospice. “I hope your friend will be O.K.”

  “Thanks,” she yelled, giving a friendly wave to the G.I.s as the truck roared away, but none responded – each too busy contemplating the fact that ten years of their life’s movie had ripped through the projector in the past ten days; wondering how much film was left on the spool.

  “I couldn’t see Rupert’s face at all,” Daphne mumbled through the tears. “Just bandages with a couple of holes to breathe through, and another with a feeding tube in what was left of his mouth.”

  “This is Major Dauntsey,” the nurse had said, more by way of identification than introduction and Daphne’s heart had sunk.

  “He couldn’t see me and couldn’t talk,” she continued, omitting to mention that the crushing disappointment had forced her to her knees. “He didn’t even have a hand that I could squeeze to comfort him.” Her one hope of finding someone or something to stabilise her thoughts had been dashed. For the two days it had taken to reach him she had pushed the pain of dead babies and massacred soldiers to the back of her mind, while searching for images of streets, pubs, shops and people they would have in common, fully expecting that, within seconds, they would find themselves chatting as amiably as long forgotten schoolfriends; perhaps sealing their bond with a kiss, maybe something more if he was capable – after all, it wasn’t as if he were a complete stranger. And it wasn’t as though Doreen was the sort who’d be too concerned, even if she found out – not that she would.

  “I’m ashamed to admit this, but I screamed and ran,” she confessed to Bliss, adding, “If something that horrible could happen to the shy little boy who lived up the road ...” The words failed as she sobbed in the handkerchief, then she tried again. “I think it was because I had known him. All the others, even the baby, were strangers.”

  “But you said that whatever happened to you had been Rupert Dauntsey’s fault,” Bliss reminded her. “What did you mean.”

  “I don’t expect you to believe this,” she started, looking him carefully in the eye, “but it was as if I’d somehow got on the wrong planet and didn’t know how to get back to Earth. I think in some silly way I was expecting Rupert to lead me. You see, I’d done my job – killed all the people I was supposed to kill. Now what? They never told us at the training school and we never asked. I suppose we all knew, deep down, that we wouldn’t survive, so it was tempting fate to even consider what to do afterwards. But, because I survived, I was lost – not physically. I was lost because my mind had already accepted the certainty of death and had made no plans for the future.”

  Samantha’s words still buzzed in his mind from the previous night and took on a greater relevance. “You’ve got to have a plan, Dave,” she had said and he glanced at the wall clock: 7.35 am. Superintendent Donaldson would be in at 8.00 with his sights on a chocolate digestive.

  “You were telling me about Hugo,” he pressed Daphne, knowing that by 8.05 Donaldson would be informed about the goat, if someone hadn’t already snitched, and by 8.10 he’d feed an empty biscuit packet in the shredder and call the chief. By 8.15 the phone on Bliss’s desk would ring and his career would be over. London’s Grand Metropolitan Police Force wouldn’t take him back and the Chief Constable of Hampshire would be happy to see him go. “We want it to be your decision, Dave,” someone would tell him with a compassionate hand on his shoulder, thereby avoiding any suggestion he was being pressurised. “Of course – you could always go back to the safe house ... ” they’d say, somehow leaving the sentence hanging, unfinished. Or I could do myself in and save everybody the trouble, he smiled to himself sardonically.

  “I’m afraid Hugo used me rather,” Daphne said finally, and, from her tone, expected to end it there. But Bliss was coercive, if not downright insistent. Holding her spray-can hostage he said, “Come on, Daphne, you may as well tell me. It can’t be any worse.”

  Her face clouded in shame. It was worse, much worse.

  “I have to go,” she said, panic forcing her to her feet.

  “I have to go,” she repeated, her eyes searching frantically for a way out, and she headed for the door but was drawn back to the canister of polish. Reaching with a shaky hand she muttered “I have to go” again, and began pacing around the room, eyes everywhere, mumbling, “I have to go ... I have to go ... I have to go,” like a malfunction
ing robot.

  “Calm down,” said Bliss, and she froze in the middle of the room, unable to catch her breath.

  “Daphne,” he called, going to her aid, but she fended him off and began panting hysterically, her nerves going haywire, jangling her limbs and twitching her face. He grabbed her by the shoulders but she wrenched free and paced some more.

  “Stop it,” she told herself. “Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.”

  Then she paused again, gasping deep breaths, threatening to hyperventilate as she tried to stop the pictures in her mind.

  Bliss, alarmed, picked up the phone. “Control room – call a Doctor ...” But she slammed her hand on the cradle. “No, No. I’m alright, Chief Inspector. I’ll be alright.”

  “Sit down then,” he said, easing her into a chair and giving her a glass of water.

  The phone rang – the control room sergeant, confused, calling back.

  “No,” explained Bliss, “Miss Lovelace has had a bit of a turn in my office but I think she’s alright now. I’ll let you know.”

  “Thank you,” she said and slumped back with her eyes closed, thinking – what possible difference does it make now. So you posed naked for Hugo; posed for his friends; more than posed; more than one friend. Hadn’t you been flattered – so many beautiful French girls to choose from, yet they preferred la petite tarte Anglaise.

  She didn’t explain in detail, wouldn’t have known how to express herself. “I let men take advantage of me,” she said, simply, her head bowed in her hands. “It seemed to make them happy.” Then she paused, wondering whether to elaborate; if to justify; how to justify. Yet she had justified it at the time – forcing herself to believe that she did it for food; for shelter; for love. And wasn’t it love? Didn’t Hugo love her? Wasn’t it always Hugo who had comforted her battered body to sleep at the end of the night – on a couch reeking of hard sex and cheap cigarettes, in his studio surrounded by paintings that never showed the bruises.

  “I used to sit on a canvas stool in a little square in Montmartre while Hugo painted me,” she went on, skipping the humiliation and passion, recalling the brightly coloured umbrellas and the oily smell of paint. “And one day an instructor who’d taught me unarmed combat in England wandered by when Hugo was in the bar. He stopped, flabbergasted. ‘You’re dead,’ he said, and I really wanted to believe him. It would have made things so much easier for me. I even pretended he was mistaken, told him where to go – in French, but he was insistent, and I came to my senses and realised what I was doing to myself – what Hugo and his friends were doing to me.”

  A dried fleck of correcting fluid on Bliss’s desk caught her attention and she concentrated furiously for several seconds, scratching at it with a nail.

  Is that it? wondered Bliss, and was readying to ask another question when she started again – softly, almost wistfully. “Hugo came back and I hit him, very hard. Then I grabbed a knife and ripped up all his canvasses – all the nudes; smashed him over the head with one – right in the middle of Montmartre.” She paused to look out of the window, then laughed, wryly. “I remember somebody took a photo – Hugo lying on wet cobblestones with his head stuck through a painting of me in the nude … I’ve often thought it may have won an award – always imagined it hanging in some pretentious photo gallery labelled ‘Man’s subjugation by female form,’ or something equally hideous.”

  The phone startled Bliss; the clock had shot forward to 7.55 without warning and he reached for the receiver with trepidation. Thanks to Samantha he now had a plan. But it was a plan that would be stymied if Donaldson got to him first. “What happened next?” he asked Daphne, withdrawing his hand and letting the phone ring.

  With a handful of belongings, and the one small portrait that Bliss had found on her sideboard, she had taken off with the instructor, Michael Kent, and headed east, deeper into mainland Europe.

  “I didn’t come home,” she answered, leaving Bliss to question, “Why not?”

  She found another fleck to pick at.

  “Did you let your parents know?” he asked, sensing her reluctance to continue.

  She looked up. “Let them know what? That I was a cold blooded killer; that I let men do things to me that nice girls never did?”

  “Come on,” he said, not knowing what she was talking about. “It can’t have been that bad.”

  “I sometimes thought I might’ve coped better as a prostitute,” she answered, leaving him slack mouthed. “At least I could have pretended it was just a job.”

  “I don’t understand – what were you doing? Why were you doing it?”

  “Where did you stay last night?” she asked, looking up, clear faced, as if she’d just walked in and had no notion of the turmoil in the air.

  “At a friend’s,” he said succinctly. Samantha’s, he meant.

  Samantha’s couch had been comfortable and welcoming. Which was more than could have been said for Samantha when he arrived on her doorstep, a little after 1 am, following a frantic phone call.

  “If this is some misguided plot to get into my bed you’re wasting your bloody time,” she had said, flinging open her door, defensively tugging a thick towelling dressing gown around her while preening her hair with the other hand.

  “Samantha!” he cried, stung by her mistrust. “Would I make something like that up?”

  Her face broke into a grin. “Did he really cremate your goat?”

  “It’s not funny!”

  “No, I suppose not.” She straightened her face. “Well, you’d better come in then.”

  “I still don’t get it,” said Bliss to Daphne. “Your parents must have been worried sick. They must have thought you’d been killed.” But, as he spoke, the faces of dead soldiers lining ship’s rails winged back into his thoughts and he stopped, stunned by his perception – she’d been killed the moment she took off to parachute into France.

  Daphne was crying again. “Self respect is like virginity,” she choked through the tears. “Once it’s gone you have to pretend for the rest of your life.”

  “You can get your self-respect back in time,” he protested, recalling how he’d felt after Mandy’s death.

  “Well, I never got my virginity back,” she complained ruefully. “Anyway, you’ve no idea what it’s like.”

  I have, he thought, thinking of pregnant Mandy, but when he looked deep into Daphne’s bloodshot eyes he realised there wasn’t the slightest comparison between his hurt and hers. She’d had the killer inside her every day for more than fifty years, whereas Mandy’s killer had spent 18 years out of sight and out of mind in a high-security government hotel.

  The phone rang again and Bliss was out of his chair and headed for the door as if his backside had caught fire. 8.10 am and Donaldson was stomping around his office to the tune of wildly gyrating executive toys.

  “The Mitre at ten this morning,” Bliss said to Daphne on his way past, knowing she would understand. “And please, please, don’t tell anyone.”

  “Matron! Matron!” Nurse Dryden cried a little after 10 am, rushing up the corridor of the nursing home, her bobbling breasts threatening to topple her. But the matron already had her hands full. Bliss was at the front door causing a disturbance, according to script: furiously waving an unsigned search warrant; demanding to see Mrs. Dauntsey immediately; claiming she was being kept prisoner; threatening to arrest anyone who stood in his way. Jonathon was still there and stood his ground challengingly, but the matron was backing off.

  “I don’t know ...” she started as Nurse Dryden frantically interrupted. “Matron! Matron!”

  “Not now, Nurse. You can see I’m busy.”

  “Well,” demanded Bliss fiercely, “do I get to see her or do I have to start making arrests?”

  “But Matron ...” she was tugging at her arm.

  “Make up your mind,” shouted Bliss.

  “He’s bluffing,” sneered Jonathon.

  “Matron ...”

  “Shut up, Nurse Dryde
n. I can’t hear myself think.”

  “I shall have no choice but to arrest ...”

  “Ignore him,” shouted Jonathon.

  “But Matron ...”

  “Go away, Nurse. I won’t tell you again – I’m busy.”

  “Look, Inspector. I’m sure there’s some mistake – maybe we can go into my office ...”

  “But Matron ...”

  She turned on the nurse, purple faced, screaming, “I thought I told you to go away.”

  That should do it, thought Bliss, and he had a sudden change of heart saying, “I’ll be back,” and disappeared through the front door with as much mystery as a conjurer’s assistant.

  “Daphne was magnificent,” Samantha laughed to Bliss a few minutes later, as they raced Doreen’s wheelchair into the Olde Curiosity Coffee Shoppe just off the High Street. “‘We’re just going to take my old friend for a walk,’ she said to that nurse with pneumatic boobs. ‘Oh you can’t do that, Madam,’ she said, sticking out her chest like a bloody guardsman and Daphne said, ‘Piss off, you silly little nincompoop,’ barged her out of the way and shoved the wheelchair through the French window shouting, ‘Tally Ho! Doreen. Chocks away.’”

  “I’m pleased to meet you again,” said Bliss, stooping to introduce himself to Doreen once they had pulled her up to a table in the restaurant.

  The twin flush of excitement and fresh air coloured Doreen’s cheeks, and she spent a few seconds composing herself as Daphne, her impishness returned, nudged him and drew his attention to an austerely dressed mustachioed woman in a funereal black hat across the room at a window table. “See what I mean about lah-di-dah,” she scoffed, as the woman withered the waitress with a complaint about the temperature of her coffee. “She’s no more a lady than ...” she paused, realising to her horror that she was just about to say Doreen Dauntsey.

  “I called you the other day,” piped up Doreen feeling left out. “But you didn’t come to see me.”

  “Sorry,” he said, feeling it was hardly a good time to tell her that Jonathon had stood sentinel.