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 customers.
Talk about uptight, thought Bliss, appraising the woman’s clenched buttocks, over-strung brassière 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.
“Yes, please, Doctor, if you don’t mind,” she had replied, and Dr. Fitzpatrick’s fraudulently penned death certificate had cost her a thousand pounds, but what was the alternative? “Death by shock.” But who wouldn’t have had a heart attack in the Colonel’s place – learning, simultaneously, that his beloved son was a queer, something of an idiot, and dead? And, to cap it all, discovering the man he’d been nursing as a hero for the past few months was not only an imposter, but was also his son’s lover.
Daphne was catching on. “Do you mean ...”
Samantha touched her arm to quieten her, but Doreen turned to her friend, her eyes wide open. “Yes, Daphne. I was so stupid I didn’t realise I was living with the wrong man. Not that I was living with him in the true sense. He stayed in the turret room most of the time – crying I think, though it was difficult to tell.”
Daphne jumped up excitedly. “So who was he?”
“You met him – the best man at our wedding – sham wedding.”
“Captain David Tippen of the Royal Horse Artillery,” pronounced Bliss sagely, feeling the need to prove he’d done his homework.
Daphne’s face pinched into confusion. “David Tippen – What sham wedding?”
Doreen sank back into memories of her marriage, still flabbergasted to think she had been so gullible – realising she had been so bowled over by a proposal from the Colonel’s son that she never really questioned his motives. But memories of the ceremony itself were murky, everything and everyone appearing through a screen of smoky glass, much as it had at the time – more alcoholic than euphoric. Rupert had made all the arrangements, even choosing her dress – and her hat. “Trust Daphne Lovelace to laugh at my hat,” she remembered saying – but to whom, and when ...?
Rupert had only invited his aide-de-camp, (“Done up like a dog’s dinner,” Daphne had shrieked to her friends afterwards), and his father – the old Colonel. But when he announced that Arnie, the odd-job man, and his wife would be the only witnesses Doreen had dug in her heels, insisting on a “proper wedding,” with a maid of honour and bridesmaids; what was the point of a wedding if it wasn’t to brandish one’s trophy in front of one’s friends? In the end, with less than an hour to spare, she settled for Daphne and a clutch of handmaidens dragged out of the Mitre. “What about your parents?” Rupert had asked, showing some feelings at the last minute. “No,” she had shot back fiercely, knowing they’d find fault with him; knowing they’d voice the same concerns which she’d worked so hard to keep buried. “Why you, Doreen?” her father would question. “Why not some tight-assed little bitch with a plum in her mouth, and a stuck-up mother twittering on about how rationing was playing havoc with her dinner parties? – ‘Haven’t had a decent truffle for absolutely ages; and caviar? Pah – lease, don’t even mention it, my dear.’”
Doreen surfaced with one clear recollection of the ceremony. “I remember the vicar with that stupid sing-song voice,” she said, looking inquisitively at the faces surrounding her as if she was coming around from anaesthetic. “Major Rupert Wellington Dauntsey,” he said. “Do you take this woman – Doreen Mae Mason ...” Her voice and memory dimmed for a few seconds, then she seemed to bounce back to life. “Rupert said, ‘I do,’ but he never did,” she continued forlornly. Then she repeated, “He never did,” as if to remind herself.
Three pairs of eyes forged into hers, demanding an explanation, but she sank back into her own private darkness, leaving them to watch her changing expressions as she wove together images of the wedding night out of a thick blanket of fog: Rupert, an officer and, apparently, a gentleman, in full ceremonial uniform, pouring her yet another champagne; brushing his lips off her cheek; guiding her upstairs and leaving her to marvel at the wonders of an en-suite bathroom, at a time most people still crept to the outhouse in the middle of the night, and Hollywood agents dickered over bathroom clauses in film stars’ contracts.
“Mrs. Dauntsey ...” tried Bliss, concerned that time was running out, but she was already far away, her face warming to the dreamy memory of hot water gushing out of a polished brass tap – unlike her parent’s stinky gas geyser scaring the life out of her every time it belched into life, then pumping squirts of lukewarm water into a tin bath until the meter swallowed the last of the coins.
Doreen had found good reason to forget the wedding ceremony, even at the time, but the joy of instant unlimited hot water was so overwhelming she had lost track of time, turning the tap on and off until she could write her name on the bathroom mirror with her finger. Finally, with the important bits washed and powdered, she staggered into the bedroom and swayed, intoxicated as much by the sight of the richly carved four-poster bed, with heavily embroidered tester, as by the champagne.
With her eyes still closed she allowed herself a cautious smile at the memory of the silky sheets; the eiderdown pillows; the giant wall tapestry depicting a mythical battle, with near naked angels lifting the vanquished from the field – someone’s sanguine concept of a soldierly heaven; and the Chippendale dressing table laden with sweet smelling pomanders, and cut crystal bottles so delicate she was afraid to touch. Then her face clouded as the memory darkened and she saw herself swimming fuzzily against a tide of drowsiness, struggling into the satin nightgown, the one Daphne had hurriedly bought for her as a wedding present, then watching as the bed spun wildly away from her and she crashed, unconscious, to the floor.
“It was quite a honeymoon night,” she laughed dr
ily, rising back to the surface, greedily slurping tea to wash away the rekindled taste of bile which had made her vomit all over the bed in the morning. “I think he put something in my drinks,” she added, recalling how she had struggled to pull herself awake through a porridgy sludge, testing her hooded eyes against the morning sunlight and unfamiliar surroundings, while distorted images of the previous day’s ceremony swam slowly into view. Understanding had came through the fog like the beam of a car’s headlights – a fuzzy glow that suddenly bursts into a blinding flash. “I’m married,” she screeched, and lurched upright in bed only to find her husband, the marriage certificate and his aide-de-camp all gone. In their place was a little man with a pneumatic drill trying to hammer his way out of her skull.
“Married,” she spat and opened her eyes to the realisation that those around her were holding their breath. “Rupert left me alone in that damn place,” she explained. “And I was so woozy in the morning I didn’t know if we had or not ... anyway, until my little visitor came a week later I was sure I was expecting.”
Daphne and Bliss exchanged glances – Daphne with a lopsided “told you Rupert wasn’t the father” smirk.
“Don’t ask,” mouthed Bliss, guessing she was itching to discover the true identity of Jonathon’s father; knowing that just a month or so after Dauntsey’s departure someone must have stood on guard in his place.
“He didn’t want a woman,” Doreen continued, head down in embarrassment, “he only wanted a wife.” Then she lost her composure, simpering in shame with the admission that her husband had preferred to sleep with another man on their wedding night.
Bliss checked his watch, anxiously glancing at the door, wondering who would be first through: the matron, Superintendent Donaldson or a masked man with a machine gun. Feeling a need to speed things up he pieced together what he knew, throwing in a few guesses to fill in the blanks for the benefit of Samantha and Daphne. Explaining how, after the massacre caused by Rupert Dauntsey’s stupidity, it seemed likely that Captain Tippen had carried his mortally wounded lover back from the front; that an exploding grenade had showered bits of body and uniform everywhere; that some medical orderly must have mixed up the dog tags and when the survivor, a lowly backstreet boy, found himself being treated as a major, he was more than happy to go along with the blunder.
“He’d seen the Dauntsey home and the Scottish estate,” explained Bliss. “They were a vast improvement on his own home so he obviously thought: Why go back to be a burden to my mother in a Guildstone hovel? Here I have a private nurse; private doctor; a major’s pension; a major’s family and a major’s inheritance. He knew more about Rupert Dauntsey than Doreen ever knew and, in his own mind, was entitled to the estate far more than she ever was.”
Doreen pulled herself together sufficiently to add. “It was difficult for him to talk, and his face was so ugly that nobody wanted to look closely, so it was quite easy for him to get away with it.”
Daphne stepped in, questioning, “But why go along with it? Why not just throw him out?” Then she gave Bliss a poisonous stare and spat, “Men!”
There had been so many reasons, so many conflicting persuasions and influences, that Doreen froze indecisively as she sounded out the most plausible and least humiliating in her mind.
“It was blackmail,” she said eventually, expecting sympathy, while inwardly debating who had blackmailed whom. “He knew Rupert and me had never consecrated the marriage.”
“Consummated,” suggested Samantha quietly, but Doreen wasn’t in the frame of mind to be corrected and carried on as if she had not heard. ‘As long as I’m alive you’ve nothing to fear,’ Tippen said, when I stuck the x-ray under what was left of his nose. ‘Doctor Fitzpatrick reckons there’s been a mistake,’ I told him. ‘He reckons you ought to have some sort of scar in your leg. Football, he told me. Broke your leg at school, he said. He reckons he set the bone himself, when you were ten, he remembers it like yesterday – said you bawled your eyes out the whole time.’”
But there had been no mistake and Tippen had superciliously rubbed in the hurt by explaining, in uncalled for detail, what fun he and his lover had in arranging the spurious wedding in order to stop tongues wagging in the regiment. “It made me sick,” said Doreen, without elaborating.
“I still don’t see why you didn’t chuck him out,” said Daphne. “Nobody would have believed anything he said, after what he’d done?”
“Tippen had worked that out for himself,” explained Doreen shaking her head. “That’s why he made the will.”
“The will,” not “A will,” mused Bliss, recalling the visit from Law, the solicitor, who had made it clear that neither Jonathon nor the church would benefit from the body in the attic. “Are you saying that Tippen made a will in the name of Rupert Dauntsey?” he asked.
Doreen looked destitute as she nodded. “He left everything belonging to the Major to his own mother and the rest of his family. He called it his life insurance policy. Even gave me a copy as a reminder, telling me that when he died I would lose everything – the house, the estate in Scotland – everything. That’s why I had to pretend he was still alive all those years.”
“That still doesn’t explain the bullet in his head ...” started Bliss, but she burst into tears at the memory of her wasted life, or was it relief that the charade had ended? “What could I do?” she blubbered. “If he’d died and I contested the will I would’ve had to tell them I lived with the wrong bloke for ten years.”
“But, what if you’d said you hadn’t known?” suggested Daphne.
“It wouldn’t make any difference. He had the lawyer write in the will that our marriage was never consecrated.”
Samantha let the malapropism go with a smile, but Bliss’s mind was leafing through something Doreen had said earlier.
The briefing at the police station had broken up with officers fanning out across the city – clueless. Patterson was hanging back, like a kid in school waiting to pluck up courage to rat on a bully.
“Something on your mind, Pat?” enquired Donaldson.
“Sorry, Guv ...” he said, apparently coming to a decision. “No, nothing really,” he equivocated, wiping his expression clean. “I was just trying to think of the best place to start that’s all.”
The Olde Curiosity Coffee House would have been a good place to find Bliss, where the waitress was back at his table – under pressure from the management – the bill already made out. “Will that be everything, Sir?”
“Yes, thanks,” said Bliss as a trio of noisy young mothers, teeming with children, set up camp at the next table and the chaos of everyday life resumed as the women struggled with monumental decisions: cappuccino or café latte; skim milk or cream; chocolate or cinnamon topping; orange or apple juice for the bigger kids; breasts or bottles for the infants.
What must Daphne be thinking? he wondered, trying to read her mind as she eyed the mothers with their babies, realising that at roughly the same age she had parachuted into the teeth of war. Wasn’t she envious of the mothers, whose carefree domestic existence would never be ripped apart by the horrors of war or Parisian artists; whose bicycles would never be machine-gunned in the street; whose babies would never be murdered. But her wide open smile hid no angst – simple acquiescence, he guessed. She was happy for the mothers, and resigned to the fact that she’d had her chance, it was written all over her face: “I didn’t deserve another baby – I let someone break the one I had.”
Watching Daphne, Bliss suddenly saw Doreen Dauntsey in a different light. She’d had a child, no-one had robbed her of that, and, rightfully or wrongfully she’d lived a fairly cushy life. Compassion for her predicament waned still further with the realisation that, in her own way, she had been no less mercenary than the Major who’d suckered her into a bogus marriage, or the man who’d taken his place in the house, if not in his bed. And there was something else: “Mrs. Dauntsey,” he said, turning coolly toward her. “You said earlier that the doctor had exa
mined Tippen for the army pension, that was how he discovered the fraud ...” He paused, watching the worry lines crease her forehead. “It was fraud – claiming a major’s pension to which he wasn’t entitled. Would you agree?”
Doreen was slow to respond, so Samantha helped her out. “Do you see what Inspector Bliss is getting at Mrs. Dauntsey? If Tippen was defrauding the government out of a pension, you’d have a good case for saying he defrauded you out of your inheritance as well.”
Samantha was wrong – very wrong. Bliss knew it and so did Doreen, though neither of them let on – choosing silence instead. In the end he prodded her again. “Mrs. Dauntsey ... I said, that would be fraud, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes,” she hissed through clenched teeth.
Samantha sensing something in the harshness of his tone gave Bliss a puzzled look.
“I think Mrs. Dauntsey has something to tell us,” said Bliss, leaving Doreen hanging.
“Oh. I suppose you’ll find out soon enough,” Doreen spluttered. “I was the one getting the Major’s war pension not Tippen. He couldn’t sign his name and they was very good at the post office – they knew he couldn’t get out of the house, so all I had to do was scratch a cross on the form and they’d give me his pension.”
“Didn’t anyone ever check up – ever want to see him?” asked Bliss.
“No,” she shook her head. “Nobody wanted to see him.”
Bliss whistled. “So you were collecting Major Dauntsey’s pension for what ... ten years?”
The old grandfather clock had stopped completely, halting time in the Coffee House. Even the children at the next table seemed soporific under the weight of silent anticipation. Then Doreen Dauntsey broke down. “More than fifty years,” she blubbered. “I knew I shouldn’t have – I knew it were wrong, but I had to pay the bills.”
Those damn bills, she thought to herself, sniffling into a handkerchief – never enough money for the bills, especially with old Doctor Fitzpatrick having his hand permanently in her purse almost until the day he’d died. But what choice did she have? Then there was the cost of bringing up Jonathon in a manner befitting the supposed son of a major; the death duties when the old Colonel died; in addition to the upkeep and taxes on the house. The income from the Scottish estate had helped but she had still been forced to sell everything movable over the years. Only the land and houses remained, still registered in Rupert Dauntsey’s name, and impossible to sell or mortgage while he was still alive. And, legally, he was still alive.
Missing: Presumed Dead Page 29