Missing: Presumed Dead (16 page)

His house had changed and he found himself staring at it with the eyes of a stranger. The front door was different – despite the wood-grain finish and polished brass knocker it was quite obviously reinforced steel and blast-resistant. A pattern of scorch marks etched into the stone step, and fanning out across the pavement, still marked the spot where the bomb had exploded. But it wasn't the physical changes that alienated him, the house no longer had a welcoming feel. It was, he felt, more like unexpectedly finding yourself outside your childhood home – wanting to rush in and find mother at the sink and father asleep in front of the television; the sweet smell of freshly baked apple pie; the cozy warmth of laundry drying around the fire and the promise of a new
Beano, Dandy
or
Boy's Own.

But there was no mother or father here. This was no childhood den. This was still his house – he had a key, and there was nothing stopping him from entering; only the words of the protection squad commander. “I wouldn't go back to the house if I were you, Dave – not until we've caught him. If he's desperate enough he'll try again, and next time it might be a machine gun from a passing car,
à la
Al Capone.”

He drove away with a certain sadness, managed to force a mendacious smile for the two caretakers as he passed, then was forced to stop and search for a tissue. He'd bought the house for a fresh start, having finally shaken off the divorce doldrums, and now his world had been trashed again, this time by a villainous ghost from the past.

Arriving early at the pub for his rendezvous with Superintendent Wakelin, Bliss checked out the car park and surrounding streets for blue Volvos and jotted down the numbers of a couple, though neither looked promising.

The waitress was beautiful, stunningly so, yet appeared to have no idea as she bustled around serving everyone with the same innocent smile. Bliss was mesmerised by her beauty and wanted to glide his fingers down her slender arms and stroke her soft cheeks just to have the memory for his dotage. “I remember the day I touched the most perfect woman,” he would boast to his peers on the bowling green. “She had stepped straight out of an Old Master – not a Rubens. She was a Rembrandt or Botticelli, or a Bartolini statue. Naked? Naturally. Though nothing coarse, nothing pornographic.”

She wasn't naked, but her loose fitting dress flowed sensuously over her curves, like the robes of an Egyptian princess, and the open smile on her fresh virginal face left her more exposed than most women totally nude.

“Yeah, mate – What d'ye want?” Her rough cockney accent broke the spell and she slipped under the wheels of her chariot.

“Hello, Michael,” called Superintendent Wakelin pointedly, as he appeared out of nowhere and slid into the cubicle beside him. Bliss tore his eyes off the young woman, now just a waitress, and greeted the senior officer.

“Drink, Guv?”

“So, how are you getting on in Hampshire?” enquired Wakelin once the waitress had wiggled away.

“They've given me an interesting sort of murder ... local man killed his father.”

“Domestic, eh! – should be easy enough for you.”

“Oh yeah,” he replied, choosing to ignore the minor problem of the missing body, “but they could manage perfectly well without me. In fact I don't think they quite know what to do with me. Superintendent Donaldson seems alright, although he's on his way out. I think he just wants a quiet life. I could see it on his face as he gave me the case. Here you are, son – play with this. Even the Met couldn't fuck this one up.”

“So what are you saying?”

“To be honest, I want to come back. I've done my time.”

He had – six months in a safe house, a padded prison with two acres of neatly tended gardens and a movie star's video library.

“Dave ... Oh fuck – I've done it again. Sorry ... Michael, this guy is determined, and he's done his homework. He knows where you work, live and probably where you play; he knows your car; he got your phone number – even though it's ex-directory, and you changed it twice; he even managed to clean out your bank account – in case you forgot.”

Bliss had no argument. “I see you've still got a couple of goons doing surveillance on the place.”

“We want to catch him, Dave – Don't you want him caught?”

“Of course, but that's the other thing I wanted to see you about.” He hesitated while the waitress bent over to put the drinks on the table. “Pretty girl,” he said to Wakelin as she drifted away.

Wakelin shrugged, “Didn't notice. Now what's the problem? What's happened? You sounded pretty panicky when you called?”

Bliss gave himself time to think as he tested the house
Cabernet Sauvignon
. “I think he's caught on,” he said eventually.

Wakelin pursed his lips in a whistle of surprise. “Already?”

“I'm pretty sure I was tailed from Westchester today.”

“You're gonna have to go back into the safe house then, whether you like it or not.”

The mere thought was enough to have him backtracking. “Well, I'm not a hundred percent certain. It could have been a coincidence.”

Wakelin wasn't fooled. “Surely the safe house isn't that bad?”

“A padded cell is just as much a prison. Anyway, I've had other villains threaten me in the past.”

“And how many of them have actually tried to kill you?”

He knew the answer. So did Bliss.

Chapter Seven
_____________________________

W
ednesday started early and uncomfortably for Bliss. Blue demons had tormented his sleep, chasing him out of bed and into the office at five-thirty. He walked the half-mile from the hotel, and took pleasure in the birthing smells of the dawn, smells that would be swamped by exhaust fumes within the hour. Baker's yeast, coffee, and even pungent piles of newsprint stacked against the newsagent's door hailed the new day, though the stench from the fishmonger's was clearly more an odour of things past than things to come. Without his car he found freedom in the crisp silence of the deserted streets and dawdled to relish images of the morning: the scattered refraction of steeply slanting sunlight through a jeweller's display of cut crystal; a tousled cat slaking his thirst at a stone trough after the night's hunt; and a skein of Canada geese winging noisily overhead in search of pasture.

A half-timbered Tudor Inn at one end of the High Street had thrust its upper storey out over the pavement, and Bliss was engrossed in the elegant sweep of the jetty when a persistent teeth-clenching screech brought him to a nervous stop and had him shrinking into a pharmacist's doorway. Mandy's killer was back in a flash and his ears pricked as he tried to identify the sound and connect it to some fearsome weapon. Baffled, he was still deciding whether or not to run, when a pile of filthy overcoats shuffled around the corner dragging a supermarket trolley with a buckled wheel and one lifetime's agglomeration. He watched silently as the white-bearded man passed, warily taking each step as though he were in a minefield, angrily muttering some unintelligible incantation. How pathetic, thought Bliss, watching the bagman struggling with his load. The poor old sod must be at least eighty and still trying to avoid the cracks in the pavement – maybe he'd do better stepping on a few.

A few minutes later Bliss slipped in the back door of the police station and headed straight for the cell block to check on Jonathon Dauntsey.

“Bail!” he screamed as the unsuspecting custody sergeant filled him in. “They gave him bail?”

“Don't blame me, Guv,” replied the sergeant, fighting off a gauze of haziness as he neared the end of his night shift.

“I take a few hours off and look what happens – Bail!” he spat, marching off with the feeling that the fifteen minute stroll from the Hotel was going to be the highlight of his day.

He was not to be disappointed. More bad news waited on his desk in the form of a report from Sergeant Patterson.

The re-enactment had yielded grievously little – raising more questions than it answered. Not only were they no further forward in finding the body but, according to Patterson's handwritten note, the whole Dauntsey case would have to be re-thought as a result of their findings.

The episode, according to the report, had gone much as planned, though Patterson had been somewhat creative in his composition. The planning had been meticulous enough: officers stationed at intervals on the route from the Black Horse to the churchyard; more officers at the pub itself; several patrol cars on the lane to Dauntsey's house; Sergeant Patterson at the grave where the duvet had been found.

Detective Dowding, since he proposed the re-enactment, had a vested interest in its success and had taken the villainous role of Jonathon Dauntsey. The pick-up truck, not Dauntsey's, though similar enough in the fading light, had first left the Black Horse at precisely nine-thirty and arrived at St. Paul's churchyard just forty-five seconds later.

“Amazing how far you can get in under a minute when there's no traffic,” Dowding said to the constable sitting alongside him, observing and taking notes, then his radio burst into life with Patterson's bark. “Get back to the pub, Dowding. Half the blokes aren't in position yet.”

Ten minutes later, with the stray officers rousted out of the bar of the Black Horse, Dowding re-enacted the re-enactment, arriving promptly at the churchyard, slipping out of the drivers seat and reaching for the duvet which, contrary to his wife's explicit orders, he'd borrowed from the guest bedroom. “Wait a minute,” he said to himself, stopping dead. “This doesn't make sense.”

“What's the hold-up, Dowding?” called the sergeant from the side of the newly filled grave fifty feet away.

“Why would he have thrown ...” he started to muse, then shouted his thoughts aloud. “Why would he have thrown the duvet away before getting rid of the body, Serg?”

There was no immediate answer and the performance shuddered to an unscheduled halt as the officers, one by one, were drawn into a debate around the grave. The conclusion was unanimous. Jonathon Dauntsey would not have ditched the duvet with the body still lying in his pick-up – it would have been illogical to do so. The only answer was that wherever Dauntsey had stashed his father's body he hadn't wanted the duvet to accompany it, but the evidence road led nowhere from the churchyard and the re-enactment was terminated in as much confusion as it had begun. Most of the men wandered back to the bar at the Black Horse where they had unfinished business. Dowding sneaked home with the duvet hoping his wife hadn't noticed.

Bliss finished the report, lay back in the chair, let his eyes cloud over, and mulled over the contents. Comprehension came slowly as the spectre of an idea slowly took shape out of a formless mist in his mind.

“The cunning bastard,” he breathed slowly, then gradually opened his eyes to see if the developing idea would evaporate in the harsh light of reality.

“That's it,” he said aloud, convinced he had resolved the conundrum. I've got you, he smiled wryly, recognising the genius in the apparent madness of Dauntsey's behaviour. You think you've fooled us – well, Mr. Dauntsey, you can't fool all the people ... as they say. You did drop the duvet off first didn't you – you didn't care if it was found, in fact you probably wanted it found – but why? What did it prove? Nothing really – only that someone had been bleeding. But I know why you put it in the grave ... the dogs. You guessed we'd bring in tracker dogs but, with the blood-soaked duvet in the grave, the air around would have been awash with the smell of blood, and a river of scent would have flooded all the way back toward the pub. But the trail away from the churchyard, the direction you took your poor father, would have been a trickle in comparison and the dogs would miss it. So, Mr. Dauntsey, what does that tell me? That tells me that the body must be close. Why? Because you only needed to distract the dogs if the body was within a few miles. Beyond that they'd lose the scent, especially if you drove at high speed along busy roads ... You knew that, didn't you? So, what was your motive?

Bliss closed his eyes again and stitched together a likely scenario in his mind: gamily dispute, about money probably, it usually was; Jonathon upset at the mistreatment of his mother – council-subsidised nursing home – hardly appropriate for the wife of a Major; Jonathon, wanting to take her to Switzerland, needs money – has none – asks father. Father says, “Fuck off” – No, he wouldn't have said that. “Not jolly likely, old chum.” Someone starts a fight – the old man probably – hot-tempered old soldier type – not having a whipper-snapper telling him what to do, even a fifty-year-old whipper-snapper; Jonathon grabs the knife and the old man – thin skin; no flesh to speak of, blinded by rage, throws himself into battle and gets the knife stuck in an artery. Blood everywhere – bleeds to death before Jonathon's even calmed down enough to realise what has happened; Jonathon panics, bundles him up in the duvet, dumps him in the pick-up, drives off, then thinks ...

“Oh it's you, Chief Inspector – I thought I heard voices,” said Daphne blundering in with a bucketful of cleaning materials. “I didn't expect you in yet.”

He jerked upright and flung his eyes open. Voices? Was I talking out loud? “You're in early , Daphne,” he said cheerily, hoping he wasn't blushing.

“I like to get started at six – always have.”

“I should have thought someone of your age would enjoy a lie in.”

The bucket dropped with a clang and she struck back crustily. “Most old fogeys die in bed, Chief Inspector – I minimise the risk by spending as little time there as possible.”

“Oh I didn't mean ...” he began apologetically, but she was already laughing.

Smiling, he went back to his assessment of the Dauntsey case and picked up a sheaf of papers to give the impression of busyness.