Missing: Presumed Dead (33 page)

“Stop, Dave,” she cried through the laughter, “I'm going to wet myself in a minute.”

“‘Incontinent grannies manned the barricades ..'” he continued.

“I'm not a granny,” she protested, thumping him playfully. “By the way, talking of grannies, how was Daphne this morning – was she still jealous of me?”

Bliss chortled, “Did you catch her face when she saw you standing at the door with me last night?”

“She looked at me as if her cat had dragged me out of the sewer.”

“It was my fault really,” he laughed. “I got wind of the problem when I phoned to ask if I could bring a friend to dinner. She was a bit huffy, ‘Well, it's your beef, Chief Inspector,' she said, but when I said my friend was called Sam she changed her tune.”

“On no,” Samantha laughed. “She probably thought you were lining her up with a blind date – then I showed up.”

“Poor Daphne, but I didn't do it on purpose – it only occurred to me afterwards. Anyway, it serves her right after what she did with that goat.”

“Dave!” she cried. “That's sounds positively pornographic.”

“Hardly,” he said, then amused her with the saga of the goat; what it had cost and the trouble it had caused. And they ended up laughing together.

“You're beginning to sound more cheerful,” she said as the laughing died down. “But you still haven't told me the real reason you called this morning. You had something serious weighing on your mind – I could feel it and I was miles away.”

“I've calmed down since then.”

“Sit up,” she ordered, then ran her hands over his shoulders and round his neck. “I thought so – tighter than a Scotsman's wallet. If you've calmed down, you certainly forgot to tell your muscles. Come on, open up, tell me what's bothering you or I'm going home.”

“Somebody left a nasty message on my computer,” he admitted finally.

She would have laughed at the stupidity of it had she not caught the seriousness in his tone. “I guess it must have been pretty bad,” she said, hoping to draw him, but when he didn't respond she tried a different approach. “There's no way it could've been a joke is there?”

“No, it was no joke,” he shot back adamantly, thinking – there's more, lots more, but where to start, what to tell – the blue Volvo, the strange man digging for information at the Mitre perhaps. And what about the man who had run from them in the car park? What do I say about him? That I let you wade into a river in pursuit of a murderer. And what about the explosion in the tea shop – wait a minute he said to himself, interrupting his thoughts, surely that was an accident: Bit of a coincidence though wasn't it? You're doing it again, he warned himself, recalling what the force psychiatrist had said: “Possibly suffering from delusional paranoia.” He hadn't forgotten, but neither had he forgotten that the chief superintendent himself had ripped up the report after the bomb had blasted a hole through his front door. “
Trick-cyclists
,” the senior officer had scoffed. “They couldn't cure a bad case of verbal diarrhoea.”

“A swim would do you good – wash away some of that tension,” said Samantha responding to his apparent distress.

“Is it that obvious?”

“If you don't start to loosen up soon, you'll snap something,” she said, getting up and holding out a helping hand. “Come on, you'll enjoy a moonlight dip.”

He hung back. “Much as I'd like to, I can't. I haven't any trunks.”

“It's dark, Dave,” she smiled. “There's no-one for miles and I promise faithfully not to peep.”

“I haven't even got a towel.”

“You can share mine.”

Did she say share? he thought, quickly agreeing. “But what about you?”

“I was in the Girl Guides,” she replied, turning her back, scrunching her flowing hair into a swimming cap that appeared from nowhere, and stripping off to reveal a slinky black costume that took on a silky sheen in the bright moonlight.

Bliss stood rock still, stunned almost to tears by the beauty of her body, entranced by her strong, almost masculine shoulders, her smoothly curvaceous waist and her firm boyish bottom. Then she turned and the swell of her full breasts took his breath away.

“Ready?” she asked, and he fought off the rest of his clothes in an instant. “Stay close,” she added, taking his hand, her eyes fixed firmly ahead on the dark horizon. “And stop staring – I'm sure you've seen a swimsuit before.”

He hesitated apprehensively at the water's edge and Samantha egged him on with a tug, “C'mon, it's quite warm.”

But it wasn't the water holding him back – the nightmarish fleet of death ships still floated in the back of his mind and he half expected to see them, and their grisly immortal cargoes, sailing in from the shadowy distance. But the horizon was clear, the sea had stilled and the ghosts of the dead servicemen had returned to their watery graves for another year. It was D-day plus 3, in the timelessness of the hereafter, and the grim reaper had moved on to gather lost souls from the beaches and fields of Normandy.

“D-Day plus 3,” Bliss mused to himself, his thoughts miles and years away – on the other side of the Channel with a pretty young Englishwoman, brazening her way across no-man's land on a liberated bicycle, to deliver a baby into the reaper's hands.

“Dave ...” called Samantha with alarm, breaking him out of his catalepsy. “You are in a bad way, aren't you?”

“Sorry,” he said, clearing his mind and walking forward until the coldness of the water squeezed the air out of his lungs. Samantha sensed the contraction in his hand. “Just relax, Dave – breathe normally, you'll get used to it in a moment.”

“Are you sure?” he squeaked, wondering if his testicles would ever recover.

Once fully in the water, the anonymity of darkness and the reassurance of her firm grasp dissolved his inhibitions and he bared his soul. It only took a few minutes: Maggie Thatcher's botched bank job; Mandy and her unborn baby; the killer's threats in court; the letters, phone calls and bomb; the blue Volvo; the funny little man delving through the hotel register and the final, spine-tingling message on the computer.

She said little, listened well, hummed knowingly at appropriate intervals, and clearly believed every word. “Oh, Dave ... you should've told me before,” she said without censure, then queried, “Do you think that man we chased last night was him as well?”

“I thought so at first, that's why I told you to stay in the car – not that you listened. Afterwards I realised he was probably just a local car thief sussing out the car park for a worthy motor.”

He questioned himself later, asking why he had confided in someone who may have mocked his apparent timidity or blabbed to his colleagues. And yet, instinctively, he'd known she would do neither. Anyway, he rationalised, had he not cornered himself by his actions. Wouldn't it be somewhat disingenuous to swim stark naked with someone late at night on an isolated beach and later claim that you wouldn't have trusted them to share a Mars bar let alone a personal secret?

As they stepped from the water Bliss hesitated and turned to give her an appreciative kiss, but she dodged his advance and ran up the beach to grab a towel.

“Lay down,” she said, spreading the towel over the blanket.

“Well ... ”

“Stop arguing, Dave, you're in need of serious help.”

He lay, face down, and felt himself sinking into the soft blanket as he listened to the hypnotic rhythm of wavelets fizzling into the sand. Then she laid her sea-softened fingers on his shoulders and firmly massaged his rigid muscles until the tension dissolved and her fingers felt like warm tendrils playing deep inside him.

“That's wonderful,” he sighed, as her hands inched down his spine, one vertebrae at a time, working their way into the small of his back. And his pulse raced with pleasure as she pushed even lower.

“Turn over,” she whispered when she reached his feet.

“Do I have to?”

“Don't worry – I won't bite.”

“That isn't what I was worried about exactly.”

“Oh – I see ... Well, I won't look. Honestly.”

He turned, eyes closed and felt her fingers dancing on his chest, then slipping sensuously over his stomach and down his thighs. This isn't happening, he cautioned himself. You'll wake in a minute and discover the psychiatrist was right – it's all a delusion.

The hands stopped moments before his mind would have burst in ecstasy and he felt her hair brushing his face as she leant over him, her fingers tracing his eyebrows – then the warmth of her lips on his mouth, and the tip of her tongue running along the length of his teeth.

“Oh Samantha,” he breathed, and tried to raise his arms to embrace her, but found them pinioned to the sand by a pair of strong hands. Then she nuzzled her wet lips to his ear, “That's better, Dave – you can get dressed now.”

With his arms freed he reached out to clasp her but she twisted away and sat looking out over the sea. “Don't be impatient, Dave,” she said over her shoulder. “You haven't even bought me dinner yet.”

“You're gorgeous, Samantha. I'd really like to make love with you.”

“But you already have,” she replied, leaving him questioning his memory.

“Did I miss something?”

“Close your eyes again,” she commanded, squirming back across the sand to gently stroke his forehead, and he felt the warmth of her breath on his face as her soft sing-song voice played in his ears. “Love is what happens in here, Dave – in your mind,” she whispered. “Surely you saw me slide out of my bathing suit: you must've seen my boobs when they slipped free – wasn't that your tongue ...?”

“
Mmmm
– You were very good, Dave,” she continued after a pause, her deep breathing soothing him hypnotically. “And wasn't that your hand between my thighs,” she went on, sighing breathlessly in his ear. “And your finger playing a tune on my violin ... I could feel it ... gentle but firm; soft yet hard ... And couldn't you feel yourself inside me – throbbing and pulsing ... It was wonderful, Dave ... Oh, so big; so strong; so ...
Mmmm
... Didn't you hear the angels singing and the trumpets sounding?” He smiled at the sensual imagery and she kissed him lusciously. “You see, we did make love,” she breathed softly into his mouth. “And the nicest thing is we could do it all over again the next time.”

Opening his eyes, half afraid she was an illusion, he found himself staring straight into hers. “Do you mean that – a next time?” he asked. “Do you mean – for real?”

“I don't think you've been listening,” she said, looking him closely in the eye and gently tapping his temple. “What's real is what's in here, Dave – what you believe – what your mind tells you is the truth.”

“But what about you?”

“It was good for me too,” she laughed.

“Are you teasing me, Ms. Holingsworth?”

“Maybe,” she laughed. “Or maybe you're teasing yourself.”

“How did you do that?” he asked as they dressed. “It felt as though your fingers were right inside me.”

“I trained professionally,” she explained, while using the blanket as a change tent. “I've even got a certificate somewhere.”

“So – why are you in the police force?”

“I did six months as a massage therapist,” she replied as if it had been a prison sentence, asking rhetorically. “How many lives do you think I saved? How many times did I go home at the end of the day thinking I'd made my little corner a safer, nicer place?”

“Yes, but you didn't have to pick dead bodies off the beach – or stand at someone's kitchen table watching them die a little as you tell them their Mum, Dad or little kid is lying on a slab at the morgue.”

“Nobody said the police was perfect, Dave. I just get more satisfaction than I did pummelling flabby backsides and sweaty armpits. Most of the time I was up to my elbows in some dirty-minded fat geezer with bigger tits than mine, and I knew exactly what was going through his mind – not that he stood the remotest chance.”

“Well, I know what was going through my mind,” Bliss said, wondering if he qualified as dirty-minded.

She turned and kissed him tenderly. “Yeah – but you're not fat and greasy.”

“So what's happening with the murder case now?” asked Samantha as she drove him back to his car.

“Patterson's pissing me about,” he complained, then revealed what had happened the previous afternoon when he'd asked if results on the duvet and syringe had come back from the laboratory.

“I'll chase them up, Guv,” Patterson had said, making to pick up the phone.

“No – I'll chase them up, Pat,” said Bliss, adding, “They might get a move on with an inspector's boot up their ass. Which lab?”

The left half of Patterson's face twitched violently as he leafed through a stack of papers mumbling, “I'll have to look it up.”

“Look up what? Which lab did you send them to? – I can get the number.”

Putting his hand to his face he stilled the twitch and said, “Sorry, Guv. The courier must've forgot to take them.”

“What?” exploded Bliss. “You've been hanging on to that syringe for a week – this is a murder enquiry, Pat, not kids nicking sweets from Woolie's.”

“Don't blame me, Guv.”

“O.K. Where's the paperwork?”

“Paperwork?” echoed Patterson.

“Sergeant – stop wasting my time. If the exhibits were packaged for transportation to the lab yesterday the paperwork would be ready to go with them, now where are the copies?”

Patterson needlessly hunted through his desk, muttering about the unreliability of couriers and the untrustworthiness of staff in general. “They seem to have disappeared,” he said finally, adding nervously, “Someone must've thrown them out.”