Missing: Presumed Dead (38 page)

“It was quite a honeymoon night,” she laughed drily, 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 examined 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.

“The pension was Tippen's idea,” Doreen averred when she'd calmed down. “He said we'd have to claim the Major's pension or someone would start asking awkward questions. I said I wouldn't do it, but ... ” Her eyes glazed again, this time with a memory so horrific that in fifty years it had never dimmed, even for a day: Tippen, in the turret room, viciously grabbing her by the throat with the three clawed fingers of his left hand, pulling her to within an inch of his grotesque face, then slobbering with a foetid spray of bad breath and saliva as he spat, “As long as we both keep quiet nobody will ever know.” Her face screwed in awful memory of the moment saying, simply, “He made me do it.”

“But he forged the Major's signature on the will,” said Samantha. “If you had gone to the authorities they would have soon discovered who he was and the will would have been null and void.”

“Maybe,” she said. “But it would still have left me penniless. Rupert never changed his will when we married. He didn't have time, I told myself; didn't want to was more like it. Anyway, his will left everything to the church because he had no other relatives. I still wouldn't have got anything.”

No wonder the vicar was thinking he might see a new roof, thought Bliss, wondering why the lawyer had accepted Tippen's false signature if he had the previous will to compare it against. Then it dawned on him – Tippen alias Dauntsey didn't have a right hand. He could have scribbled anything with his left, mumbling, “This won't look anything like my previous signature.”

“I decided the best thing to do was to pretend Rupert was alive as long as possible and just keep my mouth shut,” Doreen continued, pulling herself together. “I couldn't think what else to do, and I thought it would all be over when Tippen died.”

“But it wasn't?” piped up Daphne, seeming to surface from nowhere and stunning them with her understanding. “I bet it was worse.”

Doreen nodded, sobbing. “I suppose in one way or another we're all prisoners of our dead,” she said with remarkable insight. “When he was alive he had no voice. He was my prisoner and I was his. One word from either of us and we would all be out on the street: him, me and Jonathon. But once he was dead he held all the cards: His mother would get the Major's house and estate, and the pension would stop. I thought once he was dead I would be free, but he never let me go.”

A sudden flurry at the front door caught Bliss's eye and he turned in time to see the matron and Jonathon Dauntsey barging in.

“Oh shit,” he muttered.

“There she is,” shouted Jonathon as if he'd spotted a fleeing prisoner.

“Inspector?” said Doreen, grabbing his arm as if she wanted to make a dying declaration. “The dead are the lucky ones – they never have to explain.”

“Leave my mother alone,” screeched Jonathon, advancing on them.

Then Doreen had her final say, “He only really makes such a fuss of me because he knows when I'm gone he'll have to live with himself.”

“Mother are you alright? Has he hurt you?” said Jonathon, turning a dozen pairs of accusing eyes in Bliss's direction.