James Hawkins - Missing - Presumed Dead

“Did you?” Bliss teased.

“I think I’ll refuse to answer that question on the grounds I may incriminate myself,” she laughed, then carried on, still with a smile. “You should have seen the food. We’d had five years of rationing, and I’d never seen so much food. There was a huge baron of beef and a mound of smoked salmon — I didn’t know what it was, I’d only heard rumours. And they had a wedding cake — it was real cake! Most people had a measly Victoria sponge stuck under a beautifully iced tin that could be used for any number of weddings, but they had real cake with real cherries and real sultanas. And champagne, not the fizzy sugar water with plastic corks you get at weddings today. Real champagne.” Pausing to pick up the Parisian portrait, she stared into it and sighed wistfully. “Champagne — that was my life at one time. Difficult to imagine it now. La vie en rose. I sometimes wonder if it was real.”

“Was it real?”

“Who knows, Chief Inspector?” she replied, laying her head back in the chair, letting her eyes drift over the ceiling as if searching for images of her past. “Maybe I’ve just read too many novels and watched too many movies … Anyway,” she pulled her thoughts back to Major Dauntsey’s wedding day. “The strangest thing was the old Colonel himself. Doreen wasn’t what you would call a good catch in anybody’s book, in fact she had something of a reputation, if you get my meaning, but the Colonel treated her as if she were a princess.”

“So, she was a sort of Cinderella.”

Daphne gave herself time to digest the thought along with a forkful of beans. “I would have difficulty imagining Doreen as a Cinderella figure,” she said after careful consideration. “Put it this way: If you try to imagine Cinderella in the nude she always has the naughty bits air-brushed, whereas Doreen Mason … well, from what I can gather, half the boys in the town wouldn’t have needed any imagination.”

“So what did she see in the Major?”

“It wasn’t his looks, that’s for sure.”

“His money?”

Daphne let her raised eyebrows do the talking.

“Well, what did he look like?” continued Bliss. “Mrs. Dauntsey didn’t have a photo. I found that a bit strange.”

“I don’t …” She paused and picked up the wine bottle. “More?” she asked but didn’t wait for a response before pouring. “If Rupert Dauntsey was a bit of a poor specimen before he went to war, when he came back …” she shook her head in sorrow, “I didn’t recognise him — no-one did.” A chill shuddered through her. “Half his face was blown off; he’d lost an arm and the one he was left with wasn’t a lot of use. He looked like a horror movie monster.”

“Couldn’t they do anything for him — plastic surgery?”

“Today they could, but not then. It was wartime. Doctors used to pray that men with injuries like his would die quickly, that way they wouldn’t have to face their inadequacies. Can you imagine unwinding the bandages, holding up a mirror and saying, ‘Congratulations, this is your new face — scary isn’t it?’”

“It must be a bit like seeing a ghost.”

“Like the one you saw in the churchyard?”

“Mandy Richards,” he said inwardly, and suddenly found himself falling into a black hole. “Stop! Stop! You’re going to hit something,” he was shouting inside.

Dark images of the dead young woman were swirling through a dirty fog and he tried telling himself, “There’s nothing there. Stop this! Stop this! You can stop this. Change the picture. Re-focus your mind. It wasn’t your fault.” But he was still racing onwards into the blackness, his heart pounding to keep up, and beads of sweat bursting out of his brow.

“Is there something the matter, Chief Inspector?” A voice from outside broke through the blue haze. Daphne’s voice.

“Get a grip on yourself,” he told himself.

“Are you alright?”

Alright — Alright. What’s alright? Somebody’s blown Mandy Richard’s heart out with a shotgun — IS THAT ALRIGHT?

That was eighteen years ago.

No, it was only yesterday … for her parents; her husband-to-be; her brother; it’s still yesterday. It will always be yesterday. How can you move forward when Mandy can’t? Mandy’s still dead. It’s still a week before her wedding for her. Still the day she went to get her savings out of the bank to pay for her honeymoon. Still the most joyous, expectant day of her life — and still the very last day of her life.

“Chief Inspector,” a note of serious concern in Daphne’s voice got through the images of Mandy and shook him back to the present.

“Oh — Sorry. I was miles away,” he said, disentangling himself from the nightmarish memories.

“I thought you were having a panic attack,” she said, scooping the empty crockery toward her, chattering away as if nothing had happened. “I get them sometimes. Shakes you up a bit. Makes you want to run, but you can’t get away from your own ghosts.”

“I was just thinking about the Major’s ghost …” he lied again.

“No — that’s was the old Colonel,” she cut in. “It’s Colonel Dauntsey who’s supposed to ride around the churchyard on his chariot. Some reckon he’s still trying to get back to his regiment. He was invalided out after the first war — chlorine gas poisoning — and some say he was miserable as sin until the second one came along. But when they wouldn’t let him go, he pined. I heard he died soon after Rupert was brought home — suicide some reckon, although it was never proved.

“Suicide?”

“So they say,” she said, scuttling into the kitchen with the dirty crockery.

Still trying to escape the memories of Mandy Richards, Bliss got up and weaved his way around the clutter, mentally apportioning artefacts to Daphne and the Girl Guides as he went. Then he poked behind a tall umbrella stand, thinking — Girl Guides, and came upon a parchment citation in a plain wooden frame.

“What’s this?” he called.

She peeked round the door and her face fell. “Oh dear. I meant to put that away.”

He read from the citation, only half comprehending, “His Majesty King George VI … Order of The British Empire … Miss Ophelia Daphne Lovelace.”

He looked up. “The O.B.E?” he questioned disbelievingly. “You’ve got the O.B.E.”

Stepping in front of him she plucked the frame off the wall and slid it behind the sideboard, “Like I said, I should have put it away — I don’t know why I leave it out … silly pride I suppose … It’s nothing really.”

“Daphne. The O.B.E. is not ‘nothing.’ How did you get it?”

“You don’t want to hear that,” she said, heading back to the kitchen.

“On the contrary.”

She hesitated, hovering indecisively by the kitchen door, clearly torn between disclosing her past and fetching the next course. “Like I said,” she said eventually, seeming to plump for disclosure. “I haven’t always been a cleaning lady.”

“Obviously.”

She gave him a sharp look. “No, not obviously. Quite a few cleaning ladies have been recognised for their services over the years. Just think of the mess we’d be in without them.

“You’re avoiding the question, Daphne.”

“Yes, I suppose I am … I don’t want to appear rude but …” she started to drift into the kitchen, “I’m sure you understand.”

He didn’t understand, had no idea why someone with such an important honour should be reluctant to discuss it, but she forestalled further questioning with a call from the kitchen.

“Treacle sponge and custard alright for desert?” she enquired breezily, letting him know that the subject of the O.B.E. was closed. “You’ve no idea how much I’ve enjoyed having someone to cook for,” she continued, bustling in with a silver tray, not waiting for his reply. “As you get older, you realise why people go through all the trouble of having children,” setting down the tray and not giving him a chance to resurrect the question of the award. “Treacle pudding for one just isn’t worth the effort, and those tinned things are awful.”