James Hawkins - Missing - Presumed Dead

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.

“I’ve got my eye on a nice leg of lamb for tonight,” she said, dusting around the boxes of his still unpacked office.

“Sorry?” he said, looking up, realising he’d missed something important.

“I said I was thinking of doing lamb tonight — have you forgotten you’re coming …”

His mind was focused on the paper in front of him — a page from a message pad. “No, I hadn’t forgotten …” he began, then drifted to silence, pre-occupied by what he was reading.

“Seven-thirty or eight?” she asked.

His mind was miles away — Scotland — a purple heather estate on the banks of a loch somewhere in the Highlands — the distant skirl of pipes, the abattoir smell of boiled haggis. “According to this, the Major didn’t live there,” he said waving the paper at her before scrunching it and aiming at a litter bin.

“Didn’t live where?”

His brow creased inquisitively. “Didn’t you say he lived in Scotland?”