James Hawkins - Missing - Presumed Dead

“Again?”

Bliss nodded. “Really thorough this time … walls, floors, attics — the works.”

“How about some breakfast?” asked Donaldson chummily. “I know this little place where the sausages are just …”

“I think I’ll get back to the nick,” interrupted Bliss. “I’ve got a lot to arrange.”

Donaldson seemed put out and turned cold. “Oh, alright. If that’s what you want, Inspector. Was there anything else to report?”

“Tell him about the Volvo,” screeched his inner voice.

What is there to tell?

“You were being followed.”

Possibly.

“Definitely.”

Alright, don’t nag. But even if he was following what does that prove? Bliss looked around at the devastation and reminded himself that he had jumped to the wrong conclusion. You were certain this was a bomb in the Mitre … remember. There must be a dozen possible explanations for the Volvo driver’s behaviour.

“Give me two.”

O.K. One … “My wife’s screwing around with someone who’s gotta car like yours” … and … Two … “I thought I recognised you from school and I was trying to get a closer look.”

“Do you believe that?”

It’s possible.

“So is my theory.”

Which is?

“It was the killer, you idiot.”

“Inspector,” prompted Donaldson. “I said, was there anything else?”

“Sorry, Sir … miles away again. No, nothing else.”

Major Rupert Dauntsey was still on the missing list when D.I. Bliss booked off duty twelve hours later. Declining Sergeant Patterson’s offer of a ride — “I’m going right past on my way back to Dauntsey’s” — he walked back to the Mitre along the High Street.

“Did you hear about the explosion?” enquired the young Swedish receptionist as she handed him his key.

“I did,” he smiled thankfully. Thankful that she was still there, still intact and unblemished. Thankful that it hadn’t been a bomb. “Something for you,” he added, slipping a five pound note into her hand.

“Zhank you very much.”

“No — Zhank you.”

She laughed, totally unaware of how much it meant to him to be able to give her a little something.

Bliss checked his room with care, showered, slipped on a clean shirt and took off to collect his evening’s date. Then he tried to relax as they drove along knotted country lanes in the soft light of the setting sun, but his neck took a beating as he checked for the Volvo. He missed the small engraved sign, “The Limes,” hidden in the bushes, but the driver knew the way and, as they crunched to a stop on the gravel driveway of the Elizabethan manor, a concierge stepped forward with military precision and snapped open Daphne’s door.

Daphne lost twenty years in the warmth of the ancient house’s candlelight, but, even when Bliss had picked her up from her front door in the taxi, she had been radiant. She had flounced out of the house, begging for attention in a black knee-length cocktail dress, an overconfident straw hat kept in check by a wide crimson ribbon with a huge bow and a flowing black shawl laced with gold. “Chauffer driven, Chief 158 James Hawkins Inspector — I am impressed,” she had said, bouncing in beside him.

“It’s only a taxi,” he mumbled, then explained with unnecessary insistence that he had left the car at his hotel, not wanting to spoil the evening by being unable to drink. The truth, though he would never admit it, was that he was petrified of driving his own car and had caged it in a rented lock-up garage. A hire car had been ordered in its place — peace of mind had a price — but had yet to arrive. The journey back from London in the Rover the previous night had taken a dreadful toll on his nerves. Every blazing headlight in his mirror had been a pulse-racing Volvo forcing him to slow down and pull over. On the motorway, convoys of small blue Volvos bore down on him and transmogrified into yellow Chryslers, red Fords and black Jaguars as they swept by.

“ Oh la la , the prices — Mon Dieu! ” cried Daphne, glancing at the gold-framed menu as they waited in a vestibule while servants flurried around, verbally tugging forelocks, divesting them of coats and hats.

“Oh don’t worry. I’m paying.”

“I’m not being critical — praise, if anything — I was just thinking that anyone with the neck to charge prices like this had better come up with the goods. People have been murdered for less.”

“Mandy Richards for one,” he inadvertently blurted out, surprised to the extent she was in control of his mind.

“Mandy Richards?”

“Murdered for nothing — an old case,” he explained, then realised even her killing had a price — the price of a couple of shotgun cartridges. But it was the robber who had been out of pocket — assuming he’d paid for them. Fifty pence, maybe one pound — was that the value of a life?

“You’ll have to excuse me, Chief Inspector,” Daphne continued, still thinking about the exorbitant prices as they took seats in the sombre sixteenth-century bar. “I don’t get out much anymore. To be honest with you, dining alone is about as exhilarating as solo sex — I suppose it’s O.K., if you’re really hungry.” Then she relaxed back into the chair with a comedic smile. “I bet you’ve never met anyone quite like me before have you?”

He laughed, “Not really.”

“I’ll let you in on a little secret,” she said, pushing herself forward again. “Neither have I … My body seems to have got the message about aging but my mind refuses to go along with it.”

Bliss laughed, then a childhood memory of an elderly Aunt came to him. “She got ‘bugger’ in her mind and couldn’t get it out,” he explained through the laughter. “Everything was ‘bugger.’ She could even slide a ‘bugger’ into the middle of a word. We used to tell our friends we were going to see our Buggering Aunty.”

Daphne shook with laughter. “Well, I’m not that bad.” Their table would be half an hour, the head waiter told them dourly as he appeared from nowhere and fussed around, precisely centring a large bowl of mixed olives on the table in front of them, his stiff demeanour clearly a rebuke.

“Anal retentive,” whispered Daphne behind the waiter’s back and they both roared.

He was back in a flash, “You’re not here to enjoy yourselves” written all over his face. “May I get you some drinks while you are waiting for the table, Sir?”

“I’ll have a large Pastis,” said Daphne. “I have a feeling that you’re going to question me about France, so I may as well get in the right frame of mind.”

“Not question,” he said. “That sounds so harsh, so intrusive. I was merely hoping you’d be able to give me some background on Major Dauntsey and the war that’s all. Anyway,” he added, “to be truthful, I was quite looking forward to just spending an evening with you.”

Daphne beamed as he ordered the drinks. “Wartime is basically the same as peacetime, Chief Inspector, only everything seems to happen so much faster, that’s all.”

He frowned in thought, then smiled. “That leaves me with an image of Plato and Diogenes having this great philosophical argument based on the premise that war is actually peace. And please call me Dave. We’re not on duty now.”

Daphne rolled the phrase round her tongue. “War is peace,” she intoned. “It sounds like Newspeak but, in a strange way, it’s not untrue. Things get built, damaged and destroyed in peace and war; people love and lose; friends come and go; some make fortunes, others lose everything; people die of diseases and injuries. It is just as though the movie of your life is run through the projector at ten times the normal speed. Fifty years crammed into five. So, war is peace — speeded up.”