James Hawkins - Missing - Presumed Dead

“Oh. He is definitely dead, Sir.”

“Good … No, I don’t mean …” Then he erupted. The tension of receiving the unexpected phone call was bad enough, without Patterson piling on the pressure by playing guessing games. “What the hell are you trying to tell me, Patterson?”

“Well, Sir, according to the doctor, Major Dauntsey’s been dead at least forty years.”

Returning to the restaurant’s lounge, in a daze, he had been surprised to find his seat occupied by a smartly dressed older man with a prosperous toupee and gold rimmed spectacles that looked to be the real thing.

“This is Andrew,” explained Daphne as the man rose and politely held out his hand. Bliss looked to her for an explanation as they shook. “Andrew is a very, very, old friend,” she gushed.

“Daphne …” Bliss began, then noticed her radiance had taken on a additional glow.

“Here, less of the old — Daphne,” laughed Andrew. “I’m just not as well-preserved as you that’s all.”

“Well-preserved,” she echoed. “Here, I’m not a bloody pickle,” and they both laughed.

“Look I hate to interrupt …” Bliss tried again.

“Andrew’s a widower,” she whispered aside, making it sound like an accomplishment. “Sit down, Chief Inspector, you’re making the place untidy.” Then she turned back to her friend and demurely fanned herself with her hand. “Ooh. That Pernod has gone straight to my head.”

“Daphne — I have to go. Something major has turned up …” he said, but Andrew talked over him.

“Well, do let me get you another then, dear heart,” he said, in an accent redolent of colonial service in the 1920s — Singapore or the West Indies perhaps.

Bliss’s double-entendre had missed its mark. “Don’t worry about me,” proclaimed Daphne loudly. “Andrew will take me home, won’t you?”

“I’d jolly well love to, Daphne old girl. But we have to eat first.”

“Oh, of course — Silly me. Well off you go, Chief Inspector. Toddle off, there’s a dear. And thank you so much.”

The heavy hint — the bum’s rush. This hasn’t happened since Samantha’s teenage trysts, he thought.

“Da-a-ad,” she’d whine …

“O.K. I get the message,” he’d reply. “I know when I’m not wanted.”

“Nice to meet you … See you tomorrow, Daphne.”

Neither had looked up as he raced away.

7am, Friday morning and Westchester mortuary was being prepared for the last rites of Major Rupert Dauntsey, (Retd.). A cluster of spotlights flickered coldly into life above an operating table and illuminated an arctic scene. The glare of stark snow-white windowless walls reflected off the glassy sheen of steel refrigerator doors, and the milky marble floor offered neither warmth nor comfort. A couple of masked attendants, in white one-piece suits, skated around the central table, laying out trays of surgical instruments, checking the identity of the body, then blanketing the remains in a stiffly starched sheet.

“Now if you would lie perfectly still, Sir, this won’t hurt a bit,” jested one of the attendants, for the benefit of a small procession of sombre-faced students who shuffled into the room and hung about near the door.

Detective Inspector Bliss and Sergeant Patterson strode through the group with a bravado of experience and took ringside seats; they already knew what to expect; they knew the horrors lurking beneath the sheet.

Seating himself, Bliss scented the air with a degree of trepidation and was pleasantly surprised. It was more disinfectant than decomposition, though nothing could mask the unmistakeable ambience of death. Over the years, thousands of tortured souls had each shed a layer of agony in this room as they passed on their final journey, and he shuddered at the chilling concentration of disembodied spirits. He had been here before, many times — not this particular mortuary, but a dozen similar ones — and found himself mentally readying for the attendant’s scalpel to unzip the bloated bag of flesh. With the realisation that he was steeling himself against the gagging reek of methane gas and butyric acids, he relaxed. He had already viewed the Major’s body — this one would be different.

That reminds me, thought Bliss, I still haven’t discovered how Patterson tracked me down at The Limes on Wednesday evening.

“Serg,” he started, but the students were beginning to drift into surrounding seats. “Never mind — I’ll talk to you later,” he added, but the powerful memory of the fearful seconds, when he had fully expected the bellboy’s head to be blown to pieces, had re-run in his mind repeatedly over the intervening thirty-six hours and did so again. He closed his eyes for a moment thinking, What if? What if? — How would you have lived with yourself after that? But it hadn’t happened. The boy had returned safely.

The muted buzz of dreadful anticipation amongst the students was quelled by a sudden flurry of activity in the doorway.

“Sit,” said the pathologist galloping into the room, the tails of his whitish coat flying, his footfalls still echoing along the corridor. “Good morning students and guests,” he started, then snapped the sheet off the body and bowed respectfully, “and good morning to you, Sir.”

Here was a man with purpose, thought Bliss, studying the boisterously dishevelled doctor — cramming life into every moment of existence; understanding better than most that tomorrow is not necessarily another day — and, anticipating that fact, he had apparently postponed shaving, combing, ironing, and shoe-shining. Watching the ebullient man, Bliss found himself wondering whatever had became of the generation of genetically engineered pathologists who had terrorised the mortuaries early in his career: beaky, balding, po-faced men, with serious glasses and superior attitudes, who frequently looked more pallid than the cadaver; men capable of verbally lashing burly policemen to the brink of tears for slip-shod investigative practices — real or imagined; perpetually angry men — angry at the carnage, angry at the waste, and, in some cases, angry that of all possible careers, they’d ended up carving dead bodies for a living.

“So, to our first case,” said the pathologist racing ahead. “A white adult male we believe but, as you can see, the body now consists only of the skeleton with fragments of skin and a few strands of hair.” Selecting the ulna from the body’s left arm, the only arm, he held it up for inspection. “Notice that the bones have mellowed to a rather attractive butterscotch-yellow,” he said, then, poker-faced, used it as a pointer to run down a list on a flip chart. “Our task this morning is to carry out an examination to assist the coroner in determining: Who this deceased was … And, How, When and Where he met his death.”

Bliss shifted his gaze away from the pathologist and found himself staring at the unveiled skeleton, thinking it looked entirely different from when he had first seen it, two days earlier, in the cramped and claustrophobic attic of the Dauntsey house. It had taken on an inanimate aspect, sterile and benign, almost as if it were a plastic copy. In the attic — throwing a ghoulish shadow in the dim light of the hastily strung inspection lamp — it clung to some essence of humanity. Slumped in a chair, encased in full uniform, seemingly at peace, the torso had shrunk, the chest caved in, but, although headless still had the shape of a human being — not just a deflated anatomical framework.

Looking at the skeleton under the mortuary’s bright lights he couldn’t help thinking that, in a way, it was the wrong corpse to examine. Most of the Major’s mortal remains were still in the room where, in its stuffy warmth, his flesh had transmuted into the bodies of a billion flies, moths and ants. Major Dauntsey had nourished generations of insect civilisations for a while, but, as the nutrients gave out, the insects had turned to cannibalism in a downward spiral of self destruction, leaving an inch-deep layer of dust of desiccated bodies on the battleground.