James Hawkins - Missing - Presumed Dead

“It could have been just about anybody,” he started, then paused, half expecting Patterson to pipe up. “Follow me on this,” he continued, thankful for the silence. “Jonathon was pissed off with his father, seeing him as a failure for allowing his mother to struggle financially, and for deserting them, so he flattened the toy soldier, the Major, in a symbolic act of destruction. The trick-cyclists call it displaced aggression, I think. But it wasn’t enough, nobody even knew he’d done it. So, as his mother’s health deteriorated, he had to do something more to prove he really cared — something spectacular — murderously spectacular. Obviously he couldn’t attack the real man, he had no idea what had happened to him, so he chose a surrogate. But he had to have witnesses …”

“Why?” Patterson leapt on his back again. “Why not just pull some starving old bum off the street, promise him a meal and a bed for the night, bump him off and bury him?”

Hoping to lighten the atmosphere, Bliss put on a Chinese accent. “Confucius he say — If tree fall in forest and no-one see or hear. Did it fall?” He paused, not expecting applause, but not anticipating the stone-faced silence either. Discomfitted, he pushed on anyway. “He needed witnesses because he wanted to read about it in the papers and hear it on the news, and the only way to achieve that was to sacrifice someone in public — but not somewhere so public that the victim’s face would be seen.”

“What about the duvet?” questioned a grey-bearded officer, showing a glimmer of interest.

“He buried it where he knew it would be found, then threw in the mangled toy as an effigy of the Major. It was all part of the illusion and might have worked if the real Major hadn’t shown up.”

“It’s more stupid than a bloody bedroom farce,” scoffed Patterson under his breath. “Someone ought’a make it into a pantomime. First we got a killer and no body, then a body and no killer, then no body …”

“So where did Jonathon think the Major was?” asked the bearded officer talking over Patterson.

Bliss was tempted to say Scotland but knew it was an indefensible answer. He knew he couldn’t explain why Jonathon had not gone there to confront the real man.

The Dauntsey estate was still there, according to the Scottish P.C. who had made enquiries. It was occupied by a tenant farmer, the son of the man who had first leased the farm from Doreen Dauntsey a few years after the war. He paid rent once a year, April 1st, rain, shine or snow — twenty and fifty pound notes just as the Major’s written instructions had insisted — to be paid in cash to Mrs. Dauntsey.

“I’ll happily send the Major a cheque,” he’d offered numerous times. “It’ll save you having to traipse all the way up here every year.”

But she wouldn’t hear of it. “My husband insists that I come to make sure everything is in order, Mr. McAllister,” she had said more than once.

“I allus felt like I was buying off a blackmailer or paying a ransom,” he told the Scottish policeman. “A bundle of used notes in a brown paper parcel. She never counted it. ‘Och, I’m sure I can trust you, Mr. McAllister — good day to you,’ she’d say, then take the next train away home.”

“It’s difficult to believe that Jonathon thought his father was still alive,” Bliss told the group, “Although he may have been so much under his mother’s influence that he went along with it for fear of upsetting her. She was apparently quite convincing. ‘He’s in Scotland — at the estate,’ she’d say to anybody enquiring, and they would breathe a sigh of relief, mumbling, ‘Thank Christ for that.’”

“But what about his family?” asked a thick-thighed policewoman in a brave pair of shorts. “What about siblings, cousins, uncles. Did nobody ever check?”

“Obviously not.”

The street had relaxed when Bliss arrived at his house in London. It was Saturday, the double-manned surveillance car was either needed elsewhere or the crew were luxuriating in the rare pleasure of a weekend off. Unfettered residents, taking advantage of the summery weather, tarted up their cars without feeling spied upon, and children took a rare opportunity to kick a ball or throw a stone without getting yelled at by an unnecessarily anxious parent. Only Bliss, and the surveillance officers, knew the last thing in the world they cared about was what some snotty-nosed kid was doing in the street — unless it was a big snotty-nosed kid with a mask and a shotgun.

The normality of the street scene did nothing to allay Bliss’s anxiety which had been mounting ever since the suburbs, when the gradually narrowing streets had closed in around him, tighter and tighter like a strait-jacket cramping his chest, making him want to turn away. But he stuck it out, determined this would be no drive-by, and he forced himself to pull up directly in front of the house. He was going in, going to stay — only a night or two, but, thanks to Daphne, it was time to stop running.

“Is there anything else that I can tell you, or you can tell me before we call it a day?” asked Bliss, wrapping up the meeting. Several checked their watches, praying no-one would ask a question or start a debate.

“What did you make of the syringe, Guv?” said a youngish policewoman in tennis gear, breaking rank with her colleagues and suffering their glares.

“What syringe?” asked Bliss blankly.

“I found it in the ashes of Dauntsey’s Aga cooker,” she explained, having taken the initiative to sift through the ash-bin of the coal burning stove in the kitchen of the old house, thinking it an ideal place for someone to incinerate small incriminating items. “It had exploded in the heat and was all smoky and black, but I managed to find most of it.”

Bliss shook his head — completely in the dark. “Well, where is it?”

“I gave it to Sgt. Patterson on Tuesday, Guv.”

“I didn’t think it was significant,” shrugged Patterson, leaping to his own defence. “It was obviously his mother’s — being ill and all.”

“She’s got cancer, not diabetes,” shot back Bliss, seizing a vengeful opportunity. “Where is it now? In the evidence store or at the forensic lab, I hope.”

Patterson, nailed, turned bright pink. “Um … It’s in my desk actually, Guv.”

“Well get it to the lab then — right away.”

Patterson wriggled, unconvinced. “It’s burnt … doubt if they’ll find anything. Anyway, what are they supposed to be looking for? They’ll want to know.”

“A sedative of some sort. My guess is he used it to tranquillise whoever he bumped off, which would explain how he got his victim up to the room in the Black Horse.”

“Have we any idea who he killed, Guv?” It was the policewoman again, thinking — that’ll teach them for glaring at me.

“Well, we know for sure he didn’t kill the Major …”

“We don’t know that at all,” complained Patterson still clinging to his conviction despite evidence to the contrary. “He confessed — I got his confession on tape.”

“I strongly suggest you listen to that tape again. You’ve been taken for a ride, Sergeant — Jonathon Dauntsey didn’t confess to killing the Major.”

“But …” protested Patterson. “He said he killed his father.”

“In which case I suggest you check his date of birth. I know the pace of life has picked up in recent years but, unless Jonathon’s mother was ten months pregnant, I think you’ll find he is not a Dauntsey.”

“Thank you for your attention ladies and gentlemen,” he added quickly and was out of the door before Patterson had a chance to respond.

“Thank you, Daphne, you’re a genius,” he said to the corridor wall, took fifty pounds out of his pocket and poked his head back round the door. “All have a drink on me tonight,” he said handing it to the nearest. “Take tomorrow off and we’ll crack this case next week.” Then he raised his eyebrows at Patterson, fully expecting an argument, and was a trifle disappointed when the man begrudgingly nodded his thanks.