James Hawkins - Missing - Presumed Dead

“I’ve calmed down since then.”

“Sit up,” she ordered, then ran her hands over his shoulders and round his neck. “I thought so — tighter than a Scotsman’s wallet. If you’ve calmed down, you certainly forgot to tell your muscles. Come on, open up, tell me what’s bothering you or I’m going home.”

“Somebody left a nasty message on my computer,” he admitted finally.

She would have laughed at the stupidity of it had she not caught the seriousness in his tone. “I guess it must have been pretty bad,” she said, hoping to draw him, but when he didn’t respond she tried a different approach. “There’s no way it could’ve been a joke is there?”

“No, it was no joke,” he shot back adamantly, thinking — there’s more, lots more, but where to start, what to tell — the blue Volvo, the strange man digging for information at the Mitre perhaps. And what about the man who had run from them in the car park? What do I say about him? That I let you wade into a river in pursuit of a murderer. And what about the explosion in the tea shop — wait a minute he said to himself, interrupting his thoughts, surely that was an accident: Bit of a coincidence though wasn’t it? You’re doing it again, he warned himself, recalling what the force psychiatrist had said: “Possibly suffering from delusional paranoia.” He hadn’t forgotten, but neither had he forgotten that the chief superintendent himself had ripped up the report after the bomb had blasted a hole through his front door. “ Trick-cyclists ,” the senior officer had scoffed. “They couldn’t cure a bad case of verbal diarrhoea.”

“A swim would do you good — wash away some of that tension,” said Samantha responding to his apparent distress.

“Is it that obvious?”

“If you don’t start to loosen up soon, you’ll snap something,” she said, getting up and holding out a helping hand. “Come on, you’ll enjoy a moonlight dip.”

He hung back. “Much as I’d like to, I can’t. I haven’t any trunks.”

“It’s dark, Dave,” she smiled. “There’s no-one for miles and I promise faithfully not to peep.”

“I haven’t even got a towel.”

“You can share mine.”

Did she say share? he thought, quickly agreeing. “But what about you?”

“I was in the Girl Guides,” she replied, turning her back, scrunching her flowing hair into a swimming cap that appeared from nowhere, and stripping off to reveal a slinky black costume that took on a silky sheen in the bright moonlight.

Bliss stood rock still, stunned almost to tears by the beauty of her body, entranced by her strong, almost masculine shoulders, her smoothly curvaceous waist and her firm boyish bottom. Then she turned and the swell of her full breasts took his breath away.

“Ready?” she asked, and he fought off the rest of his clothes in an instant. “Stay close,” she added, taking his hand, her eyes fixed firmly ahead on the dark horizon. “And stop staring — I’m sure you’ve seen a swimsuit before.”

He hesitated apprehensively at the water’s edge and Samantha egged him on with a tug, “C’mon, it’s quite warm.”

But it wasn’t the water holding him back — the nightmarish fleet of death ships still floated in the back of his mind and he half expected to see them, and their grisly immortal cargoes, sailing in from the shadowy distance. But the horizon was clear, the sea had stilled and the ghosts of the dead servicemen had returned to their watery graves for another year. It was D-day plus 3, in the timelessness of the hereafter, and the grim reaper had moved on to gather lost souls from the beaches and fields of Normandy.

“D-Day plus 3,” Bliss mused to himself, his thoughts miles and years away — on the other side of the Channel with a pretty young Englishwoman, brazening her way across no-man’s land on a liberated bicycle, to deliver a baby into the reaper’s hands.

“Dave …” called Samantha with alarm, breaking him out of his catalepsy. “You are in a bad way, aren’t you?”

“Sorry,” he said, clearing his mind and walking forward until the coldness of the water squeezed the air out of his lungs. Samantha sensed the contraction in his hand. “Just relax, Dave — breathe normally, you’ll get used to it in a moment.”

“Are you sure?” he squeaked, wondering if his testicles would ever recover.

Once fully in the water, the anonymity of darkness and the reassurance of her firm grasp dissolved his inhibitions and he bared his soul. It only took a few minutes: Maggie Thatcher’s botched bank job; Mandy and her unborn baby; the killer’s threats in court; the letters, phone calls and bomb; the blue Volvo; the funny little man delving through the hotel register and the final, spine-tingling message on the computer.

She said little, listened well, hummed knowingly at appropriate intervals, and clearly believed every word. “Oh, Dave … you should’ve told me before,” she said without censure, then queried, “Do you think that man we chased last night was him as well?”

“I thought so at first, that’s why I told you to stay in the car — not that you listened. Afterwards I realised he was probably just a local car thief sussing out the car park for a worthy motor.”

He questioned himself later, asking why he had confided in someone who may have mocked his apparent timidity or blabbed to his colleagues. And yet, instinctively, he’d known she would do neither. Anyway, he rationalised, had he not cornered himself by his actions. Wouldn’t it be somewhat disingenuous to swim stark naked with someone late at night on an isolated beach and later claim that you wouldn’t have trusted them to share a Mars bar let alone a personal secret?

As they stepped from the water Bliss hesitated and turned to give her an appreciative kiss, but she dodged his advance and ran up the beach to grab a towel.

“Lay down,” she said, spreading the towel over the blanket.

“Well … ”

“Stop arguing, Dave, you’re in need of serious help.”

He lay, face down, and felt himself sinking into the soft blanket as he listened to the hypnotic rhythm of wavelets fizzling into the sand. Then she laid her sea-softened fingers on his shoulders and firmly massaged his rigid muscles until the tension dissolved and her fingers felt like warm tendrils playing deep inside him.

“That’s wonderful,” he sighed, as her hands inched down his spine, one vertebrae at a time, working their way into the small of his back. And his pulse raced with pleasure as she pushed even lower.

“Turn over,” she whispered when she reached his feet.

“Do I have to?”

“Don’t worry — I won’t bite.”

“That isn’t what I was worried about exactly.”

“Oh — I see … Well, I won’t look. Honestly.”

He turned, eyes closed and felt her fingers dancing on his chest, then slipping sensuously over his stomach and down his thighs. This isn’t happening, he cautioned himself. You’ll wake in a minute and discover the psychiatrist was right — it’s all a delusion.

The hands stopped moments before his mind would have burst in ecstasy and he felt her hair brushing his face as she leant over him, her fingers tracing his eyebrows — then the warmth of her lips on his mouth, and the tip of her tongue running along the length of his teeth.

“Oh Samantha,” he breathed, and tried to raise his arms to embrace her, but found them pinioned to the sand by a pair of strong hands. Then she nuzzled her wet lips to his ear, “That’s better, Dave — you can get dressed now.”

With his arms freed he reached out to clasp her but she twisted away and sat looking out over the sea. “Don’t be impatient, Dave,” she said over her shoulder. “You haven’t even bought me dinner yet.”