James Hawkins - Missing - Presumed Dead

“I’m afraid Hugo used me rather,” Daphne said finally, and, from her tone, expected to end it there. But Bliss was coercive, if not downright insistent. Holding her spray-can hostage he said, “Come on, Daphne, you may as well tell me. It can’t be any worse.”

Her face clouded in shame. It was worse, much worse.

“I have to go,” she said, panic forcing her to her feet.

“I have to go,” she repeated, her eyes searching frantically for a way out, and she headed for the door but was drawn back to the canister of polish. Reaching with a shaky hand she muttered “I have to go” again, and began pacing around the room, eyes everywhere, mumbling, “I have to go … I have to go … I have to go,” like a malfunctioning robot.

“Calm down,” said Bliss, and she froze in the middle of the room, unable to catch her breath.

“Daphne,” he called, going to her aid, but she fended him off and began panting hysterically, her nerves going haywire, jangling her limbs and twitching her face. He grabbed her by the shoulders but she wrenched free and paced some more.

“Stop it,” she told herself. “Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.”

Then she paused again, gasping deep breaths, threatening to hyperventilate as she tried to stop the pictures in her mind.

Bliss, alarmed, picked up the phone. “Control room — call a Doctor …” But she slammed her hand on the cradle. “No, No. I’m alright, Chief Inspector. I’ll be alright.”

“Sit down then,” he said, easing her into a chair and giving her a glass of water.

The phone rang — the control room sergeant, confused, calling back.

“No,” explained Bliss, “Miss Lovelace has had a bit of a turn in my office but I think she’s alright now. I’ll let you know.”

“Thank you,” she said and slumped back with her eyes closed, thinking — what possible difference does it make now. So you posed naked for Hugo; posed for his friends; more than posed; more than one friend. Hadn’t you been flattered — so many beautiful French girls to choose from, yet they preferred la petite tarte Anglaise.

She didn’t explain in detail, wouldn’t have known how to express herself. “I let men take advantage of me,” she said, simply, her head bowed in her hands. “It seemed to make them happy.” Then she paused, wondering whether to elaborate; if to justify; how to justify. Yet she had justified it at the time — forcing herself to believe that she did it for food; for shelter; for love. And wasn’t it love? Didn’t Hugo love her? Wasn’t it always Hugo who had comforted her battered body to sleep at the end of the night — on a couch reeking of hard sex and cheap cigarettes, in his studio surrounded by paintings that never showed the bruises.

“I used to sit on a canvas stool in a little square in Montmartre while Hugo painted me,” she went on, skipping the humiliation and passion, recalling the brightly coloured umbrellas and the oily smell of paint. “And one day an instructor who’d taught me unarmed combat in England wandered by when Hugo was in the bar. He stopped, flabbergasted. ‘You’re dead,’ he said, and I really wanted to believe him. It would have made things so much easier for me. I even pretended he was mistaken, told him where to go — in French, but he was insistent, and I came to my senses and realised what I was doing to myself — what Hugo and his friends were doing to me.”

A dried fleck of correcting fluid on Bliss’s desk caught her attention and she concentrated furiously for several seconds, scratching at it with a nail.

Is that it? wondered Bliss, and was readying to ask another question when she started again — softly, almost wistfully. “Hugo came back and I hit him, very hard. Then I grabbed a knife and ripped up all his canvasses — all the nudes; smashed him over the head with one — right in the middle of Montmartre.” She paused to look out of the window, then laughed, wryly. “I remember somebody took a photo — Hugo lying on wet cobblestones with his head stuck through a painting of me in the nude … I’ve often thought it may have won an award — always imagined it hanging in some pretentious photo gallery labelled ‘Man’s subjugation by female form,’ or something equally hideous.”

The phone startled Bliss; the clock had shot forward to 7.55 without warning and he reached for the receiver with trepidation. Thanks to Samantha he now had a plan. But it was a plan that would be stymied if Donaldson got to him first. “What happened next?” he asked Daphne, withdrawing his hand and letting the phone ring.

With a handful of belongings, and the one small portrait that Bliss had found on her sideboard, she had taken off with the instructor, Michael Kent, and headed east, deeper into mainland Europe.

“I didn’t come home,” she answered, leaving Bliss to question, “Why not?”

She found another fleck to pick at.

“Did you let your parents know?” he asked, sensing her reluctance to continue.

She looked up. “Let them know what? That I was a cold blooded killer; that I let men do things to me that nice girls never did?”

“Come on,” he said, not knowing what she was talking about. “It can’t have been that bad.”

“I sometimes thought I might’ve coped better as a prostitute,” she answered, leaving him slack mouthed. “At least I could have pretended it was just a job.”

“I don’t understand — what were you doing? Why were you doing it?”

“Where did you stay last night?” she asked, looking up, clear faced, as if she’d just walked in and had no notion of the turmoil in the air.

“At a friend’s,” he said succinctly. Samantha’s, he meant.

Samantha’s couch had been comfortable and welcoming. Which was more than could have been said for Samantha when he arrived on her doorstep, a little after 1 am, following a frantic phone call.

“If this is some misguided plot to get into my bed you’re wasting your bloody time,” she had said, flinging open her door, defensively tugging a thick towelling dressing gown around her while preening her hair with the other hand.

“Samantha!” he cried, stung by her mistrust. “Would I make something like that up?”

Her face broke into a grin. “Did he really cremate your goat?”

“It’s not funny!”

“No, I suppose not.” She straightened her face. “Well, you’d better come in then.”

“I still don’t get it,” said Bliss to Daphne. “Your parents must have been worried sick. They must have thought you’d been killed.” But, as he spoke, the faces of dead soldiers lining ship’s rails winged back into his thoughts and he stopped, stunned by his perception — she’d been killed the moment she took off to parachute into France.

Daphne was crying again. “Self respect is like virginity,” she choked through the tears. “Once it’s gone you have to pretend for the rest of your life.”

“You can get your self-respect back in time,” he protested, recalling how he’d felt after Mandy’s death.

“Well, I never got my virginity back,” she complained ruefully. “Anyway, you’ve no idea what it’s like.”

I have, he thought, thinking of pregnant Mandy, but when he looked deep into Daphne’s bloodshot eyes he realised there wasn’t the slightest comparison between his hurt and hers. She’d had the killer inside her every day for more than fifty years, whereas Mandy’s killer had spent 18 years out of sight and out of mind in a high-security government hotel.

The phone rang again and Bliss was out of his chair and headed for the door as if his backside had caught fire. 8.10 am and Donaldson was stomping around his office to the tune of wildly gyrating executive toys.

“The Mitre at ten this morning,” Bliss said to Daphne on his way past, knowing she would understand. “And please, please, don’t tell anyone.”