James Hawkins - Missing - Presumed Dead

“Sorry,” he said, giving himself a shake. “Did you say meringue?” But his mind was still miles away. He’d found what he was looking for and was puzzling over it.

“With a maraschino cherry,” she reminded him.

“Oh yes. Of course you may,” he said, signalling to a waif in a waitresses uniform.

“Mrs. Dauntsey …” he started questioningly, but she held up a spidery hand, indicating that the meringue was next on her agenda, and they sat in silence awaiting its arrival; Bliss checking his watch, wondering what Superintendent Donaldson was doing; wondering what plans were being concocted to oust him; wondering how long it would take Jonathon to track them down; wondering when the killer would strike again.

The slender young woman was back with the meringue in a few seconds and Doreen eyed her critically. “Skinny as a cheap chicken,” she muttered as soon as the girl was out of earshot, then took a bite. The confectionary exploded in a sugary snowstorm, dusting the bodice of her navy blue dress and giving her a coughing fit. Daphne sprang to Doreen’s side with surprising agility, towing Samantha in her wake, giving Bliss an accusatory stare. “Oh look at the mess,” she moaned, and set about cleaning up her old friend.

Doreen was still coughing but Bliss couldn’t contain himself any longer. “When I asked what happened to your husband,” he began, “you said the Germans shot him. But how did he get home with a hole in his skull …?”

Doreen creased in another convulsion of coughing and Daphne roughly pushed him aside. “Now look what you’ve done.”

Backing away, he focused on the diminutive grey-haired figure, a plethora of thoughts bombarding his mind, then all the cherries clinked into place and the jackpot came out so fast he had a job to keep up: The returning Major was unrecognisable; barely able to talk; refused to see Patrick Mulverhill the reporter; was in possession of another man’s dog-tags; and, finally, most decisively, had been shot by a German. Bingo!

“The man in your attic wasn’t Major Rupert Dauntsey, your husband, was he?” he breathed, astounded by the clarity of his own revelation.

Doreen’s head went down, her hands flew to cover her face and she gave a startled cry.

“Now see what you’ve done,” said Daphne rebukefully, as her friend burst into floods of tears. “Are you alright, Doreen?”

Doreen was anything but alright.

A storm was brewing at Westchester police station. Superintendent Donaldson had pressed the panic button a little before ten in the morning. Exhausted of ideas, nerve and executive toys he called the Assistant Chief Constable with rising concern about Bliss, the death threat and the goat. Detective Sergeant Patterson, summoned by phone, strolled cockily into the superintendent’s office, coffee cup in hand. “You wanted something, Guv?” he said, with enough political savoir faire to know that indispensability outranks rank, and flopped into a comfortable looking leather armchair.

“Yeah, Pat. There’s still no sign of D.I. Bliss — you’ve no ideas have you?”

“Like I said on the phone, Guv. I ain’t his social secretary.”

No need to be like that, thought Donaldson. “Well, you’d better get the men together in the parade room at eleven for a briefing … The Assistant Chief’s coming to lead the enquiry,” he added as he picked flakes of chocolate from the groin of his trousers. “Bloody biscuits,” he mumbled. “Well … what are you waiting for?”

“Thought we were supposed to be searching for Dauntsey’s victim,” grumbled Patterson with no attempt to move, “Not poncing around after Bliss.”

“I don’t give a shit about Dauntsey at the moment,” Donaldson’s voice rose as he stood, snowing crumbs onto the floor. “Everything is on hold until we find D.I. Bliss — do I make myself clear?”

Patterson, seeing himself as unofficial envoy for the world, pushed for more information. “What’s he supposed to have done, Guv?”

“What on earth makes you ask that? The man’s missing for God’s sake — might be murdered for all we know.”

Patterson’s face contorted. “Murdered?” he echoed.

“Why?”

Bliss was anything but dead. In fact, in the charged moments following his revelation about the identity of the body in Doreen’s attic, he found himself widely alert to his surroundings. Previously unnoticed objects now appeared as if through a lens, and he was surprised to find the coffee shoppe walls deep in bric-a-brac: polished horse brasses, gleaming like old gold, hung on black leather straps; shiny copper kettles and silvery samovars with ivory handles filled every niche; a weird collection of papier-mache masks adorned the wainscotting: white-faced Pierrots; red-nosed clowns; devilishly horned Satans with flaming vermilion hair; grotesque, gruesome and macabre masks; whimsical, fanciful and capricious masks. And, although every mask differed, each facial image was tortured by a pair of eye holes into which, and out of which, came only darkness, and, through which he saw a mirror of Doreen Dauntsey.

Doreen had sunk into a torpor, staring rigidly into the middle distance, trying to see both into the past and future at the same time, while mentally fighting against hideous images of the body in her attic. The intensity of her mental battle spun off brain-waves that disquieted every head in the room; drawing the sour-faced woman in black from her window seat to hover, nosily, unladylike, just six feet from the wheelchair; causing a group of elderly patrons to wrap shawls and summer jackets tightly about them; dragging the spindly waitress back to their table.

“Something wrong with the meringue?” she enquired.

“No, no — it’s fine,” said Bliss, waving her off.

Daphne, peering unselfconsciously into Doreen’s sightless eyes muttered, “I think the old turkey’s snuffed it.”

Samantha put her hand on Doreen’s pulse. “No, she hasn’t, Daphne — don’t exaggerate.”

Daphne, unconvinced, furiously fanned a hand in front of Doreen’s stony face. “Well, she looks fairly dead to me,” she said, measuring death by degrees.

“Be quiet,” hissed Samantha, then softened her tone. “Doreen love. Squeeze my hand if you can hear.”

The spidery fingers tightened a fraction.

“She squeezed,” declared Samantha with relief and Bliss bent over her shoulder, whispering, “It could be a stroke — I’d better get an ambulance.”

Doreen’s thin voice whistled through taut lips. “No. I’ll be alright. Please don’t make a fuss.”

The sinister looking woman snorted, catching everyone’s attention, then returned to her table, her veiled face giving nothing away.

“Maybe she was an undertaker’s scout,” Samantha joked later when she and Bliss were snuggling warmly together on her couch, and, although he laughed, he couldn’t help wondering if the old witch hadn’t had a walkie-talkie linked to a funeral home in her black clutch-bag.

Doreen went back inside her mind: seeing a dapper little Major with a sharp brain and no chin getting married and going to war, and a ragged bundle of bandages coming home — still chinless; asking herself the questions that had tormented her for half a century: So — Just when did you realise the major wasn’t himself? When did you know the pompous little toad hadn’t come back? Was it days; weeks; months or even years?

It wasn’t years. I was still pregnant when he … when “the thing” came back. It couldn’t have been years.

You weren’t expecting him to come back at all were you? That was your plan, wasn’t it?

No, it wasn’t.

Don’t lie, Doreen.