James Hawkins - Missing - Presumed Dead

“He didn’t want a woman,” Doreen continued, head down in embarrassment, “he only wanted a wife.” Then she lost her composure, simpering in shame with the admission that her husband had preferred to sleep with another man on their wedding night.

Bliss checked his watch, anxiously glancing at the door, wondering who would be first through: the matron, Superintendent Donaldson or a masked man with a machine gun. Feeling a need to speed things up he pieced together what he knew, throwing in a few guesses to fill in the blanks for the benefit of Samantha and Daphne. Explaining how, after the massacre caused by Rupert Dauntsey’s stupidity, it seemed likely that Captain Tippen had carried his mortally wounded lover back from the front; that an exploding grenade had showered bits of body and uniform everywhere; that some medical orderly must have mixed up the dog tags and when the survivor, a lowly backstreet boy, found himself being treated as a major, he was more than happy to go along with the blunder.

“He’d seen the Dauntsey home and the Scottish estate,” explained Bliss. “They were a vast improvement on his own home so he obviously thought: Why go back to be a burden to my mother in a Guildstone hovel? Here I have a private nurse; private doctor; a major’s pension; a major’s family and a major’s inheritance. He knew more about Rupert Dauntsey than Doreen ever knew and, in his own mind, was entitled to the estate far more than she ever was.”

Doreen pulled herself together sufficiently to add. “It was difficult for him to talk, and his face was so ugly that nobody wanted to look closely, so it was quite easy for him to get away with it.”

Daphne stepped in, questioning, “But why go along with it? Why not just throw him out?” Then she gave Bliss a poisonous stare and spat, “Men!”

There had been so many reasons, so many conflicting persuasions and influences, that Doreen froze indecisively as she sounded out the most plausible and least humiliating in her mind.

“It was blackmail,” she said eventually, expecting sympathy, while inwardly debating who had blackmailed whom. “He knew Rupert and me had never consecrated the marriage.”

“Consummated,” suggested Samantha quietly, but Doreen wasn’t in the frame of mind to be corrected and carried on as if she had not heard. ‘As long as I’m alive you’ve nothing to fear,’ Tippen said, when I stuck the x-ray under what was left of his nose. ‘Doctor Fitzpatrick reckons there’s been a mistake,’ I told him. ‘He reckons you ought to have some sort of scar in your leg. Football, he told me. Broke your leg at school, he said. He reckons he set the bone himself, when you were ten, he remembers it like yesterday — said you bawled your eyes out the whole time.’”

But there had been no mistake and Tippen had superciliously rubbed in the hurt by explaining, in uncalled for detail, what fun he and his lover had in arranging the spurious wedding in order to stop tongues wagging in the regiment. “It made me sick,” said Doreen, without elaborating.

“I still don’t see why you didn’t chuck him out,” said Daphne. “Nobody would have believed anything he said, after what he’d done?”

“Tippen had worked that out for himself,” explained Doreen shaking her head. “That’s why he made the will.”

“ The will,” not “ A will,” mused Bliss, recalling the visit from Law, the solicitor, who had made it clear that neither Jonathon nor the church would benefit from the body in the attic. “Are you saying that Tippen made a will in the name of Rupert Dauntsey?” he asked.

Doreen looked destitute as she nodded. “He left everything belonging to the Major to his own mother and the rest of his family. He called it his life insurance policy. Even gave me a copy as a reminder, telling me that when he died I would lose everything — the house, the estate in Scotland — everything. That’s why I had to pretend he was still alive all those years.”

“That still doesn’t explain the bullet in his head …” started Bliss, but she burst into tears at the memory of her wasted life, or was it relief that the charade had ended? “What could I do?” she blubbered. “If he’d died and I contested the will I would’ve had to tell them I lived with the wrong bloke for ten years.”

“But, what if you’d said you hadn’t known?” suggested Daphne.

“It wouldn’t make any difference. He had the lawyer write in the will that our marriage was never consecrated.”

Samantha let the malapropism go with a smile, but Bliss’s mind was leafing through something Doreen had said earlier.

The briefing at the police station had broken up with officers fanning out across the city — clueless. Patterson was hanging back, like a kid in school waiting to pluck up courage to rat on a bully.

“Something on your mind, Pat?” enquired Donaldson.

“Sorry, Guv …” he said, apparently coming to a decision. “No, nothing really,” he equivocated, wiping his expression clean. “I was just trying to think of the best place to start that’s all.”

The Olde Curiosity Coffee House would have been a good place to find Bliss, where the waitress was back at his table — under pressure from the management — the bill already made out. “Will that be everything, Sir?”

“Yes, thanks,” said Bliss as a trio of noisy young mothers, teeming with children, set up camp at the next table and the chaos of everyday life resumed as the women struggled with monumental decisions: cappuccino or cafe latte; skim milk or cream; chocolate or cinnamon topping; orange or apple juice for the bigger kids; breasts or bottles for the infants.

What must Daphne be thinking? he wondered, trying to read her mind as she eyed the mothers with their babies, realising that at roughly the same age she had parachuted into the teeth of war. Wasn’t she envious of the mothers, whose carefree domestic existence would never be ripped apart by the horrors of war or Parisian artists; whose bicycles would never be machine-gunned in the street; whose babies would never be murdered. But her wide open smile hid no angst — simple acquiescence, he guessed. She was happy for the mothers, and resigned to the fact that she’d had her chance, it was written all over her face: “I didn’t deserve another baby — I let someone break the one I had.”

Watching Daphne, Bliss suddenly saw Doreen Dauntsey in a different light. She’d had a child, no-one had robbed her of that, and, rightfully or wrongfully she’d lived a fairly cushy life. Compassion for her predicament waned still further with the realisation that, in her own way, she had been no less mercenary than the Major who’d suckered her into a bogus marriage, or the man who’d taken his place in the house, if not in his bed. And there was something else: “Mrs. Dauntsey,” he said, turning coolly toward her. “You said earlier that the doctor had examined Tippen for the army pension, that was how he discovered the fraud …” He paused, watching the worry lines crease her forehead. “It was fraud — claiming a major’s pension to which he wasn’t entitled. Would you agree?”

Doreen was slow to respond, so Samantha helped her out. “Do you see what Inspector Bliss is getting at Mrs. Dauntsey? If Tippen was defrauding the government out of a pension, you’d have a good case for saying he defrauded you out of your inheritance as well.”

Samantha was wrong — very wrong. Bliss knew it and so did Doreen, though neither of them let on — choosing silence instead. In the end he prodded her again. “Mrs. Dauntsey … I said, that would be fraud, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes,” she hissed through clenched teeth.

Samantha sensing something in the harshness of his tone gave Bliss a puzzled look.