“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.
I’m not.
Bloody liar — you’ve always been a bloody liar.
Have not.
Why did you get expelled from school then? Why did your dad chuck you out of the house then?
“Mrs. Dauntsey — can you hear me?” asked Bliss, on the outside, but the words couldn’t cut through the nagging voice in Doreen’s mind.
No-one would ever have known Jonathon wasn’t Rupert’s son if he hadn’t come back, would they?
He didn’t come back smart-ass. Not in person anyway.
But you didn’t know that at the time did you? You should’ve seen your face when the ambulance rolled up at the front door and you thought Rupert was going to pop out and point at your belly saying, “Whose is that then?”
“Mrs. Dauntsey, Mrs. Dauntsey,” Samantha broke through the haze. “Can you tell us what happened?”
“I was shocked when I saw him,” she said, breaking back into the real world for a second, trying to escape the voice.
Thunderstruck would be more accurate, said the voice, reminding her she would never escape. You spewed your guts up remember; couldn’t bear to look at him for weeks. She remembered, only too well, and her face showed the pain as she thought of the nights she’d lain awake in the cold lonely bed, Jonathon swelling inside her, as she listened to the anguished whimpering of the tormented man in the turret room next door.
“I used to lie awake at night praying for him,” she said, sounding compassionate, her downcast eyes looking for sympathy.
Now say that again with a straight face, sneered the voice.
I did pray for him.
Yeah — prayed he would die; prayed for ways you could bump him off without getting caught; prayed he’d cut his wrist.
That would’ve have been a bit tricky wouldn’t it — with only one arm? Anyway, would it have been so terrible? What was life for him? — trapped inside a useless body; pretending to be someone else; mourning his lost love; stuck in the turret room all day and night — alone most of the time.
“Doreen … Doreen,” Daphne was nagging at her sleeve. “Doreen, dear. Do you think we should call a doctor?”
“Doctor?” she asked vaguely. “No — why? There’s nothing wrong with me.” Doctors! she swore under her breath — Bloody crooks the lot of ’em. Like Doctor Fitzpatrick, pleading poverty in his leather patched tweed jacket and cloth cap; doing his rounds in a beatup Ford Popular — his gleaming black Bentley reserved for weekends in the city. Doctor Fitzpatrick — long dead now — the only other person to know the truth about the creature in the turreted room.
“The radiographer must have mixed up the pictures, Mrs. Dauntsey …” the old doctor had said, pouring over the x-rays perplexedly after being called upon to examine the returned hero — expected to certify the extent of his wounds for his pension. But there had been no mistake and he had caught on eventually.
Bliss, his senses alert to the slightest shift in the atmosphere, found himself drawn to a grandfather clock which someone had appliqued with millions of multicoloured seeds. The tasteless timepiece was wheezing noisily as it wound itself up to deliver the hour, and, under his gaze, it stopped, a tick short of eleven and, at that precise moment, the parade room at the police station jumped to attention.
“At ease,” barked Donaldson, entering with the assistant chief on his shoulder, then he faltered, seeing the measly turnout. “Christ — is this the best we can do?”
“Short notice, Guv,” explained Patterson, failing to mention that he’d not put himself out; that the twenty or so men and women he’d rounded up had, in large part, been swanning around the police station in search of an excuse for swanning around the police station.