“We’ll just have to manage, I suppose,” said Donaldson, going on quickly to explain that their new detective inspector had not spent the night at his hotel and had been missing for the past three hours.
“Probably got lost,” quipped Patterson, fixing his tombstone teeth into a ventriloquist’s smile.
Donaldson, recognising the voice, directed his words at the detective sergeant, thinking — let’s see if you think this is funny. “D.I. Bliss received a death threat yesterday morning,” he began, straight-faced. “And last night someone stole some of his personal property and set fire to it in the car park behind the Mitre Hotel — outside his window — obviously intended as a portent.”
“As a what?” asked Patterson.
“As a warning — to scare the shit out of him,” explained the assistant chief, thinking: Get yourself a dictionary — moron.
Sniggers ran around the room but Donaldson barked, “This ain’t funny.”
D.C. Dowding wasn’t so sure — he’d heard about the goat. “Can I ask what exactly was cremated, Sir?” he said with barely suppressed humour.
“It was a stuffed goat,” admitted Donaldson and got the expected gale of laughter. “O.K.” he shouted angrily. “This ain’t Alabama — it’s not the Klu Klux Klan burning crosses. This is Westchester — nobody is going to run one of our men out of town. I repeat — nobody!”
Patterson, sullen-faced, appeared serious. “It sounds more like a prank to me — kids probably …”
“Oh for God’s sake, Pat. Haven’t you been listening? I said he received a death threat yesterday morning.”
But Patterson sloughed it off. “I wouldn’t mind a quid for every little punk who’s threatened to put me in a concrete overcoat.”
“Sergeant Patterson,” said the A.C.C. “Have you any idea why D.I. Bliss was transferred here from the Met?”
“Haven’t a clue, Sir,” he replied honestly, despite all the strings he’d pulled to find out.
None of them knew — until Superintendent Donaldson filled them in.
The bizarre grandfather clock, in the Coffee House, summoned enough energy to strike only the first four beats of eleven, and time moved forward for Bliss as a pair of clacking stiletto heels announced the manageress’s approach, shattering the petrified atmosphere. “Is there some sort of problem here?” she demanded, alerted by the waitress and the epidemic of worried expressions infecting her other customers.
Talk about uptight, thought Bliss, appraising the woman’s clenched buttocks, over-strung brassiere and tightly permed hair. “There’s no problem,” he said, brushing her off.
“Well — Is madam alright?” she continued, pointedly peering for signs of life in Doreen’s wheelchair.
“Yes,” said Doreen weakly, “I’m alright.”
“She’s just had a bit of a shock,” confided Bliss, leading the woman out of the old lady’s earshot, fearing she was on the verge of asking them to remove Doreen for causing a disturbance. “Her husband’s died,” he added, not untruthfully, and watched the woman scuttle back to the kitchen.
“Maybe you and Daphne should go back to the other table,” he said, turning to Samantha, concerned that Daphne’s presence might be intimidating her old friend.
“I didn’t have to help get her out of the home …” complained Daphne, her feathers ruffled, but Doreen held up a hand, saying through the tears. “You might as well stay, Daphne. I quite relish the idea that I’m still worth gossiping about.”
“Just keep quiet then,” whispered Bliss to Daphne, “and don’t mention that damn goat again.”
“I didn’t realise at first,” Doreen sniffled. “It wasn’t as though I knew him well.”
“Didn’t realise what?” interrupted Daphne immediately, drawing an angry “shush” from Bliss.
“A nurse came in everyday and did his bandages,” continued Doreen. “His face was such a mess that it never occurred to me.”
“What about his father … ” Bliss began, then corrected himself, “I mean Rupert’s father — the old Colonel. Didn’t he realise it wasn’t his son?”
“His eyes were bad — chlorine gas in the trenches at Ypres. He died a few months later … heart attack.” She paused in memory of the proud old man slumped, blue-faced, at the feet of his son’s impersonator — his hands clawing at his chest in rigor.
“I’ll put it down to the gas, Mrs. Dauntsey — shall I?” the wily old doctor had said, ceremoniously taking the stethoscope from around his neck and placing it into his bag in a gesture of finality, while giving her a knowing wink.
“Yes, please, Doctor, if you don’t mind,” she had replied, and Dr. Fitzpatrick’s fraudulently penned death certificate had cost her a thousand pounds, but what was the alternative? “Death by shock.” But who wouldn’t have had a heart attack in the Colonel’s place — learning, simultaneously, that his beloved son was a queer, something of an idiot, and dead? And, to cap it all, discovering the man he’d been nursing as a hero for the past few months was not only an imposter, but was also his son’s lover.
Daphne was catching on. “Do you mean …”
Samantha touched her arm to quieten her, but Doreen turned to her friend, her eyes wide open. “Yes, Daphne. I was so stupid I didn’t realise I was living with the wrong man. Not that I was living with him in the true sense. He stayed in the turret room most of the time — crying I think, though it was difficult to tell.”
Daphne jumped up excitedly. “So who was he?”
“You met him — the best man at our wedding — sham wedding.”
“Captain David Tippen of the Royal Horse Artillery,” pronounced Bliss sagely, feeling the need to prove he’d done his homework.
Daphne’s face pinched into confusion. “David Tippen — What sham wedding?”
Doreen sank back into memories of her marriage, still flabbergasted to think she had been so gullible — realising she had been so bowled over by a proposal from the Colonel’s son that she never really questioned his motives. But memories of the ceremony itself were murky, everything and everyone appearing through a screen of smoky glass, much as it had at the time — more alcoholic than euphoric. Rupert had made all the arrangements, even choosing her dress — and her hat. “Trust Daphne Lovelace to laugh at my hat,” she remembered saying — but to whom, and when …?
Rupert had only invited his aide-de-camp, (“Done up like a dog’s dinner,” Daphne had shrieked to her friends afterwards), and his father — the old Colonel. But when he announced that Arnie, the odd-job man, and his wife would be the only witnesses Doreen had dug in her heels, insisting on a “proper wedding,” with a maid of honour and bridesmaids; what was the point of a wedding if it wasn’t to brandish one’s trophy in front of one’s friends? In the end, with less than an hour to spare, she settled for Daphne and a clutch of handmaidens dragged out of the Mitre. “What about your parents?” Rupert had asked, showing some feelings at the last minute. “No,” she had shot back fiercely, knowing they’d find fault with him; knowing they’d voice the same concerns which she’d worked so hard to keep buried. “Why you, Doreen?” her father would question. “Why not some tight-assed little bitch with a plum in her mouth, and a stuck-up mother twittering on about how rationing was playing havoc with her dinner parties? — ‘Haven’t had a decent truffle for absolutely ages; and caviar? Pah — lease, don’t even mention it, my dear.’”
Doreen surfaced with one clear recollection of the ceremony. “I remember the vicar with that stupid sing-song voice,” she said, looking inquisitively at the faces surrounding her as if she was coming around from anaesthetic. “Major Rupert Wellington Dauntsey,” he said. “Do you take this woman — Doreen Mae Mason …” Her voice and memory dimmed for a few seconds, then she seemed to bounce back to life. “Rupert said, ‘I do,’ but he never did,” she continued forlornly. Then she repeated, “He never did,” as if to remind herself.
Three pairs of eyes forged into hers, demanding an explanation, but she sank back into her own private darkness, leaving them to watch her changing expressions as she wove together images of the wedding night out of a thick blanket of fog: Rupert, an officer and, apparently, a gentleman, in full ceremonial uniform, pouring her yet another champagne; brushing his lips off her cheek; guiding her upstairs and leaving her to marvel at the wonders of an en-suite bathroom, at a time most people still crept to the outhouse in the middle of the night, and Hollywood agents dickered over bathroom clauses in film stars’ contracts.