“Good thinking, Guv ... And didn’t I tell you he wouldn’t have taken the body far?”
“Get the car warmed up; I want a quick word with our man,” said Bliss, angling himself back toward the cells, refusing to offer hasty praise.
“We’ve found your father’s body,” he said, poking his head round Dauntsey’s cell door, not bothering to enter fully.
“I somehow doubt that, Inspector,” replied Dauntsey with a polite cockiness that immediately annoyed Bliss.
“Are you going to tell me where it is then?”
“Inspector! If you think I’d fall for a silly trick ... I don’t play those sort of games.”
“Suit yourself. I’m off to church.”
Dauntsey’s face remained impassive. “Say one for me.”
“I have a feeling you’re going to need it,” he retorted.
No sooner had they got into the car than the question which had hovered on Patterson’s lips for the past hour sprang out. “So what brings you to the sticks, Guv?”
“It’s no big deal,” he replied with a dismissive shrug, knowing that he was lying, knowing that it was a big deal – a very big deal – and he quickly changed the subject with a note of triumph. “I told you Dauntsey was cunning, Pat. I saw it in his eyes the moment I met him.”
“Not cunning enough for you though, Guv.”
Bliss picked up the sarcastic vibe and brushed it aside. “Nothing to do with me, Serg – it’s just Lady Luck.”
“I guess he wasn’t supposed to get away with it.”
“Cunning though – what a place to hide a body. Who would ever think of looking in a grave, especially when there’s another occupant?”
“D’ye realise we would never have found it, even with an infra-red from a helicopter. The detector would have picked out a new grave alright – even the body ...”
Bliss nodded. “And the Vicar would have said, ‘That’s old Mr. So and So. We buried him this morning.’”
“Talk about a close call, Guv.”
“That’s Lady Luck for you – even moaning old clerics have their uses.”
“It’s not getting the luck, Sergeant; it’s knowing what to do with it that counts.”
Bliss drove to the churchyard, explaining, “I may as well get to know my way around, Pat.”
But no sooner had they pulled out of the car park than Patterson started digging for more information. “So where were you stationed last?”
“Various nicks ... I got around a fair bit.”
“Which ones?”
“What is this, Pat, the third degree?”
“No. I just wondered why you chose to come here, that’s all.”
Why am I here? he wondered, letting his mind drift, driving on autopilot.
“Watch out!” yelled Patterson, suddenly realising that Bliss had missed a fast approaching red light.
“Shit,” shouted Bliss, standing on the brakes, slewing to a halt with the bonnet nosing into the junction. A cyclist, head down against the drizzle, skimmed across the front bumper, then turned in her saddle to give Bliss a pugnacious glare and stab a rude finger in the air.
“Little cow,” said Patterson, then gave Bliss an accusatory look. “You nearly clobbered her.”
“Sorry,” he said, his voice strained by anxiety, his hands frozen so hard to the wheel he could feel the vibration, his pulse racing through the roof.
“I thought you’d seen the light,” continued Patterson, unaware of the turmoil in the mind of the man next to him.
“Sorry,” he said again then excused himself with a mumble about the unfamiliar roads, the lousy weather and his pre-occupation with finding the Major’s body.
It only took a couple of minutes to the churchyard. The vicar was ahead of them, sheltering under the thatched lych-gate, his black robes and white collar standing out sharply against the fuzzy backdrop of the Norman church, its squat square tower drifting in and out of the murky grey drizzle like a castle’s keep in a fairy tale.
Under the vicar’s direction, Bliss and Patterson tiptoed toward the freshly dug grave, examining the ground ahead, skirting every depression that bore the least resemblance to a footprint or tyre mark. Bliss took the lead, warning the other two of potential evidence with the dedication of a shit-spotter leading a party of ramblers across a cattle field.
“Watch out there ... Mind that ... And there ...”
“I thought you said it had been filled in,” Bliss said with annoyance, reaching the grave, and sensing the presence of the vicar as he peered into the seemingly normal grave.
“It has,” he shot back belligerently. “It should be eight feet deep. It was yesterday. I checked it myself after communion. Mrs. Landrake, the widow, came with me. ‘Want everything to be just right for my Arthur,’ she said. Anyway, it had to be eight feet to give enough depth for her to go on top of him when her turn comes.”
Bliss wasn’t listening, his mind had wandered into the past, into another churchyard, standing by another grave, thinking of another body, but the vicar was unaware and prattled on. “I even fetched my measuring pole to be sure. Old Bert, the gravedigger, can be a bit spare with his measurements at times – tries to get away with the odd six inches if he thinks he can. Anyway, look at it now, it’s barely six feet, and the bottom looks like a ploughed field. I want my internees to rest easy ... well, as easy as they deserve, but look at that. Like a ploughed field,” he repeated. “That’d be like sleeping on a crumpled sheet ...”
With his mind miles away, an eighteen-year-old memory was consuming Bliss, edging him toward the grave, threatening to topple him into the pit. Patterson grabbed his arm. “Look out, Guv!” he called, pulling him from the brink.
Persuaded by the iron grip, he stepped back onto the duckboard, but his thoughts were still in the past, in a grave with a young woman’s coffin.
“I thought you was gonna faint, Guv,” said Patterson with a note of apology.
“No – No. I, I’m alright,” he stuttered. But Patterson was too pre-occupied with the arrival of the search team’s mini-bus to notice the shaking hands and perspiration-soaked forehead.
“We’re gonna need a ladder, Vicar,” said Patterson, heading off toward the mini-bus, leaving Bliss alone with the grave and his eighteen-year-old memories. He tried to break away, to take off after Patterson but the images in his mind were too strong and kept him glued to the grave. He peered in, almost expecting to see a coffin. He knew which coffin: not a flashy one, little more than a plywood box with brassy handles.
“We bought it with the honeymoon money,” the occupant’s husband-to-be explained at the little gathering in the local pub afterwards – sausage rolls, pickled onions and pints of best bitter ale around a pool table shrouded in a white bed-sheet.
“I would willingly have paid ...” started Bliss but the young victim’s grieving mother had cut him off.
“It’s alright, Constable. Very thoughtful of you, but there was no need.”
Why was she so damn nice? he wondered. He’d killed her daughter, hadn’t he? Hadn’t he? But they didn’t see it that way. They never had.
“It wasn’t your fault, Mr. Bliss ... Dave, isn’t it?” said Mrs. Richards, putting a chubby hand consolingly on his arm while dabbing her puffy red eyes with a Kleenex.
“Yes.