“Oh yes – I’d forgotten.”
“How old d’ye think she is, Guv?”
Bliss, feeling the stab of yet another barb, gave him a hard stare – He’s not suggesting there’s something going on between us is he? “I suppose she’s my mother’s age – sixties, sixty-five maybe,” he replied, feigning total disinterest in Daphne as he casually rooted through the morning’s sheaf of crime reports.
“Ugh – I bet she’s nearer seventy-five, Guv,” he said somewhat scornfully.
“How come she’s still working?”
“Don’t ask me.”
“I am,” said Bliss, putting down the reports and giving Patterson critical attention.
Clasping his hands behind his head, the sergeant thrust out his legs and stretched back in his chair. “They’ve tried to get rid of her several times. Last year they gave her a retirement party – dinner, bouquet, carriage clock – the works. Next day she comes in regular as All-Bran, plonks the clock on the Chief’s desk and says, “I won’t be needing this for a while, Sir.” He paused for a chuckle, all gums and teeth, then carried on. “They even stopped paying her at one time. She didn’t care – didn’t even know for a few months. They had to tell her in the end. “Never mind,” she says,
“Give it to the widow’s and orphan’s fund.”
“She seems harmless enough,” said Bliss feeling a defence, was called for. “What do you think?”
Patterson, needing time to consider, leant forward to pick up his coffee. “She a nosey old bat really. Not that I mind personally speaking – bit of entertainment. Though some of the youngsters don’t like it ’cos she knows so much of what goes on around here. I remember one case ...” he slurped some coffee as he tried to assemble the facts, gave up, and generalised. ‘This’ll be a tricky one,’ I said once, and Daph overheard. ‘Nonsense,’ she said, ‘Old so-and-so did it.’ ‘How the hell do you work that out?’ I said. ‘Because his father did exactly the same back in 1937,’ she said. And d’ye know,” he laughed, “She was absolutely right.”
Bliss slid into the chair opposite Patterson and gave him something to think about. “Did I hear she’s got some sort of title?”
“Title?” he queried, “Like ‘Lady’ – Oh yeah,” he scoffed, “I can just see it – Lady Daphne Lovelace – society dame and shithouse cleaner.”
“No. I was thinking more along the lines of a C.B.E., or O.B.E.?”
A mouthful of coffee splattered across the desk as Patterson exploded in laughter, “The O.B.E. Our Daphne – you are joking, Guv?”
“Shush – she obviously doesn’t broadcast it, but no, I’m quite serious.”
“Did she tell you that?” he queried, but didn’t wait for a response. “I reckon she’s having you on. I wouldn’t put it past her. She’s got a bit of an imagination – I mean, that story about crop circles and UFO’s ...”
“Possibly,” said Bliss thoughtfully.
“Possibly my foot. I’d bet my pension on it.”
“You’re probably right. It was just something I overheard. I probably got it wrong.”
“I would say so – Daphne – O.B.E.,” he guffawed.
Bliss laughed along with him.
“The Major’s body?” enquired Donaldson, with more than a trace of hope, as Bliss stuck his head into the chief superintendent’s office a few minutes later. Bliss strolled in, sat heavily and gave his head a negative shake.
The senior officer took on a crestfallen look. “Shit, I knew I should have called in the Major Incident Unit ... Oh,” his face brightened, “I guess that’s a pun ... Major Incident – searching for a major.”
“Very funny,” said Bliss noticing that the packet of chocolate digestives had taken a serious mauling since the previous day. “May I?” he asked rhetorically, reaching out for one of the last two.
Donaldson swiped the packet off his desk faster than a shoplifter snatching a Rolex. “Rationed,” he mumbled, screwing the top and shoving it into a drawer. “One pack a day instead of fags,” he explained. “Can’t afford to give ’em away.”
“Sorry, Sir.”
“So what do you make of all this, Dave?”
“On the face of it, it seems too simple. But what if we don’t find the body? What if he’s disposed of it so cleverly we never find it? Furthermore, what if he knows we can’t find it?”
“Where – how?”
Bliss relaxed in the chair with a shrug. “I haven’t a clue. If I knew I’d just go out and find it. Do you have any ideas, Sir?”
Donaldson sat back and ruminated on a novelist’s palette of barely plausible explanations, “... dissolved it in acid; burnt it to a cinder; fed it to the pigs ...”
“No, Sir,” interrupted Bliss, standing up and pacing with frustration. “He didn’t have enough time for any of that. In any case, the larger bones would have survived, especially the femurs.”
A degree of agitation sharpened Donaldson’s tone and the Newton’s balls took another hammering. “Well, Inspector, perhaps you have some better suggestions.”
“I suppose he might have had time to wall it up in the house or jam it under the floorboards,” mused Bliss, not waiting for the steel balls to stop chattering back and forth.
“He might have had time, but the dogs would have sniffed it out.”
“What about if he dropped it down an abandoned well and capped it with a load of concrete?”
Donaldson caught the swinging ball as if the suggestion were serious enough to be considered in silence. “That’s possible,” he started slowly, then shook his head. “Dauntsey would have been plastered in cement.”
One look at the senior officer’s face was enough to remind Bliss there was no cement. “I don’t know then,” he concluded and sat back down.
Donaldson took on a phlegmatic tone. “If it doesn’t turn up we’ll just go for a trial without a body – it’s been done before. It may be unusual but certainly not unique.”
Bliss wasn’t so sure. “What if he gets in the box and recants his confession. Where does that leave us?”
“The jury will still hear the confession.”
“I know – but he says, ‘I was confused – we had a bit of a barney. Dad went for me with the knife. He got cut somehow – nothing serious, and ...’”
Donaldson wasn’t listening, he was still working on devious methods of concealing a body. “I wonder if Dauntsey’s playing some sort of intellectual game with us. He’s hardly been a raving success in his life. Maybe he’s just trying to prove how smart he really is.”
“And he’s prepared to murder his own father in the process ... I somehow doubt it.”
“He’s weird enough.”
“Possibly, but that still leaves us seriously short of physical evidence.”
“What about the duvet? Witnesses saw him bundling something wrapped in it into his truck – and the duvet was obviously missing from his father’s room at the Black Horse.”
“It was only the duvet,” he says to the jurors. “I got blood on it and was taking it to get it cleaned.”
“But