Although the motorway was now speeding Bliss away from the town, he was still smarting from Patterson’s assault and couldn’t help thinking there was more to the antagonism than an interrupted Saturday afternoon.
“This is the man we were looking for,” he had said, producing the Dauntsey’s wedding photograph, and Patterson had immediately jumped on him.
“It’s pretty useless showing us that now we’ve found him.”
“This man ... ” continued Bliss, ignoring Patterson while pointing to the Major’s aide-de-camp. “This man may have been Captain David Tippen, something of a Gay Cavalier, if you get my meaning. Anyway, who checked him out?”
“Sergeant Dobson, Guv.”
Dobson rose, shaking his head. “Sorry, Guv, bad news I’m afraid. According to the Ministry of Defence, Tippen’s body was never found, he was listed as missing – presumed dead.”
“Where? What battle? When?”
“I didn’t think to ask.”
“Do you think it might be important?”
“Doubt it, Guv.”
“I was being sarcastic, Sergeant. Of course it’s important – find out please.”
Patterson had his doubts and sneered, “What possible relevance could that have?”
Sensing another insurrection, Bliss quickly stepped in to quash it. “We know Tippen’s dead, we’ve got his tags, but what about his family – don’t they have a right to know?”
“I thought this was supposed to be a murder enquiry,” grumbled Patterson.
I’m going to belt you in a minute, thought Bliss. “Dauntsey obviously knew where the body was,” he explained. “How else could he have got the dog tags. And if he knew, how come he didn’t tell the Army administration, or the man’s family?”
“I still don’t see what that’s got to do with us,” griped Patterson. “I still don’t see the connection.”
Bliss was still trying to work out the possible connection for himself when he drove into the motorway service area where he had escaped from the Volvo earlier in the week. The nutcase was still there, sitting in the same seat, still regressing, bending the ear of some other unsuspecting traveller. “Helen of Troy was my aunty, you know?”
Bliss chuckled as he went past in search of a coffee and sandwich, then he took a nearby seat and tried to take his mind off the meeting by watching her snare unwitting listeners. “Have you ever been here before ...?”
“So what’s this great theory of yours, Guv?” Patterson had asked, still in a snit.
“Personally, I think that flighty, fun-loving, Doreen Dauntsey soon got fed up living with a cabbage, especially an ugly one, so she lured him into the attic and shot him. Then she told everyone he’d gone to stay on the estate in Scotland.”
“That’s not much of a theory,” scoffed Patterson. “Why would he go into the attic? How would he get into the attic – he only had one arm?”
Bliss looked past him again, he had no answer and was becoming increasingly aware of the disgruntled murmuring from the other officers. He needed a juicy morsel to throw at them that wouldn’t be seized on by Patterson.
“What about Jonathon’s victim?” asked a spiky-featured officer, giving him a seconds breathing space. “If the Major was already dead in the attic, who did Jonathon kill?”
“It could have been just about anybody,” he started, then paused, half expecting Patterson to pipe up. “Follow me on this,” he continued, thankful for the silence. “Jonathon was pissed off with his father, seeing him as a failure for allowing his mother to struggle financially, and for deserting them, so he flattened the toy soldier, the Major, in a symbolic act of destruction. The trick-cyclists call it displaced aggression, I think. But it wasn’t enough, nobody even knew he’d done it. So, as his mother’s health deteriorated, he had to do something more to prove he really cared – something spectacular – murderously spectacular. Obviously he couldn’t attack the real man, he had no idea what had happened to him, so he chose a surrogate. But he had to have witnesses ...”
“Why?” Patterson leapt on his back again. “Why not just pull some starving old bum off the street, promise him a meal and a bed for the night, bump him off and bury him?”
Hoping to lighten the atmosphere, Bliss put on a Chinese accent. “Confucius he say – If tree fall in forest and no-one see or hear. Did it fall?” He paused, not expecting applause, but not anticipating the stone-faced silence either. Discomfitted, he pushed on anyway. “He needed witnesses because he wanted to read about it in the papers and hear it on the news, and the only way to achieve that was to sacrifice someone in public – but not somewhere so public that the victim’s face would be seen.”
“What about the duvet?” questioned a grey-bearded officer, showing a glimmer of interest.
“He buried it where he knew it would be found, then threw in the mangled toy as an effigy of the Major. It was all part of the illusion and might have worked if the real Major hadn’t shown up.”
“It’s more stupid than a bloody bedroom farce,” scoffed Patterson under his breath. “Someone ought’a make it into a pantomime. First we got a killer and no body, then a body and no killer, then no body ...”
“So where did Jonathon think the Major was?” asked the bearded officer talking over Patterson.
Bliss was tempted to say Scotland but knew it was an indefensible answer. He knew he couldn’t explain why Jonathon had not gone there to confront the real man.
The Dauntsey estate was still there, according to the Scottish P.C. who had made enquiries. It was occupied by a tenant farmer, the son of the man who had first leased the farm from Doreen Dauntsey a few years after the war. He paid rent once a year, April 1st, rain, shine or snow – twenty and fifty pound notes just as the Major’s written instructions had insisted – to be paid in cash to Mrs. Dauntsey.
“I’ll happily send the Major a cheque,” he’d offered numerous times. “It’ll save you having to traipse all the way up here every year.”
But she wouldn’t hear of it. “My husband insists that I come to make sure everything is in order, Mr. McAllister,” she had said more than once.
“I allus felt like I was buying off a blackmailer or paying a ransom,” he told the Scottish policeman. “A bundle of used notes in a brown paper parcel. She never counted it. ‘Och, I’m sure I can trust you, Mr. McAllister – good day to you,’ she’d say, then take the next train away home.”
“It’s difficult to believe that Jonathon thought his father was still alive,” Bliss told the group, “Although he may have been so much under his mother’s influence that he went along with it for fear of upsetting her. She was apparently quite convincing. ‘He’s in Scotland – at the estate,’ she’d say to anybody enquiring, and they would breathe a sigh of relief, mumbling, ‘Thank Christ for that.’”
“But what about his family?” asked a thick-thighed policewoman in a brave pair of shorts. “What about siblings, cousins, uncles. Did nobody ever check?”
“Obviously not.”
The street had relaxed when Bliss arrived at his house in London. It was Saturday, the double-manned surveillance car was either needed elsewhere or the crew were luxuriating in the rare pleasure of a weekend off. Unfettered residents, taking advantage of the summery weather, tarted up their cars without feeling spied upon, and children took a rare opportunity to kick a ball or throw a stone without getting yelled at by an unnecessarily anxious parent. Only Bliss, and the surveillance officers, knew the last thing in the world they cared about was what some snotty-nosed kid was doing in the street – unless it was a big snotty-nosed kid with a mask and a shotgun.