“Murder ...” breathed the doctor, falling meditatively back into his chair. “I had no idea.”
The bullet had been the clincher. Bliss had dug it out of the woodwork as soon as the ladder arrived. Samantha, Arnie and the scenes of crime officer clustered around him as he descended with it clamped between thumb and forefinger.
“Thought so,” he said, peering beyond the slug to watch Arnie’s reaction. “So it was Jonathon who killed him.”
Paling noticeably from his usual florid complexion, Arnie found himself fascinated by something deep in the bowl of his pipe, and devoted himself to removing it with the sharp end of a reamer.
“How are you feeling now?” asked Bliss, with a cheery smile as Jonathon shuffled into the doctor’s office and deflated himself into a padded armchair.
“Better,” he mumbled, fixing his gaze on his bare right foot.
The room which had been brightly streaked by the late afternoon sun suddenly dimmed. Jonathon’s depression was contagious and Bliss found himself staring at his own foot and dropping his voice in sympathy. “I’ve been giving some thought to what you said the first time we met, Jonathon. About the two fates of dread death – do you remember?”
Bliss felt, rather than saw, Jonathon’s nod of agreement and continued. “Now I know what you meant. You had a choice, didn’t you? You could only hope to save your mother by sacrificing your father.” He paused – waiting; watching for a response; a sign; anything.
The psychiatrist seemed to spot something in Jonathon’s face. “Just carry on, Inspector,” he said quietly. “Mr. Dauntsey is listening.”
“The only problem was that you didn’t know who your father was ... did you? And I’m pretty sure you knew the man in the attic wasn’t your father.”
Jonathon’s foot had developed a nervous tremble, riveting his own and everyone else’s eyes, then he mumbled, as if speaking to the foot.
“Sorry?” quizzed Bliss. “Did you say something?”
Jonathon didn’t look up. “I said I had no idea there was a man in the attic.”
“So – if you didn’t know he was there, why are you trying to convince me you bumped him off?”
The psychiatrist looked ready to kill Bliss. Hadn’t they just agreed? “You can talk to him for five minutes in my presence, but you’re not to confront him with the murder.” Bliss had no need to ask really. He knew Jonathon was the killer. The re-enactment in the turret bedroom had shown that.
With a high-backed Windsor chair brought from the kitchen to represent Captain Tippen’s wheelchair, Bliss had quickly set the scene.
“You play the Captain,” he said to Arnie, pulling him toward the seat, but the old man shied away as if it had been electrified.
“Not me. I ain’t doin’ it,” he cried, squirming out of Bliss’s grasp.
“I’ll do it myself then,” said Bliss, dismissing Arnie’s refusal without comment, leaping into the chair and shuffling around until he was facing the hole, high up in the wooden panel, from where he had extricated the bullet. “Now ... Samantha. You pretend to be Doreen Dauntsey. Come up behind me and put a gun to the back of my head.”
“I get it,” cried Samantha, without even trying. “It had to be Jonathon.”
“So, Jonathon. You say you killed him.” Bliss continued, with no regard for the promise he’d given the psychiatrist.
“Shot him.”
“O.K. You shot him. Where exactly were you at the time?”
Jonathon closed his eyes in concentration. “I can’t remember ...” Then he looked up and the pain in his eyes said he was trying.
“Can you remember what you did when you were nine?” he asked in frustration.
“I remember I didn’t kill anyone.” Jonathon narrowed his eyes and stared accusingly. “How do you know? How can you be that positive? Until your sergeant told me you’d found a body in the attic, I remembered nothing about it.”
“But you say you remember shooting him.”
“I suppose it was him, I’ve sometimes thought about what happened but I could never get a clear picture.” His eyes shifted to the ceiling as if seeking a revelation in the jumble of pipes and wires. “In the end I assumed it was a bad dream, or a book I’d once read. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t have been real ...” he continued, his voice failing.
“Repressed memories,” breathed the psychiatrist scribbling furiously as Jonathon drew a curtain over his eyes and stared intently at nothing.
Back in the turret room, the scenes of crime officer, a civilian trained to find clues not interpret them, had failed to appreciate the significance of Samantha standing behind Bliss with a gun in her hand, pretending to be Doreen Dauntsey. “Why do you say that proves it was Jonathon?” he asked, with a vacant expression.
Bliss hopped back into the Windsor chair. “Alright,” he said. “Why don’t you pretend to be Jonathon and stand behind me with a gun?”
The young officer obliged and poked his forefinger into the back of Bliss’s skull.
“Have you forgotten something lad?” said Bliss, spinning his head around to look up at the man.
“Sir ...?”
“Jonathon was only nine at the time. How tall were you when you were nine?”
The bullet hole in the wall stared the officer in the face and he blushed at his own stupidity. “Of course, Sir,” he said, crouching down and sighting along his finger as it pointed up into Bliss’s head and on up in a direct line into the woodwork close to the ceiling.
“Jonathon,” continued Bliss, deciding he’d had long enough to ponder. “What do you remember about the man in the turret room?”
“He was ugly ...” started Jonathon in a rush, but his voice faded again as he gave his words some thought. “I don’t know …” Then he picked himself up, seeming to gather his thoughts, and answered directly to Bliss. “Actually, I’m not sure whether I remember him that way or whether that’s a reflection of what other’s have told me. He was in a wheelchair, I remember that. I only ever saw him that way. I knew he was different, and I knew people whispered about him behind my back.” He smiled as a warmer memory slid over his face. “I remember his toy soldiers – his little army, he called them.” Then a deep shadow fell – Jonathon had retreated into a nightmare.
The psychiatrist was on his feet in seconds. “You’d better leave,” he said, his face as grey as Jonathon’s.
“Nurse!” he shouted, and a plump woman in sickly green barrelled into the room. “Show these officers out ...” he started, but Jonathon unfroze with a scream that held them all rigid.
“I thought the fire alarm had gone off,” Samantha said a few minutes later, as she and Bliss sat in the cafeteria trying to calm themselves over coffee.
“He was like a wild animal ...”
“A bloody werewolf,” she cut in.
Jonathon’s cries had stalked them down the corridor. “I killed him! I killed him! I killed him!” he was screeching, pleading for judgement, and a worried army of white coats had scurried past them, rushing to the psychiatrist’s aid.
“You were right then, Dave,” she said, adding extra sugar to her double-espresso.
“Looks