“Sometimes I used to believe he was still there and Mum only said he’d gone to Scotland so he couldn’t play with me. I used to call through the keyhole, ‘Dad – are you there?’ I was sure I could hear him crying at night when I was in bed. I wanted to say sorry. I only ever wanted to say I was sorry. But I never did.”
“Did you tell your mother you’d shot him?”
“She said I’d missed, and that it wasn’t a real bullet anyway. It was only like my potato gun ...” Pausing, he looked at Bliss. “Did you have one of those?”
“Yes,” nodded Bliss, “I think everyone did,”
“I only ever wanted to say sorry, but I never could – he was gone forever.” He looked at Bliss. “Isn’t that a terrible thing, Inspector – never having the chance to say sorry?”
Mandy Richards flashed into Bliss’s mind. “Yes, Jonathon, it’s a terrible thing,” he mumbled, seeing a picture of himself leaning over her on the floor of the bank, his ear pressed to her mouth, listening for the faintest trace of a breath, as he whispered, “I’m sorry.” But it was too late, she’d gone.
“I went to the estate in Scotland to beg Dad for money so I could take mother to Switzerland,” Jonathon continued, without expecting a reply from Bliss. “There’s a Doctor in Lucerne who could cure her,” he explained enthusiastically, oblivious to the scepticism in the faces surrounding him. “I needed twenty thousand pounds for the treatment alone – plus the expenses, but the farmer said he’d never seen my father, only my mother. He said my father had never lived there. I told him he was mistaken.” Then his face and voice dropped, his eyes went back to his foot. “There was no mistake. Mum had been lying to me all those years, making excuses whenever I said I wanted to visit him. She said it would be too painful for him to see me, that I would remind him of what he’d lost.”
He paused, glancing from face to face as if mystified by their presence, then focused intently on Bliss and looked straight through him. “Once I knew he wasn’t in Scotland the only alternative was that Mum had killed him – Why else would she have lied to me? But I couldn’t ask her could I?” He paused to look at the psychiatrist, pleading for understanding. “What on earth should I have said ...?”
The young doctor shook his head. He had no answers, only questions.
Jonathon had an answer of sort. “I thought I’d just sell the estate, or get a mortgage on the house, but when I went to a solicitor I found I couldn’t. Both properties were still in Dad’s name alone. Only he could sell them – unless he was dead.”
“So he had to die, and be seen to be dead,” said Bliss, pleased he’d been right almost from the start, “And I assume the blood on the duvet was yours. You must have bled yourself dry to get enough.”
“You knew?”
“You shouldn’t have thrown the syringe in the stove.”
“You found it?”
Bliss nodded, with no intention of ever admitting that Patterson had disregarded it.
“I knew I should have got rid of it properly. I worried about it when I was in the cells.”
“And the pig?” prompted Bliss.
“You know about the pig as well?”
They knew all about the pig. They had stopped off to see George, the butcher, on their way to the hospital. The purchase of the stuffed goat had apparently elevated Bliss to celebrity status. “Ah, my dear Chief Inspector,” greeted George, using his barrelling gut to clear a path through a pack of housewives, dragging him and Samantha to the front of the counter. “What a pleasure to see you again. I’ve got a nice leg of lamb ...”
“Actually, I wanted a few words,” said Bliss, nodding toward the back room.
“Of course,” said George, yelling for his assistant to take over, ignoring the mumbles of dissent from the waiting customers. “Won’t keep you a moment, ladies,” he said to the crowd, and opened a flap in the counter to usher them through.
A side of pork lay conveniently on a wooden block in the back room and Bliss used it as a prop. “I was wondering, George,” he pointed. “If I needed a pig in a hurry, where would I get one?”
“You wanna whole one?”
“A live one ...” he started, then stopped in memory of his first day at Westchester police station, in the C.I.D. office – D.C. Dowding ragging Daphne about crop circles in the cornfield behind her house. What had Dowding said? Pig rustling? Somebody had stolen a pig from the farm behind Daphne’s.
“Sorry, George,” he said, turning back to the butcher and changing the question. “What I meant was: If I had a whole pig, how would I get rid of it?”
“Eat it,” suggested George, scratching his head unnecessarily.
“That would be a lot of pork.”
“You could sell it then.”
“Would you buy it?”
Turning to the side of pork as if it suddenly demanded his attention, he hacked at the hind leg with a meat cleaver, uttering a requisite with each downward stroke. “Ministry licence; health inspection; quality control ...”
“So,” said Bliss, catching a quiet moment, “what you are saying is that even at the right price, you wouldn’t buy a pig from someone who wasn’t a bona fide supplier?”
“I didn’t exactly say that, Chief Inspector ... ” he began, his loyalty clearly torn between someone who would purchase his stuffed goat and whoever had sold him a pig.
Bliss cottoned on and turned up the heat. “You’d better start getting all your books and records together then, George. And I’ll ask the tax people to come in and do an audit ... ”
“That won’t be necessary,” he said, laying down the cleaver in resignation. “I knew I shouldn’t buy it. Knew I’d get caught. But he assured me it was all above board. Reckoned he’d hand reared it in his back yard. Nothing wrong with that.”
“Who?” asked Bliss, as if he didn’t know.
“Jonathon Dauntsey, of course. I knew you’d find out sooner or later. He pinched it, didn’t he?”
“Did he?”
“I ain’t stupid, Chief Inspector. I should’ve known summit were up when he said he’d bring it round in middle of Sunday night.”
“So what happened to it?”
“You ate it. Well some of it, anyhow.”
“Me?”
“Yeah. Mrs. Lovelace bought some chops for your dinner. I remember her telling me it was for the new chief inspector. It were on Monday last week. His lordship, Jonathon Dauntsey, had left it in me cold store the night before. He must have had it a few days ’cos it were just ready for butcherin’.”
“What time did he bring it round?”
“I don’t rightly know. I always visit me old mum on Sunday evenings: tea, church, watch telly. Got back about eleven, an’ it were hangin’ up in the back just as he promised.”
“Show me,” said Bliss and George led them out of the rear door along a short red-brick path to an iron shed leant against a high brick wall.
“What’s there?” asked Samantha, seeing only treetops beyond the twelve-foot back wall.
“That be the churchyard,” replied George, and pointed to a narrow door let into the wall. “This is where he got in with the pig,” he explained, opening the unlocked door.
Bliss stuck his head out of the