“Massacred?” echoed Bliss, probing gently.
Arnie turned from the window, his face suddenly pale, his cheeks sunken. “The Jerries was on ’em in a flash,” he explained. “Damn near wiped ’em out. Only an ’andful got away an’ they wuz all pretty badly shot-up, the Major included.”
“So they didn’t have a chance to retreat.”
Arnie flashed him such a dirty look that Bliss realised immediately he had missed the point.
“’Course they ’ad time to retreat, plenty of bloomin’ time,” he spat. “But the Major was such a prissy-ass ’e weren’t gonna leave the place in a such a state. Didn’t want the bloody Boche accusing ’em of being scruffy so-an-so’s, ’e said. So ’e ’ad all ’is troops running round tidying the place up, even made ’em pick up all the shell casings and put ’em in neat piles.”
Patterson, who had been stewing in silent contemplation since Dowding’s revelation about Bliss’s registration number, couldn’t contain himself. “You’re joking.”
Arnie looked offended and crossed himself, saying, “As God is my witness – ’e made ’is men pick up every last bit of rubbish – even filled in the latrines – an’ all the time the Jerries were picking ’em off. Everyone hereabouts knows what ’appened – ask any of ’em. That’s why when ’e come back no-one would ’ave anything to do wiv him, only old Doc Fitzpatrick. An’ rumour ’as it as how the old Doc only treated ’im ’cos ’e went private an’ always paid cash.”
Bliss cogitated on the ridiculous spectacle of troops tidying up the battlefield under fire and, despite Arnie’s invocation of the Supreme Commander, put it down to the sort of outlandish rumour that would be spread about any unpopular officer. “You’ll have to carry on here,” he said to Patterson, feeling he’d heard enough. “I’ve got some business to attend to in London this afternoon. I’ll be back before nine for the re-enactment.”
Patterson gave him a jaundiced look then bobbed out of his seat. “I’d better get back to the station,” he said quickly, then mumbled about the need to supervise the house-to-house enquiries.
“I was rather hoping you could arrange to get Arnie home.”
Arnie heard. “I could prob’ly make me own way if I ’ad another pint,” he said, his voice pained in self-sacrifice, as he held out the empty glass and slumped comfortably back in the deep chair.
Chapter Six
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Sidestepping a guilty feeling that he was abandoning the hunt for the Major, telling himself there was little he could do until the body surfaced, Bliss set off for London. The driver of a small blue Volvo obligingly let him escape from the Mitre car park into the High Street and, with a quick salute of thanks, he slipped his Rover into the stream of traffic heading out of town toward the motorway.
The grey overcast had evaporated into milky blue and the hazy sun was already drying off the damp pavements as Bliss navigated the narrow streets, barely aware that the Volvo was tagging along behind. As the road opened up Bliss swept aside the fears that had been with him since the morning’s visit to the Dauntsey house and he found himself conducting the 1812 overture, volume blaring, bass speakers pulsating.
The music, erupting with canons, muskets and rifle volleys, rose in a crescendo and transported Bliss away from the bloody murder of the Major to another time, another place, and an altogether different scenario of violent death. In his mind he conjured formations of brightly festooned French Dragoons sweeping across the steppes, swooping out of the early morning mist, sabres and lances glinting in the sunrise, only to be mown down by a terrifying rabble of Cossacks armed with broadswords.
The triumphant chorus and jubilant peel of bells signified the finale of the orchestrated battle and Bliss savoured each chord almost as though it were the last time he would hear it. The final strains hung in his ears for a few seconds then the air stilled. The gentle buzz of the engine and the steady hum of the tyres on the road seemed only to augment the sense of tranquillity that had returned. Bliss loosened his grip on the wheel, relaxed back into his seat and glanced in the rear-view mirror. He jerked alert – the Volvo was still there and a chill rippled through him as he caught a glimpse of it slipping in behind a van. “Don’t be stupid,” he chided himself, dismissing immediately the possibility that he was being followed.
Why would someone be following me?
You know why. You remember what Mandy Richards’ murderer had screamed across the courtroom at the Old Bailey? He remembered. The killer’s words were forever burned into his brain. “I’ll get you for this copper – I’ll get you.”
Forget it, thought Bliss. Ignore it – it’ll go away. Like you ignored the threatening letters, the midnight phone-calls and the shadowy stalker, until someone put a bomb through your letterbox and took out your front door.
O.K., he conceded, but don’t panic. He’ll be more nervous than me.
Why? He’s done it before, remember. And he’s already spent one lifetime in prison: becoming acclimatised to the routine, inured to the coarseness and violence and revelling in the irresponsibility of institutional life. So how will he do it – run me off the road into a bridge support; pull alongside and put a single bullet in my brain; or pick off a tyre and laugh as I lose control and career into a bus or truck.
Passing an exit ramp, he checked the mirrors again. A small blue car was dissolving into the distance as it slowed in the deceleration lane and he admonished himself for allowing his imagination to run away with him. With a sigh of relief he rummaged through a glove-box of cassette tapes, seeking something less climactic than Tchaikovsky, and pulled himself together, telling himself that he was being ridiculous. A hit-man wouldn’t be driving a Volvo, he told himself. A hit-man wouldn’t be seen dead in a Volvo. Hoodlums don’t drive poky little Volvos with more safety features than a spermicidal condom. He would be a Jag man, or a Mercedes or BMW. Even the smallest of petty villains could manage a Jaguar, especially a hot one, and Mandy’s murderer was no small time villain.
Relaxing, Bliss amused himself with the notion of a villain turning up at a mobster’s convention, wearing a slick suit with an ominous bulge under his left armpit, driving a little blue family saloon. But five minutes later the Volvo was still there and his pulse raced as he spotted it tailgating a large yellow rental van with the hire company’s telephone number emblazoned across the bonnet. Ignoring the blare of an annoyed motorist’s horn he eased out and straddled the white line as he manoeuvred into a position where he could see the following driver. Peering deeply into the mirror he sought a familiar face, and a familiar pair of eyes – the same icy eyes that had stared unflinchingly at him across the courtroom eighteen years earlier as he stood in the witness box describing the pointless murder of Mandy Richards. But he couldn’t see, not clearly. His vision was obscured by distance and the constantly shifting traffic that conspired time and again to block his view.
Vowing to concentrate on his driving, he dismissed worries about the Volvo but couldn’t dislodge Mandy Richards from his mind, demanding to know whether he would have ducked if he’d known someone was behind him in the bank? But he’d been through this a thousand times – knew the answer – knew there was no answer. He had ducked – flinging himself sprawling onto the floor as the blast ripped through the space he’d vacated – nothing could change that.
Mandy Richards’ memory continued its torment as he sped along. She would have been thirty-eight, if she’d lived, he calculated, recalling that she had been twenty when both barrels of the shotgun exploded and ripped a cavity in her chest large enough to get his fist into. She had been a pretty girl, beautiful he had thought, seeing her framed photograph propped on her coffin at the funeral, though he’d not noticed at the time of the shooting. His eyes and mind had focused only on the gaping wound.
A mental snapshot of the scene in the bank hit him with the stark clarity of an unkind mirror and the road ahead dissolved into images of screaming bank customers, terrified tellers cr
ouching behind the counter, and a tiny girl in a red dress clutching her mother’s hand while a puddle of pee grew around her feet. And there, spread-eagled on the floor, the lifeless bundle of flesh that had been Mandy Richards.
He had seen the shots coming, not physically, not with his eyes. It was more of a feeling – a pulse of evil intent so strong he would have known the man was going to fire even if he hadn’t noticed the fingers tightening on the triggers. He had dropped to the floor, oblivious to the fact that the young woman was standing right behind him. She’d not felt the evil stare, hadn’t seen the tensing fingers. She was, in any case, too petrified to move in any direction.
The blast of acrid smoke from the gunshot still filled the air as Bliss picked himself off the floor, stared in horror for a fraction of a second at the crumpled rag-doll figure, then, without any deliberation as to the consequences, lunged at the hooded villain. Snatching the gun out of the startled man’s hand he set about him, slamming the barrels into his ribs, doubling him over, then pounding him repeatedly over the head until an assistant manager vaulted the counter, staid his arm, and brought him to his senses.
The gunman, a professional mobster in a comical Maggie Thatcher mask, slumped motionless into a corner with tendrils of blood dribbling out from under the mask and creeping down his T-shirt and Bliss stood back, his elation quickly turning to horror as he realised what he’d done. It had been the mask, he reasoned later when he’d had a chance to cool down. He couldn’t have beaten an unarmed man senseless, whatever the provocation, but, dehumanised by the mask, the robber had brought the attack on himself.
What else could I have done? What else could I have done? he kept asking himself as both customers and staff cringed fearfully away from him. And he was stunned by the look of revulsion on the face of the woman clutching the wet child. Who was the villain here?
“Police!” he shouted to the stunned bystanders as if justifying his actions. “Get an ambulance!” he continued, screaming at no-one in particular, rushing across the blood-slickened marble floor to tend to the young woman who had taken the blast intended for him.
“Oh my God,” he sighed, seeing her pulverised chest, mentally tearing through the Red Cross first-aid manual, desperately searching for guidance on gunshot wounds – but his mental page was blank. O.K. Don’t panic, he said to himself, think about the general rules. The three “B’s” of first-aid flashed instantly to mind and he easily recalled the first two. “Breathing, Bleeding, and ...” but then his mind froze, unable to remember the third. He gave up and went with the first two, deciding the ambulancemen would arrive within seconds and take over before he had need of the third.
Picking up one of the girl’s limp wrists he dug in his fingers desperately searching for the rhythmic beat of a pulse – nothing. He gripped harder, so hard that he felt the beat of his own heart pulsing through his fingertips and, with rising optimism, stuck his ear to her mouth. She wasn’t breathing. She had nothing to breath with. A couple of hundred lead pellets had turned her lungs into pin cushions. But he wouldn’t give up – he couldn’t give up. It was his fault. If he hadn’t been so stupid. “Armed police,” he had shouted at the robber. Armed with what? A blank cheque and a ballpoint Biro.
“Get a fucking ambulance!” he screamed again as he knelt over her, still searching his memory for a meaning to accompany the third “B.”
“Stop the bleeding,” he ordered himself, but she wasn’t bleeding, the blood pump that had been her heart was as decimated as her lungs. “Put her in the recovery position then.” Recover – from this?
With his mind racing, desperately searching for a way to resurrect the dead girl until a doctor or ambulanceman could arrive with a defibrillator and oxygen mask, he set about tidying up her dishevelled chest. One breast ripped aside by the blast, still clinging to her body with a flap of skin, had flopped loosely to one side and he tenderly positioned the bloodied mound of flesh back in place but, beyond that, could think of little to do other than search for a pulse again, and again, and again.
Over the years, images of that displaced breast had sprung to mind whenever he thought of Mandy. It was her pulped lungs and pulverised heart that had ceased to keep her alive but, deep in his psyche, it was her mutilated breast that symbolised her demise.
“Where’s the ambulance?” he cried, convinced that someone with the right training could work a miracle.
“Where’s the police,” echoed one of the survivors huddling in a corner well away from the bandit and the dead woman.
“I am the police,” he screeched, stung by the implied criticism.
It had only been a couple of minutes since the gun’s blast had fractured the air and filled the young woman’s chest with lead-shot, yet those minutes had the mind-concentrating intensity of a hand grenade with the pin pulled. Do something! Do something! Bliss was screaming inside. Then he had a revelation, breathed “cardiac massage” in relief, and was convinced he had solved the first-aid riddle.
His elation wilted almost immediately as he realised that Mandy’s chest offered absolutely nothing solid to palpitate. Her sternum and half a dozen ribs had been blown into shards. His heart sank and, with an impatient eye on the door, he was reduced to carefully arranging her body ready for a stretcher. Ignoring the hole in her chest, inwardly praying that it might somehow heal itself, he stretched out her legs, smoothed the creases out of her skirt which had ruckled under her bottom.
“Put her in the recovery position,” suggested someone in the huddle of terrified customers.
Recover! From this? He said to himself and sat back, downhearted, to wait for the ambulance.
A close call with a speeding Rolls startled him from the nightmarish spectacle in the bank and forced him to check the mirror. The Volvo was still there. He shrugged it off as simply a coincidence, concluding that the driver just happened to be travelling to London, the same as him. However, a mile or so further on he felt himself soaring with relief as the other driver signalled his intention of leaving the motorway and swooped into the deceleration lane. Thank God, Bliss thought, switching his eyes and attention back to the road ahead. Behind him the trailing car took the exit lane and slowed to a crawl. Then, at the last moment, the Volvo swung back onto the motorway, tucked swiftly in behind a large pantechnicon and resumed the chase.
Bliss had just got his mind away from Mandy’s breasts and back on the Dauntsey mystery when fast approaching road works forced him to a crawl amongst bunching traffic. Slowing, he checked his mirror and caught a familiar flash of blue. “Shit!” he shouted, although he still couldn’t shift the underlying notion that a killer wouldn’t be seen dead in a Volvo.
O.K., I’ve had enough, he said to himself, pulled into the slow lane without indication, slammed on the brakes and steered for the hard shoulder.
“Let’s see what you do now,” he said, telepathically addressing the pursuer.
The Volvo shot past in a blur, tangled up in a knot of cars vans and trucks, but the glimpse of the driver’s profile was sufficient to tell him that the man was certainly of the right age and colour.
Skidding to a stop in a cloud of loose gravel, Bliss found himself next to an emergency phone and was already out of the car and picking it up before he stopped himself. What’s the point – what’s the emergency? I think I’m being followed! He dropped the phone with the realisation that he would have the motorway control officer in stitches.
“Some clown at Junction 129 reckons he’s being followed,” he imagined him laughing to his colleagues with his hand over the mouthpiece. “Can you give me a description?” the officer would ask with a barely concealed smirk.
“A blue Volvo.”
“And the registration number ...?”
“I don’t know ... S registration. I think.”
“You think?”
“I couldn’t see properly.”
The hand would slide back over the mouthpiece, “He says he couldn’t see.”
“What about
the driver, Sir? Could you see him?” he imagined the next question might be.
“Male, white,” he would say and cringe while the control officer repeated the description sarcastically before saying, “I guess there’s not more than a quarter of a million Volvo drivers in the country fitting that description, Sir. It shouldn’t be too difficult working out which one was following you.”
“You don’t understand,” he would say in frustration, “this man’s a killer.”
“O.K., Sir. In that case you’d better give me a full description.”
That’s a good point – what does he look like? he asked himself, deciding against using the phone and getting back into the car. What did he look like 18 years ago? he tried to recall, then realised that the exercise was pointless. The killer would have gone from being little more than a teenager to almost middle-age in the intervening years. And what had eighteen years in prison done to him? He’d be forty-one now, thought Bliss, feeling foolish as he drove off, quickly picking up speed.
The Volvo, bonnet up, looking like a breakdown victim, was parked on the next overpass with the driver carefully scrutinising the vehicles passing below. Bliss’s Rover came into view and in a flash the blue bonnet was dropped and the small car was hurtling down the approach ramp and back on the motorway. Bliss saw. Already spooked, his senses were on high alert and he caught a glimpse of the blue car weaving in and out of traffic as the driver struggled to catch up to him.
“One more test,” he mused and patiently waited until the car had settled into place behind a Volkswagen van. Then he indicated his intention of moving into the fast lane.
Missing: Presumed Dead Page 10
