Missing: Presumed Dead

by James Hawkins

  Chapter Eighteen

  _____________________________

  Jonathon Dauntsey stalled at the top of the main staircase, steadying himself against the balustrade. Bliss strode ahead into the turret bedroom with a lightness of spirit he’d not experienced on his previous visits. “C’mon, Jonathon. Are you going to show me where you shot him or not?”

  “Is this where it happened?” asked Samantha, peering into the room and up into the gaping hole in the ceiling.

  “That’s what Jonathon’s about to tell us, isn’t it, Jonathon?” replied Bliss, turning just in time to see the other man’s pallid face disappearing back down the stairs. “Jonathon!” he called, but the fleeing figure didn’t flinch.

  “He’s a strange one,” sighed Bliss, turning back to Samantha.

  “Aren’t you going after him?”

  “No. He’ll come back if he wants to ... Anyway, I don’t need him at the moment,” he added, sidling slowly around the room, head back, examining the oak-panelled walls and ornately carved cornice just below the ceiling.

  “Are you going to tell him we know it was a pig in the duvet?” she asked, staring at the walls with him.

  “Not yet. He’ll only say something clever like: ‘That’s a bit of a swine, Inspector.’”

  “Dave ...?” she queried vaguely, still craning.

  “What?”

  “What are we supposed to be looking for?”

  “That!” he cried triumphantly, pointing to a small hole in the panelling high up on the wall.

  She squinted. “It looks like a knot-hole in the wood to me.”

  “It could be. Let’s get a ladder and find out.”

  Jonathon was cowering in a cubby-hole behind the kitchen door when they went looking for a ladder, and they would have missed him had Bliss not thought it a likely place to search.

  “Oh there you are, Jonathon,” Bliss started breezily, caught off balance at finding him in such an odd place. But Jonathon wasn’t there. He was miles away and his blank stare said, “Do not disturb.”

  “Jonathon,” said Samantha, easing him out of the recess as she soothed one of his hands, “Why don’t you come and sit down and tell us what’s the matter?”

  He moved like a man on a ledge, taking little hesitant steps; staring, terrified, dead ahead; gripping Samantha’s hand with white-knuckle force as she led him toward the scrubbed pine table in the centre of the room. “Get a chair, Dave,” she said from the corner of her mouth. “You’ll be alright, Jonathon,” she told him with a concerned kindliness, feeling she should add – don’t worry, you won’t fall. But the look on his face said he had already fallen.

  “He’s got a hole in his head, Mum,” said Jonathon, staring right through Samantha and looking deep into the past.

  “Sit down ... ” she started, but Bliss gently elbowed her aside. “Who’s got a hole in his head, Jonathon?” he probed gently.

  Jonathon’s face turned to Bliss but his eyes continued to hunt the room with the apprehension of a cornered fox. “Daddy has ... Daddy’s got a hole in his head.”

  The ambulance had probably been unnecessary. In his catatonic state they could have bundled Jonathon into Bliss’s Rover and driven him to the psychiatric wing of Westchester General with as much speed and less commotion, but Bliss was concerned he might suddenly snap out of the trance and become hysterical.

  “I’ve never seen anyone fall apart like that before,” said Samantha as the ambulance pulled away. “What on earth’s happened to him?”

  “I think he finally solved the case of the dead captain, and didn’t like the outcome.”

  “What outcome? I thought you said Doreen shot him. I don’t understand.”

  “Help me find a ladder and we’ll know for sure.”

  Arnie caught them in the act as they rummaged through a stack of dusty old planks and beams in one of the outbuildings. “Oy. What’ye doin’ ...?” he began, arming himself with a handy stick, then he recognised Bliss. “Oh ’tis you again.”

  “Hello, Arnie – looking for a ladder. Is there one around?”

  “Out back,” he said, staring at Samantha, waiting for an introduction.

  “Sergeant Holingsworth,” said Bliss. “This is Arnie. He knew the Major; father worked for the Colonel; likes a pint.”

  Her smile disarmed the old man and he beamed, toothlessly, as he led them to the rear of the outbuildings and started hacking creepers off a homemade ladder. “Me old man made this,” he wheezed, prompting Bliss to pull out his cell-phone. “I’ll get the station to send a new one.”

  Superintendent Donaldson wanted to speak to him, the control room telephonist advised him and put him through to the senior officer.

  “Mrs. Dauntsey’s here, Dave,” mumbled Donaldson through a mouthful of chocolate biscuit – making up for the missed dessert. “She insists on seeing you; claims she’s escaped from a nursing home; wants to let you know she shot the man in her attic; says she used the Major’s service revolver.”

  “Ask her where he was when she killed him, will you.”

  “She said he was in his room in the turret.”

  “In his wheelchair?”

  “Yes.”

  “I guessed as much.”

  “Do you want me to have her arrested?”

  “No, Guv. But I think somebody should take her to the General hospital to see Jonathon. Confessing may be good for the soul, but those two could keep the Pope boxed in for a month. They should try to get their stories straight.”

  “Is that a good idea?” asked Samantha as he closed his phone. “Shouldn’t they be kept apart until we know for sure who did it.”

  “But I know already,” said Bliss. “Or I will as soon as the ladder arrives.”

  Arnie was still struggling to free the makeshift ladder from the tentacles of a vine. “Don’t bother with that, Arnie,” called Bliss, and waited while the old man got his breath back sufficiently to light his pipe. “Mrs. Dauntsey tells me you took out the staircase from the turret room attic,” he lied, with an expression innocent enough to fool an Old Bailey judge.

  “So what if I did?” Arnie coughed through a blue haze.

  “Nothing ...” Bliss turned away to conceal a smirk of satisfaction. “I just wondered where it was, that’s all.”

  “’Tis over there amongst the stingin’ nettles.”

  Much of the spiral wrought iron staircase had dissolved into the ground, and the remainder had been swallowed by vegetation, but its tubular shape had endured and Bliss kicked away some of the nettles for verification. “This is it,” he called to Samantha, then teetered back in fright as a hen flew out of the undergrowth squawking angrily. “There’s a nest here,” he added with obvious astonishment, peering into the void and finding a clutch of brown eggs.

  “How did you know there had been a staircase into the attic?” asked Samantha, a country girl, unimpressed by the novelty of a chicken’s nest.

  “I didn’t. It was just guesswork – I couldn’t figure how Doreen could have got Tippen’s body up there on a ladder, so I thought: What if there used to be stairs?”

  “So it was Doreen who killed him then?”

  “Is that the scenes of crime van?” said Bliss, hearing a vehicle’s tyres crunching on the gravel driveway at the front of the house. “Let’s get the ladder, shall we?” he said, striding away.

  “Mr. Dauntsey is here under observation,” said the hospital’s resident psychiatrist as Bliss and Samantha sat in his office an hour later. He might have said, “Piss off and stop interfering,” the tone would have been the same. Bliss sized him up: mid-twenties – hoping the moustache will add a few years; still practising to write illegibly; still believing everybody needs a shrink. You haven’t got the faintest idea what’s going on in the real world, mate, thought Bliss, saying, “I think I can help ... ” But the doctor rose with his hand outstretched and a bilious smile. “Just leave him to us, Inspector. He’ll be fine.”

  Samantha started to get u
p but Bliss was unmoved. “It’s not that simple, I’m afraid, Doctor. You see Jonathon Dauntsey is wanted for murder ...” He waited for the word to sink in. “Personally, I’d like nothing more than to talk to him for a few moments and leave him in your capable hands, but, if that’s not possible ... ” He paused long enough to throw open his hands disclaiming responsibility, “If that’s not possible then we’ll have no option but to arrest him and take him with us.”

  “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 like it. Although I still don’t know his motive.”

  “How did you figure it out?”

  “Something’s been niggling me ever since the post mortem,” he said, recalling the effervescent pathologist poking his finger into the entry wound in Tippen’s skull. “There was no corresponding exit wound. Which meant, either the bullet didn’t have sufficient velocity to break out of the skull, in w
hich case we would have found it with the body, or, it escaped without leaving a hole.”

  “Through an existing hole,” conjectured Samantha, picturing the scene.

  “Quite,” he said, impressed. “Imagine: Jonathon has got behind him with the loaded gun. He tips his head back trying to see the boy and ‘Bang.’ Point blank range. The bullet pierces the skull, goes through the brain like a hot knife in butter, shoots out of his eye and up into the wall.”

  “Ugh,” she screwed up her nose at the thought.

  “If Doreen or another adult had shot him the bullet would have gone down into the floor. It had to be someone short; a nine-year-old; Jonathon.”

  “And you think Doreen covered up for him?”

  “She had too much to lose by his death. Though I doubt she did it on her own.”

  “Arnie?” she mouthed.

  Bliss raised his eyebrows over his coffee cup.

  With the re-enactment in the turret room completed, Arnie’s face had dropped when Bliss and Samantha said they were heading for the hospital to check on Jonathon. “You ain’t goin’ back to the Mite’er then?” he said, clearly salivating over a Guinness. When Bliss shook his head, he whined, “I wouldn’t ’a told you about the bloomin’ stairs if I’d known that.”

  Bliss turned on him sharply – face to face. “I should be careful what you say if I were you, Arnie, before I start wondering how Mrs. Dauntsey managed to get the body up those stairs on her own, how she plastered up the ceiling, and how you didn’t notice a body when you took out the staircase. ”

  “He went purple,” laughed Samantha as they drove away. “Talk about apoplectic. I was wondering if he was ever going to catch his breath.”

  “It’s almost a pity we can’t offer opinion in evidence,” sniggered Bliss. “That’s not the first time I could have said, ‘The defendant looked as though he’d pooped himself, Me’lord.’”

  The psychiatrist came to find them halfway through a third coffee. “I’m glad you’re still here,” he said, looking anything but glad. “Mr. Dauntsey is asking to speak to you.”