Читать книгу Inspector Bliss Mysteries 8-Book Bundle - James Hawkins - Страница 20

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 up 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 which 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.”

“What’s happened?” asked Samantha

“It seems as though his conscious mind has finally accepted the situation.”

“That he shot the man he thought was his father?”

The psychiatrist wagged a warning finger. “Just because he admits killing him doesn’t necessarily mean he did it.”

Bliss gave the finger a critical stare and winced at the ragged nail-less flesh and raw cuticles. Psychiatrist, analyse yourself, he thought, and pondered what defences the doctor was cooking up for Jonathon: false memories; guilt complex; retaliation for abandonment. Should I tell him not to bother? he wondered. Should I remind him of the age of criminal responsibility? No – let him have his fun.

Jonathon was a different person on their return. (“Fascinating subject,” said the psychiatrist later. “He’s a nine-year-old in a man’s body.”) The tension had dissolved and his puffy red eyes were lowered in contrition. “I believe I owe you an explanation, Inspector.”

Bliss knew he should be furious – an entire week chasing a dead pig. But Jonathon’s little-boy-lost expression took the sting out of him. “I’d like to know why you did it.”

Jonathon’s face lit in a happier memory. “We used to play wars. I was his little captain, he said; even let me wear a cap. I’d set all the soldiers up – just where he told me.” He paused to stare at the ceiling, then corrected himself. “He couldn’t really talk, but he sort of grunted and pointed with his swagger stick until I got it right.”

The spark in his face faded as a darker memory returned.

“If I didn’t get them just right he hit me with the stick ...” he was saying when tears replaced the smile and he searched his pockets for a tissue.

“Here,” said the psychiatrist offering a well-used box.

“Thanks ...” Jonathon continued, talking to the floor. “Anyway, he’d get me to move his toy soldiers around in battles; manoeuvring battalions or regiments – sometimes entire armies.” He paused, marking time, an alarm sounding in his mind, holding him back, telling him to stop.

“Go on,” said Bliss, and caught a glare of rebuke from the psychiatrist.

“Shush.”

“Each figure represented a hundred or a thousand men,” continued Jonathon after a few seconds, “and the Royal Horse Artillery, his regiment, always had to be in the vanguard, with the gun carriage party leading the way.” Then he froze, his eyes found his foot and the twitching re-started.

“I thought he was going again,” Samantha had said in the car on their way back to the police station. But Jonathon hadn’t “gone.” He was fighting an ancient battle.

“One day I knocked over the major and knelt on him by accident,” he began again, his voice faint, his eyes riveted to his foot. “He was very angry – screaming, ‘Bring him here. Bring him here.’ I saw the tears. I’d never seen him cry before. ‘My major – Look what you’ve done to my major,’ he was crying. ‘It’s only a toy,’ I said, but when I gave it to him he grabbed me.” He paused, tears streaming, and a bubble of silence grew around him – pressurising the small office to bursting point.

“I should have been in bed,” he started again, releasing the valve with a noisy snort. “Mum told me never to go into his room alone.”

“I’m not surprised,” mused Bliss silently.

“But sometimes I’d pretend to go to bed then creep to his room to play with the toys. He was my dad ...” His face crumpled in tears once more. “It was all my fault – I’d squashed his favourite toy.”

“What was your fault?” asked the psychiatrist, anxious not to let the silent tension re-build.

“I was in my pyjamas,” Jonathon mumbled, focusing sharply on the psychiatrist, barely whispering. “And he pulled them down. It was our little secret. He made me promise never to tell.”

Horrific remembrances turned his face into a battlefield of emotions and his eyes swam around the room as if trying to escape the images in his mind. “If he was asleep, I would have my own pretend battles,” he continued, finding a lump of dried chewing-gum on the floor as a focal point. “But when he was awake I had to do exactly what he wanted.” He took his eyes off the floor and looked pleadingly at Bliss. “You do know what I mean, don’t you, Inspector?”

Bliss nodded sombrely.

“I was ashamed. I knew it was wrong, but he was my dad,” he continued, covering his eyes with his hands, trying to block out the images. “I couldn’t tell Mum. He said it was our little secret. Then one day I said, ‘Stop, Dad – I don’t like it. You’re hurting me. Stop. Please stop.’ But he wouldn’t stop ...”

Jonathon was back in the turret room – a frightened nine-year-old with his pyjamas round his ankles. “I picked up the gun ... Please stop, Dad ... Stop, Dad ... Stop it ... Stop it ...”

The gun went off inside Jonathon’s mind and the whole room jumped as he screeched. “I shot him.”

Nobody spoke. What to say?

“What happened afterwards?” asked Bliss, once the air had settled, hoping to establish Doreen’s involvement – just for the record.

Jonathon dabbed his eyes. “Nothing really. It was as if nothing had happened. His room was always locked and Mum told me he’d gone to live in Scotland where he wouldn’t be able to hurt any other little boys. I felt so sorry for him. I think he was lonely – he just wanted someone to love; someone to love him back; someone warm and soft to touch; someone warm and soft to touch him back.” He blinked back the tears for a few seconds before adding bitterly. “Loneliness is a straight road that leads you nowhere, Inspector.”

Bliss looked at Samantha, but she was staring out of the window, seeking sanity in the stubby branches of a loppy tree.

“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 door, saw Colonel Dauntsey’s elaborate mausoleum only a few feet away, and the newly mounded grave where they had found the duvet only fifty feet further on, and everything became crystal clear. “No wonder we couldn’t find the body,” he mused aloud. “He threw the duvet into the grave to put the dogs off the scent, thirty seconds later dropped off the pig, and two minutes after he’d left the Black Horse with a dead body, all the evidence has gone.”

“But the blood on the duvet was human,” Samantha reminded him.

“Jonathon’s own blood,” replied Bliss, shutting the churchyard door. “That’s what the syringe was for – not to inject an anaesthetic, but to draw out blood.”

“But why?”

“Remember what Doreen said: She couldn’t sell the house or estate because it was in Rupert’s name, and she’d lived off his pension for fifty odd years. Jonathon obviously thought that if he could convince everyone that his father had just died, the property would go to his mother and the pension would simply stop – no questions asked.”

“So he killed the pig and set the whole thing up to make it appear as if he killed Rupert Dauntsey,” said George, hovering inquisitively.

“So, Jonathon. Can you remember when you first realised you had shot somebody?” asked Bliss, more for tidiness than anything else.

“He’s going again,” said Samantha with little finesse as Jonathon’s eyes started swimming.

“I think you’d better leave now,” said the psychiatrist, trying to usher them out, but Jonathon perked up.

“I don’t think I understood death. People just went away when they got old and I remember thinking that I wanted to get old quickly so that I’d be able to visit Dad and tell him I was sorry.”

“He wasn’t your father,” said Bliss, offering the information as comfort, but Jonathon already knew.

“I worked that out a few years ago. Major Dauntsey went to war before I was conceived, but I still considered him to be my father. He was the only father I ever knew, whatever he may have done.”

Bliss dropped his head into his hands with the realisation that Doreen still hadn’t told Jonathon about Tippen.

“I don’t know how to tell you this ...” he began, then explained what he knew of Tippen and his relationship to Rupert Dauntsey. “So you see,” he concluded, “not only wasn’t the man you killed your father, he wasn’t Major Dauntsey either.”

“I couldn’t understand why he would hate me so much,” said Jonathon as he slowly absorbed the information.

“It was the ultimate betrayal,” explained the psychiatrist later, after Jonathon had been gently guided out of the office, shuffling like a man back on a ledge, his personality a psychoanalyst’s research manual. Then Doreen Dauntsey turned up in her wheelchair, still protesting her guilt.

“You’d better discuss that with Jonathon.” said Bliss, as he and Samantha scurried out of the room.

“But I want to confess,” Doreen shouted after them. “I did it. I killed him.”

“Will she never give up?” asked Samantha as they got to his car, still laughing.

“We shouldn’t mock,” smiled Bliss. “You can say what you like about Doreen’s morals, but you can’t knock her for trying to protect her family.”

“So. What happens now?”

“Well. The case is closed as far as I’m concerned and by the time the lawyers have sorted out who gets the property they’ll be the only ones to benefit.”

“Isn’t that usually the case?”

“All I have to do is take my two favourite women out for dinner tonight.”

“Two?”

Was that a trace of jealousy in her voice. “Yes, two. And there’s no need to look so peevish. My other guest is Daphne, without whom, as they say, none of this would have been possible.”