sullen twenty-year-old in a baseball cap and Grateful Dead T-shirt was attempting alcoholic suicide at a nearby table. “I wuz up all night, thinkin’ about my life,” he said to a similarly dressed companion. “Where I am? Where I’m going? What I’m gonna do?” he added, with the rhetoric of a depressed pop singer. As if he had a choice, as if fate had not already laid out its plan. “That’s the story of my effin’ life.”
Bliss was tempted to tell him, from experience, that he may as well get used to it, when a fierce-faced young woman stormed up to the young man and casually dumped his beer in his lap. Punch-up, thought Bliss, readying to leave. But the man didn’t flinch; just turned to his companion with his voice so full of controlled anger his jaw was quaking, and said, “I guess it’s over then.” Bliss sat back, wishing he could have ended his relationship with Sarah so succinctly.
An hour and three drinks later he sat contemplating the smoke-stained ceiling, trying to make out familiar images in the dirty brown tar. Mother Teresa’s profile swirled into view, but vanished as a commotion at the bar attracted his attention. The landlord had grabbed the phone and was semaphoring to Bliss with his free arm. “Excuse me mate someone’s just stolen your car,” he called across the bar as the emergency operator answered.
Bliss spun to look out of the window. His car was gone. “What? Who the hell would want my car?”
“Joyriders,” the landlord replied, after he asked for “Police.”
“How did you know it was mine?”
“I saw you drive in. Anyway, that’s the spot they usually pinch ’em from.”
Bliss put on a crestfallen look. “It’ll probably be wrecked.”
The landlord gave him a look which said, I’ve seen your car, then spoke into the phone as he was connected to the police operations room.
Catching the bus to work the following morning, Bliss was grateful the rain had eased. In the circumstances he would have been justified in asking the duty officer to send a car, but he didn’t want to give anyone the satisfaction of having a laugh at his expense. The early shift are probably pissing themselves already, he assumed, rightly.
“Did you hear about poor old Dave Bliss,” one of them had said, “Someone nicked his wife, he gets into a plane crash, goes sick for nearly a year, then someone half-inches his car.
“When?”
“Last night outside the Four Feathers up Dalton Road.” They laughed. “I’d rather someone nicked my missus than my car,” said a wag.
“I wouldn’t go sick for ten minutes if someone nicked my missus,” said another.
“Who would want to nick your missus?” asked a third with a malicious twist…
“She’s not that bad,” he replied, paradoxically defending her.
There was a message waiting for Bliss on his desk; a response from a George Weston to a small article in the morning papers revealing that a police spokesperson had refused to confirm or deny that the death of Martin Gordonstone was now being treated as suspicious. But first he had to deal with another note — hand scrawled in an obvious attempt to disguise the writer’s identity. “This is the best we can do but it’s worth more than your old one,” a joker had scribbled, and left it attached to a battered dinky toy, hurriedly borrowed, Bliss guessed, from the lost property office. Dropping the toy and the note straight into a waste bin, and ignoring the guffaws of the assembled pranksters, he read the other message. It advised him that Weston had phoned to say he made a videotape of Gordonstone collapsing in the restaurant the night he died.
The vultures drifted away after one of them fished the toy out of the trash bin, leaving Bliss to contact the videographer and arrange to collect the tape.
A succinct third message awaited him in his pigeonhole. Report to Superintendent Edwards at 11:30 a.m. today.
A pep talk, assumed Bliss, immediately feeling more depressed than ever. He could guess the format if not the actual words. Welcome back, tidy yourself up, pull yourself together, lay off the booze, and stop farting about.
Central records opened at eight-thirty. Bliss strolled in at nine-fifteen and found the three clerks still clustered around a copy of the daily nude.
“Not disturbing you, am I?” he asked as sarcastically as possible. Two of the three men drifted languidly in different directions without comment, leaving the third to carefully fold the newspaper as if it were a precious manuscript.
“Yeah Mate. What d’ye want?”
“Detective Inspector to you,” shot back Bliss, resolving to bring up the question of uncivil civilians at the next divisional meeting.
The Betty-Ann Gordonstone file had been shredded, the clerk pronounced after a brief search through his records.
“Shredded!” cried Bliss.
“That’s right, Inspector. It was non-suspicious sudden death according to my records.”
“Suicide,” said Bliss.
“Maybe it were. It don’t say here. But it were destroyed in 1999.”
“Why?”
“You should read standing orders, Mate,” suggested the clerk, then he quoted the relevant order verbatim in an affected official voice. “Destruction of documents: non-suspicious sudden death files to be destroyed after seven years, unless the officer in the case specifically requests otherwise.”
“I know that,” replied Bliss untruthfully, but with sufficient conviction that most would have believed he was fully conversant with the standing order on the subject. “But I also know that files often hang around for years before they are shredded.”
“Not this one. Like I said, it’s gorn.”
“Are you sure?”
The civilian clerk took the enquiry as an affront. “Ruddy coppers,” he mumbled aloud, but kept the rest of his outrage under his breath. “Think they should be treated like ruddy God. I could run rings around most of ’em.” The phone rang, providing him with an opportunity to make Bliss wait while he took a lengthy message. Undeterred, Bliss waited; there was more to the Betty-Ann Gordonstone case and he wanted answers. Finally, the clerk put the phone down and looked at Bliss as if to say, Are you still here?
“Do you expect me to check my files again?”
His files? Bloody cheek. “Yes please.”
That wasn’t the correct answer; not the answer the clerk was expecting. A polite, “No, that’s all right, I believe you,” would have sufficed. The clerk slowly took off his spectacles and made a performance cleaning the lenses, contemplating various ways of thwarting Bliss’s request. In the end he simply opted to make a song and dance about finding the right book and after several false starts eventually slung the open book on the counter between them,
“There you are,” he shouted triumphantly, “See for yourself.”
Betty-Ann Gordonstone
Born 23rd June, 1955
Deceased15th October, 1992
File Location. Destroyed 15th October, 1999
“That’s seven years to the day,” said Bliss, more to himself than the clerk.
“Told you,” the clerk replied in a childlike manner.
Someone hadn’t wasted much time in destroying the file, Bliss noted, and reread the ‘Cause of Death’ column: suicide. Then he spotted the name of the investigating officer in the far right-hand column: Detective Inspector Edwards.
“Is that Superintendent Edwards?” he enquired.
“How should I know?”
“Is there any way of checking?”
“Yeah,”