Missing: Presumed Dead by James Hawkins

queried, but didn’t wait for a response. “I reckon she’s having you on. I wouldn’t put it past her. She’s got a bit of an imagination – I mean, that story about crop circles and UFO’s ...”
    â€œPossibly,” said Bliss thoughtfully.
    â€œPossibly my foot. I’d bet my pension on it.”
    â€œYou’re probably right. It was just something I overheard. I probably got it wrong.”
    â€œI would say so – Daphne – O.B.E.,” he guffawed.
    Bliss laughed along with him.
    â€œThe Major’s body?” enquired Donaldson, with more than a trace of hope, as Bliss stuck his head into the chief superintendent’s office a few minutes later. Bliss strolled in, sat heavily and gave his head a negative shake.
    The senior officer took on a crestfallen look. “Shit, I knew I should have called in the Major Incident Unit ... Oh,” his face brightened, “I guess that’s a pun ... Major Incident – searching for a major.”
    â€œVery funny,” said Bliss noticing that the packet of chocolate digestives had taken a serious mauling since the previous day. “May I?” he asked rhetorically, reaching out for one of the last two.
    Donaldson swiped the packet off his desk faster than a shoplifter snatching a Rolex. “Rationed,” he mumbled, screwing the top and shoving it into a drawer. “One pack a day instead of fags,” he explained. “Can’t afford to give ’em away.”
    â€œSorry, Sir.”
    â€œSo what do you make of all this, Dave?”
    â€œOn the face of it, it seems too simple. But what if we don’t find the body? What if he’s disposed of it so cleverly we never find it? Furthermore, what if he knows we can’t find it?”
    â€œWhere – how?”
    Bliss relaxed in the chair with a shrug. “I haven’t a clue. If I knew I’d just go out and find it. Do you have any ideas, Sir?”
    Donaldson sat back and ruminated on a novelist’s palette of barely plausible explanations, “... dissolved it in acid; burnt it to a cinder; fed it to the pigs ...”
    â€œNo, Sir,” interrupted Bliss, standing up and pacing with frustration. “He didn’t have enough time for any of that. In any case, the larger bones would have survived, especially the femurs.”
    A degree of agitation sharpened Donaldson’s tone and the Newton’s balls took another hammering. “Well, Inspector, perhaps you have some better suggestions.”
    â€œI suppose he might have had time to wall it up in the house or jam it under the floorboards,” mused Bliss, not waiting for the steel balls to stop chattering back and forth.
    â€œHe might have had time, but the dogs would have sniffed it out.”
    â€œWhat about if he dropped it down an abandoned well and capped it with a load of concrete?”
    Donaldson caught the swinging ball as if the suggestion were serious enough to be considered in silence. “That’s possible,” he started slowly, then shook his head. “Dauntsey would have been plastered in cement.”
    One look at the senior officer’s face was enough to remind Bliss there was no cement. “I don’t know then,” he concluded and sat back down.
    Donaldson took on a phlegmatic tone. “If it doesn’t turn up we’ll just go for a trial without a body – it’s been done before. It may be unusual but certainly not unique.”
    Bliss wasn’t so sure. “What if he gets in the box and recants his confession. Where does that leave us?”
    â€œThe jury will still hear the confession.”
    â€œI know – but he says, ‘I was confused – we had a bit of a barney. Dad went for me with the knife. He got cut somehow – nothing serious, and ...’”
    Donaldson wasn’t listening, he was still working on devious methods of concealing a body. “I wonder if