LITMIR.BIZ

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and skull fragments splattered all over the front of an express train or patterned across a wall. Just a little girl sleeping peacefully in a hospital cot and the same little figure, naked, sculpted out of polished white marble, as she lay on the mortuary table awaiting the mortician’s knife.

      He continued to resist the temptation to open the file. There is no point, he thought, defying the power of his own conscience. Why punish yourself again?

      You deserve to be punished, said his conscience, playing Devil’s advocate.

      “Don’t open it.”

      Open it.

      “Don’t open it.”

      Punish yourself.

      “Don’t punish yourself anymore.”

      Temptation won. He opened the file. The photographs lay on top and he slowly shuffled through them sad nostalgia. The little stone cherub had not aged. One of the photographs was missing, although he could not remember where it had gone. But he was able to conjure it up from memory: the light blue lake dappled with touches of white from a few passing clouds, some trees — bushes really, hawthorn and elder, he recalled — tiny pink splotches of water lilies hiding amongst a raft of greenery, the shadow of a taller tree falling across a patch of water and muddying it with a deep grey tint. And there, in the centre, was a shoe forming a tiny red speck that looked more like a glitch in the film than something tangible in the water.

      It was the cameraman, the scenes of crime officer, who spotted it through his lens and called Bliss’s attention.

      “Did she have her shoes on?”

      He hadn’t noticed, he had been so wrapped up in his frantic efforts to breathe life into her.

      A phone call to the emergency room soon answered the query. “Yes, one of her shoes was missing, the left one.”

      She must have kicked it off when she was struggling in the water, they had decided. He remembered the semisubmerged shoe vividly. Wading out to retrieve it with his trousers rolled knee high. A red sandal, Clark’s, size…? He’d forgotten the size and tortured his brain for a full half minute before deciding it was immaterial.

      Although he had forgotten the shoe size he remembered the ambulanceman, a gentle giant of a man who tenderly scooped the little body off the grassy bank with hands as big as shovels and swung her onto the stretcher. Bliss still had his lips affixed to hers as the man carried the stretcher to the waiting ambulance, he was still blowing, still breathing movement into her chest, and his tears still trickled onto her tiny cheeks. Within moments a plastic oxygen mask had replaced his mouth and the ambulance drove away, a mechanical respirator now pumping air into the lifeless lungs, the little chest heaving futilely, mocking life. Her tiny heart no longer even trying to beat. Each future page of her life’s passport now stamped with a single word, “Dead”

      And under the photographs in the file lay the statement. His statement. The statement headed, “This statement of David Anthony Bliss, consisting of two pages, each signed by me, is true to the best of my knowledge and belief and I make it knowing that if it is tendered in evidence I shall be liable to prosecution if I have wilfully stated in it anything which I know to be false or do not believe to be true.”

      He didn’t read the statement, he had no need, but the final paragraph leapt off the page accusingly. “I believe that Melanie Ann Gordonstone, aged 6 years, wandered away from the house and accidentally fell into the lake while her parents, Martin and Betty-Ann Gordonstone, were otherwise engaged.” Those words, those exact words, had reverberated confidently around the Coroner’s Court twenty years earlier, in the clear calm voice of the young policeman standing in the witness box. And the voice of the coroner, an older, gravelly voice filled with quiet authority and a lifetime’s experience, invited him to confirm the statement so there should be no doubt in anyone’s mind. “Is that your honest belief, Officer?”

      “It is, Sir,” Bliss had replied.

      “Thank you, Officer. No further questions.”

      He had faltered leaving the witness box and looked at the faces in the sparsely peopled room: the stoic face of Martin Gordonstone; the dishevelled face of his wife, a poor crumpled figure who had snivelled throughout the twenty minutes of the proceedings and had been excused from giving evidence by the coroner on the basis that she had no material facts to offer; the impassive face of a reporter from the local paper who’d seen it all before. He’d seen the sad faces, heard the sorry stories and the guilt-ridden excuses: “I only left her for a minute, I don’t know how it could have happened.” It happens, he thought, all too often it happens. And, at the back of the courtroom, Bliss spied a huddle of grieving relatives awaiting the next inquest, an inquest into the death of a ninety-three-year-old victim of road accident.

      There was no sign of Margaret. No twelve-year-old weeping tears for her little sister. In fact, as far as anybody in the courtroom was concerned, Margaret might never have existed. Gordonstone had hardly mentioned his surviving daughter as he recounted his well-rehearsed story. Bliss, in his evidence, though not in his statement, had carefully avoided making reference to Margaret; he had no wish to explain why he hadn’t interviewed her. Everybody, it seemed, had avoided mentioning Margaret.

      With no further witnesses to be called, the grey-haired coroner removed his half-spectacles and, doing his best to inject as much sympathy as he could into his voice, pronounced that Melanie Ann Gordonstone had been the victim of a tragic accidental death. But he’d seen it all before, as well.

      “We thought it would be too upsetting for Margaret to attend,” explained Gordonstone loudly in the foyer outside, after the verdict had been handed down. It seemed a reasonable assertion at the time; it was only later that Bliss wondered about the true meaning of the statement. Would it have been too upsetting for Margaret, or would it have been too upsetting for her father if she had used the opportunity to blurt out that he had killed her sister? And, Bliss thought, why had Gordonstone found it necessary to make such a loud and public declaration about Margaret’s absence? Isn’t it usually the guilty who most vociferously protest their innocence?

       chapter five

      The man who shot the videotape had not been impressed with L’Haute Cuisinier, even before the episode with the owner. Bliss, anxious to view the tape, found himself standing on the threshold of George Weston’s apartment listening to a catalogue of complaints about the restaurant, which included the prices, the parking, the service and, amusingly, the height of the food.

      “Why is it,” the man demanded, fiercely stretching his bright red suspenders in a show of annoyance, “Why is it, that some chefs believe indifferent food can be improved by giving it a vertical aspect?” Weston strongly suspected that they were pandering to the American tourists, whom, he believed, were far more likely to applaud an audacious culinary balancing act than a subtle gastronomic conjuring trick. “Even the names signify loftiness,” he whined nasally, his affected Oxbridge accent overlaying a Cotswold twang. “Gateau Mont Blanc, Mile High soufflé; A stack of… Whatever.” The only thing higher than the food was the price, he moaned. “Even the name of the place, L’Haute Cuisinier…”

      Bliss managed to stop him momentarily by suggesting they should go inside, but Weston’s griping began again as soon as the door was shut. “Why?” he continued loudly, thumbs still tucked into suspenders. “Why is it so necessary to set fire to everything in front of the customers?”

      At this point Bliss cut him short and more or less demanded he hand over the tape. But he was determined to have a final all-encompassing grumble and, sounding like a newspaper’s restaurant critic, he summed up L’Haute Cuisinier as, “A high class brothel for gourmands: piles of trashy food plastered in cheap perfumes and tarted up with gaudy cosmetics to make it appealing.”

      Finally consenting to get round to the tape, he apologized that he only had a copy. The original, he claimed, had been given to a television reporter who had called earlier. Bliss’s black look left Weston in no doubt that he should not have disposed of the

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