Missing: Presumed Dead by James Hawkins Page A

heard, not that it meant much to us, not that we cared. Although Rupert was about my age, he lived on a different planet. Anyway, he scotched the rumours a few years later when he walked into the lounge at the Mitre Hotel in full uniform, puffed out his chest and announced he was about to marry Doreen Mason, as she was then, and we were all invited.”
    â€œYou were there?”
    â€œOh yes.”
    â€œWhen was this?”
    â€œA few weeks before D-Day. Everyone scheduled to go was given twenty-four leave, and it just so happened that my twenty-four hours coincided with Rupert’s.”
    â€œDo you mean you were going on D-Day as well?”
    â€œIt hardly seems possible now, does it?”
    His voice rose with incredulity. “But that was more than fifty years ago.”
    â€œWas it really?” her face blanked as she looked into the past. “Yes, I suppose it was ... You can see what I mean about time distorting time. Anyway, a group of my friends were giving me a send off in the Mitre when Rupert marches in with his invite. We all thought, ‘Why not?’ We all knew Doreen anyway – everyone knew Doreen.”
    Something in the way she spoke of Doreen suggested an element of unseemliness and he quietly tucked the thought away as the basis for a supplementary question.
    â€œThey had the reception at the big house,” continued Daphne, the memories flooding back. “I’d never been in there before, I don’t think any of us had. I’d never seen furnishings like it – the sort of things you’d find in a stately home or a museum. Massive ancestral portraits; fig-leaved statues; settees you could hide under; and the carpets – we had linoleum and a lot of people thought we were posh, but the big house had carpets everywhere, even on the walls. Persians and Afghans, although I didn’t know it at the time. Back then I wouldn’t have known a Wilton from a Woolworth’s Boxing Day special. Doreen was flitting around in her new home with the excitement of a bluebottle who’s landed in a dung heap. ‘Look at this!’ she’d scream, or ‘Look at this!’ jumping from one enormous painting to the next, or from one statue to another ...” Daphne paused as a smile spread over her face. “I recall one statue, probably a copy of Michelangelo’s David – Oh, there’s another noble David for you – anyway, it didn’t have a fig leaf, and we all giggled and dared each other to touch its thingy ...”
    â€œDid you?” Bliss teased.
    â€œI think I’ll refuse to answer that question on the grounds I may incriminate myself,” she laughed, then carried on, still with a smile. “You should have seen the food. We’d had five years of rationing, and I’d never seen so much food. There was a huge baron of beef and a mound of smoked salmon – I didn’t know what it was, I’d only heard rumours. And they had a wedding cake – it was real cake! Most people had a measly Victoria sponge stuck under a beautifully iced tin that could be used for any number of weddings, but they had real cake with real cherries and real sultanas. And champagne, not the fizzy sugar water with plastic corks you get at weddings today. Real champagne.” Pausing to pick up the Parisian portrait, she stared into it and sighed wistfully. “Champagne – that was my life at one time. Difficult to imagine it now. La vie en rose. I sometimes wonder if it was real.”
    â€œWas it real?”
    â€œWho knows, Chief Inspector?” she replied, laying her head back in the chair, letting her eyes drift over the ceiling as if searching for images of her past. “Maybe I’ve just read too many novels and watched too many movies ... Anyway,” she pulled her thoughts back to Major Dauntsey’s wedding day. “The strangest thing was the old Colonel himself. Doreen wasn’t what you