Flush as May

Book 235: Murder Room

by P.M. Hubbard

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries; Suspense

Synopsis

A vanishing corpse; a mistrustful policeman; a celebrated archaeologist and TV personality involved in the macabre rites of a primitive religious sect - these are just some of the dark ingredients of a novel whose every page is vibrant with menace. P. M. Hubbard has a disturbing talent for evoking terror in the most unlikely settings: in this case, a sleepy English village is shown to conceal a pit of horror, a terrifying nightmare world that destroys all who would uncover its secrets.

Release date: September 6, 2012

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 192

Sample

The body sat comfortably against a bank, facing the early summer sunshine. The face was middle-aged and undistinguished, and wore a slight smile, almost a smirk. If the man had
been alive when she found him, Margaret would have been instantly irritated by his affectation of mystery. Even when she saw that the mystery was not of his making, some of this irritation remained
at the expense, she felt, of more suitable emotions.

She was aware of a total absence of pity or terror. Surprise, naturally, but even here she was more surprised at finding him there at all than at subsequently finding that he was dead. The
annoyance that quickly supervened on her first surprise survived the second. It was a bit silly, at her age, to go walking in the fields at sunrise on May Morning at all, when most of her friends
were hitch-hiking home across the Continent or waking up on pavements ready to ban the bomb or demonstrate the solidarity of the Left.

That she should be caught at it by this smirking little non­descript was bad enough. That she should have to admit it, as now no doubt she would, in every circumstance of publicity was
almost unbearable. And it was his doing, with his neatly composed mortality and his knowing look. She considered the possibility of ignoring him and saying nothing to anyone, but there were obvious
difficulties in that too.

It was the flies that decided her. A big blue fly first, which came droning from behind her in a powerful curve and landed slap on the smiling mouth. She moved instinctively to brush it off, but
was anticipated by several smaller black flies, which came gyrating eagerly out of the bank, and after a few exploratory flights landed on his chest and crawled busily one after the other into the
top of his waistcoat. Margaret turned and made for the village.

The sun was well up now and behind her as she climbed the steady slope, throwing up the small conical hill in a pyramid of pale green and gold. The tiled roofs emerged from, and cut horizontally
across, the bunched trees, and the church tower, golden and vertical, stood up cunningly off-centre. Even in her distress, which was now growing on her, she was amazed, as so often before, at the
village’s perfection of general design, which seemed perpetually able to absorb the individual out­rages inflicted on it from within.

The morning was mild and silent. An early tractor snorted several fields away to her left, but the village itself seemed lifeless. Margaret came to the gate on to the road and turned to look
back. He was invisible from here, but she knew pretty well where he was, and nothing stirred. The valley dropped away in close-cultivated perfection until the hedgerows merged in a general drift of
trees hiding other villages. Beyond, the Beacon threw up a grey-green curve of that startling significance peculiar to weathered chalk. May Morning was all hers.

For the first time Margaret was suddenly embarrassed by what she had to do. She was not herself a villager, though she had visited the place before. She was on the friendliest terms with many of
the people, but remained not one of them. They were fond of her, she knew, as one is fond of a beautiful but exotic bird, and they talked to her freely about themselves and each other; but the very
freedom was a measure of her detachment. She might, she thought, have got away with bringing in a may-bough, but she was bringing in a body, and did not quite know where to start.

Close to the first house there actually was a may-bough, broken and bedraggled on the grass verge. Three gardens along two girls, whose need for even desperate measures was all too obvious,
tried with muffled hysteria to wash their faces in the dew that stood on a pocket-handkerchief of ruthlessly cut grass. Margaret nodded vaguely in their direction, conscious of her own lack of
need.

The police cottage was on the far side of the village. She could not remember having seen the constable, but there must be one. She pushed the gate open and walked up the brick-paved path. Here
too nothing stirred. She knocked on the door and stood back, rebuked by the silence. Then the absurdity of her hesitation struck her. She had every right to be at least half hysterical. She knocked
again, picturing a man waking grudgingly after a night on duty.

The door opened very suddenly and silently, and a man stood looking down at her. He wore police trousers, but his face was uncompromisingly hostile. In spite of herself Margaret apologised.
‘I’m sorry to trouble you so early,’ she said, ‘but there is something I must report, and I thought I’d better come at once.’

The man said nothing, but looked at her. He had little pig’s eyes with no sleep in them. ‘There’s a man down in the fields,’ she said. ‘He’s dead. It’s
a dead body.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I saw it. I found him there.’

‘How do you know he was dead?’

His pointless hostility galled her. ‘He’s dead all right,’ she said. ‘If you don’t believe it, you had better come and see for yourself. In fact, I think you had
better come anyhow.’

He said, ‘When was this?’

‘Just now. I came straight here.’

‘What were you doing, then, out there as early as this?’

‘I went for a walk. I’m staying at Mrs Besson’s.’

‘I know where you’re staying. What time did you go out?’

She thought. ‘Soon after five. About ten past.’

His mouth turned up slightly on one side and she knew, with a sense of helpless resentment, that she was going to blush. He watched her unhappiness appreciatively but offered no comment. Finally
he said, ‘Wait a minute, then. I’d best come along and see.’

She swallowed a childish retort, turned her back on him and sauntered down the path. She came to the gate, looked up and down the street and had nerved herself to turn round when she heard the
door shut. When she did turn, the garden was empty except for a bullet-headed tabby which watched her from a window-sill. She walked towards him, but hesitated. He was not that sort of cat.

Golden hazed and exquisitely scented, the village slept around her. Minutes passed. She looked at her wrist and saw that she had forgotten to put her watch on. Her stomach produced a ridiculous
and unladylike bubbling, and she found she was almost desperately hungry. Black resentment struggled in her with a wholly unreasonable feeling of panic and guilt; and still the policeman did not
re-emerge. When he did appear, he came from behind the cottage and she saw that he was fully uniformed. He was pushing a bicycle.

She said, ‘It’s only just down the road,’ but he did not appear to accept the implication. He shut the gate firmly behind them, and she had a feeling that he was going to mount
his bicycle and leave her to run behind. Instead they processed through the village with the bicycle ticking quietly between them. Now there were heads everywhere. They craned over the sills of
dormer windows and peered from behind ground-floor curtains. Doors opened momentarily to afford a glimpse of them and then shut silently. There should have been wood-smoke and the smell of cooking,
but the cottages burnt coke in slow-combustion stoves and did not breakfast till later.

The giggling girls had given up and gone indoors. The trampled may-bough was still there, and the constable turned his bicycle slightly and wheeled it firmly over it. When they came to the gate,
Margaret pointed and said, ‘Over there.’ He looked at her for the first time since they had started out. She forced herself, out of her mental disarray, to stare back at him, and found
his little eyes full of a sort of truculent good humour. He nodded, put the bicycle against the hedge, took a padlock and chain out of the carrier-bag and locked it elaborately round the back
wheel.

‘You go on,’ he said. ‘Go just the way you came.’ She started off down the slope, walking into a sea of uncertainty as if she waded into dark water. Half-way across the
third field she hesitated and the water closed over her head. She turned left, making for a likely-looking bank, but saw that it could not have been facing the sunrise. The Beacon was golden-green
now, and the sloping sun threw up on its summit and sides the scars and dimples of primordial occupation. The tractor had stopped working. The morning was absolutely still. She turned to get a
sighting on the village, and found the sun striking back at her dazzlingly from a hidden window. She was too far left.

She doubled back along the side of the next field. The constable walked heavily behind her, his silence goading her to panic. They came to the end of the field without finding a gate, and she
turned because she had to. She said, ‘It was here somewhere,’ and he pounced on the past tense with a sort of ponderous brutality. He said, ‘Not here now, though, is it? Or
perhaps it’s got up and walked off a piece.’

This time he had pushed her too far, and she turned on him in a fury. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘it doesn’t matter to me in the slightest whether you believe me or not. So far as
I am concerned you can have bodies under every hedge in the parish, and I hope it keeps fine for them. I needn’t have reported this one, and I wish now I hadn’t, but I thought it was
the proper thing to do. Anyway, there you are. I’ve made my report and it’s up to you. I saw a body not far from here less than an hour ago. Now I don’t know where it is and I
don’t care.’ She sobbed ridiculously twice, blew her nose and started to walk back in the direction of the road.

‘Now wait a bit,’ he said from behind her, ‘let’s hear a bit more about this. You were going for a walk you said?’ She refused to stop, and he pulled alongside her,
walking two steps to her three. He was an immense man. ‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Always go for a walk this early?’

‘No.’

‘Special today like, to see the sunrise?’

‘I suppose so, yes.’

‘Then what?’

‘Then I saw him, propped up against a bank, facing the sun. I didn’t realise he was dead at first. Then I saw.’

‘Saw what?’

‘His eyes were open. He was quite still. He wasn’t breathing. And then there were flies.’

‘Flies?’ he said appreciatively. ‘What did he look like? Old or young? Fair or dark? Tall or short? How was he dressed?’

She thought. ‘Middle-aged, I suppose. I didn’t notice his colouring. All very ordinary. Ordinary sort of clothes, a suit. I couldn’t see how tall he was, sitting down like
that. Not specially tall, I think.’

‘Well now,’ said the constable, ‘practically got him identified, haven’t we? Age medium, ordinary appearance and clothes, not too tall. Shouldn’t be any trouble
finding out who he is.’

Margaret said nothing and they came to the gate. The constable unlocked his bicycle, stowed the chain in the carrier-bag and took out a pair of bicycle clips, which he adjusted round his ankles
with close attention to the crease of his uniform trousers. He pushed the bicycle back on to the road, heading away from the village, and put one foot on the pedal.

‘Officer,’ said Margaret. He turned and faced her. ‘I forgot to tell you. He had a beard, rather foreign-looking, and a scar on his face. He had a ruby ring on his hand. And
there was a curiously-carved oriental dagger sticking out of his chest.’ She remembered the flies crawling one by one under the nondescript waistcoat, and choked slightly.

‘Ah,’ said the constable, and Margaret saw at once that she had not made him angry at all. ‘Irrelevant detail you were right to omit as unlikely to assist identification. Thank
you, miss.’ His savage joviality caught up her exasperation and seemed to find it unexpectedly enjoyable.

Her defiance collapsed. ‘Have it your own way,’ she said. ‘I don’t expect I shall see you again. I’m leaving this evening, and I don’t think I shall come back
here. But you know, there was a dead man in the field here this morning. It seems only fair to you to say so.’

The constable nodded. ‘I’ll remember everything you’ve said, miss,’ he said. ‘I’d advise you to forget it.’ He mounted his bicycle heavily, as he did
everything, and started off down the road. She waited until he was out of sight and then sat suddenly on the grass and put her head on her arms. Then, finding this inadequate, she lay full length,
wrapped her arms round her head and cried briefly but fiercely into the roadside grasses.

This met her immediate requirements, but did not conceal from her essentially sensible mind her overriding need of food. She sat up, grief-ravaged but still superb, and faced the road that
climbed back towards the village. As she did so a long black car, expensive and certainly not local, crept out from among the houses, hesitated and stopped fifty yards from her. A chauffeur,
elegant in olive green, got out. For a moment he turned the pages of a book propped on the paintwork and then, seeing her coming slowly up the hill, shut the book and walked down to meet her.

Margaret and the chauffeur studied each other frankly and with growing confidence. She concluded that he had a sense of humour and would not, whatever he wanted of her, call her miss. She
wondered how he would manage the chauffeur’s cap. A salute seemed over-dramatic and any other gesture impossible. He solved the problem by pulling it off and smiling at her. His eyes were
rather tired and not at all piggy.

‘Do you think,’ he said, ‘you could possibly tell me anywhere round here we could get breakfast? I mean – it must be rather a good breakfast, you know, something a bit
elegant.’ His expression, and perhaps the slightest movement of his head, indicated the silent black car behind him. He himself, he suggested, would gladly share a roadside crust with her
this fair May Morning, but he was in duty bound elsewhere.

‘There’s the Ram at Rushbourne,’ said Margaret. ‘Very special. It’s in all the books. It’s a good ten miles on, but you wouldn’t get breakfast at this
hour in any case. I should go on there, if – if you think that would be all right.’ Her eyes went to the car.

‘The Ram, of course,’ said the chauffeur. ‘I should have thought. And ten miles is quite all right. Sir James’ – he indicated the car – ‘is
asleep.’

‘You don’t come from around here, do you?’ Margaret asked. He shook his head. ‘Just passing through?’

‘That’s it.’

‘What would you do if you saw a body – a man’s body – lying in a field by the road?’

‘Sir James being asleep?’

‘Yes, I think so. At any rate, you being on your own.’

‘What sort of a body? Fairly fresh?’

‘Oh yes, absolutely mint-fresh. We don’t let them lie hereabouts.’

He considered. ‘I should probably go through the pockets for anything of value and drive quickly on.’

‘You wouldn’t tell the police?’

‘The police? Oh no, surely not the police. The Express, perhaps.’

‘And by God,’ said Margaret, ‘you’d be right at that.’

He looked at her with a fresh sort of interest. He said, ‘Your tone suggests recent, harsh and personal experience. It is no business of mine, but you started this conversation. I suppose
there’s nothing I can do?’

‘I don’t think there is really, but thank you for asking. And Sir James will be wanting his breakfast.’

‘Not till I wake him, he won’t. You do come from around here, I gather?’

‘Not really, no. I know it pretty well.”

The silence blanketed them. The sun, already surprisingly warm, winked on the curved convexities of the black car. ‘I’m afraid I need breakfast myself,’ said Margaret.
‘Nothing elegant in my case, but I can’t wait like Sir James. I could cry with hunger.’

‘Yes. You have just been crying with something, haven’t you?’

‘Yes. I told you – hunger. Hunger and frustration.’ She walked firmly up the hill and he fell into step beside her. ‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘thank you for
suggesting the Ram. I am sure it will do me credit.’ He got into the driving seat. ‘I hope we may meet again.’

She nodded. ‘I’ll think about it. I have taken the number of your car – Sir James’s car, I suppose.’

‘Not actually. It’s hired.’

‘And you with it?’

‘Me with it.’

She looked past him into the cavernous elegance of the car. Sir James slept peacefully with a tartan rug round him and a slight smile on his lips. He had a long scar on his left cheek and a
small pointed beard. There was no ruby ring, and it seemed unlikely that the tartan rug concealed a curiously carved oriental dagger. But it was near enough.

She turned back to the chauffeur. She said, ‘Will you do me a favour?”

‘Almost certainly. What do you want me to do?’

‘You’ll pass a policeman down the road, a big red man on a bicycle. Will you engage him in a few moments’ desultory conversation without getting out of the car?’

‘Conversation about what?’

“Anything. Ask him the way. Ask him if there’s much crime in these parts. Anything really.’

‘You aren’t landing me in anything?’

‘Not you, no, I promise.’

He sighed unbelievingly. ‘All right. But if I don’t see you again, I can’t tell you about it, can I?’

She said, ‘That’s my risk.’ He nodded. ‘My name’s Garrod, by the way,’ he said. The great car sighed into movement. For the second time that morning, Margaret
set her face to the village.

‘What are you thinking of doing next vacation, Margaret? Do you expect to be here?’

‘I do not think I expect anything of next vacation, grandmother. I have the intention of being here and of doing a great deal of reading, and that is what most people would say I expected.
But I do not really know whether my intention will be fulfilled.’

Her grandmother sighed. ‘I do wish you would try to stop talking like a Compton-Burnett character,’ she said. ‘You don’t do it very well, and you don’t do it with
your friends at all. I don’t see why you should try it on with me. Even with me it sounds very affected.’

Margaret laughed. ‘I’m awfully sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s the temptation of calling you grandmother. If you had brought me up to call you Grannie or Grandma, I
shouldn’t have half the trouble. Anyway, I should like to be here, I think, if that’s possible. I haven’t really got through as much as I wanted this vac., and I shall be pretty
busy.’

‘I thought you were going to Lodstone to work. Of course I like you to be in the country over Easter, but I can’t think what else you found to do there. Or did Mrs Besson feed you
too well? And you’re going back late as it is.’

‘I know, but I’m glad I stayed the extra days. I had an experience on May Morning.’ She smiled reminiscently.

‘Oh. Well, that’s very nice. Spiritual, occult or merely carnal?’

‘Not carnal. Not very occult, I don’t think. Spiritual, perhaps. Is there a very wealthy person called Sir James Something with a scar on his cheek and a beard?’

‘Yes, darling, of course, Sir James Utley. I do think you ought to try to watch television more. I think it has a broadening effect on the mind, especially the academic mind, but I suppose
that is very old-fashioned of me. But if your May Morning experience had anything to do with Sir James, I’m sure it was spiritual or nothing. He’s very respectable, despite . . .