High Tide

Book 282: Murder Room

by P.M. Hubbard

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

Curtis had killed a man, and he had paid the price. Now free from prison and moving his way across England searching for a place to begin a new life, Curtis slowly realises he is being shadowed by mysterious pursuers and is entering a very dangerous, stealthy game of hide-and-seek. Curtis finds himself in a desolate seaside village where a beautiful woman and a deserted house will be crucial in the desperate - and murderous - drama about to be played out on the English Coast. 'The novel is written with power' New York Times Book Review 'A smooth elaboration of mounting horror and danger' Library Journal

Release date: July 14, 2013

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 256

Sample

I PUT MY HAND OUT and waved the other car past. I did not want to be rushed, and I was in no particular hurry to get anywhere, if only because I was not
very sure where I was. The car passed me, putting its off-side wheels over the edge of the tarmac and raising a small cloud of dust as long as they were there. The dust swirled about in the air
eddies raised by the two cars, and then, as I watched it in my driving mirror, hung about over the road, settling slowly. There was no natural movement in the air at all. Even at this time of the
morning the sun-heat was all the weather that mattered. It was all very un-English.

But I was not out of England yet. Even if I was not very sure where I was, I knew that all along a line twenty or so miles south of me the Channel lay covered with a flat sheen under the
slightly misted sky. I knew just what it would look like under these conditions. They did happen occasionally, and when they did, you remembered them. I had not actually seen the Channel for nearly
five years.

I also knew that the place where the whole business had begun was now about thirty miles behind me. I had passed a few miles south of it during the night, and now it was away east of me. I had
planned my course to miss it, and now I had. Now I was edging south towards the sea as I drove westwards. I wondered whether it would not have been better to go there and look at it, but at any
rate I had not, and now it was behind me and getting further away every minute.

The other car did not seem in any hurry to get away. It was the first I had seen that morning. I had waved it through as soon as I saw it behind me, but it was still there, going my pace fifty
or so yards ahead. I had not even noticed who was in it, but it irritated me, and I wanted it out of the way. I pulled in under a bunch of trees and stopped. The other car rolled sedately away and
disappeared over the top of the hill. After that nothing moved at all except the birds, and they darted furtively from tree to tree, cutting their flying time down to whatever minimum met their
immediate needs. They sang occasionally out of the shade, but tentatively, as if they found the silence too much to cope with.

I sat there in the car, taking it all in. It seemed an unnecessary complication that when the country was in any case, after all these years, unfamiliar, it should also happen to be so
untypical. It made the whole experience doubly strange.

But I liked the silence. Above all, I liked the silence and the solitude, just as at night I liked the darkness. The trouble with prison was the same as with hospitals and I suppose boarding
schools and any other institution where you have a number of mainly unwilling inmates looked after by a small staff. It was never entirely quiet or entirely dark, and even if you were supposed to
be alone, you never felt it. There was always a light burning round a corner or someone talking at the far end of a corridor. That was why I was travelling the way I was, driving at night and in
the early mornings and lying up during the day. I had come all the way down from the north like that. Whatever it looked like, it had nothing to do with being furtive. I had no reason to be
furtive. I was a free man with money of my own. It puzzled the hotels a bit, of course. They were so used to bed and breakfast that breakfast and bed took some explaining. But there was nothing
they could get upset about, once they understood that I was not in some way trying to do them out of some payment they felt entitled to. So I travelled, as far as I could, through a silent and
empty England, mostly in the darkness, but using as much of the early mornings as I needed to get to the next hotel open and ready to take me in. I took it very easy, pulling up for a rest at some
point every night. Already I felt unbelievably the better for it.

There was traffic on the main road by the time I got to it, mainly heavy stuff. I thought it was time I got off it. The signpost said Burton St. Michael 9 miles, and I decided that if Burton St.
Michael had a hotel, that would be it. There was a car parked on the side of the road where I turned out, but I was watching for the lorries and took no particular notice of it. I drove on, faster
now. The early-morning exhilaration had worn off, and I was getting sleepy.

The odd thing is that I cannot now remember the name of the hotel, but it was the only one, and it looked all right. Burton St. Michael turned out to be a large village strung out along the
road. There were several pubs, but only one had developed into a hotel catering for the road business. The front door was open and the place smelt fresh. There was no one at the desk, but the drone
of a vacuum cleaner led me to a woman in a pink overall. A local woman, I thought, with a husband gone early to work. The overall would be hotel uniform, more or less. I was still passionately
interested in women, not only their sex, but everything about them. I told her what I wanted, and she switched off the cleaner and said, “I’ll tell Miss Benton.”

Miss Benton had been called away from her breakfast, but she did not seem to mind. She seemed pleased to see me. That was one of the things I still could not get used to, being welcome. Not but
what I looked all right, better, almost certainly, than four years ago. I said, “I’ve been driving all night, and I think it’s time I got some sleep. I wonder if you can find me a
room? At the back, if possible.”

I had got the approach worked out now, and Miss Benton even took the second line of the script out of my hands. She said, “Yes, that will be all right, sir. You’d like some breakfast
first, I expect.”

“Oh yes, please,” I said. I signed where she showed me and put my bank address.

“I’ll put you in Number Six,” she said. “It’s small, but it’s over the garden. You’ll be quiet there.”

I said, “That will be fine,” and went out to put the car away and get my bags.

When I came in again, Miss Benton had disappeared, but the overalled woman took me over. She was older, the mothering sort. She was not going to call anyone of my age sir. She said, “Been
driving all night, Miss Benton said. You’ll be tired.”

“I am a bit. But nothing that a few hours’ sleep won’t cure. Many people in?”

She looked at me as if she found this funny. “Not coming in at this time of the morning,” she said. “There’ll be two going out after breakfast, and I expect more coming
in this evening. When are you going on, then?”

Motherly or not, I did not want to discuss my movements with her. “I’ll see what I feel like,” I said.

She was faintly curious, and I wondered, as I spent a good deal of time wondering, whether she noticed anything and whether there was anything to notice. If there was, she could not put her
finger on it, and motherliness reasserted itself. “That’s right,” she said. “You get a good sleep, and you’ll feel better. You’ll be quite quiet here.”

Number Six was a small cool room with just about gangway between the bed and the rest of the furniture. The window was open, and the garden underneath still had the faint early-morning smell,
with the sun not yet on it. I looked at it all with enormous pleasure. The woman said, “Breakfast will be ready in ten minutes, Miss Benton said.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “I’ll be down.”

She hung for a moment in the doorway and then gave it up. She said, “Right-oh then,” and went off down the passage, leaving the door open. I shut it and opened the only case that
mattered. When I came upstairs again, I leant out of the window for a moment, snuffing up the scents of the garden. But my breakfast had made me sleepy. I shut the window firmly, in case the birds
got out of hand, or someone started in with a lawnmower. The curtains were flowery but solid, and kept out a lot of light. I drew them close and got undressed and washed in the slightly coloured
dusk. When I got into bed, I could just hear the vacuum cleaner droning away somewhere in the bottom of the house, but I rather liked it. It was a very domestic sort of noise. It made me feel, in a
not very explicit sort of way, that someone in a pink overall was looking after me. I went to sleep almost at once.

I drifted awake a little after three. The house was dead quiet, and I lay for a bit savouring the silence and my physical comfort. Then I got up and opened the window, leaving the curtains
drawn. The sun was coming round to the back of the house and the room would soon be getting warm. Even the birds had almost given up now. Only an occasional chirp showed that they were still there.
The dead weight of that extraordinary summer weather lay on the garden, and nothing stirred under it.

I had had all the sleep I wanted. I got dressed in a leisurely sort of way and went downstairs, hoping I might find someone who would give me tea. There was no one about. The hotel register
still lay open on the desk where I had signed it early in the morning. I was going past it when a single line of rather black writing caught my eye. I stopped and went over to look at it. There was
another entry after mine. Somebody called C. W. Matthews had clocked in during the day and had been given Room Number Four. Mr. Matthews was British and lived in Surbiton, which did not promise any
great excitement. The only thing which interested me was the fact that the woman in the pink overall had been wrong when she had said that there would be no one in until the evening. I did not know
when Mr. Matthews had arrived, but whatever had brought him to Burton St. Michael, it had brought him there fairly early in the day. He was not the ordinary overnight visitor. Whether he too had
retired to bed I did not know, and short of going up and knocking on the door of Number Four, I had no means of finding out.

I did not want to disturb the peace by ringing the bell on the desk, and in any case I had a feeling that no one would hear it if I did. I wandered down a passage going towards the back of the
house and tapped on a likely-looking door. The woman in the kitchen was neither Miss Benton nor the woman in the pink overall, but she knew who I was. I thought she had probably seen me at
breakfast, and people remember me, if only because of my size. She took my suggestion of tea with calm, and said would I like it in the garden? I said, “Oh yes, please,” and went out to
wait for it.

It was not much, I suppose, but I was enormously pleased by it. Things like this, gratuitous offers of small considerations, still took me by the throat with their unexpected kindness. I sat
down on a white-painted bench under the shade of a May tree, feeling almost dangerously happy. I was aware of the danger underneath the happiness. I think it gave it an extra tang. The danger was
that the happiness would not last. That is a threat common to all sorts of happiness, but here there were two good reasons for it which even I could see. The first was the obvious one that things
might be different if people knew about me. I was not entirely sure of this, but I think I had been led to assume it. For all I really knew, the woman in the pink overall might be more motherly,
not less, if she knew I had just come out of prison; but I did not think so. The odd thing was that I badly wanted to tell her.

The second reason was just that my present happiness was too simple to last. It was the merest happiness of normal human relations and ordinary living, and there are very few people who can keep
happy for long on that. No doubt you ought to be able to, but civilisation, or something, makes it next to impossible. At the moment I was utterly content, but sooner or later I should start to
want something I had not got. Meanwhile, I was aware of the insecurity of my happiness and at the same time consciously tempted to put it at risk.

When the woman brought out the tray, I thought of ways of telling her why I was as pleased with it as I was, but before I could choose the right words, she had put the tray down and gone back
into the house. That left only the birds, and they were no use. I fell back on the solid substance of my insecure content. There was bread-and-butter in not over-thin slices and home-made jam and
cakes. I ate it all with the sort of pleasure I had not known since childhood. When I had finished, I walked round the garden, dodging back into the shade whenever I got too hot. Then I went
upstairs to my room and lay on my still unmade bed in the flowered dusk behind the drawn curtains, waiting for dinner and the time to be on the move again.

Mr. Matthews apart, the woman in the pink overall had been right. There were two parties of obvious travellers at dinner, a pair of commercial gentlemen of a fairly familiar type and a young
couple with two small children. The two children were full of the excitement of holiday travel and the parents a bit edgy with the strain of it. They made more noise between them than the rest of
us put together. The businessmen talked to each other steadily in earnest undertones. Mr. Matthews was recognisable at once, if only because he was so startlingly ordinary. If you had been asked to
imagine a typical Surbiton man, you would have imagined something very like Mr. Matthews. Everything about him was discreet, his dark suit, his glasses, his voice when he spoke to the waitress,
even his choice of food and the way he ate it. I could not see him as a fly-by-night like myself. His table was next to mine. He was already there when I came in, and nodded pleasantly. I nodded
back.

I did not think discretion would allow him further familiarities, but in this I was wrong. We finished our meal and got up to go almost together, and as we got near the door he ventured a
cautious smile. “Been a wonderful day,” he said.”

“Wonderful,” I said.

We went out into the hall together. He said, “I don’t know—I was thinking of having a night-cap. Would you care to join me?”

I hesitated, but I should be away from Burton St. Michael in an hour’s time, and I saw no harm in it. “Yes,” I said, “I’d like that very much.”

He nodded. “Good,” he said. “The bar’s in here.”

He ordered a couple of whiskies, and we both filled them to the top with soda. It was a hot evening, and I was every bit as discreet as he was. “It’s warm in here,” he said.
“Shall we take them in the garden?”

I said, “That would be nice,” and meant it. I rather took to Mr. Matthews. He was so gentle and diffident. We went out into the dusk and settled ourselves on the white-painted bench
under the May tree. There was night-scented stock somewhere in the garden, and the place smelt as near paradise as one has a right to expect, even in the West Country.

“Going far?” he said. He seemed to assume I was a traveller. I suppose not many people actually stayed in Burton St. Michael. It was nice enough, but there was nothing much to stay
for.

“I’m going westwards,” I said.

He nodded. “Business or pleasure?”

“Purely pleasure.”

“You’re lucky,” he said. “I’m on business myself.”

I suddenly found my heart beating faster, but there we were, in that paradisal garden, and he had paid for the drinks. I could not just get up and go. I sat there, sipping my drink and telling
myself it was all nonsense. He said, “I’m looking into the affairs of a late colleague of mine.” I knew then, without a shadow of doubt, that it was going to happen, and it did.
“A man called Evan Maxwell,” he said.

“I see,” I said.

He was looking into his glass, turning it round and round in his hand. Then he looked up. “You knew him, perhaps?” he said.

“My acquaintance with him was very brief.”

“So I gathered. Nevertheless, I think you might be able to help me.”

“In what way?”

He thought for a moment, looking down at what was left of his drink. Then he drank it off and put the empty glass down on the bench beside him. He said, “Look, Mr. Curtis, it’s all
quite a long time ago now. So far as you’re concerned, it’s all finished and done with.”

I said, “So I had hoped.”

“So it is,” he said. “For you, but not for me. That was why I hoped you might be . . .