Picture of Millie

Book 434: Murder Room

by P.M. Hubbard

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries; Suspense

Synopsis

Millie Trent, the toast - or scandal, according to some - of a West Country sailing resort, is found drowned. The verdict is accidental death, although no one seems to know when or why she ended up in the sea. Paul Mycroft, despite his determination not to let the affair spoil his family holiday, finds himself drawn into an enquiry that begins by providing a startling diversity of views on Millie's character and ends by involving him in unexpected danger.

Release date: September 6, 2012

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 216

Sample

‘All right,’ said Mrs Mycroft, ‘you know the drill. If you see me wave my handkerchief, you must come out straight away, all of you, and come here. And if you
want Daddy or me to come, wave your arms. Don’t wave them unless you do, but if in doubt, wave. I’ll be watching. And you keep your eye on me, in case I wave. Promise?’

‘Promise,’ said the biggest of the three children.

‘All right. Go on then.’ They were in fact already gone, running wildly towards the creamed edge of an almost level sea.

Paul Mycroft, flat on his back on the sand beside her, said, ‘It’s almost high tide, one of the smallest tides of the year. There is no wind at all. There is no sea. There is no
under-tow or current. There are no sharks, as far as one can see or reasonably expect. I can reach the sea, if I have to, in about ten seconds from a lying start. It is a perfect day – the
one day in the year when summer suddenly occurs. For heaven’s sake relax and enjoy it. And let them enjoy it. And me.’ He shifted the edge of his bathing trunks slightly where the sun
had caught him the day before, scratched under it gingerly and sighed deeply. ‘Peace, peace, peace,’ he said. ‘God knows I can do with a bit. Try some.’

‘It’s all very well, but we’ve got to have the drill. I can’t be at peace unless I’ve closed all the gaps.’

‘I know. Eternal vigilance. But it’s done now. All the gaps are closed. Nothing can happen to any of us except sunburn and in due course, thank God, thirst. Lie down and anticipate
them with caution and hope respectively.’ He rolled over on his towel and cocked an eye seaward. ‘Look at those dinghies,’ he said. ‘You’d think they had motors. Not
enough breeze to flap a handkerchief, and there they all are, lying over on their sides and running around like scalded cats. It’s amazing.’

He completed his roll to his satisfaction and settled down comfortably on his face. ‘But not for me. Too much like work on a day like this.’

‘It’s the young. They are energetic and competitive. And they love showing off.’

‘Not only the young, you know. Look at old Leatherlegs – what’s his name? – Dawson. Anybody’s bronzed sea-daddy, all oilskins and far-seeing eyes. And I bet you
he’s out there, dashing about with the best of them.’

‘He lacks a crew.’

‘Millie Trent? She’s probably back in time for the morning tide. Even Millie can’t stay on the tiles indefinitely. I wonder what her story was this time?’

‘How does she do it, Paul?’

‘Get away with it?’

‘Well, that too. But how does she manage it at all? I can give her – what? – eight years, to be charitable, and I’m sure I couldn’t.’

He turned his head deliberately on his folded arms. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘she’s got a good figure and doesn’t hesitate to make it apparent. But mainly she’s keen,
don’t you see? Much too obviously for me. One has one’s pride. And a sense of the ridiculous. I should have to be very drunk or very lonely to succumb to Millie. But for anyone
who’s not too choosey, or who isn’t many people’s cup of tea, or who’s just plain in a hurry, she’d be all right.’

‘I think it’s horrible.’

‘I think you’re a bit jealous. Anyway, you asked. But good Lord, you’ve seen plenty of Millies in your time. The world is full of them. It’s only that in a respectable
place like this she rather sticks out.’

‘She certainly sticks out.’

‘That’s what I like about her. It warms my old bones. It’s her mind that gets in my hair. Fancy being married to her.’

‘I like the major.’

‘Not really. You can’t like a damned soul. You mean you feel sorry for him, or think he’s harmless, or too good for her, or something. But you can’t like a man in that
case. And you can’t think of him apart from it. I don’t say he mayn’t have been all right before she got at him, but you’ve got to take people as they are, not as they might
have been.’

‘No, but – if I met him casually, on a bus, say, I’d like him.’

‘That would only be a first impression, and completely inaccurate as such. Unless you know he’s the man who married Millie, you don’t know him at all, only an abstraction.
Anyhow, I don’t think you’d be right. He’s the hollow man, of course, poor sod, but there’s things inside I shouldn’t like. Good God, there’s bound to be. Think
what his life must have been these fifteen years past at least.’

‘Why couldn’t he divorce her?’

He rolled over on his back again. ‘Why indeed? That’s one of the things. Oh, to hell with Millie and the major.’ He sighed and stretched deliberately and significantly. Mary
turned and lay on her side, her face always to the sea.

The sun laid powerful motionless hands on her shoulders and back. The beach was silent and unbelievably empty. The three children made more noise than the Atlantic. Somewhere above them a pair
of droning vapour trails headed westwards for America. They had come, with all their doubts and changes of mind, to the right place and at the right time. Peace, peace, peace. She shut her eyes and
her head dropped on her arm.

Major Trent boarded the bus and said, ‘I am the hollow man.’ He raised his hat politely and looked at her with his little staring blue eyes. A gull said ‘Kwee-ee’ with a
dying fall, and then came back again saying ‘Kwee, kwee, kwee-ee’ in a steady crescendo. Cathleen pulled at her sleeve and said, ‘Mummy! Mummy!’ in a unusually shrill voice,
and the others joined in from a distance, ‘Mummy! Mummy!’

She jerked upright and saw Paul already sitting up. They were on their feet together, and she counted, with sick relief, three distinct and identifiable figures racing towards them from the
sea.

‘Mummy,’ said Cathleen, ‘it’s Mrs Trent.’

‘Mrs Trent?’

‘In the sea,’ said Jennifer.

‘She’s floating,’ said Cathleen. ‘Her eyes are open, but she’s quite white. Is she dead, do you think?’

Paul said, ‘You stay here with Mummy.’ He followed the children’s tracks back to the edge of the sea, where the waves, hardly more than rounded ripples of clear water, followed
each other gently on to the almost level sand. Ten yards out something lolloped disjointedly over the succeeding crests. It looked like seaweed with a white face.

Millie was in walking-out dress. She wore skin-tight sharkskin trousers, one white buckskin shoe and a sky-blue jersey which had shrunk into even more startling conformity with her figure. Her
hair, despite her dinghy sailing, had not proved quite waterproof and her mouth gaped. Only her eyes, round, green and rather prominent, had the authentic Millie look. His first thought was for the
children, but there were no horrors. It was simply Millie in the water, unable to fend for herself. Paul, with some professional experience of bodies, had seldom seen one so inoffensive.

He took hold of the shoe and began to tow her ashore, but remembered that the children would be watching him. He left her to the waves again and walked up the beach. The children, clustered
round Mary, stood wide-eyed but collected.

‘Is she dead?’ said Cathleen.

‘She’s dead,’ said Paul. ‘She must have fallen in the water and been drowned. Will you go up to the house,’ he said to Mary, ‘and phone for – the police, I
suppose. Yes, the police – they’ll do whatever’s necessary. No need for a doctor.’

Mary said, ‘You go straight up to the house, all of you. I’ll catch you up before you get off the beach.’ They went, hand-in-hand and rather reluctantly. She said, ‘Was
it all right? They don’t seem upset.’

‘Yes, all right. Nothing special to see, and they take the fact in their stride. You go and phone. I’d better stay and see she doesn’t get up to any more mischief.’

‘Oh Paul – you mustn’t—’

‘Nonsense. You know the way we were talking about her only a matter of minutes ago. Perfectly fair comment. It still is. I suppose she didn’t like dying, but I can’t see who
else suffers. Go on up now, and I’ll get her out.’

The buckskin shoe came off in his hand when he pulled at it. He wondered it hadn’t followed its fellow. He put it on again, guiding the stockinged foot into the toe as he did with the
smaller children. The action set Millie’s head awash, but this did not seem to matter. Sea-water was clean, cleaner than Millie had been these many years. The moving waters at their
priest-like task of rolling Millie up the beach for decent burial. He got the shoe on to his satis­faction, almost asking ‘Comfy?’ automatically as he did with the children. Then he
took her by the ankle and towed her gently on to the half-liquid sand, which the sea would presently leave dry.

The body, which had had so much significance for every man within sight of it, had been sterilised by death and the sea. There was nothing, yet, for the gorge to rise at. Everything looked
exactly as it would have looked if she had fallen into the water with her clothes on and climbed out, laughing and making the most of their cling and shrinkage. He could imagine it so clearly. Only
this time she had not climbed out. She had stayed in too long, and the light had gone out, and now the body with its clinging clothes meant nothing, nothing at all.

The face had changed. Millie’s face had never been her strong point, but then it had had other points of great strength to contend with. It hadn’t been a bad face in itself. Rather
plump and highly coloured, with those green cat’s eyes and a mouth that was always smiling. He couldn’t remember, off-hand, ever seeing Millie not smiling. Now he came to think of it,
there was some virtue in this, however questionable the causes of her satisfaction. There wasn’t all that joy in the world, after all. He suddenly saw that the face was pathetic. Poor Millie,
quite chap-fallen, with the laughter-lines drawn hard down the side of her dropped mouth and her eyes seeing no further cause for satisfaction in anything. He believed, as he had told Mary, that no
one was likely to suffer for her death, but he was surprised to find himself suddenly very sorry for Millie.

The ambulance rolled discreetly on to the car-park behind the tamarisks and stopped by an ices-and-minerals cabin not yet open for business. The driver got out a folding stretcher and came down
the beach with a constable in uniform. The constable’s boots were beautifully polished, and he stepped delicately and unwillingly into the salt mushiness at the edge of the sea. He said,
‘Mr Mycroft?’

‘That’s right. I asked my wife to phone you.’

‘You found the body in the sea, sir?’

‘The children found it, in fact, and called us. I brought it out of the water, as you see.’

‘I understand you know the lady, sir – a Mrs Trent?’

‘That’s right. Staying with her husband at the Carrack Hotel. Major Trent.’

‘Yes, sir. We’ve sent a car for him. Is there anything more you can tell me, sir?’

‘I don’t think there is really. She was floating about ten yards off-shore in the shallow water. She was obviously dead. I simply brought her in to make sure the tide didn’t
take her out again. It’s on the turn.’

‘Quite right, sir, so it is. All right, Joe. Better get her in the ambulance.’

‘ “Peace, peace, peace,” says I,’ said Paul later, ‘ “Nothing more can happen.” And there was dead Millie creeping up on us out of the sea even while we
were saying just what sort of a woman she was alive.’ He raised his glass of bottled beer and stared through it at the midday sun. ‘It hasn’t put the children off the sea, I hope,
has it?’

‘I don’t think so. They are determined to go down again this afternoon. I think they hope someone else will have come in by then.’

‘Tell them the tide’s out. Whatever their predilections in jetsam, they may as well get the facts of life right. Tide is more important than time hereabouts with the river running as
it does.’ He stretched himself in his cane verandah chair. ‘I’m glad we took a house, aren’t you? I know it means work, but fancy having the children at the Carrack,
spitting out the hotel food and asking the wrong questions about Millie Trent.’

‘I think so. A hotel would be nice for us for a bit, but not with the family. Where do you suppose Millie went in? She could swim, couldn’t she?’

‘I’ve never seen her at it. A bikini and sun-tan oil were more in her line. But yes, of course she must have been able to swim a bit. Even in these days of universal life-jackets no
one would go dinghy sailing, surely, unless they could manage to paddle around till they were picked up. I suppose she could have gone in anywhere on either side of the river and been taken out by
the night tide. It wouldn’t have taken her very far as it is now. And then the morning flood brought her in and put her down on Lanting instead of taking her back up-river.’

‘I wish it had put her down somewhere else, but I suppose the sooner the better, anyhow. Paul – there’s nothing here to involve you professionally, is there? You are on
holiday, aren’t you?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Paul, ‘I’m on holiday all right. With one small reservation, possibly, but that’s nothing to do with Millie Trent. Don’t worry. I remain a
tripper, though the seas were choked with drowned Millies.’

‘There are bound to be questions asked, though, aren’t there? The major was looking for her yesterday evening. Someone must know where she was. At least, Millie being Millie, one
tends to assume she wasn’t alone.’

‘One does indeed. Straight off the tiles into the river. I wonder if she was tight? Not that that was one of her vices. She could knock it back with the best, but I never saw her anything
more than warmed up.’

The feet crunched hesitantly on the shingle path at the side of the house, and Paul shot to his feet. ‘Trent, my dear chap, come in and sit down. I don’t – there’s
nothing much one can say that it’s any good saying. I’m going to give you a drink.’

Major Trent said, ‘I came to thank you,’ He blinked his small eyes quickly at them and sat awkwardly on the edge of a chair. He was immaculate as usual, immaculately casual in a blue
blazer with a Paisley silk scarf tied stock-wise in the open collar of a fine check shirt.

Mary said, ‘We did nothing. We just happened to be there. I’m so sorry—’

Paul came back out of the house and handed him a glass. ‘Drink that,’ he said.

The major took it and lifted it vaguely in their direction. Paul thought he was going to say ‘Happy days,’ but he checked himself, failed to find a formula that suited the occasion
and drank in silence. ‘I’ve just come from the police station,’ he said. ‘They told me you found her. I – I thought I’d come here, not that damned hotel. And I
wanted to thank you.’

‘I’m glad you came,’ said Mary. ‘You must stay and have lunch with us.’

‘That’s very kind. I don’t know. It’s the shock, you see. Seems almost impossible to believe she’s dead. She was always – full of life, Millie. And coming
suddenly like this, it’s very difficult to get hold of. You see that? I hope I’m not upsetting you. I’d better be on my way. Just wanted to thank you.’ He drained his
glass.

Paul said, ‘You sit where you are and I’ll get you another.’ The major made no move. He sat there staring at Mary. His clipped ginger moustache trembled slightly, and she
thought for a moment that he was going to cry. He said, ‘I never thought it would be this way, do you see? I always assumed she’d outlive me. She was younger, you know – a good
deal. I’m afraid I bored her at times. I can’t think how she came to drown. She could swim – not much, you know, but enough to get ashore.’

He took the drink Paul gave him, repeated his silent gesture of incantation and drank deliberately. ‘The trouble is, I don’t know where she was yesterday. The police asked me, you
see – well, they would, naturally. I had to say I didn’t know. Sounds a bit off, though, doesn’t it?’

He gazed into the amber heel of his glass, raised it and poured it down. ‘I had asked one or two people, but I wasn’t worried. She’d have told me when she came back, you see.
And she hadn’t been gone long. But now I don’t know, and it sounds queer to say so. What do you think?’ He looked sharply at Paul, but his eyes were not quite in focus. Paul
wondered whether they’d given him something at the police station, or whether he had fortified himself before he left the hotel. They must, after all, have told him what had happened.

‘I don’t see it’s anything to worry about,’ he said. ‘One can’t always say where one’s going or how long for. As you say, one explains it when one gets
back.’

‘That’s it. That’s it. I thought – well, I mean, it was nothing unusual, you see. And then to have this happen. I can’t get over it. I couldn’t believe it
when they told me, and I still can’t in a way. But I mean that’s nonsense, you see. I’ve seen her. But it’s the idea of it. I keep taking it for granted she’ll be
back.’

He stood up and moved into the sunlight, perfectly steady on his feet, but slightly breathless, as if he had been running. ‘I mustn’t stay,’ he said. ‘No, really, thank
you, you’re very kind, but I’d better be on my way. Thank you again.’ He marched off, soldierly and immaculate, with six straight fingers of Paul’s whisky inside him.

‘He’s shaken,’ said Mary. ‘Do you think we were wrong about nobody’s being hurt but Millie?’

‘Not really. He’s odd, isn’t he? I agree he’s shaken. But—’

‘People are when they win the pools.’

‘Or when the X-ray is negative. Or when they’re acquitted of murder. I know that. I don’t for a moment think the major’s heart is broken. The facts are all against it.
But there was something a bit cagey about him, wasn’t there?’

‘The only thing I did wonder,’ said Mary, ‘was why he came here at all.’

‘Well, sir,’ said the sergeant, ‘that seems to be about all you can tell us. And that’s only to complete the record, really. Don’t add much, do
it?’ He pushed the signed statement aside and sat back in his chair. ‘You’re not staying at the Carrack, are you, but I understand you know Major and Mrs Trent. Particular friends
o. . .