=============================

Continued from: http://weirdmonger.livejournal.com/2006/11/12/

Constable Milly Mauve started by following various leads that eventually led to a middle-aging Claura Gill.

Everyone who had investigated the murder of Denise Dumond over the years had automatically assumed it had been carried out by a ravening male.  The Augusthog, as the pink blancmange portakabin was called in ‘honour’ of its encroaching permanence to replace the crumbling war memorial as a landmark for approaching boats, was full of backbiting, crudity, sexism, racism and sheer gratuitous spite.  Many a holidaymaker had been banged up there simply because they had started singing out of tune in a pub or missing their step during a foxtrot.  Milly, however, never lost the plot quite so completely as the clueless male officers she saw around her in the portakabin.  She was so self-subsumed she could actually empathise with the most unlikely motives.  Including affection-subterfuge or blame-transference or paradox-immersion or sexual envy across and between genders.

A male murderer, Milly was convinced, would never have preferred eating the body without first corrupting it with the effects of his lust. And after several months of paperwork crossing the corridors of the Augusthog, it had been discovered that Denise’s body, short of the bits missing through eating, was otherwise intact.

Meanwhile, over the years, Milly watched Claura standing on several separate occasions at the end of the pier gazing towards the seahumps and the electrical storms shorting between the two main dumpy ‘earths’ that the erstwhile peaks had become by dint of heavenly erosion.  As if Claura were expecting a loved one to return from his sojourn abroad, sailing between those very humps’ shifting shapes.  A bastard of a man, resurrected from drowning, one who had once ill-treated Claura, the simple-minded Claura who had in turn loved him with unrequited passion, thus losing her heart to him when it was taken aboard his body during a devilmaycare attempt to emulate the Flying Dutchman upon the High Seas. A Romance of adventure and derring-do.

So Milly deduced that Claura had killed Denise Dumond by misplaced role-playing, in vicarious hope that it was the work of the love-rat who had secretly returned to Bonnyville by the effect of there having been such a suitable crime perpetrated in Bonnyville at all.  So, by Claura initiating the need for a murder hunt, Milly was convinced that Claura was convinced the culprit (whom she now carried within her as he had once carried her within him) would be excised from her body and reunited within her arms, as a villain made manifest by her own villainy.  A convoluted motive to flesh out Claura’s love-rat lover in her own shape that made sense only to women police officers like Milly.  Cannibalism had been the icing on the cake.  Or simply the clincher to complete the circle.  It all made sense to Milly.  If not to Claura Gill herself who continued to gaze out to sea for many more years following the actual murder – now intent on marrying the first-comer between the humps, whoever it was, love-rat or handsome French lieutenant or black-eyed pirate or even Father Christmas.

Milly Mauve, meanwhile, never gave up hope of nailing the crime to its mast.  Ever on the watch itself for others watching.

 CONTINUED HERE: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2006/11/apocryfan-22.html

==================================