Hire Me a Hearse (15 page)

She paused to look at the face under the turban. Janssi Singh's eyes were screwed up as though to avoid a rising feather of smoke from the cigarette in his mouth. He looked pained but not terribly surprised at what he was hearing and feeling. Like a bull receiving the
estogue
. He looked
pierced. Suddenly his eyes opened wide and there were etiolating lights in their dark depths that masked the reflection of his thoughts as he took the cigarette from the corner of his mouth and dropped ash into the tray on Drury's desk.

‘You must be fair, Vicki,' he said. ‘Wilma should never have started that joke about having a baby. Afterwards he wouldn't have believed her if she had told him the truth. So she went on with it and he grew away from her. It has happened before. Women sometimes want their fun and their virginity and don't know how to compromise, so they end up by lying and getting in a mess and getting men in a mess with them. It is sad, Mr Drury. Very sad. Sometimes,' Janssi Singh added thoughtfully. He shook his colourful head and his teeth flashed in a fresh smile before he said, ‘I feel sorry for Mr Jeremy Truncard. Pulsating with a late-arrived puberty and the beginnings of a Freudian id, he could never hope to handle Wilma. So Gladys, as Vicki tells me, was inevitable.'

Bill Hazard choked over some smoke
that went the wrong way down. Drury looked not at the man in the turban, but at the woman. He was stone-faced.

She said, ‘Gladys Albirt, the daughter of Sir Thomas Albirt, Jeremy's I.C. boss. Jeremy hasn't bought her the ring, but he feels morally engaged to her. He's even told her about the fictitious baby he believes Wilma let him father. She took it rather well. Quite enlightened. Told him these things happen. The big thing is not to let them happen too often.'

Bill Hazard choked again, but this time for a very different reason. He was grinning. Janssi Singh looked at him and shrugged.

‘Women, my dear Inspector. They are utterly and wholly unpredictable. They can kill you with a smile and make you intolerably happy with a tear.' He crushed out his cigarette and turned to his wife. ‘Don't let me interrupt, Vicki.'

He caught one of her hands, stared down at it like a pedologist who has grabbed up some moon dust, and
dropped a kiss in the palm as he turned it over.

‘You were right, as always, to insist I come along. But I'm afraid we will never make a good double act. Superintendent Drury must be wishing he had agreed to hear us separately rather than together.'

If Drury thought he detected a note of quiet mockery in that statement he gave no sign. But his expression was not quite so stony when he said, ‘The baby Mr Truncard mentioned on the phone to Miss Haven. It sounds almost unbelievable, but then so does most of this case.'

Vicki Seeburg asked quietly, ‘Just what is the case you're on, Mr Drury? I mean, just so that I have an idea of what interests Scotland Yard. I know you want all the facts you can come by. But you also have a case to solve.'

‘Who put the plastic bomb in that gnome? That's my case, Vicki. Whoever planned the explosion was about to take care of Jeremy Truncard, Professor Warrender, and possibly a couple of nosy Yard men besides Wilma Haven.'

Vicki shook her head.

‘I can't somehow believe that, Superintendent,' she said.

‘Why not?'

‘It isn't logical.'

‘Well,' said Drury with fine patience, ‘how is it illogical?'

She caught her hands together and compressed them until the knuckles shone waxy white through the dusky brown flesh.

‘Jeremy was important. He hasn't finished telling all he knows about the new explosives and the latest kind of napalm.'

She spoke with such a cool matter-of-factness that Drury wondered what in hell he had missed.

At that moment the tape on the recorder ran to the end of its spool.

When Hazard had fixed a fresh spool and the familiar faint whirring was again heard in the room she said in a crisper tone, speaking like someone
who had made up her mind about something, ‘Listen, Mr Drury. Jeremy was being contacted at the ‘Golden Pagoda' just the way Wilma happened on. He was instructed where to go, and it is certain that he arrived at some consultant's room, where he thought he was undergoing psychiatric treatment. Instead he was being brainwashed in reverse. He was surrendering, under hypnosis and traumatic suggestion, all he knew of the experiments being made at International Chemicals. Formulae he couldn't remember when in his right mind, as it is termed, were reproduced from his subconscious, which had stored them. It was like having a mental sound track playing back what his mind had absorbed.'

She paused.

Her husband added his few words. ‘This isn't new. Freshly acquired drugs can not only stimulate memory, but condense it, like light seen through the reverse of a telescope. Jeremy Truncard could not only be induced to surrender what he knew, but he could be conditioned
to go away and mentally store what he was about to absorb of fresh secret results.'

Bill Hazard came forward and crushed out about a millimetre of smoking cigarette.

‘This is actually practicable?' he asked.

‘Yes,' said the man in the turban. ‘Of course certain drugs are helpful in the process. That is how Wilma tumbled to what was happening.'

‘How?' asked Drury, and this time the woman took over.

This pair might not be good for a double act, but they were certainly a smoothly operating team, the Yard superintendent reflected. He was both impressed and wary. They were in their own way and their own time, he felt, feeding him all the information he could expect to receive from two individuals in a very privileged position. But they were doing so in a way that would leave him afterwards with no false impression about their own part and their co-operation with the British authorities.

Someone in Whitehall was being very
clever. A lot of hands with itchy fingers were being kept clean until he had sifted the dirt. If any stuck to him — well, he was the clever bastard who let Wilma Haven be killed by something that might have been prevented if . . .

Drury could supply a score of ifs. That someone in Whitehall would need only one in a showdown. He wondered if Wilma Haven had had any real idea of what she was getting into, or even why she had been allowed to go to perdition in her own sweet way.

He became aware that the woman was watching him closely as she continued speaking.

‘Wilma took Jeremy's cigarette case from his pocket and found it empty. He was smoking long-sized filter tips, which didn't fit the case,' Vicki said, careful not to hurry her words. ‘She found it was a cigarette with a strange taste that made her feel mildly elated and mentally unburdened, as though she didn't care about things she should be caring for. She purloined a second and had it tested. It was impregnated with LSD-25. You
know of course what that is.'

‘The favourite drug of the new crop of acidheads,' Bill Hazard said with a rough snort. ‘Well, if that's all it comes to, Truncard being one of the new breed of psychedelic junkies — '

‘No, that isn't all it comes to.'

Janssi Singh's voice was sharp with reproof. Hazard looked startled. He looked at Drury, and got a warning scowl that lasted only the time it took to give a brief headshake.

‘A moment please, Inspector,' said the man in the turban. He removed a wallet from a pocket inside his mohair jacket and extracted a folded piece of printed matter. ‘This is something,' he went on, ‘by a Harley Street psychiatrist, possibly of equal standing with Professor Warrender, whom Wilma consulted about Jeremy later. I will read two extracts. They will be sufficient. The first.'

He paused, then read: ‘I cannot sufficiently emphasize how infinitely dangerous the haphazard use of LSD can be. LSD is not a drug for everyone. Psychiatrists are exceedingly careful in
selecting their patients.' He paused, and looking up said, ‘Note that Jeremy Truncard was not given the drug haphazardly, but by careful and calculated assimilation. Also that it is a drug useful in the hands of psychiatrists. Now the second extract.'

He paused again before reading: ‘I myself have found that, for the drug to have its therapeutic effect, the patients must be of average or above average intelligence.'

Again he looked up. ‘A therapeutic effect, which could become an inverse or reverse therapeutic effect. You follow? And Jeremy Truncard, despite his poor performance with the women in his life, must be rated well above average intelligence. He is thought to be a brilliant research chemist, which is why he is with I.C. and also why his brain and subconscious have been milked like a milch-cow.'

‘Good God,' breathed Hazard, feeling for his cigarettes and lighting another in an absentminded way.

‘Perhaps,' said Janssi Singh, ‘I should
take up just a few more moments of your time by reading you one more passage. It helps one to understand the other two in relation to Jeremy Truncard. Here it is.'

He smoothed out the cutting and held it farther from his face, then read aloud: ‘I've been using the drug on patients since 1958, with a fifty to sixty per cent success rate. I'm absolutely convinced of its value in medical treatment. Often, after twenty sessions of LSD — with talks and discussions on what the drug reveals — patients who have been under analysis for years and years, with little or no progress, have improved out of all recognition.'

Janssi Singh stopped, folded his cutting, put it away in the wallet which he returned to the inside pocket of his jacket, and then crossed his arms in a very deliberate manner.

‘For medical treatment you substitute hypnotic treatment of a conditioned mind. We don't know how many sessions Jeremy Truncard had, but they were continuing, and he knew nothing about them. He went to London, called
at the ‘Golden Pagoda' when told, and afterwards found himself travelling back to Nuneaton. Vicki has thoroughly checked with Jeremy Truncard himself, and all he remembers is that he has been to see a psychiatrist suggested by Wilma. Wilma! You get the devilish cunning of that implanted suggestion? If he saw her and recognized her at the club while he was in some traumatic condition he would rationalize her being there with himself. It would not be a surprise. He was in a psychedelic cocoon, to use your word, Inspector.'

Hazard's mouth was slack.

‘Finish what you were going to tell me, Vicki,' Drury invited, his gaze on the woman, who was moving her head and making her ear ornaments bob along her cheeks.

She fingered her lower lip with a very pointed nail glinting with mother-of-pearl lacquer before saying over her slim pale brown finger, ‘Lysergic acid diethylamide, to give LSD its full name, was something Wilma at first didn't know how to cope with. She made inquiries about the drug
and its users and thought Jeremy was some schizophrenic enjoying what is called a freakout by the addicts seeking escape in hallucination. She found she was wrong, and went after the truth. She got me caught up in it, and I couldn't do anything inside I.C., so I made liaison with Daniel Paget, who was concealed as a special inquiry agent with a normal security man named Bateman. Wilma found she could do nothing apart from interesting me and Professor Warrender, who had once treated her. Frankly, I didn't think anything of it until Janssi and I worked out some patterns of the visits to the ‘Golden Pagoda'. Both of us, for instance, we were never there together. No one on the staff seemed to know anything about Jeremy. But there was a man, they recalled, who came in occasionally and had a phone call and got a waiter to take it and say Russian Roulette, and then the voice at the end of the line would tell the waiter to summon this man. When Jeremy took the call it was apparently to leave shortly afterwards and keep a rendezvous.'

‘Where?'

‘We don't know.'

‘Didn't Wilma or you, since you became so interested, follow him?'

‘On two occasions. On the first a big man with a flat top to his head baulked Wilma from getting into the underground train Jeremy had taken travelling West from Piccadilly Circus. On the second a man ran for a taxi at the same moment I did. There was an argument and when he finally shrugged and went in search of another cab the one Jeremy had taken was lost.'

Drury snapped up the apparent discrepancy.

‘I thought you never went to the ‘Golden Pagoda' without your husband. Yet you followed Mr Truncard from the club to a taxi rank, I take it.'

Janssi Singh's white teeth came flashing on show again.

‘You mustn't lie to the superintendent, Vicki,' he said. ‘He is very sharp, and I suspect very deep and also a man of frightening experience — with liars,' he added softly, but cramping down on
genuine amusement that seemed to spark new lights in his rather arrogant eyes.

If Drury had no liking for being ribbed, even in a friendly way, in his own office he gave no sign, but out of his line of vision he could hear Hazard getting restive again. This sort of session ground down the big inspector's patience to a very sharp edge that required careful handling. Bill Hazard was more at home with a character like Claude or Cedric —