Hire Me a Hearse (16 page)

Drury hung up on that reminder, his eyes pinching close at the corners. The woman was trying not to look amused.

‘You haven't actually caught me in a lie, Superintendent,' she said mildly.

‘Mr Singh's word, not mine, Vicki.'

Drury seemed determined to remain as uncommitted as a pendulum, oscillating between both of them.

‘My husband has some strange ideas about women, Mr Drury. You've heard some of them. He thinks they are for males to make fun of. In fact, he still cannot understand why my Government uses me for what he thinks is a man's job.'

Janssi Singh shrugged the thick shoulders pushing against the mohair of his jacket.

‘Killing is a man's job,' he said as though the claim required no additional support.

‘And being killed, like Wilma?' asked Vicki softly.

‘That was bad, Vicki.'

‘It happened.'

‘So you want to avenge her.'

‘No,' she said. ‘It is simpler than that. I want to be sure Superintendent Drury can arrest those responsible.'

Drury said, ‘I have a feeling you want more than that.'

‘The rest,' she told him, ‘will come when you have made your arrests, Superintendent. There are men working for high stakes and some for a high price. The first are those who decided Russian Roulette was a clever term to use. Clever because it could be easily misunderstood if it didn't apply to a suicidal game with a revolver with one loaded chamber. It would be thought to point to the Soviet, and pointing in that direction would be away from another direction which
would be more of a threat to India and Pakistan.'

‘The men working for the country,' said Janssi Singh, ‘who made things very rough for your man in Shanghai some months ago and fomented trouble in Hong Kong. I tell you because some things must be underlined, and I name no names because our High Commissioners do not wish names to be mentioned and that is satisfactory to Whitehall. We are here to help with a case of murder, a civil case, not political. It cannot be put on any other plane, Mr Drury. Frankly, that is why we are seeing you and not the Commissioner of Police himself. That is why this is going on tape. We will ask for one playback, and then the tape will be wiped clean. No record except what is in your mind, what we all have in our minds, what we remember and what we can deduce from that. If this sounds a little pompous, please understand this isn't easy. We could say too much, which would be unforgivable, because we are working well with your people. We don't want to say too little, which would be
stupid, because it would not help you.'

‘You see,' Vicki Seeburg put in as soon as her husband paused, ‘we know what Wilma wanted to do. I tried to tell her it was dangerous. She laughed. She said she knew something I didn't. She said she was certain, because of what she knew, she could force things to a head at Broomwood. But Jeremy must be there. She said his being there was the only way to make sure he was not processed for the rest of what his subconscious could divulge.'

‘Tell me one thing that's puzzling me,' Drury said.

‘Certainly.'

Husband and wife sat attentively forward, waiting for the question.

Drury asked slowly, ‘I take it all this was leaked back to Whitehall through Paget. Well, in that case, why couldn't Paget move in and stop things dead in their tracks? That would have made sure no further damage was done, no more leakage was made.'

She smiled and looked at her husband. He smiled at her. They seemed to be
sharing a secret until they both turned their heads to look at Drury.

‘If that had been done, Superintendent,' she said, ‘it would have started over again with someone in place of Jeremy Truncard, possibly in a search for different information. You see, the machinery would have remained intact. It could be taken elsewhere and set up under a different cover. Your own people want to see that doesn't happen, but they want to take the machinery apart legally, with no diplomatic or political come-backs, even no certain knowledge outside this country that it has been done. Whatever goes wrong must be inexplicable apart from your own operation, which will receive all the publicity a Western democracy can give it — a murder plot, deep and devious, in the best tradition of Sherlock Holmes.'

‘Not Sherlock Holmes,' Drury corrected her gently.

She widened her eyes at her husband.

‘Not?' she said.

‘No,' he nodded, ‘because Mr Holmes was not a man at Scotland Yard. You
had better say, Vicki, in the best tradition of Frank Drury, who has some very good cases to his credit, I happen to know.'

She rose. ‘Very well, Mr Drury. Will you please run the tape back so we can hear it and then wipe it clean? This must be off the record, and I have to say that I saw the tape cleaned. It was on that condition I was allowed to come at all.'

Janssi Singh rose, stood back, his hands on the back of his chair.

‘My own Government is not quite so demanding,' he smiled. ‘But then it is run by a man. Vicki's — '

He let it go.

‘Perhaps women are intuitive,' she said.

‘In that case never discount a man's powers for out-thinking intuition.'

She considered the words. ‘I'll try to find some comfort in what my husband says, Mr Drury,' she smiled. ‘But I'm not sure I know what he means. Do you?'

‘I think I do.'

He was trading hard stares with Janssi Singh, who suddenly smiled and then laughed, shook his head as though to
deny a thought that had occurred to him, and turned away to go to the window.

Vicki Seeburg appeared surprised and looked from her husband's back to Drury's enigmatic smile.

‘What's that meant to imply, Superintendent?' she asked.

‘I think,' Drury said, covering up fast, ‘your husband realizes I have just a few questions I would like to ask before you go.' When she frowned quickly he hastened to add, ‘I'll ask them, if I may, when the tapes have been wiped clean. There will be no record of them that you will knowingly leave behind except in my head. And in Inspector Hazard's,' he added. ‘You will be asked to make no formal statement. That is quite understood, and you will both be kept out of any trial that might result from the conclusion of my inquiry.'

She thought about it, looked at her husband again. Plainly she didn't like adding more.

Janssi Singh said, ‘Act as though you were a man, Vicki. Say yes and stop using your intuition. It kept Jeremy Truncard
alive. But leave it to Superintendent Drury to catch the killer in his own way. I have a feeling he won't disappoint either of us, and I'm not being intuitive.'

She nodded. ‘Very well, Mr Drury. Play back the tapes, let me see them wiped clean, and then I'll answer these more particular questions.'

They didn't sit down, and it didn't take very long for Hazard to run the spools through again. In the rerun some of it sounded repetitious, but Drury realized that was inevitable with this kind of cautious approach, with one party trying not to spill unsharable secrets and the other not to tread on political corns. Drury also realized something else. The questions he had to ask had not been answered, even in a roundabout way, by what had been recorded.

After a glance had been shared round the room Drury said to Hazard, ‘Wipe them, Bill.'

Nothing was said while the inspector ran the tapes annulling what they held.

‘Thank you, Superintendent,' said Vicki Seeburg. ‘Now your other questions.'

‘You shot a man with a flat-topped head. Who was he?'

She nodded. ‘The man who stopped Wilma taking off after Jeremy. I knew him as Jack Mulley. He was a contact of Paget's. I think he fooled Daniel Paget, he certainly killed him, and in the house where I took Jeremy, who didn't know him. Wilma and I, when we tried to follow Jeremy and were baulked, did not leave from inside the club. We kept watch outside, which answers another point you raised earlier. I wondered when you would get to it.'

As she came to a stop Drury said, ‘The man who baulked you at the taxi. Do you know him?'

‘No. But he looked very like Professor Warrender, and that may have been a coincidence. Wilma would have known, of course.'

‘As you would have known the big man with the flat head?'

She started visibly, as though surprised by something he had said beyond the actual words spoken.

‘Yes,' she said slowly, ‘that is so.'

Drury kept to his role of someone asking questions merely for enlargement of what he knew. He did not hesitate before the next, which he had ready.

‘Jeremy Truncard came south in his own car. What happened to it?'

‘Dan Paget had it picked up by his department. I think the police have it. But I didn't ask which police station. There were some things I couldn't ask. Another was what happened to the bodies of Dan Paget and Mulley. I phoned a number Dan had given me and told them what had happened. They also cleared it with someone at my High Commissioner's office.'

‘The house where Mr Truncard was taken. I'd like the address. There may be fingerprints. We shall formally ask your High Commissioner's office for yours in order to eliminate those that are not — well, relevant. You have no objection?'

‘None.'

‘You, Mr Singh?'

‘Have my fingerprints, by all means, if having them will help,' said the man in the turban readily.

Drury looked at the woman. She said, ‘The house had a silly name, I remember. Twin Trees. If you have a pencil I will write down the full address. You might forget it.'

‘Thank you.' Drury opened a drawer, produced a notepad and a ballpoint and she wrote down the address. He said, ‘Thank you' again without looking at the writing on the pad, which he dropped in the drawer without closing it. He tapped his left hand with the ballpoint. ‘Did you know Wilma Haven wrote a sealed letter which she gave to her lawyer, Peregrine Porter, to be opened in the event of her death?'

‘She told me on the phone she was going to do that. When I asked why she laughed. You'll see, she promised.'

Drury nodded and did not ask the next question Bill Hazard thought he would have ready — Who would be interested in securing that letter with the green seal?

Instead Drury said, ‘I understand you refused to bring a charge on one occasion against Flora Marshall. Why?'

‘Wilma felt sorry for her. I had given Mrs Marshall work and she was not suitable. She drank and was lazy, and when my husband was away became abusive and on that one occasion when the police came she was violent.'

‘How did she come to you?'

Again the woman appeared surprised. ‘She wrote saying she was replying to my advertisement. Actually I had not advertised. There was some mistake about the address, as it turned out. But I did want someone.'

‘So she brought herself to your attention and so secured a post in your home. Did you ever find her spying on you?'

‘No. I think you are being fanciful, Mr Drury. But I suppose you have to consider every possibility.'

‘Even a few that aren't possible sometimes,' Drury said, making it a weak joke.

No one laughed or even smiled.

‘Is this all?' she asked. ‘It is Saturday and I have to drive Janssi back to Bournemouth for tonight.'

‘Only one more, Vicki. The gate guards
at Broomwood, two characters named Claude and Cedric, one of whom is a relative of Mrs Marshall's. I understand they were employed at the ‘Golden Pagoda'. Is that correct?'

Janssi Singh took a couple of steps forward. ‘Perhaps I should answer that, Superintendent. They were what you call bouncers. When the club opened there was the prospect of occasional trouble. The club had to be prepared to handle any undesirables. When they were refused higher wages they left. I understand it was as simple as that. It is fairly safe to assume they knew they wouldn't get the extra wages they had asked for. So it was an excuse for leaving, in a way.'

‘To join Mrs Marshall at Broomwood.'

‘Uh — yes, I suppose you could put it like that — yes.'

‘My last question,' said Drury, and the woman wasn't quite able to hide the look of relief that crept into her bright eyes. It had been a challenging session and, as Drury realized, she would have to be making her own report to her own people, and that could conceivably be
even more exacting. ‘How much have you made clear to Jeremy Truncard of all this? I mean before you helped him to arrive at Broomwood.'

‘That was after I had phoned Wilma,' she explained. ‘As to what I told him of what we have talked about here — well, virtually nothing. You see, it was not possible for me to let him know my real interest. I was just Wilma's friend, and I helped him by being friendly with Dan Paget. He thinks I saved his life and I probably did, but I feel bad about Dan Paget. Mulley and whoever had put him on to Dan and set up that house called Twin Trees had fooled Dan Paget by putting an old-fashioned mike in the shuttered room where Jeremy was left. Dan tried to get through to him with some explanation and of course what he said was picked up. I didn't make that mistake, but, even so, I was lucky. Afterwards I bought Jeremy some clothes and kept him under another name in a private hotel at Tunbridge Wells. That wasn't difficult and it was only for a short time. I phoned Janssi and he came
up from Bournemouth to help, but it wasn't necessary. I didn't want to spoil Wilma's show, whatever it amounted to, so I didn't try to put pressure on Jeremy. Indeed, he couldn't have taken it. He spent most of a day sleeping, his nerve badly shaken. My intention, if nothing really happened at Broomwood, was to pick him up afterwards. He only talked about one subject voluntarily. Wilma's baby. He seemed mildly obsessed by it. All else, even his work, seemed a blank.'

They shook hands, and the pair left their phone numbers in London and Bournemouth, and then they left. Drury refilled his pipe, lit it, and said, ‘Take the other tape recorder out of the drawer, Bill.'