Hire Me a Hearse (18 page)

She remained watching them as they piled into the police car. She saw that Hazard had purposely placed himself to beat Frank to the driver's seat. She smiled to herself in the velvet darkness of her own front doorstep, feeling grateful that her Frank had a man like Bill Hazard siding him.

She hoped it wouldn't rain, though there were plenty of clouds. Rain late at night made the roads skiddy, and Saturday there were too many late drivers beating it up. The figures for late-night road casualties were always depressing, she felt.

The engine of the car roared awake, headlights burned along the street of middle-class homes with tidy front gardens, and as the car pulled away from the kerb with its winkers flashing Bill Hazard gave a quick toot on the horn.

She put both hands to her mouth, and blew that departing car a kiss. No one would see it, but somehow she felt better for blowing it because she sensed it would reach them, even if only she knew.

She went back into the hall, shut the front door, and turned into the small dining-room to start collecting the plates and cutlery.

The door was left open. She heard the small voice calling, ‘Mummy, was that Daddy come home?'

‘Only for a meal,' she called back. ‘Stay there. I'll come and tuck you in again.'

She put down the used crockery and a handful of knives and forks and spoons that rattled as they spilled on to the tray she always kept on the sideboard.

She wasn't hurried.

Not now.

She went up the stairs and into the small bedroom, as they referred to the boy's room, and she was composed and close to being content.

He had managed to get home.

That was the great thing. That was what mattered to her.

Always.

Flora Marshall was scared. Her fear was like a caged mouse leaping about inside her head, first peering out of one eye, then the other. Her breath smelled of bottled stout, and she was burning up cigarettes as though she had been told they were going out of fashion. Claude and Cedric sat one at each end of the worn settee that had once been green with a surface of velvet nap raised in a grotesque flower design. They had been brought to this house by a Flying Squad car, which was parked outside with the driver at the wheel. The two other members of the crew made the small back sitting-room in Hornsey look crowded.

One of the Flying Squad men with an idea of being funny said, ‘There's nothing to stop you lot talking among yourselves.'

‘Go and screw a rusty nail,' Claude told him.

‘Like one in a coffin?' the Flying Squad man retorted, no whit abashed by such a sullied pleasantry. ‘Like your coffin maybe?'

The next piece of advice was in much more basic English that betrayed no spark of original inventiveness.

‘Here, here, now,' chided Flora. ‘No good getting like that. You always had it in for the Heavy Mob since they nicked you for that warehouse job. Live and let's hate each other, I say. Anybody feel like a cup of tea?'

She was told what she could do with the tea if she bothered to brew it. But not by either of the grinning plain-clothes men, one of whom let his tongue sag through his teeth.

‘I get it,' she said.

She walked into the kitchen to put the kettle on. One of the Flying Squad men went with her. She gave him a wide-eyed look and tried to make the best of an unpromising situation by saying, ‘I don't know if I should be out here alone with
you, copper. I've got my reputation to think of.'

‘Don't bother,' he told her. ‘They'll do all the thinking necessary about that in Holloway.'

It was a fairly smart riposte. Anyway, it registered in the more fleshy region of Flora Marshall's pride, and it felt uncomfortably permanent. That was the reason she was mean in spooning the tea into the pot.

The pot was being carried into the other room, the Flying Squad man balancing cups and saucers, when a car drew up outside. It was Drury, and the rap on the front door could have shivered a cheap-quality paint.

He was let in by the unburdened Flying Squad man, and was followed into the crowded back room by Hazard. Drury looked disdainfully at the teacups and steaming brown pottery teapot.

‘All right,' he said. ‘Pour out and then I'm wanting answers in a hurry. Anybody who wants to get smart about Judge's Rules can do it at the station. He'll be held till Monday and taken
to Sevenoaks and charged by the Kent police. Or her.'

‘What with?' asked Cedric.

‘To start with, accessory to murder.'

‘Christ,' said Flora. ‘Here, let me pour.'

It was a short session, but rugged. Drury had no time to waste. That was all in the past — he hoped. He was the only one to refuse a cup of tea.

He led off with the big one. All the other questions were subsidiary, in any event.

‘Who planted the plastic bomb? Any of you can answer.'

One of the men broke wind and gave a little moan. It was Claude. Cedric cracked his knuckles. Flora almost dropped her cup. Tea spilled over her lap. She swore quietly but intensely.

‘I'm waiting,' Drury said. ‘Who?'

Claude stirred on the settee. ‘We don't know, but we think it was Sharal.'

‘Why?'

‘We let him in. He told us to get lost. That was about half-past six. It was still raining a bit.'

‘Mean to say you didn't follow?' Drury said sharply. ‘It should have looked good for some easy black money.'

Claude said, ‘You don't follow a man with a gun who can send you to jail even if he chucked the bloody shooter over the wall.'

It seemed a fair argument, Drury allowed, but he said sharply, ‘How was it set up for you to go to Broomwood? All of it.'

The pair on the settee looked at the woman who was wiping her damp lap in a preoccupied manner.

‘Tell him, Flora.'

Mrs Marshall nodded as though agreeing to a voice none of the others could hear. She spoke in a sort of loud and fierce whisper.

‘She advertised for someone. I mean that Vicki Seeburg who married the bloke in the turban. She gave me the job, and I saw Sharal at her place, and he asked if I could recommend a couple of useful types, so Claude and Cedric got fixed up. Later he wanted someone who packed a shooter. That's not their line.'
She pointed at the settee with her chin. ‘So they sent Jack Mulley along.'

‘By the way, he's dead,' Drury said. ‘Vicki Seeburg shot him after he'd killed a Home Office special security man. Does Paget ring a bell?'

If none of them were lying, it didn't. Three worried heads shook.

Cedric said, ‘Jack Mulley didn't talk much. A closemouthed bastard, but he loved guns. The bigger the better.'

Claude gave him a long hard look, but said nothing.

‘Let's have the rest of it,' Drury said to the woman.

‘There's not much to tell,' she said, wiping her mouth in fingers that weren't too steady. ‘Like I said, she'd taken me on, and one day she said I'd pinched some damned trinkets, and was going to send for the police. Mind you, she didn't look half-way like doing it. I knew it was leading to something. I was right. I had to drink a bottle of stout, act drunk, and she'd send for a copper. Afterwards she'd withdraw the charge, and talk to that nut Wilma Haven. If I got taken
on by Wilma I didn't put up any fight. That's what happened, just as she said it would. She was real smooth. Then Sharal told these two' — another head jab at the settee — ‘that they couldn't have the rise they hadn't asked for, so he was showing them the door, but he would put in a word for them if I gave them a reference, which he thought I would. It was all like a real con.'

‘Flora,' said Drury, ‘that man and Vicki Seeburg are the most dangerous cons I've ever met. You're lucky to be alive. If you think I'm wrong think of Wilma Haven.' He paused, then said, ‘One question more, Flora. Did you turn up at the Seeburg flat through making a mistake with an advertisement?'

The woman scowled. ‘What's this? I don't like — '

‘Nor do I,' Drury snapped. ‘Just yes or no.'

‘No,' she shouted at him, thinking he had tried to put something over on her.

He said, ‘The three of you will be taken to make formal statements of employment only. At the moment,' he added with
dire meaning. ‘So don't give trouble or we'll have a charge read out. Make the statements helpful, all the details you can to help the prosecution in a murder trial. You just might get left alone if you cooperate the right way. That's all.'

Drury nodded to the Flying Squad men. ‘You know what to do?'

‘Yes, sir,' said the one who hadn't gone for the tea-things.

At the door Drury turned, spoke to the woman and the men on the settee again.

‘If you're kept, take my advice and don't yell for bail.' He paused. ‘Not until you've read that Sharal and Seeburg have been arrested. You won't be safe until they are.'

He marched out of the house and this time he didn't give Bill Hazard a chance to grab the wheel. As he drove south away from Hornsey he said to his assistant, ‘Try again, Bill.'

Hazard picked up the police car's phone, spoke to the Yard night operator and there was a good deal of crackling coming over before he put down the instrument.

‘Bayliss called in. He said he's at Peregrine Porter's and he's got the professor with him. They're waiting.'

Hazard, truth to tell, was awed by his chief. He had never known Drury yank so many people away from their beds in such a short time and at such a late or early hour — depending how you thought of it.

‘What's the best way to Bexley?' Drury asked.

Hazard thought about it. ‘At this time of night forget the tunnels. Make for the City, London Bridge, straight through New Cross and Blackheath. It's on the A2.'

Drury's head jerked. ‘I agree.'

There was a pause before Hazard said, ‘There's one question I'd like to ask.'

‘Who the hell is Lakhi Sharal?' Drury said for him. ‘The manager of the ‘Golden Pagoda' who Singh forgot conveniently to name, possibly because Singh was dead and was killed by Lakhi Sharal, who is doing a good turn at doubling for two men — until he gets his hands on a lot of money. It must be a lot,' Drury said
in a fierce low voice, as though he had to convince himself. ‘This isn't a play for peanuts. It's the most nervy set-up I've ever tackled. They took me like they took everyone else, except possibly one person.'

‘Who?' Hazard asked obligingly.

‘Wilma Haven.'

The police car with Drury and Hazard arrived at the house called Pinelands in Bexley, fourteen miles from London along the Dover Road, at twenty-five past two that Sunday morning. Going past London Bridge, Drury had stopped to let Hazard get a couple of the day's first newspapers.

Wilma Haven smiled back from both of them. He couldn't be sure whether she looked more appealing as the intractable Miss Haven or the Wackiest Woo. When he looked under the photos there didn't seem to be much to choose between the two splash articles. Both were in bad taste, only one tried to conceal the fact with some multisyllabic words.

Drury felt a little sick and the feeling remained with him until he was standing on the doorstep of Pinelands and Bayliss, looking ten years older, was showing him into the house and opening a door off
a close-carpeted hall. The chief clerk needed a shave. Which reminded Drury. He stroked his chin. So did he.

In the room where a two-bar electric fire with a mock grateful of glowing logs made the atmosphere too stuffy Peregrine Porter lay in the depths of a deep armchair, his head sunk in an enormous cushion. Professor Warrender, sitting upright on the edge of a straight-backed chair, looked like a figure purloined from a waxworks. Only his eyes moved when Drury appeared. Recognition flared in them like shock.

It was Bayliss who produced the two bottles of sherry, one very brown, the other very pale. For Hazard's sake Drury accepted a generous glass of the amontillado. His assistant took the nut-brown. But then occasional evidence of the inspector's sweet tooth never failed to surprise Drury. It seemed curiously out of character.

‘We're at your service, Superintendent,' Bayliss said, and Peregrine Porter pushed his head out of the pillow, took a glass of sherry from his chief clerk, and stared
at the drink as though it were laced with arsenic.

Drury had the perverse notion that he probably wished it was.

‘I — '

Drury got out the one word before Bayliss interrupted.

‘Excuse me if I point out one thing, Superintendent. I did notify you that the letter Miss Haven left with the firm had been stolen. There can be no question of Mr Porter compounding by silence a felony that — '

‘Oh, for God's sake,' said Drury, ‘it's late. Too late for legal tactics, too late for bed, too late for every damned thing except hearing the truth, and a lot of people are going to think that's coming a lot later than it should.'