Hire Me a Hearse (19 page)

It wasn't the way he should have spoken. But he wanted to have one thing understood. He wasn't there at half-past two on a Sunday morning to hear a collection of alibis dreamed up by some scared professional men. He wanted to get the facts that would nail murder where it belonged.

A double murder so far, and lucky not to be four, as planned.

‘Mr Drury, I think — ' Bayliss didn't get far.

Peregrine Porter said, ‘The super-intendent is right to remind us. Tell us what you have to, Mr Drury, then ask what you want to know.'

‘Thank you, Mr Porter.'

Drury lost no time accepting the invitation. He didn't make it complicated, but he did show why he had to know what hold a certain Janssi Singh, who had been an entertainer and a stockholder in the ‘Golden Pagoda' and was married to a Vicki Seeburg, friend of Wilma Haven, had over them to make both the man of law and the man of psychiatric medicine do his bidding.

He was thankful when Peregrine Porter did not start asking questions the Yard man would have been compelled not to answer. It saved time and didn't put his temper in jeopardy.

Peregrine Porter said, ‘Mr Bayliss contacted us after he had received your phone message. We agreed to meet you
together. Mr Bayliss is not concerned, you understand. I did not at any time take him into my fuller confidence and — '

‘Let's leave the niceties till later,' Drury interrupted. ‘After all, with some luck, they may not be so very important. It has been known for blackmail to be treated leniently, and the Crown will want evidence it can use later, and you don't need me to teach you any law, Mr Porter.'

‘I'm not at all sure,' Peregrine Porter said, accepting the words at their face value. ‘Very well, this is what I feel you want to know, Superintendent. Some few years back Miss Haven was recommended to undergo psychiatric treatment. She came to me. The suggestion had come from a prison medical officer. I advised her to make the gesture. It would stand in her favour. She agreed. I arranged for Professor Warrender to have her as a private patient at his South Kensington clinic. I had, frankly, forgotten the episode when a Janssi Singh, who had come to me through a friend of Wilma's, Vicki Seeburg, asked me to
recommend a psychiatrist for his club manager, a Mr Sharal. Well, I phoned the professor, who said he was willing to see the person needing advice and treatment. But it was not advice and treatment that were sought. Rather a dupe. Photos of this Sharal on a couch were taken and a tape recorder provided spools of some outrageous suggestions made in what sounded like the professor's voice.'

Peregrine Porter paused.

‘I rather thought it might turn out to be like this,' Drury said grimly. ‘When was the man Singh murdered at Twin Trees?'

The straight-backed professor all but toppled off the edge of his chair. ‘You know?' he gasped.

‘We found the body under a rockery a few hours ago,' Drury told him. ‘Things are now moving fast, gentlemen, and I hope you are going to help their acceleration. It was a step-by-step blackmail process, of course. They moved in on you, a man with a flat head and the club manager. How about Vicki Seeburg?'

‘No.' The professor shook his head. ‘You see, I couldn't risk challenging these awful people. The words on that spool — '

‘You don't have to tell me,' Drury said. ‘They're great believers in tape recorders, and I must say they have so far plenty of justification for their great belief,' he said cynically, and looked at the lawyer. ‘But how were you hooked?'

‘Very simple. I was at Twin Trees when this Sikh with the long hair was murdered. I don't think the murdered man was Mr Singh because I saw him later. In fact — '

‘The man you saw later looking very like the murdered man was Sharal acting the dead man's part.'

‘Oh, that explains so much.'

‘It explains a great deal, I agree,' Drury said. ‘But there's still a lot left unexplained. You were at Twin Trees, but that's no reason for being blackmailed.'

‘It is when your fingerprints are on a murder weapon, and there was another spool with the professor and myself
arguing, quarrelling if you like, but it was another fake. However, it did explain why I might have destroyed the wretched Hindu who had been introduced to Miss Haven. Whichever way the story came out I should have been ruined.'

‘Like the professor.'

‘Indeed, yes.'

‘So you did nothing?'

Peregrine Porter flinched. ‘I thought I was playing for time. It is often a sound legal device, but not in this case. Wilma began to hint that Jeremy Truncard was in trouble. I'm afraid I didn't appear to give her fears the full consideration she might have thought they warranted. Besides, she distrusted my doubts about her, poor girl. I'm afraid I wasn't a success with trying to instil her with a sense of the fitness of things. But then perhaps I not unnaturally lacked — '

‘So she thought up her Russian Roulette stunt. Did she tell you why?'

‘No, she hinted, but I was never any good at that sort of thing. I was shocked at talk of hiring a hearse and suicide, but she was in her right mind, so I felt it must
be a poor joke that would create another lot of publicity. After she called to see me the last time I was given a sealed letter she had left with Mr Bayliss. You know about it's disappearance. Well, first you should know I rang Wilma several times. I didn't like that stupid advertisement. I told her I thought she was going too far. She said something rather strange. She said her friend Vicki might get the same idea when it was too late. Then she said she'd already told her so. Shortly afterwards I had a visit from that terrible Janssi Singh. He took me to lunch, and asked for my office keys. He knew about the envelope from Vicki and wanted it — or else, as he said. But he is a very devious man, Superintendent.'

‘I've never met one more so,' Drury agreed.

‘He said he would take my keys and his manager, Mr Sharal, would come in early the next morning and unlock the safe and remove the letter. The keys would be left in the safe. I could even tell the police, he said, to make it look right, because there would be no fingerprints, and nothing
else would be taken, and of course I had to tell my chief clerk I had lost my keys, to explain their being found or stolen and turning up in the safe door.'

‘Quite a little play,' Drury mused. ‘But then he is very fond of contrived situations. I think he fancies himself as someone who is so clever he can set the stage for others to act parts he has prepared for them.'

‘I don't know about that, but I was terribly upset. I had to think of Wilma.'

‘But you gave him the keys?'

‘What else could I do? He even reminded me of the professor, who was even more a victim of his schemes. I gave him the keys, came back, and told Mr Bayliss and asked his advice.'

Drury looked at the chief clerk.

‘You tell me,' he said to the man who was staring at his hands.

Without meeting the Yard man's gaze the chief clerk said, ‘I told him to let me cut off that green seal with an old razor blade and steam open the envelope. Then he made a copy of what was inside, but when he showed it to me I said no, that
couldn't be given to this Singh person. Mr Porter said yes, but he would again phone Wilma Haven and tell her what he had done.'

‘Did you?' Drury asked, turning to the lawyer.

‘No, Mr Drury,' Peregrine Porter said sadly. ‘I couldn't get her on the phone. I sent a telegram asking her to phone me. She didn't.'

‘Possibly because she didn't get the telegram. Our Mr Sharal tried to think of everything, and most of the time he succeeded,' Drury felt compelled to accede.

Wilma Haven's last letter read:

‘I know what has been going on, Peregrine. I know Jeremy has been to see Professor Warrender, and I know the professor has helped to put him in a state of hypnosis and that others have then taken over, with the professor out of the consulting-room, and pumped Jeremy of all sorts of things. I don't really know why. It must be some of this industrial espionage that is sometimes featured in
the newspapers. I know there is a key phrase that must be used as part of this treatment, a kind of recognition signal. It is Russian Roulette. I am going to blow this whole thing out into the open and I am going to get Professor Warrender himself to do it. I know he will because unless he does I am going to write to International Chemicals and to the Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury and possibly the chairman of the Confederation of British Industry and the Governor of the Bank of England, though God knows what use he is to man or beast. I must find a beast and ask it.

‘Of course, you knowing the professor and Vicki's husband, I have a good idea Vicki and her curly Sikh are in this neck deep, like cats wallowing in cream, and you may be too crooked for words yourself. But if you do anything about baulking me by telling them what I have written I shall know — shan't I? — that you have read this letter.

‘If you are in this thing, Peregrine, you will know that you and your friends will
have to kill Jeremy too, and I have a feeling the professor hasn't finished with him. So that would be a pity — I mean, if one's a hypocrite. But this is why I can't delay further or lose any more time in putting my colourful (I stress the word, and with reason!) volte-face, as I like to think of it, into effect. Why am I doing it this way? I don't like nasty things being covered up with fatty layers of respectability. I never have. This, if I can contrive it, will be all out in the open, and Jeremy, if he lives, will be seen to be an innocent victim of some rather nasty people whom I have mistakenly given my friendship.

‘Of course, if I am wrong, and the whole thing backfires you will be asked to give me back my letter, so that will be putting you in a spot. Peregrine, unless you are not involved in this swindle to rob a man's brain. How do I know all this? Tell Vicki I lied about the big oaf who blocked me when trying to catch an underground train. He thought he did. Actually it was a friend dressed like me. A real friend, Peregrine. I followed that
poor boob Jeremy to the professor's. He was there three hours. I followed his taxi to Euston. I ran into him on the station. He didn't know me. He had been brainwashed, and I didn't have to guess hard to know why and who was in the raw deal. I didn't let on to Vicki, who so much wanted to help me — like hell she did, the black and tan bitch!

‘Well, I hope you never read this, Peregrine, for the best and most obvious of reasons. I hope you're a nice old duck and not a dangerous money-grubbing old fraud, as I fear.

‘I don't know about putting yours ever — though it could ironically be true, couldn't it, if I have to be shut up permanently?'

‘She got it garbled, and wasn't always right, but she did a good job,' Drury said as he handed back the copy of the letter to Peregrine Porter. ‘So you let Sharal have it and then told Miss Haven, and she — '

‘No,' said Peregrine Porter without bothering to sound angry. ‘You know better than that. I told you I couldn't get her on the phone and I sent her a wire.'

‘So she didn't know what she was really letting herself in for?' Drury pressed.

‘Oh, she knew,' said Bayliss. ‘I went and saw her. I even asked her to tell me how she knew the professor wasn't in the room when Jeremy had been put under drugged sedation and conditioned to answer questions. The answer was so simple I felt a fool. She asked him. She went and saw him and he told her he couldn't help himself, but that was all he told her, and that he would like to finish with the nightmare. He agreed to come and help her at Broomwood.'

There was silence after the chief clerk had stopped speaking.

It was broken when Drury said, ‘Oh, you bloody fool.'

The chief clerk shook his head. ‘Tell me why.' He sounded like a man pleading.

‘Wilma Haven, Jeremy Truncard, and
Professor Warrender — one explosion. There should have been three corpses.'

Another silence dragged to an end with Bayliss's ‘Oh, my God.'

‘But you did one thing you're to be commended for,' said Drury. ‘You've proved Jeremy Truncard had served his turn. He was finished. Otherwise he could not have been set up for the killing, with the professor and Wilma Haven herself. And this is a new thought. It is very different from something somebody else told me recently.'

He refused to look at the hitherto quiet Hazard, who looked about to have an apoplectic fit. Instead he turned to the professor with, ‘Who did the questioning, do you know?'

‘A Chinese, I think it was. That's all I can tell you. He had a tape recorder.'

‘I bet he did,' Drury said.

‘But the spools didn't leave with him. They remained with this Sharal man.'

‘To be handed over at one time for a fat round sum,' said Drury, and nodded. ‘A couple of Oriental diamond cut diamonds. Tell me, Professor. Can
young Truncard repeat again what he has already told?'