Hire Me a Hearse (7 page)

‘Have you an extension to the phone upstairs, Miss Haven?' he asked.

‘In my bedroom,' she informed him coldly. ‘Why?'

‘Did you hear a click when you hung up?'

‘Yes, I did. But — '

She didn't have to go on. The point of Drury's question had suddenly penetrated. Wilma Haven turned her blonde head to glare at the woman on the stairs.

‘So you were snooping again. You know what I told you.'

Mrs Marshall's broad face lifted with the rest of the top half of her well-developed figure as she squared her shoulders. Had she folded her arms the movement would have been comic, but one hand remained on the broad black rail of the balustrade, the other knotted into a formidable fist at her side.

Silence didn't get her off an uncomfortable hook.

‘Well?' said the young woman.

From her tone she expected an answer.

The woman on the stairs said in no sweet tone, ‘I guessed it was him. He rang earlier when you were out. I told him, and he said he'd ring again. He asked who I was and when I told him
he said a very funny thing. That's why I wanted to know what he said this time.'

Mrs Marshall knew how to be tantalizing. She smirked a little when she saw the quick close-knit frown on the younger woman's face.

‘I'll talk to you later, Flora,' Wilma Haven said.

‘Not if I'm to pack my bag you won't,' the woman on the stairs retorted. She sounded sure of herself, and she smiled at Drury with a mocking twist of her fleshy mouth.

‘I said I'll talk to you later.'

Wilma Haven tried desperately to override the woman standing on a higher level, but Mrs Marshall was wearing a smile that couldn't be fazed. She shook her head.

‘No, you won't, not if I'm being turfed out, and if I go I take Claude and Cedric with me.'

Hazard, standing in the doorway left wide by Drury, gave a choking sound. The two women looked at him. Drury remained looking at Flora Marshall.

It was the Yard superintendent who said, ‘The lads on the gate, Flora? Pals of yours?'

‘You could say that.'

The woman on the stairs gave a too-coy display of primping and patting the back of her rather straggly coarse hair with the hand that had been folded in a fist. The effect was ruined, though she was totally unaware of it, by the large armpit stain the movement revealed.

‘Seems you got trouble, miss,' Drury said to the girl.

‘You go,' said Wilma Haven, ‘if you don't tell me what he said to you earlier.'

There was a new snap to the words. The over-large woman trying to look girlish dropped her hand from her head. She had lost her swift display of assurance, and was just as quickly uncertain.

‘What, in front of these?'

She waved the same hand to take in Hazard and Drury.

Before the young woman could change her mind, or even before she could have second thoughts that would make her
dubious, Drury interposed again.

‘He said something funny, Flora, or were you lying, trying to fool Miss Haven?'

‘Like hell I was. He said — '

She gulped. Led to the brink she had no wish to topple over.

Drury did a little more pushing. ‘He said what? Anything or nothing or were you just making it up, Flora, to scare Miss Haven, so a little blackmail could be tried on for size?'

‘Cops!' said the woman in a bitter tone.

‘That's hardly an answer,' Drury pointed out.

‘It could be,' said Hazard helpfully, ‘if she wanted us to make it one. At the station she could take her time about talking. Hours of time. Days if she wanted it. Couldn't you, love?' he ended with coarse sauciness.

Just for a moment Flora Marshall looked at him as though he had offered her an invitation she might consider worth taking up, and Hazard jerked himself in an upright position, standing
in the doorway, watching her with a wary expression.

The interested look died on her face. She turned hard eyes on Drury, whose miniature smile neither suggested amusement nor hope.

She said, ‘All right, if you perishers must know, it was about the baby.'

Hazard stared as though she had uttered an obscenity.

‘What baby? Whose baby?' Drury asked quietly, but he was doing a great deal of guessing at that moment, and some of it seemed very wild even to himself.

‘Flora!'

The girl's sharp exclamation made the woman take her hand from the balustrade. A pout grew on the broad face, robbing it of any lingering softness.

‘You wanted to know.'

‘Go back to the kitchen,' Wilma Haven said.

The woman walked down the five stairs, and Drury moved aside to allow her room to pass. She sniffed as she turned away from him. It was a most
expressive sniff, but was spoiled in its effect because Drury had lost interest in any comedy the scene had held. He said to Wilma Haven as the kitchen door closed on Flora Marshall, ‘All right, you tell me, miss.'

‘She's mistaken.'

‘I don't think so.'

‘I'll find out later.'

‘Possibly,' Drury said non-committally. ‘But I'd like to know now, miss.'

‘Then you're going to be disappointed, Superintendent,' the girl returned. ‘Until I'm sure myself I can't very well tell you.' She paused before adding, ‘Even if I thought of doing that.'

Drury didn't let his anger show. That wouldn't have been of any use with her in this fresh mood. He nodded as though accepting what she had said, and then said, ‘Your baby?'

It was said so casually that she let the question pass for some seconds before the implication hit her. She was walking towards the door where Hazard stood when she turned, her face tight-knotted. But it wasn't flushed, nor was she in any real
way put out of countenance by what he had said.

‘Don't be impertinent, Superintendent. I'm not married.'

‘Aren't you?'

‘No.'

They stood staring at each other. Drury smiled. She had either lied or told the truth. She hadn't compromised by evading a real answer.

‘Whose baby, then?'

‘Why, Jeremy Truncard's, if it's important to you. But it isn't to me.'

‘He was on the phone asking about his own baby?'

‘He was on the phone not asking about his own baby.'

‘You mean he's married?'

‘I don't think so.'

‘Really. Then what?'

‘Engaged.'

‘To you?'

She smiled at him, but it was a strained effort. ‘Really, Superintendent,' she said, ‘I've spent too long with you already telling you what I plan to do is a very private business. It is not criminal to hire
a hearse or to play any type of roulette that I know of, never mind what it is called.'

She had apparently recovered from the jolt she had received before she put down the phone and Flora Marshall had tried to get downstairs without being found out at snooping.

‘Who is he engaged to, miss?'

‘You sound like a stick in the mud.'

‘Her name, please?'

‘Gladys. And don't ask me what, I don't know. Likewise, I don't know where Jeremy was phoning from. I don't know and I don't care a damn. But why is strictly my business. Now, if you don't want any chocolate fudge, I suggest you go. I don't wish to appear inhospitable, but visits from the police can quickly lose the little novelty they have, and yours, I'm sorry to say, was lost very quickly.'

Drury started for the door.

‘Come on, Bill,' he said. ‘The lady doesn't want our company. I think she's making a mistake, but she can find that out in her own time, not ours.'

Bill Hazard nodded and moved forward,
whistling softly between his strong white teeth. The tune had been a riot when Gershwin first wrote it. ‘Lady be Good'. But it never had sounded like well-meant advice, and it didn't change its character with Hazard's toothy whistling.

All the same, the young woman shot him a glance as he walked away that should have drilled a hole in the back of his neck.

It was when Jeremy Truncard hung up the receiver in the telephone kiosk that he saw the two men converging on his red-painted glass shell. The face of one he recognized. He wasn't sure about the man's name. He thought it was Bates. But of one thing he was certain.

The man was a security officer at International Chemicals. Jeremy had seen him walking the corridors and trying to make himself inconspicuous ducking behind doors and disappearing rather ostentatiously into lift shafts and down staircases.

Bates … he was almost sure it was Bates.

Then he cursed himself for standing there dithering with a detail like a name that didn't matter. Wilma had said the police were in the next room. From what she had said afterwards he didn't think she was lying. He just had to get out of
there and stop her being a fool. She had refused to say anything about the baby. All she wanted to talk about was the other thing, and she knew he wouldn't go along with that.

He stood there looking through the dirty glass of the kiosk at the man he recognized and the other. They must have signalled each other, for they were walking towards each other, and at the same time converging on the telephone kiosk. They meant to cut him off whichever way he turned when he left it. He glanced up and down the street, looking for someone to come and take his place, for preference a bulking person he could remain concealed behind for valuable seconds.

That was how he was now thinking. In seconds. For he knew he hadn't got away with anything. He had been followed. That meant he had probably been tailed when he left to see Gladys, and because she was her father's daughter they had given him enough rope to hang himself.

He pulled himself up at that. It was an out-moded phrase, he reminded himself.
Hanging had been abolished. Then he thought that hanging by the State had been abolished. One could always hang oneself. That was a privilege the State had not taken away for the simple reason it couldn't, so long as there was enough rope.

He was using up that line of thought fast, feeling desperate in case he finished too soon and he would have nothing to put in its place and would have to project himself from his glass shell and take to his heels.

He had no turn of speed. He wasn't the athletic type. But then nor was Bates, if that was his name. He was middle-aged, paunchy even, probably had been a plainclothes man before he had retired and taken this job. Well, that may be why he had the second man. He looked younger. He would make better time trying to stop a man escaping in a busy street with plenty of two-way traffic in the road.

That was when he saw her, bustling up, her red face hot, wisps of hair protruding from under a woollen ski cap of bright
purple with a lemon yellow bobble. The combination of colours above her broad shoulders was something to make a sensitive eye ache and water. She reached the door and tugged it open.

‘You going to be all day, young man?'

The voice was aggressive and critical at the same time, the kind of voice that made him flinch as though from an unwelcome physical contact.

‘I've just finished.'

‘You haven't, you know,' she said, her steamy eyes under that most unsuitable headgear looking not unlike boiled gooseberries. ‘I've been waiting and while I've waited I've watched. You're just standing in there and I've a good mind to call a policeman.'

‘Oh, don't be a fool, madam,' he said. They were the first words that came into his mouth. He was watching Bates, who had slowed and signalled the other man to slow. Bates wanted to see if that distinctive hat was a recognition signal or something equally preposterous.

‘Here, don't you go calling me names. I'm not standing for that.'

Irregular teeth that were distinctly off-white appeared in the bright red face, and her veined wattles shivered with the flowing inpulse of her displeasure.

He said, ‘I'm not calling you names. I'm giving you good advice if you had the sense to take it and stop filling the door. Then I might get out.'

The red cheeks puffed, the wattles under her buried chin stiffened as she stretched her neck, but she was moving back. Jeremy Truncard thrust himself past her, and only the last part of her scream touched his ear. But it was more than enough. The pennies she had clutched in her hand spilled to the pavement, and she went down after them, almost tripping two persons and certainly blocking the way.

Bates had tumbled to the fact that he had been mistaken about the bright blue hat with the lemon yellow bobble. He was running, and he was shouting. Jeremy didn't catch the words, possibly because he was directing his attention elsewhere, in as many directions as he could as he darted first one way, then another, to
avoid pedestrians who suddenly seemed snail slow. He had covered fifty or sixty yards when the car slid to the kerb and the woman waved to him.

‘In here.'

She slowed, opening the passenger door at her side, and Jeremy did not think.

This was the time for action.

He ran around the car with the two ruby brake lights held by her foot. He jumped in beside her.

‘Slam it,' she said.

He tugged the door hard, and the lock didn't catch securely, so he opened it and slammed again. This time the door closed with a satisfying click of the lock. He sank back with a feeling of relief as comforting as the touch of cool silk on hot flesh. The effect of that positive click, shutting off pursuit, was in no way spoiled by the car's sudden leap away like a startled live thing. She managed to get over some amber traffic lights before they turned red at the main road junction.

Then the car was beating it down a side-street where other cars were parked
down one side, a street that curved between small factories and warehouses. She came to the end and turned, and before his body had rolled upright she had turned again.

That was when he thought to look at this woman who had snatched him, as it were, from the hands of those who would have detained him. At least, that was how he was thinking of what he now considered his escape. The very fact that she had been there, a waiting ally, increased his sense of having got away from —