Hire Me a Hearse (11 page)

‘Seems they should try asking Vicki, or does diplomatic immunity prevent that?'

‘He apparently took off after her.'

‘By bus, if that's the smart thing to do. I've heard of a car following a bus, but the other way round is too much like using your reverse gear for a quick getaway forwards. You mustn't be surprised if it doesn't happen.'

Drury rubbed the smile from his face with a hand that made scrubbing sounds among the bristles.

Don't get arch, Bill. I expected you to come up with something better, even after nineteen hours in harness.'

‘All right, a question. Vicki girl's got diplomatic immunity. Whose?'

‘India.'

‘I don't believe it.'

‘Nevertheless, it seems she's an Indian national and she's working for them. The Commander thought I should be told,' Drury added, keeping his face straight, ‘that since Nehru's death the Indians have been adopting more sophisticated views about national security and Intelligence with a capital i. We've gone along with it because Vicki Seeburg was helping our people running down drug smugglers who operated on the jet liners and transworld airways.'

‘And now she isn't rounding up dope smugglers?'

‘I think she's on a very secret job.'

‘Sounds political.'

‘It is.'

‘An Indian agent on a political mission. Must be Pakistan. That's their dark-skinned neighbour who starts them rioting.'

Drury said nothing and Hazard frowned at him. ‘No comment?'

‘No need for one.'

Hazard thought that over and said in a sound like a surcharged whisper, ‘ ‘The Golden Pagoda'. Singh. That's a Sikh name and the Sikhs belong to Pakistan. How's that sound?'

‘Like a detective who's been doing his homework. But don't get steamed up, Bill. We don't chase Vicki Seeburg, remember?'

‘How can I forget?' Hazard growled. ‘One of those lovely Hindu names that sound like a couple of bullock carts colliding. Seeburg. Sounds more like a tailor in the Mile End Road.'

‘Not these days,' Drury grinned. ‘Montagu Burton and John Collier and John Temple have taken over too much territory and presented a new Saxon image. But I won't fault you about Janssi Singh.'

Hazard's head began to tilt back and he started that down-his-nose peering, which secretly irked Frank Drury because it looked so damned disdainful.

‘So we go after him.'

‘Not yet.'

‘When?'

‘Perhaps not at all. Depends on what Wilful Wilma pulls at Broomwood. We shan't have long to wait, Bill. If it goes off like a damp squib we've no action to take. I've just been told in not quite such concise terms to hold everything. You'd better cut off and catch up on your sleep.'

Before Hazard could say anything rude the door opened and a constable came in and handed Drury a manilla envelope about ten inches by eight.

‘The Commander's compliments, sir.'

He didn't dally. As soon as the door had closed after him Drury folded back the unsealed flap and drew out a glossy photo. Hazard came across the room to have a look at it as Drury held it at arm's length.

It was a rather exotic photo of an Oriental dancer with flowing veils, a multitude of bangles and spangles, and flourishing a broad-bladed scimitar.

‘She looks like she could do some damage anyway you like to — ‘ Hazard stopped abruptly, and his tone became
crisper in a hurry. ‘Hey, just a minute. Who is she?'

‘Look on the back,' Drury invited, handing the other Yard man the professional glossy prepared originally for display purposes.

Hazard took the photo, turned it over, and read the typed legend on a strip of paper that had been pasted down at one end.

‘Vicki,' he read aloud, his eyes running over the words for the second time, ‘one of the troupe of dancers now appearing with the Great Janssi.'

There was no date, just the blue die-stamped words: ‘Copyright Pro-Pics Ltd. Not to be used without permission' covering the lower half of the reverse side under the typed legend.

Hazard handed the photo back to Drury.

‘You know something?' he said. ‘If I ran out of a phone box and she offered me a lift in a car, and she just happened to be slowing down and also going my way, I'd be sorely tempted. No wonder Danny boy's got himself lost.'

‘Off and catch up on your shut-eye,' Drury told him.

‘You've almost guaranteed my having a lurid dream. I'd probably get more rest reading a good book.'

‘They don't print that sort any more,' Drury growled and showed his back to the man already at the door.

‘You bastard, I ought to — '

Jeremy Truncard's wild attempt to jump off the cot in the corner of the room and in the same over-extended movement deliver a blow solidly on the nose of the man who had entered failed for a whole package of reasons, but the chief was his inability to co-ordinate his actions. He tripped, he went down on one knee when he was only half off the cot, then he lost his balance, and his outflung fist smote a leg of the cot and split some skin along the backs of his fingers.

The turbulence that had carried him to disaster died as Jeremy sat on his rump sucking his barked hand and rubbing a big toe that had been bent for a moment the wrong way under his collapsing weight.

The man said unfeelingly, ‘Serves you right, Truncard. I told you to take it easy.'

‘Easy,' mumbled Jeremy.

‘That's what I said — easy. Leave this to Vicki and me. We know what we're doing.'

‘You two may, but I'm damned if I do. How about my car?'

‘I phoned in. It's been taken care of.'

‘What's that mean?'

‘The police have collected it.'

‘Oh, very nice. How much will that cost me? It's two quid if they impound a car. This time — '

‘It won't cost you anything,' the man said, anxious to stop the flow of words. He had endured it before, and Jeremy Truncard never seemed tired of being verbally aggressive, which was tiring for anyone who had to put up with it. ‘When you're free you just collect it.'

‘Where from?'

‘I'll let you know.'

‘If you don't forget.'

‘That's right, if I don't forget. So don't overload me with too much to think about.'

Jeremy picked himself up from the floor. He scowled because he knew he
looked foolish in his trousers and shirt and socks. They had removed his shoes and braces and jacket while he had been unconscious from that first welcoming blow on the jaw. As this character had later told him, ‘That was to be on the safe side. I didn't want you recognizing me.'

This explanation that was more baffling than silence had been made hours ago. It might have been days. Jeremy had no way of telling. His watch had stopped when he first collided with the floor of the hall, and since he had been picked up and brought to this cell-like room he had lived under a rain of low-wattage artificial light, with shutters over the one window.

‘Look,' Jeremy said, standing on one foot and gently inspecting his bruised toe with sympathetic fingers. ‘Just tell me who you are.'

‘I'm a friend. Leave it at that.'

‘Vicki?'

‘She's a friend, too.'

‘Why, what have I done to earn such friendship, being smacked on the jaw and kept a prisoner and — '

‘Break it off,' said the other man testily. ‘What you've done is too damned much only you don't know it, and that's the trouble. Tomorrow Wilma Haven either goes through with that crazy stunt of hers or she doesn't. I've got to think how I can get you to — '

He was still speaking when the door opened. In the opening stood the man with the gun the size of a cannon.

‘Sucker,' he said with mock-pity and squeezed the trigger.

The bullet, at that range, tore a great hole through the middle of the man who had been first seen by Jeremy ganging up on him in the street with Bateman. The impact of the heavy steel-jacketed slug bowled the man round like a tenpin, sideways and over, with his feet sliding out from under him.

He gave one little moan as he went down, and then he was lying in a tumbled heap of untidy limbs, with a wide stream of fresh blood like spilled paint shining on the floor. There was blood over the hand that he had managed to push against his stomach as he went down. It was his
right hand, and that very wet-looking redness smeared the fingers that had cracked Jeremy's jaw. He thought of that while he stared in horror at the crumpled corpse.

‘Sucker,' repeated the hefty killer who had just shot down a man in cold blood without showing any repugnance for his act.

‘Is he dead?'

Jeremy felt impelled to ask. The other looked at him with quickening interest, much as he might have stared at a deaf mute who had suddenly decided to speak.

‘He won't ever be deader, chum. But he was still a sucker. Look.'

The bull-framed man tucked his gun into a pocket and, ignoring Jeremy standing by the foot of the cot, walked to the only picture in the room, a dusty reproduction of a Utrillo street scene behind a piece of cracked glass. He took it down and showed the small microphone that had been hooked on behind, the flex curling up with the picture cord and getting lost behind the
picture rail that ran around each wall.

‘It wasn't fixed until after you'd been brought in, chum. He must have checked first, then got lazy. You got to keep checking. That's the only way to stay alive. Get it?'

He somehow seemed anxious for Jeremy to understand he was in earnest.

‘I get it,' said Jeremy, wondering if it was humanly possible to tackle such a human gorilla and wrest that cannon from him. He decided it wasn't. Not if you were a research chemist. ‘He was a sucker,' he said with a little shiver that might have been awareness, but he hoped it was something else. Anything else.

‘You can say that again, chum. A sucker. I knew it when I first saw him. He didn't even look right. And I'll tell you something else. She don't look right, not to me. That Vicki. She'll end up the same. A sucker. It just takes time.'

Jeremy couldn't help it. He asked, ‘How about me?'

‘You?' The gorilla looked and sounded surprised.

‘Am I a sucker, would you say?'

The large head with the curiously flat top over the drooping eyes that seemed to be perpetually grieving over something shook and the long curly brown hair over his large pink ears and in the nape of his thick pink neck seemed to prickle with alertness.

‘Chum, you were born a sucker. You're a natural. You don't have to try. You just are. Follow?'

Jeremy was thinking of the gun in the pocket that looked over-weighted. He nodded with his mind elsewhere.

‘I bet you follow. Here, now take this and lie down.'

‘What is it?'

‘Just something to make you sleep. Don't start giving trouble, that's all. Do as you're told, chum.'

Jeremy was sick of being called chum. It made him feel canine. Not that he had anything very much against dogs except a few of their more deplorable and quite instinctive habits. But he felt this was not the time to point out an objection. He looked at the dead man and shuddered and forced back the taste of bile that,
he discovered with surprise, clung to the back of his throat.

He stretched out on the bed, watched the other pour some of the stale water from the jug into the glass and bring it to where he lay.

‘Here.'

A great hand that had the grip of a steam press forced open his jaws and he caught a flash of yellow as a couple of seconal tablets were dropped in his mouth.

‘Drink and swallow.'

He never quite knew how he did it, but he took the glass and filled his mouth with water. He gulped, and the water slid down his throat, leaving the two little tube-like tablets under his tongue.

He gave a moan for no reason other than to impress the other with a little touch of theatricality, and it worked. The big hand slapped his shoulder with the kind of playfulness that could leave a blue-green bruise. The man refixed the microphone, hung up the picture, lugged the body out of the room by its feet, and didn't bother to shut the door. Jeremy
lay there looking at the pool of blood on the floor and the broad track of red that thinned towards the door.

He spat the two seconal tablets into his hand, dropped them between the cot and the wall, and lay there with his eyes drooping. He was lying in the same position when the man came back with a bucket of water and some rags and cleaned the floor. All the while he was sloshing the damp rags around he whistled
Danny Boy
in a very melancholy fashion, as though enjoying it, and Jeremy couldn't understand why. It went on and on, refrain after refrain, until he began to feel drowsy, and when the man rose and came to the bed and pulled his under lids away from his eyeballs he didn't have to act very hard to convince the man bending over him that he was about to fall asleep.

The man took that moist cold hand with a musty smell away from his face and gathered up rags and bucket and went out. A key turned in a lock.

Jeremy shivered.

He wondered if he was about to burst
into tears. He felt he wanted to, and yet was scared of finding out he was so weak emotionally. He lay there wondering not about the dead man, but about the live woman.

What would happen to Vicki?

She and the dead man had, in some way, been working together. The dead man had, she had told him, jumped on a bus and reached a car. She had timed her arrival for the man to be ahead of her. Jeremy didn't understand why this was necessary, and she had only told him a few words, more by way of hurried encouragement, he had gathered, than for any other reason. But he had found himself warming to her, even against his inclination. Afterwards the man had told him more. Enough for him to understand that it was necessary for him to remain out of circulation until Wilma had finished her fresh novelty act that was taking up so much space in the newspapers' front pages.