Hire Me a Hearse (12 page)

Now the man was dead.

‘Call me Dan,' he had said.

But Jeremy had been shy of using the
man's name and had not addressed him by it any time they had met in that drab little room with the burning ceiling lamp and the shuttered window.

The window.

He pushed himself into a sitting position. If he could open the shutters he might be able to get through the window and climb down into the garden. He had no shoes and no jacket, but he still wore his socks.

He sat there, thinking about it. Almost it was as though he was a boy once more sitting in the garden in summer under the leafy acacia, whose leaves made wiggly little shade patterns just where the edge of the lawn was bare. Moth-eaten his father had called it. And he had the same trouble trying to see his father's face. Always superimposed on it was the face of his grandfather, the old man who had taken it badly when he said he didn't want to pass his life amidst dust and lawbooks and bundles of red-taped briefs.

He tried listening, just to hear if memory would turn a tap and supply
his grandfather's voice. Words came. His grandfather's words. He knew that because he had learned them by rote long ago, almost, it seemed, when he had learned a different kind of nursery rhyme. But not the voice. The voice was stilled, and he lay there and knew he had lived with the fear that this would never happen, and then he felt bad about wanting such an event to come true. A voice to die. Just as he had seen a man die. A voice with a great red hole in it, all life and breath pouring through it to waste.

He was being fanciful again, and knew he was indulging himself. It was a bad habit. He had told himself many times. Like in that café that had the accent dropped from the e on the door — no, he corrected himself, it was the e that had been dropped, leaving the accent on nothing.

He remembered — an accented nothing.

It had seemed funny in a sort of way at the time. But not now. Nothing was always sad. It didn't have to be accented. Nothing, like a drained-away life. Like
the red-mouthed hole through which a voice had poured and been lost.

God! The urge to indulge in tears came back, but he had to deny himself because they would prove nothing in his eyes except maybe he was sentimental about a past he didn't even understand, which was ridiculous.

To get away from this kind of mental butchery he began adding figures, columns of five and six figures, and he went faster and faster with the results humming in his mind until he was like a computer that couldn't slacken off as long as the current was on, and that scared him. He stopped adding, stopped thinking, even stopped breathing, with his hands over his face, the heels of his palms pressing on his eyes until they felt hot and burned in his head.

Then he took his hands away and regulated his breathing. He must switch off — something. What was it? He couldn't think because he had interrupted the process. But he had to think what that something was. He closed his eyes and concentrated, and as successful
concentration was not a new habit with him he reached what he wanted to know.

He had to switch off the microphone. In case she came in and talked. Then she wouldn't be trapped like Danny.

He was on his feet, aware that for the first time he had thought of the dead man as a person with a name.

Dan.

Yet he had thought of him as Danny. Why? The process of recall picked up. He could fancy the whistling of
Danny Boy
was stealing across the room again, like curling smoke. His flesh began to shiver, but he stilled abruptly. That had been a macabre touch. Enough, he thought, to make him hate the brawny man with the flat head and a readiness to squeeze a trigger.

He studied the Utrillo as he approached it, the wavy trunks to the trees, the little pavement bistro, the street that climbed out of the picture just as it climbed out of perspective. He decided he didn't like the picture, but couldn't find a sound reason for disliking it.

He took it down and found the switch.
He pushed it over with a soft click, and that reminded him of the car door clicking shut.

‘Slam it,' she had said, and he could hear her voice clearly though his grandfather's was withered and dead and blown away. And when he slammed that car door he had shut another. A door enclosing his life.

God, he was getting fanciful again.

‘Stop it, damn you!'

Now he was talking aloud to himself, which was bad. Well, the words had only been whispered, but he had found his hands shaking as he hung up the picture with the switched-off mike. He didn't say the next words aloud. He couldn't. His mouth was too firmly closed. But the words were clear in his mind when he ordered himself to regain control and think of nothing except the motion he was making, the thing he was physically doing.

The blind rolled up quietly under hands suddenly steady. He fumbled the fusty latches out of the old-fashioned interior shutters. Sweat beaded his face
and he had to wipe his hands on the seat of his trousers. Rust powdered on his finger ends, finer than chalk.

When he drew the shutters aside they creaked, and the light outside was failing. It was quite dark under the trees, though there was light in the sky.

He opened the window and cool air washed over him like an incoming tide. He looked down. The nothingness below made him giddy.

An accented nothingness.

It was as though there was a gap in time through which he scarcely lived. He was leaning out of the window peering into swimming shadows under the shapes of trees by a stretch of dark greensward that vanished into deeper shadow, and then he was out of the window, his stockinged feet gripping a drainpipe with almost prehensile frenzy, a hand leaping from the cracked cement of the sill, his body swaying, his other hand coming away and following his body, and horrible moments when he thought the lead tube pinned to the wall by staples that had rusted like the window catches would
tear from the mouldering brickwork and he would be pitched headlong.

He felt the piping move under his weight, and silently prayed that it would hold.

At least, he thought he prayed. It was as though he prayed with his feelings. Or maybe with his fear.

He clung like a spider unable to risk trusting itself to its own thread. Only his thread was fear, and it was invisible and couldn't be grasped, but just had to be lived through in a great timelessness.

The bile was back in his throat, and he knew why. He couldn't climb back if he wanted to.

He couldn't change his mind.

He unhitched his clinging toes and felt the nylon of a sock split like a skin and the piping was colder where it touched his big toe. The one he had damaged trying to jump at a dead man. Then he managed it. He blanked out his mind. He didn't close his eyes, because he knew if he did he would give up and fall like a stone. His eyes remained wide and empty and saw nothing just as he
thought nothing, and slowly he began going down that piping.

Somehow.

It was like going down through a vacuum. He was not conscious of breathing from the effort, though he was very conscious of the stabs of abbreviated pain when he knocked a knee against brickwork or scraped a foot or caught the knuckles he had already barked against the piping as he dug at its cold smoothness with a pressure that broke his fingernails.

The lower he descended the deeper grew his fear and this was disturbing, for when he tried to understand it he found he had no personal yardstick. He had never considered himself brave or intrepid or even a man who kept in physical condition in order to employ his body to his own benefit. In the laboratory or his study later he wore reading glasses.

He wore them as he ate cereal for breakfast. It was something he had always done.

And he surprised himself by thinking such a comparison while suspended
somewhere between the roof of the house and the foundations, with a rusty drain-pipe his only salvation from falling like a plumb-line and breaking his back or his neck or some collection of bones that might take weeks to heal — if he remained alive to help the process.

Then suddenly his feet were on the ground and he felt dizzy and sick and more afraid than at any moment since the one he couldn't remember, when he had pushed himself feet first over the window sill. He knew why his fear was as big as an appetite when he heard the voice growl beyond his shoulder, ‘Sucker.'

He turned and sight swam back into focus. The man with the mounds of brawn built on to his frame and the flat top to his head was looking at him in the shadowy space between the side of the house and the trees. He seemed to have three staring eyes, two in his head and the one in his hand.

The man spoke again.

‘Thought you fooled me, didn't you? Spitting out that stuff, dropping it down on the floor. I saw it when I mopped up.
What did you do, turn off the mike so we wouldn't hear you forcing the window open?'

He couldn't tell the man the real reason. He didn't want the woman to walk into a trap.

But she might do that anyway.

He said, ‘I wanted some air.'

It was so stupid as a reason that the man with the big gun filling his hand laughed.

‘That's just what you're going to get. Air. Right in the middle of your guts, blowing a clean draught to tickle you to death, sucker.'

He was so amused by his own imagery that the gun wavered when he laughed, and Jeremy was an automaton working on slightly stale reflexes so that he didn't quite take the man by surprise, but got past him as the man raised the gun. Jeremy heard the sound as he tore past, but it seemed farther away and in the wrong direction, and then he collided with a tree and fell, and he thought he was dying.

He lay there, quite quiet, to complete
dying without any fuss or fury. He thought it rather seemly of him, and even began to wonder how long it would take. The lack of pain must be due to shock, he reasoned.

Then he felt it begin, but in his shoulder. Only it wasn't the pain of a wound, but the feeling of pressing fingers that conveyed urgency to his nervous system.

‘Jeremy,' she said. ‘Get up. There's no time to lose — not now.'

He rolled over on his back and stared into her face.

‘Vicki,' he said, taking the hand she held out to help him to his feet.

‘Who else?' she said rationally and the two words were like a cold douche of water in his face.

She retained his hand as they walked under the trees away from the house and from that crumpled pile of flesh from which he kept his eyes averted, so that he did not see the little round hole in the middle of the low forehead and the grudging red worm that crawled from it and spilled into a sightless eye.

By half-past eight, when Wilma Haven phoned Thynne's Undertaking Service in Sevenoaks, the lane outside Broomwood was choked with the cars of sightseers, reporters, TV camera teams, police, even vendors of peanuts and icecream.

But there was no reply from Thynne's. In fact, the phone didn't ring and Wilma Haven could only get the unobtainable signal, and for the best of reasons. Charles Horace Thynne had personally removed the receiver from its cradle. In the yard he and Tom Chaggin wormed the reinforced coffin for a man of six foot two into the hearse.

At nine o'clock Mr Thynne wiped his face and said, ‘We'll let it go at half-past.' He could have added, ‘and damned good riddance,' but that would have been undignified in the head of the firm. He had no wish to return to his office, so he followed Tom Chaggin to the workshop
and stood watching him shaping up the planks for the replacement coffin.

At five and twenty past Mr Thynne could stand the suspense no longer. He went back to the yard.

‘All right, off with you.'

He helped bolt back the main doors to the yard, and stood between them after the hearse had driven into the street and turned. It arrived at Broomwood at five to ten, with uniformed policemen having to make room for it to get into the grounds after making an awkward turn in the lane.

‘Where do I take it?' asked the sober-looking driver in his best funeral attire.

‘Up the hill,' said the blonde whose eyes seemed to be flashing blue-green fire at the two-hour delay.

She pointed, and the driver of the motor-hearse stared to a mound rising between trees to top the wall running round the grounds.

‘Up it?' he queried incredulously.

‘Up it,' she repeated. ‘Park it on the top.'

It took a lot of concentration to
manage, for the mound was bumpy and at one stage it looked as though the engine might stall, but the driver managed it, and when he applied the brake there was a cheer from the spectators choking the lane.

‘Now what?' he said to the blonde.

‘Let's have the coffin out.'

The driver shook his head, bemused, his sense of the fitness of things utterly outraged, but by this time past offering any intelligent protest. He was like a man performing in a trance. Which could in no way describe the actions of Wilma Haven. She bustled about, knowing precisely where the coffin had to go, on the trestle under the large white sheet with ‘Russian Roulette' painted on it in scarlet capitals. At the side of the trestle was a large garden figure of a gnome with elfin ears, a puckish grin, long-toed boots, and a stocking cap that was falling over the back of his left shoulder. The hearse's driver regarded this dubious ornament sourly, for the overgrown gnome looked most of five feet tall to him and the damned
thing had been painted in red, white, and blue.

‘Help me with him on the coffin,' said the blonde.

He wanted to protest, but those fires were giving out from her eyes again, and he felt in no condition to challenge their heat. So he stooped and they hauled and lugged together, but it was no use.

‘The damned thing weighs a ton,' he grunted.

She didn't seem put out by his rough tone, which had surprised himself.

‘Wait a minute,' was all she said quite agreeably.

She went down the modest knoll and came back with a couple of characters with broken veins in faces that looked as though they had been shaped with a meat cleaver. They made short work of mounting the gnome on the coffin and after nodding at the blonde trudged back to the gate, which appeared to be their official place in the mad scheme of things.