Hire Me a Hearse (17 page)

Hazard pulled open the drawer of the filing cabinet on which the wiped tapes had turned. He took out the tapes of the second recorder, which had been left switched on and held a full record of what had been said.

‘You think Janssi knew what you were up to, chief?' Hazard asked.

‘I'm sure of it,' Drury grinned. ‘But we have to keep parts of this globe a man's world, don't we? Go and look up Professor Warrender's addresses in
Who's Who
, Bill. I'm curious.'

Hazard closed the cabinet drawer and went out. He came back ten minutes later.

‘Funny thing,' he said. ‘There's this address in South Kensington and a place called Twin Trees. Small world, when you — '

He stopped short. Drury was holding out the pad on which Vicki Seeburg had written an address. Hazard moved on catfeet to stare at it.

‘The same place!' he exclaimed. ‘What the hell does it mean?'

‘We've got a drive in front of us, Bill. Did you see where he went to school?'

‘Did I see — '

‘In the
Who's Who
entry?' Drury said testily. ‘Don't flake out on me. Not just now. This could be the important time.'

Hazard's face knotted. ‘Wait a minute,' he said. ‘Yes, I remember. Winchester
and New College, Oxford.'

‘I thought it might be something like that,' said Drury. ‘When you pick up the car stick a couple of spades in the boot.'

‘Good God alive — why?'

Drury excused the mode of address in a junior officer and grinned like a brooding death's head.

‘I could say any number of reasons and none of them would satisfy you, Bill. I'll give you one. Because when you so obligingly tossed the professor over my legs and kept me pinned to the ground just before the bang went off his Old Etonian tie was floating in the wind, a funereal black tie with a modest pale blue stripe. Now don't tell me you're satisfied.'

‘I won't because I'm not. Spades!' Hazard growled. ‘They mean digging, and what the heck are we going to find there if we start digging?'

Drury bent a hard look on him without losing that bitten-in smile that seemed engraved around his mouth.

Bill Hazard suddenly jerked upright,
shoulders braced.

‘No,' he whispered. ‘It can't be.'

‘Meaning you think it could, that it?'

‘But it's fantastic. You think we'll find the professor buried in his own garden?'

‘I'm not going to be surprised if we do. Let's put it like that, Bill.'

‘But what about Wilma? She knew him.'

‘She knew the man Peregrine Porter introduced her to as the professor when she was already a good friend of a certain Jeremy Truncard, Bill. In fact she had slept with him and for her own sense of fun had told him she was going to have his baby, which really made him flip. Probably put him in the right schizophrenic mind for LSD-25.'

‘Which proves what?'

‘If the real professor is pushing up the daisies in his own garden Jeremy Truncard really has been put under hypnotism — by a charlatan. Let's go, Bill. I'm sick of the smell in this office. It's had too many people in it for too long.'

‘That exotic stink is the tang of the
Orient,' Hazard grinned. ‘When you get home your missus will ask you where you've been.'

‘She doesn't ask awkward questions in front of the youngster,' Drury said, reaching for his hat. ‘Too often he knows the damned answers.'

But, in one sense at least, Frank Drury was disappointed.

He didn't find the remains of a murdered psychiatrist under several hundredweight of his own garden behind the house called Twin Trees, presumably from the guardian copper beeches standing like sentinels at the main gate giving on to the road.

When he and Hazard arrived they found both Sussex and Kent C.I.D. officers in two cars and a South-east Regional Crime Squad car parked beside the others out of sight of the road. They had come in answer to the call Drury had dispatched from the Yard's radio room, which he visited on his way down to join Hazard, who had collected a car, but on a Saturday had been unable to locate a couple of spades.

This omission was adequately filled by the two county C.I.D. crews.

There was a Kent chief inspector named Clarke who seemed to be the rating police office of the group awaiting Drury's arrival from London. Several of the plainclothes men had already been working under Drury's orders indirectly since the Broomwood blast. A few of them, in their own resigned way, hadn't thought too much of the Metropolitan superintendent. He didn't shout and he didn't walk four steps when one was sufficient. He cut no sort of figure unless one tried staring him out, then one felt like a chunk of ice trying to outstare the sun.

Clarke came up. He gave Drury a sloppy-handed salute and a grin that was close to being a smirk.

‘Four spades. Hope it's enough, sir,' he said, trying the sardonic touch.

It didn't faze Drury.

‘I hope so, Chief Inspector. Now, where to set your lot working up a sweat.'

Drury was conscious of the faces pulled as he turned his back. Hazard purposely kept his eyes averted. He had been
warned by Drury on the way down.

‘Give them time, Bill. They'll soon change their ideas, or they'll change mine.'

He was only partly right. They all had their ideas changed, and very drastically.

First Drury walked round the garden with its trees and lawns and flower-beds and shrubberies that were beginning to acquire an uncared-for look. He came to a pause at a rockery, with a lot of reasonably new rock plants that were still struggling to make growth.

‘I don't think they'll make it,' Drury told Clarke, who frowned and tried to look as though he knew what the hell the London superintendent was talking about. Drury let him down easily. ‘There's plenty of walls and northern aspects in this garden to shelter a rockery,' he pointed out. ‘Yet some silly so-and-so decides to set it here, facing south, right in the full glare of the sun, no shade, no trees, only a lot of rain from the south-west to rot the roots.'

Clarke said a little uncertainly, ‘I'm not
much of a gardener myself. Some of the others might be.'

‘Good,' said Drury, ‘because this is where they start digging.'

By the time the hole was just over three feet deep the muttering and sweating C.I.D. locals were changing their mind about the crazy sod from the Big Smoke. First they came upon some bloodstained linen and a towel with powder marks round a bullet hole, all well muddied and grimed, and shortly afterwards a spade went into something resistant and soggy.

‘Hey, here's something,' said the digger.

‘Easy now,' said Clarke, who hadn't taken off his coat.

The diggers cleared away more earth, and found a blanket that had been sewn at both ends. It was a grey Army type blanket with some red stitchwork. The bundle stank when it was lifted out of its secret resting-place and lowered on a strip of grass.

Drury held out a hand to Hazard, saying nothing. The big inspector took out his pocket-knife, opened it, and
pushed the handle between Drury's fingers.

‘Think you know whose body it is, Superintendent?' asked Clarke, unable to keep back the excitement he felt.

‘I think so, Chief Inspector.'

But Drury thought wrong.

Very, very wrong.

His hand holding Hazard's knife released the sewn-up ends with a few quick slashes, and he rolled the bundle over and opened it. He and the others were suddenly staring at a naked figure, not much to look at except for the head. The body was nut-brown in colour, and incongruously a jock-strap remained fastened round the waist, modestly covering the withering genitals. The eyes were wide, dark, and in some dull way seemed to be enjoying a joke in which no one could share. There was a long mane of dark hair flecked only here and there with an occasional grey streak, and the beard was curly, covering a good deal of the neck and reaching almost to those mocking dead eyes.

‘God Almighty,' said Bill Hazard.

‘Well, I'll be damned,' said the chief inspector.

As expressions of surprise the words amounted to approximately the same thing.

It was Drury who said, ‘The real Janssi Singh, which just about tells me all I needed to know. Bill.' Drury spun to face his assistant. ‘Get into the house any way you can. Get the Commander on the phone. Even if he's at home in the bath. Hold him talking. Tell him I'll be there as soon as I can make it, and tell him also people are going to miss their Sunday golf tomorrow morning. I don't know how many, but the number will include some of our own top brass, certainly a Home Office spokesman, and I should say a bigwig from the Pakistan High Commissioner's Office in Lowndes Square and from the Indian High Commissioner's Office in Aldwych. Their duty officers are going to change their ideas about the English weekend. Oh, and one other thing while you hold him and talk sense at him, Bill, not a whisper to the news agencies or to
Fleet Street. Thank God it's the weekend and Sunday is still ahead.'

Hazard hesitated to depart on his mission. The Regional Crime men and the local C.I.D. officers looked at him, thanking God they didn't have a chief who tossed them to the lions this way. None of them dare risk a look at Drury.

‘Well, Bill, shake the lead out,' Drury snapped.

‘Suppose the Commander — '

‘Suppose he nothing, Bill. Keep him talking. If he rings off ring back. Keep ringing back. My guess is before you've told him half what you know he'll be chewing your ear off. I'll take over when I've used the Regional Squad's radio.'

Hazard turned and ran towards the house.

Drury jerked his head at Chief Inspector Clarke and pointed to the dead Hindu.

‘Better cover him up or a few thrushes and blackbirds will get the wrong idea.'

Someone sniggered. The sound was covered up with a quick bout of coughing.

Drury pointed to the senior officer of
the Regional Crime Squad, who was in his shirt-sleeves with mud up to his serge-covered knees.

‘All right, let's go. I'm going to use up a lot of juice, so afterwards you'd better have your battery recharged.'

It might have been a joke to lessen the tension. The Regional Crime Squad man couldn't know. To be on the safe side he gave a half-hearted laugh.

Drury made no further sound. He was striding towards the parked cars.

At half-past ten that Saturday night Drury arrived home. He had Bill Hazard with him, and Mrs Drury had a hot meal waiting to serve up on the table. She smiled at Hazard and grinned at her husband after giving him the sort of quick under-the-lids glance that anxious wives who know when not to ask questions specialize in. Like the wives of detective superintendents in charge of a murder case that is still a subject for national headlines.

At eight minutes to eleven the phone rang.

Mrs Drury was out of her chair like a teenager. She didn't bother to call her husband. She spoke crisply, with an economy of words she had learned the hard way, and when she came back from the hall, where the phone was kept, she said simply, ‘Frank, they've got Claude and Cedric at Mrs Marshall's.'

‘Anything about a man named Porter?'

‘No.'

‘Or Bayliss?'

‘No.'

‘Or Warrender?'

‘Nobody else was mentioned, Frank,' she said gravely. ‘Now I'll serve the coffee. What about something to help you both — '

Her words slowed expectantly but her husband was shaking his head.

‘We're driving. Best not. If anyone gets through again put them back to Central. I'll contact them, and tell them I will, when I reach Hornsey.'

‘You got enough tobacco?' she asked, watching him drink his coffee. ‘Matches?'

He drained the cup, shook his head when she pointed at the pot again, and went and kissed the top of her head. His face was just a little longer amid the tight curls than any casual kiss would have required.

‘Stop fussing.'

‘I've never fussed since you were a sergeant,' she told him, and tossed Hazard a smile. ‘What would be the use?' Her voice changed subtly. ‘Is it big?'

‘As big as anything I've handled.'

‘So it'll take time?'

‘It could take days, even weeks. My guess is a few fast hours will wrap it up.'

Drury didn't acknowledge the quick look of interest this statement earned from his assistant, for Bill Hazard had been enjoying the gloomiest thoughts about how long this case would be protracted, and what the outcome might do to a number of promising Scotland Yard careers, including that of Detective Inspector William Hazard.

She followed them to the door, kissed her husband on the mouth and squeezed his shoulder.

‘Good luck, Bill,' she said to Hazard, and in the softness of the night her voice was warm and friendly and echoing with a pride of which she did not feel ashamed.