Hire Me a Hearse (2 page)

He caught her by the lift. She looked at him without bothering to ask a useless question.

‘Why not go back to Broomwood, ring up Jeremy, and tell him you'll marry him?'

He didn't know it, but he looked to her like a man pleading. Desperately pleading for something that was vital to him. Her glance softened. When she spoke her voice was low, gentle.

‘You think I wouldn't if I could?'

Another question from her. Another he couldn't answer because he didn't know what really prompted it. Irregular furrow lines appeared in his brow as he racked his mind for something else to say, couched in terms that would prise some small piece of truth from her. Even a lie, so long as it was information.

But before he could find the words to which she might be responsive the lift had whirred to a halt, and she was sliding back the door.

‘Oh, Tom Bayliss has something for you when you go back, Peregrine,' she said gravely. ‘I told him not to give it to you until I've gone. Well, I have.'

She had pressed the ground-floor button and the lift was descending as she spoke, so that her last words rose from somewhere beneath Peregrine Porter's feet, like sound from a grave.

He found himself shivering again.

He went back into the outer office, and Tom Bayliss stood up and held out a legal-sized white envelope decorated with a blob of green wax over the stuck-down flap. Before the soft warm wax had hardened Clifton Haven's signet ring had been pressed into it. Peregrine Porter recognised the ship and the bird that had been the Haven family seal.

‘She told me to give you this when she'd gone.'

Peregrine Porter looked at his chief clerk, who met his gaze unflinchingly. Tom's choice of words was explicit. Told, not asked.

‘I know, Tom.'

He looked at the other side of the
envelope, which was fairly bulky. On it, written in Wilma's appalling script, were the words, ‘Only to be opened in the event of my death. W.H.' The first and last words of the instruction had been underlined twice.

One could never accuse Wilma of not being emphatic. Her life was one series of impossible emphases, and now he was left with the alarming suspicion that her death might be the same.

Another if only occurred to him.

If only Clifton and Gloria Haven had not piled themselves up late at night against a tree on the Esterel corniche, taking the right-angle bend outside Anthéor too fast because the Riviera moon was too bright, or they were having one of their bouts of being too much in love with life and each other and all their falsely promised tomorrows . . .

But like most of the others that occurred to him from time to time this was another if only that ended in a mist of elusive wishful thinking that had no real shape and certainly no purpose except to touch his personal regrets with poignancy.

He looked over the envelope in his hands at his chief clerk. Tom Bayliss was about ten years younger than himself and probably knew more law. He had passed the first law examinations without having to extend himself, only to learn that he had a very limited ambition, which robbed him of the will to stick at the grind for the final year. So Tom Bayliss had not quite achieved the professionalism he had sought originally. He had settled into a comfortable groove, chief clerk, a man with no ultimate responsibility except to his employer.

And perhaps to a handful of personal friends.

Peregrine Porter liked him, and secretly regretted that he could not make Bayliss a partner of the long-standing law firm of Abbott, Abbott, Truncard, and Porter, of whom only the last-named remained.

Of course, there was Jeremy Truncard, but that young man had turned his back on the law, and, anyway, Peregrine Porter had only a very qualified regard for scientists in the main and research chemists in particular. He felt that, in
the ultimate, they were responsible for the drug addicts who so untidily cluttered the modern age.

‘Tom,' he said thoughtfully. ‘Did she say anything else when she passed you this?'

He held up the envelope.

Tom Bayliss's stare didn't waver. There were times when that stare could be disconcerting. Peregrine Porter hoped this wasn't about to become one of them.

‘Not a hint of what's in it? Or why? Or even why you had to hold it until she'd gone?'

Tom Bayliss said, ‘She just told me, Mr Peregrine.'

Ever since he could remember he had been Mr Peregrine to Tom Bayliss, and their association had gone back more years than he supposed either cared to remember.

‘Oh, she did ask after my budgies. She always remembers to do that. I think she feels that, because I keep budgies, I'm some sort of freak.'

Tom Bayliss smiled, but his grey gaze remained speculative. He too had his
thoughts about the envelope with the green seal. He added, ‘She's a bit young to have secrets that can't be told till she's dead.'

Peregrine Porter heard himself saying, as he rapped his left hand with the sealed end of the envelope, ‘It might not contain secrets, Tom. Or, if it does, they may not be hers.'

Bayliss looked at him as though he had said either something very profound or very stupid. Perhaps he had, but he couldn't decide which, any more than he could say what had prompted the words.

At his door he turned.

‘You'd better look out for an advertisement she intends putting in the national dailies, Tom. Something about her funeral and sending vegetables and fruit.'

Tom Bayliss sat very still. Only his mouth moved when he said, ‘Her latest?' making the words a mild query, but with no hint of censure in his voice.

‘I don't like it, Tom,' Peregrine Porter said, stopped on the threshold of his
own office, ‘but then I haven't liked any of her escapades, and I've never really been unable to shrug them off as pranks simply because I fail to understand what prompts them.'

‘A natural rebel, Mr Peregrine.'

‘That and something else, I feel. It's the something else that really worries me when I think about it.'

‘You could let a psychiatrist do the thinking for you. I've said so before.'

‘You have indeed, Tom, several times. But I don't wish to make her suspicious of me. I've always had her come to me frankly and tell the truth. That at least I value because to that extent I am lucky as her friend and her parents' one-time friend and now the trustee of their estate. If I alienated her feeling that she could trust me there wouldn't be much for her except suspicion, Tom, and I don't want that. Besides, I know psychiatrist, to her, is one of the dirtier words.'

It had been almost a speech. Peregrine Porter sighed and glanced again at the envelope he held, noting that she had pressed her father's signet ring down very
carefully in the warm green wax, in the centre, and square with the top of the envelope. Neat, and he liked neatness as much as he approved of it in principle. But then he was a man who naturally preferred to sit in a carefully cultivated garden rather than a forest littered with birdlime and dead leaves and even trees. Nothing was tidy in a forest. Not even the humans who roamed it.

‘Will you try to stop her?'

The chief clerk's words cut through his momentary reverie like a sharp spring shower through unleafed trees. He was almost startled by it, for he was aware it was a subject he had been forcing from his mind from the moment he had unsuccessfully raised it in his visitor's hearing.

‘Naturally.'

He closed the door. The click of the latch sounded like an echo of the chill word.

Tom Bayliss remained with his head twisted over his shoulder staring at the door. He knew precisely what that word was worth. Naturally was just the way a
man like Peregrine Porter would try to stop a headstrong girl from a foolish act — as he saw it.

But naturally would not be the best way. Most likely it would be a useless way in any case in this age and day of the specialist. Stopping Wilma Haven from doing anything she had set her mind to required either force or finesse, or perhaps both.

He wasn't sure.

But he was sure he faced a personal crisis. This time he had to do something unnatural to Tom Bayliss, and certainly most unnatural, to the point of being extremely unethical, to the chief clerk of Abbott, Abbott, Truncard, and Porter, of Lincoln's Inn Fields, W.C.2.

After all, if it hadn't been for old man Truncard, Jeremy's grandfather, he himself might have gone to jail, and for a very long spell.

He remembered the old man saying to him, ‘Now I've only Jeremy to pin my hopes to, Tom.' That had been after Jeremy's father had crashed piloting a maimed Lancaster back from a raid on
the Ruhr. It had been somewhere off the Dutch coast. A wartime casualty that paved the way, eventually, for the firm becoming Peregrine Porter's.

But he felt he still owed old man Truncard more than he could pay at this late date. So the least he could do was think of Jeremy, who loved the wayward young bitch.

He didn't want to think like that about her, but he couldn't help it. If it hadn't been for her Jeremy might have looked at some nice pleasant girl who would have made him a bright loving wife and borne him healthy kids, and that would have made his grandfather happy.

Only what the hell did it matter anyway?

He put the question roughly to himself, and it rang through the corridors of his shrewd mind like a challenge beaten out in a voice of metal. He smiled one-sidedly, his own secret smile betraying a deep layer of inward bitterness that did not concern himself, except as a spectator. Well, this time he was doing more than just looking on.

This time he had to.

For old man Truncard and for Jeremy. And, yes, in a way for himself.

He purposely closed his mind to the subject of Peregrine Porter, who signed the cheque he pocketed monthly.

He picked up the phone on his desk, and said to the girl at the firm's small switchboard, ‘Oh, Beryl, get me Scotland Yard, please. Ask for Superintendent Frank Drury, and tell him it's Tom Bayliss and mention that it's urgent.'

He put down the receiver.

But he did no work. For once he couldn't behave naturally, and this thought brought back the secret bitter smile. He was certainly being unnatural in a hurry.

As soon as the phone bell rang he snatched up the receiver, and when he spoke he was panting as though he had run to catch a bus.

Superintendent Frank Drury lifted his gaze from the White Paper on prison reform he had been reading. The door had opened and his assistant, Inspector Bill Hazard, big enough to fill the opening he had just made, stood there with a quizzical look on his face.

‘He's just arrived,' he announced.

Drury closed the pages of the White Paper and pushed it away from him with an air of reluctance. He had just discovered that, given some encouragement, he could get interested in prison reform. It was a subject he had never thought about in the past. After all, his job was catching villains, not reforming them. But reforming the places that were built to reform villains, that was something curiously different.

He flattened the top page with the large coat-of-arms decorating its upper half, running the fingers of his right
hand up and down it. Then he looked distastefully at a print smear on his finger ends.

‘Funny thing how printing ink doesn't seem as good as it used to be,' he said.

‘It's the quick driers they mix in with it,' Hazard said complacently. ‘I was reading an article about it the other day. The runs they make these days are usually larger than years ago, and so it's important for the ink to dry quicker.'

‘Very clever, I'm sure,' Drury nodded like a man who isn't convinced by what he has heard, but is being polite about it. ‘Now they'd better try again and find something to make the damned inks stay put when they're dry.'

‘Of course, it's not only the ink. I was reading another article about paper, and it seems that some papers — '

‘I know what some papers are, and I don't much care for gentleness in the wrong place, so lay off the general knowledge routine, Bill, and show Bayliss in. And come back yourself,' Drury called as the door was closing. ‘I want you to hear what he's going to tell us.'

The door closed, and Drury removed the White Paper and picked up the folded copy of that morning's paper, with a ring in ballpoint blue around one of the advertisements in a long column.

It read:

‘Miss Wilma Haven wishes to announce that preparation has been made for her funeral to follow her death by Russian Roulette in the grounds of her home Broomwood, near Hever, Kent, on or around Thursday next. Any person wishing to join her in a private game of Russian Roulette, shots on the hour every hour from one p.m. to five p.m., weather permitting, must have a postal application acknowledged by midday Wednesday. S.a.e., please. No flowers. Fruit and vegetables only.'

He knew it by heart, but was still fascinated to read such an arrant and blatant piece of self-advertisement, as he considered it. He knew Wilma Haven's reputation. She had not concerned the
C.I.D. in the past, only the uniformed police who had dealt with her antics and the uproar they occasioned. He wasn't sure that he wanted Tom Bayliss from Lincoln's Inn to persuade him the damned show-off could be C.I.D. business. But he had known Bayliss outside their respective offices over a number of years, and just occasionally inside those offices. Tom Bayliss was one man with legal training he had time for. Most lawyers gave him a pain because they were men operating behind the stone wall erected by their profession. From the special vantage-point police work had afforded him they did not appear specially human.

But then that also applied to coppers, in uniform and out, he had heard.

So one had to take the rough and be grateful for any smooth one came upon. Tom Bayliss wasn't rough. That much Drury granted. Whether he would be smooth was a matter of waiting to find out. There were special definitions in his private book of words for smooth. He wouldn't have liked it if some of them
were true of Tom Bayliss.