Hire Me a Hearse (21 page)

In such a mood, and refusing to consider that he could be endangering his pension, Drury said, ‘There are a few things I'd like to be told if this thing is to be tidied up, and my office has quite a mound of paperwork on the case.'

The Commander coughed warningly.

The Intelligence man looked at Sir Benedict, who stared at Drury and that furtive smile played around his mouth again.

‘Mr Drury,' he said, ‘I should have gone away feeling disappointed in you if you'd backed down from that one.' He nodded. ‘Tell him what he wants to know.'

The Intelligence man's gaze came back to Drury's face. His wink this time was faster, more intimate. Drury breathed with quick relief. He had been a fool to risk it, he told himself, but he'd had a fool's luck. Leave it at that.

Bill Hazard swore softly as he leaned over the granite wall of the Thames Embankment and stared at the lights of London River at a quarter to ten on a Sunday night. He exhaled twin streams of smoke down his dilated nostrils. The man beside him drew more or less contentedly on his pipe.
Frank Drury had got over feeling mad. His assistant was just beginning, which was why Drury had thought it best to let the process take its own shape outside the walls of Scotland Yard rather than inside. He waited for the first verbal reaction to his news. It came after the swearing.

‘It turns the whole thing into a — well, a bloody farce.'

‘A bit lethal for farce,' Drury said round his pipestem, but he didn't sound critical. The thinking matched his own of only a few hours before.

‘Wilma Haven's not dead! This Intelligence crowd only got on to her hours before this Russian Roulette barney — '

‘In order not to destroy what had been built up.'

But Hazard was sweeping on. ‘That damned gnome containing five kilos of pure heroin, the price of setting up Jeremy Truncard for brain-tapping, only Truncard was brainwashed first, to hand out some dangerous formulae. Five kilos, by God! That's about eleven pounds. In
the dope market, cut several times, that's worth — '

‘A million pounds,' said Drury without getting excited. ‘A lot of money of course, but it still had to be turned into money. The whole thing started with that round-up of the ring bringing it to Marseilles from Albania. This stuff came from Albania in a diplomatic bag. Jeremy Truncard finished his piece some three weeks or so back, and that's when the tapes were handed over in exchange for the stuff, which had to be hidden. Where better than in friend Wilma's garden gnome? It could have been milked as required, especially with Flora in the house and, for a time at least, those two thugs in the garden.'

‘You're making it sound easy. I don't believe it is,' Hazard muttered, blowing cigarette smoke at the stars.

Drury gave a sound rather like the beginnings of a doomed laugh.

‘It's a bit intricate, but not difficult to follow.'

‘Hell, now you're on their side!'

‘Which side should I be on?' the
Yard superintendent asked in a very mild tone.

Hazard was quiet for some moments before tossing his cigarette butt into the Thames.

‘Just let me in on the final swindle,' he said.

‘Wilma was responsible — for going off half-cock about her Russian Roulette. She had got hold of enough loose ends to think Truncard was being used for industrial espionage.'

‘I remember all that. I mean let me in on the last part, the Broomwood blast that was a fizzle.'

‘Not quite. A certain persuasive gentleman from Whitehall reached her very late in the act, after Paget's murder. Vicki Seeburg was getting rough. She had Jeremy, who was actually a decoy, but had decamped to try to reach Wilma. Vicki had to slow down the process, and she made Paget help her, but once Paget was isolated he was doomed. He knew too much about Vicki and Mulley and Twin Trees. So did Mulley, who was a
near-homicidal maniac. Vicki had been married to the real Janssi Singh, but Sharal was more suited to her esoteric taste — '

‘Where the hell did you get that word?'

‘I borrowed it,' Drury confessed, ‘from a certain character who operates farther down Whitehall than we go — if he ever actually walks down Whitehall, which is doubtful.'

‘Now I've gone and side-tracked you,' Hazard regretted.

Drury grinned at the dark shape of County Hall.

‘No, I've got it clear in my mind.'

‘I wish I had.'

‘Just a little patience, that's all it requires.'

‘They've gone and brainwashed you too, damned if they haven't, and they — '

‘Shut up, Bill, and listen. Vicki and Sharal played out their act at the ‘Golden Pagoda', and set about snaring Truncard. But our people were on to her since heroin went missing in Marseilles. Vicki was crooking her own Government. When they were told they agreed to let her
trip over her own feet in our territory. Reasonable?'

‘I suppose so. But — '

‘No, let me tell you my way, Bill. Jeremy was a friend of Wilma, so that made it easy for getting to him in a roundabout way and using Porter and the professor, both of whom were contacted by our people and told to go along with mayhem and blackmail and what else — '

‘Why?'

‘So our people could follow through, find out really what can happen in our own backyard.'

‘Now that does make sense. I'm beginning to feel happier.'

Hazard lit a fresh cigarette.

Drury went on. ‘So the conners were being conned, Bill. Remember what I said about Oriental diamond cut diamond. I don't think that second diamond, the one that did the real cutting, was Oriental. It was polished and ground not a great many yards from where we're standing. But Wilma's advert was rather like lighting a slow fuse. Vicki went after Jeremy, who
didn't want Wilma hurt, but didn't want her involved in undercover stuff. He'd had enough of it himself, working with his own boss, Sir Thomas Albirt, and getting nowhere with the boss's daughter — '

‘But I thought he was making out there.'

‘Not according to the boys higher up Whitehall, or lower down if you prefer. They know all, see all, and only tell what they think is necessary. Of course when Vicki took after Jeremy, Paget went with Bateman to have a chance of losing him with no questions asked and picking up Vicki, who had all the time kept up the deception of working with our people as represented by Paget, and our people had helped by making things easy for her to do her stuff, like telling you and me to keep our noses clean. It was a clever game Sharal and Vicki were playing of matching both ends against each other and trying to tie up the middle at the same time.'

‘Oriental minds,' Hazard said disgustedly.

‘Oh, I don't know,' said Drury. ‘Our people were doing some pretty close
pattern work themselves.'

‘Why Russian Roulette? Tell me that.'

‘A catch phrase. Wilma seized on it, and it was good for stalling the action any time. But Truncard, poor chap, had a bad time at Euston and in the club trying not to show Wilma he knew her. That was when he really felt like chucking his hand in. Especially when she followed him to Euston and tried to talk to him on the platform and he appeared not to know her. She broke into tears. That did it. That's why he went absent when he saw her advert.'

‘This is new.'

‘Not to our people, Bill. They know all, chummy. And they can only know this much by having had someone tail Wilma. They didn't leave much to chance.'

‘My God!' Hazard looked over his shoulder quickly.

‘I think we're alone here,' Drury told him, amused. ‘Of course they could have had a second tail on Jeremy Truncard, too. Amazing what you can do when it doesn't all have to go down in triplicate
afterwards. I wish we could have such facilities.'

‘Don't say you aren't side-tracked this time,' Hazard put in.

Drury tamped down the warm ash in his pipe-bowl. ‘Anyway, to get back to what I started out to tell you. As soon as Vicki left with Jeremy from Twin Trees he was a bit of putty in her slim hands so long as he reached Wilma. Don't tell me that isn't love.'

‘I won't. But there was all that stuff about a baby.'

‘Wilma playing bitchy, no more. She resented being dependent on a male.'

‘More stuff you got from those know-alls?'

‘Well, they've given it all a great deal of thought.'

‘I'm doing that right now, and somehow you aren't making it as easy as I'd hoped.'

Drury's pipe was out. He tapped the warm ash down between his feet, and was quiet for some seconds, so that Hazard shot him a sharp look of inquiry.

‘Anyway,' he resumed, ‘it seems Wilma
and Jeremy have a problem to work out. They've been pecking at it since they were kids. Now — '

‘Now all England thinks Wilma can't recover and is likely to die at any minute, and he's in some unnamed hospital.'

‘So's she. Wilma's been moved. She will have a remarkable recovery where reporters can't get at her. Peregrine Porter will quietly fix a name change by deed poll. She's told Jeremy there's no baby, that she was just making sure no other woman would have him — '

‘And this is love?'

‘It takes all shapes and comes in all sizes.'

‘But when did she tell him?'

‘That's the most important question you've asked, really, Bill. The answer wraps it all up. After our people had got her to go along with them there was a wait. Sharal turned up, just as Claude and Cedric told us, and went to collect the heroin from the painted gnome and fix a plastic time bomb. He has been nabbed with the five kilos and will be charged with Singh's murder and
later deported. None of this will come out. But, of course, when he apparently vanished with the heroin she had cached in the gnome, Vicki took off. No one knows where the hell she is, so Wilma's been moved.'

‘Don't tell me our clever people haven't kept another tail on her.'

‘They had Paget, remember? It was Vicki who rang the number Paget had given her and reported what had happened at Twin Trees. Our people did what was necessary without even telling us, so they were following the Biblical advice not to let the right hand know what — '

‘Not on a Sunday night, please,' Hazard begged.

‘I get your point, Bill,' Drury smiled, tapping the parapet with his cooling pipe. ‘But you must see there was a sudden gap with Paget removed that way. Vicki moved right into it. Either she knows something has come unstuck, or she must think Sharal has run out on her with the five kilos prize money handed over, presumably, by someone who Warrender
said looked like a Chinaman.'

‘And our people didn't say a word about that?'

‘Not a syllable. But they did say a small charge was set in the gnome, to smash it, and Wilma agreed to set it off herself, so that she had ample time to duck, and of course she had told Jeremy Truncard she loved him, and he had confessed he wasn't really engaged to Gladys, and the professor was acting like an automaton, so she didn't have to ask him awkward questions. She knew that the cue was when she said Russian Roulette. Jeremy would start running, the professor after him. You know who bloody nearly spoiled everything, Bill?'

‘Us.'

Suddenly Bill Hazard began to laugh, loudly, the sound tearing out of his throat in great jovial gusts. He took out his handkerchief and started wiping his eyes. But he wasn't crying.

‘They should have told us earlier, chief. Serves them right for the shock they gave us. I suppose that ambulance being ready was all part of the act?'

‘It was most efficiently handled.'

‘Claude and Cedric could have talked.'

‘They didn't know. It was all set up before Sharal arrived and got tough with them. You know, I even think those Intelligence boys spend longer on the job than we do.'

‘You're beginning to sound — '

Bill Hazard half-turned as he started to speak derisively because his mind was suddenly at ease. The next moment he flung himself at Drury, hurling the other back away from the parapet and falling with him and rolling. They were still moving on the hard pavement when the car screeched over the kerb, but the front wheels went into a spin.

Instead of the front wheels being pulled back, the driver lost control of the steering and the car went smack into the granite wall at about fifty miles an hour. There was a crunch of collapsing sheet metal, the sound of glass splintering, and the air was suddenly poisoned with petrol fumes.

The two Yard men picked themselves up. They reached what was left of the
car together and Hazard switched off the ignition. Hazard was staring at the yellow face of the Chinese driver whose neck had been broken.

As if that had not been sufficient to terminate an expendable life, a long sliver of glass from the rear-view mirror had been driven through one eye. Only the end showed, like a glinting jewel.

There was the sound of a soft drip, drip.