Hire Me a Hearse (6 page)

‘You'd better come inside,' she suggested, and turned to go in and lead the way, but changed her mind and came to a halt. Looking round, she asked, ‘Do either of you like chocolate fudge?'

Drury looked at Hazard, who stared back.

Both Yard men shuddered.

Jeremy Truncard crushed out his filter-tipped cigarette in the dirty ashtray six inches from his emptied coffee cup. He wouldn't have come into such a sleazy café if he had not felt the need for a final consideration of what he planned to do. As soon as he had sat down with the cup of lukewarm coffee he knew he was merely trying to fool himself. There was no room for any further final considerations. He had made the really final one when he had left Nuneaton. It was no use pretending there was still room for any consideration.

There wasn't.

By this time the security bouncers would be trying to pick up his trail and if he let them clap a hand on his shoulder before he had finished what he had to do he wouldn't be given another chance.

Not that he had been given this one.
He reminded himself of this forcibly, like a man split in two, one half of him waging mental war on the other half. It wasn't comfortable and it didn't get anyone anywhere.

He looked around and felt for a fresh filter tip. Unless, he mocked himself, one admitted the obvious. It had got him into this place. A mire. A place of dirt and meaningless noise and bad odours.

He smiled tightly around the cigarette he had fitted into his screwed-up mouth like a key into a lock. He flicked on his lighter, considered the spearhead of gas flame as though he had never seen it before, then lit his cigarette slowly, very deliberately, like an old-time priest setting a lighted brand to a sacrificial fire.

His tight smile twitched a little.

He was thinking the damnedest things. Priests. Sacrificial fires. Well, maybe he was a sacrifice at that. To what? To whom? The sound of the short questions in his mind spun his thoughts away at a crazy tangent, and he closed his eyes and saw an owl. To wit, to woo. Owls. Not
to what, to whom. He knew to whom.

Damned right he knew.

Wilma.

But not to woo. No, not now. That was all over. That was why he was there. He had to ring her.

Wring her, he thought with that split type of stupid thinking in which he indulged secretly. Wring her neck. What the hell would a psychiatrist make of this thinking? He'd be declared bonkers. Not plain, but pretty fancy bonkers. The worst kind, thinking of death and wrung necks.

His hands trembled, and he had to make an effort to still them.

He should have had some breakfast, especially as he had missed a meal last night. Too scared to eat. Too scared and too sick, but food would have settled his stomach, and that would have been the only thing about him that was settled, he cut in with that other thought process, still mocking himself.

He hadn't settled anything about the baby.

And there was Gladys.

Wilma had to know. She had to realize this last piece of nonsense she had dreamed up wasn't going to get her anywhere. She had had all the fun she was getting out of him. That's why she had to be told the score.

He was through. This time for keeps. But he was prepared to take on the baby. After all, he was the father, and Gladys knew. She had agreed it was the only thing he could do if he wanted peace of mind. And, godless though he thought of himself, he wanted a peace of mind and soul that surpassed all understanding.

Certainly his own.

Anything his science-trained mind could understand wasn't going to be enough throughout all the years of his life, though that was a piece of very simple arithmetic he couldn't figure without the future being reasonably assured, and there was no future while Wilma —

He stopped it.

Coldly, deliberately, and with brutal shock to his system he stopped thinking at all. In place of thought there was a sort of cloudy awareness, and it included
what he had to do, and this was as final and sure as though he had spent hours thinking it out. He was even a little scared by this awareness. Because he didn't know who was responsible for providing him with it and he had a feeling he hadn't. In fact, he felt rather like a thief.

Feelings!

Hell, his training, his way of life, even his thinking when he didn't give it free rein like some blasted poet, every part of him rejected feelings as a guide to anything in this modern day. Feelings belonged in books and courtrooms, in hospital wards and prison cells, not in a grubby little back-street café, where he had ducked for a reason, not a feeling.

He had seen a police constable parading down the street on his beat, and the eyes under the helmet had been quick and intelligent, and the man in the blue uniform had been using them, earning his pay and allowances and boot money and whatever else a stupid bloody society gave its human watchdogs whose job was to watch and presumably
howl if they saw anything — anything like Jeremy Truncard where he shouldn't be, and about to do something his chiefs would never approve of, only Gladys, who would approve because she loved him, and love was a feeling, and there it was in his mind again and the whole bloody mess was something short of awareness, and that was a feeling too.

His head was beginning to ache.

He crushed out the remains of the fresh cigarette that was smouldering away between his fingers, staining them the colour of that Eurasian girl's flesh, the one who used to be with Wilma. He remembered her eyes, burning like coals in a grate when daylight dies in winter.

Why the hell should he think of her? Vicki. Yes, that was her name. It sounded Austrian, not a name from somewhere around the Ganges or the Hoogli. Well, she could have been part Austrian at that. She could have been part anything. Part snake.

It was she who had spoiled Wilma, spoiled her by changing her, and Wilma
hadn't been aware of the rot setting in. Only he. And he had left it almost too late. Maybe actually too late, because there was the baby.

He rose.

The pain in his head was a dull throbbing. It came more often these days. He had thought he would be all right after he had faced up to the truth about himself and Wilma and then about himself and Gladys. Only psychiatrists were liars and charlatans. They worked to no rules. They refused to be pinned down. They proved nothing that applied like an axiom. So they never dealt in truths. Only near-truths at best. They didn't even know in which direction to set off to find truth. Which was damned funny, too.

You had to go down. That was the direction to go to find truth, down, down a well. Truth and pussy, both of them down a damned well, humming with sound most likely because cats can't keep silent for long, and they can't remain alive for long down a well either, and when they're dead they stink like
anything else that has been alive and suddenly isn't, so there was stink down the well, stinking up the truth so that truth stank like a dead cat.

He heard himself laughing and felt mildly shocked as well as surprised.

I'm mad.

He thought that slowly and, he hoped, objectively, but somehow he couldn't believe it. Because, after all, he did have feelings and through feelings came that awareness. But he wasn't sure.

And that was more stinking truth.

He wasn't sure of anything except that he wasn't a case for a nuthouse. Then what in hell was he?

The rationalizing was tearing its effectiveness to untidy shreds as he tried to convince himself he was lightheaded because he hadn't eaten for too long. Hunger could be like a drug in some ways.

The opposite way, draining a system of vitality to produce a false effect like over-stimulation.

He was just plain damned hungry. To hell with the noise of that bloody radio
and the pop muck it was spewing into the atmosphere of long eaten meals of fried food sprayed with pungent sauce from a cloudy bottle.

He went to the counter.

‘A meat pie,' he said.

When he saw it on the plate with the greasy thumb mark he felt bile at the back of his throat, so he knew it would be rugged, but he had to put something in his stomach just to give his damned intestines something to do to stop them annoying him.

‘Another,' he said and received a curious look from the grey eyes dull with too much knowledge of the world. ‘And another cup of coffee.'

The thin mouth with the pale pink lip rouge that wasn't really rouge in any real sense drew thinner.

‘Two pies, one and eight, and a coffee ninepence, that'll be two and five.'

Her voice was like a threat and no one would ever tell her unless she acquired a husband who came home drunk.

He put down a half-crown and turned away. But she could be a stickler for
exactitude, like most women, when she chose.

‘Your change.'

He had to go back and pick up the penny, feeling like a boy and somehow apologetic and knowing his face was warm, and the dull grey eyes stared at him as though he wasn't human.

Or maybe she wasn't.

Maybe not either of them.

He stopped the futility of thinking in tight curves that only arrived at tighter curves and went back to his seat and sat down and ate the two stale pies. At first he had to force himself to swallow what his teeth had over-chewed. Then it went down leaving a murky taste in his mouth. By the time he was munching through the second pie his palate had awakened, and he was close to enjoying deep-freeze pabulum delivered twice a week in little plastic bags covered with colourful lettering and a manufacturer's recommended price.

He chose a couple of lumps of sugar from the bowl that looked fly-specked and probably wasn't but really something
much worse, dropped them into the cup of coffee and spooned them away in close circles. He drank the result straight down as though it were a draught of physic.

He didn't quite know what to do about tipping in such an establishment, so he pushed sixpence towards the rim of the plate that now held pie crumbs. His mathematical mind told him this sum was adequate, but somehow it didn't look it. Before he got into another mental wrestling bout with himself he rose quickly and turned his back on the table. He stopped to light a fresh filter tip.

He didn't want to smoke so much as to know his face was being occupied with doing something.

He walked unhurriedly towards the glass door with the letter e missing from the white-enamelled word Café, but the acute accent remaining firmly in place over nothing. That made him smile with a kind of tolerant appreciation. It was like so much today, an accented nothing.

As he reached out his hand to open the
door he laughed out loud, again taken by surprise.

He looked back quickly. The dull grey eyes had brightened a little, he thought. But not with pleasure. With alarm. He closed the door firmly behind him, refused to glance at that mocking word Caf' glued to the smeared glass, and trod firmly down the street to the telephone kiosk he had previously walked past until he had given what he was about to do final consideration.

Some gas exploded in the back of his throat, and he made the polite gesture of trying to catch in his hand something he couldn't hold.

He was too late to do anything about the second belch except quicken his pace past a middle-aged woman who stoned him with eyes of flint. The telephone kiosk was unoccupied. He crowded into it and felt for some change.

He didn't have to look up the number. It was one he remembered even in his sleep.

He picked up the phone and started dialling. Suddenly he felt as though he
had eaten a seven-course meal too rapidly and had run too far afterwards.

Well, he was running. That much was true, and he knew what truth did. It stank.

Then he was pushing in the coins he had in his warm hand, and they sounded loud as they fell, and all the time the pussy-purring voice was saying, ‘Hello. Hello.'

Then he pressed button A and said, ‘Wilma,' and the pussy-purring voice said, ‘Oh, it's you.' Only, it was just a pussy voice now, no longer purring. And then she said something utterly startling.

‘It's about time you rang up, but you cut it very fine, Jeremy. Almost too fine. I've got the police in the next room, so you'd better not waste words, had you?'

‘She's a long time on the phone,' Bill Hazard grumbled.

Drury did not reply. The superintendent
was listening. He crossed to the door, which Wilma Haven had closed after going to answer the ringing phone in the next room, and opened it a couple of inches.

He heard the footsteps on the stairs, and was out in the hall as Flora Marshall came down, trying to tread without making the old timbers creak. For a bulky woman she was doing very well at catfooting downstairs, but the effort of concentration apparently required an open mouth and a tongue that protruded and wagged from side to side.

She still had to come down five stairs when Drury's appearance stopped her.

That was when the other door down the hall opened and Wilma Haven appeared. She looked mad and shook her mane of silky pale hair like a lioness preparing to leap. Before she could say the wrong thing Drury spoke.