Hire Me a Hearse (8 page)

It wasn't Bates. He remembered now.

Bateman. Harry Bateman, and he had been an ex-cop. In Sheffield, or was it Stafford?

His head was turned and he was looking at her. As he took in the smooth silky skin of pale coffee and the tilted chin sliding gracefully away from the high cheekbones with the merest suggestion of shadows in the planes of her cheeks his mind was a blank. Slowly it filled with a sound like a swarm of bees that have been made angry. The sound grew, and
he felt himself going dizzy and discovered why. He was holding his breath.

She turned her head, smiled.

‘Just relax. You're all right now.'

He wasn't sure about the look in her dark eyes. He didn't think they were joining in the smile contrived by her mobile red lips.

‘Vicki, for God's sake!'

He was gulping air so greedily he choked.

‘Surprised?'

‘Flabbergasted.'

‘I don't think I know that word.'

‘I'm not surprised. Will you now let me out?'

‘No, Jeremy.'

She shook her head to give point to her words. The smile had been taken from display and put away.

‘Then I'll have to get out — '

This time when he sucked much-needed air quickly the sound whistled through his teeth until he clamped his jaws firmly shut. She was holding the wheel with her left hand, the car had slowed appreciatively, so that she could
share glances between the road ahead and him, a movement that made him conscious of the sweep of her smooth-skinned neck.

But not for long. He became much more conscious of the small piece of complicated ironmongery in her right hand. He thought it was Italian. A Beretta possibly, but he was no expert on firearms, which was a curious omission in his education, when one realized that he was a researcher on new means of making small weapons of conventional types behave destructively like larger weapons of less-conventional types.

But he appreciated one very disquieting fact as he sat there, swaying a little to the car's motion, and eyeing that round muzzle, like a small black eye, pointed somewhere in the region of his tripes.

‘You're not getting out, Jeremy,' she said, ‘until we arrive where we're going.'

‘Where's that?'

‘Don't get impatient. You'll find out. Who were you phoning? Wilma?'

‘That's my business.'

She kept her eyes on the road, driving
expertly with one hand. She had no need to declutch as the car was provided with automatic transmission, and the space where the top of the gear lever would have been was taken up with her small right fist and its deadly contents. Her right forearm lay across her lap, low, so that no curious lorry driver could stare down into the car and catch sight of the gun.

It struck Jeremy that there was something disturbingly professional and practised about the manner in which this girl of mixed bloods was operating, like some character in a TV thriller. She made no work of what she did. She just performed. And he knew he was growing a fresh feeling for which he had no liking.

He was afraid of her.

She said, without turning her head to look at him, ‘Don't try it, Jeremy,' and only then did he know for sure that he had actually been about to grab at the small gun she held. He saw his clenched fists. They had been held like talons, in readiness, until she spoke, and then the reflex action shut them with
the suddenness of a photo-electric cell closing a circuit.

She gave him a sobering impression of a young woman ready for any emergency, which was certainly not the state he was in. He felt completely at a loss. He had left the Midlands in a moment of near-desperation, and now he was no longer sure he had done the right thing.

Or even a very bright thing for a thinking individual.

At the time it had seemed he had no alternative, but now, looking at that sleek chin line and the confident grip she retained on the gun, he wondered if he had been guilty of a damned foolish and impulsive act. If he had, then how did she come to be there in the street where he had eaten in the sleazy café and had phoned Wilma? The street where Bateman and his pal had tried to pick him up after he had done his phoning?

She said, ‘Don't worry about it, Jeremy. All will be made clear in good time.'

He thought she was mocking him, but she wasn't. Her head had turned so that she could again look at him, and if either
of them looked worried at that moment he thought it must be she.

‘Put that gun away,' he said. ‘It makes me jumpy.'

He didn't know if that was true, but he certainly didn't wish to continue a car ride with her driving one-handed and that gun able to explode any moment the car bounced a little too high over a pothole.

‘Very well.'

She pushed it under the dashboard, on the shelf from which she had taken it. He saw it was concealed by a bright golden scarf, and the incongruous thought crossed his mind that it would look most effective tied over her dark hair.

‘Would you like a cigarette to help you relax?'

‘No, thanks.' He wanted no favours. Just explanations. ‘Is this something to do with Wilma?'

She paused before committing herself to ‘In a way.'

‘What's that supposed to mean?'

‘She's involved, but indirectly.'

‘How indirectly? She asked you to
come and pick me up? She couldn't have been that quick, even by telepathy.' He gave a laugh that came out of his mouth sounding like a snort. ‘You followed me.'

She didn't deny it, nor did she agree.

‘Look — ' he began.

‘Shut up, Jeremy,' she said. ‘You're beginning to get the tiniest bit tiresome, and I seem to remember that, once you start, you can get very tiresome quickly. So please — shut up.'

He opened his mouth and quickly closed it, breathing hard. So far as he could recall, he had seen her only on two previous occasions. Both times he had been with Wilma, and he had no pleasure in recalling them.

Wilma had been skittish. Vicki had been rude. That was what he had decided afterwards. Now she was still being rude, but much more overbearing. Then it had been with Wilma, who had seemed to indulge Vicki in an incredible fashion. Now Vicki was not only being overbearing, she was positively lethal, with a gun and . . .

He made a choking sound because he couldn't help himself. He had thought of something which suddenly assumed a dreadful significance.

Those advertisements of Wilma's had mentioned Russian Roulette. The stupid game was played with a gun.

Vicki had a gun.

What the hell were they both trying to prove?

She said, ‘What's the matter now?' The words were uttered conversationally although she did not look at him. He sat staring at her profile, and for some reason he could not understand or hope to explain to himself he was comparing her with Gladys.

He tried to stop because he realized with a sense of guilt how unfair the comparison was to his fiancée. At least, Gladys wasn't exactly his fiancée, though he thought of her in that way. He hadn't bought her a ring, and he certainly hadn't spoken to her father, Sir Thomas Albirt, the chief of his own section at International Chemicals. He had told Gladys about himself and about Wilma
and she had been sympathetic, or he thought she had. In fact, he had been surprised at her interest in him. He had imagined her more interested in Leslie Frant, who was one of International Chemicals' high-pressure salesmen. Very different from a researcher. A whole breed of specie different, in fact.

‘What, no words?'

She turned her head again and looked at him. This time when he looked up he saw the trace of mockery in her smile, and he said aloud, ‘Austrian.'

‘What did you say?' she asked.

‘Austrian,' he repeated. ‘I seem to remember your father was Austrian.'

‘Why should you remember that?' she said slowly, and he could tell she was puzzled.

Well, she wasn't the only one. Why should he?

‘I don't know, but it suddenly came to me, and I didn't even want to think of it. All I want to know is what the hell you were doing in that street with a car ready to get me away from those security men.'

His tone didn't turn the words into a question. Maybe that was why she chose not to accept them as one.

She said, ‘You'd better have a cigarette and stop thinking. You'll get a headache.'

‘I've got one.'

‘Well, I can't stop to let you out to buy aspirin. We're expected.'

‘Where, in God's name?' he demanded, letting his growing exasperation show, which he knew wasn't very clever. He fumbled for a cigarette. ‘You want one?' he asked.

She shook her head and said, ‘I don't use them, thanks.'

He pushed the filter tip into the centre of his mouth, snapped on his lighter, and drew deep the first lungfuls.

‘You haven't answered my question,' he reminded her, not that he believed she was so forgetful. ‘Where?'

‘You'll see,' she said quietly. ‘Just be patient.'

She might have been talking to a fractious child who was being troublesome. He sat hunched together smoking and indulging a thunderous frame of mind,
which merely served to spoil his enjoyment of the cigarette.

She drove for nearly twenty minutes out to some suburban area where the gardens became larger and the buildings more remote behind an increasing amount of timber.

He said after a long silence, ‘I've left my car parked in a street. I ought to have collected it.'

‘That'll be done,' she said, like telling him the carpet would be swept or the tea-things washed up.

‘By whom?' He tried to keep his tone neutral, but he knew the sound came out belligerently.

‘I don't know,' she said, as though it didn't matter in any event. ‘Someone.'

The thunder cloud did not lift from his mind. It grew and became more difficult to contain, and when he felt he had to make a further attempt at protest she deftly turned out of a winding road, with grass verges and well-clipped hedges and shiny painted gates with neatly lettered names on them, passed between two leafy trees and crunched over rolled gravel
towards a porticoed entrance to a large double-fronted house. Before the car had rocked to a stop and she had applied the handbrake the front door opened.

The man who came out had a gun in his fist, a very different calibre from the Beretta under the car's dash-board. It looked like a howitzer and must have been a forty-five. He didn't speak, just jerked the gun's muzzle in a gesture full of potent meaning.

Jeremy climbed out of the car and preceded the man into the house. At the end of the long hall stood another man. He gave him only a glancing stare, but then took another look.

‘Hey,' Jeremy said, ‘aren't you the man who was with Bates — no, Bateman? Aren't you — '

He didn't get out the rest.

The man had doubled his fist and it was speeding fast along the shortest route to Jeremy's jaw. Jeremy was so surprised he just stood there and let his face be used as a punchbag. He didn't feel the blow land. It had been delivered by an expert, who knew precisely what
the sudden shock of contact would do to certain of Jeremy's not very well organized nerve centres.

Charles Horace Thynne recognized her voice as soon as he picked up the phone, and he felt himself shrivelling inside.

‘Yes,' he said with a feeling that he was chewing on a mouthful of particularly sharp tintacks, ‘this is Mr Thynne, Miss Haven. You haven't rung up to cancel the order, have you? Everything's ready for the morning.'

‘I'm glad to hear it, Mr Thynne,' she said. ‘No, I'm cancelling nothing. In fact, I'm ringing up for something additional.'

‘Oh.'

Mr Thynne thought that single sound sufficiently neutral to be safe, though he wasn't prepared to wager money on it.

‘Yes, I've ordered the hearse, and silly me I forgot to order a coffin to go with it.'

Mr Thynne felt strangled.

‘A coffin,' he repeated weakly. There was certainly no exclamation mark after the word to betray the surprise he felt so ominously.

‘Yes, I want you to send one along with the hearse.'

He did something about that strangled feeling. He pushed a finger between his neck and his collar and tugged, and heard the stud under the knot of his tie go pop. But he still felt strangled.

He strove to grasp the dignity slipping away from him, something it always did when this young woman was on the far end of the phone complicating his normally well-ordered business.

He said, ‘One doesn't just order a coffin, Miss Haven. There are measurements to be taken. The material has to be chosen. I mean the wood. For instance, elm or oak or perhaps mahogany. Or a coffin occasionally is not of wood, but of metal, and — '

‘Any old coffin.'

Mr Thynne took his face from the receiver and stared at it as though he had been affronted by it.

‘I beg your pardon,' he said, and then realized he was speaking to the room at large and not to the person on the phone, who probably hadn't heard the words. He repeated the words into the receiver, then thought they must sound silly robbed of the tone of surprise, and added, ‘I mean, I'm afraid I don't understand. Who is it for?'