Hire Me a Hearse

by Piers Marlowe

  ‘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.

  Chapter 2

  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.

  The door opened again and Bill Hazard ushered in the visitor and Drury rose and pulled forward a chair.

  ‘How are you, Mr Bayliss?’ he said, holding out his hand.

  Peregrine Porter’s chief clerk took it, and the grip of both men was firm and satisfactory to the other. Drury was a half-head taller than his visitor, stockier, filled out his clothes better. Tom Bayliss was beginning to give his desk stoop more prominence, and his limbs seemed slack.

  So did the look in his eyes.

  ‘Oh, I can’t complain, I suppose. No need to ask how you’re keeping, Superintendent.’

  ‘Over-worked, I’d say, if you did ask. That’s the trouble with the computer age. The computers have to be fed, and they’ve got appetites like hungry work horses. They’re never satisfied. I sometimes wonder if we don’t have to feed them a ton to get back a few useful ounces.’

  ‘You sound prejudiced.’

  ‘Oh, I’m that all right. Ask Bill Hazard.’

  Drury included the inspector with a wave of the hand. Hazard produced cigarettes and a lighter and after each man
had taken in a couple of lungfuls of smoke Drury brushed aside the pleasantries and picked up the paper.

  ‘You rang up this morning because you’d seen it?’

  Bayliss nodded through his cigarette smoke. ‘Yes, I told you I would when I rang up the first time, the day after she’d come with the envelope.’

  ‘Does Mr Porter know you’re here?’ Drury asked.

  Bayliss shook his head. ‘No, he wouldn’t approve, I’m sure.’

  ‘You’re not telling us something we don’t know, Mr Bayliss.’ Drury tapped the ringed advertisement with a finger. ‘Or are you here to enlarge?’

  There was a noticeable pause on the part of the visitor after this question had been put to him.

  When Tom Bayliss spoke again he moved forward to the edge of his chair, rocked to and fro a few times, then sat in a rather rigid pose staring somewhere just over Drury’s left shoulder. The chief clerk appeared to be concentrating on his words.

  He said, ‘It’s like this, Superintendent. I wanted to see you personally. About Miss Haven. But even more about Jeremy Truncard. I believe he’s in love with her. I know he thought he was, and was miserable about her. I have a good idea she feels as much for him as for anyone, but I have never been able to decide that she could be in love with him. Or, indeed, in love with anyone.’

  ‘You suggesting she’s a lesbian?’

  Bayliss’s eyes swerved a few inches and found Drury’s face. He didn’t look shocked, though he guessed Drury’s tactics had been intended to shock something from him. If shock should prove the right means of separating him from something he didn’t want to tell.

  ‘Not that I know of,’ he returned levelly. ‘I don’t know a thing about her love life, if that’s the term to use. I’m more concerned, as I told you, with what a caper like this’ — his chin jutted at the paper on the desk — ‘could do to Jeremy Truncard.’

  ‘How did he take her other capers?’

  ‘Badly. I told you, he was damned miserable about her.’

  ‘He told you?’

  ‘I have a pair of eyes, Superintendent.’

  Drury nodded, aware that he was being taken around in a circle, and anxious not to waste time. If Tom Bayliss was merely a damned old woman who felt he had to push his nose somewhere where his employer kept his own out and so clean, then Drury wanted to know.

  ‘Why the special interest in young Truncard?’

  ‘He’s the grandson of old man Truncard, who started me in the firm. I feel — well, a mite responsible.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For seeing what I can do.’

  ‘About what, Mr Bayliss?’

  Tom Bayliss drew on the cigarette that had been smouldering between his fingers. A kind of withdrawn smile hovered over his features without settling.

  ‘You’d be good in court, with a wig and a gown spattered with cigarette ash.’

  ‘I don’t know enough law. You do, Mr Bayliss, and that’s one reason why you’ve come to the police. Either you want to keep someone out of trouble or you want to make sure someone else doesn’t create trouble for that person. My guess, from what you’ve said, is you’re thinking Wilma Haven could make trouble for Jeremy Truncard, for whom you have a sense of responsibility that goes back to gratitude to his grandfather. Am I right?’

  ‘Near enough.’

  Drury lifted his brows. ‘Where am I missing the target? Tell me. That’s what I want to know.’

  Tom Bayliss stretched forward and rubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray on Drury’s desk. He did it ponderously and slowly, and with great attention, almost like a man defusing something that could explode in his face. He sat back in his chair, appearing to squirm a little. But Drury knew it wasn’t a very comfortable chair. The Ministry of Works had very primitive ideas about creature comforts.

  ‘Wilma Haven brought an envelope to the office the day she called to tell Mr Porter she was going to put this advert in the papers. She left it with me. It was sealed and there was an instruction in her own hand saying it was not to be opened until after her death.’

  ‘Dramatic, I suppose. But nothing new or novel,’ Drury said, discounting the incident. ‘A will, a new codicil, a request. Some damned thing she’s thought up to provide a new laugh for the Wilma Haven Fan Club.’

  Drury looked at Bill Hazard for some show of approval, for there was none showing on the chief clerk’s face. Hazard dutifully rocked his large frame with simulated mirth and made sniggering sounds that were like echoes of distant claps of thunder. But his eyes remained alert and watchful. Bill Hazard’s attention was caught and he was interested in what was to come.

  So was Frank Drury, but he wasn’t prepared to reveal as much to his visitor.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Tom Bayliss said seriously. ‘I’ve no idea what’s in that envelope, but whatever it is I’ve a feeling I shouldn’t like knowing it.’

  Drury studied the face in front of him, while Bill Hazard stood motionless and making no sound.

  ‘Because of Jeremy Truncard?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But you think it could concern him?’

  Reluctantly Tom Bayliss nodded. ‘I think it could. I also know my boss. Whatever is in that envelope, if he has to open it upon the instruction written on it, he will do what he legally has to, no matter what the cost to anyone, even himself.’

  Drury wasn’t being dazzled by the prospect. He said, ‘A lawyer’s job, after all.’

  ‘I’m not a lawyer.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So I think the police could be within their rights as preventors of crime by seeing Miss Haven, asking her what this advert really means.’

  Drury was disappointed, but didn’t show it when he said quietly, ‘We’ve no knowledge that a crime is about to be committed by Miss Haven.’

  ‘Russian Roulette isn’t exactly a game like crown and anchor or clock golf. The players have a revolver with five chambers blank and one filled with a cartridge, and they take it in turns to spin the cylinder and when it stops squeeze the trigger.’

  ‘You didn’t have to explain how the so-called game’s played, Mr Bayliss,’ Drury admonished gently. ‘I know. I also know a few variants that are even more exciting if one wants to die in a hurry. But I don’t know that Wilma Haven does. I’ve read what she’s put in the paper — if she did have it inserted, and even that I don’t know — but I don’t know whether to believe it. She has a warped sense of humour, as a prosecution counsel once called it. She might be indulging in it again. Hence the fruit and vegetables. Pity she didn’t add nuts. Or would that have been a giveaway?’

  Tom Bayliss looked at him.

  ‘You’re hard, Superintendent.’

  ‘Possibly. I try to be a realist, Mr Bayliss. I have to or I wouldn’t last in this job. No.’ Drury shook his head slowly, registering a firm negative. ‘Unless you can come up with a better reason, a much better one, I can’t do anything about Wilma Haven or her stupid advertisement.’

  His visitor sat there considering what he had just heard. He felt depressed, but told himself he had been expecting too much in coming at all. But he had to try. For Jeremy’s sake. This thing could be bad for him if she went through with it.

  He made his last try.

  He said, ‘I think she’s up to something. I think she’s getting at someone. I don’t know who, but I suspect that she feels that in this way she is going to score against that someone, and heavily. She always tries to do that. Against the Prime Minister, who didn’t reply personally to a letter she sent him about an evicted family who had been turned out of their home by some damned Government department. Against a woman who had been at school with her and had been responsible for a young man becoming a drug addict, then turned her back on him and married a title. Against a shop stewards’ committee who managed to get a Jamaican ousted from his union and so left his family short of food — so she shot a deer to get the story in the papers.’

  Drury interrupted quietly.
‘You’re not telling me anything I don’t know, and most of the people in the British Isles as well.’ Drury leaned back, watching the writhing lips of the man in the chair on the far side of his desk. ‘She’s up to something this time. All right, I can accept that. Tell me what it is, and I may be able to act. But I have to know more than you’ve told me because I can’t just act on suspicion.’

  ‘Why not? She’s got a record.’

  ‘Of sorts, true. But she’s also got a lot of sympathizers with the reasons that prompt her novel antics. If I knew she was intending to kill someone at this stupid Russian Roulette game, then I might be able to get some action with Home Office approval.’

  ‘Someone like herself?’

  Drury dodged that by asking, ‘Can you suggest anyone else?’ and almost before the words were out knew what the answer would be.

  ‘Jeremy Truncard.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He’ll see the advert. I think he is meant to. He’ll turn up.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To stop her.’

  ‘Is that a bad thing?’

  ‘It is if it’s all designed to make him a laughing stock and through him his firm.’

  A little grunt escaped the hitherto silent Bill Hazard. Tom Bayliss looked at the big inspector and let his gaze travel on to Drury’s face. It now wore a more interested look.

  ‘What does Jeremy Truncard do for a living?’ he asked.

  ‘He’s a research scientist.’

  ‘And his firm?’

  ‘Independent Chemicals.’

  Another deep grunt, half smothered, came from where Bill Hazard stood. Drury knew why. Hazard was recalling something that was no longer news. Since the Government’s decision to improve the effect of certain of the conventional firearms used by the armed forces, as a counter to a United Nations proposal for a further halt in the stock-piling of nuclear weapons, some sizable contracts had been given to a number of firms who had produced new ideas of destruction. One of the firms that had secured a number of valuable contracts was Independent Chemicals, who were said to have several new-style explosives that increased certain firing ranges by nearly fifty per cent and had a much greater destructive potential than any explosive used hitherto in police-action wars. Moreover, they had been reported as having an improved type of napalm that was still on the secret list, but which could cinderize bricks and mortar in mere minutes.