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.
‘Have you an extension to the phone upstairs, Miss Haven?’ he asked.
‘In my bedroom,’ she informed him coldly. ‘Why?’
‘Did you hear a click when you hung up?’
‘Yes, I did. But — ’
She didn’t have to go on. The point of Drury’s question had suddenly penetrated. Wilma Haven turned her blonde head to glare at the woman on the stairs.
‘So you were snooping again. You know what I told you.’
Mrs Marshall’s broad face lifted with the rest of the top half of her well-developed figure as she squared her shoulders. Had she folded her arms the movement would have been comic, but one hand remained on the broad black rail of the balustrade, the other knotted into a formidable fist at her side.
Silence didn’t get her off an uncomfortable hook.
‘Well?’ said the young woman.
From her tone she expected an answer.
The woman on the stairs said in no sweet tone, ‘I guessed it was him. He rang earlier when you were out. I told him, and he said he’d ring again. He asked who I was and when I told him he said a very funny thing. That’s why I wanted to know what he said this time.’
Mrs Marshall knew how to be tantalizing. She smirked a little when she saw the quick close-knit frown on the younger woman’s face.
‘I’ll talk to you later, Flora,’ Wilma Haven said.
‘Not if I’m to pack my bag you won’t,’ the woman on the stairs retorted. She sounded sure of herself, and she smiled at Drury with a mocking twist of her fleshy mouth.
‘I said I’ll talk to you later.’
Wilma Haven tried desperately to override the woman standing on a higher level, but Mrs Marshall was wearing a smile that couldn’t be fazed. She shook her head.
‘No, you won’t, not if I’m being turfed out, and if I go I take Claude and Cedric with me.’
Hazard, standing in the doorway left wide by Drury, gave a choking sound. The two women looked at him. Drury remained looking at Flora Marshall.
It was the Yard superintendent who said, ‘The lads on the gate, Flora? Pals of yours?’
‘
You could say that.’
The woman on the stairs gave a too-coy display of primping and patting the back of her rather straggly coarse hair with the hand that had been folded in a fist. The effect was ruined, though she was totally unaware of it, by the large armpit stain the movement revealed.
‘Seems you got trouble, miss,’ Drury said to the girl.
‘You go,’ said Wilma Haven, ‘if you don’t tell me what he said to you earlier.’
There was a new snap to the words. The over-large woman trying to look girlish dropped her hand from her head. She had lost her swift display of assurance, and was just as quickly uncertain.
‘What, in front of these?’
She waved the same hand to take in Hazard and Drury.
Before the young woman could change her mind, or even before she could have second thoughts that would make her dubious, Drury interposed again.
‘He said something funny, Flora, or were you lying, trying to fool Miss Haven?’
‘Like hell I was. He said — ’
She gulped. Led to the brink she had no wish to topple over.
Drury did a little more pushing. ‘He said what? Anything or nothing or were you just making it up, Flora, to scare Miss Haven, so a little blackmail could be tried on for size?’
‘Cops!’ said the woman in a bitter tone.
‘That’s hardly an answer,’ Drury pointed out.
‘It could be,’ said Hazard helpfully, ‘if she wanted us to make it one. At the station she could take her time about talking. Hours of time. Days if she wanted it. Couldn’t you, love?’ he ended with coarse sauciness.
Just for a moment Flora Marshall looked at him as though he had offered her an invitation she might consider worth taking up, and Hazard jerked himself in an upright position, standing in the doorway, watching her with a wary expression.
The interested look died on her face. She turned hard eyes on Drury, whose miniature smile neither suggested amusement nor hope.
She said, ‘All right, if you perishers must know, it was about the baby.’
Hazard stared as though she had uttered an obscenity.
‘What baby? Whose baby?’ Drury asked quietly, but he was doing a great deal of guessing at that moment, and some of it seemed very wild even to himself.
‘Flora!’
The girl’s sharp exclamation made the woman take her hand from the balustrade. A pout grew on the broad face, robbing it of any lingering softness.
‘You wanted to know.’
‘Go back to the kitchen,’ Wilma Haven said.
The woman walked down the five stairs, and Drury moved aside to allow her room to pass. She sniffed as she turned away from him. It was a most expressive sniff, but was spoiled in its effect because Drury had lost interest in any comedy the scene had held. He said to Wilma Haven as the kitchen door closed on Flora Marshall, ‘All right, you tell me, miss.’
‘She’s mistaken.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘I’ll find out later.’
‘Possibly,’ Drury said non-committally. ‘But I’d like to know now, miss.’
‘Then you’re going to be disappointed, Superintendent,’ the girl returned. ‘Until I’m sure myself I can’t very well tell you.’ She paused before adding, ‘Even if I thought of doing that.’
Drury didn’t let his anger show. That wouldn’t have been of any use with her in this fresh mood. He nodded as though accepting what she had said, and then said, ‘Your baby?’
It was said so casually that she let the question pass for some seconds before the implication hit her. She was walking towards the door where Hazard stood when she turned, her face tight-knotted. But it wasn’t flushed, nor was she in any real way put out of countenance by what he had said.
‘Don’t be impertinent, Superintendent. I’m not married.’
‘Aren’t you?’
‘No.’
They stood staring at each other. Drury smiled. She had either lied or told the truth. She hadn’t compromised by evading a real answer.
‘Whose baby, then?’
‘Why, Jeremy Truncard’s, if it’s important to you. But it isn’t to me.’
‘He was on the phone asking about his own baby?’
‘He was on the phone not asking about his own baby.’
‘You mean he’s married?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Really. Then what?’
‘Engaged.’
‘To you?’
She smiled at him, but it was a strained effort. ‘Really, Superintendent,’ she said, ‘I’ve spent too long with you already telling you what I plan to do is a very private business. It is not criminal to hire a hearse or to play any type of roulette that I know of, never mind what it is called.’
She had apparently recovered from the jolt she had received before she put down the phone and Flora Marshall had tried to get downstairs without being found out at snooping.
‘Who is he engaged to, miss?’
‘You sound like a stick in the mud.’
‘Her name, please?’
‘Gladys. And don’t ask me what, I don’t know. Likewise, I don’t know where Jeremy was phoning from. I don’t know and I don’t care a damn. But why is strictly my business. Now, if you don’t want any chocolate fudge, I suggest you go. I don’t wish to appear inhospitable, but visits from the police can quickly lose the little novelty they have, and yours, I’m sorry to say, was lost very quickly.’
Drury started for the door.
‘Come on, Bill,’ he said. ‘The lady doesn’t want our company. I think she’s making a mistake, but she can find that out in her own time, not ours.’
Bill Hazard nodded and moved forward, whistling softly between his strong white teeth. The tune had been a riot when Gershwin first wrote it. ‘Lady be Good’. But it never had sounded like well-meant advice, and it didn’t change its character with Hazard’s toothy whistling.
All the same, the young woman shot him a glance as he walked away that should have drilled a hole in the back of his neck.
Chapter 5
It was when Jeremy Truncard hung up the receiver in the telephone kiosk that he saw the two men converging on his red-painted glass shell. The face of one he recognized. He wasn’t sure about the man’s name. He thought it was Bates. But of one thing he was certain.
The man was a security officer at International Chemicals. Jeremy had seen him walking the corridors and trying to make himself inconspicuous ducking behind doors and disappearing rather ostentatiously into lift shafts and down staircases.
Bates … he was almost sure it was Bates.
Then he cursed himself for standing there dithering with a detail like a name that didn’t matter. Wilma had said the police were in the next room. From what she had said afterwards he didn’t think she was lying. He just had to get out of there and stop her being a fool. She had refused to say anything about the baby. All she wanted to talk about was the other thing, and she knew he wouldn’t go along with that.
He stood there looking through the dirty glass of the kiosk at the man he recognized and the other. They must have signalled each other, for they were walking towards each other, and at the same time converging on the telephone kiosk. They meant to cut him off whichever way he turned when he left it. He glanced up and down the street, looking for someone to come and take his place, for preference a bulking person he could remain concealed behind for valuable seconds.
That was how he was now thinking. In seconds. For he knew he hadn’t got away with anything. He had been followed. That meant he had probably been tailed when he left to see Gladys, and because she was her father’s daughter they had given him enough rope to hang himself.
He pulled himself up at that. It was an out-moded phrase, he reminded himself. Hanging had been abolished. Then he thought that hanging by the State had been abolished. One could always hang oneself. That was a privilege the State had not taken away for the simple reason it couldn’t, so long
as there was enough rope.
He was using up that line of thought fast, feeling desperate in case he finished too soon and he would have nothing to put in its place and would have to project himself from his glass shell and take to his heels.
He had no turn of speed. He wasn’t the athletic type. But then nor was Bates, if that was his name. He was middle-aged, paunchy even, probably had been a plainclothes man before he had retired and taken this job. Well, that may be why he had the second man. He looked younger. He would make better time trying to stop a man escaping in a busy street with plenty of two-way traffic in the road.
That was when he saw her, bustling up, her red face hot, wisps of hair protruding from under a woollen ski cap of bright purple with a lemon yellow bobble. The combination of colours above her broad shoulders was something to make a sensitive eye ache and water. She reached the door and tugged it open.
‘You going to be all day, young man?’
The voice was aggressive and critical at the same time, the kind of voice that made him flinch as though from an unwelcome physical contact.
‘I’ve just finished.’
‘You haven’t, you know,’ she said, her steamy eyes under that most unsuitable headgear looking not unlike boiled gooseberries. ‘I’ve been waiting and while I’ve waited I’ve watched. You’re just standing in there and I’ve a good mind to call a policeman.’
‘Oh, don’t be a fool, madam,’ he said. They were the first words that came into his mouth. He was watching Bates, who had slowed and signalled the other man to slow. Bates wanted to see if that distinctive hat was a recognition signal or something equally preposterous.
‘Here, don’t you go calling me names. I’m not standing for that.’
Irregular teeth that were distinctly off-white appeared in the bright red face, and her veined wattles shivered with the flowing inpulse of her displeasure.
He said, ‘I’m not calling you names. I’m giving you good advice if you had the sense to take it and stop filling the door. Then I might get out.’
The red cheeks puffed, the wattles under her buried chin stiffened as she stretched her neck, but she was moving back. Jeremy Truncard thrust himself past her, and only the last part of her scream touched his ear. But it was more than enough. The pennies she had clutched in her hand spilled to the pavement, and she went down after them, almost tripping two persons and certainly blocking the way.
Hire Me a Hearse Page 5