Hire Me a Hearse
Page 17
‘Mr Jeremy Truncard, the research chemist injured at the same time, is still recovering in another hospital. He is a friend of Miss Haven’s of long standing.’
Drury gave the paper back to his assistant, but Hazard was now grinning broadly as he pushed it back.
Drury scowled.
‘More?’ he asked almost bitterly.
‘Turn to the column of engagements. It’s the first under the A’s. Then have a good laugh.’
Drury turned over some pages, found the personal columns, and stared at the following:
‘Mr L. .J. Frant and Miss G. K. Albirt.
‘The engagement is announced between Leslie, son of Mr and Mrs M. Frant of Birchington, Kent, and Gladys, only daughter of Sir Thomas and Lady Albirt of Nuneaton, Warwickshire.’
Drury grinned, then caught Hazard’s mocking eye and broke into a laugh that grew richer in tone as it became more prolonged, echoing his genuine amusement.
‘I’d like to see friend Jeremy’s face when he reads it, Bill. But our friends up the street haven’t even let me know where he is. How smart can you get?’
The phone rang.
It was the Commander, ready to ask, ‘Is Hazard with you?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Drury told him.
‘Right, tell him to stay there and come in yourself. We’ve an urgent call from the Chief Constable of Carmarthenshire. Sounds like a straightforward murder.’
The Commander rang off.
An hour and a half later Superintendent Frank Drury and Inspector William Hazard were on a train heading for Wales. The straightforward murder turned out to be a case that took them to Scotland and across to Dublin, back to Wales, and then to a small village in Somerset — all to find a man who had killed his aunt because she had called him ‘foxy-faced, like your father, and your mother should never have married him’. For that he had broken her head with the back of an axe and buried her body in a quarry, where it might have remained if heavy rains had not started a miniature landslide.
Two days after Drury and Hazard were back in London, with the man they had sought languishing in a Welsh jail and awaiting an appearance before the local magistrates, Hazard again was in early and had put a newspaper on Drury’s desk.
It was another day when the newsboy had not turned up with the morning’s paper, and Drury hadn’t seen any of the day’s crop of headlines.
The one Hazard had ringed read: ‘Echo of the Haven Bang.’
‘Don’t tell me somebody’s opening that one again,’ Drury said sourly.
‘More like somebody’s shutting it for keeps.’
Drury started to read:
‘Mr Jeremy Truncard, who will be remembered as the research scientist whose top-secret assignment with International Chemicals was completed about the time of the much-publicized Russian Roulette fiasco at Broomwood, has accepted a new research post.
‘He will head a fresh team of researchers to be organized at a factory now nearing completion in the new Scottish Redevelopment Area under the Board of Trade’s revised Industrial Expansion Scheme.
‘Board of Trade regulations for this Government-sponsored research centre require the team chief to be a married man. Mr Truncard is listed as unmarried, but it is learned that he will be marrying a Miss Winifred Hill after a short engagement just prior to taking up his new post.
‘Miss Hill has lived for some time past in the West Indies, where she won a trophy for water-skiing. She is not a career woman.
‘ ‘I shall endeavour to be a career wife,’ she told friends recently. ‘I consider that a good vocation for any woman who takes marriage seriously, as I do.’
‘It is understood Mr Truncard met Miss Hill some years before the notorious Haven Bang.
‘ ‘It wasn’t a case of love at first sight,’ he confided. ‘More a case, perhaps, of love by second sight.’
‘The happy couple laughed as though enjoying a secret joke. They did not explain on whom.’
Hazard took out his cigarettes, chose one with great care and studied it closely before deciding to light it.
‘You don’t even get one guess at another name for Winifred Hill,’ he told Drury through a cloud of smoke.
Drury nodded ponderously. Hazard’s brows shot up.
‘You’re not amused. You even look disappointed, and you’ve always been a strong advocate of marriage as a social institution to keep down the crime rate, although I doubt whether that was why you got married.’
Drury turned a blank stare on him.
‘I’m puzzled by that bit about second sight. Second sight of what?’
Bill Hazard was suddenly doubled over, trying to cough up a mouthful of smoke that had gone several wrong ways at the same time.
Note on the Author
Piers Marlow is one of the pen names of Leonard Reginald Gribble (1908–1985), a prolific English crime writer born in Barnstaple, Devon. In 1953 he was a founding member of the Crime Writers Association. He wrote thrillers, crime and mystery novels as well as non-fiction on criminology.
Discover books by Piers Marlowe published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/PiersMarlowe
Cash My Chips, Croupier
Hire Me a Hearse
Killer in the Shade
For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain references to missing images.
This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
First published in Great Britain in 1968 by Robert Hale Limited
Copyright © 1968 Piers Marlowe
All rights reserved You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
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eISBN: 9781448214495
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