Cart Before The Hearse
Roger Ormerod
© Roger Ormerod 1999
Roger Ormerod has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1980 by Robert Hale Ltd.
This edition published in 2017 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter One
We were driving a hot car, George and I, in more than one sense. I was behind the wheel, and well aware that some genius or other had breathed on that engine, had dabbled with such mysteries as high-lift cams and close-ratio boxes, and had poked out all the exhaust baffles. It had a healthy, throbbing and very hot feel about it. George, beside me, was eyeing the mike and radio transmitter morosely. He, I knew, was contemplating the fact that every police car in the country would probably be looking for this one. Hot indeed!
I drove carefully, foot caressing the throttle. It would have been stupid to be picked up for a minor traffic offence, when our expectation was to be pulled in for murder.
Though the word “murder” had not been used. Marcia Connolly had told us that her husband merely said: “I have killed…” No more and no less. And she had struck me as being inflexibly correct in all she said and did. She’d been quite calm about it, mind you, but, after all, she had had three days to think it over. Having thought, she appealed to Mallin & Coe, Private Investigators, because, in those three days, Ernest Connolly had said not another word.
Their house occupied an enviable quarter of an acre on the quiet side of town, with a splendid view from the rear over the golf course. It was a split-level bungalow, the drive plunging down to the garage under one corner of the house, and the front lawn rising in gentle, passionately-tended terraces to the front door. She had met us at the door, having it open before we reached it.
“Come in, gentlemen.”
“I am David Mallin,” I said. “And this is my partner, George Coe.”
She seemed uninterested in our individual identities, and watched tensely as we wiped our feet. There could have been a touch of frost on our soles. It was mid-November — you’ll recall that sudden cold spell.
Marcia Connolly was around forty-eight, plump in a self-contained and complacent manner, her face sour, and with that lip-indrawn severity of constant criticism, perhaps mainly of herself. Her hair had been golden, but was now picking up flecks of grey. It was a noble grey; she flaunted it with pride. With Marcia, one felt, you could not share a joke. But the woman scarcely had anything to laugh at.
“This was Saturday,” she said, not wasting any valuable time. “Ernest was late. But he hadn’t said anything… He’s an accountant, you know. A very fine mind.” She tensed her mouth, terrified that the mind might prove to be less than fine. “He worked out of the district quite a lot, but usually I could rely on him being home by seven-thirty. Supper is always on the table at eight. Ernest knew that. But on Saturday…”
The strain was mainly in her eyes. Dark, deep eyes, fixed on us alternately, George and I, gathering impressions. Could she trust us? Had she done the correct thing? Her eyes darted and probed.
“Saturday,” I said gently, “he was late.”
“Nearly eleven.” She nodded. “Seven minutes to, to be exact, when his key went in that lock.”
George, unlike me, is restless. He had been prowling the room. He paused and looked round. “You didn’t see him arrive, then? I’d have thought…” He looked towards it. “The window…”
“I do not peer round curtains,” she said sharply. “I heard his car, certainly. Heard the garage door slam down. I stood up when I heard his key. But he didn’t come in here. Normally he’d call out: ‘it’s me, dear.’ But he didn’t.”
“Could it have been anybody else?” I asked, exploring the relationship.
“We are quite alone.” She snapped her mouth at me. “Please do not interrupt. I was saying that he did not act normally. I went out into the hall. He was leaning against the door, with his head back, panting sort of, as though he’d been running, when of course he hadn’t. And his face…” For the first time she looked away. Her voice dropped a little, but was still quite steady. “He had either been in a crash, or he had been terribly beaten. His face was cut and swollen, one of his eyes was completely closed, and I’m sure it must have been very painful for him to move his lips. I tried to take his hands, but he didn’t seem to see me, though he was looking straight at me. And he said, quite clearly:
‘I have killed…’ Then he collapsed.”
“You’re sure of the words?”
“Mr. Mallin… that is you, I believe… Mr. Mallin, I know every inflexion of my husband’s voice. He said: ‘I have killed…’ There was some kind of struggle to get something more out, but then his eyes turned up and he just crumpled down in a heap. I had great difficulty getting him in here, and quite a struggle lifting him to a chair. That chair, the one you’re using now.”
“And where is he?”
“In the other room.”
“Perhaps we should see him.”
“It’s quite useless.”
“All the same, I think we should.”
As, of course, we must, if we were to make any decision on this. I was not yet sure what she wanted from us. There was a suspended moment, then she moved her hands wearily and led us in to see him.
Ernest Connolly was a big, gaunt man, fifty-two or three, with lax limbs and vacant eyes. He sat, unreacting, in a rocking chair, and appeared not to realise we were there. I had thought there was a possibility that he had knocked down a child and put his head through the screen. But his injuries excluded that simplification. I can tell a man who has been beaten-up. Fists had inflicted that damage, to be sure. But his own knuckles were unbroken. Whoever he had killed, it had not been with his bare hands.
“Has the doctor seen him?”
“Of course,” she said. “He called it shock. Said he should be in a hospital. But I am a trained nurse. They weren’t going to take him to one of those places.”
So there’d been mention of psychiatric hospitals. Was the damage that deep? “Shock?” I queried.
“He used another term for the condition.” For a trained nurse, she seemed rather vague on the medical terms — or reluctant.
George lumbered close, hands in his trousers pockets. He stared down at the shell of Ernest Connolly. “Catatonic,” he declared.
“Yes.” She nodded, pursing her lips in distaste, because it is a state associated with schizophrenia. But of course, this could not be a mental disorder. Connolly had a fine mind.
“So what do you expect of us?” I asked.
“I want you to discover who was killed, and the whys and wherefors.”
“You think that would help?”
She stood, laced fingers in front of her, her head slightly tilted. “His mind will not accept it — whatever it is. If I can find out the truth, then I’ll offer it to him, and show him that it’s nothing to be feared. Then he will… will…” She turned and stared down at him, and one hand, insufficiently controlled, made a move towards him before she restrained it.
She would offer him the truth, like a dose of medicine. “Here, get this down you.” And expect it to heal, when the possibility was that it’d push him that final step over th
e threshold of insanity. Clearly, the truth was desirable. Equally clearly, it might be best suppressed.
“You checked his car, I suppose?”
“Of course not.”
George raised his eyebrows at me. “We ought to check the car,” he grumbled.
“He’s an excellent driver,” she told him severely.
“But all the same…”
“He passed his test the very first time.”
I smiled at her dignified pride. “When was that?”
“Two years ago, when it became necessary to travel in his work. I told him…” She checked herself severely. What she had told him was irrelevant. “Very well, if you must see it. The garage door will be open.”
“You’re sure?”
“He didn’t bring in his car keys.”
So she had been aware of that, in the centre of crisis. We stood aside for her to lead the way.
You can see what was in my mind. The words: I have killed… would normally precede a name or description which would be self-explanatory to the listener. So, one had to assume that he’d been about to mention a person known to both of them. Yet, if such a person — relative or friend — had died on Saturday, Marcia would surely have heard. Therefore, there could be no such person. There was, at least, a touch of the bizarre to it.
There was also a touch of hopelessness. We had absolutely nothing to guide us towards a death, possibly distant. His office might help, but this had been a Saturday. Saturday? Since when did accountants work on Saturdays?
As George reached for the garage door, I asked: “Do you know where he was intending to go on Saturday?”
“I never interfere in his work.”
The door crashed up. We stared in at his car.
“But that’s not Ernest’s!” she cried.
I had not thought for one moment that it was. An io accountant would use a sedate car, something fitting to his position in life. But this vehicle fitted the position of someone around the mental age of nineteen. It was reasonably new, a Hunter Super, I thought, and had been neat and tidy enough when Chrysler had parted with it. But its owner had not been satisfied. He had embroidered it. Customized, they say nowadays. The fancy had been for plastic coloured strip, as lining along the sides and across the rear panel, in half inch wide stripes of yellow, black and red against the mid-green of the bodywork. The endeavour had been to obscure as much as possible of the rear screen with stickers: Llandudno; Have wife — must travel; Windows shut — no hand signals; St. Ives; Brighton (almost every spot on the coast); We do it on our feet — Midlands Water-Ski Club; and a dancing monkey suspended from a sucker. There was a drooping Welsh National flag hoisted on the aerial, and a white, plastic tyre print running over the roof and bonnet.
The registration number was FLO 551 E, the final letter belonging to about eleven years before the car was born.
“But it’s not…” she was saying.
“Let’s have it out,” said George, interrupting. There was, at last, a note of interest in his voice.
She had been slightly incorrect about the car keys; only the ignition key was stuck in the ignition lock. Being the slimmer I slid down beside the car and edged into the seat. The gear lever was stub. The engine started with a growl. I backed out.
In front of me, backwards, I read one of those name indicators people spread across the tops of their screens — black letters against a green plastic background. It read: PAT and FLORENCE.
I stopped in the drive, got out, and went a tour of it with George. “Some tearaway,” he murmured. But I wasn’t sure. “Look inside,” I told him. He did, gave the horn a try and got Colonel Bogey, and withdrew his head. “That’s illegal,” he said severely.
“The radio, George.”
He put his head inside again, and this time spent longer on it. He emerged with a puzzled expression, and a notebook with an elastic band round it.
“This,” he said, “is a police car.”
Patrol cars and Pandas carry two-way radio as standard equipment. More private, and anonymous, vehicles, such as CID cars and those belonging to the higher ranks, usually have radios. This car wasn’t anonymous, though. It cried out its personality — and yet it had a regulation police two-way radio.
“Anything?” I asked.
George was thumbing through the notebook rapidly. “It’s a working copper’s notes.”
“Any names?”
“Welsh place names.”
“I meant his own.”
“Could be a woman.”
“A woman copper’s car?”
I must have sounded incredulous. He thrust it at me impatiently. The name was printed inside the front cover.
“Not a woman, you idiot.”
The notebook, and probably the car, belonged to Detective Inspector Peter Underhill Florence. Come to think of it, the car almost certainly did. The number plate was personalised. FLO 551 E was a London registration. The car belonged to a Welsh Detective Inspector, who was therefore probably known as Flossie. Not, perhaps, called Flossie, or at least, not to his face. But he was clearly aware of his nickname. He wore it brazenly on his number-plate, and more than likely smouldered for the first sign of a snigger.
I showed it to George. He walked round the car again, shaking his head.
“So what do we do?” I asked, not fancying the obvious.
Mrs. Connolly had gone indoors; too cold for her. He glanced at the twitching curtains she said she never peered past. “Do we want to help her, Dave?”
“Do we want to help him?”
He shrugged. “I doubt it’d help, but we can go hunt for the body.”
“But where?”
He widened his eyes and looked innocent. “This time, we don’t follow clues and reach a nice, cosy solution. This time we let the solution find us. Dave, in this car we’ve only got to drive around and wait to be picked up. Then we’ll find out who he’s killed.”
George becomes interested when he sees a little action on the horizon. I wasn’t sure he was pursuing the idea deeply enough.
“Assuming he has.”
“Whether or not, we’ll find out, because Connolly came home in a DI’s car. What say, Dave?”
“I’ll drive,” I said.
So in the end we left George’s Renault — in which we’d arrived — parked up Connolly’s drive, backed out the souped-up Hunter, and drove towards trouble.
It had taken George fifteen minutes on the phone to a mate of his (he’s got friends everywhere) to discover that FLO 551 E belonged to a P. U. Florence of the Gwent County Police. We headed south, avoiding the motorway, trying the radio from time to time to tell us when we were within range.
George pored through the notebook, but there was nothing obviously relevant to Ernest Connolly, or any specific case in progress which seemed to involve him. George sat silent, strangely for him, until:
“Dave, there’s no call out for the car. Did I tell you that?”
“Isn’t there?”
He glanced at me, but I wasn’t ready for any ideas.
Then, later: “Dave — these names they put across the screen…”
The idea’s partly as a glare screen. They use plastic number-plate letters behind the green anti-glare plastic.
“What about’em?”
“I thought the idea was to put the names above the people they represent. Florence in the driver’s seat, and Pat, whoever she might be, over the passenger’s.”
“So I always assumed.”
“Then why is Pat’s name in front of you, and Florence’s in front of me?”
And I hadn’t noticed! “He can’t drive, and uses an Irish chauffeur.”
“Damn it all, you’re not taking it seriously.”
“Dead serious, George. Try that radio again.”
We got a weak, distant signal. “Getting close,” I said, and switched off.
We were fifty miles from Cardiff, from Tiger Bay and all the heavy action the port would probably crawl with.
“You don’t have to be so pleased,” I said, and lie cracked his knuckles.
George thinks he’s still a young, tough copper, when now he’s simpy an old, tough ex-one. But he worries me. He’s got a tendency to dive in, uncaring for bones that now break easier, and blood that flows longer before it heals over. He’s got no consideration for mine, either.
I said: “Try it again.”
We got it clear and sharp. “Come in Peter Seven. Peter Seven.” We were in the operative area.
Five minutes later we got out first bite.
Due to the proximity of the motorway in that area, the main road was so much de-nuded of traffic that I first noticed the maroon car as a speck in my rear-vision mirror. It came up on us very fast, and became a 4.2 Jag, and then it settled down to dog us. Just to test it, I piled on a few revs, and the Jag remained stolidly at the same distance.
“Look behind you, George.”
He turned and looked. “Don’t think it’s police,” he said. “Find a lay-by, Dave, and we’ll make sure.”
The one I found was a U, which had been part of a minor road at one time. I drifted into it, giving due warning with the winkers. Drawing to a halt, I could see we were quite hidden from the road by the bare, frost-laden thorn hedges. The Jag halted alongside. I waited. He was my side, and what I could see was a stolid mountain of man behind the wheel, looking disinterestedly ahead.
The rear door opened and another man got out. This one was merely plump, a bouncy character in a sky-blue velvet suit with 24 inch bells to the slacks, a pale blue, lace-trimmed shirt, and a bow tie. His hair was slicked over a balding spot; his face was round and shiny. His smile could have been embarrassed, or even shy.
He stood, jerking into sight his lace cuffs. “My,” he said, “what a pretty car.”
I wound down the window. “It’s a crisp day,” I said pleasantly.
“Will it never break! Just fancy, this cold in November! I’ll give you five hundred for it. Cash.”
“It isn’t mine.”
“I know, I know. So you’d make five hundred. No… be generous… six.”
Cart Before The Hearse (David Mallin Detective Book 14) Page 1
