Cart Before The Hearse (David Mallin Detective Book 14)

by Roger Ormerod

  “It’s not on.”

  He beamed. The smile had been flicking on and off, all hesitant, but now it flushed into full strength. His cheeks glowed. “Silly of you. There’s no guarantee you’ll have it for long. Though that, of course, depends on who you borrowed it from.” He licked his lips. The smile faded a little and became painful. “But I’m being nosey.”

  “No, no,” I asssured him. “Who would you suggest — that I borrowed it from?”

  George got out the other side. He leaned forward over the roof, and said nothing.

  The character gazed up the lay-by as though expecting company. “I have a friend — an acquaintance — who runs a car like this.”

  “Named?” asked George.

  “I did hear he’d lost his car.”

  “So perhaps,” I suggested, “we’re simply returning it. He’ll not be happy to hear you offered a measly six hundred for it. Who shall I say was asking?”

  The smile poked at me tentatively. “No need to say.”

  “Oh, come on Wally,” said a woman’s voice. “Stop acting the fool.”

  I leaned forward. A young woman, a blonde with the self-assurance to wear her hair loosely streaming over her shoulders, sat in the far, rear seat. She had the formalised features of a model, as though someone had carefully selected the best individual items and meticulously assembled them. He’d done quite a job. The result was the passivity necessary to hide the joins, but from where I sat she was quite beautiful, in a cold sort of way.

  “Make it a thousand,” suggested George. “Show us how interested you are.”

  He blinked. The blonde was lighting a cigarette. “We’re late as it is,” she said, bored and not really caring.

  Wally murmured: “That’s life. Duty calls, and it seems we’re late.”

  He got back in the car, quite quickly because George had decided to walk round for a closer look at the suit. The Jag spurted away, and I saw the blonde turn and stare back at us. I wondered why she looked scared.

  “Not the police, after all,” I said.

  “I dunno.” George kicked the front tyre angrily. He’s a slave to convention. “With this fairground, rodeo thing belonging to a DI, then that we’ve just seen could’ve been a Chief Superintendent.”

  “Let’s get moving. It’s getting on for lunch time.” I knew he hates to miss out on his food.

  But he was morose and unsettled. Things were coming up all backwards.

  He got back in. We started. He turned on the radio. Paul Three was telling Grand-dad that he’d spotted the car. John Seven cut in to say he’d handle it. And alone, please, with no harassment.

  I drove. We waited for John Seven to start handling things. I had no doubt that the spotted car was this one, and by now I was even anxious to meet an ordinary, down-to-earth copper.

  But I was unsure what an ordinary copper would look like, in the situation that was gently engulfing us.

  Chapter Two

  His car was unremarkable enough. He picked us up, turning in behind from a side road about two miles further on. A grey Cortina. I waited for him to overtake, and he did not. I had an idea. “Switch the radio on, George.”

  “John Seven to Flossie,” it squarked. “Are you reading me?”

  “Loud and clear,” George told the mike.

  “Left turn a mile ahead. There’s a restaurant half a mile along on your right. I’ll buy you a drink. Suit you?”

  It was a motel, with its restaurant and bar out front. We parked side by side. We slammed car doors simultaneously. He said: “Could get some snow.”

  “It’ll never stick, not in November.”

  But the roads had begun to wind and the hills to nudge us this way and that. Heavy clouds hung round their peaks, towed by the bitter wind.

  “You’re strangers to these parts,” he said, “or you wouldn’t say such things. I’m Detective Sergeant Fyne.” George pushed on ahead. I was pleased to meet Fyne, I said, and he acknowledged the evasion with an inclination of his head.

  He bought us bitters, and George picked the menu from the bar and examined it. On expenses, he lets himself go. He hadn’t seemed to be studying Fyne, but I knew he’d seen all that mattered. Six feet two inches of lean muscle, moving smoothly, that was Fyne. A long, serious face, betrayed by amused grey eyes, his hair long, but not excessively so, his chin firm and aggressive but his voice calm. That was Fyne. He must have been around for about thirty years, long enough to have persuaded himself that the world was a ghastly place. His wide shoulders were slightly bowed by the weight of his portion of the responsibility, but his steady gaze intimated that he had no intention of avoiding it.

  He lifted his glass. “Cheers.” We did the same. George said the sirloin sounded just the thing.

  “What’s the word?” Fyne asked.

  “The word?” I put down my glass.

  “What message did Flossie send me?”

  I looked at George in innocence, and we both stared at Fyne. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  But he was undisturbed. “Then I’ve got things wrong. I assumed, seeing you’re using the car, that it was a method of contacting me.”

  “There’re phones,” I pointed out. “He could phone you, this Flossie character you’ve mentioned.”

  “It doesn’t follow. Sometimes he goes undercover. So maybe he’d send somebody in his car…”

  I shook my had.

  “Then things are more serious.” Fyne pursed his lips. “It means you must have the car illegally. It might even mean that your having the car illegally is connected with his disappearance.”

  “What’s he on about, Dave?”

  “The fact that you know Flossie’s a man,” Fyne told him. “The fact that you know exactly what I’m talking about.”

  “We know nothing about any disappearance. This friend of yours…”

  “My DI.”

  “… has been missing — how long?”

  “Since Saturday.”

  George made sucking noises with his dregs. I managed to speak calmly. u I can hardly believe that. There’s obviously no nationwide call out for him. A DI disappears, and that’s big stuff. Same again?” u I’m driving. But you go ahead.”

  “I’m driving too.”

  “Not if I say otherwise. It could be necessary to impound the car.”

  “And arrest us?”

  “Take you in for questioning.”

  “We were both in Birmingham on Saturday.”

  “I’m not asking for alibis. And who said there’s a crime involved?”

  “You’re accusing us of stealing his car. On Saturday.” He smiled thinly. “Was I? It’s Flossie I’m after, not his car.”

  “Then we can’t help you,” I told him sadly. “We’ve never met him.”

  “Then how the devil do you come to have his car?”

  And yet I felt that the irritation in his voice was at his inability to avoid asking the question. He had been skating round it, toying with the idea, when a direct basis of accusation was parked right there opposite the window.

  I was just about to fall back, reluctantly, on professional ethics, a device which I hate. Everybody, these days, flaunts his ethics like a flag in your face, when usually he’s hiding a lack of morals. But I was spared the indignity. George to the rescue.

  “We could have stolen the car,” he suggested. “Then we5d naturally drive it to the area where it’s known — which would have to be a coincidence, anyway, because it’s got a London registration. We could’ve done him in and dumped his body, and gone on using his car, seeing it’s tarted up so’s everybody can spot it a mile off. Or we could be using it to find out whose it is, and why it’s hanging around loose. I fancy the iced melon for starters. I wonder if they’ve got any cinnamon.”

  Fyne looked at him speculatively. “Mind if I join you for lunch?”

  It was almost abdication. George had told him firmly enough that he wasn’t going to get anywhere with slanted implications. But there was a quiet
confidence in his words, and of course we couldn’t afford to lose sight of him now, so I said we’d be delighted, and when the waiter approached he ordered with the reckless abandon that indicated he believed he was on our expense account, which at least, even though he was incorrect, told me that he had identified our profession.

  He delicately picked at his trout, and turned out to be one of those who can’t stop themselves talking with a full mouth.

  “He’d got this special thing on. I wish he’d given me the details, but he was always a close bugger, my DI. We’re on the drugs squad, me and him — but of course you know that.”

  A pause. He delicately separated flesh from bone and glanced up at us. Beautiful timing it was, because George was registering, as he always does, the full extent of his emotions. And my heart plummetted. I hate a drugs case, partly because I know George’s very strong feelings about the drug traffic. He’d been intimately involved before, and his hatred of the drugs barons was bitter, and apt to be violent.

  A split second’s glance at George, and I swear Fyne warmed to him.

  “Perhaps you didn’t.” He sat back and looked round for the next course. “But Flossie was on to something. Sure, we’ve been picking at the edges for years, dragging in the odd pusher here and there, but not really denting the thing. Flossie’s not your conventional type. Not the sort who goes round quietly, picking up the odd tip here and there. You know when he’s around. He shouts it. Everything he does — Flossie’s here! You can see him coming. But it means you don’t look round when he plays it gentlelike. You expect to hear him, so when he wants to go undercover, somehow it works if he plays it quiet.”

  I could appreciate that. “So you suspect he went undercover on Saturday? But he’d report in, surely.”

  “That your sirloin?” he asked George pleasantly. “I’m having the duck. No, he wouldn’t report in. Everybody’s used to it. They put up with him, because he gets things done.”

  George stared at his sirloin, in agony because politeness forced him to wait for us to be served.

  “And nobody enquires too deeply how he does it?” I asked, being very polite. “It’s scum he brings in, so it doesn’t matter if he skims it off with a heavy hand?”

  “Something like that.”

  “But he was on to something?”

  “I knew he was. A fortnight before. Ah, here is comes. You having the same, Mr…?”

  “The duck,” I agreed, still dodging. “How did you know he was on to something?”

  “I was in his car — that car out there. I saw one of those sachets they use — like a plastic tea bag — in his glove compartment. I guessed it was heroin. Usually we work round, when we do get anywhere, to the location of some big pick-up, then we all go in and get the lot. Comes in through the docks, of course, but we’ve never stopped it there.”

  “So just the single sachet…”

  “Meant he’d got it somewhere along the line, after it’d been broken down and processed for the streets. It was what we’d been aiming for — to work back to the big man, the head distributor. He was somewhere in our area, and we’d got a line on him.”

  “We?” I asked. The duck was luscious.

  “He tells me what I need to know. With Flossie, you don’t ask.”

  “So you don’t know what he’d got?”

  “I know he’d got close to the big man.”

  Now it was clear how the Flossie car was so important to him, and why they’d played it down. DI Peter U. Florence had, as far as his mates were concerned, abandoned the car when he took on his more quiet and secretive role. It could be very important, if it became necessary to supply heavy back-up, to know how and where the car had been abandoned. But of course, Fyne wouldn’t be revealing all he knew, any more than George and I were.

  And we knew nothing about the abandoning of it, only that Ernest Connolly had somehow come into possession of it. There wasn’t anything, really, we could offer Fyne.

  Yet he was angling for something. He couldn’t expect clear details of what we were working on. So… what?

  He was eating fast, which left me lagging behind, because not even Fyne could beat George at that game. They were at the coffee before I’d plunged a spoon into my Coupe Jacques.

  “Sorry to hurry you chaps,” said Fyne, peering at his watch. The lighting was low, the music gentle.

  “In a hurry?’’ George asked.

  “Going to a funeral.”

  And I’d thought his black tie was part of the smart grey get-up.

  The ice cream was freezing my tongue, I was working so hard at it. George got the point and took over, signalling the waiter.

  “Just the two,” he said, and Fyne looked disgusted.

  “Whose funeral?” asked George.

  “Doubt you’d be interested. The drugs game is something to stay away from.”

  “No, no,” George assured him. “We’re interested.”

  Fyne stared glumly into his wallet. “It’s a young woman called Mia Poole. Twenty. She died of a drug overdose. Heroin, it was.”

  George was very quiet. “Don’t tell me she died on Saturday.”

  Fyne got to his feet. He patted his lips with his paper serviette, and crumpled it with savagery into a tight ball before tossing it onto the table. “As a matter of fact, she did.”

  My tongue was still frozen as I manoeuvred the car out of the park. George wasn’t saying anything. I could feel his tight anger, but didn’t disturb it. He knows my attitude to drugs, calls it stupid and pitiful, so that particular moment was a good time for silence. Fyne’s car was a quarter of a mile ahead. He was hanging back for us.

  George began to fumble around in the glove compartment.

  One thing was certain, I decided, and that was that Mia Poole had not died of a heroin overdose. Statistically, that is, because they don’t normally die of the drugs they poison themselves with, but from pneumonia or septicaemia, both associated with neglect. And in any event, too many bastards intrude their grasping paws between the supply and the eventual demand for it to be possible even to obtain an overdose. Not unless you had a fortune.

  It works like this. The raw heroin comes in at a kilo a time, say. A sugar bag full. The big man sells it out to his suppliers, but he likes his thosuand per cent profit, so he not only charges a hundred times what it cost him, per kilo, but also extends the quantity available to ten sugar bags full by mixing it with icing sugar. The icing on the cake, you might say. The supplier also gets in on the act, because he knows where to get icing sugar, so that the pushers get little packs of very weak heroin — cut, they call it — which they promptly weaken further before making it up into sachets. So the final recipient gets enough to draw the nerve ends back inside the skin — but, an overdose? That’d be something.

  George said: “It’s still here.”

  I glanced sideways. He was holding a small sachet containing a white powder. Behind it, his face was stretched in a tight, terrifying grin.

  “Put it away, George.”

  He did, in his pocket. Then he started scrambling around under the seats, and I concentrated on my driving.

  My anger wasn’t at the drug bosses, the suppliers, the pushers. It was at the poor, dumb fools who allowed themselves to be persuaded from hash to amphetamines or barbs, to speed, to coke, to heroin. My anger was at the persuaders, who were on the hideous stuff themselves, and wanted company in the pit. It was at the law that gave it to them when they were on it, in an emptily emotional gesture to save their sanity, and yet proposed no proper withdrawal clinics to help them climb out.

  Only at the end had I any anger for the suppliers. They simply produced the heroin to fill the demand. What maddened me was the way they did it, the vast profits they extorted from those whose suffering they prolonged, and the violence that always accompanies large sums of money obtained illegally.

  I didn’t want to be drawn into that violence; it was too close to the suffering.

  “Here’s another
,” said George with heavy triumph.

  He had found it under the seat. Now he had twenty or thirty pounds’ worth, at street-level prices.

  “Congratulations.”

  We had gone through a small town called Greater Hay, and were now drifting steadly downhill into a small township called Meagre Hay. We had crossed the Wye, lazy just there, and could see it looping away between willows on our right. Fyne led us on through a main street not long enough to park a couple of cars on their double yellow lines, and skirted the town hall, in the very centre of the street, a tall, plaster and beam building with an ancient clock over its studded door. The Norman Church was just the other side of town, enjoying an open sweep of the road, and with almost as good a site as the Chapel opposite.

  A line of cars stood along the curb. We parked behind Segt. Fyne. He did not glance at us, but was aware of our presence. Inside, the service was ending. We stood and waited. It was cold as only a churchyard can be.

  I always hope to avoid funerals, all except the one I shall not be able to avoid, but sometimes you can’t retreat. The mourners were few, the central figure being the man I assumed to be her husband.

  He was built for mourning with his thin, stooped posture and his haggard face. He held a hat to his stomach as though he had bought it specially to hold, and his blond hair blew in the breeze. Ashes to ashes… I thought he was weeping, and looked away.

  She was standing well back, her face averted, but I knew her at once. The blonde from the car. She had put a plain silk square over it, and when she turned for a second she wore the same expression as I’d seen in the car. Empty.

  There was no sign of Wally.

  Fyne spoke softly, his steaming breath barely disturbed by the words. “That’s Gregory Poole. Her husband. Surveyor and Valuer.” Then he added a strange thing, and at that time it couldn’t have been intended as humour. “A pity he didn’t value his wife.” The tone was bitter.

  George touched my arm. I looked at him, and he nodded sideways.

  I turned, and saw a dark, lustreless man standing by the gate. He was chewing a matchstick and looking bored.

  “Ray Caldicott,” said George in my ear, and I wasn’t any the wiser.