Cart Before The Hearse (David Mallin Detective Book 14)

by Roger Ormerod

  “I have to do shopping,” she said defensively.

  “But he hasn’t spoken?”

  “No.”

  George palmed a patch clear on the rear window, and looked out at the dreary garden. Withdrawn. Leave it to you, Dave, that sort of thing. She hadn’t asked us what we’d discovered.

  I said: “We came back for some socks. Left the cases in the Renault.”

  “Foolish of you.”

  “And it’s beginning to look as though it’ll be a long job.”

  “Not too long, I hope.”

  Hadn’t she heard from Ray Caldicott? “It could be a while before we get anything you dare tell your husband.” I was becoming reconciled to George’s attitude, you see.

  She lifted her chin. The nose pointed directly at me. “Young man, I expect to receive regular reports. I shall decide what to tell him, and when.”

  George turned. His voice was low. “Have you told him about Mia?”

  Her eyes held mine. The shock was that we knew. “No, I have not told him. It would make no difference.” She dipped a biscuit in her tea. “To Ernest, she had been dead for three years.”

  Seated there, she seemed a dumpy little creature, vulnerable and weak. But the strength was in her character, and the determination was in her positive, almost attacking, enunciation. She faced life, and hit back.

  “You should have told us about Caldicott,” I said, as a statement rather than an accusation.

  “Why should I do that? Don’t talk nonsense, please. These were two separate matters — the actions of my husband and the location of my daughter.”

  “But they’ve run together. You must see that. Whatever it was, it happened to your husband on Saturday. And it was on Saturday that Mia died.”

  Her eyes were black, wrinkled in. Her mouth tightened, valleys creasing vertically on her upper lip. She hadn’t linked them.

  “All the same…”

  I pounced on the advantage of her weak return. “And the car he was driving came from that district.”

  She recovered briskly, coming to her feet, her hands reaching for her apron and one quick wipe of her fingers. “You’re talking nonsense.” She swept me aside from the washer, and peered at the indicator. “There, you see, I’ve missed the conditioner.”

  “He was involved in violence,” I persisted, mainly because I couldn’t get round that point.

  “Ernest? Ridiculous.” Now she stood and faced me, embattled, her face set and belligerent. “Ernest never hurt a fly. He’s always been the most gentle and peaceful man I’ve ever come across. Severe … oh, I’ll give you that. He conducted his life in an upright and…” She moved a hand impatiently.

  “God-fearing?” said George, his face impassive.

  “Yes, if you like, though he was never a church-goer. My family were…” She paused. “You’ve made me forget what I was saying, now.” Annoyed with herself, her eyes snapping.

  “Ernest,” I said. “Upright and God-fearing.”

  “Never did a speck of harm to anybody. Kept himself to himself, and expected others to treat him with the same courtesy…”

  “So — he wouldn’t be involved in violence.”

  “It’s beyond question.”

  “Even when he threw her out?”

  She sat suddenly. Shock. She tossed her head. “Who… who has told you that?”

  “Mia left home — ”

  “Not threw,” she said sharply. “Ernest discovered she was using those dreadful drugs. I’d noticed she’d been acting strangely. I tried to keep it from him. All she needed was a good talking-to, mother to daughter. But when he found the stuff in her drawer…”

  “It was his habit to search her room?”

  “Ernest,” she said with chilling dignity, “would not have descended to such depths. She — Mia — demanded it. Challenged him. She’d … she’d said to me, admitted…

  oh, I’d been worried about a boy she went round with. She told me I was being silly and old-fashioned, and I didn’t have to worry because she was on the pill! Have you ever heard such a filthy thing!”

  “It’s how things are.”

  “I had to tell Ernest, of course. She went wild. She said it’d been a joke. A joke! I ask you. I really thought Ernest would strike her.”

  “Only — he wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “She screamed at him. cGo on,’ she said, ‘have a look then.’ I can see him now, the stare he gave her, and the way he went out of the room. Mia was in tears. She sat… here. This chair. And that was how he found it.”

  “It?”

  “Them. Some cigarette things.”

  “Hash,” I said. “Marijuana.”

  “Is that what it was?” she asked dully.

  “They use it to get high on. Drunk, you could say. A soft drug, you’d call it. Not habit-forming.”

  “But the beginning…” her voice was despairing. ££ Of course, he told her she’d have to leave. No child of ours was going to bring disgrace to my house. But no violence! You hear, there was no violence.”

  “Showed her the door,” said George cheerfully, with the grin on his face that means he’s close to smashing something.

  “Do stand out of my way,” she demanded, thrusting at him.

  “And now she’s dead.” He stood, immovable, as she ridiculously pushed at his stomach.

  “There’s no point in telling Ernest that, you fool.”

  “We’re telling you, blast it.”

  “I knew. Last night. Caldicott phoned.”

  “But I suppose it was all right, happening a hundred miles away,” said George, doing his best not to leer. “No disgrace to your house.”

  George was coming on too hard, too impatient. But she faced him squarely, with a pursed smile of triumph on her tinged lips. “But I was represented at her funeral. Nobody can say — ”

  “Oh Christ!” he said, turning away.

  She tossed her head, and I said, cooling the atmosphere: “So we’re finished with it.” And George looked at me very sharply.

  She turned on me angrily. “How can you be, until you can tell me who killed her.”

  “She killed herself.”

  “No!” She shook her head tightly, rejecting it. “The creature who gave her the filthy stuff. That murderer.” Her eyes were wild now. “The one who killed my daughter.”

  It was hopeless. There could be no answer to that — no single person, but a train of disgusting events…

  “She died of an overdose,” said George placidly.

  “You don’t know that,” I shouted.

  “We know. Collie Dean phoned the path lab. They’d tell him.”

  “It doesn’t mean…” But I was helpless, trapped between them. Marcia tapped her foot with impatient triumph. “So we’d beter go and find out,” said George, grinning at me.

  I could have killed him, suddenly her blue-eyed boy. I’ll swear she might have hugged him, if she’d been capable of hugging anybody, and I was out at the car again before I realised what she really wanted.

  There was no anger in her about Mia’s death. She thought only of her husband, and what might restore his reason. She was still obsessed over whom he could well have killed. But, sinkingly, I already knew.

  I sat behind the wheel and allowed George to fetch the bags and toss them on the seats behind me. The windscreen steamed-up rapidly.

  I shouted: “Fish my pipe out of the glove compartment.”

  He climbed in, handing it to me. “Poisoning yourself.” He grinned. “You’re an addict, Dave.”

  I got started, wondering at the fact that the car seemed no longer to be of interest to the police.

  “Where d’you want to go?”

  “I want to talk to that Wally person,” he said flatly.

  I drove a matter of twenty miles. “We need something to fire at him.”

  “Guns?” he asked with interest.

  “Facts. Let’s keep it friendly, huh?”

  He laughed. I could hear h
im cracking his knuckles. I drove another twenty miles.

  “We ought to see her husband,” I suggested.

  “I suppose.”

  So we went to see Greg Poole, whose estate agency was in Greater Hay. But he wasn’t in his office. The old dear at the desk said he was doing a valuation on a property in Meagre Hay, and there we discovered him.

  Frost be-decked the tattered foliage around the place. It was an unkempt Victorian monstrosity with a U drive and fifty feet of high wall between the entrances. A yellow Volks Polo stood in the drive, squarely in front of the crumbling steps up to the porch. The front door was open.

  Our feet struck hollowly on the boarded floor. There was a smell of dry-rot, and the air was thick with a miasma of disturbed dust. The filtered daylight struggled through encrusted windows. Ahead, a fancy staircase rose to a gallery. I raised my voice.

  “Mr. Poole!”

  A door slammed somewhere and echoes probed the motes. He stood at the head of the stairs. The light up there came from a stained glass window behind him, so that his face was in shadow. I couldn’t be certain, but I thought his shoulders were shaking.

  “You keep away from me!”

  “We wanted to talk to you.”

  “I’ll send for the police.” Now his voice was rising. A veneer of class was peeling away. “I’m not standing for it.”

  The possibility of his contacting the police was very slim, because it was unlikely that the phone was connected. It was the wrong place for a frightened man to take himself.

  “Perhaps we want to buy the place,” I said. “Will you show us round?”

  “Don’t come near me. I know your type.” Then his voice became pitiful with pleading. “You don’t have to do this. Really…”

  George put a hand on the banister, and Poole recoiled. George was still.

  “We simply want to talk about Mia,” he said.

  “I bet you do.”

  “We’re only a couple of enquiry agents, working for her mother,” George went on, using his soothing voice. It wouldn’t have soothed me.

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Then what do you believe?” George prodded. There was no response. George made a guess. “Do you think we’re from Wally?”

  He was obsessed with Wally. From where I was considering things, there seemed no reason why Poole should be afraid of Wally. But George struck a chord.

  “Then why have you been following me?” Poole suddenly shouted. “It’s my car. I’ve got a right to take it back. You didn’t have to chase me. You didn‘t…”

  “Mr. Poole,” I said, “if you were followed — chased if you like — then it wasn’t by us. You’d know if it had been, because were using Flossie’s car.”

  Silence. The staircase creaked. A shaft of weak afternoon sun struck through the window and capped his head in gold. His hands shifted, and slowly he lifted his fingers to his mouth and touched his lips.

  “But how could you be using his car?”

  “Come down, Mr. Poole, and check for yourself,” I offered.

  George turned his head and I nodded. We backed out into daylight. The Flossie car was parked directly behind the Volks. We waited, and Poole emerged. He seemed dazed, and now I saw that he was younger than I had thought at the funeral. Mid-thirties, perhaps, with high cheekbones, and that indefinite line of lips which can deny the mood that flexes them. He had a strong chin, but his eyes were mild. He was definitely shaking.

  George touched my arm and I followed his eyes. Just above the Polo on the tailgate there was a neat round hole. Poole had said he’d been chased, but he hadn’t spoken about being shot at.

  “You see,” I said, indicating the Flossie car.

  “Yes, yes,” he agreed with growing assurance. “But how could you have it?”

  “You know the car?”

  “But of course. I know… I have come to know Mr. Florence very well.”

  “Asa friend?”

  “You could say that. He was…” He flinched. “He was interested in Mia.”

  We were still standing there in the cold, and it seemed ridiculous to be carrying on the conversation there. I gestured to our car.

  “Will you tell us about it?”

  He summoned a pitiful dignity. “You say you come from the parents. It’s too late for them to show an interest now.”

  “Please.” I held open the door.

  He licked his lips. They were thin and dark. “I’ve got work to do here… Oh, very well — if it’ll get rid of you.”

  I didn’t promise anything. He slid into the passenger’s seat, myself beside him and George in the back.

  “But her parents showed interest before,” I said. “Or at least, her father did.”

  There was no reply. I thought that perhaps Poole hadn’t known. Then, at last, he spoke bitterly. “The old fool. He made it worse.”

  “In what way?”

  “She was on drugs. Oh, I’m sure you know that. But when we were married, I didn’t. Then, of course, it became obvious.”

  He blinked at us, half-turned in the seat to indicate his sincerity to both of us. Now, suddenly, in a world that was treating him harshly, he had two people on whom he could exercise his play for sympathy. It poured out of him.

  “You can tell, you know. The moods and the depressions and then the wild excitements. I suppose it wasn’t much more than stimulents, at that time, and then depressants to try and get some rest. But I was confident. That sort of thing, it’s just caused by a retreat from reality, when their world’s got no background of security.” He looked at us with open-eyed ingenuity. “I read that somewhere. And of course I’d got so much security to offer her. You’ve seen my place? No? If you had, you’d ask yourself what woman wouldn’t be pleased to walk into all that, as her own. And she’d got nothing, you know, when she came to me. She was nothing. Nothing stable, you understand. I couldn’t… couldn’t kind of fix her character long enough to decide what she was. Oh, pretty enough, that long-legged gawkiness, like a deer. I think it was that I was attracted to, though later, things sort of fell apart, when the drugs…”

  He became silent, and deep in his eyes was the haunting realisation of failure.

  “It didn’t work, then,” I said, leading him on. “All your security, the professional solidity of it, the house… you… none of it worked?”

  “She got on to heroin.”

  “When?”

  “I think she’d started before we ever met.”

  “You’d know. They inject it. You can’t miss — ”

  “Don’t you bloody-well think I know that!” he burst out.

  “Then you’d surely see…”

  “She would never allow me to see her undressed. Always in the dark, we…” Now his voice was very small. “I didn’t know, until one day I came home and found her unconscious on the bed. Then… I looked. I… I felt sick. That she’d… well, let me down, I suppose. I’d offered her everything, and she’d kind of slapped it back in my face.” He drew in his breath shudderingly.

  “So you threw her out?” asked George with interest.

  “What?” His head swivelled from one to the other. “Who told you that?”

  “Did she die in your home?” I asked. “Was it in all that comfort and security that she died?”

  “You don’t know anything!” he cried. “Coming here with your snide remarks. I knew I could help her. Just knew it. They die…” He shook uncontrollably, and there was saliva in the comers of his mouth. He clenched one fist over the other, steadying himself, and abruptly his voice was dead and unemotional. “They die, these people… when they die, it’s not from the drugs. Did you know that? It’s from malnutrition and filth because they don’t look after themselves. They poison themselves with filthy needles. But I’d have looked after her, and fed her, and kept her clean, and got her sterilised needles.”

  “You did that?” George demanded.

  “I could have done,” he said simply. “And then I could
have controlled it. Allowed her only what she absolutely had to have. Reduced it. You know.”

  The simpleton. He was naive beyond belief.

  “Could have?” I asked gently.

  “But she left me.”

  George nodded. “She would.”

  “She went,” he said hollowly, “to where she could get all she wanted. She went to live with that Wally creature.” There was silence in the car. The engine clicked as it cooled. George caught my eye. I thought he looked triumphant.

  “At the club?” I asked. Then, when he didn’t answer: “Did she go to live at The Penguin?”

  “As though she would! No, he had this cottage place. An old farm or something, up in the hills north of the town. He took her there. He kept here there, in a kind of flat.”

  Was this the same Wally, the Wally of the 4.2 Jag and the chauffeur, of The Penguin and the fancy suits?

  “And you allowed that?” George asked.

  “I’d done what I could for her.”

  “You let her go to some pig of a — ”

  “You don’t know?” he screamed. “You don’t know anything about that lot… what they can do…”

  I pointed out: “They put a bullet in his car, George.”

  “A bullet?” Poole whispered.

  “Perhaps they don’t like you.”

  “I’ve never done anything anybody could take exception to.”

  “Except perhaps to win money at their wheels?” I grinned at him. “Except to allow your wife to die in Wally’s care? Eh?”

  I thought he was going to be sick, and hoped I could get him out of the car in time. George reached forward and patted him on the shoulder.

  “I’ll kill him for you,” he offered. “I’ll break his neck.”

  “George…”

  It was his turn to grin, and mine to feel sick.

  Chapter Four

  And after all, I realised as we drove away, we had not asked him what part Mia’s father had played in it.

  “Wally,” said George impatiently.

  “Yes, yes. But later. No… listen, you idiot. You’re forgetting the job we’re supposed to be on — Connolly’s part in all this. So we go and see the young lady. I’ve met her and talked to her, and she might tell us. And more.”

  “We ain’t got time to chat-up young pros, Dave.”