Cart Before The Hearse (David Mallin Detective Book 14)

by Roger Ormerod

  “One who might be able to get us in to see Wally?” I asked, glancing at him.

  George’s idea of gaining an entrance is to put his shoulder down and charge. But there would be a lot of doors at The Penguin. By the time he’d thought it out, I was sweeping into the forecourt of the block of flats.

  From a distance it had looked expensive. Close to, Miranda Mansions was so exclusive that the car was suddenly pathetically plebeian, and I was ashamed to step from it. We were in the centre of its arc of tastefully smoked glass and non-functional balconies, directly opposite the plate glass entrance that opened when you made up your mind to enter. It opened now, when I was still thinking about it, to reveal a doorkeeper whose proportions were not disguised by the uniform. He eyed our vehicle with distaste, but with no surprise.

  “Gentlemen?”

  “We wish to see Miss Patricia Montague.”

  As I said it, I realised it could have been her working name, but he knew whom I meant. He gestured towards the desk.

  You’d never have sneaked past the porter to the neat row of three lifts at the rear. The marble echoed, the soft lights disguised the spaciousness, so that you were naturally channelled to the sharp chin and suspicious eyes at the desk. I repeated my request and gave our names. All I’d told her was: Dave. He murmured into a phone, stared us up and down, and finally nodded.

  “Two — three — seven,” he said.

  She was in negligee and pyjamas, and seemed to have risen directly from her bed. A working girl needs her rest. But her make-up was immaculate and her hair in no way indicated that it had been involved with her sleep.

  “We didn’t want to dent your reputation,” I apologised.

  She shrugged. “You’re clearly not gentlemen friends. I told him you’d come to check my hi-fi.”

  “Without tools?”

  “Check it, not touch it. I’m not satisfied with the bass response.” She looked George up and down with disapproval. “Who’s this?”

  I introduced him. He nodded, watching her walk away to find a cigarette, and said he thought her bass response was adequate. She turned, and I thought she smiled. But her tone was unencouraging when she said:

  “I suppose you want to talk about Mia?”

  The flat was hers, not Miranda’s. She’d made it over to suit her personality, which I decided was brittle, modern and a little childish. But she was in control, no doubt about that. We were trespassing, on her territory and on her confidence.

  I had to argue for five minutes or more, whilst George wandered, and whilst her eyes followed him with suspicion and some admiration.

  Mia’s father? She shrugged. He upset her. Eyes like a spaniel’s, she said, but when Mia tossed him a ball, he woudn’t retrieve it.

  Wally? You’d need to know Wally. Sweet Wally, dangerous Wally. When he gave and didn’t take, you wondered who was going to cover the cost.

  The cottage?

  “What cottage?” she demanded, and her eyes, at last, left George and centred on me.

  “I’m told that Wally set her up in some cottage or other. And that she died there.”

  “On Saturday,” said George, picking up a Doulton figurine and staring at its base.

  She considered us, one to the other, for a full minute. Then she made up her mind.

  “I’ll take you there.”

  If the doorman was surprised to see one of his treasured residents slipping into such a car, he did not register it. She had changed into a slim, lime green suit of trim jacket and skirt, whilst we had sat and sipped her offered drinks, and, escorting her, I suddenly felt scruffy and old. She directed me. George sat behind me and watched her profile as she turned, filling us in.

  “It’s not a cottage, really the chauffeur’s flat at Wye-combe Hall. That’s Wally’s place. Was, rather, only it burnt down. That was two or three years back. He was having trouble with a rival crowd up north. Merseyside, I think. They came and burnt his home. He lives in a flat at The Penguin now, and all that’s liveable in, back at the Hall, is the old place over the stables. That’s where he put Mia.”

  I wondered in passing what had happened to the crowd from Merseyside. She didn’t seem to care.

  “Put her?” I asked. “What’s his interest in her?”

  She spoke negligently. “His way of looking at it, he was in love with her. In so far as he could be. Like he’d love a piece of delicate porcelain. Turn it over,” she said, glancing at George, “and look at its base, and not know what the markings meant. Only that it’d break if you dropped it. And worship it because his hands weren’t going to let it go. And suck in his breath if somebody else pawed it. But he would set it on one of his fancy tables and gaze at it and adore. That sort of love.”

  And deep down, behind her negligent patter, there was an undertone of disgust and hatred.

  “So he provided her with heroin,” I said.

  “Whatever she wanted, he’d give her.” She lit a cigarette and told me to turn right. “Towards the end, that was all she wanted.”

  I watched her cigarette smoke bounce off the windscreen. It clouded briefly as her breath brushed the cold glass.

  “He wouldn’t let nicotine foul the glaze, surely. I mean to say, with Mia…”

  “It was what she wanted,” Pat snapped. Then she sat back, ashamed of the emotion.

  We were climbing, by a second-class road, into the hills. A grey-blue peak towered to our right. Sheep offered the only sign of life. The hedges fell away. “Left here,” she said, a little late, as all non-drivers do. The surface became broken. Shale pounded under the tyres. I slipped down a gear as the rise became steeper.

  “She came,” said Pat, “to the club. Oh, five or six months ago. I… I hadn’t seen her for a long while. It was… shocking. She’d always been slim, but the flesh’d fallen away. And her eyes! I took her in to Wally. He was savage. You know, Wally savage, he goes so quiet and gentle. There was a lot of activity that night. Then, a day or two later, I heard he’d got her at the old place. Where we’re going now. No, not right, you fool, left. That’s an old quarry, on the right.”

  Ahead, the road forked. On our right were the old warning signs, decrepit now. Blasting — Keep Off. Authorised Vehicles Only. The track to the left was insignificant in comparison, rising into rutted solitude. Strangely, on the fork, stood a telephone booth, perhaps a legacy from past activity at the quarry. I slipped into second and tackled the left fork.

  We climbed between high banks scrubbed with patchy thorn. I was beginning to wonder why anybody but a solitude bug would want to live up there. Left, she said, and I did a rally driver’s skidding turn into a lane which became a drive, which opened out into a rising sweep of grass-encrusted gravel.

  The gaunt, charred remains of the great house were silvered by the crisp rays of the lowering sun. Up here, a brisk wind was sighing through the bare branches of what protecting trees there were. They all leaned precariously to the east. Deep, cavernous shadows were bitten into the remaining fabric of the main building. To one side, tremulous, hung a row of buildings untouched by fire, and marching up one side of a charred wall was a steel staircase.

  “It’s the flat above,” said Pat.

  A shape squatted beside the old building’s side wall. I saw that it was a car, its passenger side tucked well in, the slanted sun just touching its tail.

  “There’s visitors,” said George.

  Pat opened the door and slid out. She stood, the sun catching her profile.

  “No,” she told us, shading her eyes. “It’s her father’s car.”

  So we were here at last. Connolly had left his car here on Saturday night.

  We approached the car. George said: “It’s his all right. A Sceptre.”

  “When did anybody tell you that?” I demanded, not having known myself.

  “I asked,” he said complacently.

  The Sceptre’s door was unlocked. I eased my way in behind the wheel. The key was in the ignition lock. I sat a moment an
d thought about it, but nothing came. The Sceptre was an automatic version, the lever at P. I tried the ignition and on full choke it fired first time. I put it in R and backed out. The two cars were side by side, almost twins if it hadn’t been for Flossie’s garish decoration.

  George said: “All the tyres are at their right pressure.”

  No, nothing wrong at all with the car.

  If Connolly had been there on Saturday, as his car indicated he had, then why hadn’t he driven away in it?

  I tucked it back where it had been, and we followed Pat up the outside staircase.

  “It shouldn’t be locked,” she said, and it wasn’t.

  We were in a cramped hallway, with a small table to one side serving as a phone table. Its two drawers were half open, and were empty. She led the way through, the flat being constructed in a straight line, living room next, then bedroom, with a small portion taken out of it as a bathroom.

  The living room had been rigged as a dining-kitchen, to give it a fancy name. One wall was naked brick, with a small firepace cradling a tiny electric fire, a cupboard, doors hanging half open, its drawers on the floor. A few desolate cans were visible on the shelves, their labels stripped off. A bag of flour and one of sugar were burst open, spilling on the shelves. We moved slowly, cautiously. Crockery and cutlery were strewn across the floor. A barrel of salt had been crushed underfoot. On the further wall, behind the door into the bedroom, was a small refrigerator, door open, contents scattered, empty ice-cube tray on its upper surface. The table lay on its side.

  I paused. The smell was beginning to get me down. Rancid fat and stale vomit. I looked at Pat. Her face was frozen, her eyes huge, her mouth tight and angry.

  I spoke as gently as I could. “Better go and wait in the car.”

  “No.” She tossed her hair back with an angry jerk of her head. “I’ve seen it before.”

  “Like this? But it’s been torn apart!”

  Imperceptibly, she drew closer to me. “Not as bad as this. I… I came to see her a couple of times. It was getting bad the last time I saw her…”

  “But it obviously got worse.”

  She gulped and nodded. I looked round. George had hissed to gain my attention. It seemed, in that atmosphere of dissolution, that a raised voice would shatter any last trace of life and human dignity. He was standing by the doorway to the bedroom. He merely looked at me, and I went over to him.

  It was becoming dark, especially so in that bedroom, with its tiny, high window. He reached inside for a switch, and a mournful light revealed the room. We stood and looked, and at my shoulder Pat’s breath caught on a sob.

  I whirled on her. “Get out!”

  I didn’t know if she obeyed. The worst of the smell came from that room. It was the smell of sweat and terror, and of agony. The faded, soggy wallpaper had absorbed it and screamed of it. The coverings, what remained of them, to the tiny pallet bed — half twisted across the centre of the room — were soaked in the filth of distress. Mostly the coverings, which were old army blankets and one ridiculous satin-edged pink one, were in tatters. They had been lashed about the room in a frenzied spasm that seemed, even then, to vibrate from the walls.

  The paltry, speckled light fell on it in shame. What I had taken for stains of damp on the wall I now saw were vomit.

  Behind us, calmly, Fyne spoke.

  “I’m sorry there hasn’t been time to clear it up. But you see, I didn’t expect visitors.”

  Chapter Five

  “Better not go in the bathroom,” he said, sort of easing us out of the flat. I raised my eyebrows at him. “It’s real bad in there,” he explained.

  When we got down that staircase into the keen, sharp wind, I thought Pat was going to be sick. She stood, head raised, gulping in air. George just stood, looking out over the purpling slopes.

  “My car,” said Fyne. He explained: “I wanted you out of this. Now you’ve seen, you deserve an explanation.”

  “Yes,” said George. He elapsed one fist in the other.

  “Pat, you go and sit in our car,” I said. I’d got an idea what we were about to hear.

  She turned and looked at me as though I wasn’t there. “I’m going to take a walk.”

  “Not far,” I warned.

  She nodded and turned away. Then she was running, stumbling over the rough ground, and I thought she was sobbing. We got into the back of Fyne’s car. Fyne was behind the wheel and didn’t turn to face us all the way through it. I don’t think he liked the look in George’s eyes. Fyne lit a cigarette. I fumbled for my pipe, but didn’t get round to lighting it.

  “I wanted to tell you why I’m a policeman,” said Fyne. “No… let me take it my way. It’s relevant. Some years ago — Lord, it’s a good ten years now — that long ago I was on drugs myself. I’m not going to tell you why and how, only that it was bad. Heroin. I’ve still got the scars, on both arms and thighs. I was mainlining, just about ready for the trash-heap. Then suddenly I wanted to live. I wanted control of my own body and mind. Oh, you can laugh… but something had started me on that kick. You have to have some despair in you, something that takes everything away from you, before you need the stuff in the first place. But suddenly all that dissolved away — and I wanted to live.”

  He paused. I said: “This was before you joined the police?”

  “Of course,” he said sharply. “But I had a mate. He was in the police, a rookie. And I wanted out. Oh I know, there’re clinics, but all they do is prescribe the stuff. They get you on methadone, so’s you stay alive longer and still suffer. No, there’s only one way out. You stop. Just like that. Cold turkey, they call it in the States. I did that. I stopped. Dead.”

  He drew in a deep breath. George was mercifully silent.

  “Do you realise what that means?” Fyne demanded. “You go on a journey, a nightmare. Your body screams for relief, you feel as though every nerve is straining to burst out of your skin. You go into paroxysms, you fight, you tear at your own body to break your way out of it. And it goes on and on… and on.” He whispered: “And in your brain is nothing but terror. I did that, and Charlie helped me, fed me soup to keep me going, water when I was de-hydrated from vomiting, held me down when I wanted to throw myself at the walls. Then, after a fortnight, I knew we’d won. That,” he said, “was why I joined the police, and why I applied and applied to get on the drugs squad.”

  He tossed his cigarette out of the window and left it open. I was cold.

  “That,” he said tonelessly, “and Charlie.”

  “What about Charlie?”

  “He’d got onto the drugs squad. I was in uniform then. They got a message on the blower. Charlie was on to something. The big man. A lead. Then they found his body on the docks. Enough to identify. I sort of took his place, and that was when I first went to work with Flossie. Lord, I thought that was the absolute peak of my ambitions. Flossie was a real drugs man, dedicated. You know. Like a dynamo. I didn’t trouble at first that he told me nothing. I was his leg-man. In at the kill sometimes, though, and that was what I wanted. But after a while I found he didn’t care who he hurt so long as he got what he wanted, and I wasn’t so keen. Several things worried me, and I wasn’t so sure it was the best way, his way, all unconventional. You see, I was all for the book, then your case is stronger in court. Do it right, I say. And then came Mia, and Wally, and for the first time I was right in the thick of it.”

  “You knew about Wally, then, and Mia being up here?” I asked.

  “The Penguin’s been our best bet for a couple of years now. But Wally seemed to be only a minor cog. It was the man behind him we wanted. Then Wally went soft over this Mia. It was his big mistake. A louse like Wally can’t afford emotions. The kid meant a lot to him, and Flossie worked on that. I didn’t understand what Flossie was up to. He didn’t explain. This was around the beginning of last week. I’d seen those sachets of heroin in his car, and I reckon, now, that he’d somehow got hold of Mia’s supply. Anyway, he told me what I’d
got to do. He was going to pick up Wally for questioning. He’d done it before and got nowhere. But this time he was going to hide him away somewhere until he cracked.”

  “And you?”

  “I was going to look after Mia.”

  God, I was cold.

  “I moved up here,” said Fyne. “Brought some food and stuff. Mia had already missed a couple of shots, so she was bad. I hadn’t got anything for her, of course, but I was Sir Galahad. I was going to do for her what Charlie had done for me.”

  His voice was still level, but I caught the tension in it. A lot could depend on character, and Mia might not have had it.

  “I didn’t know it could be so bad from the outside,” he said softly. “Four days we had, the four worst. I had to rest, or try to rest. She tore the place apart, screaming that Wally had left the stuff somewhere for her. I had to fight with her. Twice I knocked her out cold. I’d wrap her in wet towels when she poured with sweat, and I lay with her, in a tight ball, when she shook so that I could barely keep my arms around her. And Poole…”

  “Poole?” jerked out George.

  “I suppose Flossie had told him. He’s her husband. He’d have to know. He came, peering in through the doorway, like a limp, useless clod, all tears and hysteria. He wanted to call an ambulance, but of course Flossie had cut the telephone wire. Then he came, the third day I think it was — I’d lost touch with time. This time he was a bit different. And this time he couldn’t take it any more, and be ran off shouting about ambulances, and blast him I had to chase him with the car all the way to the junction. He’d actually got the phone in his hand when I grabbed bim. The idiot, he didn’t know we’d nearly won. I dragged at him — we tore the handpiece right out — and it took me ten minutes to calm him down. Then I want back…” He ended in a sigh.

  “She was dead?” I ventured.

  He shook his head. “No. She smiled. Actually smiled. It wasn’t over, not by a long chalk, but she knew what we were doing, she and I. We were beating it. Then, the next morning, Flossie came along and took me off.”