Hire Me a Hearse

By Piers Marlowe

Whenever Wilma Haven decided to be wayward, she insisted that she was seen to be wayward. So perhaps she was merely being consistent when she hired a hearse before committing suicide, then proceeded to take her time over the act in a very public place. However, Wilma died not from her own act, but by the murderous intent of a unsuspected killer, and Superintendent Frank Drury of Scotland Yard becomes embroiled in his most challenging case ever.

Hire Me a Hearse was first published in 1968.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Aug 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781448214495

Piers Marlowe

Piers Marlowe 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.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Peregrine Porter shook his grey head and absentmindedly felt at his vest pocket for his gold toothpick, but remembered in time that the morning’s grapefruit had produced no dental problem, which was unusual. Moreover, he was in his office, not in the car.

He tried to unscramble his far-away thoughts. After all, they should not have wandered. They had plenty to focus on in the immediate vicinity of his polished mahogany desk. Wilma Haven had that effect on most males, and although he was sadly used to her thrustful personality and modern youthful cavortings, she was still stimulating to behold, even to his aged and slightly rheumy eyes.

But then he had a special responsibility. He was the senior trustee of her parents’ estate, which made him the custodian of her more important troubles, such as getting her freed from jail or putting up bail or standing off importunate reporters to whom Wilma was always a good story, and had been ever since she had been sent down from Lady Margaret Hall for trying to smuggle a tramp into her room because, she had claimed, he had been in need of care and attention.

He looked at her as she stood looking out of his window over the green expanse of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Her back was towards him and he knew she was angry with him. She was always angry when she crossed her arms and appeared to be hugging herself in, as though to prevent her anger escaping.

He had first discovered this about her after the awful business of throwing the stick of dynamite at the Prime Minister’s car. That had really started something. The something had dissipated quietly when a Special Branch man discovered that the apparent stick of dynamite had been a dummy, no more harmful than its fizzing strip of wick.

In court she had been flippant.

‘I thought a dummy stick of dynamite was good enough for a dummy Prime Minister,’ she had claimed, knowing she would be quoted around the world.

She might have been dealt with leniently if it had not been for her costume when she appeared in court. It was a loose-fitting suit of silk decorated with broad arrows.

‘Lounging pyjamas for a day likely to prove hot for me,’ had been her excuse.

That she had not been forgiven by the Bench. It had been jail, which guaranteed the photos of the costume joining the quotes about the dummy stick of dynamite on their world travel. Even Life had felt compelled to feature her.

Then there was the case of her taking a prize pig to a Society wedding and creating a scene that was manna in a very square wilderness for the assembled reporters and their cameramen when turned back at the church door.

‘I protest,’ she had declaimed. ‘My friend’ — she had held up the pig with the bright blue ribbon round its scrubbed neck — ‘is the only possessor of a worth-while pedigree here.’

Her instinct for the outrageous was never at fault. She and her borrowed pig had made the front page.

Taking the pig to church had been followed by arriving in Richmond Park dressed as Robin Hood and killing a fallow deer with an arrow. The R.S.P.C.A. had not been able to fault her toxophilitic skill, so there had been no charge of cruelty. On the other hand her plea that she had shot the deer to provide protein for a starving coloured family in Paddington had been given what could only be described as a mixed reception.

Peregrine Porter had found his patience more than sorely tried with the resulting legal flap. Attention had been focused entirely on Wilma, although the Guardian had reported on an inside page that an outcome of the schemozzle was the inflow of funds to allow the coloured family in Paddington, who had not received the carcase of the slaughtered deer, to return to the West Indies. But even the Guardian had not mentioned that the family had enough cash left over to buy a fishing boat with a diesel motor and new nets.

A few months after the hubbub had died down, and Wilma was again free to think up new ways of protesting at the way the modern world behaved itself — or misbehaved, as she insisted — she had made the headlines again with her standing in the Strand and offering pound notes for sale for ten shillings in silver coins minted before 1939. She had collected a great crowd, and had actually made two sales before the nearest traffic policeman arrested her for obstruction.

‘Why do you do it?’ a reporter had called out as she was being hustled away. ‘To smite the Establishment?’

‘To smite at those who have put in too low a takeover bid for the Establishment,’ she had retorted.

Left Wingers and Right Wingers had taken joy from those words. There had been articles, letters to the newspapers, TV interviews, all purporting to explain what she meant.

Only Middle of the Roaders had remained silent, as though struck dumb by a too bright revelation.

When Peregrine Porter had acted out of character sufficiently to inquire of her, ‘Just what did you mean by those words, Wilma?’ she had said petulantly, ‘Oh, not you too, darling. As though one has to mean something every time one breathes or goes to the loo.’

Which was not the sort of answer even Peregrine Porter had expected.

And now she was angry with him again.

He stared at her silk pale hair that fell over her braced shoulders in a cascade of soft gold. He sighed, and she heard the sound and turned to look at him, her lovely face creased in a frown.

‘I’m not going to explain why, Peregrine. I’m going to do it, and I’ve always tried to be considerate to you. So I came and told you.’

‘Suppose I stopped you?’ he asked.

‘How could you?’

That’s right, how could he? How could he stop her inserting a notice in the daily Press giving the date of her own funeral, and inviting all and sundry to send fruit and vegetables instead of flowers?

‘A word to Fleet Street.’

She laughed at him, but it wasn’t a pleasant sound, and he knew she had a laugh that could be like a ringing bell, quite infectious.

‘That would merely be a tip-off, and you know it.’

‘Then the police.’

‘They couldn’t do anything, and wouldn’t if they could. They can only act after I’m dead.’

‘Wilma, don’t talk like that, for God’s sake.’

He looked shaken, and her frown almost smoothed away as the grip on her arms slackened. But she remembered in time, and gave frown and hugging arms more pressure.

‘I’ve already ordered the hearse,’ she said coldly.

He shivered.

‘You’re making me very miserable,’ he pointed out, and his looks didn’t belie his words.

‘All trustees of wills should be miserable once in a while, just to make them remember what they are and what they’re doing.’

‘Wilma, I’m a lawyer. I can’t condone an act that — ’

‘Stop talking like a lawyer even if you can’t stop being one, Peregrine, and stop trying to stop me. That’s a lot of stops, Peregrine, but I’m pulling them all out, as the saying is, so you must expect to have your share. You follow?’

‘No.’

‘I’m going to prepare for death in the hearse I’ve ordered.’ This time she let her hands fall to her sides and allowed the frown to escape from her face. She even managed a shadowy smile. ‘The ceremony will be in the grounds at Broomwood. So it will be private. Strictly my own affair. Preparing for my funeral. After all, who better to prepare for it? It’s my funeral. I’m the person chiefly concerned. In fact, you might say I’m wholly concerned with it.’

She paused, as though expecting a comment.

He said, ‘Wilma, answer one question, please. Under all the words and flammery, are you intending to commit suicide?’

He shivered again now the words were out.

‘The lawyer would like to know if he is going to be tricked into being an accessory to an unlawful act, like self-murder. That it?’

‘Wilma, please.’

She shook her head and the long silken pale hair shimmered in the light from the window.

‘You’ll have to come to find out, Peregrine, won’t you?’

‘Wilma, this isn’t a game.’

‘You think I think it is?’

It was invariably the same. He never got anywhere by arguing with her. She would always drive off at a tangent by asking another question.

He tried to be severe.

‘I could arrange to have your allowance held up, Wilma. I shouldn’t want to do that. But if you force me I might have to.’

‘How would I force you, Peregrine? Tell me. I’ve always wanted to know.’ Her smile became lavish as she came and leaned over his desk. ‘Just remember, vegetables. Or fruit,’ she added brightly. ‘You cut off my allowance, I can always eat them. I’ve always been contemptuous of vegetarians. Maybe then I shall find out really why.’

She drew on her long black gloves, picked up her black patent bag with the gold clasp that was a flying horse of improbable proportions, and walked away from him towards the door, light glinting from her shiny blonde hair, her shiny black boots, her shiny white coat and shiny gloves.

All of her seemed to shine, especially her bright green eyes when she turned her head again and considered him with a long sober look.

‘Don’t do anything stupid, Peregrine dear,’ she said to the man who considered himself almost old enough to be her grandfather. ‘I wouldn’t like that. It would hurt me.’

The door was closing on her and a typically unsatisfactory meeting of the kind she always managed in his office when he called, ‘Wilma, you haven’t told me the date you’re inserting this preposterous advertisement.’

He was standing, hands flat on the desk, his weight on his wrists, as he finished. The door didn’t open any wider, nor did her bright young head appear round the edge of it. Only her voice came to him, like disembodied sound.

‘You’ll have to buy a paper each morning to find out, darling.’

Then the door closed with a click and he dropped down in his chair. He took a fresh handkerchief from a pocket and dabbed at a moist forehead.

Wilma Haven. If only her parents had been rational, reasonable people, and not his good friends. If only they had not always quarrelled and threatened each other with divorce, only to patch up the quarrel with a kind of furious tenderness which, allowed them to eat each other alive with passion until the next time. If only …

But it had all resulted in Wilma growing up the way she had.

Suddenly he was out of his chair again and out through the door and hurrying across the outer office, where Tom Bayliss, the chief clerk, refused to look up from the pile of papers he was sorting.

He caught her by the lift. She looked at him without bothering to ask a useless question.

‘Why not go back to Broomwood, ring up Jeremy, and tell him you’ll marry him?’

He didn’t know it, but he looked to her like a man pleading. Desperately pleading for something that was vital to him. Her glance softened. When she spoke her voice was low, gentle.

‘You think I wouldn’t if I could?’

Another question from her. Another he couldn’t answer because he didn’t know what really prompted it. Irregular furrow lines appeared in his brow as he racked his mind for something else to say, couched in terms that would prise some small piece of truth from her. Even a lie, so long as it was information.

But before he could find the words to which she might be responsive the lift had whirred to a halt, and she was sliding back the door.

‘Oh, Tom Bayliss has something for you when you go back, Peregrine,’ she said gravely. ‘I told him not to give it to you until I’ve gone. Well, I have.’

She had pressed the ground-floor button and the lift was descending as she spoke, so that her last words rose from somewhere beneath Peregrine Porter’s feet, like sound from a grave.

He found himself shivering again.

He went back into the outer office, and Tom Bayliss stood up and held out a legal-sized white envelope decorated with a blob of green wax over the stuck-down flap. Before the soft warm wax had hardened Clifton Haven’s signet ring had been pressed into it. Peregrine Porter recognised the ship and the bird that had been the Haven family seal.

‘She told me to give you this when she’d gone.’

Peregrine Porter looked at his chief clerk, who met his gaze unflinchingly. Tom’s choice of words was explicit. Told, not asked.

‘I know, Tom.’

He looked at the other side of the envelope, which was fairly bulky. On it, written in Wilma’s appalling script, were the words, ‘Only to be opened in the event of my death. W.H.’ The first and last words of the instruction had been underlined twice.

One could never accuse Wilma of not being emphatic. Her life was one series of impossible emphases, and now he was left with the alarming suspicion that her death might be the same.

Another if only occurred to him.

If only Clifton and Gloria Haven had not piled themselves up late at night against a tree on the Esterel corniche, taking the right-angle bend outside Anthéor too fast because the Riviera moon was too bright, or they were having one of their bouts of being too much in love with life and each other and all their falsely promised tomorrows . . .

But like most of the others that occurred to him from time to time this was another if only that ended in a mist of elusive wishful thinking that had no real shape and certainly no purpose except to touch his personal regrets with poignancy.

He looked over the envelope in his hands at his chief clerk. Tom Bayliss was about ten years younger than himself and probably knew more law. He had passed the first law examinations without having to extend himself, only to learn that he had a very limited ambition, which robbed him of the will to stick at the grind for the final year. So Tom Bayliss had not quite achieved the professionalism he had sought originally. He had settled into a comfortable groove, chief clerk, a man with no ultimate responsibility except to his employer.

And perhaps to a handful of personal friends.

Peregrine Porter liked him, and secretly regretted that he could not make Bayliss a partner of the long-standing law firm of Abbott, Abbott, Truncard, and Porter, of whom only the last-named remained.

Of course, there was Jeremy Truncard, but that young man had turned his back on the law, and, anyway, Peregrine Porter had only a very qualified regard for scientists in the main and research chemists in particular. He felt that, in the ultimate, they were responsible for the drug addicts who so untidily cluttered the modern age.

‘Tom,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Did she say anything else when she passed you this?’

He held up the envelope.

Tom Bayliss’s stare didn’t waver. There were times when that stare could be disconcerting. Peregrine Porter hoped this wasn’t about to become one of them.

‘Not a hint of what’s in it? Or why? Or even why you had to hold it until she’d gone?’

Tom Bayliss said, ‘She just told me, Mr Peregrine.’

Ever since he