Bill for the Use of a Body Read online

  BILL FOR THE USE OF A BODY

  Dennis Wheatley

  Edited by Miranda Vaughan Jones

  For

  SHEILA

  and for all those who showed such

  gracious hospitality to my wife and

  myself while we were in the Far

  East.

  Contents

  Introduction

  I The Past Catches up with Mr. Hayashi

  II Hell in a Sea-girt Paradise

  III Love at First Sight

  IV Set a Killer to Catch a Killer

  V A Gentle Wooing

  VI Oh! To Be Young Again

  VII The Past Catches up with Julian Day

  VIII The Man who Came up from the Sea

  IX The Sprat to Catch the Mackerel

  X An Ally, or …?

  XI The Unprofessional Guide

  XII Trapped in the Matabura

  XIII ‘None But the Brave Deserves the Fair’

  XIV Mr. Hayashi Makes a Plan

  XV The Final Hand is Played

  A Note on the Author

  Introduction

  Dennis Wheatley was my grandfather. He only had one child, my father Anthony, from his first marriage to Nancy Robinson. Nancy was the youngest in a large family of ten Robinson children and she had a wonderful zest for life and a gaiety about her that I much admired as a boy brought up in the dull Seventies. Thinking about it now, I suspect that I was drawn to a young Ginny Hewett, a similarly bubbly character, and now my wife of 27 years, because she resembled Nancy in many ways.

  As grandparents, Dennis and Nancy were very different. Nancy’s visits would fill the house with laughter and mischievous gossip, while Dennis and his second wife Joan would descend like minor royalty, all children expected to behave. Each held court in their own way but Dennis was the famous one with the famous friends and the famous stories.

  There is something of the fantasist in every storyteller, and most novelists writing thrillers see themselves in their heroes. However, only a handful can claim to have been involved in actual daring-do. Dennis saw action both at the Front, in the First World War, and behind a desk in the Second. His involvement informed his writing and his stories, even those based on historical events, held a notable veracity that only the life-experienced novelist can obtain. I think it was this element that added the important plausibility to his writing. This appealed to his legions of readers who were in that middle ground of fiction, not looking for pure fantasy nor dry fact, but something exciting, extraordinary, possible and even probable.

  There were three key characters that Dennis created over the years: The Duke de Richleau, Gregory Sallust and Roger Brook. The first de Richleau stories were set in the years between the wars, when Dennis had started writing. Many of the Sallust stories were written in the early days of the Second World War, shortly before Dennis joined the Joint Planning Staff in Whitehall, and Brook was cast in the time of the French Revolution, a period that particularly fascinated him.

  He is probably always going to be associated with Black Magic first and foremost, and it’s true that he plugged it hard because sales were always good for those books. However, it’s important to remember that he only wrote eleven Black Magic novels out of more than sixty bestsellers, and readers were just as keen on his other stories. In fact, invariably when I meet people who ask if there is any connection, they tell me that they read ’all his books’.

  Dennis had a full and eventful life, even by the standards of the era he grew up in. He was expelled from Dulwich College and sent to a floating navel run school, HMS Worcester. The conditions on this extraordinary ship were Dickensian. He survived it, and briefly enjoyed London at the pinnacle of the Empire before war was declared and the fun ended. That sort of fun would never be seen again.

  He went into business after the First World War, succeeded and failed, and stumbled into writing. It proved to be his calling. Immediate success opened up the opportunity to read and travel, fueling yet more stories and thrilling his growing band of followers.

  He had an extraordinary World War II, being one of the first people to be recruited into the select team which dreamed up the deception plans to cover some of the major events of the war such as Operation Torch, Operation Mincemeat and the D-Day landings. Here he became familiar with not only the people at the very top of the war effort, but also a young Commander Ian Fleming, who was later to write the James Bond novels. There are indeed those who have suggested that Gregory Sallust was one of James Bond’s precursors.

  The aftermath of the war saw Dennis grow in stature and fame. He settled in his beautiful Georgian house in Lymington surrounded by beautiful things. He knew how to live well, perhaps without regard for his health. He hated exercise, smoked, drank and wrote. Today he would have been bullied by wife and children and friends into giving up these habits and changing his lifestyle, but I’m not sure he would have given in. Maybe like me, he would simply find a quiet place.

  Dominic Wheatley, 2013

  Chapter I

  The Past Catches up with

  Mr. Hayashi

  Mr. Inosuke Hayashi’s lined face remained impassive as he looked down into the square wooden box that contained the bloody severed head of his only son. But his apparent calm did not deceive Police Chief for External Affairs, Okabe. A little vein pulsing in the bereaved father’s forehead told him that if Hayashi could get his hands on his son’s murderer there would be another murder done.

  The box had been sent from Macao, the Portuguese colony on the coast of China, and addressed to Mr. Hayashi at his home in Kyoto. It had been opened by the Customs who had despatched it to Police Headquarters Tokyo, and Hayashi had been summoned to the capital. There, Okabe had broken to him the news of the grisly present he had been sent and asked him if he could identify the blotchy, mortifying features of the head in the box.

  There was no clue to the sender and Hayashi could throw no light on the affair. He could say only that his son, a man of thirty, had gone a fortnight before to Hong Kong on business connected with a line of coastal trading ships of which his family were the principal shareholders.

  Although Okabe had never been able to secure evidence against the Hayashis, he had good grounds for believing that a considerable part of their wealth came from using these small ships for dope smuggling. In consequence, had there been no other factors in the case he would have assumed that the younger Hayashi had become the victim of a rival organisation, and that his head had been sent to his father as a warning to cease operating in their territory.

  But that seemed unlikely, because this was not the first severed head in a box that had arrived in the same way on the Police Chief’s desk. Since 1952 four others had come in at long intervals and, as far as he had been able to find out, none of these previous victims had been in any way connected with criminal activities.

  The first, Otoya Matsuko, had been the representative of a big firm of radio manufacturers; the second, Yasunari Kido, a doctor who had gone to Hong Kong to attend a medical conference; the third, Kayno Nakayama, an engineer who had hoped to secure a contract connected with the improvement of Hong Kong’s water supply; and the fourth, Zosho Iwanami, a traveller in Japanese cultured pearls. All four had disappeared after being for upwards of a week in Hong Kong and their heads had been despatched from Macao. One thing only linked the four victims: they had all served in the 230th Infantry Regiment, commanded by Colonel Shoji when it had been part of the Army that had invaded and conquered Hong Kong in December 1942. But the best endeavours of the Japanese Police, with the willing co-operation of the Hong Kong and Macao Police, had failed to provide any indication as to when, where and why these men had been murdered.
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  Having given Hayashi such particulars as he could of these previous crimes, Okabe went on, ‘While our enquiries revealed no circumstances in their previous lives for anyone wishing to bring about their deaths, it will not have escaped my honourable visitor’s astute mind that a common motive may have inspired their untimely end. However unwillingly, we must admit between ourselves that during the conquest of Hong Kong some of our troops, elated by their splendid victory, got out of hand and committed acts of a discreditable nature. It is therefore not unreasonable to assume that someone in Hong Kong who suffered at the hands of men of the 230th Regiment is systematically revenging himself upon the men of that unit whenever opportunity offers. Your honourable son, would, of course, have been too young to have participated in the war; but it has occurred to me that your honourable self, perhaps …’

  He knew the answer before Hayashi gave it. The small, elderly man inclined his head and replied gravely, ‘The assumption of the honourable Chief of Police is correct. Before the war I spent much of my time in Europe. I speak English fluently and also acquired some small understanding of the curious and frequently illogical mentality of the English. In 1940, thinking it probable that the exalted Son of Heaven would decide to extend his Empire at the expense of the British, I naturally offered my humble services to our country and was accepted into the Intelligence Corps. My poor abilities received recognition beyond their deserts and I was rapidly promoted. By December 1941 I had become a Colonel, and Chief Intelligence Officer to the 38th Division. The 230th Infantry Regiment was a part of that Division and with it I entered Hong Kong. There were, of course, certain regrettable incidents and from what has gone before it seems highly probable that the shrewd deduction of my honourable friend provides the motive for this abominable crime.’

  Hayashi did not add that after the war he had been tried as a War Criminal and served a ten-year sentence for atrocities for which he had been responsible. But Okabe knew that too. He merely nodded, sucked his prominent teeth and said:

  ‘That being so, perhaps my honourable visitor can recall some specific incident of which he was a witness: a British officer who was badly beaten up, or something of that kind. If so we might trace the man and find him to be the murderer of your son.’

  With a slight shake of his nearly bald head Hayashi replied, ‘There were a number of incidents. Our men had fought hard. It was natural that in the hour of their triumph they should wish to see the insolent English grovelling at their feet. But it is all so long ago. The names of such officers as I chanced to have dealings with have passed out of my memory.’

  The bespectacled Police Chief shrugged his plump shoulders. ‘In that case we can do no more than proceed with routine enquiries. Now that you have identified the victim as your son the police in both Hong Kong and Macao will do their utmost to trace his last movements and investigate any persons with whom he was known to have associated during his stay on the island. But in view of their lack of success with regard to the earlier victims I cannot hold out any great hope that your honourable desire to see justice done will be satisfied.’

  The small dark eyes in Hayashi’s wrinkled face narrowed to slits, and in a venomous whisper that was almost a hiss he said, ‘In that, honourable sir, you are mistaken. You cannot refuse me the fullest possible particulars of those earlier victims, their families, business associates and so on. With that information, and by an exhaustive enquiry into my son’s activities while in Hong Kong, I shall succeed in hunting down this English pig who has become an assassin. Yes, if it costs me my last hundred yen I’ll see to it that he pays in full for his abominable crime. And when I get him I shall not call on the law to provide him with a relatively painless execution.’

  The Police Chief rarely felt sympathy for any of the many criminals with whom his work brought him into contact and he had none at all for Hayashi, except as a father who had just lost his only son, for he knew him to be a man who had brought disgrace on his country, and had good reason to believe that he had amassed his big fortune mainly in ways that had brought misery to great numbers of people.

  Okabe also knew that Hayashi had contacts in every port in the China Seas, and the wealth to employ scores of unscrupulous hirelings who would use methods barred to the police to extort the truth from people; so there was quite a possibility that, sooner or later, he would get his man. He had spoken with such cold, malevolent determination that, at the thought that he might succeed, even the hardened Police Chief felt a sudden surge of pity as he envisaged the ghastly death in some secret hide-out that Hayashi would inflict on the Englishman who it was presumed had killed his son.

  Chapter II

  Hell in a Sea-Girt Paradise

  Julian Day was sitting on the grass, in the warm February sunshine, near the flagstaff on the Peak of Hong Kong. The Peak is so often mentioned as a main feature of the beautiful island that many people who have never been there are apt to visualise it as a somewhat larger Gibraltar: a solitary mountain rising out of the sea. But that is far from being the case. The Peak is only the highest of nine mountains in the eleven-mile-long island, and the island itself only the second largest of an archipelago which, together with Kowloon on the mainland and the New Territories, goes to make up the three hundred and sixty square miles of the Colony.

  Even from where Julian was sitting, eighteen hundred feet up, other peaks to the south and east, outlined against a cloudless blue sky, cut off his view of many of the beautiful bays with their beaches of golden sand. But looking northward he saw a magnificent panorama spread before him. The ground sloped almost sheer to the splendid city of Victoria, nearly three miles long and half a mile deep, curving along the nearer shore of the enormous harbour.

  Riding at anchor in the harbour, gaily dressed with flags but looking like toys at that distance, lay a part of the Western Allies’ Far Eastern Fleet—three aircraft carriers, four cruisers and eight or ten destroyers. Fringing the docks were a score of merchant ships and liners. Resembling water-beetles, the big ferries that carried a hundred thousand people a day scuttled back and forth between Victoria and her twin city of Kowloon on the peninsula opposite. From the peninsula’s eastern side the great causeway of the Kai Tak Airport projected like a pointing finger out into the sea, and every few minutes an aircraft owned by one of a dozen nations was either landing or taking off from it. Beyond the sprawling city the land broadened out into hills and fertile valleys, then in the distance there rose range after range of mountains, merging some twenty miles away into Red China.

  As Julian’s gaze roved over the massed roofs down on the sea-shore he marvelled at the way in which Hong Kong had grown since he had last been there. The city had not only spread both to east and west as far as the eye could see, but a score of skyscrapers now towered up from it and another dozen dwarfed the biggest older buildings in Kowloon. The airport too had formerly had only two short runways, whereas now, by a great feat of underwater engineering, it had been extended for a mile and a half out into the sea, so that the largest jet aircraft could land there.

  But the feature which more than any other showed the growth of the two cities was that in a hundred places where there had previously been areas of mean streets or waste land there were now great blocks of modern flats; while further out in the suburbs there were whole groups of these blocks. Yet even those that Julian could see with his bird’s-eye view he knew to be only a small part of the amazing feat that the Government of the Colony had achieved to cope with the enormous influx of refugees from Red China. At Choi Hung they had erected eight blocks all twenty storeys high with forty flats on each floor. That estate alone accommodated some fifteen thousand people; and to care for the children they were opening a new school for a thousand pupils every ten days. As he thought of that, Julian wished that the anti-colonial Americans and the Blacks, Browns and Yellows who so consistently abused Britain in their parrot-house, the United Nations, could be forced to come to Hong Kong and see what the old British Raj, at i
ts best, could do.

  He knew, though, that although this herculean labour for humanity was mainly due to the able planning and administration of selfless and devoted British civil servants, it could not have been achieved without the wholehearted co-operation of the Chinese, who made up nine-tenths of the Colony’s population.

  Before the war Hong Kong’s prosperity had arisen from the fact that it was the entry port for the great Chinese city of Canton that lay some sixty miles away to the west up the great island-spattered estuary. With the triumph of Communism in China the door had suddenly been slammed, cutting off the multi-million trade between Europe and China. For a while it had looked as though Hong Kong must wither and become bankrupt. But during the years of strife on the mainland great numbers of wealthy Chinese had seen the red light, got their money out in time and emigrated to Hong Kong. With British encouragement these highly intelligent men had revolutionised the status of the Colony. It had originally been mainly a channel for supplying China with goods from the Western world, but by building over 5,000 factories, large and small, and establishing a great variety of new enterprises, they had made the Colony not only self-supporting, but, with the one exception of Japan, the greatest centre of industry in the Far East.

  To that had to be added the contribution of the million Chinese who, mostly penniless, had sought refuge in the Colony. Thrifty, cheerful and industrious by nature, they were gluttons for work. They were no believers in short hours, let alone wildcat strikes. Their one aim in life was to be able to support their families in comfort and have a little money put by in case of misfortune. Three hundred thousand of them had been settled on farms, to start with in wooden shacks, but now great numbers of them were living in pleasant bungalows with radios, refrigerators and washing machines. Hundreds of thousands of others who, at first, teemed like ants in squalid shanty towns had since earned enough to furnish and live well in the flats on the great housing estates that the Government let to them at a nominal rent.