Lay Her Among The Lilies

Paula started the car and drove up to the gate of the blue and white cabin. I got out.

“You may or may not hear screams,” I said. “If you do, think nothing of it. It’ll only be

Eudora impressed by my personality.”

“I hope she hits you over the head with a flat iron.”

“She may. She’s one of those unpredictable types. I like them that way.”

I climbed over the gate and walked down the path to the front door. I rapped and waited,

whistling softly under my breath. Nothing happened. The house was as quiet as a mouse

watching a cat.

I rapped again, remembering how Big Boy had looked up and down the road, and seeing in

that memory a sudden sinister significance. I touched the door, but it was locked. It was my

turn now to look up and down the road. Apart from Paula and the car it was as empty as the

face of an old man who is out of tobacco and has no money. I lifted the knocker and slammed

it down three times, making quite a noise. Paula peered out of the car window and frowned at

me.

I waited. Still nothing happened. The mouse was still watching the cat. Silence brooded

over the house.

“Drive down to Beach Road,” I said to Paula. “Wait for me there.”

She started the engine and drove away without looking at me. That’s one of the very good

things about Paula. She knows an emergency when she sees one, and obeys orders without

question.

42

LAY HER AMONG THE LILIES

Again I looked up and down the road, wondering if anyone was peeping at me from behind

the curtains of the many houses within sight. I had to take that risk. I wandered around to the

back of the house. The service door stood open, and moving quietly I peered into a small

kitchen. It was the kind of kitchen you would expect to find in a house owned by a girl like

Eudora Drew. She probably had a monthly wash-up. Everywhere, in the sink, on the table, on

the chairs and floor, were dirty saucepans, crockery and glasses. The trash bin was crammed

with empty bottles of gin and whisky. A frying-pan full of burnt grease and bluebottle flies

leered up at me from the sink. There was a nicely blended smell of decay, dirt and sour milk

hanging in the air. Not the way I should like to live, but then tastes differ.

I crossed the kitchen, opened the door and peered into the small, untidy hall. The doors

opened on to the hall— presumably the living-room and the dining-room. I gumshoed to the

right-hand door, peered into more untidiness, more dust, more slipshod living. Eudora wasn’t

in there; nor was she in the dining-room. That left the upstairs rooms. I mounted the stairs

quietly, wondering if she might be having a bath, and that was the reason why she hadn’t

answered my ring, but decided it was unlikely. She wasn’t the type to take sudden baths.

She was in the front bedroom. Big Boy had made a thorough job of it, and she had done her

best to protect herself. She lay across the tumbled bed, her legs sprawled out, her blouse

ripped off her back. Knotted around her throat was a blue and red silk scarf—probably hers.

Her eyes glared out of her blue-black face; her tongue lay in a little bed of foamy froth. She

wasn’t a pretty sight, nor had death come to her easily.

I shifted my eyes away from her, and looked around the room. Nothing had been disturbed.

It was as untidy and as dusty as the other rooms, and reeked of stale perfume.

I stepped quietly to the door, not looking at the bed again, and moved out of the room and

into the passage. I was careful not to touch anything, and on my way downstairs I rubbed the

banister rail with my handkerchief. I went into the smelly, silent little kitchen, pushed open

the screen door that had swung to in the hot breeze, on down the garden path to the gate, and

walked without haste to where Paula was waiting.

43

James Hadley Chase – Lay Her Among The Lilies – Chapter II

Chapter II

I

Captain of the Police Brandon sat behind his desk and glowered at me. He was a man

around the wrong side of fifty, short, inclined to fat, with a lot of thick hair as white as a fresh

fall of snow, and eyes that were as hard and as friendly and as expressionless as beer-stoppers.

We made an interesting quartet. There was Paula, looking cool and unruffled, seated in the

background. There was Tim Mifflin, leaning against the wall, motionless, thoughtful, and as

quiet as a centenarian taking a nap. There was me in the guest of honour’s chair before the

desk, and, of course, there was Captain of the Police Brandon.

The room was big and airy and well furnished. There was a nice Turkey carpet on the floor,

several easy chairs and one or two reproductions of Van Gogh’s country scenes on the walls.

The big desk stood in the corner of the room between two windows that overlooked the

business section of the city.

I had been in this room before, and I had still memories of the little unpleasantness that had

occurred then. Brandon liked me as much as Hiroshima liked the atomic bomb, and I was

expecting unpleasantness again.

The interview hadn’t begun well, and it wasn’t improving. Already Brandon was fiddling