Bill for the Use of a Body by Dennis Wheatley Page A

me for another engagement. Here is the address. Please check with them. Where are you staying?’
    â€˜At the Repulse Bay.’
    â€˜You are wise. It is much more pleasant out there than at the hotels in the town. If all is well, then, I’ll call for you with a car at half past nine on Wednesday morning.’
    Urata got to his feet and said with more geniality than he had previously displayed, ‘You’re a lucky guy to be staying on here, if you get Merri for a guide. But now it’s about time that we got back to the city for lunch. Merri’s car is parked down where the road ends. Can we give you a lift back?’
    Julian was more than satisfied at having achieved such a promising opening to his acquaintance with the beautiful Miss Sang; so he resisted the temptation to deprive Urata further of having her to himself, and said, ‘Thanks, but I think I’ll walk. It was good of you to let me join you.’
    Seating himself again, he watched them go downthe steps in the grassy slope. Ten minutes later he followed. A mile’s walk brought him to the highest station of the cable railway that serves the many fine private properties scattered about the seaward slope of the Peak. In one of its cars he made the precipitous descent to the city. There he took a rickshaw to the office of the Tourist Association. To his relief he learned that Miss Sang would be free on Wednesday morning, so he booked her services from then for the remainder of the week, then he lunched at the Parisian Grill. When he had finished his meal he began to wonder how to while away the afternoon.
    Filling in time was Julian Day’s perpetual problem. For years he had drifted round the world doing little else. He had a fine house in Gloucestershire, but since he had inherited it he had never been there. With it he had inherited a baronetcy, and his real name was Hugo Julian du Crow Fernhurst; but he never used it. As a product of Eton and Oxford he should have been able to come to Hong Kong with a sheaf of introductions to some of the most interesting people, to sign his name in the book at Government House and to be made a temporary member of the Hong Kong Club; but none of these things was for him, because his real name might have aroused in people’s minds a most discreditable affair of the past in which he had been the principal figure.
    The fact was that he was absurdly oversensitive about the folly which had ruined his career when young, and underestimated both the shortness of people’s memories and the fact that few of them took the view that a youthful indiscretion damned a man for life. His dread of being recognised and ostracised was so great that for years he had avoided mixing with English people of his own class and for company made friends with foreigners or casual acquaintances met on liners or in hotel bars.
    Any thought of marriage he had long since ruled out as impossible, because he was by nature fastidious, and the only sort of woman he would have cared to make hiswife was of the kind who moved in the circles from which he was debarred.
    Now, a new thought stirred in his mind. To ask any English or American girl, or a foreigner who would at times wish to go to London, and so risk sharing the shame to which he was liable to be exposed, was out of the question. But that would not apply to an Eurasian with whom he could make a home in Hong Kong. They need never go to England or mix with the Government House set. He was so utterly weary of drifting from place to place, living in hotels and on liners, or taking furnished flats. How wonderful it would be to settle down at last with a home of his own and a wife who was intelligent, amusing and unbelievably beautiful.
    Before he left the restaurant he had made up his mind to marry Merri Sang.

Chapter IV
Set a Killer to Catch
a Killer
    At the moment when Julian Day’s mind was illuminated by the thought that if only he could persuade Merri Sang to