Death of a God Read online

  ‘You’re the first one I’ve met,’ Jurnet answered truthfully. ‘And when we’ve finished talking, I’m going to get a copy made for our files, so you can keep the original and put it away carefully in a safe place.’ The detective had not the heart to point out that such a piece of paper was, like a cheap day return to the seaside, valid only on the day of issue.

  ‘I want yer to know,’ the girl said, and something about the sweet absurdity of her youth caught at the detective’s throat, ‘that, one way of looking at it, I don’t deserve that certificate, whatever it cost me. Because if Loy had ever asked to screw me, the way I felt about him, I’d have let him without thinking twice about it. Even if he hurt me something shocking. Even if he did things –’ the girl frowned, the childish forehead arranging itself in prominent ridges – ‘horrible things you can’t hardly bear to think about –’

  Jurnet said, ‘You got a funny idea what it means for a man and a woman to get together in that way. Nobody hurts anybody.’

  ‘Oh ah?’ The small pointed face had become sullen and withdrawn. Queenie King said, ‘You want to have a word with my pa.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Sergeant Ellers said cheerio, got into his car and went off to quizz his fellow-foreigners at the Virgin. Jurnet drove home.

  Nothing had changed since the morning, save that the frost had yielded to a greasy thaw. The bags of rubbish were still there waiting for Godot. The lean black cat who haunted the premises sat on the low wall which divided the forecourt from the street, and watched unblinkingly as the detective locked the car, got out his doorkey, and went inside.

  Suddenly, hunger overwhelmed him, making even the familiar bouquet of slow-simmered underwear which pervaded the stairwell smell appetizing. There must be, he thought, willing it to be so, a can of beans left in the cupboard to stave off the pangs and give him strength to make it to the Chinese takeaway or the chippie. Unless, of course, Miriam was back, in which case he would take her out for a slap-up meal. Mario’s, the Nelson, that new place in Shire Street where everybody said the food was out of this world – Jurnet was still reviewing the mouth-watering choices when he arrived at his front door, and collided with Miriam coming out of it.

  Which would have been no great matter, if only she hadn’t been carrying her suitcase.

  Miriam said, ‘After the way you lit out of here this morning, I knew you had to be in on it. But I phoned Headquarters and spoke to the duty sergeant, just to make sure.’

  For what it was worth, Jurnet asked, ‘Make sure of what?’

  She did not condescend to explain further. The beautiful eyes were shadowed. She’s been crying, Jurnet thought – as much, that is, as he could think of anything for the hunger that was consuming his vitals.

  It did not seem a good moment for asking if there were any beans in the cupboard.

  ‘I’m a bit tired,’ he pleaded. ‘Can’t we talk about it inside?’

  ‘Nothing to talk about. I phoned for a cab.’ She pulled her white coat about her. ‘When I told you last time I couldn’t stand it one more time, I meant it.’ She picked up her case and would have moved towards the stairhead if he had not barred her way. ‘Please! The man will be here in a minute!’

  ‘Are you saying you don’t want Loy Tanner’s murderer apprehended?’

  ‘Apprehended! What a police word!’

  ‘Why not? I’m a policeman, and that’s what policemen do to murderers when they get the chance. Or would you rather whoever did for Tanner got off scot-free?’

  ‘Don’t be silly!’ Miriam cried. ‘Only why do you have to be the one to do it?’

  ‘Because it’s my job.’ Too tired for argument, he said, ‘I love you.’

  ‘You don’t, you know!’ She burst out in tearful anger. ‘Or not half so much as you love death. Someone you wouldn’t spare the time of day for when he’s alive, dead, you’re obsessed! He’s never out of your thoughts for a second, day or night. You come to bed and there’s this corpse with his skull bashed in or his stomach hanging out or whatever, lying there between us.’

  ‘Sorry about that.’ Jurnet mumbled something about justice.

  The other picked up the word as if she had been proffered an insult.

  ‘Who are you to put the world straight?’

  Up the stairs, trailing a delicate aroma of gin-and-it and Yardley’s Lavender to mingle with the simmering underwear, came Mrs Petherton, the widow lady who lived across the landing, home from her Happy Hour at the Hacienda Wine Bar. For the duration of the Happy Hour all drinks at the bar were 25p off: which, as Mrs Petherton often assured Jurnet with a widow’s anxious regard for economy, meant that the more you spent the more you saved.

  She had, it seemed, making the landing with a surprised pleasure to find it actually under her trim but uncertain little feet, been economizing even more strictly than was her wont. Drowning her grief.

  ‘That lovely Loy,’ she mourned, and sang a few bars in her gentle, gin-hazed voice. ‘‘‘I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine’’. Taking a holiday?’ she went on without pause, catching sight of the suitcase. ‘That’s nice.’

  Jurnet and Miriam watched as she fumbled in the depths of a large tapestry handbag and, unearthing her doorkey, made an ineffectual pass with it in the general direction of her door. The key clattered on to the lino.

  Jurnet picked it up and unlocked the door for her.

  Mrs Petherton thanked him prettily. She was a daintily made little woman who must once have done everything prettily. Even with her blue eyes faded, her ash-blonde hair dull as dead leaves, she still retained something of the air of a Dresden shepherdess, if one long past the days of wine and roses – the tip of a tiny pointed slipper missing, a couple of fingers glued amateurishly back in place, a rosebud mouth that had outlived kisses.

  Mrs Petherton took the key and let it fall again. This time Jurnet picked it up and dropped it into the tapestry bag.

  ‘The cussedness of illaminate objects,’ Mrs Petherton said brightly. She went into her flat and closed the door, only to reopen it a moment later, poking her head out perkily.

  ‘Illaminate objects! What could I have been thinking of? What I meant, of course was enamelate. Why I said illaminate I can’t imagine.’

  Jurnet carried Miriam’s suitcase down the stairs for her. It was heavy, signifying no token departure. A removal, back to her own flat in a chic conversion of one of the old warehouses down by the river.

  On the first floor landing where, to judge by the smell, Miss Whistler, the late-blooming spinster, was cooking fish fingers with gin-seng and rhino horn, he put the case down, as if to gather strength for the final flight.

  Miriam said in a diminished voice, ‘You know what the trouble is, Ben? I’m not good enough for you.’ Putting up a hand to ward off interruption: ‘You know it’s true. I lack all sense of public service. I know somebody has to catch murderers. I just can’t stand it being you. I’m selfish and unkind –’

  ‘You know me –’ Jurnet wondered if it were as much of a joke as his lightness of tone intended to suggest – ‘a masochist. Made to be a doormat. And you’re another. You should have found yourself a lovely young chartered accountant years ago – numbers don’t bleed – before ever you took up with the likes of me.’

  ‘All I do is make you unhappy. You just like me in bed.’

  ‘In bed and out. I’ll write you out a list, if you like, beginning with your courage which sustains me, your honesty which delights me, your beauty which –’ He broke off, the passion in his voice taking even himself by surprise. He put a foot on the topmost stair. ‘I’ll go down and tell that cabbie to bugger off.’

  ‘No!’

  She picked up the case herself and ran downstairs and out of the front door. The cabbie, ill-pleased at having been kept waiting, took it from her and rearranged his face when he saw what a smasher he’d drawn as a fare. Miriam’s presence brought the forecourt alive, her white coat richly shadowed, her magnificent hair blaz
ing beneath the orange street light. The woman clothed with the sun.

  It was cold again, getting colder. The two, moving their feet a little to keep warm, said nothing while the cabbie stowed the case in the boot: did not kiss, nor touch. When the man came back to the front of his vehicle, Miriam got into the rear, gave him the address with an exaggerated articulation, as if it were a direction to foreign parts, as indeed it was.

  The cabbie swung the cab round in a circle that cleared the low brick wall with an inch to spare. The black cat, still perched there, did not move so much as a whisker, its eyes shining green in the cab’s headlamps. Jurnet did not move either.

  When the cab had gone, he turned back to his home, past the rubbish bags whose number seemed to have increased with the dark. To his surprise, when he reached the entrance to the block of flats, the cat was there before him.

  There were no baked beans in the kitchen cupboard; only a tin of sardines whose escaping fragrance, as Jurnet turned the key to open it, filled the hungry detective with a desire that was almost sexual. Quickly, before he could weaken, he turned the compacted mass into a bowl, and set it on the floor for the cat to polish off with a speed and elegance that, but for the evidence of the discarded tin and the residual perfume tormenting Jurnet’s starving senses, would have made the detective wonder whether it had ever been there at all.

  Seeking the only comfort available, Jurnet put out a hand to stroke the cat. Dead to all sense of gratitude, the creature moved away before he could make contact with the black fur still diamonded with frost and dew. Like Loy Tanner, the detective thought dismally: hating to be touched.

  Unable to face the thought of the long evening and the longer night alone, he went early to bed in hope of thereby shortening them; leaving the window open so that the cat could push off whenever it had a mind to, and taking a self-pitying satisfaction in the piercing chill which tumbled over the sill as he pushed open the casement and fastened the latch on the second hole.

  The bed at least, he had hoped, would provide some kind of solace, the bedclothes retaining for a little some intimate essence of his lost love. But no: with unaccustomed housewifeliness Miriam had changed the pillow cases, the sheet and the duvet cover. Only the cold from the open window was there to greet him with a dank embrace.

  The cold and Loy Tanner, the latest body between.

  Jurnet moved well over to his own side of the bed to leave that invisible, omnipresent bedfellow plenty of room. Anything rather than frighten it away altogether. Even a cadaver under the duvet was better than nothing, nobody.

  In the freezing dark the detective found it hard to put two consecutive thoughts together. The wound in his arm, which he had left bandaged, itched like mad. See Queenie King’s pa, he made a mental memo. Just as well Miriam had moved out. That white coat of hers wouldn’t have stayed white for long in that place. Had he in fact, as he had promised the Portuguese chambermaid, spoken to the manager at the Virgin about the shattered mirror? Remember to let Rabbi Schnellman know the lessons would have to be called off for the time being.

  Would he, Benjamin Jurnet, ever make it to becoming a Jew, whatever that might be? Sometimes it seemed to him Jews themselves weren’t over-sure.

  Jurnet tossed on his bed, and said aloud to the God of Moses, ‘Stop mucking me about, for Christ’s sake.’

  It was twenty past two by the awful digital clock when Dave Batterby rang, going on for so long about the unreliability of British Rail that Jurnet knew without being told he’d balled it up: hadn’t got in London what he’d gone there for.

  Out of a fellow-feeling for losers Jurnet allowed him to put off the moment of truth by inquiring what the other had done to fill his evening; and was presently rewarded – if that was the word – by hearing the old note of self-congratulation seep back into the man’s voice like olive oil into French dressing.

  ‘Had dinner with a couple of chaps from the Yard – surprising how much you can learn from people at the heart of things … Wonderful little restaurant – need an introduction before they’ll book you a table, but if ever you’re interested, let me know and I’ll put a word in, in the right quarter …’ Only when the colleague launched himself into a course by course description of the menu did Jurnet feel it was time to call a halt.

  ‘So how did it go?’

  By now, bolstered in his self-esteem, Dave Batterby did not seem to think it had gone as badly as all that. Not his fault some old crone old enough to be his great-grandmother had been prepared to lie her head off for Lenny Bale. ‘They’re like that,’ he expanded, for Jurnet’s benefit. ‘Queers. If it’s got to be a woman, it has to be somebody who reminds them of Mummy.’

  ‘And Lenny Bale keeps one of them on hand in his office?’

  ‘One! A coven! Address in Savile Row, very nice entrance, you think you’re going to find someone on reception with legs and a bit of class. And instead there’s this collection of old bags with faces like billy goats, knitting.’

  ‘Knitting?’

  ‘That’s right.’ The voice moved up half an octave. ‘Squares. Blankets for starving Dinkas, king-size because they’re all at least eight feet tall and any smaller won’t cover their you-know-whats. Needed so urgently, the one who said she was the telephone operator told me, she hadn’t had time to keep the phone log up to date.’

  ‘Did she at least remember the call from Heathrow?’

  ‘Too well. It was what first put me on my guard. A Mr Brown from California. With an American accent, surprise, surprise. But as to the gentleman’s address, she couldn’t help me.’

  ‘Did she say if Bale was in the office Wednesday?’

  ‘In and out, she said. In a tearing hurry because he wanted to get back to Angleby for the concert. Lies, every last word,’ Dave Batterby pronounced confidently. ‘I could swear to it, so long as it wasn’t in court. Proof’s another matter.’

  ‘You think she’ll stick to her story?’

  ‘They all will. Lenny’s their golden boy. They think the sun shines out of his arse.’

  Jurnet’s naked arm, holding the receiver, had begun to feel numb with cold. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘It was worth a try. And Savile Row, eh? You could have treated yourself to a tie, at least.’

  ‘Matter of fact, I did,’ Batterby admitted. He prided himself on being a sharp dresser. ‘Raw silk with a thin red line. Quite something.’

  ‘Then it’s not all loss.’

  Whilst he was still debating with himself whether to get out of bed and shut the window, Jurnet fell asleep: uneasily, for the outside cold had possessed the room, and the duvet – another of Miriam’s bloody innovations – was, in the detective’s opinion, no substitute for blankets and still more blankets, topped by a quilt and, for good measure, one’s winter overcoat to keep the whole glorious edifice from sliding to the floor. Foolishly, too, he hadn’t bothered with pyjamas, never used them with Miriam there, couldn’t remember whether he still owned any. Between sleeping and waking, he made a mental note to get himself a couple of thermal nightshirts proper to his years, now that he had no lovely lover to warm his bed.

  One thing to be said for murder. You didn’t die alone.

  Jurnet fell asleep again, and again awoke. Someone, something, was in bed with him. Miriam had come back!

  As he stretched out a hand in incredulous joy, a velvety pelt brushed against his cheek. The cat gave a small mew and settled itself into the angle between the detective’s shoulder and neck.

  For a long time Jurnet stayed still, afraid to move. The smell of sardine, breathed rhythmically into his left ear, was not unpleasant. Gradually the man relaxed, dared to put a hand on the gently rising and falling body. At the touch, the cat gave a little twitch, whether of pleasure or irritation it was impossible to tell, but did not otherwise shift its position.

  Jurnet slept, greatly comforted. When he awoke in the morning, the cat was gone.

  Chapter Sixteen

  ‘Havenlea is heavenly’ proclaimed the po
ster flapping on its hoarding at the entrance to the pier. Beneath the outsize lettering, her suntan bleached by the past winter’s gales, a long-legged girl in a scarlet bikini bared her gums at passers-by in a wide, wide smile, the effect only a little diminished by the fact that somebody had blacked out several of her teeth and decorated her dewy upper lip with a fine handlebar moustache. As Jurnet and Sergeant Ellers emerged from the shelter of the car-park, the wind came at them with the roar of a maddened elephant. Failing to topple the rash mortals who presumed to walk the sea-front of Havenlea in March, it took out its wrath on the poster girl. With a rip and a swoop a well-stacked bosom took off for the Arctic, or perhaps the Antarctic, Circle, the wind seeming to encompass both Poles simultaneously. Two storm-tossed gulls, legs dangling, shied away screeching.

  The little Welshmanm sang, the wind wrenching away every note before it was out of his mouth: ‘‘‘I do love to be beside the seaside!’’’

  ‘When I was a kid,’ said Jurnet, making himself heard above the tempest, ‘we used to come here for the day, and I’d sit on the beach with my bucket and spade trying to dig down to Australia. Just when I seemed to be getting somewhere, suddenly, there was that bloody sea seeping into the bottom of the hole. Put me off the briny for good and all.’

  ‘Today’s not going to change your mind.’ Beyond the arid expanse of beach the North Sea heaved as though it might throw up any minute. ‘Can you imagine, a few miles over the horizon, there are blokes actually living out there day after day? Earn a fortune on those rigs, so they say – must deserve every penny of it. No wonder they take the place apart when they come on shore leave.’

  Crouched against the stinging air, Jurnet lifted his head tortoise-wise, and let his disenchanted gaze roam along the sea-front, the boarding houses whited sepulchres in need of a repaint, the ice-cream stalls battened down as if against an impending visitation of Hell’s Angels.