Death of a God Page 15

  ‘By then, other people had come down to the river, and were getting ready to go in after them: but suddenly Francesca went limp, and Loy was able to get to the bank without help. The people there pulled them both out, and they gave Francesca the kiss of life until the ambulance came. It was only later, at the inquest, that we heard she must have been dead already when they took her out of the water. That blow on the head had killed her.’

  ‘What about Loy?’

  ‘They wanted to take him to hospital as well – he was in a terrible state, as you can imagine. But – one of the ambulance men told me about it later – when he heard that Francesca was dead, he let out a great shout, and he got up and ran away, just as he was, in his bare feet and dripping wet. They tried to stop him, they thought he’d gone out of his mind – which I suppose he had, poor boy – but he ran like a deer, they couldn’t catch him, even though, by the time he arrived back home, the soles of his feet were slashed to ribbons.’

  Mrs Felsenstein concluded with sombre satisfaction, ‘He came home. It was his first thought. I stripped off his clothes, wrapped him in a blanket, put him to bed just as he was, with a couple of hot-water bottles. Leo went for the doctor, but by the time he came Loy was asleep, a sleep so deep I wouldn’t let the doctor disturb him. He slept for nearly twenty-four hours, and when he woke up he was a different boy.’

  ‘Different? How do you mean?’

  ‘It’s not easy to explain.’ Mrs Felsenstein wrinkled her brow, pushed her hair back from her forehead. ‘To say he’d grown up is too simple. It was the first time he’d had anything to do with death – and when it’s the death of somebody you love! Also, he obviously had a terrible feeling of guilt: that if he’d only put out that little extra effort he might have saved her – from which it wasn’t too much of a step, I suppose, to convincing himself that, to all intents and purposes, he was the one who’d killed her. It was Leo who, with infinite love and patience, finally got him to see that he had nothing to reproach himself with. Quite the contrary.’

  ‘You still haven’t said in what way he’d changed.’

  The woman answered slowly, testing each word to make sure it could bear the weight of her meaning.

  ‘In a way that completely astonished us. He became – harder’s the best description I can think of. Dominant: even domineering. From being so quiet and retiring, he became the leader among the boys he knew, and among others he’d had nothing to do with before who suddenly seemed attracted into his orbit. Not that he became loud or pushy; just that, when he spoke, they sprang to attention. It was quite remarkable how they all deferred to him, and even more so how Loy seemed to take it all for granted. Leo said it was like Tamino in The Magic Flute. He had passed through a soul-searing ordeal, and emerged tempered steel.’

  Falteringly: ‘I wouldn’t want you to think that overnight he turned into a stranger. When the letter came from the Royal Humane Society to say they were going to give him a certificate for his courageous attempt to rescue Francesca, he tore it up and threw the pieces into the grate. It was summer, there wasn’t any fire, and he went and got matches, and didn’t move away from the hearth until it was burnt, to the last scrap. And when Mrs Falcone called round to thank him personally, he slammed upstairs, and wouldn’t come down until she’d gone.’

  Jurnet commented, ‘Knowing Annie Falcone, I’m surprised she let a little thing like that stop her. I’d have expected her to be up the stairs after him.’

  ‘Is she like that? She looked like that,’ Mrs Felsenstein admitted. ‘Very handsome, but overpowering, with her blonde hair, and her clothes, and her shoes with such high heels. What a cat I sound! I’m so dowdy myself, I’m just not used to women who dress like that.’ The woman shook her head, correcting herself with that devastating honesty which Jurnet had decided went with her eyes. ‘But I don’t really think, at the time, I noticed anything about her, except her face. It seemed to have suffered a stroke worse than actual paralysis, a dreadful stoniness which left the features still able to move, but had frozen all the emotions behind them. I remember she sat there on the couch with her skirt very short, her knees showing, and a great big handbag on her lap – alligator, very grand, like a small Gladstone bag – and she kept snapping and unsnapping the fastener on the top. After telling me why she’d come she hardly said anything – just sat there snapping and unsnapping that bag. I don’t suppose she even knew she was doing it. It was the only sound in the room. I don’t know why, it sounded more terrible than silence.’

  ‘What about you? Didn’t you say anything?’

  ‘I tried to. I let her know how much I’d loved Francesca, how happy I’d been for Loy to have her for a friend: how even her short life had made the world a better place. After a while, she snapped her handbag shut, got up from the couch and said, ‘‘Tell your son I’ll say thank you some other time,’’ and went. At the door she turned and kissed me, so I can only hope I’d given her some comfort. Her lips were very cold, I remember, and when Loy came downstairs again, after she’d finally left, he looked at me, burst out laughing, and told me to go and wash my face. She’d left a great smear of lipstick on my cheek.’

  ‘Did Loy find himself another girl-friend?’

  At the sink again, Mrs Felsenstein turned on the tap and began to wash up the coffee mugs.

  ‘From here on,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to ask those others you were talking about. It wasn’t long after Mrs Falcone called that Loy left home.’

  ‘Some kind of family bust-up?’

  ‘Oh, nothing like that! I told you, he’d changed, knew what he wanted to do, and how to go about it. To Leo’s regret, he’d never shown much interest in school – all his reports said how well he could do if he would only try, but he never did – and he left as soon as he could, and moved in with a couple of boys – well, it was a squat, really.’ With an indulgent smile: ‘I remember Leo saying, if he wanted to live in a derelict house he’d only to move next door, but that wasn’t the point, was it? The whole idea – and very natural, please don’t think we didn’t understand – was to get away from home, stand on his own feet. After a while, he moved on to Havenlea, and from there to London and a lot of other places.’ The woman looked at Jurnet with a pride touched with sad humour. ‘The rest, as they say, is history.’

  ‘But he never lost touch?’

  ‘I told you. We were a very loving family.’

  ‘That money he was always on at you to take. How much was it, at any one time?’

  ‘It varied. £50. £150. That last time, when Mr Scarlett came round with the tickets, it was over £3000.’

  ‘Never as much as £13,000?’

  Mrs Felsenstein stared at the detective in astonishment.

  ‘What on earth would we do with £13,000?’

  ‘Just asking.’ Jurnet asked further, ‘That last time he came to see you, on the Tuesday evening, was he as affectionate as ever? Everything the same between you?’

  ‘Everything the same.’

  Mara Felsenstein put the mugs back on the shelf. Her back was to the detective: he could see her shoulders shaking.

  ‘Loy!’ she sobbed. ‘Loy!’

  Chapter Twenty Two

  ‘Have you eaten?’ the Superintendent asked Jurnet with that mixture of irritation and concern which seemed at the roots of their relationship. ‘That lean and hungry look you were lucky enough to be born with looks even leaner and hungrier than usual. Do you just forget to eat, Ben, or is it some private bargain you make with that Old Testament God of yours? An ongoing Day of Atonement, not a morsel of food to touch your lips until the moment He sees fit to deliver your quarry into your hand?’

  ‘Actually –’ Jurnet gave away nothing of his gratification that his superior officer actually cared about his physical well-being – ‘I was holding back on purpose. I’ve got a table booked at the Nelson.’

  It was a lie, and Jurnet fancied the Superintendent knew it as well as he did.

  ‘They do a go
od roast beef and Yorkshire at the Nelson,’ said the Superintendent, making his scepticism explicit. ‘Also a gooseberry fool which, whatever else I am, I am not. Starve yourself, by all means, if that’s what you have in mind, just so long as you don’t peg out before you catch whoever killed Loy Tanner.’ He turned on his subordinate a look from which all goodwill had been expunged. ‘We don’t seem to be getting on all that fast.’

  ‘No, sir,’ the other agreed with a sunny smile artfully calculated to send the bugger up the wall. Of such small revenges was happiness made. ‘It takes a little while to get the threads sorted out.’

  ‘Threads?’ the Superintendent echoed sourly. ‘We aren’t sewing the Bayeux Tapestry.’ He got up from his chair at the wide desk which made explicit his apartness from the underlings, and went over to the window. ‘You seen the latest, out there in the garden?’

  ‘I saw the flowers.’

  ‘Then you haven’t seen anything. A lying-in-state, I tell you, lacking only the body of the dear departed. They’ve got a youngster of doubtful sex at each corner, got up all in white and standing with bowed head over a reversed guitar. That besotted Mrs Skylark has even had the floodlights turned on.’

  ‘Sounds a bit theatrical.’

  ‘A travesty! No doubt, if this weather gets any colder, we’ll have a crucifixion on ice. Mountebanks!’ exclaimed the Superintednent, finding relief in the small explosion of syllables. ‘At least, whatever else it was when they crucified the real Christ, it wasn’t sick. It was part of the everyday pattern of events, the normal Roman way of getting rid of troublemakers.’

  Still irate at the limits of his authority: ‘In the old days, too, in a city of this size, they turned away travelling players and similar trash – wouldn’t so much as let them through the gates. Here in Angleby today, God help us, we not only let them in with hosannas, we welcome them to our seat of higher learning, so-called. Wonder they didn’t confer honorary degrees on the three of them while they were about it!’

  In the interests of fair play, Jurnet felt constrained to point out, ‘We don’t know that it was actually one of the group who –’

  ‘How right you are!’ the other returned, in a voice heavy with sarcasm. ‘The extent of our ignorance is positively mind-blowing. We still don’t even know where the murder was committed – no reports of screams in the night, or blood seeping through the ceiling. Nothing as to what happened to Tanner’s clothes; nothing in the van except a few lengths of cord which, mercifully, the road manager was able to account for. We have no idea how far Mr Tanner toured in his role of corpus delicti. Colton, that eager beaver, tells us the post-mortem abrasions on the body could just as well be due to a mile and a half over the potholes of an unmade-up road as forty on a dual carriageway. We’re still not sure whether we’re looking for a lone killer or a conspiracy. And, central to all, we still haven’t a clue as to why, with the whole planet in which to dispose of the carcass, our murderer-stroke-murderers made the bizarre choice they did. Exhibitionism, religious mania – or what?’

  The Superintendent drew an exasperated breath, pressed his back hard against the back of his chair, and suddenly favoured his subordinate with a smile of astonishing sweetness.

  ‘Get along with you to the Nelson, Ben. It’s been a long day.’

  Disarmed by the smile, as ever, Jurnet ventured rashly, ‘Chap today wanted to know how anyone could think him capable of man-handling a dead body up on to a cross, he hadn’t the physique for it. I told him we were working on that one – had an experiment going with a corps of volunteers, round the clock, to find out if in fact it could be done single-handed.’

  The Superintendent burst out laughing, exceeding the detective’s expectations. He was a man who seldom laughed aloud. Even more surprising was. ‘That’s the first sensible idea I’ve heard today! Where can we set it up.’

  ‘I didn’t really mean –’

  ‘Then you should have! Let’s see –’ The Superintendent got up from his chair again, this time to perch himself on the edge of his desk, a liberty he seldom took with that formidable emblem of office, and an infallible pointer to good humour. ‘The cross is over at the lab. There’s that courtyard with the rose bushes we could use to set it up in – no!’ pulling himself up short. ‘All those windows! Can’t you imagine what a meal the media’d make of it, if it leaked out? Or – God forbid – they sneaked in a camera-man?’

  He reviewed the options, solved the problem with characteristic dispatch.

  ‘That barn of a place where they play badminton. Only skylights there, and we could fix some blinds, if we’re scared of helicopters!’ The man looked as gleeful as an urchin planning mischief. ‘None of your volunteers, though. We’ve got to keep this strictly under wraps. If anything leaked out, the Chief’d have conniptions and we’d all be out on our ears. You and me, Jack and Sid Hale – what do you think? Not Dave Batterby. He couldn’t resist the chance of getting himself on the front page, even if he had to play Judas Iscariot to do it.’

  Jurnet was not sure what to think. Playing safe: ‘Who are we going to practise on? Where are we going to find someone as long and skinny as Tanner was?’

  The Superintendent did not answer. The mischievous grin grew wider. He reached across the desk for the telephone, and lifted the receiver.

  ‘Put me through to Dr Colton, would you?’

  On the way down to the car-park Jurnet paused, cocked his head to listen, and changed direction – back to the main hall and thence out into the Market Place. Night had settled down on the city, brooding it without love. Under its chill wings most of the traders had packed it in for the day: only here and there a sad, Asian face still waited for the last purchaser of a brass tray or a cut-price toilet roll.

  Above, in the little garden, the floodlights gleamed on the young heads, the thin young necks, bent in homage over the mound of flowers. How still the youngsters stood, thought the detective, despite their thin clothes and the piercing cold. Still as a stone. Never a shiver.

  But then they had the beat to keep them warm.

  The beat had penetrated Police Headquarters; faintly, but enough to drum Jurnet out into the Market Place and across the road to where Lijah Starling, in a black kaftan splashed with yellow, on his head a round African cap woven with gold and silver threads, sat among his drums celebrating the life and the death of his lost leader.

  Polished ebony in the floodlights, the drummer sat with eyes half-closed, sleeves thrown back to reveal his powerful arms moving with deceptive ease. The message of the drums filled the available space, banged against the sky. It bounced off the surrounding buildings, scooping bewildered pigeons off the ledges where they had already settled down for the night. Crowds gathered quickly, belated workers hurrying home to their evening meal and their tellies, but drawn to stand rooted to the cold cobbles, listening.

  ‘Go back to Africa!’ Jurnet growled under his breath. Yet he stayed. He stayed until the sound died away and Lijah Starling sat quietly, his hands clasped in his lap.

  A guitar sounded, fragile after what had preceded it, and Johnny Flowerdew walked into the circle of light, strumming as he came.

  The voice that came out of the white, mocking face was not the voice of Loy Tanner, but it was not the voice of Johnny Flowerdew either. Either the cold, or the occasion, or the hovering spirit of the lead singer of Second Coming had transformed it. Or else the drums had prepared the way, programmed the listeners to hear more than was there to be heard.

  Whichever it was, they listened, and they wept.

  How sweet the light,

  How dark the night:

  Sorrow is better than laughter.

  A time to weep,

  A time to sleep,

  Whatever may come after:

  A cruel whisper of wind had begun to circle the Market Place. Automatically, without any lessening of attention, the listeners drew scarves tighter across throats, fiddled for the top buttons of overcoats. Out of this diffuse, unthinking mo
vement a flash of white caught the corner of Jurnet’s eye. Taller than most who stood there, he looked over the heads of the crowd and saw Miriam in the act of pulling the shawl collar of her new white coat high over her bare head.

  That she had not seen him the detective was practically sure. All her attention was held by Johnny Flowerdew and his bitter-sweet threnody.

  The silver cord is loosed,

  The golden bowl is broken.

  The final song is sung,

  The final word is spoken.

  A low moan rose from the crowd, heaven-sent backing for a number bound to make it to the charts. Jurnet worked at his cynicism, without much success; conscious all the time of the white coat away on his right. Conscious of the song Johnny Flowerdew was still singing.

  Johnny Flowerdew sang:

  We have come to the end of the world.

  The beginning is less than the end.

  The curtain is down, the flag is furled.

  Oh, my friend! Oh, my friend!

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Jurnet drove on to the forecourt of his block of flats with the feeling that it had been a long time since he had last seen home. For once he was glad to find that nothing had changed, the black polythene bags poised at the entrance as immutable and imperious as the stone lions and unicorns that graced statelier residences. To his one regret, though, there was no sign of the black cat.

  A pity. At the deli where he had stopped off for the makings of his evening meal – baked beans, an expiring salad, and a wedge of blueberry cheesecake – he had picked up six tins of catfood, each of a different brand in case the cat was a choosy eater.