Death of a God Read online

  Ending, with becoming grace: ‘Although it is, of course, an academic text primarily, it should not be beyond the understanding of a moderately intelligent layman.’

  Jurnet, whilst acknowledging the compliment, declined with suitable regret. ‘Above my head, I’m afraid.’

  At which point Detective-Sergeant Jack Ellers, his chubby face unsmiling, came into the room and announced without ceremony, ‘I’ve got the car out, Ben. It’s round the front. The Super’s gone on ahead. We’re needed at Havenlea.’

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  This time, familiar with the place, they drove straight along the front, making for the cars already parked in the distance. Apart from them, Havenlea seemed as empty, as uninviting, as on the two detectives’ previous visit. The tide was at its peak, three-quarters of the way up the beach, the air drenched in flying spume. The waves hurled themselves at the shore and retreated in a rattle of pebbles. The best you could say about the lowering sky was that there was altogether too much of it.

  As Jack Ellers parked at the end of the line, a thickset figure battled its way along the promenade to meet them. Jurnet was pleased to recognize Detective Chief Inspector Herring, stationed at Havenlea; christened Alexander but, in that place, destined from birth to be known as Bloater.

  A huge man, with the gentle strength of many giants, it did not seem to have embittered him. He greeted Jurnet and the little Welshman as old friends, and reassured them, ‘We’ve left everything as we found it.’

  ‘Who found him? You never see a soul about.’

  ‘It is a bit parky.’ The Havenlea man smiled, sounding quite proud. ‘Last Monday we registered the lowest temperature in the British Isles south of the Shetlands. Pensioner lives just off the front took his dog out to do its business. Let it off the lead so it could go down on the beach while he waited up top in the nearest shelter. When it didn’t come back as usual he went to investigate, and found it behind the Punch and Judy tent, running back and forth barking like mad. It didn’t look as if the dog had actually gone into the tent: just kept snuffling around at the base. The old chap had quite a job getting the animal on the lead again. He himself didn’t look into the tent either. What there was to be seen outside was enough for him. He went across to the Haven Hotel and asked them to phone 999.’

  The Superintendent was waiting for them down on the beach, trousers tucked into wellies, and dressed for the wind and the waves in a navy parka laced with white cords, very nautical. Jurnet often wondered where his superior officer kept the apparently inexhaustible wardrobe that was stocked with clothes for every occasion, however unlikely. Somewhere in the depths of Police Headquarters, he felt sure, behind a door to which only the Superintendent had the key, hung everything from a wet suit to lederhosen and funny little hats with feathers in them, all available instanter as the need arose.

  ‘You took your time,’ said the Superintendent, not caring who heard him. He was in the usual filthy temper murder produced in him. Jurnet, trying nobly to be understanding, mumbled something inaudible, and turned to the matter in hand.

  Punchy King sat inside his Punch and Judy tent leaning sideways, his body supported by one of the corner struts, his wide black hat tilted at a rakish angle. He looked extremely surprised, as well he might have been, that somebody should have stuck a knife into his back, with fatal results.

  Amused, as well. Whether it was intended, or whether it was a trick of muscles contracting in a last agony, the face of the dead man looked more than ever like Punch’s, full of the puppet’s derisive dismissal of the world and all its tomfoolery.

  The man, however, unlike his little playmate, had spouted blood, not polystyrene foam or whatever else went to fill a puppet’s innards. A lot of blood. Blood had soaked into the back of the tent, obliterating a fair proportion of the red and white stripes. Blood that must have tumbled from mouth and nostrils had turned the front of the dead man’s grey cardigan a sticky rust; it had splashed in great gouts over Judy and the crocodile and the policeman, lodged in an arrangement of pockets that hung against the outer canvas; stained the needles and reels of cotton in the open workbox he still held in his lap.

  Slumped between the Punch and Judy man’s knees, his absurd little legs dangling, Punch stared, full of a malign humour. It looked as though King had been sitting on his stool – which was, in fact, a small pair of folding steps of the type usually found in kitchens, peacefully sewing, when the killer had raised the back flap of the tent and struck. The seam down the centre of Punch’s hump was slightly open, a needle and thread still dangling from the point Punchy King had reached in his stitchery. From the narrow aperture, something white and powdery still descended in a last feeble trickle to join the small mound of whatever it was that had already formed beneath the hump on the sheet of hardboard which did service as a floor.

  Protected by disposable overalls, one of the scene-of-crime men reached in gingerly and lifted a sample of the white powder on a plastic spatula. When he had straightened up, cautiously, so as not to displace his booty, the Superintendent took the spatula from him, moistened a finger and dipped it in: put it to his lips, his nose.

  Jurnet, not waiting for the verdict from on high, pronounced unhesitatingly, ‘Heroin!’

  ‘Reason we wanted you here pronto,’ Bloater Herring explained amiably, ‘was because you’d been in touch so recently with regard to questioning King about Loy Tanner. I must say, unless you’ve come up with anything pointing the other way, I’d be surprised if it turns out there’s any connection between the two killings. My guess is – though it is only a guess – that it’s one of those coincidences which occur every now and again.’

  The Detective Chief Inspector sat down in a chair which had none of the pretensions of the Superintendent’s back in Angleby. Jurnet for one was relieved the man had sat down. On his feet, he filled the small room to the point of suffocation. Seated, he at least left more or less enough oxygen for the rest of them.

  A ship’s whistle sounded piercingly under the window. Jurnet, close enough to the glass to see the busy commerce along the river, marvelled afresh at the difference between the two Havenleas, the port and the resort: a difference between the quick and the dead.

  Outside the police-station window, cranes dipped and rose with a strange, avian dignity; juggernauts, parked along the quay, engulfed or disgorged containers whose contents, so far as the looker-on was concerned, were known only to God and the customs and tally men moving importantly with their clipboards amid the organized chaos all about them. Principally, there was life: men shouting, swearing, spitting; coiling ropes and uncoiling them; slouching on bollards, fag-end in mouth, staring out vacantly over the water; sitting in lorry cabs with the racing editions spread out over the steering wheel. A rough, tough lot from the look of them, with the swagger of men with money in their pockets, and no apparent worries about where the next lot was coming from.

  The Superintendent said, ‘I get the impression you’re not exactly surprised.’

  ‘I am and I’m not,’ returned the Havenlea man. ‘It’d never have surprised me to hear King had done for one of those beauty queens he shacked up with, he’s been so near to bringing it off more than once. On the other hand, I’d never have picked him out as a victim – not, that is, till I saw what came out of that little fellow’s hump. Anyone who’s into drugs, whether as seller or buyer, has to know the score.

  ‘Ever since they parked those platforms out there in our bit of ocean, we’ve been aware of an operation building up. In fact, as you know, we’ve been working on it for some time, and we’ve got our eye on a couple of chaps who work on one of the rigs. We’ve reason to believe they’ve been taking delivery of the goods out there in the North Sea, and landing it at Havenlea. We’ve been holding off in hopes of catching the big wheel.

  ‘When any of the men come in for rest and recreation, as they laughably call it, we all but give them an enema to see what they’re bringing in with them. As for the boats
and ’copters, we practically take them apart every trip. But so far – nothing.’

  ‘There could be a link.’ Jurnet deemed the moment right to bring his colleagues up to date on the life and times of Simon Culliver. Inured as they were to the infinite diversity of human folly, they still looked a little bemused at the lengths to which the Professor of Contemporary Institutions had been prepared to go to get on terms with his students.

  The detective finished, ‘Loy Tanner went to Queenie King’s caravan after the concert, when her father was still there. Could be that the object of the visit was to pass on the Professor’s order for his drug cocktail.’

  Addressing himself to the Detective Chief Inspector with that charm he was always so free with to strangers, the Superintendent said, ‘What worries me, frankly, is whether the villain who has just put paid to Mr Punchy King hasn’t, at the same time, and quite inadvertently, deprived us of our murderer.’

  ‘Look on the bright side,’ urged Bloater Herring, the smile on his enormous face positively angelic. ‘One suspect less can’t be bad, can it?’

  PART TWO

  Answer

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  ‘Suspects!’ exclaimed Sergeant Ellers, winding the car window down an inch or two as if the outer air were a commodity it had become safe to breathe so long as you didn’t overdo it. The sun was shining, the wind reduced to a breeze. Suddenly it was to be observed that branches thought winter-bare were, in fact, full of buds, that songbirds were getting their act together, and the new season’s no-parking lines flaunting golden along the verges.

  Only Sid Hale, sprawled in the back of the car, protested plaintively ‘You want to give us all pneumonia?’

  ‘Suspects,’ Sergeant Ellers repeated, reporting to his senior officer in the driving seat. ‘Scarlett says he and Queenie were in her Dormobile playing – I kid you not – Happy Families. Lijah Starling was in bed, according to him. Says he never gets up before noon, not even to commit a murder. Johnny Flowerdew was in Havenlea.’

  ‘What’s that?’ cried Jurnet. Sid Hale sat up and took notice.

  Pleased with the dramatic effect, the little Welshman proceeded to detail.

  ‘The story is that he did a gig there on the edge of town – a private party to please an old school chum, and they persuaded him to stay over. He gave me a number to call and a woman answered, who, unless she was having me on, said she was Viscountess something or other, and yes, dear Johnny had indeed come down for Orion’s engagement party and stayed the night, leaving at about 11.30 after a late breakfast. I checked with Havenlea who said it was all in the local rag, Johnny’s name included.’

  ‘I don’t suppose they also put in the paper whether he did or did not get up early, whilst everyone else was still out cold after a night of champers and knees-up, tiptoe out of the house to knock off Punchy, and then tiptoe back to his bacon and eggs without a soul knowing, Punchy included? Hm!’ concluded Jurnet. ‘Interesting!’

  ‘Not as interesting as Lenny Bale who says that at the fateful hour he was in Angleby, down by the river, thinking sad thoughts.’

  ‘Oh ah.’

  ‘No ‘‘oh ah’’ about it. As it happens, he wasn’t the only one down there by the Water Gate. There was a youngster too, a good-looking lad, according to PC Nye who, at 9.10 a.m., had occasion to arrest our Lenny for indecent exposure.’

  ‘Christ! What a lot!’

  At least, thought Jurnet, Annie Falcone had a respectable alibi, if indeed it was any alibi at all. Certainly, remembering her getting out of her car, the long legs swivelling round from the driver’s seat, it seemed unthinkable that she could have just come from a murder. Could she anyway have walked on the beach in those high heels? Unless, of course, all her wits about her, she had taken along flatties to change into, as well as something blood-proof to slip on over her clothes. The detective remembered that she hadn’t wanted to sit talking in her car. Was she afraid he might notice sand on the floor, a knife on the shelf under the dash?

  She had said that she had gone to church to give thanks. For one death, or two, Jurnet wondered, his face reddening at the memory of his own visit to St Joseph’s.

  He had inquired first at the presbytery, only to be told by a skimpy-haired housekeeper that Father Mullen was over at the church, a flamboyant brick structure which made the detective feel uneasy before he had even got inside, where the sight of the many painted statues, their poses of exaggerated piety, brought him out in a sweat.

  By the time a black-clad figure entered from somewhere at the side of the altar, he had changed his mind about the whole business; was ready to leave with his questions unasked, unanswered.

  The priest, however, had seen the stranger and come forward faster than the latter could retreat with decorum.

  ‘Welcome,’ the priest said, a greeting which did nothing to make Jurnet feel any more at home. He fumbled for his card whilst Father Mullen, an elderly man who looked satified with his faith, waited patiently, hands folded in front of him, a smile on his face.

  When Jurnet stated his business, the smile did not waver, only became quizzical: the kind of smile reserved for children who have done something silly. ‘I’m afraid I cannot answer your inquiry about Mrs Falcone.’

  ‘But I understand she spoke to you about some gifts she was proposing to make to St Joseph’s.’

  ‘Is that so?’ the priest said pleasantly.

  Conscious of blundering on, Jurnet nevertheless persisted, ‘So it stands to reason you must know, one way or the other.’

  ‘Only God takes note who enters His house, Mr – Mr Jurnet, was it? Fortunately, I am not required to stand at the door taking the tickets.’

  At least, Jurnet congratulated himself, he’d been spared one chore. The Havenlea men had broken the news to Queenie. Done it pretty well, by all accounts. There had been no hysteria, and not all that much crying either. It was almost as if – since everything Dad did was OK – getting himself killed was OK too: something which he had arranged to have done to himself for reasons she wouldn’t dream of questioning. She had shown no surprise upon learning that a kilo and a half of heroin had been found inside the little wooden windmill whirling merrily away in the dead man’s front garden, as well as enough domes of acid to have half the population of Havenlea jumping from their bedroom windows in preference to taking the stairs.

  Sure, she knew about the drug-trafficking – that is, in her own words, ‘kind of knew’; having finally caught on as to why he kept changing over the Punches, taking back the empties, as it were: but as to the scale of his enterprise, she hadn’t a clue. He was a Punch and Judy man, wasn’t he, the best in the business? Fixing up a fix for a friend was just the kind of thing you did, if you were the kind of man her Dad was, always ready to do anybody a good turn.

  By the time Jurnet had arrived to have his own little word with Queenie, she was back from Havenlea where she had been taken for the formal identification of her father’s remains. They seemed to think she would mind it, she told the detective, and Guido had nearly done his nut, but it had been nice to get a last look at him before they started cutting him up proper. She was glad that he hadn’t looked as if it had hurt too bad.

  Jurnet said, ‘You mustn’t be afraid to have a good cry. Do you no end of good.’

  ‘Make me look like an old hag, you mean, with me eyes sticking out like gooseberries!’ The girl tossed her head. ‘Know what’s the matter with you coppers? You don’t know what being straight is. All that counts is what looks right, never mind what‘s the truth of it.’

  Turning on the detective a look of contempt: ‘If I say I’m even relieved he’s gone for good and all, you’ll either say to yourself oy, oy, what’s she been up to? or, the little slag, going on like that, and her dad not even cold in his coffin. But it’s true.’ For a moment the childish underlip quivered. ‘Ever since I was a kid I’ve spent my life afraid it would happen that one day I’d run back home and he wouldn’t be there, ever.’ Daring t
he other to contradict her: ‘Well, tha’s one worry off me mind, in’t it?’

  Shaken, Jurnet inquired, with some diffidence, ‘So what do you intend to do?’

  ‘Marry Mr Guido Scarlett, what else, and live happy ever after.’

  ‘You could do a lot worse.’

  ‘You mean, assuming it wasn’t him did for Loy?’

  ‘Assuming that,’ the other assented gravely.

  ‘You reckon? No sex, of course,’ the girl said, as if it went without saying. ‘I told him, and he’s willing. He knows I’d never go against me certificate.’ Queenie King touched her green quiff, preened herself. ‘Loy would’ve laughed himself silly,’ she asserted cheerfully. ‘‘‘Imagine,’’ he used to say to me sometimes, ‘‘you coming down the aisle arm in arm with that gargoyle. The wedding guests’d fall out of the pews laughing!’’’

  ‘You could always go to the Registry Office.’

  ‘There you go again!’ the girl cried. ‘Let me tell you, Mr bloody copper, I’m going to have a long white dress and a veil with orange blossom, an’ a bunch of roses and lilies done up with satin ribbon. And if you feel like coming along to the church for a good giggle, you’re welcome, I’m sure!’

  When Jurnet came out of the caravan, Guido Scarlett was there, as the detective had known he would be: dark and threatening, rocking to and fro on his foolish little legs like one of those German clockwork toys, ingenious but unlikeable.

  Jurnet greeted the roadie with, ‘Congratulations!’

  ‘What you buggering round here again for?’ was the gracious response. ‘There’s already been enough bloody bluebottles buzzin’ around to fill the Albert Hall, standing room only.’

  ‘You don’t know how lucky you are. One murder in the family, you can always assume it’s a one-off, which it usually is. But two, that’s an entirely different kettle of fish. It means somebody’s found out that murder’s a useful tool to have around the house. You’d be surprised how easily two murders can blossom into three, or four, or even more. The more you do it, the more you can think of somebody else who’d be improved out of all recognition by being dead. If I was in your shoes I’d jump for joy every time a copper came within hailing distance.’