Death of a God Read online

  Guido Scarlett scowled. ‘Still don’t give you no reason to drive Queenie round the bend.’

  ‘What’s the matter? Wax in your ears? Don’t tell me you weren’t listening to every word I said. Drive her round the bend! She even asked me to the wedding! Look –’ Jurnet said, making a last attempt to get on terms with the prickly customer – ‘you probably think she’s taking her dad’s death very well – no screams, no carry-on. So she is, up to a point. Only it’s part of my job to have experience in such matters, and you can take it from me, it’s too early to tell.

  It hasn’t hit her yet, but when it does, there’s no knowing how it’ll take her. All I’m doing is warning you to look out for the signs.’

  ‘Don’t you bleeding well tell me how to look after Queenie!’

  The detective sighed. ‘In that case, I’ll change the subject –’ changing his tone to match – ‘to one I’ve raised with you before. Let’s see if we can do better second time round, shall we? Namely, what Loy and Punchy King were chewing the rag over, after the concert.’

  ‘Go an’ bounce your balls!’

  ‘In that case, I’ll have to go back and have another word with Queenie.’ Jurnet took a step or two, back towards the Dormobile.

  ‘Leave her be!’ The man waited for the detective to stop and turn. Then he muttered, ‘What the hell! Can’t make no difference now.’

  His voice, when he spoke again, was, for Guido Scarlett, conciliatory. ‘I didn’t want her involved, tha’s all. I knew, when those two used to get talking, and it was something she’d rather not know about because it could get them all into trouble she’d shut off – not hear a bleeding word they spoke, innocent as a lamb. But I knew you’d never buy it.’

  ‘So – what were they saying?’

  ‘Something about a boat. Whatever you say, I couldn’t hear more than snatches here and there. Punchy said something about the old one being past it, and they’d have to get themselves another, with a better engine. An’ then Loy asking how much Punchy reckoned a new boat would cost; and after that, a lot of argy-bargy about money. I couldn’t hear the details.’

  ‘What was your impression? That Punchy was trying to touch him for a loan, or that the two of them were in it together?’

  The roadie was silent, his brows knit, eyes brooding. Then he sighed. He seemed to be saying goodbye to something, or somebody. ‘Anyone knew Loy, ’d know it couldn’t be either of them things. Loy, he’d never have lent you the dirt under his fingernails. And as for going partners –’ The dark face lit up momentarily at the absurdity of the suggestion.

  ‘What gave Loy his kicks was to start things going, stir the pot, an’ then stand back in the wings splitting his sides watching the others falling flat on their faces –’

  ‘And yet you say you loved him –’

  The dark face twisted painfully.

  ‘We all did. That was the best bloody joke of all.’

  In the lab recreation room, the cross, set up on the centre line of the badminton court, had lost all its magic: merely two planks of wood, placed so, and so. In that setting, held upright by an arrangement of blocks and wires, it looked no more than another piece of PE equipment, on a par with the vaulting horse and the wall bars.

  The room, on the Superintendent’s instructions, had been left unheated. Not so cold as the Market Place on the night of the murder, but cold enough. Concerned to reproduce as faithfully as possible the conditions under which the killer or killers of Loy Tanner had gone about the macabre disposition of his body, he had commanded his men to report for duty in such coats, scarves, caps or anoraks as they deemed sensible wear for a hard frost. Gloves, too, it went without saying. Whatever else the murder/murderers had worn that night, he/she/they had worn gloves.

  Jurnet, sorrier than ever to have begotten such a crackpot enterprise, made one last try.

  ‘I still can’t help thinking, sir, we shouldn’t bother Dr Colton. A dummy would serve the purpose just as well –’

  ‘Absolutely not!’ It was the police surgeon himself who took up the challenge, seeming to take the detective’s suggestion as a personal reflection upon his ability to play the role for which he had been cast. ‘The articulation would be bound to be unsatisfactory, and the distribution of weight all wrong. The outer integument, whatever else it was like, would be nothing like skin.’

  ‘A serious reconstruction for a serious purpose.’ The Superintendent was in high spirits. ‘Check that the door’s locked, Jack, will you, and then bring over that ladder. Now then –’ in tones well suited to a games room, the coach rehearsing the rookies in the ground rules – ‘since there’s nothing to show us the exact placement of the ladder, each of us is to feel free to position it any way he thinks best. And if, in the course of the experiment, you want to move it from one spot to another, that’s OK too, the one reservation being that, in doing so, you never let yourselves forget that Dr Colton, however well he may act the part, is not in fact a cadaver. So whatever you do, don’t drop him on the floor from a great height or we may end up with a different kind of case on our hands.’

  The police surgeon was busy undressing himself. He took off his clothes, bracing himself against the cold, and put them, neatly folded, on top of the vaulting horse. His body, whilst looking older and less flexible than Loy Tanner’s, did indeed bear a remarkable resemblance to that of the murdered pop singer. Neither Jurnet nor the Superintendent had the cheek to point out that, strictly speaking, in the interests of verisimilitude, the doctor ought also to remove the modest trunks which concealed his private parts.

  ‘As for you, Barney –’ the Superintendent concluded his exhortation – ‘you say rigor wasn’t established by the time Tanner was, so to speak, elevated, so for heaven’s sake let yourself go floppy. Don’t forget you’re dead.’

  The doctor unlaced his shoes and removed them: took off his socks before replying. He tucked them into the shoes and placed the pair, nicely aligned, next to the clothes.

  Then he said, with unexpected humour, ‘I hope I’ve met enough of them in my time to know how a properly brought-up corpse behaves in company.’

  Half an hour later, all the participants in the serious reconstruction were ready to agree that a single person, acting on his own, could have crucified Loy Tanner, just about. The Superintendent did it with the neat-fingered precision with which he did everything, only his forehead, shining with perspiration, suggesting that any special effort was required to heft a dead man up a ladder, anchor him by his belt to the centre post of a cross, and then, raising the head and the upper part of the torso, secure each arm in turn to the horizontal.

  Through it all, Dr Colton, well versed in the gaucherie of death, lolled too convincingly for comfort. To the others, awaiting their turn, it was a relief to observe that he, too, was sweating.

  Jurnet, while hating every second of it, managed not too badly, aware that he would have done much worse without the Superintendent’s example to follow. Fumbling in his kitchen-sink gloves, he dwelt with hatred on the sight of his superior officer’s elegant hands encased in operating theatre issue, a second skin. It came as no surprise that the Superintendent had not seen fit to requisition a similar pair for each of the team, nor even to strip off his own for re-use, once he had no further need of them.

  Jack Ellers, instructed, for purposes of comparison, to wear his normal winter gloves, made a right muck of it and very nearly of Dr Colton into the bargain. Somehow up-ended, the police surgeon, still heroically shamming dead, hung by one leg, the ladder teetering alarmingly.

  ‘Leave them alone!’ the Superintendent commanded peremptorily, when the other two detectives started forward to render assistance. ‘Jack can do it!’

  And so he could, if a man hanging lopsided by his arms alone – the silver clasp on the late pop singer’s belt having somehow unlatched itself – could properly be called crucified.

  ‘Take a short rest, if you want to,’ the Superintendent suggested graciously, w
hen the doctor had been helped down the ladder, his trembling legs refusing to perform the manoeuvre for him. Once down, he squatted cross-legged on the board floor, inhaling chestily. Sid Hale went over to the horse and brought back the man’s jacket, draping it over his shoulders with the exaggerated tenderness which he often called in aid to avoid any suspicion of soft-heartedness.

  Even so, listening to Colton’s laboured breathing, he let the camouflage slip, and addressed the Superintendent. ‘I should say he’s had as much as he can take, sir.’

  ‘Oh! Do you think so?’

  The police surgeon caught the note of exasperation, and lifted his head, controlling his voice with an effort. ‘I shall be quite all right, once I get my breath back.’

  The Superintendent looked closer, and put on his charming face.

  ‘Barney, I’m nominating you for an Oscar! A magnificent performance! Go and get yourself dressed, man, before you catch cold. Even lacking Sid’s contribution, I think we can say that we’ve proved our point – demonstrated that, at the same time as we are looking for a pair, a trio, a quartet, a coachload of villains who may have done for Loy Tanner, we are equally looking for a single killer.’

  Jack Ellers was looking green – as indeed they all were, in varying degrees, even the Superintendent. It was as if, in placing a man on a cross, they had each received some private intimation of what the real thing had been like. The little Welshman blurted out, ‘Whoever did it, whatever else he was, he was sick. Isn’t that right, Doctor?’

  Colton, fumbling with his shirt buttons, was glad of the excuse to take five.

  ‘Not my field, I’m thankful to say. My clients are beyond such questions. Still, it’s a sobering thought that the corpse of Einstein possesses no more reasoning powers than that of a mentally retarded infant.’

  ‘You know what’s going to happen once we make an arrest?’ The Superintendent spoke with resignation. ‘The shrinks will move in from all points of the compass. As if one needed to be told that murder could never be normal!’

  Looking from one to another of the little gathering: ‘Haven’t we all noticed, taking depositions, even where the accused professes terrible remorse, how often a kind of gruesome pride creeps in unbidden – an enlargement of personality which seems to come with discovering yourself capable of committing an act so far beyond the bounds of the permissible –’

  From across the room, knotting his tie, Dr Colton nodded agreement. ‘A feeling which could even affect physical performance –’

  ‘Are you saying that a person who doesn’t ordinarily possess the physical strength to hoist a body on to that cross might, in that temporary state of euphoria, be up to it?’

  ‘As I’ve said, I’m not the person to ask. But it certainly would not surprise me.’

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Jurnet was climbing the castle mound.

  Crossing the Market Place, below the little garden where kids with reversed guitars still stood guard at each corner of the murdered pop star’s symbolic tomb, he had happened to look eastward up Lion Yard, the pedestrian way which cut through to the Castle Bailey, and seen the Norman keep high on its mound above the city.

  Probably it was the sun, pale but convalescent, which had tempted the detective’s steps away from the path of duty. The great building of creamy stone bulked four-square against a sky of gentle blue. Here and there on the grassy slopes that rose steeply from the Bailey some early daffodils were already trumpeting the spring. Jurnet, moved by God alone knew what vernal madness, had bought himself a doughnut.

  Punishing himself for his truancy, he ignored the fine stone bridge which leaped across the chasm which separated the castle from the rest of the city, and toiled up the mound itself, using the track – part path, part stair – which zigzagged up to the plateau at the summit, Halfway there, at a little nook furnished with a wooden bench, he stopped to get his breath back, and partake of refreshment.

  There, out of the wind, the sun was warm, the view tremendous. But alas, as with so many things in life, the idea of a doughnut was better than the actuality. It was messy, the jam oozing, the sugar a film of crystalline glue. Even after vigorous rubbing with his handkerchief, the detective’s fingers and mouth still felt sticky.

  Jurnet’s disillusion was not assuaged, either, by the sudden recollection that long ago, on that very seat, he had sat, one summer evening, with a girl whose name he had forgotten – Sandra Something, was it? – a pretty girl wearing a dress crackling with the petticoats they were wearing that year, and shoes with spike heels that made her legs look almost as good as Marilyn Monroe’s. She hadn’t found it easy, in those shoes, to mount to this eyrie to which he had led her with lecherous intent, but she had persevered good-humouredly enough, doubtless anticipating felicities which would make the journey worthwhile.

  What had happened was nothing. Jurnet discovered that twenty years later the memory of that non-event could still bring a blush to his cheek. He had been afraid to so much as touch the girl’s hand, until at last she had stood up, stiff with starch and boredom; called out derisively, ‘Ta ta, Romeo!’ and gone stumbling downhill on her spindly heels in search of boys who, if they didn’t yet know everything, at least knew enough to be going on with.

  Seen close to, the castle stopped being a picture postcard and stood forth in all its stony heartlessness – a fortress built by foreign conquerors, not to protect the city, but to keep it under. Nasty little shafts of chill, tumbling down its walls from some polar repository above, sent Jurnet moving out of their shadow as if out of javelin range, towards the high railings which protected visitors from the cliff edge beyond. In all the wide gravelled space which surrounded the keep, only one person was to be seen: a woman sitting on a camp stool, a large drawing-pad on her knees, making a view of the city.

  Hunched over her work though she was, something about the set of her shoulders seemed familiar to Jurnet. As he drew nearer, scrunching the gravel, the woman looked up with a wary expression which changed instantly to a smile of warm recognition.

  ‘Inspector Jurnet! This is a strange place to run into you!’

  ‘I could say the same.’ Jurnet shook Mrs Felsenstein’s hand, proffered across her drawing pad. ‘Except –’ with a sideways twist of the head, the better to see the sketch she had been working on – ‘now that I’ve seen that, not strange at all. I didn’t know you were an artist.’

  ‘Nothing so grand, I’m afraid. I just felt I had to have some air, and as I enjoy sketching when I get the chance –’ She let the rest of the sentence go; stood up, closed her pad, and carefully placed it on her stool.

  ‘Now I’ve interrupted you.’

  ‘Not at all! I’m so glad to see you, I can’t tell you –’

  Again the woman broke off, this time apparently in some difficulty. The detective thought she looked a bit peaky, though the impression of inward strength which had struck him earlier was undiminished.

  ‘How can I help?’

  Mrs Felsenstein did not answer immediately: she turned towards the railings and looked out over the city. Then she said, with a little shiver, ‘This is a hateful place, really. I don’t know why I come here. This great pile of earth – did you know there used to be a hundred Saxon homes on this spot, before the Normans came and started to build the castle? And that when some of the home-owners protested, they knocked the houses down anyway, and buried them and the protesters together?’

  She gave a little deprecatory smile.

  ‘Sometimes – I know it’s silly – I find myself imagining that they’re still down there, those buried people, living their Saxon lives as if there’d never been any 1066 and all that: and that one day, out of all that nice municipal grass, I’ll see a hand sticking up and it’s an Anglo-Saxon trying to get out.’

  Jurnet laughed. ‘That’s a bit morbid, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’ the woman agreed readily. ‘I’m afraid I do have a rather morbid imagination. But
this is the place to encourage it.’ This time she looked upward, to the castle ramparts. ‘They say that Robert Tanner’s bones hung there for more than fifty years. Just to remind the citizens of Angleby what happened to people who tried to make life better for the poor and oppressed. There’s a story that every time another one of them fell down – sometimes it was as big as a thigh bone, sometimes as small as the joint of a little finger – that same night one or other of the Tanner family would swim the moat – there was water in it still in those days – climb the castle mound and whip it away. When, at long last, they finally collected the whole skeleton, they took it to Wendham, where he came from, and buried it near the church altar.’

  Mara Felsenstein, neé Tanner, sighed. ‘A hundred years ago, the local squire had Wendham church done over – the old flagstones taken up, and shiny tiles put down in their place. The workmen found some bones: well, old churches were full of old bones, and if you held up work to give all of them a consecrated burial, you’d never be done. So they chucked them out with the rest of the rubbish, and got on with laying the new floor.’

  The woman turned back to the detective, astonishing him afresh with the candid beauty of her eyes. A little smile emerged at the corners of her mouth, and retreated again.

  ‘You’ll say I’m being morbid again, and perhaps I am. I keep thinking of Robert Tanner, and I want Loy buried, not left dangling from the ramparts, as it were. Not because I’m religious, because I’m not, at all. I just want his life brought to a decent close, one decent, ordinary people can accept.