Death of a God Read online

  ‘Without a funeral and a grave –’ she was speaking rapidly now, urgent to get what she had to say over and done with – ‘without people coming in for a ham tea after the service, there’s no ending I can take hold of, only the hateful violence that stopped him breathing. He’s not alive any more, I can face that if I have to, but so long as he’s lying in that mortuary, he isn’t dead either. I can’t go on to the next thing. And I have to go on to it. Leo’s ill. He needs all my care and all my love, and I can’t give him either, not properly, so long as Loy’s life and death remain incomplete.’

  ‘Buried or unburied, that’s the way they’ll stay till we catch whoever killed him.’ Moved by the sorrow in her face: ‘Don’t fret yourself. One thing’s not dependent on the other. I’m afraid there’s nothing I personally can do about advancing the date of the inquest; but once it’s over the body will be handed over without messing about.’

  ‘Will it? Oh, I hope so.’

  ‘I’ll tell you one thing, though.’ No good, Jurnet thought, the woman deluding herself. ‘You’ll have a job keeping your son’s funeral quiet. And once the media cotton on to who you are –’

  ‘I shan’t care about that,’ she replied with surprising nonchalance. ‘It’s the way of life he chose. If he leaves it with all that show business and publicity I can only suppose that’s the way he would have wanted to go. I can put up with it, if I have to.’

  ‘Once it’s over,’ she continued, with that devastating honesty which went with her eyes, ‘Leo and I can settle down, not as if nothing had happened, but to some semblance of peace and quiet again. After all, we saw him so seldom, once he’d left home. In time, it will all seem like a dream. We’ll be asking each other if it really happened.’

  ‘You’re not likely to be left in much doubt about that. Don’t forget your son must have been a very rich man.’

  ‘That’s nothing to me.’ The woman stared at the detective in sudden alarm.

  ‘Naturally, we’ve been making enquiries, if only to see who could have had a vested interest in wanting him out of the way. I don’t think I’m letting you into any secrets when I say there’s a strong likelihood that, whoever else may benefit – depending on whether a will does or doesn’t turn up – you must be in line to come into money, a lot of it.’

  ‘No!’ Mrs Felsenstein cried out in distress. She had become very pale. ‘I don’t want it! I don’t have to take it if I don’t want to!’

  ‘Absolutely correct!’ Jurnet said soothingly. ‘Sorry if I spoke out of turn. Don’t often come into contact with somebody who actively doesn’t want to be rich – in fact, this is my first time ever, and probably my last! If you really don’t choose to benefit from Loy’s estate, I’m sure the Treasury will be only too glad to take it off your hands. I was thinking more of Mr Felsenstein, actually. How you’ll be able to provide all sorts of comforts for him, take him on holidays –’

  ‘We do go on holidays! Every May we hire a car and we have the most wonderful week driving round Norfolk and Suffolk visiting all the sites Leo used to be so interested in –’

  ‘With your own car, if I may say so, you wouldn’t be restricted to just one week in the year. But there! You don’t need my advice on how to live.’

  ‘No,’ she returned stiffly. Then, melting: ‘I’m sure you mean well. It’s just that –’ faltering a little – ‘I dont’t know how much longer Leo and I have together. I don’t want anything to disturb it.’

  In a rather agitated way, unlike her usual air of quiet containment, she folded up her camp stool, tucked her pad under her arm, and bade the detective good-bye. Jurnet thought it better not to suggest accompanying her. He watched her move away in the direction of the bridge, walking fast. In motion her body possessed a distinction not apparent in repose. If she’d lived in one of those countries where women went about with pots on their heads, Jurnet reflected, she’d have managed fine.

  As he turned to leave, back down the steps and past the bench where nothing had happened, something lying on the gravel caught his eye: a small tin of dull metal which Mrs Felsenstein must have dropped without noticing.

  He picked the tin up and opened it. Inside were a stick of charcoal and a number of pencils beautifully sharpened, only one pointbeheaded by the fall. The name Mara Tanner was scratched roughly, as with a compass point, on the inside of the lid.

  The detective put the tin in his pocket. He would be seeing Mrs Felsenstein again, that was certain.

  Chapter Thirty

  Jurnet came up the stairs carrying a carton packed with two dozen cans of baked beans. He hoped it wasn’t the same with cats as it was with people. For himself, he had only to fall for a special offer, the large economy size, two for the price of one, for him to go off whatever it was that was being offered for the rest of his natural.

  Approaching his landing, sounds from Mrs Petherton’s flat across the way informed him that this was one of those days when that lady’s Happiness at the Hacienda Wine Bar had prolonged itself beyond the appointed Hour. Her gramophone was on.

  Mrs Petherton’s gramophone, a massive construction wound up by a handle with the kick of a Kalashnikov, was encased in a mahogany cabinet pockmarked by shrapnel, its lower half opening by double doors on to a record store, 78s all of them, their surfaces corrugated by time and war and steel needles used too many times over, but once as blackly shining as the brilliantined hair of the young men who had long ago danced to them, partnering girls with tiny breasts.

  The gramophone stood on its own circular rug in the centre of Mrs Petherton’s living-room, at once a cenotaph and a phoenix, the sole survivor of Mrs Petherton’s furnishings, blitzed together with the building which gave them shelter on a night of 1942. Amazingly, as its grateful owner never tired of recounting, not only had the machine itself survived intact, but the records equally.

  Mrs Petherton did not often mention that the same providence which had miraculously preserved her gramophone had at the same time seen fit to obliterate her husband and her five-year-old daughter, dug out of the rubble three days later.

  ‘I’ll see you again, (sang the record on Mrs Petherton’s gramophone)

  Whenever spring breaks through again.

  Time may lie heavy betwee – twee – twee –’

  Jurnet sighed. He was familiar with ‘betwee – twee – twee –’. On ordinary days, within a second or two, Mrs Petherton’s neat little heels could be heard clicking across the floor, and flick! the needle was over the hump and running in the groove again as sweetly as anyone could wish. Today, obviously, it was a matter of waiting until the spring unwound itself, ‘twee-twee-tweeeeee-ing’ down to ginny silence.

  The cat was not on the doormat. Not that the detective had expected it there. He had got into the habit of leaving the bathroom window open, and the cat of availing itself of the facility.

  Indoors, it was – not waiting, for that would have implied a need of him which Jurnet would never have had the conceit to presume – but there; coiled in the armchair, not moving when the detective sat down on the edge of it to take off his shoes, except to raise a desultory paw and claw a few strands out of his jacket sleeve.

  Jurnet slipped out of the coat, and said, ‘High time I got myself a new one,’ only to blush for his foolishness. If things had come as far as talking to animals, things had come a sight too far.

  The cat did not even have a name, or if it did, it was a secret, not to be advertised to every Tom, Dick or Harry who chanced along. Somehow, Jurnet felt obscurely, if ever he came to deserve knowing the cat’s name, it would be vouchsafed to him.

  He opened a can of the beans, set it out in a bowl, and filled the cat’s saucer with milk. ‘Cat’s saucer’: he liked that. Of such trifles was home made.

  It gave him the courage to ring up Miriam and ask her why Jews in a house of mourning covered up their mirrors. It was a point which had bothered him off and on ever since his visit to Lenny Bale.

  Miriam sounded pleased to he
ar from him, but annoyed to be asked; but perhaps that was only because she didn’t know the answer.

  ‘If it’s that important, why don’t you ring up Rabbi Schnellman and ask him yourself?’

  ‘I would,’ Jurnet replied, not without malice, ‘except I thought it might be a bit awkward if he asks me about the Seder. If he wants to know why I’m not coming tomorrow after all, I’ll have to say, won’t I, that you told me not to?’

  ‘Sod you,’ said Miriam, ‘and happy Passover.’

  She rang off.

  Half an hour later, she phoned back.

  ‘I spoke to the Rabbi, and he says it’s nothing to do with anybody having died, it’s to do with praying. He says you must never pray in front of a mirror because, even if you don’t consciously intend it, it’s as if you’re bowing down to an image – to that most potent of false gods, is how he put it – an image of yourself. Well, you know how many people can turn up at a shiva – often by the time they’re ready to say prayers the living-room’s jammed to the doors. Without meaning to, you could easily find yourself staring straight into a looking-glass.

  ‘And so they cover them up – only where people happen to be praying, not anywhere else in the house – just to be on the safe side. Is that what you wanted?’

  ‘Exactly what I wanted. Ta very much,’ said Jurnet. ‘A happy Passover, and sod you too.’

  Later, in the bathroom, shaving in front of the mirror in the ever delusive hope that, for once, the rampant stubble would not require an additional pruning back next morning, he surveyed his own reflection and decided you would have indeed to be hard up for a god, if that was the best you could come up with.

  Gods should be cool and inscrutable. That was why the Ancient Egyptians had worshipped cats. Strange squeaks and mews summoning him back to the living-room, he found his own cool and inscrutable feline rolling about the floor enmeshed in knitting wool. From some crevice it had unearthed one of Miriam’s samples, and from some place still more submerged a memory of its own kittenhood – if indeed it had ever had one, streetwise as it was. It tumbled about the room in ecstasy, the velvet fur rumpled into fluff, paws shadowboxing, eyes hugely staring: a moment of complete relaxation, collapsed like a spent balloon, and then it was off again.

  For a little, Jurnet watched entranced. Then, not sure he was doing the right thing, he found some scissors and carefully cut the animal free. It seemed neither pleased nor sorry to be back to the inscrutability bit again.

  Gorged on baked beans, and wondering if the cat felt as flatulent as he did, the detective went to bed early, setting the alarm of the bedside clock, but turning its hateful, spastic display away from him.

  One day, he promised himself, when he had solved the Loy Tanner murder case, he would drive out with it to the country, open the car door, and set it free. Jurnet lay back in bed, picturing the clock as it disappeared into the distance in little hops, skips and jumps tic, tic, tic – until it was out of sight and gone for ever. Only the possibility that it might find a mate, multiply like mink, of digital displays winking like mad from every burrow and hedge bottom, held him back.

  Mrs Petherton had found the strength to wind up the gramophone. She had put on an old favourite which Jurnet, who knew the record only too well, had rechristened ‘Tiptoe Through the Hiccups’. Detective and gramophone belched in unison.

  It was not the most encouraging milieu for logical thought, so that it was not surprising that Jurnet found it hard to marshal his thoughts on the death of Loy Tanner into anything approaching an orderly progression. Instead, they fluttered about him like butterflies, just out of reach. They settled with wings folded, pretending they weren’t there at all; though he knew, with an almost obsessional certainty, that they had only to spread themselves out in the sunlight – stay still for a moment, blast them – for him to read there all he needed to know.

  Sinking turgidly towards sleep, he found himself thinking of a woman. Nothing unusual about that, except that, in some way his tired brain could not unravel, he seemed still to hold the dead pop star in the forefront of his mind; and the woman, for once, wasn’t Miriam, but a stumpy figure with dugs down to her what’s-it – the Hob’s Hole Venus.

  There was nothing erotic about his fantasy: on the contrary, the Venus scared the pants off him with her fierce, all-consuming concentration on the life growing inside her. Jurnet, who often thought about the children he and Miriam would one day make together, tossed uneasily on his bed. Was the message that once he had performed his crude, biological function he would lose her; not as at present, for a few days, or weeks, but for good – the child to be born not the visible consummation of their love, but its sworn enemy?

  On the edge of oblivion he wondered blurrily why on earth the yobbo who’d mucked up the Venus had gone for her breasts when what she was crying out for was a bloody great boot in the belly.

  Chapter Thirty One

  ‘And one Good Friday, after a hundred years had passed, a bloke called Prince Charming hacked his way through the undergrowth and woke up the Sleeping Beauty with a kiss –’ Jack Ellers broke off and looked about him with qualified approval. ‘Pity there only seems to have been one of them. Beauties, I mean. The wicked spell may have been broken, I’ve still only seen one pair of legs worthy of the name since we started walking.’

  ‘It’s a family resort. Kids and grannies.’

  Jurnet screwed up his eyes against the sun. He at least was in no mood to be critical. Havenlea had awoken from its winter’s sleep. The wind was still distinctly nippy, wrack littered the beaches, the strong light rendered cruelly explicit the shabbiness of the sea-front shelters and bathing huts, but what the hell! The season had begun, and for once the sun and a public holiday had made it together. Dogs were barking, children running, mothers calling: families down on the sands staking out tribal encampments with windbreaks of striped canvas.

  Early in the day as it was, cars were already cruising slowly along the front in search of a parking space.

  ‘If you really want to see a sexy pair of legs,’ Jurnet suggested, ‘take off your shoes and socks, stroll down to the water, roll up your trousers, and give everyone a treat.’

  They had wasted a couple of hours, but Jurnet bore no ill will for that. It was the kind of courtesy to be expected from a man like Bloater Herring that he should have invited the Angleby detectives to sit in on the Havenlea conference with the regional drug squad; and to have declined the invitation would have been churlish in the extreme. Jammed into the room which was barely large enough to house that giant of a man on his own, let alone in conference, Jurnet would have regretted his own politeness had not the Detective Chief Inspector been such a likeable man. As it was, he had listened with every appearance of intelligent interest with, this time, not even a glimpse out of the window to divert him, to an hour or more of the obsessive statistics which, with such specialized units, as he knew from experience, passed for conversation. Just as he had expected, neither the regional squad nor the Detective Chief Inspector himself had had a single thing to contribute which might bring them closer to either Loy Tanner’s or Punchy King’s murderer.

  Now, nearing the place where the Punch and Judy man’s tent had stood, he was not surprised to find a sizeable crowd, constantly replenished, gazing down at the patch of sand where a life had come to a violent end. One cheeky little boy, greatly daring, jumped down from the promenade on to the fatal spot, where he stood shifting from one foot to the other, looking up at the rest for their admiration. Proud of himself, but suddenly fearful.

  ‘You come back here this minute, Darren!’ his mother commanded; and Darren, for once obedient, dashed for the nearest steps, thankful to be delivered without loss of face.

  Convenient to the scene of the crime, the bar at the Haven Hotel was doing sensational business. Enormous as the room was, it was packed wall to wall. At the sight of the crowd, Jurnet nearly retreated. He had been hoping for a quiet drink in a room as empty as on his earlier visit
, with, given a bit of luck, occasion for a word with the barman – not enough to constitute a questioning, which would have been quite improper without prior clearance with Havenlea, but, well, a word.

  Sergeant Ellers asked, ‘Shall we try somewhere else?’

  ‘Might as well.’ Then: ‘Hold on a minute! What’s that?’

  The detectives painstakingly worked their way to the bar where two large-bosomed ladies of mature years were helping out the barman. One of these asked Jurnet, ‘What’s yours, love?’ and looked understandably put out when he ignored her, edging away along the counter to where the barman stood drawing a pint.

  Jurnet pointed and said, ‘Where did that come from?’

  Punch sat at his ease, high on one of the shelves at the back of the bar. Legs crossed, one hand affectionately cupping the great hook of his nose, he leaned nonchalantly against a cluster of Johnny Walkers, surveying the crowded room with a bright-eyed insolence. In the smoke-laden atmosphere of the place, Jurnet, for a ridiculous moment, had the impression that the puppet had favoured him with a nod.

  The barman, too rushed for chat, rang up the money for the beer, and said offhandedly, before turning away to the next customer, ‘Another one of Punchy’s.’

  ‘Just a minute!’ The detective intervened with enough authority in his voice to bring the man back, face red with annoyance. ‘How and when did it come into your possession?’

  ‘Who the hell wants to know?’

  Jurnet took out his ID card.

  ‘Christ! Not another one! What is this, a persecution? I already spoke to you lot. Told you everything I knew, which was strictly nix.’

  The man was overdoing it. Jurnet took a chance, and said, ‘You never showed the police officer that.’

  ‘Yeah – well.’ The man changed tone, became ingratiating. ‘Punchy only left it night before he was done in, didn’t he? And when those other guys came round it completely slipped my mind. When Punchy give it me, I just stuck it in the cupboard, way I always did, and never gave it another thought. It was only this morning, looking for some extra space for the tonic waters, that I came on it, and thought to myself, now Punchy’s gone, this here’s what they call a conversation plece, and stuck it up where you see it now. Punchy’s never coming back for it, poor sod, that’s for sure.’