Ritual Murder Read online

  “Once you’re at school,” Jurnet told Willie, “they’ll give you a hot dinner every day.”

  “Wi’ bangers?”

  “Twice or three times a week, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  The child considered the paradisiacal prospect.

  “Nah,” he said at last.

  “How’s that? Don’t you want to learn to read and write?”

  Willie lifted his head and looked Jurnet full in the face.

  “Who’d be wi’ Ma?”

  Jurnet smiled into the fair little face, at once so young and so old. The only thought that came into his head—if thought was the right word for it—was the one that, earlier that morning, he had read twice over, proclaimed in capitals on the cathedral walls.

  SOD GOD. Sod the God that for His own sodding reasons had made things the way they were.

  The thought was cathartic. Having got it out of his system, Jurnet recognized the irrelevance of peevish abuse. Millie’s boy, despite being Millie’s boy, was quick as a whip. And as to Millie herself, who did the detective know happier than this twenty-two-year-old woman with the mental age of an eight-year-old child?

  Certainly Millie’s own luck, in a world teeming with agencies panting to get their well-meaning paws on those in her condition, had verged on the miraculous. The offspring of an alcoholic mother and an incestuous father, she had, lacking the brains to know better, taken the drunkenness for jollity and the incest for a natural demonstration of paternal love. Joe Fisher had got her pregnant below the age of consent, but because he had married her on her sixteenth birthday there had seemed no point in sending to prison the one man prepared to look after the backward girl.

  And look after her he had, in his own way. Even the succession of social workers who had threaded their eager way between the scrapheaps had, baffled by a radiance unchronicled in the text-books, given up trying to make Millie clean and miserable.

  Against all the odds, she had turned out a wonderful mother. Willie, fed on chips and God alone knew what else once her milk dried up, grew straight-limbed and intelligent.

  What would happen to the two of them when the truant officer came looking for young Willie, as sooner or later he must: when, the ins and outs of the ownership of that bit of riverside slum finally sorted out, men came with a Court order and a tractor to drag the trailer out on to the road?

  Millie smiled at Jurnet across a table covered with oilcloth whereon means innumerable had inscribed their autobiographies. If she had not been a mental defective he would have said she had read his thoughts. As it was, he guessed that, seeing him preoccupied, she had merely, out of the riches of her own overflowing cornucopia, proffered her unfailing panacea.

  “Joe’ll see to it.”

  Chapter Four

  Jurnet dropped Miriam off at night school and drove on to the synagogue. She had said not to pick her up on his way back: she fancied sleeping at home for a change.

  “I need to use my sewing machine. And I promised Mum I’d pop up to London for a week or two. She reminded me on the phone it’s three months since she last saw me. Besides, I feel like being virginal for a bit.” Which was daft talk if ever he heard it, after all they had done together.

  She had promised to marry him if he became a Jew: a mere formality, it had seemed, to one who found no more difficulty in disbelieving in one God than in three. A parting with a bit of skin that had never served any useful purpose anyway. Remembering the welcome accorded at his Chapel to those who asked to be received into the brotherhood, he had expected his conversion to take a matter of weeks. But here was Miriam into Book-Binding, having worked her way through Macramé, the Golden Years of Hollywood, and the Economic Consequences of the Black Death. What was going to happen when she ran out of courses?

  Parking in the synagogue forecourt, Jurnet saw that the lights were out in the Rabbi’s flat above the synagogue hall: but, from below, the slam of table-tennis balls told where the action was. The blood-curdling howl that accompanied this sporting tympani like something serial out of Webern emanated, Jurnet knew, from Taleh the Alsatian, whose name, the Hebrew for “lamb”, reflecting the gentle nature housed in the fearsome exterior, was a secret closely guarded by the Angleby Jewish community. Since the Rabbi had brought himself to give house-room to a creature unhallowed and unclean, there had been no more swastikas scrawled on the walls of the little building in the quiet suburban street, no deaths to Christ-killers, no invitations to improbable copulations.

  Jurnet came into the synagogue hall in the middle of a rally that neither his entrance nor Taleh’s welcome did anything to interrupt. It was absurd that Rabbi Leo Schnellman played table-tennis at all, let alone played it to near-international standards. The man was fat, his legs too short for his body, his arms, beneath the rolled-up shirt sleeves, flabby and varicose. Jurnet, waiting for the game to finish, noted the sweat stains that darkened the armpits, the belt straining to contain the jouncing paunch, the glistening bald head to which a tiny yarmulke clung like a desperate limpet.

  He also noted the face of the Rabbi’s opponent, the young man he had last seen smoking, his feet through the cathedral floor.

  The Rabbi must have noted it too, for suddenly, without any apparent diminution in the strength of his game, the luck began to go against him. It was very cleverly done, a losing by stealth that took more skill than winning. From 13–17 the younger man improved his position until the score was 19–16 in his favour; then went on to take the game with two strokes which the Rabbi, with exquisite misjudgment, just failed to reach.

  Moses Epperstein put his bat down and said, with complacent disapproval, “The trouble with you, Rabbi, is, you don’t play to win.”

  “Oh, yes, I do,” said the Rabbi. “Only not the game.” He wiped his face with a crumpled handkerchief. “Ben!” he exclaimed warmly. Then: “You two know each other? Mosh Epperstein. Detective-Inspector Benjamin Jurnet.”

  “Jesus!” said Mosh Epperstein. “The fuzz!”

  “The fuzz,” said Jurnet, catching up with a bit of unfinished business that had bothered him all day, off and on, “that was with the Dean when he caught you smoking. Care to tell me what brand?”

  “Go and screw yourself.”

  Ignoring the injunction, and with a demure sideways glance at the Rabbi, Jurnet observed, “I’m surprised, Leo, that after being half-stoned on pot this morning, this fellow had the wind to take a game off you.”

  Epperstein exclaimed, “Prove it! And I’ll take a game off you too, any time you say!”

  “No more Ping-Pong,” said Leo Schnellman, reducing the game and the tension at one go. “Ben’s not here to play games. It’s the beer he’s after. Come on upstairs. I’ve got half a dozen cans on ice.”

  “So you’ve been in the cathedral?” Leo Schnellman leaned back in his Louis Seize armchair, making it cry out in protest. Louis Seize-Who, thought Jurnet, making for the leather pouffe, a souvenir of Israel, which he considered the only seat in the room to be relied on. The flat’s furnishings were a memorial to the taste of the Rabbi’s dead wife, and, as such, sacrosanct. Epperstein, similarly distrustful, stretched out his gangling length in front of the electric fire, Taleh arranging herself alongside; her muzzle, across the young man’s legs, perilously close to the red-hot bars.

  “What did you think of it?” the Rabbi persisted.

  “Big,” replied Jurnet, in a voice that implied “not much.”

  “It is, isn’t it? But then Gentiles, unlike the Jews, haven’t had the destruction of two Temples to make them wonder whether the Almighty is really all that comfortable in large structures.”

  “All that stone. It might as well be the Castle.”

  “But that’s exactly what it is—a fortress, to take heaven by assault, not supplication.” The Rabbi drank some beer, wiped the foam from his lips. “Though perhaps one should call it a ship, rather—a great stone ship. Did you know that the word ‘nave’ comes from the Latin navis, a ship?”

  “
I wouldn’t give you tuppence for it,” declared Jurnet.

  “Funny that, with a name like yours,” commented Epperstein from the hearthrug.

  Jurnet said resignedly, “Oh, that! Everyone picks on that, sooner or later. Couldn’t expect you to miss it—just up your alley. Jurnet of Angleby, the Rothschild of the Middle Ages—loans to build cathedrals, launch crusades, arranged on favourable terms. My old man, umpteen generations removed. Maybe. Could be just a coincidence, to say nothing of Edward I booting the Jews out of England anyway.”

  Rabbi Schnellman said with severity, “To say nothing of your not being a Jew either.”

  Jurnet, seething with unexpected fury, got up to go.

  “Sit down, Ben,” said the Rabbi, smiling up at him without apology. “And take that look off your face. You aren’t a Jew yet and you’d better not forget it—just a chap who’s ready to make a few formalized gestures because that’s the only way he can get a nice Jewish girl to make an honest man of him. Not good enough! His prepuce is only the first sacrifice a Jew makes to his God.”

  “What’s the second?” Jurnet sat down again.

  “The rest of him.”

  “You don’t ask much.”

  “Not me,” said the Rabbi. “I don’t make the rules.”

  Mosh Epperstein grinned at Jurnet with the first sign of friendliness he had shown. “You must be out of your tiny mind.”

  Leo Schnellman got up and replenished the beer glasses. He put down a saucer and poured a little for Taleh, who lapped it up with the air of a connoisseur.

  “That’s because you haven’t seen Miriam,” he remarked. “What we have to do is convince the man there’s more to Judaism than a pretty face.”

  “Anyone called Jurnet ought to know that in his bones. Anyone in Angleby, for that matter, who knows the first thing about what happened here.”

  “Little St Ulf, you mean?” Jurnet asked. The other nodded. “For that matter—” getting his own back—“I must say I was a bit surprised to find a chap called Epperstein helping to dig him up, of all people. Let sleeping lies lie, I should’ve thought.”

  “Trust a copper to go for a cover-up!” Epperstein pushed Taleh’s head off his legs and stood up, tall and so thin as to appear, almost, two-dimensional. “It’s people like you get history a bad name.”

  “Look,” Jurnet said, reasonably, “it was—how many years ago?

  Five hundred? Six? There has to come a time to close the books once and for all. I don’t know the details—”

  “Eight hundred and forty.” It was the Rabbi who interrupted, an unaccustomed heaviness in his voice. “And it’s high time you did.”

  Chapter Five

  “Oddly enough,” Mosh Epperstein began, speaking as if he had been there, “it was a moment when, for once, the Jews and the Gentiles of Angleby were getting on like a house on fire. Sure, the Jews went on living in Cobblegate right under the Castle walls so that, in an emergency, they could get themselves inside the gates and under the Sheriff’s protection before it came to anything, but it was years since they’d had any cause to worry. Most of the bad feeling against the Jews, when you came down to it, wasn’t religious at all, but because they were the tax-collectors and the money-lenders, not exactly popular professions in any age; but as there’d been a series of good harvests and trade was flourishing, people were able to pay their taxes and the interest on loans without too much hassle.”

  “If it got them such a bad name,” Jurnet asked, “why didn’t they go in for some other line of business?”

  “Not a hope. All the other jobs were organized into guilds. Christian closed shops. A little butchering and baking strictly for themselves, some dealing in secondhand clothes, and apart from usury that was it.”

  “And medicine,” Leo Schnellman put in. “Don’t forget about Haim HaLevi.”

  “How could I? One of my main characters. There was this doctor, Haim HaLevi, who had a tremendous reputation locally. Gentiles, actually, weren’t allowed to consult Jewish doctors, but everyone knew Haim had cured the Bishop of Angleby himself when his own doctor’d given him up for dead, so no one took the ban seriously.”

  “Except the Gentile doctors of the city,” the Rabbi reminded him.

  “That’s right! They were livid about the competition, and they complained to the Sheriff—only, as Haim had just got him over a nasty case of piles, they didn’t get much sympathy in that quarter either.

  “That’s how things stood the Easter it all happened. It was one of those years with Easter and Passover falling at the same time; and as a result there was a run on flour for holiday baking. Wastel flour, the finest white, something people in those days only tasted on high days and holidays, was what was wanted, and there simply wasn’t enough of the stuff to go round.

  “One of the people who ran out was a pastrycook called Godefric. So he sent his son Ulf, who was twelve years old and learning the business, with a wheelbarrow and some money to go and get some more from a guy named Josce Morel, who baked the matzoth for the Angleby Jews.

  “And that was it. Ulf was seen going into Josce Morel’s house, and he was never seen alive again.”

  “Hang on!” the Rabbi exclaimed. “You’re giving Ben the wrong impression. You haven’t made it clear that all we have to go on are monkish chronicles, set down by men blinded by prejudice, and written years after the events they purport to describe—”

  “I’m just telling the story, for Christ’s sake! I didn’t say swallow it hook, line, and sinker. Whether or not Ulf was seen going into Josce Morel’s house, people came forward who swore they’d seen him doing it—that’s the important thing. Two days later, the burnt-out remains of the wheelbarrow were found on Crows Hill, back of the Leper Hospital, and the day after that the kid’s body was found in a disused claypit nearby.”

  Jurnet commented, “Knocked off for the money, most likely, and the killer got rid of the body best way he could.”

  “Thank you, Sherlock Holmes!” Mosh Epperstein bowed his head in ironic acknowledgment. “What makes you think we’re looking for a logical explanation? Don’t they teach you Epperstein’s Law down at the nick—that human readiness to accept an explanation for anything increases in direct proportion to its intrinsic implausibility?”

  Jurnet laughed, unoffended.

  “You’re young to be a cynic.”

  “Mosh?” Leo Schnellman cried. “A starry-eyed romantic who never stops being amazed that human beings don’t behave like angels.” His mood darkening: “Though the way they found Ulf—or the way the story goes that they found him—you can’t blame the ordinary folk of Angleby for believing what they believed.”

  “Emasculated, and with the blood drained out of his veins.” The archaelogy student’s lips twisted in a kind of horrified amusement. “And just in case that wasn’t enough, nineteenth-century embroiderers on the old story added their own delicate touch. In addition to all the rest, they said, the murdered child had a magen doved, a Star of David, cut into his chest and stomach—though, however else the kid was found, it couldn’t have been like that, because it was only in the nineteenth century that the Star of David became accepted as a Jewish symbol at all. Still, ex post facto proof’s better than none, as I’m sure they say down at the nick. With a signature like that, it had to be the Jews.”

  Leo Schnellman looked upset again.

  “I can’t bear to hear it said, Mosh, even in irony.” Again he turned his attention to Jurnet. “From the perspective of time it’s easy to look back and say look, that’s where it all started—the first accusation of ritual murder, the first time anyone dreamed up the charming notion that the Passover festival is incomplete without the blood of a Christian child mixed into the matzo dumplings. By now we’ve got used to its utter preposterousness. But think how it must have seemed to the Jews of twelfth-century Angleby, confronted with it for the first time.”

  “They couldn’t take it in,” said Epperstein. “They didn’t even run for cover
to the Castle. Twenty-nine of them were killed the night the boy’s body was discovered, and that was only the beginning. They arrested Josce Morel and his wife Chera, who both denied ever seeing the boy, let alone killing him, but they strung them up in iron cages from the city wall just the same. His and Hers. Chera was a tough old bird. They say she took six days to die.” After a moment he said, “And of course there was Haim HaLevi.”

  Jurnet asked, “How did he come into it?”

  “Some of the city doctors were called in to testify. They gave it as their expert opinion that Ulf’s blood had been drained off with such skill, it could only have been done by a trained medical practitioner.”

  “The bastards!”

  “Effective way, though, to get rid of the opposition. Except that it wasn’t as easy as all that. Haim had friends in high places. The Sheriff, for one, wasn’t keen to lose the only pill-pusher who didn’t make him feel worse than he’d been feeling already. So what he did was say that since the Jews were, legally speaking, the King’s chattels, the King himself would have to try the case. Haim HaLevi’s trial would have to be held over till the next time the King came to Angleby on one of his royal progresses, which could be years away. In the meantime, for security purposes, he moved Haim into the Castle, where he treated him very well, on the principle that it pays to be nice to your doctor.”

  “Do you know what he did?” asked the Rabbi, with a touching pride. “Haim HaLevi, while he was waiting? He planted a herb garden in the Castle grounds, the first one to be recorded in England; and it became so famous, doctors from all over Europe travelled to Angleby just to get cuttings of his plants, and learn from him their curative properties. And he wrote a treatise on herbal remedies—in Aramaic first, and then he made his own translation into Latin—that was still in use as late as the seventeenth century. You know that famous essay of Francis Bacon’s which begins, ‘God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed it is the purest of human pleasures’? Word for word, it’s a literal translation of Haim HaLevi!” Leo Schnellman chuckled. “Bacon!”