Death of a God Page 4

  ‘They must think it’s for something, or they wouldn’t be doing it,’ the other pointed out reasonably. ‘It’s a free country. It’s not yet an offence to be young and besotted, thank heaven. Personally –’ Miriam stretched herself luxuriously, her right hand momentarily touching the detective’s thigh – ‘I feel great – used, manipulated, brainwashed and all. An evening I’ll never forget, if I live to be a hundred.’

  Suppressing a sudden wild desire to press down the accelerator, charge through the waiting ninnies to get there faster, Jurnet said, ‘Let’s go home and go to bed.’

  ‘Lovely idea. Only by way of the Market Place, if you please.’

  The city centre, as always, once the workers and shoppers were gone for the day, was empty, with the air of a civilization suddenly deserted for some awful, unfathomable cause, an urban Marie Celeste. Not all that long ago, Jurnet remembered, feeling unaccountably bereft, people had actually lived on those upper floors above the shops; so that, long after closing time, squares of light had spilled out into the dark, people passed to and fro behind window panes. On warm nights, when the windows were open, you could hear music as you walked along the street, or the ten o’clock news, voices raised in anger or love. Now, there was nothing but the shop-window dummies, their mindless eyes giving back the orange of the street-lights.

  Scarcely a car either, since the Council had belatedly awakened to the treasure it possessed in the medieval city and promptly put it into pickle in the middle of a one-way system based, so the natives swore, on the maze at Hampton Court. Even Police Headquarters, that ever-open eye, presented a dark face to the Market Place, all its nocturnal business – after-hours entrance, car park, garage and all – concentrated round the corner in Almoners Hill. On the Market Place itself, cats with amorous intent stalked the skeletal stalls, sliding like shadows across the cobblestones.

  Everywhere, that is to say, that bilious dinginess which, in the city, passes for dark: – everywhere save in the strip of garden at the top of the market slope, where floodlighting threw into terrible chiaroscuro the three figures hanging on their crosses. In that theatrical projection of white light and black shadow their situation no longer seemed cause for pity. Scornful and irreverent, they confronted their surroundings with a massive contempt. An air of violence seemed to have gathered about them like winter fog. A promise of resurrection? More a threat.

  Solicitous of the long-suffering greenstuff, Jurnet parked his car further along the road where, earlier in the day, the bandy-legged man had parked his van, and ushered Miriam through an official opening in the wall, flanked by some dwarf cupressus. Still fiercely at odds with the contradictions in his own nature revealed to him by Second Coming in concert, the detective kept his eyes resolutely away from the tableau which occupied his lover’s absorbed attention. What the hell was she doing, anyway – she, of all people – gazing up worshipfully at the primal cause of Jewish grief through the ages? Bruised by the night’s happening, he ached with longing to lie with his head between her breasts.

  More in anger than love he said, for the umpteenth time, ‘Let’s get married.’

  ‘Oh, Ben!’ She did not deflect her gaze, her tone preoccupied rather than tetchy. ‘How many times do I have to say so we shall, just as soon as –’

  ‘I’m a Jew – I know! As soon as! That’s a laugh! Rate things are moving, I’ll be lucky to make it before the Messiah comes.’ Taking Miriam by the shoulders, and twisting her about so that she was obliged to face him: ‘Look – it isn’t as if you’re a pillar of the synagogue. You drive on the sabbath, you don’t fast on Yom Kippur, and you’re crazy about snails – so what’s it all in aid of, this making of conditions? Some kind of fancy brush-off?’

  The other chose not to take offence; said simply, turning back towards the crosses and tilting her head the better to study the faces of the crucified, ‘In 1290, I think it was – anyway, not long before all the Jews in England were kicked out for good – they took a boatload of Angleby Jews, more than three hundred of them, saying they were going to deport them to the Low Countries. They sailed down the river to the estuary; and there, waiting for the tide to change, the captain invited his passengers to disembark on a convenient sandbank. Stretch your legs, why don’t you, while you have the chance, is what he said: there’s a long journey ahead.

  ‘The Jews were so crammed into that little cockleshell they were glad to take advantage of the offer, perhaps even pleasantly surprised at such kindness from a Gentile. Except that when the tide turned and there was once more enough water under the keel to get moving, but before the Jews had time to climb on board again, the captain gave the order to weigh anchor and off they went, the ship and the sailors, leaving the Jews to drown as the water rose higher and higher and, at last, covered the sandbank completely. One of the crew said later that the Jewish fathers held their children high on their heads so that they would be the last to go. Funny: if it had been me out there with my child, and the water creeping up to my chin and my mouth and my eyes, I think I’d have held it under right away. Why prolong the agony?’

  In the same level tone Miriam continued, ‘Today it couldn’t happen quite like that. Even if human nature is still capable of such behaviour, at least we’ve learnt to swim. But just the same, just in case someone should ever again take it into his head to turn the Jews of Angleby out on to a sandbank and sail merrily away, just in case – I want to be dead sure the man I marry is right there beside me, not waving goodbye from the shore.’

  At that moment the floodlights went out. Reduced to the general level of night, the figures on their crosses became no more than the rest of the Market Place clutter.

  Starded, the two drew together. Miriam gave a little ‘Oh!’ of concern. Jurnet laughed for the pleasure of finding her unexpectedly close. ‘Wrath of the Lord!’ he proclaimed.

  ‘You!’ protested Miriam, but not disengaging herself. ‘They must be on a time switch.’

  ‘Aren’t we all? Time for bed, like I said.’

  Chapter Seven

  The telephone rang. Jurnet had the impression that it had been ringing for a long time. Even so, he made no move to reach out, lift the receiver off its hook.

  The telephone went on and on. The cloud of bronze hair on the adjacent pillow, the one bare shoulder showing above the duvet, did not move. Little liar, the detective thought acidly, regarding hair and shoulder with love but not all that much liking. Worn out, was she, by the exertions of the night?

  Oh yes, they had finally made it; gone to bed together, made love – if those were the right words to describe a hasty and vacuous greed it shamed him to remember. If that, he thought, the phone dinning in his ears, was what an evening of pop music did for you, come back, Ludwig van B., all is forgiven.

  A body deliciously warm and buoyant pressed itself against him. From under the duvet a voice cooed, ‘You aren’t going to answer – oh, good!’

  The options thus put into words, there was no alternative. Coppers always answered the phone, God rot that clever dick, Alexander Graham Bell.

  There was no further sign of life from the bed as Jurnet dressed hurriedly, sluiced face and hands in the bathroom, grimacing with distaste at his reflection in the mirror, the chin rimmed with the dark stubble which every morning made him look more like something the Mafia had dragged in than a pillar of Angleby law and order.

  No time to shave. The digital clock on the bedside table, one of Miriam’s few so-called improvements, which he never glanced at without a pang of regret for the dear old wind-up alarm she had given to a CND jumble sale without even asking, jerked out 5.01 in its baleful green, and then 5.02 before he had comfortably accommodated himself to the earlier figure. With the old clock, time slid away unnoticed, not in a convulsive St Vitus’ dance. God rot him too, the saintly jerk, along with AGB.

  Outside, on the crumbling concrete of the forecourt, black plastic bags of rubbish put out for the dustman blocked the exit to the street. The detective haul
ed them aside, muttering only ‘Bloody hell!’ when one of them burst open, depositing a glissade of time-expired tea-bags over his trouser hems. He was in the car and reversing before he realized that the windscreen was frosted over, had to stop, fumble under the dash for a rag which was inevitably oily, and smear an approximation of visibility before getting on his way again.

  As one who had long ago accustomed himself to the cosmic absurdity of violent death, none of this surprised Jurnet. The Superintendent awaiting him in the Market Place, combed and shaved, in cashmere coat and trousers whose creases were pure poetry, was no surprise either. In their early days of working together, the detective had deeply resented the effortless immaculacy of his superior officer, but no longer; recognizing that a higher authority than the Police determined who were nature’s scruffs and who its swells.

  Detective-Sergeant Ellers, arriving a moment later with his grotty old sheepskin car coat done up on the wrong buttons, redressed the balance, a little. In the first light the little Welshman’s rosy chubbiness looked washed out. For that matter, the whole Market Place looked as if the departing night had taken with it more than its dark. Down among the stalls an occasional light, swinging in the wind, showed where some early bird was already at his daily pyramid building, heaping up the mounds of apples and cauliflowers, carrots and sprouts that, once the day cast off its early misery, would turn the market into a patchwork of colour, as pleasing to the eye as to the palate.

  The Superintendent said without preliminaries, ‘We’ll have to make do with what we have. There’s no way we can get our screens up high enough, and I’m hanged if we’re going to provide a spectacle for the populace.’

  ‘Dr Colton –’ Jurnet began.

  ‘He’s over there already. With that new fellow, Stanfield or something, the biologist. Not that there’s much, if anything, either of them can do here beyond a formal assurance that we haven’t got ourselves out of bed at this benighted hour without sufficient reason.’ With the familiar touch of acerbity that made Jurnet’s face stiffen with equally familiar dislike, ‘We’re not likely to do much better if we hang about.’

  Whoever else had caught it, Jurnet reflected fleetingly, stepping with the others over the low wall on to the flower bed, it was curtains for the daffodils. The three of them, true, moved with practised care: but just wait till the scene-of-crime boys really hit their stride, going over every crumb of earth with a fine-tooth comb. Then – never mind the daffs – even the worms, gone down deep to get away from the frost, would wish they’d never been born.

  On Angleby Market Place, in the cheerless light of dawn, a figure hung from the great central cross. Prepared as he was, Jurnet caught his breath, suppressed an exclamation for which, in the circumstances, there was no need to apologize. Admittedly, in his years in the Police, he had seen a fair number of men and women dead by violence. But it was, on the other hand, the first time he had attended a crucifixion.

  Chapter Eight

  ‘Like I told the officer on the desk, I brung over my first load from the van – onions it was, good old Ailsa Craig, you don’t see all that lot about nowadays – and what do I find but them great feet sticking out under the skirting board like there was some bloody down-and-out bedded down there for the night.’

  Nosey Thompsett took out a grubby handkerchief and blew a fanfare on the nose which was one of the sights of Angleby. By the time he had finished, that organ had lost some of its pallor and once more displayed, albeit in a delicate mauve rather than its normal clotted purple, the customary network of veins which striated it like a map of his native fens.

  ‘Except,’ its owner continued, stuffing the handkerchief into the pocket of an even grubbier windcheater, ‘I knew all the time, really, no tramp in his right mind would be sleeping out in last night’s weather barefoot and without so much as a bit of cardboard against the cold.

  And o’ course, when I seen that ruddy great nail through the middle of the instep –’

  The Superintendent prompted impatiently, ‘Well?’

  To Jurnet’s not all that secret pleasure – it was part of the rum game, without winners or losers, he and the Superintendent played unremittingly – the market trader ignored both interruption and speaker and addressed himself to the Detective-Inspector exclusively.

  ‘Believe me, Mr Jurnet, I know a creepin’ Jesus when I see one, specially one that’s been giving all of us here on the market the willies, hanging up there in the garden all week like the washing hung out to dry. First go off, I reckoned some of the lads been having a bit o’ fun after closing time, ho ho ho, I don’t think. Sense of humour’s a peculiar thing, I always say. But why me, for Christ’ sake?’ The nose flared momentarily purple with affront. ‘A whole van to unload, Mr Jurnet, an’ me there on purpose to make an early start, never mind my fingers an’ toes, to say nothing of you know what, dropping off wi’ the cold. But I knew it weren’t no good shifting the bloody thing somewhere else. You lot’d be bound to find out, you’re so clever, an’ think I was mixed up in it, some way. So I left it just as it were while I come up to the station to say what I’d found –’

  There was another pause. The handkerchief reappeared, this time pressed into service to wipe lips that needed no wiping; that were dry, and trembled a little.

  ‘I come up them steps into the garden’ – the tremor had transmitted itself to the words spoken – ‘I didn’t go anywhere near those fuckin’ crosses – I’m chapel myself, I don’t go for graven images – I weren’t even looking that way. All I wanted was to get it reported an’ done with. But I did look, Mr Jurnet. I had to. Like someone said, ‘‘Over here, Nosey,’’ an’ then took hold of my head an’ twisted it round. Even then, my first thought was, tha’s funny! He can’t be in two places at once.

  ‘An’ then I looked again –’

  Loy Tanner hung naked and dead on the centre cross in the Market Place garden. On either side, the effigies of Lijah Starling and Johnny Flowerdew still suffered their emblematic agonies. But they had become meaningless – or rather, Jurnet amended, obscene travesties, juxtaposed, as they now were, to the real live death that hung between them. The detective saw nothing contradictory about his choice of adjectives.

  Violent death, in his book, did indeed have a life of its own. It was a monster to be exposed and disarmed, a monster and an obligation. An obligation put upon him Ben Jurnet, personally. A settling of accounts between a killer and a victim in no position to do the job himself.

  Not that he personally felt any more drawn to the Loy Tanner who, the night before, had, against his conscious will, enslaved, enchanted and enraged him. In the beginning might be the beat, chum, but not in the end – oh, not in the end! No heart pulsated in that carcass tied to the cross by someone who, all too obviously, had been in too much of a hurry to make a proper job of it. It was a stranger who hung there, head flopped against one shoulder, lank hair over a face invisible save for a single eye which stared out at the burgeoning day with supreme incuriosity.

  The Superintendent observed bad-temperedly, as if the sight of such sloppy workmanship offended him, ‘The wonder is he ever stayed put in the first place. One side’s all right, but the other! Those cords round the wrists and feet, and that belt fastened round upright and waist together – if anything of a wind had blown up during the night he’d have come down like Humpty Dumpty, bringing the cross with him. Picture cord, is it, or what? We’ll see. My guess is the belt’s the fellow’s own.’ With a disdain that, in other circumstances, would have made Jurnet’s mouth twitch at the corners: ‘It looks the kind of flashy rubbish a pop singer might wear.’

  The detective, who had been studying with a kind of paralysed attention the thin line of pink-tinged ooze which, originating at the back of the dead man’s head, had meandered a turgid way across throat and chest to deposit a terminal moraine just above the elaborate silver belt which had earned the Superintendent’s disapproval, said, ‘I never noticed him wearing it last night, though he
could have had it on underneath his sweater, I suppose, and not showing.’

  The other, as Jurnet had known he would, made no attempt to hide either his astonishment or the dark suspicions that went with it. ‘Don’t tell me you were at that concert!’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Unplumbed depths,’ commented the Superintendent with a dourness that for a moment made the other wonder if his superior officer weren’t himself a Second Coming freak. ‘From all I hear of the demand for tickets, I can only hope you didn’t queue for yours in police time.’

  ‘No, sir,’ Jurnet returned neutrally, determined to provide the bastard with no further information, nor any explanation he wasn’t entitled to. But then, immediately, because, bloody hell, there it was again, that inescapable compulsion to tell the bugger everything he ever wanted to know, more than he wanted to know: ‘Somebody passed on a couple they weren’t using.’

  ‘Somebody must’ve wanted to get into your good books –’ the tone was brazenly sceptical – ‘considering what they were fetching on the black market.’

  ‘Not me, sir. My fiancée –’

  ‘Hm!’ The Superintendent said no more, Miriam being the one subject between them upon which it was silently understood that a strict communication blackout prevailed. Jurnet, for his part, squirmed in inward mortification. Fiancée – of all the wimpish words! Yet what could he have used instead? My life, my love, my live-in torment? He’d like to see the Superintendent’s face if he had.

  The Superintendent squinted up at the sky, daring it to be day before he was ready for it; then, turning to Jack Ellers, commanded peremptorily: ‘Sergeant, let the men know they’ve got another two minutes, not a second longer, to get that body on its way to the mortuary, or we’re going to find ourselves with an audience bigger than they had at the Middlemass last night. As to that cross he’s hanging on, I don’t care how hard the frost is, I’ll give them another five minutes to get it out of the ground and on its way. Pinner must have taken enough pictures to fill an album. From here on we’ll have to make do with those.’