Ritual Murder Read online

  Jurnet observed, “I bet the Angleby doctors weren’t best pleased.”

  “What do you think?” The archaeology student shrugged. “It turned out to be nearly five years before the King came to Angleby—and during that time something very peculiar began to happen.”

  “Take note, Ben,” admonished the Rabbi, leaning back in his chair. “How to be a saint in ten easy lessons.”

  “Lesson one,” said Mosh Epperstein. “The grave. Godefric buried his son outside his parish church, St Luke’s Parmenter-gate. A month later he came into the churchyard to find the raw hump of earth ablaze with flowers like something out of Constance Spry.”

  “Not very convincing.”

  “To Godefric it was. He hared it to the cathedral and told the monks, who told the Prior, who told the Bishop. The upshot was that they dug the boy up and reburied him in the cathedral Chapter House.”

  “Sounds a bit simple-minded to me,” said Jurnet. “Even for those days.”

  “Not at all. It was a consummate stroke of public relations. Martyrs were big business in medieval England. The monks were on to a good thing and they knew it. Especially with a child. Especially with a child who could work miracles.”

  Leo Schnellman burst out laughing.

  “Children and animals! The infallible English combination!” To Jurnet, “They kept a cat in the Chapter House to catch rats. Pretty fierce rats they must have been too, because one of them, just about that time, bit one of the cat’s paws off. After that, the cat’s fate was sealed, as not being up to the job any longer, and one of the monks went into the Chapter House with a sack, intending to catch it and take it down to the river for drowning.

  “The poor old moggy, probably guessing what was in store for it, ran off as fast as it could, its disability permitting, and as it ran it happened that it ran across Ulf’s new grave. Instantly, it stopped limping, and, with all four paws back in their proper place, promptly caught another rat and laid it at the astounded monk’s feet. There’s a miracle for you!”

  “Hard on the rat,” Jurnet remarked.

  “But that’s the essence of a miracle! Somebody always suffers. Who knows, when the trumpets sounded, and the walls of Jericho came tumbling down, how many innocent bystanders were buried under the rubble? Even in the utmost revelation of His power, the Almighty reminds us that unmitigated good is not of this world.”

  Epperstein took over again. “There was this woman who’d heard about the cat, and she had a sick pig. She had a sick child too, as it happened, but that was by the way. Her capital was tied up in the pig, so it was to pray for that, not her child, that she went to Ulf’s grave. It was a ruddy great sow, too big for her to fetch with her, but she was carrying the sick child in her arms.

  “Well, what happened was that the child suddenly got better, though the mother hadn’t so much as mentioned its name in her prayers, and when she got home again she not only found the pig in the pink, but the proud mum of twenty-four piglets. That‘s why pictures of Little St Ulf always show him surrounded with little piggies. A really kosher saint.”

  “The miracles multiplied—” Leo Schnellman took up the narrative. “Everything from epilepsy to wooden leg, cured while you wait. Pilgrims came pouring in and their money with them, and after a while it was decided to use some of the profits to provide the little saint—for he’d become St Ulf by then: in those days saints didn’t have to pass exams before getting their haloes, the way they do today—with a shrine inside the cathedral itself. And there he remained, until the Reformation swept away all such objects of veneration—”

  Jurnet cut in, “And until our friend here took it into his head to go digging him up again.”

  “For Christ’s sake!” the student broke in. “The floor fell in! You didn’t expect them to put it back without trying to find out what it was all about?”

  “What they do in the cathedral’s their business. What I can’t understand is how a Mosh Epperstein comes to get into the act.”

  “Pargeter asked me.” Then, stung at being put in a posture of defence, “What the hell business is it of yours anyway?”

  “Shut up, Mosh!” The Rabbi’s smile belied his words. “I’m working hard to make it his business.” To Jurnet, “But Mosh is right, Ben. People with as much past to carry around with them as the Jews can’t afford to be afraid of it. Anything that clarifies what actually happened has to be OK.”

  “Me,” said Jurnet, “I’ve got my hands full trying to clarify the present. Like, for instance, why, in the cathedral this morning, I ran into a wide boy name of Joe Fisher. Far as I know he hasn’t got a sick sow back home, so what d’you reckon he was up to, asking the way to Little St Ulf?”

  “You’ve obviously got an idea,” the archaeological student said coldly.

  “Call it a glimmering. Ever heard of the English Men?”

  Leo Schnellman leaned forward in his chair, suddenly alert.

  “What are they up to, Ben, this time?”

  “Don’t know as they’re up to anything. Except I know Fisher hangs out with them, and something like this is right up their alley.”

  “How did he get to know?” Mosh Epperstein demanded. “Only thing in the papers so far was about it probably being the pit where they cast the cathedral bells. That’s what we thought it was ourselves, at first.” He flushed, and muttered, more to himself than the others, “Stan Brent.”

  “And who’s Stan Brent when he’s at home?”

  The young man flushed again. Following a sudden intuition, Jurnet asked, “Lady Aste’s fancy man, you mean?”

  “Liz isn’t a Lady.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “Look here, you! Not a Ladyship’s, what I meant.”

  Very, very young.

  For the first time that evening, Jurnet felt compassion. The man was a lover, like himself. Not the poor bugger’s fault there was, however unjustly, something faintly risible in the thought of anyone named Moses Epperstein making it with the daughter of Lord Sydringham.

  “What does this Stan character do for a living?” Jurnet asked, with a friendliness of tone that obviously took the other by surprise.

  “Mugs old ladies, I shouldn’t wonder. Says he dropped out of the University. Doubt it. All he can do to write his name.”

  “That’s proof?” The detective queried, determinedly jovial. “And is he digging up Little St Ulf along with the rest of you?”

  “Him? Pargeter’s already warned him off more than once. He keeps hanging about, on the chance, I shouldn’t be surprised, we’ll turn up something worth nicking. Several of the old chroniclers seem to think a lot of the pilgrims’ offerings of gold and silver and precious stones were actually buried in the kid’s tomb. Myself, I can’t see the monks putting all that lovely lolly out of circulation, but that’s what they say. You can even read it in the booklet about Little St Ulf they sell at the cathedral bookstall. For all I know, Stan Brent may have got wind of the possibility, and is living in hopes of making a killing.”

  “In the meantime putting the bite on Miss Aste?”

  “He doesn’t have to,” Epperstein returned bitterly. “She has it all hanging out for him.” He looked about the room in a lost kind of way, and Leo Schnellman said gently, “You left your jacket under the Ping-Pong table.”

  “Ah! Well. Thanks for the game, then. I’ll have to give you your revenge.”

  “You won’t!” the Rabbi declared robustly. “Not till I see you here on Shabbat. It’s time to balance the books a little.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Do that. I have a particularly brilliant sermon planned.”

  “For next Saturday, you mean?”

  “For every Saturday. All my sermons are the same sermon. Only the words differ. All of them demonstrations that, despite appearances to the contrary, the universe makes sense.”

  After the study period was over, and Jurnet and the Rabbi sat over cups of tea, Jurnet remembered. “You never said what happe
ned to the doctor, Haim HaLevi.”

  “Oh, the King came to Angleby, eventually. Not a bad man, in the context of his time. What he did was remind the citizens yet again that, as a Jew, the man was royal property. He warned them that if anyone touched so much as a hair of his head, he’d punish the whole city collectively.”

  “That was something, at least.”

  “Nothing at all. Three months later, a mob broke into Haim HaLevi’s home—he’d gone back to his house in Cobblegate on the strength of the King’s promise—castrated him, broke his arms and legs, and hung him upside down on a cross. Next day, by which time he may or may not have been dead, they took his body down, dismembered it, and threw the pieces down a well. His last words were said to be, ‘Water my plants.’”

  Suddenly it did not seem like something that had happened 840 years ago.

  “And did the King carry out his threat?” Jurnet asked at last.

  “You must be joking. Kings have more important things to think about. It was, after all, just another Jew.”

  Chapter Six

  On his way home Jurnet made a detour so as to pass the Institute. It was shut up for the night, as he had known it would be; no Miriam on the steps waiting to be picked up, the only light an illuminated notice-board advertising a forthcoming course in obedience-training for dogs. He made a mental note to tell Taleh.

  Another detour took him to the Close, knowing that the gates, which had once been shut promptly at sunset, would be open however late the hour. Not long before, there had been a fire in the early hours in one of the houses near the river, and the fire engine, arriving at Bridge Gate, had been kept waiting. The chain at the gate rang a bell in the lodge where one of the vergers lived, and the verger, who had been under the weather, had taken some tablets without knowing they were sedative. By the time the clanging had awakened him, and the gate been opened for the engine to pass through, a child had died in the burning house.

  Since that night the cathedral precinct was no longer a little world which shut itself off from the city when darkness fell. With its dim lighting and shadowy byways it had become, indeed, a favorite place of resort for courting couples.

  Jurnet found a parking space in the Upper Close, and sat in the car feeling envious of the activity he pictured was going on all round him in the vehicles that edged the central lawn. He wished he smoked, or that he had a cassette player in the car. Anything to put off the moment of going home.

  Home! That was a laugh. In the flat, he knew, there would be nothing to remind him of Miriam’s presence. Always when she left him, even for a night, she took with her all her possessions, down to the last hairpin. Not so much an absence as a desertion. It was almost as if she wished to convince him that she had never existed rosy in his bed, repaying passion with passion, other than as the figment of his overheated imagination.

  A car started up somewhere ahead. Then another, and another. In the one immediately in front of him, two heads rose into view through the back window; a dishevelled man got hurriedly out of the back and into the driving seat. In a moment the car moved off, following the others back to the FitzAlain Gate.

  Jurnet waited until the man with the lighted torch who had been working his way along the line of vehicles reached him. Then he wound down the window, and said, “Evening, Mr Harbridge. Can’t win ’em all, can we?”

  “You, Inspector! What you doing here, this late?”

  Ignoring the question, Jurnet observed, “I don’t have to ask the same of you. Do this every night, do you?”

  “No. Mr Quest’s off tonight.”

  “Don’t think I know Mr Quest.”

  “Head verger. His daughter’s been took sick in Northampton.”

  “Oh ah. Keep you at it pretty late, don’t they, the Dean and Chapter?”

  “I’m not complaining.”

  “Good for you. What I don’t get, though,” Jurnet went on evenly, “is why you don’t stand at the gate and stop ’em coming in in the first place.” No explanation was forthcoming, and the detective finished, “Not half the fun, of course, of catching them actually at it.”

  Even in the dark Jurnet could see the red that overspread the man’s face. Then the anger faded and Harbridge laughed. A straightforward laugh, uncomplicated.

  “Bit of a misunderstanding, sir. I’m not one of those. Been on the gate since nightfall, and just nipped back home for a sip of something hot. This lot’s what built up while I was gone. Usually me and one of the other vergers does it turn and turn about, see, but wi’ Mr Quest called away unexpected—”

  “Seems I owe you an apology.”

  “That’s all right. You couldn’t be expected to know.”

  “Sorry just the same.”

  “Know, I mean, what it means to be part of this.” A sweep of the torch indicated the dark bulk of the cathedral. “Even a very humble part, unimportant.”

  “It’s big all right,” Jurnet said inadequately.

  “It’s perfect! Not another cathedral to touch it! At Salisbury they put a few extra feet on the spire—” the verger’s tone made it plain that he regarded the addition as un-Christian one-upmanship—“but that don’t mean anything—”

  “Can’t see the point of a spire myself.” Jurnet meant it as a joke.

  “For me,” Harbridge declared simply, “it’s the holiest part of the whole building. Holier than the High Altar, even. A finger pointing to Heaven. When I was a lad at school they taught us that parallel lines meet in infinity, meaning, I suppose, never. The way I look at it, that there spire—” turning for a brief, confirmatory glance— “is parallel lines meeting in the here an’ now, and the point where they meet is God.”

  The verger smiled at the other’s embarrassment.

  “If you don’t mind me saying, sir, you don’t strike me as a religious man.”

  Jurnet said, “I don’t mind your saying it, at all.”

  Only to find that he did, a little.

  As he slowed down at the gate, a boy and a girl, closely intertwined, came through on the narrow footpath. They were none of his business either, and Jurnet could not have explained why he wound down the car window and called across, “Good evening!”

  The pair came apart and stared at him, at first blankly, then in hostile recognition. The girl’s face, in the light of the lantern that hung from the centre of the arch, was puffy and discoloured. Into the boy’s, as Jurnet watched, came that blend of calculation and artlessness with which, as a police officer, he was only too familiar. They were the ones who really had you worried. The sinners without a sense of sin.

  Detaching himself from the girl, the boy stepped into the road towards the car. Jurnet suddenly did not want to hear what he had to say. He set the car in motion, out of the Close, into the sleeping city. In the driving mirror he could see the two together again, in the middle of the carriageway. As if he guessed himself under observation, the boy put his arms round the girl and pressed his body impudently to hers.

  Jurnet drove home to his empty flat.

  Chapter Seven

  When the bells began to chime for Sung Eucharist, Jurnet abandoned hope of Miriam’s coming and came into the cathedral. He deliberately kept his eyes away from the inscription in the corner. He knew it by heart anyway.

  The people filing into the cathedral out of the pale sunshine were of two clearly differentiated kinds. Most were sightseers, in jeans and anoraks, with cameras dangling from their shoulders. The rest were dressed in Sunday best, the older women—who formed a majority—hatted and gloved and carrying prayer books. Where the first category drifted along the nave with the uncertain air common to all transients through sacred buildings, these others made purposefully for the transepts where rows of chairs had been set out facing the altar positioned under the tower, at the crossing of the arms of the great cross which was the building itself.

  The bells stopped. The choristers filed into the choir-stalls, white surplices over scarlet cassocks. On the nave side of the altar
rails the onlookers strained forward like visitors to the Zoo waiting for the animals to be fed. What a bonus to see the mechanism working, as it might be a National Trust watermill with the wheel actually going round!

  When the first organ notes zoomed into the air, they looked pleased; but the arrival of the officiating clergy, ceremonially robed and preceded by a golden cross brandished aloft like a banner, clearly disturbed some among them. A small man, dwarfed by a towering backpack, expressed noisy disapproval upon discovering that the service, being located bang in the middle of the floor space, frustrated, for its duration, a total perambulation of the cathedral; an obstruction, he appeared to think, on a par with a farmer putting a bull into a field for the purpose of blocking a foot-path, and as deserving of censure.

  The choir began to sing, something splendid and celebratory but not, Jurnet thought, as soaring as the song he had heard in rehearsal. He craned his neck and saw that the Gentlemen of the Choir, the adult singers, six a side in the second row of the stalls and robust of figure and voice, were hard at it, underpinning the boyish trebles and holding them earthbound. Hard to tell at that distance, but the detective had the impression that the child choristers were one short of their full complement.

  Jurnet could not see the Dean anywhere, and wondered whether, like the producer of any other theatrical piece, he was hovering somewhere in the wings, overseeing exits and entrances, biting his nails when someone missed a cue.

  Not likely, he decided, after a while. In this performance all the actors were word-perfect. The spectacle proceeded with a magnificent self-confidence that left him, as one brought up to the hesitancies of lay preachers, awed and, against his will, envious.

  But then, it was a production that had been running for a long time.

  Suddenly uncomfortable at the thought that he, a Jew-to-be, might be deemed to be participating in a Christian rite, Jurnet retreated down the nave, reassured by the thought that it was hardly the place to run into any of Rabbi Schnellman’s flock.