Ritual Murder Page 5

  He had forgotten about Mosh Epperstein.

  In track suit and plimsolls the archaeology student came loping down the aisle, away from the boarded enclosure. It was not a pace at which people customarily moved through houses of worship, and several of the sightseers looked at him curiously. It was a haste that jarred with the stately swell of the music, the invocation rolling down from the altar, “In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit—”

  Looking pale and ill, Epperstein broke into a run; and Jurnet, whose thought it was that the student had been back to the excavation to recover some cannabis cached there—either that, or the fellow was stoned already—set off in pursuit.

  Just the same, such was the chemistry of the place, the detective could not bring himself actually to sprint after his quarry. When, at last, hurrying as best he could without giving the appearance of haste, he achieved the Close, Epperstein was nowhere to be seen. Stan Brent was lying on his side on the lawn chewing a blade of grass, and to all appearances in no way incommoded by a scramble of children playing some game in which his prostrate body served some essential purpose, boundary or goal.

  Giving up the chase, the detective turned to go back into the cathedral.

  The young man called over, “How much is it worth to say which way he went?”

  Jurnet gave no sign of having heard; but his face felt hot as he made his way back through the little door into the north aisle.

  “Bloody shit!” he muttered.

  From the distant transept, some devotional Everest scaled at last, the entire building resounded with a triumphal “Amen!”

  Elizabeth Aste came towards him along the north aisle, prim and wanton by turn as she crossed the bands of sun and shadow in her transparent muslin shift.

  The girl’s face, he saw, was almost back to normal. The swelling had gone down. The purple bruise on the cheekbone she could easily have masked with make-up had she wanted to.

  She was looking enormously pleased with herself. So pleased as to be willing to include even an interfering copper in her general satisfaction with the world.

  “Good morning, Police Officer!” Barely suppressed laughter bubbled in her voice. “If you really are one, that is.”

  “I really am. Detective-Inspector Jurnet.”

  “Detective-Inspector—how grand! What on earth are you doing here on a Sunday?”

  “It seems quite a popular day for being in a church,” Jurnet observed mildly. “I’m not on duty, if that’s what you mean.”

  “How stupid of me! I suppose I always assume policemen never stop being policemanly. You’re late for the service.”

  “So I hear. How about you? Are you working? Don’t tell me they keep your nose to the grindstone seven days a week?” He hazarded experimentally, “I just passed young Epperstein in a hell of a hurry—”

  “Epperstein?” she repeated vaguely, as if she were trying to put a face to the name. “I came by to pick up some slides.” She smiled as if she had said something amusing.

  Jurnet said, “I’m glad I ran into you. I’ve been hoping for a guided tour of Little St Ulf’s grave.”

  “I’m only the photographer. Besides, there’s nothing much to see so far, except a hole in the floor. You don’t need a guide for that.”

  “That only makes the interpretation all the more important. Anyway, I couldn’t get in on my own, could I? Surely you keep it locked up?”

  “In case somebody steals the hole? Even if we did, anyone who wanted to get in would only have to lean on the boards. They’d go down like a pack of cards.”

  “Just the same,” Jurnet said, “I’d have thought … To keep out the nosey parkers, if nothing else—”

  “There’s a notice up, didn’t you see? ‘Private’, in capital letters. Nobody in a church ever opens a door marked ‘Private’. Scared stiff what they might find on the other side.”

  “Just the same,” Jurnet said again. “There ought at least be a token padlock and chain. Some kid that can’t read could fall down the hole and break his neck.”

  “Then they could make him a saint like Little St Ulf couldn’t they?” Looking past him, “Here’s Professor Pargeter. Take it up with him.”

  “My dear child!” Professor Pargeter cried, at the same time waving to a group of sightseers who had recognized him from the telly. In the few steps that separated him from the pair standing in the aisle he signed his name on a hymn book, the official guide to the cathedral, and a copy of Penthouse. “Working on Sunday!” he called across. “This is indeed conduct beyond the call of.” Taking in the girl’s costume, “Unless the Dean’s signed you up for a re-run of the Temptations of St Anthony.”

  “You are awful! I just popped in for some slides.”

  “Better pop out before the Bishop sees you, unless you want to be exorcized bell, book, and candle.”

  “It sounds like fun.”

  “Get along with you, hussy! Besides—” the voice shedding some of its jollity—“I saw the egregious Brent outside. And it doesn’t do—does it?—to keep him waiting.”

  “Don’t be horrid, Pargy,” she pouted. “I can’t think why you always have it in so for Stan.”

  “I can’t think either, unless it’s because he’s amoral, sadistic, and forty years younger than I am.” His eyes, blue as the girl’s, narrowed. He put out a finger that did not quite touch her bruised cheek. “He hasn’t been knocking you about again?”

  The girl positively bloomed. Waiting, as usual, for his existence to be recognized, Jurnet could see the nipples lifting the thin muslin.

  “You are silly! Anyone would think you were my father!” Tilting her face so that the bruise was even more visible, she kissed the Professor on the cheek. “I’ll have those pictures you wanted ready in the morning.” Then, “Oh—this is a police officer. Chief Constable or something. He’s investigating who killed Little St Ulf and he wants you to show him the dig.”

  When she had gone, the two men took stock of each other. Here Jurnet had the advantage, being moderately fond of “Past Imperfect,” the programme which had made Professor Pargeter a TV personality and archaeology the biggest thing in spectator sports since all-in wrestling. The man stood up surprisingly well to being viewed in three dimensions. Large and tweedy, he looked powerful but unfrightening, whilst the arrogant cock to the handsome features was more than counterbalanced by a moustache that looked as if it had been stuck on for a joke.

  As for the Professor, he said, “I was in the Judaean Hills couple of years ago. Place called Tel Ari. Kind of Mini-Masada where some Israelites held out against the Romans. Full of bodies looking just like you.”

  Jurnet asked, startled, “How could you tell? Skeletons, weren’t they?”

  “Well? What d’you suppose you are, under that biodegradable flesh you’re got up in? Chief Constable, Liz said. Some kind of joke?”

  “Detective-Inspector actually. Detective-Inspector Jurnet.”

  “What did I tell you?” said the Professor, with no particular surprise. “No need to ask what’s your interest in Little St Ulf.”

  “I’m not Jewish, if that’s what you mean.”

  “And I’m not a chap that makes fancy patterns in wet plaster for a living. It’s not where you’re going, it’s where you’ve been that counts.”

  The two walked towards the excavation, the Professor stopping several times to sign autographs and shake hands. The buzz of recognition grew, accompanied by a marked movement of people towards the north aisle.

  Harbridge and another verger hurried up, clucking annoyance. The Professor, a finger to his lips, complained charmingly to his admirers, “You lovely people are going to get me slung out on my ear, do you know that?”

  He shushed their laughter and made an amusing gesture of shooing them away; and although they did not go, they followed him no further, but stood watching his retreating back, chattering excitedly. Harbridge snapped, “Quiet, please! A service is in progress!”

 
“Try to give it a miss on Sundays as a rule,” the Professor remarked to Jurnet. “Only I’ve been away all week, filming on Hadrian’s Wall. Thought I’d take a quiet look to see what the others have been up to while my back was turned.”

  “Mr Epperstein was here too, earlier.”

  “Was he, now? And Liz makes two. The helots are more conscientious than I’d given them credit for. Beginning to wonder why I hurried back.”

  “Hadrian’s Wall sounds interesting.”

  “A ruin, Inspector. That’s the beauty of it.” Pargeter looked about the cathedral with a jaundiced eye. “Henry VIII must have been out of his mind to leave a place like this standing. Just think what a ruin it would have made! To say nothing of posing enough problems to keep me and my fellow-practitioners off the bread-line till Doomsday. Instead of which, this otherwise delightful city is lumbered with this dreadful Waterloo Station of a place where the station-master can’t even be certain the trains are running, let alone from what platform.”

  Arrived at the wooden hoarding, he paused before the door marked “Private”.

  “Only let myself in for this bit of nonsense because of the Dean. Flossie Carver. We were Cathedrans together. Hated each other’s guts.” Professor Pargeter gave his moustache a twist that, had it indeed been attached to his upper lip by spirit gum, would have had it off without a doubt. “Ties like that mean something.”

  Jurnet seized his opportunity.

  “Padlock on the door’d be a good thing, don’t you think? Kids might get in—hurt themselves.”

  “Serve the little buggers right!” The Professor pulled the door open. A broom clattered to the ground.

  Within the enclosure the air was gritty; a different kind of air from that which filled the rest of the cathedral. A battered table piled with files and boxes, a couple of three-legged stools, sieves and trowels, a bundle of graduated poles, some folded sacks and one bulging with lumps of masonry, were all covered with a grey dust that seemed adhesive, the deposit of some stranded sea.

  By some trick of acoustics, the circumscribing boards vibrated strongly to the chords that Mr Amos, up in the loft, was conjuring from the organ; yet the notes themselves arrived debilitated, as if the music had vaulted across the fenced-off space, leaving a bubble below, a vacuum.

  A frayed drugget stretched from the door to the hole in the paving; a hole roughly oblong, and of a depth varying between two-and-a-half and five feet.

  All this Jurnet both saw and did not see. Just as he both heard, and did not hear, the Professor’s rasping “My God!” He went down on his knees by the hole in the cathedral floor, his Sunday-trousered legs pressed into the dust. He knelt and he looked. He had no need to touch what lay there, half in and half out of the hole that housed the tomb of Little St Ulf. He had seen death often enough to recognize it for what it was.

  Even when he had not seen it for 840 years.

  Chapter Eight

  The photographs were appalling. The photographs were worse than the real thing.

  The real thing, true, was a boy, horribly murdered, horrifically mutilated. But sooner or later this real thing would be taken out of the mortuary drawer where it now lay tagged and dated like meat in a well-organized home freezer, packed into a coffin and lowered into the busy darkness of the grave, there to return, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in decent privacy. Give it a few years, plus worms that knew nothing about working union hours, and it would look like any other kid’s skeleton: sad, OK, but socially acceptable.

  Time was powerless to abate the horror of the photographs. In them the murdered child was abominable forever. The colour might fade a little from the tie buried deep in the skinny neck, the raw wound where there had once been a penis bleach silently in the official folder. But that livid Star of David hacked from throat to navel— Jurnet put the prints down abruptly.

  The Superintendent looked up from his chair, across the width of the desk.

  “For the moment, let’s put aside the tempting overtones, shall we?” He reached over, picked up the top-most photograph, and studied it as coolly as if it were a holiday snap. “The thing is, are we looking at what it appears to be, or at a common or garden sex crime artfully dressed up to look like something else?”

  “If it is a sex crime, it’s certainly not a common or garden one.”

  “True. The test will be, what comes next.”

  “Sir?”

  “We’ve released nothing as to the nature of the boy’s injuries. But the killer knows, and if the inflection of those particular wounds was his prime motive—if, in short, he killed the boy simply to make it look like Little St Ulf all over again—he won’t be able to wait to see it spread all over the media.” The Superintendent considered what he had just said, and found it wanting. “Not conclusive. He still might want to raise the biggest stink possible, to make sure we don’t latch on to his simple, uncomplicated homicide.”

  Jurnet said, “Either way, the kid’s common or garden dead, that’s for sure.”

  “Now, Ben,” the other chided. “You’re letting yourself get involved again. How many times do I have to remind you that detachment’s the first requisite for a good copper? Not that there aren’t days—” the hand holding the photograph had grown tense and white-knuckled—“when I find myself wondering whether the good Lord didn’t dangle those quaint appendages on the male torso simply for the fun of seeing them crushed, burnt, stamped on, electric-shocked, cut off, or otherwise put in painful jeopardy.”

  Jurnet said, “I’ll remember what you said about being detached, sir.”

  For a moment the Superintendent’s face stiffened with annoyance. Then he laughed, unaffectedly.

  “It’s these bloody pictures.” He returned to the pile the one he had been looking at. “The corpse as ritual object, eh? T. S. Eliot knew what he was doing all right. Stage a murder in a cathedral, it becomes transmuted into an art form. I doubt they’d ever have thought twice about Becket if he’d been struck down in some Canterbury back alley.”

  Jurnet forced himself to look at the photograph the Superintendent had discarded.

  A common or garden kid, done to death in a sick and barbarous way. Thin arms, knock knees, pot belly showing through the unbuttoned shirt. Could never have been a Little Lord Fauntleroy at the best of times, but presentable enough, as Jurnet remembered him, in scarlet cassock and white ruff, paired with the kid with the chewing gum, filing into the stalls for choir practice.

  Aloud he said, “Don’t know about Canterbury. Reckon one Little St Ulf’s enough for Angleby.”

  “More than!” the other agreed readily. “Medieval superstition was bad enough in the Middle Ages, let alone today. Unless, maybe, it’s that nowadays we simply make superstition respectable by calling it art. Both, after all, have their roots in the same need to propitiate the dark and unknowable forces in the Universe.”

  “Too deep for me, sir.”

  The Superintendent’s face reddened with an irritation instantly suppressed.

  “Me too, Ben. Words to cocoon the nastiness. Let’s stick to the knowables, eh? Arthur Cossey, aged twelve years and nine months, murdered in the cathedral between the hours of 6.45 and 8.15 a.m. It seems that the climate of the cathedral poses special problems, and Dr Colton can’t be more specific. So—what have we got so far on Arthur Cossey?”

  Mrs Sandra Cossey’s front doorstep, as white and welcoming as a new tombstone, should have prepared Jurnet and Sergeant Ellers for what to expect inside Number 7, Bishop Row. When Mrs Cossey opened the door, the sight of the apron she wore evoked for Jurnet an instant picture of a woman in cardigan and apron busy with her Brasso in the Close.

  The recollection had point. For Sandra Cossey, polishing was evidently more than a means to a living: it was a way of life. Everything in the little parlour that could be polished—and a significant proportion of the furnishings appeared to serve no other purpose—flashed and twinkled with the deadly jollity of a set of false teeth. Jurnet could not reme
mber ever being in a house so repellently clean.

  The woman had made no undue outcry when she had first heard that her only son was dead. Jurnet had not thought less of her for it. Grieving was a creative activity for which you either had, or hadn’t, a gift. By now, he saw, she had made some attempt to devise a proper role for herself; taken the rollers out of her hair, and put on a black skirt and jumper. From time to time she dabbed at her eyes—pale and bulging like her dead child’s—with a white handkerchief carefully folded to show the drawn-threadwork in one corner. Only her slippers—pink and fluffy with a sequinned heart on the instep—troubled the detective a little, like a clue that did not fit in with the rest of the evidence.

  The shame-faced pride that every now and again lit up her face was something else he was familiar with. The reporters would have been round, her name in the papers and on telly, the neighbours in and out of the place, as if she had suddenly done something remarkable. Few could resist the blandishments of fame, however dire the occasion.

  He was glad she had not yet been told the full extent of her son’s injuries.

  “Tell us about Arthur,” he prompted gently. “We need to know what kind of boy he was.”

  The woman looked up sharply.

  “He weren’t never in any trouble, if that’s what you mean.”

  Jurnet smiled reassurance.

  “If he had been, I wouldn’t be asking. We’d have heard of it. Kind of thing I mean, for instance—he had a good voice, didn’t he? Must have, to be a Song Scholar. Things like that, general. They all go to make up a picture.”

  “He did have a lovely voice.” Her own was thin and complaining. “Artistic as well. Like his Pa.”

  Jurnet said respectfully, “I heard about Mr Cossey. Terrible thing that was.” He did not add that he knew Arthur Cossey’s father had been pissed to the eyebrows when, five years previously, he had fallen from some scaffolding during repairs to the cathedral tower. “From what I hear, Mr Cossey was one of the most gifted masons they’d ever had working on the fabric.”