Death of a God (23 page)

Jurnet made no attempt to disguise his scepticism. ‘I must say, it seems conduct beyond the call of duty.'

‘Perhaps.' The Professor of Contemporary Institutions sighed, and suddenly looked his age. ‘But then you see, Inspector, it wasn't a matter of duty, but of love. I happen to love my students, unwashed, unmannerly and unaware as they mostly are. And I feel – I've felt for some time – that I am failing them.'

‘In what way?'

‘In every way. Can you imagine a teacher of English Literature, let us say, who can lecture only in Sanskrit, and whose class, in turn, can respond only in a secret language of their own?' The Professor ran a despairing hand through his hair, rendering the bald spot explicit. ‘As you know, I occupy the Chair of Contemporary Institutions in the University – a contradiction in terms, if ever there was one, since institutions, of their very nature, cannot be contemporary. They need time and patience to develop and come to maturity, and today there isn't time and certainly no patience. Notwithstanding, my courses are always over-subscribed because young people are attracted by those two words. They think they sound, God help us, relevant. And when at last the penny drops and they begin to understand what a con it all is, I'm the one they blame for misleading them.

‘And that's why –' the man looked at Jurnet, fancying, quite mistakenly, that he perceived a dawning sympathy – ‘I thought that if I could bridge the gap, not just learn to speak their jargon but tune in to their wavelength – for example, since so many of them seem to go in for it, find out for myself what it's like to be high on drugs – I could be of some real service instead of remaining – in their own words, I need hardly say – the silly old nit who likes to pretend he's one of the boys –'

‘Silly old nit sums it up precisely, sir.' Jurnet's words were a cold douche, drowning the Professor of Contemporary Institutions' pitiful little moment of truth. In defence, the man resumed his motley, smoothed his expensive hairdo back into place, sucked in his stomach, brought his dimple out into the light of day.

‘Are you going to charge me?' he asked hopefully.

‘Boost your standing with the young ' uns no end, I dare say.' Jurnet was stubbornly unco-operative. ‘We'll see. In the meantime, and before you leave the building, we shall require a statement from you, setting out what you have just told us, together with anything further which may come to mind as you go along. Incidentally, I can tell you that no sum of £150 has been recovered. If it should come to light, and you can prove your ownership, it will be returned to you in due course.'

‘Seven twenty-pound notes, and one ten.'

‘Put that into your statement with the rest. Did Tanner tell you who he intended passing the money to?'

‘I never asked, and he never said. To tell you the truth – whatever you may think, Inspector, after today – I'm a law abiding bloke by nature and I felt a bit diffident about asking.'

‘I see.' Jurnet paused, himself a bit diffident about asking. Then: ‘That book of yours, Professor – Eschatology – what is that?'

‘It means the study of last things.' The Professor of Contemporary Institutions picked up his
magnum opus
with loving hands.

‘The study of last things,' the detective repeated. ‘Seems a lot of paper to say pop is the end.'

‘Foreshadowings of the Apocalypse –' the proud author seemed not to have heard the intervention – ‘not just in the words and music, you understand, the philosophy and the body language of the performers, but in the total ambiance: everything from the design of record sleeves to the psychosomatic motivation of the disco – the volume of noise, the strobe lights, the deliberate fostering of disorientation. I can claim in all modesty to have written the definitive work on the subject. It's a good read,' he promised boyishly, ‘even if I says it as shouldn't. I'll be happy to lend it to you, Inspector, and promise not to turn up at your address with my American Express card in my hand if you're late in returning it.'

Ending, with becoming grace: ‘Although it is, of course, an academic text primarily, it should not be beyond the understanding of a moderately intelligent layman.'

Jurnet, whilst acknowledging the compliment, declined with suitable regret. ‘Above my head, I'm afraid.'

At which point Detective-Sergeant Jack Ellers, his chubby face unsmiling, came into the room and announced without ceremony, ‘I've got the car out, Ben. It's round the front. The Super's gone on ahead. We're needed at Havenlea.'

This time, familiar with the place, they drove straight along the front, making for the cars already parked in the distance. Apart from them, Havenlea seemed as empty, as uninviting, as on the two detectives' previous visit. The tide was at its peak, three-quarters of the way up the beach, the air drenched in flying spume. The waves hurled themselves at the shore and retreated in a rattle of pebbles. The best you could say about the lowering sky was that there was altogether too much of it.

As Jack Ellers parked at the end of the line, a thickset figure battled its way along the promenade to meet them. Jurnet was pleased to recognize Detective Chief Inspector Herring, stationed at Havenlea; christened Alexander but, in that place, destined from birth to be known as Bloater.

A huge man, with the gentle strength of many giants, it did not seem to have embittered him. He greeted Jurnet and the little Welshman as old friends, and reassured them, ‘We've left everything as we found it.'

‘Who found him? You never see a soul about.'

‘It
is
a bit parky.' The Havenlea man smiled, sounding quite proud. ‘Last Monday we registered the lowest temperature in the British Isles south of the Shetlands. Pensioner lives just off the front took his dog out to do its business. Let it off the lead so it could go down on the beach while he waited up top in the nearest shelter. When it didn't come back as usual he went to investigate, and found it behind the Punch and Judy tent, running back and forth barking like mad. It didn't look as if the dog had actually gone into the tent: just kept snuffling around at the base. The old chap had quite a job getting the animal on the lead again. He himself didn't look into the tent either. What there was to be seen outside was enough for him. He went across to the Haven Hotel and asked them to phone 999.'

The Superintendent was waiting for them down on the beach, trousers tucked into wellies, and dressed for the wind and the waves in a navy parka laced with white cords, very nautical. Jurnet often wondered where his superior officer kept the apparently inexhaustible wardrobe that was stocked with clothes for every occasion, however unlikely. Somewhere in the depths of Police Headquarters, he felt sure, behind a door to which only the Superintendent had the key, hung everything from a wet suit to lederhosen and funny little hats with feathers in them, all available instanter as the need arose.

‘You took your time,' said the Superintendent, not caring who heard him. He was in the usual filthy temper murder produced in him. Jurnet, trying nobly to be understanding, mumbled something inaudible, and turned to the matter in hand.

Punchy King sat inside his Punch and Judy tent leaning sideways, his body supported by one of the corner struts, his wide black hat tilted at a rakish angle. He looked extremely surprised, as well he might have been, that somebody should have stuck a knife into his back, with fatal results.

Amused, as well. Whether it was intended, or whether it was a trick of muscles contracting in a last agony, the face of the dead man looked more than ever like Punch's, full of the puppet's derisive dismissal of the world and all its tomfoolery.

The man, however, unlike his little playmate, had spouted blood, not polystyrene foam or whatever else went to fill a puppet's innards. A lot of blood. Blood had soaked into the back of the tent, obliterating a fair proportion of the red and white stripes. Blood that must have tumbled from mouth and nostrils had turned the front of the dead man's grey cardigan a sticky rust; it had splashed in great gouts over Judy and the crocodile and the policeman, lodged in an arrangement of pockets that hung against the outer canvas; stained the needles and reels of cotton in the open workbox he still held in his lap.

Slumped between the Punch and Judy man's knees, his absurd little legs dangling, Punch stared, full of a malign humour. It looked as though King had been sitting on his stool – which was, in fact, a small pair of folding steps of the type usually found in kitchens, peacefully sewing, when the killer had raised the back flap of the tent and struck. The seam down the centre of Punch's hump was slightly open, a needle and thread still dangling from the point Punchy King had reached in his stitchery. From the narrow aperture, something white and powdery still descended in a last feeble trickle to join the small mound of whatever it was that had already formed beneath the hump on the sheet of hardboard which did service as a floor.

Protected by disposable overalls, one of the scene-of-crime men reached in gingerly and lifted a sample of the white powder on a plastic spatula. When he had straightened up, cautiously, so as not to displace his booty, the Superintendent took the spatula from him, moistened a finger and dipped it in: put it to his lips, his nose.

Jurnet, not waiting for the verdict from on high, pronounced unhesitatingly, ‘Heroin!'

‘Reason we wanted you here pronto,' Bloater Herring explained amiably, ‘was because you'd been in touch so recently with regard to questioning King about Loy Tanner. I must say, unless you've come up with anything pointing the other way, I'd be surprised if it turns out there's any connection between the two killings. My guess is – though it is only a guess – that it's one of those coincidences which occur every now and again.'

The Detective Chief Inspector sat down in a chair which had none of the pretensions of the Superintendent's back in Angleby. Jurnet for one was relieved the man had sat down. On his feet, he filled the small room to the point of suffocation. Seated, he at least left more or less enough oxygen for the rest of them.

A ship's whistle sounded piercingly under the window. Jurnet, close enough to the glass to see the busy commerce along the river, marvelled afresh at the difference between the two Havenleas, the port and the resort: a difference between the quick and the dead.

Outside the police-station window, cranes dipped and rose with a strange, avian dignity; juggernauts, parked along the quay, engulfed or disgorged containers whose contents, so far as the looker-on was concerned, were known only to God and the customs and tally men moving importantly with their clipboards amid the organized chaos all about them. Principally, there was life: men shouting, swearing, spitting; coiling ropes and uncoiling them; slouching on bollards, fag-end in mouth, staring out vacantly over the water; sitting in lorry cabs with the racing editions spread out over the steering wheel. A rough, tough lot from the look of them, with the swagger of men with money in their pockets, and no apparent worries about where the next lot was coming from.

The Superintendent said, ‘I get the impression you're not exactly surprised.'

‘I am and I'm not,' returned the Havenlea man. ‘It'd never have surprised me to hear King had done for one of those beauty queens he shacked up with, he's been so near to bringing it off more than once. On the other hand, I'd never have picked him out as a victim – not, that is, till I saw what came out of that little fellow's hump. Anyone who's into drugs, whether as seller or buyer, has to know the score.

‘Ever since they parked those platforms out there in our bit of ocean, we've been aware of an operation building up. In fact, as you know, we've been working on it for some time, and we've got our eye on a couple of chaps who work on one of the rigs. We've reason to believe they've been taking delivery of the goods out there in the North Sea, and landing it at Havenlea. We've been holding off in hopes of catching the big wheel.

‘When any of the men come in for rest and recreation, as they laughably call it, we all but give them an enema to see what they're bringing in with them. As for the boats and 'copters, we practically take them apart every trip. But so far – nothing.'

‘There could be a link.' Jurnet deemed the moment right to bring his colleagues up to date on the life and times of Simon Culliver. Inured as they were to the infinite diversity of human folly, they still looked a little bemused at the lengths to which the Professor of Contemporary Institutions had been prepared to go to get on terms with his students.

The detective finished, ‘Loy Tanner went to Queenie King's caravan after the concert, when her father was still there. Could be that the object of the visit was to pass on the Professor's order for his drug cocktail.'

Addressing himself to the Detective Chief Inspector with that charm he was always so free with to strangers, the Superintendent said, ‘What worries me, frankly, is whether the villain who has just put paid to Mr Punchy King hasn't, at the same time, and quite inadvertently, deprived us of our murderer.'

‘Look on the bright side,' urged Bloater Herring, the smile on his enormous face positively angelic. ‘One suspect less can't be bad, can it?'

‘Suspects!' exclaimed Sergeant Ellers, winding the car window down an inch or two as if the outer air were a commodity it had become safe to breathe so long as you didn't overdo it. The sun was shining, the wind reduced to a breeze. Suddenly it was to be observed that branches thought winter-bare were, in fact, full of buds, that songbirds were getting their act together, and the new season's no-parking lines flaunting golden along the verges.

Only Sid Hale, sprawled in the back of the car, protested plaintively ‘You want to give us all pneumonia?'