Death of a God (25 page)

‘As for you, Barney –' the Superintendent concluded his exhortation – ‘you say rigor wasn't established by the time Tanner was, so to speak, elevated, so for heaven's sake let yourself go floppy. Don't forget you're dead.'

The doctor unlaced his shoes and removed them: took off his socks before replying. He tucked them into the shoes and placed the pair, nicely aligned, next to the clothes.

Then he said, with unexpected humour, ‘I hope I've met enough of them in my time to know how a properly brought-up corpse behaves in company.'

Half an hour later, all the participants in the serious reconstruction were ready to agree that a single person, acting on his own, could have crucified Loy Tanner, just about. The Superintendent did it with the neat-fingered precision with which he did everything, only his forehead, shining with perspiration, suggesting that any special effort was required to heft a dead man up a ladder, anchor him by his belt to the centre post of a cross, and then, raising the head and the upper part of the torso, secure each arm in turn to the horizontal.

Through it all, Dr Colton, well versed in the gaucherie of death, lolled too convincingly for comfort. To the others, awaiting their turn, it was a relief to observe that he, too, was sweating.

Jurnet, while hating every second of it, managed not too badly, aware that he would have done much worse without the Superintendent's example to follow. Fumbling in his kitchen-sink gloves, he dwelt with hatred on the sight of his superior officer's elegant hands encased in operating theatre issue, a second skin. It came as no surprise that the Superintendent had not seen fit to requisition a similar pair for each of the team, nor even to strip off his own for re-use, once he had no further need of them.

Jack Ellers, instructed, for purposes of comparison, to wear his normal winter gloves, made a right muck of it and very nearly of Dr Colton into the bargain. Somehow up-ended, the police surgeon, still heroically shamming dead, hung by one leg, the ladder teetering alarmingly.

‘Leave them alone!' the Superintendent commanded peremptorily, when the other two detectives started forward to render assistance. ‘Jack can do it!'

And so he could, if a man hanging lopsided by his arms alone – the silver clasp on the late pop singer's belt having somehow unlatched itself – could properly be called crucified.

‘Take a short rest, if you want to,' the Superintendent suggested graciously, when the doctor had been helped down the ladder, his trembling legs refusing to perform the manoeuvre for him. Once down, he squatted cross-legged on the board floor, inhaling chestily. Sid Hale went over to the horse and brought back the man's jacket, draping it over his shoulders with the exaggerated tenderness which he often called in aid to avoid any suspicion of soft-heartedness.

Even so, listening to Colton's laboured breathing, he let the camouflage slip, and addressed the Superintendent. ‘I should say he's had as much as he can take, sir.'

‘Oh! Do you think so?'

The police surgeon caught the note of exasperation, and lifted his head, controlling his voice with an effort. ‘I shall be quite all right, once I get my breath back.'

The Superintendent looked closer, and put on his charming face.

‘Barney, I'm nominating you for an Oscar! A magnificent performance! Go and get yourself dressed, man, before you catch cold. Even lacking Sid's contribution, I think we can say that we've proved our point – demonstrated that, at the same time as we are looking for a pair, a trio, a quartet, a coachload of villains who may have done for Loy Tanner, we are equally looking for a single killer.'

Jack Ellers was looking green – as indeed they all were, in varying degrees, even the Superintendent. It was as if, in placing a man on a cross, they had each received some private intimation of what the real thing had been like. The little Welshman blurted out, ‘Whoever did it, whatever else he was, he was sick. Isn't that right, Doctor?'

Colton, fumbling with his shirt buttons, was glad of the excuse to take five.

‘Not my field, I'm thankful to say. My clients are beyond such questions. Still, it's a sobering thought that the corpse of Einstein possesses no more reasoning powers than that of a mentally retarded infant.'

‘You know what's going to happen once we make an arrest?' The Superintendent spoke with resignation. ‘The shrinks will move in from all points of the compass. As if one needed to be told that murder could never be normal!'

Looking from one to another of the little gathering: ‘Haven't we all noticed, taking depositions, even where the accused professes terrible remorse, how often a kind of gruesome pride creeps in unbidden – an enlargement of personality which seems to come with discovering yourself capable of committing an act so far beyond the bounds of the permissible –'

From across the room, knotting his tie, Dr Colton nodded agreement. ‘A feeling which could even affect physical performance –'

‘Are you saying that a person who doesn't ordinarily possess the physical strength to hoist a body on to that cross might, in that temporary state of euphoria, be up to it?'

‘As I've said, I'm not the person to ask. But it certainly would not surprise me.'

Jurnet was climbing the castle mound.

Crossing the Market Place, below the little garden where kids with reversed guitars still stood guard at each corner of the murdered pop star's symbolic tomb, he had happened to look eastward up Lion Yard, the pedestrian way which cut through to the Castle Bailey, and seen the Norman keep high on its mound above the city.

Probably it was the sun, pale but convalescent, which had tempted the detective's steps away from the path of duty. The great building of creamy stone bulked four-square against a sky of gentle blue. Here and there on the grassy slopes that rose steeply from the Bailey some early daffodils were already trumpeting the spring. Jurnet, moved by God alone knew what vernal madness, had bought himself a doughnut.

Punishing himself for his truancy, he ignored the fine stone bridge which leaped across the chasm which separated the castle from the rest of the city, and toiled up the mound itself, using the track – part path, part stair – which zigzagged up to the plateau at the summit, Halfway there, at a little nook furnished with a wooden bench, he stopped to get his breath back, and partake of refreshment.

There, out of the wind, the sun was warm, the view tremendous. But alas, as with so many things in life, the idea of a doughnut was better than the actuality. It was messy, the jam oozing, the sugar a film of crystalline glue. Even after vigorous rubbing with his handkerchief, the detective's fingers and mouth still felt sticky.

Jurnet's disillusion was not assuaged, either, by the sudden recollection that long ago, on that very seat, he had sat, one summer evening, with a girl whose name he had forgotten – Sandra Something, was it? – a pretty girl wearing a dress crackling with the petticoats they were wearing that year, and shoes with spike heels that made her legs look almost as good as Marilyn Monroe's. She hadn't found it easy, in those shoes, to mount to this eyrie to which he had led her with lecherous intent, but she had persevered good-humouredly enough, doubtless anticipating felicities which would make the journey worthwhile.

What had happened was nothing. Jurnet discovered that twenty years later the memory of that non-event could still bring a blush to his cheek. He had been afraid to so much as touch the girl's hand, until at last she had stood up, stiff with starch and boredom; called out derisively, ‘Ta ta, Romeo!' and gone stumbling downhill on her spindly heels in search of boys who, if they didn't yet know everything, at least knew enough to be going on with.

Seen close to, the castle stopped being a picture postcard and stood forth in all its stony heartlessness – a fortress built by foreign conquerors, not to protect the city, but to keep it under. Nasty little shafts of chill, tumbling down its walls from some polar repository above, sent Jurnet moving out of their shadow as if out of javelin range, towards the high railings which protected visitors from the cliff edge beyond. In all the wide gravelled space which surrounded the keep, only one person was to be seen: a woman sitting on a camp stool, a large drawing-pad on her knees, making a view of the city.

Hunched over her work though she was, something about the set of her shoulders seemed familiar to Jurnet. As he drew nearer, scrunching the gravel, the woman looked up with a wary expression which changed instantly to a smile of warm recognition.

‘Inspector Jurnet! This
is
a strange place to run into you!'

‘I could say the same.' Jurnet shook Mrs Felsenstein's hand, proffered across her drawing pad. ‘Except –' with a sideways twist of the head, the better to see the sketch she had been working on – ‘now that I've seen that, not strange at all. I didn't know you were an artist.'

‘Nothing so grand, I'm afraid. I just felt I had to have some air, and as I enjoy sketching when I get the chance –' She let the rest of the sentence go; stood up, closed her pad, and carefully placed it on her stool.

‘Now I've interrupted you.'

‘Not at all! I'm so glad to see you, I can't tell you –'

Again the woman broke off, this time apparently in some difficulty. The detective thought she looked a bit peaky, though the impression of inward strength which had struck him earlier was undiminished.

‘How can I help?'

Mrs Felsenstein did not answer immediately: she turned towards the railings and looked out over the city. Then she said, with a little shiver, ‘This is a hateful place, really. I don't know why I come here. This great pile of earth – did you know there used to be a hundred Saxon homes on this spot, before the Normans came and started to build the castle? And that when some of the home-owners protested, they knocked the houses down anyway, and buried them and the protesters together?'

She gave a little deprecatory smile.

‘Sometimes – I know it's silly – I find myself imagining that they're still down there, those buried people, living their Saxon lives as if there'd never been any 1066 and all that: and that one day, out of all that nice municipal grass, I'll see a hand sticking up and it's an Anglo-Saxon trying to get out.'

Jurnet laughed. ‘That's a bit morbid, if you don't mind me saying so.'

‘It is, isn't it?' the woman agreed readily. ‘I'm afraid I do have a rather morbid imagination. But this is the place to encourage it.' This time she looked upward, to the castle ramparts. ‘They say that Robert Tanner's bones hung there for more than fifty years. Just to remind the citizens of Angleby what happened to people who tried to make life better for the poor and oppressed. There's a story that every time another one of them fell down – sometimes it was as big as a thigh bone, sometimes as small as the joint of a little finger – that same night one or other of the Tanner family would swim the moat – there was water in it still in those days – climb the castle mound and whip it away. When, at long last, they finally collected the whole skeleton, they took it to Wendham, where he came from, and buried it near the church altar.'

Mara Felsenstein,
neé
Tanner, sighed. ‘A hundred years ago, the local squire had Wendham church done over – the old flagstones taken up, and shiny tiles put down in their place. The workmen found some bones: well, old churches were full of old bones, and if you held up work to give all of them a consecrated burial, you'd never be done. So they chucked them out with the rest of the rubbish, and got on with laying the new floor.'

The woman turned back to the detective, astonishing him afresh with the candid beauty of her eyes. A little smile emerged at the corners of her mouth, and retreated again.

‘You'll say I'm being morbid again, and perhaps I am. I keep thinking of Robert Tanner, and I want Loy buried, not left dangling from the ramparts, as it were. Not because I'm religious, because I'm not, at all. I just want his life brought to a decent close, one decent, ordinary people can accept.

‘Without a funeral and a grave –' she was speaking rapidly now, urgent to get what she had to say over and done with – ‘without people coming in for a ham tea after the service, there's no ending I can take hold of, only the hateful violence that stopped him breathing. He's not alive any more, I can face that if I have to, but so long as he's lying in that mortuary, he isn't dead either. I can't go on to the next thing. And I have to go on to it. Leo's ill. He needs all my care and all my love, and I can't give him either, not properly, so long as Loy's life and death remain incomplete.'

‘Buried or unburied, that's the way they'll stay till we catch whoever killed him.' Moved by the sorrow in her face: ‘Don't fret yourself. One thing's not dependent on the other. I'm afraid there's nothing I personally can do about advancing the date of the inquest; but once it's over the body will be handed over without messing about.'

‘Will it? Oh, I hope so.'

‘I'll tell you one thing, though.' No good, Jurnet thought, the woman deluding herself. ‘You'll have a job keeping your son's funeral quiet. And once the media cotton on to who
you
are –'

‘I shan't care about that,' she replied with surprising nonchalance. ‘It's the way of life he chose. If he leaves it with all that show business and publicity I can only suppose that's the way he would have wanted to go. I can put up with it, if I have to.'

‘Once it's over,' she continued, with that devastating honesty which went with her eyes, ‘Leo and I can settle down, not as if nothing had happened, but to some semblance of peace and quiet again. After all, we saw him so seldom, once he'd left home. In time, it will all seem like a dream. We'll be asking each other if it really happened.'