Death of a God (5 page)

Down in the front row the head of Mrs Lark the Chair nodded slowly to and fro like the head of one of those china mandarins, black-pencilled moustache and all. The Bishop's chaplain, in an attempt to regain his poise, blew a trumpet voluntary into his handkerchief. Only the Bishop, so jolly earlier, looked thoughtful, touching the cross on his breast every now and again: even a little scared.

Miriam had kept her head turned away, withdrawn her hand.

‘So you enjoyed it after all,' now, in the car, she stated calmly, out of the depths of her lovely coat. Her instant grasp of the situation only put Jurnet even more at odds with himself. ‘Don't look like that!' Miriam protested. ‘What's wrong about enjoying a really first-rate group? No need to act as if you've just come out of a blue movie and you're wondering if you oughtn't to make a clean breast of it to the Superintendent.'

‘Not a question of enjoying or not enjoying. Question of being used, manipulated. Brainwashed.' Jurnet glowered at the chapped young faces illuminated by the car's headlamps. ‘Look at ' em! Waiting for the great Loy Tanner to come past like he was Princess Di or Christ walking on the water. Pathetic! And you know what? Chap other side of me said actually the group have got a couple of caravans parked somewhere in the grounds, so he isn't even coming. Always travel like that on tour to avoid the crowds, he said. Never put up in hotels.
And
all the fans know it. So what do these kids think they're doing, standing about getting pneumonia for nothing?'

‘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.'

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 hauled 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.

‘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.