Death of a God (7 page)

‘So she will.' The Superintendent, unpredictable as ever, seemed suddenly to have recovered his good humour. ‘Every one will need to be told, or, if not, will want our guts for garters.' His gaze wafted jovially from Jurnet to Sergeant Ellers and back again. ‘What we have on our hands, God help us, is not just another murder. We have a media event, something that's going to sell record-breaking numbers of newspapers and keep television commentators in the style to which they are accustomed.' Eyes bright with irony, he announced, ‘This is a solemn moment, gentlemen. We have become part of the great British right to know.'

Allowing a moment for the awfulness to sink in, the Superintendent resumed.

‘There'll have to be press conferences, of course –'

‘Dave Batterby –' Jurnet interposed desperately, naming the detective-inspector whose ill-concealed ambitions to rise in his profession were the source of much discreet amusement in Angleby CID – ‘Dave'd be the one for that.'

The Superintendent exclaimed, ‘That's the first time, Ben, in all our years together, I've heard you actually
ask
for help! Wonders will never cease. But you disappoint me. Those romantic looks of yours on the box could do wonders for our corporate image. Still –'

‘Right up Dave's street. He'd do fine.'

‘By which you mean –' the Superintendent's eyes twinkled – ‘as you don't intend to tell him a damn thing anyway, he'll be in a perfect position to keep the press informed with all it needs to know! Ah well! At least it will enable me to assure the Chief, scout's honour, when he asks – as he's bound to – that Detective-Inspector Jurnet, this time round, is definitely one of a team, not a CID Lone Ranger galloping off into the sunset regardless.'

The phone rang, relieving Jurnet of the need either to concede or dispute an observation admittedly founded upon long experience. Control, asking for Mr Jurnet.

The detective took the receiver and listened, while the Superintendent drummed his fingers on his desk a little louder than was convenient.

Jurnet spoke into the mouthpiece, ‘Get it picked up and brought in for examination right away. Set it up, will you, Mary? And tell Hinchley he's to stay where he is meantime, on the chance somebody turns up looking for it. Ta, love.' Handing back the instrument: ‘The van they've found it on the Chepe. From the look of it, it appears to have been parked there for some hours.'

‘And what van is that?' inquired the Superintendent, making a noble effort to control his irritation.

‘The one belonging to the group. A Datsun 1300. Jack and I happened to notice it yesterday in the Market Place. It's pretty hard to miss, actually. White, with a rainbow painted on it you can see a mile off. Soon as we got back here I put out a call, asking patrols to keep a look out. I'd already ascertained it wasn't parked back at the University, where you'd have expected it to be, overnight.'

The Superintendent stated in flat tones, ‘There has to be something else special about it beside the rainbow.'

‘Yes, sir. We'd both of us noticed yesterday that it had a ladder in it.'

‘Ah!' The Superintendent sat silent for a moment, contemplating his beautifully manicured fingernails. Then he said, as if the conversation had never been interrupted, ‘You realize it's the post-mortem bit that's going to grab the mesmerized attention of the world. Why should someone, having killed a man and put himself already into enough jeopardy, God knows, think it worth taking the additional risk inherent in fastening his victim's corpse to a cross in a public place?'

Sergeant Ellers ventured, ‘Not all that much risk, sir, if you think about it. Nor, if you know Angleby, all that public either. I reckon the Himalayas must be a hive of activity compared to the town centre at night. At least the Himalayas have got their Abominable Snowman, which is more than you can say for us.'

‘Death of a god,' murmured Jurnet, the only one of the three present to have been at the concert the night before. Even so, the instant he said it, he wished he hadn't, feeling daft and vulnerable.

As for the Superintendent, he got up from his chair, giving no indication that he had heard. He crossed to the window, and stood looking out and down: a symbolic action only, any view of the remaining crosses being cut off by the wing of City Hall which housed the Registry Office. When he turned back towards the room, the man's expression was one of grim humour.

‘Can you imagine what they must have said, over at Jerusalem CID all those years ago, when they found out what had happened? Happened afterwards, that is. The empty tomb, and all that. How in heaven's name are you going to keep your statistics straight if the dead refuse to lie down? At least,' the Superintendent concluded, ‘we must be grateful for small mercies. God or no god, this one's not going to rise on the third day, if I have to sit on him myself!'

The sun was shining when Jurnet and Sergeant Ellers parked their car in Gallipoli Street and turned the corner into Sebastopol Terrace, a kindly sun that graced the mean little houses – built of a raw brick that more than a hundred years of English weather had not succeeded in mellowing – with a spurious, period charm. Even so, the sunlight could not disguise the terminal dilapidation – the sagging gutters, boarded-up windows, the bits of mosaic missing from the lengths of path up to the front doors. A gap-toothed vacancy between a derelict Number 14 and a Number 22 propped up with a wooden buttress which looked itself on the verge of collapse seemed to have become the rubbish dump of the neighbourhood.

Only a number of estate agents' boards flaunted like banners along the ramshackle fences promised better things.
‘This delightful bijou residence,'
one of them had the cheek to offer,
‘ripe for modernization.'

‘Ripe!' Sergeant Ellers looked about him with narrowed eyes. ‘Family trouble,' he pronounced, at the end of his inspection. ‘Either that, or lacking in the top storey. Say what you like, no mum in her right mind with a famous pop-singer son would be hanging out in a dump like this if the two of them were on speaking terms. Why, it's the only bloody one in the whole Terrace left in occupation.'

‘What suits some people doesn't suit others,' Jurnet returned with some heat. ‘And you can leave Loy Tanner out of it. On what Miriam pays them they don't have to live here if they don't want to. You'll have to go a long way to find an employer who pays her outworkers more than she does –'

‘Hold on!' the other cried. ‘No insult intended to your Miriam intended! Only, honestly, can
you
understand it? Would
you
choose Sebastopol Terrace if you had the choice?'

Carefully keeping the envy out of his voice, Jurnet said, ‘Miriam says they're very happy here.'

The bright red door of Number 12 was ajar. As Jurnet gingerly wielded its brass knocker in the shape of a dolphin, a woman's voice, low-keyed and pleasant, called from inside: ‘Come on in! Coffee's on the table!'

It seemed an unlikely welcome to bearers of ill tidings. The two detectives, one after the other, stepped out of the sunlight into the tiny hall, no more than a passage really.

This was a part of the job Jurnet could well have done without. He could have kicked himself for not, after all, bringing along a WPC to do the tea and sympathy bit, except that after what Miriam had told him about Mara Felsenstein it had seemed a kind of insult to proffer such phony comfort.

It was not so much that the grief of kith and kin, informed out of the blue that their nearest and dearest had been savagely done to death, upset him unduly. Somebody had to tell them, Jurnet accepted that. Rather, it was the overwhelming sense of his own inadequacy which always, at the opening of a murder investigation, undermined his confidence of ever bringing it to a successful conclusion.

At least, those who were thus incontinently bereaved mourned a real person. They had someone to remember. All Jurnet, the outsider, had to be going on with was a carcass, evil-smelling offal taking its revenge on the air it could no longer breathe by polluting it. Only when, by a laborious process of inquiry and elimination, he had eventually come himself to know the man or woman all the keening was in aid of, would he begin to understand the grieving; even – so close by then had the two of them become, the quick and the dead – to share it.

In the meantime, as he murmured the conventional phrases of condolence, he seemed to be talking about someone else.

There was no door to the front room which opened immediately out of the passage, only a curtain of some dark-brown stuff, looped back. Within was a room lit by a window at either end, the rear one giving on to a narrow strip of garden where a substantial wash, a regular spring-cleaning, bedspreads, covers, curtains, flapped on a line as if to advertise that even in such unpromising surroundings a decent cleanliness could still flourish unimpaired.

Mrs Felsenstein, the houseproud housewife, Miriam's paragon, sat at what Jurnet assumed to be a knitting machine, one of a pair facing each other, though at first glance (perhaps it was the way the knitter's fingers moved, knowledgeably but with a loving concentration) they looked to the detective more like musical instruments: spinets possibly, or something else that stood upon spindly legs and, when played upon, emitted antique sounds that seemed to come from another planet.

As the detectives entered, Mr Felsenstein came in from a back room and took his place at the second machine where, its ribbed lower edge held straight by some small pieces of plastic hooked into the fabric, a substantial length of knitting hung down from what one might call the keyboard, like music already played, waiting to be rolled up and put away. Not a spinet, Jurnet amended his earlier thought. More a pianola.

Sitting there facing each other, the silence broken only by a gentle hum which Jurnet realized was the sound made by the machines when they were working, the two, intent upon what they were doing, presented a picture of calm companionship which moved the detective to hope his task might be less disagreeable than he had anticipated. Those two could support each other.

Once the man stood up, and the detective had got a good look at him, he was less sure, so frail was the bent shape, twisted, with one shoulder higher than the other.

‘Excuse us, please!' Mr Felsenstein exclaimed. ‘Mara thought you were the milkman.'

Jurnet could not resist asking, ‘Do you always invite your milkman in for coffee?'

‘It is time for his break, is why. Before, he would go to the café, and we'd get no milk until he began work again, by which time, often, we were forgotten entirely, or, on a hot day, the milk had gone sour.' The man smiled, the bony contours of his face dissolving into a droll humour. ‘So not kindness, you understand. We can take no credit for it. Expediency.'

Mrs Felsenstein slid the carriage of her knitting machine backwards and forwards two or three times along its bank of needles, her lips moving in a silent count. Satisfied she had reached a point where it was safe to break off, she looked up and said pleasantly, ‘If the gentlemen will be good enough to tell us why they've called, Leo, perhaps we'll offer them a cup of coffee too, just to show we can on occasion be kind without ulterior motive.' Smiling at the two detectives: ‘That is, if they don't mind it black.'

Not one of the hysterical sort at least, Jurnet thought thankfully, though he should have gathered as much from his conversation with Miriam the night before. Yet, at first sight, his expectations having been aroused, he was disappointed by the reality – a woman of average height and rather heavy build, dressed in a black sweater and patterned skirt, with shoulder-length brown hair tied back from a face which was in no way out of the ordinary, save for the eyes.

At a second glance, the eyes made up for everything else. Large and grey, they were the eyes of a child, disconcerting in their direct and uncomplicated gaze.

Apart from the knitting machines and the two kitchen chairs on which their operators sat, the room contained only a small couch, its loose-cover of a beige fabric faded but crisp and fresh, two more chairs to match the others, and a small table whose flaps had been let down. Plain brown curtains, unlined; no carpet, except for a hearthrug, but polished floorboards that filled the air with the smell of wax polish only slightly spiked with overtones of sulphur from the fire of smokeless fuel which flickered dispiritedly in the narrow grate.

Nothing to get into
Homes and Gardens
, that was for sure: but satisfying, in a way Jurnet could not easily account for. A home, not a collection of other people's ideas of what a home should be.

The woman sitting at the knitting machine was similarly her own and nobody else's. Mara Felsenstein, the detective decided, feeling at the same time a little dismayed by the extravagance of the image, was – if her eyes were to be believed, and if eyes like that could lie, nothing was to be trusted – a woman of a startling purity of soul.

She did not disappoint him when he told her that her son was dead, murdered. Leo Felsenstein groped blindly for the couch, collapsed on to it with his head in his hands, emitting a rusty noise that seemed to heave itself like vomit up from the depths of his protesting body. His wife sat deathly pale but silent, even managing a small smile when Sergeant Ellers brought her some of the coffee from the kitchen, and sipping obediently when the little Welshman lifted the cup to her lips.

She did not sit long. She crossed to the couch with unfaltering step and went down on her knees by her husband, her full skirt spreading out over the floorboards. She pulled away the hands and laid her face against his.

‘Liebchen … Liebchen
…' she murmured. ‘It's all right. We can bear it –' And, looking up at the two detectives, hovering full of goodwill but embarrassed by the necessity of being there at all: ‘When he was a boy, Leo was in Auschwitz. He has had as much death as he can manage.'