Ritual Murder (24 page)

Ellers, with genteel dexterity, spat grape pits into a cupped palm and inquired, “How are Millie and the kid going to manage with Joe in the clink? I suppose it's bring on the social workers at long last, eh?”

“Not if Joe can help it. He phoned a solicitor—bloke by the name of Fendale, from Hiller, Upton's—”

“Hiller, Upton's,” echoed the Sergeant, in a tone that spoke volumes.

“Now, now,” Jurnet returned reprovingly. “Someone has to represent the villains. They have their rights like anyone else. Fendale seems a decent enough chap. He'll see Willie gets money for food day by day, and generally keep an eye on things.” Guilt rose in Jurnet's throat, mingling with the taste of the orange. He had promised the child to return in a jiffy. And he had not returned.

Rosie discarded her apple core and started in on a banana.

“Jack's told me about them. Anything I can do?”

“Ta. I'll bear it in mind.”

“Seems a lot to put on a child's shoulders, that's all. How old is he, exactly?”

“Officially, coming up to five and a half. Provided you don't tell the Education Authority, seven.”

“Poor little mite!” Rosie was exclaiming when the telephone rang on the sideboard. “It doesn't seem fair.”

Jack Ellers took the call.

“It isn't,” Jurnet agreed. “But then, what is?”

Jack Ellers held out the receiver to his superior officer, stretching the cord to its limit.

“You'd better hear this, Ben.”

Jurnet took the phone; listened, and heard.

When they got to the scrapyard the trailer was still burning. Nothing to what it had been before the fire engine arrived, one of the bystanders assured them, sounding aggrieved that the show was nearly over. Someone had sheared through the chain on the metal gates, and they stood open. A hose snaked from a hydrant, figures moved dark against the flickering light, or bright in the headlamps of the fire engine parked beside a small mountain of rusted bedsprings. An ambulance waited, a little further along.

The trailer was dying noisily as its wood warped, its metal twisted in the heat. A sudden crackle splayed a plume of sparks against the night sky.

PC Hinchley came limping to meet the pair, a sleeve of his tunic charred to a sticky web, the arm showing through blistered and swollen.

“I tried to get inside, sir. It went up like a ruddy bomb.”

He turned his face away from Jurnet's bleak gaze, and the detective saw that the skin down one side was scorched and angry.

“Go and get that seen to!” he commanded harshly. And, on a softer note, “I'm sure you did what you could, Bob.”

PC Bly came up, having heard the last words.

“More than anyone could, short of Superman. Thought we'd lost him as well, for a bit.” Perhaps the man imagined some critical appraisal in the detective's eyes: perhaps his own conscience troubled him, for he burst out, “The devil himself couldn't have got in there, Mr Jurnet. By the time we were out of the car and across the street, flames were shooting out everywhere. Those two never had a chance.”

“No.” After a moment Jurnet asked; “Did you see anyone about?”

“Not a soul. Couple of cars passed earlier, young fellow called for a girl at one of the houses, and they went off towards the river. Otherwise, nothing. Blaker, down at the Water Gate, called in to say it was quiet as the grave over there too—except that, about ten minutes before the fire started, he came on, happy as a sandboy, to let us know some bloody owl was tuwhit-tuwhooing it up in some tree or other.”

“You kept the trailer under surveillance at all times?”

“Yes, sir.” The constable jerked his head in the direction of the street. “You can see where we're parked. The trailer windows were lit up all the time—that is, until a couple of minutes before the place went up, when we reckoned they'd turned out the light to go to bed. The curtains were drawn, but they were thin, and the light showed through. Every now and then someone seemed to be moving about inside, but the curtains weren't all that thin you could be sure.”

“I shall want a full report.”

“Yes, Mr Jurnet.”

PC Bly watched as the detective strode away towards the fire engine, followed by Sergeant Ellers: stiffened, wondering what more was in store when the tall, lean figure suddenly checked, turned, and came back.

Jurnet said, “I want you to know I'm satisfied you did everything possible in the circumstances.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The chief fireman, a square, strong man, pursed his lips doubtfully.

“Bomb? Could be, I suppose. More likely a gas cylinder. Wouldn't be the first of
them
we've been called out to, nor the last.”

The contents of Joe Fisher's pockets, for which he had been given a receipt at the police station, had not included the “gas bit”. (
I'll be back in a jiffy, Willie!
)

Jurnet asked tonelessly, “How long before you'll be able to get at the bodies?”

“Take a bit of time. That metal's been white-hot. Two of them in there, so I hear.”

“Yes. A woman and a child.”

“Ah. Did something silly, I reckon, like leaving the stopcock open. Some people never learn till it's too late.” The fireman sighed, and got back to business. “We've had a look already, far as we can, but there's such a tangle there you couldn't see an elephant, if there was one. They'll be underneath—what's left of them.”

“Jack—” turning to Ellers—“will you call in for a van?”

The thought of Millie and Willie, barbecued on the bone, packed into polythene bags like some new convenience food, was suddenly more than Jurnet could bear;

He moved away from the trailer, past the fire engine, and the ambulance waiting to no purpose, into a darkness fitfully illuminated by the flames dying reluctantly behind him. Among the jagged ziggurats of waste metal a pyramid of perished tyres loomed suave and surprising. Several freezer chests lay on their sides, like dominoes flung down by a petulant giant. On one of them, a sign in shocking-pink fluorescent paint read:
Happiness is a Baccaloni Lik-Stik
.

The detective was not aware of grief. He felt empty, hollow, which was no more than he deserved, having done such poor justice to Rosie Ellers's cooking. Burrowing further into the dark, he became aware of the small night noises of the scrapyard, the scuffle of mice and rats and whatever other creatures had staked out a territory for themselves among the rubbish. An owl hooted down by the river. PC Blaker's pal, no doubt.

Nearer, some larger animal—a cat, perhaps, caught in iron ganglia from which it had been unable to free itself—breathed shallowly, in little mews that were beyond despair. Jurnet took out his flashlight and played it over the nearest pile. The light caught some flattened petrol cans with a pretty iridescence, but no creature in distress announced itself.

He went round to the other side and found Millie.

She lay, her cotton dress ripped open from neck to hem, staring up at the sky above a strip of rag tied over the lower part of her face. Her body was scratched and bruised, her thighs dark with dried blood. When Jurnet shone his torch into the beautiful grey eyes they blinked, but otherwise did not interrupt their incurious perusal of the heavens. Every now and again she mewed like a trapped cat.

“Millie!” The detective knelt down in the dirt, removed the gag, and slid a hand gently under the girl's head. “It's Mr Ben!”

She gave no sign of recognition and, swallowing down the bitterness of saying it, he whispered into her dirty and delicate little ear: “Joe!” and again: “Joe!”

For once the magic password had no effect. The girl lay inert. It looked as though Millie Fisher's marvellous luck had run out at last. Unless, indeed, she had achieved yet another miraculous victory against all the odds: escaped into some world of her own choosing, where joy still reigned unconfined, and Joe, darling Joe, was forever at hand to look after her.

Jurnet ran back towards the trailer; fetched Jack Ellers and the ambulance men, needed after all. With expert ease they moved the girl on to a stretcher, wrapped her in a blanket; lifted their burden ready to depart.

Jurnet bent over the battered face.

“Willie!” he begged. “Where's Willie?”

“Leave her be!” one of the ambulance men exclaimed, not at all in a friendly way.

“Willie!” he persisted.

No answer.

After an hour of searching, Jack Ellers said, “We'll have to come back in daylight. It's the only way to be sure we haven't missed anything.”

“They may have done him over. He may need medical help. We've got to keep on looking.” Jurnet glared at the little Welshman, missing completely the concern incised on the chubby face. “No one's stopping you from knocking off, if you feel you've had enough.”

“Don't talk daft! All I'm wondering is if he didn't do the first thing you might expect—take to his heels and get the hell out of here. In which case he could be anywhere.”

Jurnet shook his head.

“He'd never leave his Ma.”

“The kid could have been too frightened to remember he ever had one. Getting away would be all he could think of.”

“Not Willie.”

“OK,” Ellers agreed wearily. “In that case, I take it, you'll be wanting me to call in to tell the lads to stop looking for him in the city. Tell Mr Hale and Mr Batterby they can go back to bed.” Jurnet looked at him without saying anything. “Look, they may simply have dumped him in the river. Or he could be in the caravan after all. The firemen say they can't be sure till morning. An incinerated kid,” the Sergeant finished with calculated brutality, “doesn't take up all that much room.”

After a moment, Jurnet said, “I'm sorry, Jack. Find Bly and Blaker will you, and tell them to call it a day. You go along with them, and take Hinchley with you. Get him to the hospital, if you have to do it by force.”

“I'm not leaving you here on your own.”

“That's all right, Sergeant.” The Superintendent was standing there, still in his evening clothes. “I'll keep the Inspector company.” To Jurnet with, for once, no acid corroding the concern, “You should have let me know earlier, Ben.”

Jurnet smiled, inexplicably soothed.

“Hardly thought you'd be dressed for it, sir.”

“Quite right,” said the Superintendent. “So we'd better find the boy quickly, hadn't we, before I get myself messed up.”

They began at the beginning, and worked their way back from the chain-link fence along Bridge Street as methodically as if no one had covered the territory before them. Aware of how small was the space into which a desperate child could compress itself, they circled each scrapheap at a snail's pace, peering along the torch beams that penetrated the dark interiors beyond their reach. They lifted sodden mattresses and rotting cisterns, handling the revolting detritus with the exquisite care accorded to ancient artefacts, lest their prying precipitate an avalanche in which Willie might perish at the hands of his would be rescuers.

Jurnet's cracked ribs sent thuds of pain through his tired body. The Superintendent worked on imperturbably. Crafty fellow that he was, a born leader of men, he had produced from the boot of his car gum boots and a boiler-suit in which he looked not much less elegant than in his evening clothes. Jurnet would not have been surprised to see emerge from that cache, should the circumstances call for it, anything from deep-sea diver's equipment to an astronaut's space suit.

“I take it—” the Superintendent remarked when, the last scrapheap accounted for, they drew breath in front of the first of the row of prefabs—“that whoever was responsible for what was done here tonight was safely holed up in the caravan before Hinchley and Bly even took up surveillance?”

“Probably. Three of 'em, I reckon. Four at the most.” Jurnet omitted to specify the basis of his calculation: one to take care of Willie, one or two to hold Millie down; one to take his turn at rape. “If they'd come after, the light spilling out when the trailer door was opened would have given them away—even though, from the car, the PCs hadn't what you could call a marvellous view of the door.”

“And how was that?” the Superintendent inquired, in a tone that boded little good to the departed constables.

“Not their fault,” Jurnet countered, quick as always to come to the defence of his brothers-in-arms. “The way the trailer was positioned made it impossible to park in Bridge Street and get a full frontal. I reckon that's how, in the couple of minutes the trailer light was out and before the place went up in smoke, the bastards were able to slip out, and get Millie and the kid out—” he steeled himself to interpolate, “
if
they got the kid out—without being spotted. Hinchley and Bly chose the best spot they could find in the circumstances.”

“Nothing to stop them getting out of the car and crossing the road for a better look.”

“So they did, from time to time. But I'd particularly warned them to keep a low profile. If anyone
was
planning something, I wanted it to be along the street, where we could control the situation and nip it in the bud.” The same loyalty that impelled Jurnet to defend PCs Bly and Hinchley operated to prevent the detective from reminding the Superintendent that it was he who had disallowed protection round the entire perimeter.

“My fault as much as theirs,” declared the Superintendent, a wonderful man. “It isn't as though you didn't warn me.”

“I'm the one told the kid I'd be back in a jiffy.”

“Let's not compete in breast-beating, shall we?” The Superintendent bent his head under the low lintel and entered the first Nissen hut, Jurnet following. The place was stacked with bags of cement, most of them soaked with damp and oozing their contents in a grey slime that overlaid the floor.