Ritual Murder (3 page)

The choristers had stopped singing. Had the kid with the cheeky face retrieved his gum from under the seat? The thought made Jurnet feel friendlier. Friendlier to the Dean, friendlier to the God who inhabited the Godforsaken hole. Poor bastard, could be He had no choice. Had His name down for a council house and was still waiting.

The Dean had shaken hands in a professionally cordial farewell.

“I'm sure, Inspector, we can leave the matter in your capable hands.” Meaning nothing would be done and a good thing too.

“We'll do our best, sir.” Meaning ditto.

Feeling bloody-minded at the other's ready collusion in his own inadequacy, Jurnet added, “Please don't have the writing removed till I give the word.”

“Oh dear! Is that really necessary?”

“It would be best not to.”

“If you say so.”

The Dean sighed, turned to go. Over his shoulder he asked negligently, “It
was
Inspector Jurnet, wasn't it? J-U-R-N-E-T?”

“J-U-R-N-E-T.”

On the steps that led up to the West Door Jurnet grinned to himself. Trust the Dean to know his local history if anybody did!

The detective moved gratefully towards the open air. The great central door that, banded with iron, looked made to keep out besieging armies rather than afford ingress to worshippers, was shut. Following the sign, Jurnet made for the modest exit in the north aisle.

He was almost there when some letters cut into a wall plaque in the shadowed corner where aisle and door met caught his eye. It was not the first time he had noticed how alert that eye was to pick out the name Miriam.

Miriam my wyf,
Joy of my lyf,
Heav'n so swete,
Without her was not complete.
God I must not dispraies,
Who has sadden'd my daies.
Wyf, forget not me,
With whom thou once didst sport right merrily.

Miriam,
Wyf to Robert Coslane,
Saddler of this citie.
An. Dom. 1537.

Jurnet's first impulse was to reach into his pocket for his notebook. Then, he decided, no. Born and bred in Angleby and never once set foot in the cathedral: this she had to see.

“‘Miriam my wyf, joy of my lyf,'” he repeated softly, and went out, into the spring.

How delightful the air felt after the chill inside! Jurnet stood for a moment, face uplifted to the sun, eyes closed.

When he opened them he saw that the young man he had left asleep on the grass was awake, sitting up, and listening with every appearance of disgruntlement to what Elizabeth Aste, on her knees at his side, was saying.

The girl's pose of prayer was apt, thought Jurnet, for she seemed to be imploring a favor or, perhaps, begging forgiveness. Apt but surprising. He would not have taken her, with that upper-crust self-assurance she wore like a second skin, for someone either to beg or plead.

But then, if he were to believe those slushy novels Miriam left lying about the flat, not even those whose blood ran blue as the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race were impervious to the pangs of love.

Now, across the width of lawn, he could see that the girl was crying, or pretending to; a performance which seemed to irritate the young man beyond endurance. He jumped to his feet, picked up the windcheater he had been using as a pillow, and strolled away towards the FitzAlain Gate, the garment slung over one shoulder, hips moving in a little swagger that had Jurnet muttering, “Cocky bastard!”

The girl ran after him, grasped his free arm. Whereupon the young man pulled himself free and hit her hard across the face.

Jurnet, used as he was to covering space without waste of time when the occasion called for it, was nevertheless surprised to find the young man on the same spot towards which he had projected himself before the flailing arm had well found its target. Red hair bright in the sunlight, the man turned on the detective a look of no more than bored incuriosity. There was no apprehension of danger, no remorse for an unthinking act. A cool customer.

Elizabeth Aste had her hands to her face, covering mouth and nose.

Jurnet said, “I'm a police officer. What's going on here?”

The girl dropped her hands. Out of her bruised and bleeding mouth emerged, but still in the accents of Roedean, “Piss off and mind your own bloody business!”

At the mouth of the alley which led through to where he had left his car, Jurnet hesitated, then passed it by, choosing instead to continue along the narrow way which led down to the river. This was the part of the Close where he felt least uncomfortable. Here, the houses were smaller, and a bit ramshackle. A congenial seediness hung about the area, mingling at nightfall with the mists that rose off the river. Jurnet had a theory, for which he had no evidence at all, that this was where the Dean and Chapter exiled sinners and those who were found to be doctrinally impure.

Trust a copper to feel at home in such company!

Where the houses ended the water meadows began, playing-fields where Cathedrans charged about in blue-and-red shorts merging almost imperceptibly with grazings whose resident cows played in black-and-white. Jurnet stepped briskly down to the little staithe where centuries ago the stones that made up the cathedral had arrived from distant Normandy, and turned aside on to a path which bordered the river. The cabin cruisers moored alongside the further bank still had a closed-up, winter look.

A quarter of a mile on, the path ended abruptly in a tangle of bramble and barbed-wire that Jurnet, who had been that way before, had little trouble in negotiating. On the further side lay a dreary complex of vandalized Nissen huts and one-storied brick buildings which, in the war, had served some purpose long since forgotten. It was, in fact, because no one could be found willing to admit responsibility for the mess, and so for the cost of clearing it up, that year by year more sheets of corrugated-iron dissolved into rust, thistles and cow parsley and rose-bay willow-herb cracked ever wider the crevasses in the concrete standings, and generations of pigeons from the Close bore away unmolested the asbestos felting of the roofs to line their nests.

Every spring since the war the
Angleby Argus
had printed letters protesting against the eyesore down by the river; to which, every spring, the Town Clerk replied, referring the problem to Whitehall, where, the forms observed, it lay decently buried until spring once more set the civic sap rising.

The sole beneficiary of this bureaucratic cock-up—with the doubtful exception of the pigeons, ignorant as they were of the perils of asbestosis—was Joe Fisher. The car bodies and disembowelled refrigerators heaped high on parts of the site were not funeral piles left behind by its aboriginal inhabitants, whoever they might have been. They were part of Joe's stock-in-trade, for scrap-metal dealing was one of the many ways in which he made his dubious livelihood.

The trailer jacked up on old railway sleepers was not part of the scrap metal, although, by the look of it, it could well have been.

As Jurnet came through the hedge he heard a shrill “Coo-ee!” There was a brief silence, and then a high, sweet voice, smudged at the edges but full of suppressed glee, called out, “I see yer! I see yer!”

Jurnet stood still as a slight figure in a torn, ankle-length dress of flowered cotton backed into the space between two of the huts.

“Willie! You c'n come out, then! I see yer!”

Jurnet moved out of the shadow of the hedge into full sunlight, where the girl—or was it a woman?—could see him clearly should she happen to look his way. The last thing he wanted to do was frighten Millie Fisher.

He had forgotten that nothing frightened Millie Fisher. She turned and caught sight of him: stared unafraid with the beautiful grey eyes that seemed the eyes of a blind person until such time as the slow brain had made sense of the image conveyed to it. Then they came alive, sparkled with pleasure.

“Mr Ben!” She rushed towards him, turning her head to shout as she came, “Willie! It's Mr Ben!”

Not much taller than a child, she threw her arms round the detective's hips, crowing with delight. “Did yer come to see me, Mr Ben? Did yer?”

“I came to see you.”

A small boy appeared from behind a water tank. Millie sped towards him over the broken concrete.

“Mr Ben's come to see me, Willie! What yer think o' that, then.”

The boy, who was about seven years old and as fair as Millie was dark, smiled at her kindly. Paternally.

“I spec' he's come to see both of us.” He nodded at Jurnet as to an equal, and turned back to his mother. “An' it's no good your sayin' you c'n see me when yer can't see me.
I
know when you c'n see me an' when yer can't.”

“Yes, Willie,” she said meekly. Then her face, so soft and pretty and unfinished, brightened. “I did
almos'
see yer, though! I'd'a seen yer in a minute, wouldn't I?”

“Were yer goin' t' look back o' the tank, then?”

The light faded. “I don't know, Willie—”

The boy relented; smiled Millie's smile, thought Jurnet, who, unnoticed, had drawn nearer. Millie Fisher's smile. In Joe Fisher's face.

“I spec' you were. You always do, sooner or later.”

Jurnet clinched the matter.

“She was just going to, when I came along and interrupted.”

Millie's smile burst out in all its glory. The detective, taking avoiding action before she could be on him again, like an over-demonstrative puppy, swung the boy, yelling with delight, up in his arms. Somewhere on the way up Willie shed his years and his cares, arriving on Jurnet's shoulders a laughing child.

“How's the big boy, then?”

“Mr Ben! Mr Ben!”

Inside, the trailer was dirtier, even, than Jurnet remembered it. He touched a wall and grimaced. The whole place was coated with the fallout of God knew what nauseous fry-ups.

None the less, when Millie, bursting with pride in her role of hostess, invited him to take a seat, he complied unhesitatingly, with a ceremoniousness fully equal to the queenly gesture with which she indicated the filthy bench. Grandly, out of some uncharted hoard of memory, she inquired, “Will yer take tea?” But before Jurnet could answer Willie interposed angrily, “Joe took the gas bit, din' he? Don't be daft!” There were tears in his eyes as he explained to the guest in the house, “He won't let
her
light the ring, an' he won't let
me
! He takes the bit with him every bleeding time he goes out. I c'd make tea, an' beans, an' everything, if
he'd
let me.”

Jurnet, secretly glad of Joe Fisher's foresight, said placatingly, “That bottled gas is tricky stuff. Dead scared of it myself.” Carefully casual, he added, “Dad in dinnertime, then, to fix you both up something hot?”

The boy looked down and made no answer. Millie sat back and said comfortably, scratching her armpit through a convenient hole, “Joe'll be back. Joe.” The monosyllable seemed to please her so much she said it again, for its sheer music. “Joe.”

“Once you're at school,” Jurnet told Willie, “they'll give you a hot dinner every day.”

“Wi' bangers?”

“Twice or three times a week, I shouldn't wonder.”

The child considered the paradisiacal prospect.

“Nah,” he said at last.

“How's that? Don't you want to learn to read and write?”

Willie lifted his head and looked Jurnet full in the face.

“Who'd be wi' Ma?”

Jurnet smiled into the fair little face, at once so young and so old. The only thought that came into his head—if thought was the right word for it—was the one that, earlier that morning, he had read twice over, proclaimed in capitals on the cathedral walls.

SOD GOD. Sod the God that for His own sodding reasons had made things the way they were.

The thought was cathartic. Having got it out of his system, Jurnet recognized the irrelevance of peevish abuse. Millie's boy, despite being Millie's boy, was quick as a whip. And as to Millie herself, who did the detective know happier than this twenty-two-year-old woman with the mental age of an eight-year-old child?

Certainly Millie's own luck, in a world teeming with agencies panting to get their well-meaning paws on those in her condition, had verged on the miraculous. The offspring of an alcoholic mother and an incestuous father, she had, lacking the brains to know better, taken the drunkenness for jollity and the incest for a natural demonstration of paternal love. Joe Fisher had got her pregnant below the age of consent, but because he had married her on her sixteenth birthday there had seemed no point in sending to prison the one man prepared to look after the backward girl.

And look after her he had, in his own way. Even the succession of social workers who had threaded their eager way between the scrapheaps had, baffled by a radiance unchronicled in the text-books, given up trying to make Millie clean and miserable.

Against all the odds, she had turned out a wonderful mother. Willie, fed on chips and God alone knew what else once her milk dried up, grew straight-limbed and intelligent.

What would happen to the two of them when the truant officer came looking for young Willie, as sooner or later he must: when, the ins and outs of the ownership of that bit of riverside slum finally sorted out, men came with a Court order and a tractor to drag the trailer out on to the road?

Millie smiled at Jurnet across a table covered with oilcloth whereon means innumerable had inscribed their autobiographies. If she had not been a mental defective he would have said she had read his thoughts. As it was, he guessed that, seeing him preoccupied, she had merely, out of the riches of her own overflowing cornucopia, proffered her unfailing panacea.

“Joe'll see to it.”

Jurnet dropped Miriam off at night school and drove on to the synagogue. She had said not to pick her up on his way back: she fancied sleeping at home for a change.