Ritual Murder

by S. T. Haymon

  “He carved me there—did they tell you that? Left hand side as you face the altar, under a sort of arch.”

  “Quite an honour! Terrible for you, though. Two tragedies, both in the same place. And a cathedral!”

  Mrs Cossey became quite animated.

  “Someone I know—” her pasty face coloured slightly—“went and paced it out. Hundred and five feet, he made it, give or take a few inches, from where Vince landed to where Arthur—” She twisted her handkerchief. “You wouldn’t think God’d let things like that happen, not in a cathedral.”

  “Not for us to question,” said Jurnet, who made his living doing just that. “And so you’ve had to bring Arthur up all on your own.”

  “I’ve got my pension. And they’ve been very good, in the Close. I work for several people there. A very nice class of people—but then, it’s only what you’d expect, isn’t it?”

  Jurnet, who had long ceased to expect anything of anybody, ignored the question, and asked, “And Arthur?”

  “He was a very quiet boy, Arthur was. Anybody’ll tell you.”

  “Had a lot of little friends, did he?”

  “Friends?” She repeated the word as if unsure of its meaning. Then, “Artistic, like I said. Spent all his time up in his room drawing. Made me stop calling it his room. His studio.”

  “What about weekends? Did he spend his weekends in his studio too?”

  “What with choir practice Saturday mornings and the services on Sunday, I didn’t see all that much of him weekends.” As if suddenly afraid her answers might reflect on her maternal solicitude, “There was always a meal waiting, if his lordship chose to come in and eat it.”

  “D’you know what he did weekends between times, when he was out? When he wasn’t at the cathedral, I mean.”

  “Mucking about, I suppose. What do kids do? Nothing bad, though. He always came back neat and tidy as he went.”

  “Last Sunday, did he leave home wearing what he usually wore?”

  “They always have to wear their blazers, even if it isn’t a school day—” She broke off and looked at Jurnet. “You saw him, didn’t you? After?” The detective nodded. “You must know what he was wearing.”

  “He—he didn’t have his blazer on.”

  “It weren’t more than three weeks old!” The thought made her cry a little. “He won’t be able to flog it anyway, whoever did it. That’d be a real giveaway!”

  “I only wish he would. We’d have him quicker than you could say Jack Robinson. You saw the lad go out with it on, then. What time would that have been?”

  Mrs Cossey coloured a little.

  “I never actually saw him go through the door. I have a bit of a lie-in Sundays. Arthur always was an early riser. Used to be out first thing on his paper round.” As if rebutting unspoken criticism, “I always set the table and leave the sugar crispies out the night before. The milk’s in the fridge. He’d only got to take it out.”

  “And did he, on Sunday? Take any breakfast?”

  “I don’t know about the milk. I didn’t think to look, not expecting—” She took thought and said, “The crispies. Even if he didn’t have them at the table, he never went out without filling up his pockets. He’d rather eat sugar crispies than sweets any day. Two packets a week he cost me. I used to say to him. ‘You’ll ruin me or your teeth with your sugar crispies, you will. Arthur Cossey, and I don’t know which’ll be the first to go!’”

  “And what did he say to that?”

  Mrs Cossey looked startled.

  “I don’t know as he said anything. He was a quiet one, was Arthur.”

  Things went better, upstairs, once Sergeant Ellers had suggested that he and his superior officer take their shoes off to avoid messing up her beautiful floors. The woman did not appreciate the effort it took the little Welshman, who was sensitive about his lack of inches, to make the suggestion; but she grew measurably more forthcoming as the detectives, stocking-footed on the landing, slid across the glassy linoleum to the door of Arthur’s studio.

  The room, judging from the type of dwelling, was the largest in the house. Despite appearances, there must be love here, Jurnet thought, heartened by the possibility, to give up the best bedroom for a child’s hobby. Either that, or quiet Arthur Cossey had a knack of getting his own way.

  Even so, the room was none too large for its contents. A clothes cupboard, a proper draughtsman’s table, another stacked with paints and sketch books, canvases, brushes in jars, plastic trays filled with pencils and erasers, pastels and crayons, took up one wall; a chest of drawers and a divan bed the best part of another. A substantial easel, not a child’s toy, stood in the middle of the floor.

  “Understand now why he called it a studio.” Jurnet looked about him. “All this stuff must have cost you a bomb.”

  “He had his paper round.”

  “Shouldn’t think it could cover all this.”

  Mrs Cossey looked about her vaguely.

  “Arthur always had something or other on.”

  “Oh ah.” Then, “Where’d the youngster keep his finished work? In the chest of drawers?”

  The woman looked alarmed. “Arthur never liked me pulling his things about. You must have found the key in his trousers. A key ring with a Donald Duck on it—”

  “We’ll have to check up on that,” Jurnet said smoothly. It was no time to let on that the boy’s trousers were as unaccounted for as his blazer. He brought forward the only chair in the room. “Just you sit yourself down while Sergeant Ellers and I take a look. We won’t damage anything.”

  “No need.” Ellers, who had been bending over the chest of drawers, straightened up, his chubby face flushed. “They’re not locked, any of ’em.”

  “Not locked!” Mrs Cossey sat down and looked at Jurnet. It was the first time she had looked at him directly. “Anyway, what’s all this got to do with finding out who killed him?”

  “Blow all, most likely,” the detective readily admitted. “But a room like this—so professional. I’m curious to see just how good he was.”

  “People that kill little boys, it don’t make any difference what kind of boys they are.”

  “I expect you’re right,” said Jurnet. “Except that, while we’re looking for the fellow that did it, we try to pile up as many random facts as we can in the hope that, somewhere in the pile—maybe when we’re least expecting it—one of ’ em will suddenly poke itself out, like a needle out of a haystack, give us a ruddy great prick where we’ll feel it most, and that’ll be it—the clue that leads us to the murderer.”

  “You won’t find anything sticking out here,” Mrs Cossey insisted, the very idea of a fact, or anything else, out of place in her dusted and polished home clearly outside belief.

  “Only one with paintings.” Ellers had levered out one of the drawers. He brought it over to the table.

  Considering the promise of the room, Arthur Cossey’s artistic efforts were a disappointment: highly coloured views of the cathedral and the castle, all the well-known sights of Angleby, exactly as depicted wherever postcards were on sale in the city; executed with a technical assurance astonishing in a twelve-year-old, but with such utter lack of insight as to make their very facility a visual yawn.

  Jurnet took up the last picture of the pile. It was a drawing, copied, at a guess, from a book published in the second half of the nineteenth century. The figures, dressed though they were in medieval costume, had an invincibly Victorian look about them.

  It was one of the most ambitious exercises Arthur Cossey had attempted. In a nave where every pillar and rib and boss was filled in with painstaking detail, a press of people knelt round a stone altar, upon which stood a boy clothed in a white robe left open to the waist, which was as far, probably, as the proprieties of the original illustrator’s day would allow. The boy, whose head was encircled by a halo, had his right hand raised in blessing.

  Almost entirely in black and white, the drawing had two points of colour, the more arrest
ing for the surrounding monochrome. They were the halo, glossy with meticulously applied gold leaf, and a Star of David inscribed in fluorescent red upon the exposed chest. The title, LITTLE ST ULF, was lettered in neatly at the foot of the drawing.

  Or would have been, had not some other hand crossed it out with a bold stroke; and substituted, with a bravura that was livelier than anything else on the paper, LITTLE ST ARTHUR.

  Chapter Nine

  Leaving the car outside Bridge Gate, Jurnet came into the Close, Ellers prancing alongside, happy to be back in his shoes and taller by the height of his heels. The detective knew of old that when the little Welshman was excited he rose up on the balls of his feet, a kind of human hydrofoiling; and here he was, at it again, tiptoeing over the cobbles in a way that, to anyone who did not know Rosie Ellers, highly sexed and to all appearances highly satisfied with her husband’s performance, might well have raised doubts it were safer not to voice to Sergeant Ellers’s face.

  Instead, Jurnet asked, “Going to let me into the secret, or do I have to squeeze it out of you like Pepsodent?”

  The Welshman laughed and opened his palm in which lay a small, transparent, polythene bag, at first glance empty.

  Peering closer, Jurnet saw that the bag contained a sliver of celluloid, or, perhaps, perspex.

  “Found it in the one with the pictures in it. Whoever it was that’d been so busy getting the drawers open never noticed a bit’d broken off.” He looked at his superior officer. “Who d’you reckon’d want to get into a kid’s chest of drawers, and what did he, or she, expect to find?”

  “More than one of young Arthur’s masterpieces, that’s for sure. And not ‘she’. Mrs Cossey doesn’t strike me as one to know the uses of a bit of plastic in the wrong hands. The kid could’ve had some money stashed away there. He sounds a real little wheeler-dealer.”

  “I thought he sounded a bloody little creep, actually.”

  “Yes,” Jurnet assented sadly. It was a familiar disillusion. Violent death so angered him that he invariably flung himself into a murder investigation as if he were inquiring into the Massacre of the Innocents; only to discover that, by and large, the murdered were no more virtuous and no less corrupt than those who died peacefully in their beds. “Though we’ve only got his Mum’s word for it.”

  “She never said that!”

  “Not in so many words. But did you notice there isn’t a single one of the boy’s pictures up on the walls? You’d have thought she could have found room for one, at least.”

  Sergeant Ellers frowned.

  “See what you mean. Unless it could be young Arthur wouldn’t let her. Strange, secretive kid he seems.”

  “Maybe he had good reason, poor little tyke, with characters hanging about the place with bits of celluloid tucked up their sleeves. I suppose it’s the joker with the merry thought of pacing out how far it was to Little St Ulf and Arthur from where hubby mashed himself on the flagstones.”

  “Same bugger who gave her the slippers,” agreed Ellers, not to be outdone, sleuthwise. “Shouldn’t be hard to put a name to him.”

  “We’ll put someone on to it.”

  The spring sun was taking a leaf out of Sandra Cossey’s book, polishing the world to a shine that glinted off the old flints and poured itself into the trumpeting daffodils. This was the business side of the Close; on the one side of the road the eastern end of the cathedral with its great flying buttresses, on the other those equally essential props of righteousness, the Appeals office and the Deanery.

  For a moment Jurnet felt inclined to turn in at the latter, have another word with Dr Carver if he was at home; but decided against it. For the time being the two had already said all they could usefully say to each other.

  The Dean had been out of the city on Sunday, visiting a country parish. By the time he had returned, there was nothing to see; merely, outside the grey hoarding, a plain-clothes man doing his best to look like a tripper or a worshipper, and not succeeding too well at either.

  At that time the photographs had not been printed, so that the Dean had had to take Jurnet’s word that a child had been found foully murdered at the tomb of Little St Ulf.

  “In the cathedral! The cathedral!”

  Pale and shaken, a different being from the confident personage of their last meeting, Dr Carver had moved along the aisle, and into a side chapel where a representation of Christ’s Passion glowed jewel-like above the altar.

  There, he had sunk to his knees, his head bowed in his hands. Jurnet, close behind, could hear the words, between a whisper and a sob, “In the cathedral!”

  Jurnet scowled at the Crucifixion, the bloody wounds. Red paint. He put a firm hand on the Dean’s shoulder.

  “The boy, sir. Arthur Cossey. One of the choir-boys.”

  The Dean made the sign of the cross, and got to his feet.

  “I know the boy.” He raised his head. “You are angry with me. Inspector.”

  “Not my business to—”

  “You are angry with me because I seem more concerned for the well-being of the cathedral than for a murdered child. I admit it. The child has gone to his Maker and will be judged by Him. He is in the hands of a loving God, and neither you nor I nor anyone else can do anything for what remains on earth except bury it with decent decorum. But that the living house of God should be so defiled!”

  “As to that,” Jurnet returned stolidly, “I can’t speak. It’s not what you’d call a police matter. But as to young Arthur Cossey, burying him won’t be the end of it by a long chalk.”

  “Of course not,” said the Dean. “Foolish of me. I am not myself.” He took a deep breath, and said, after a moment, “You are hard on the heels of the murderer, I trust?”

  “Early days. I’d be grateful to hear anything you yourself can tell me about the boy.”

  The Dean’s face took on a closed and distant look.

  “I find it hard to see how unimportant personal details can be relevant. Surely the balance of possibilities is that any boy would have served equally? The South Door is opened at 7.45 for Holy Communion at 8, and that is celebrated in a chapel quite out of sight of the body of the cathedral. The murderer had only to wait until a boy—any boy—entered, to accomplish his fell purpose.”

  “In that case, he could have waited a long time, couldn’t he? I gather the choir doesn’t have to clock in till 10, and by then there’d be far too many people about to try any funny business. Looks more like a meeting by appointment to me—or what’s a kid doing in the eathedral at that early hour?”

  “Not at all unusual. By tradition, the first door to be unlocked every morning is the Bishop’s Postern, the small door in the north transept. It opens directly into the Palace gardens, the thinking behind it being that nothing should impede the Bishop, should he have a mind to it, from entering his cathedral during his waking hours. There is no public access, but there is a footpath from the Cathedral School which the boys have used from time immemorial.” The Dean smiled faintly. “I myself, in my time, have come in that way before breakfast, to play marbles or hopscotch in the cloister.”

  There was no answering smile from the detective.

  “If the Cathedrans all know about the Bishop’s Postern, so do the Old Boys, who must number quite a few of the public hereabouts. Besides which, your vergers tell me Professor Pargeter and his assistants have a key to that particular door.”

  “That is so. In order to keep disruption of services down to a minimum, the Professor agreed that as much of the heavy work as possible should be done in the early hours. Of course, no work is done on Sundays at any hour of the day.”

  “Professor keeps the key in his possession, does he?”

  The Dean permitted himself another small smile.

  “I hardly think the Professor is that much of an early riser. But I have no reason to doubt the dependability of his assistants. Miss Aste—”

  “Ah yes,” said Jurnet. “Lord Sydringham’s daughter.”

  “Yo
u are still angry with me,” the Dean stated without acrimony. “May I ask whether it has anything to do with the fact that your name is Jurnet?”

  “I’m not Jewish,” said Jurnet, “if that’s what you mean. And if I were, it’d be no reason to be angry with you or anyone else. On the other hand, sir, since you’ve raised the subject, I’ll say this. I can’t say I think it the best idea in the world to go digging up Little St Ulf.”

  “Tell me, Inspector,” the Dean demanded, “would you be in favour of banning a demonstration organized for some perfectly peaceful and permitted purpose, simply because you had received information that a group of hooligans had plans for breaking it up?”

  “That’s hardly the same—”

  “The analogy is exact. Are we to be denied the chance to elucidate a not-unimportant fragment of the history of this mighty edifice simply on the chance that conscienceless persons may pervert our discoveries to suit their own dark purposes?”

  “Not for me to say, sir. The only principle I go on is that a child shouldn’t have to be murdered to prove a principle.”

  “A madman, Inspector! A mindless crime!”

  “Mad maybe, but not mindless. Murderers don’t stop to carve racist symbols into the bodies of their victims without giving it a bit of thought.”

  The Dean put a hand over his eyes as if the light had become too strong. He turned back to the altar, to the painted wounds of the dead Christ.

  “It is in the hands of God.”

  “And the Angleby Police.” Jurnet’s tone was uncompromising. “Which is why I need to know anything you can tell me about Arthur Cossey.”

  “I can tell you nothing. He was a very quiet boy.”

  Chapter Ten

  “Have you noticed,” Ellers inquired, as the two passed the Deanery, following the line of the cloister, “how it’s always the quiet kids that get done, never the young tearaways you might expect?”

  “Don’t know about that,” Jurnet demurred. “Kid gets done, it stands to reason his Ma’s not going to let on he used to kick her up the backside if she didn’t have his football socks ready on time.”