Ritual Murder

by S. T. Haymon

  “You must have some suspicions.”

  “Too many! Arthur was a nasty bit of goods. Young as he was, he’d made enough enemies to last a lifetime—which, come to think of it, is exactly what they did.”

  “You’ve spoken to them all?”

  “All I could find, anyhow.”

  The Rabbi said calmly, as one resolving a difficulty, “One of them will have lied to you.”

  “I’d be surprised if the whole darn shoot hadn’t.”

  “In that case, you must look for the truth you have overlooked.” The man heaved himself out of his chair. He stood looking down at the detective with the encouraging air of a schoolmaster for a pupil who needed to try just that little bit harder. “Think about it. It will come to you. And now I’m going to make you a hot, fresh cup.”

  He was still in the kitchen when the doorbell rang.

  “I’ll get it,” Jurnet called, and went downstairs to let in Mosh Epperstein.

  When he saw who it was, the detective almost left the house then and there. Instead, he turned his back on the new arrival without a greeting, ran upstairs and said to his host, “Thanks just the same, Rabbi, but I’ve got to be getting along.”

  “Unclean! Unclean!” The archaeology student came into the room. He looked thinner than ever, the dark eyes sunken in their sockets.

  Leo Schnellman put the tray down on the table, and handed Jurnet his tea. “You aren’t going to waste it.”

  “Give it to him instead.”

  “Now, Ben, don’t be childish. Would it surprise you to know that when I looked out and saw you parking the car I telephoned Mosh to come over?”

  “Nothing about you would surprise me, Rabbi,” said Jurnet, obstinately ignoring the proffered beverage. “That doesn’t mean that, just because you tell me to, I’ve got to sit down and make polite conversation with a man who’s out on bail on a serious charge.”

  The Rabbi opened his eyes wide.

  “Who said anything about polite conversation? Mosh wants to tell you what he was really doing in the cathedral the morning Arthur Cossey was killed, that’s all.”

  After the Rabbi had fetched a cup for his second visitor, Jurnet demanded impatiently, “Well? I’m waiting. What were you doing in the cathedral? What time was it, Sunday, you went there?”

  The archaeology student took a sip of the hot liquid, then set the cup and saucer down on the table. “I didn’t. I went Saturday. I was there all night.”

  “All night! That needs a bit of explaining.”

  “That’s what I’m here for, just like the Rabbi says. It’s very simple, really.” The young man’s voice sounded near extinction. “Liz asked me to stay. She often has night-long sessions, up there in the triforium, with Stan Brent. Fancied a change, I suppose, or maybe she’d had a row with lover boy and wanted to show him he wasn’t the only fish in the sea. Liz says it turns her on to screw in such holy surroundings.”

  Jurnet said, “You’re having me on.”

  “Ask her yourself.”

  “I mean, the cathedral. There are vergers who make sure the place is empty before they lock up for the night.”

  “That’s just where you’re wrong, then. That place is like a park at closing time—the keepers go round the main paths, but they can’t look under every bush, there’re too many of ’em. The ground floor’s easy enough, but upstairs—”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed it isn’t a bungalow! In a way, the way it’s built, it’s a building within a building. The outer walls form a sort of shell, and inside there’s another wall altogether, except that it’s pierced through with arches. Marvellous how they figured it out, all those years ago. Between the two, on every level, there’s a walk, a gallery, an arcade—a tribune, a triforium, if you want to talk posh—all the way up to the roof. And that doesn’t include the tower and the spire. The vergers’d never get home if they had to go through that lot every day.”

  “The doors to the stairs must be kept locked.”

  “Must they, indeed? Then you won’t want to take my word for it that at least two of the doors—there may be more, for all I know—haven’t got any locks on them at all, just bolts on the outside anybody can draw. One stair doesn’t even have a door at all—just a red cord like in a cinema and a No Admittance sign. Anyway, Liz has a key to the stairs back of the organ loft, so what difference does it make? All official and above-board. She keeps her cameras and stuff up there. So no problem.”

  Jurnet pondered what he had been told, then commented, “You looked as if you had a problem or two when I saw you next morning, on your way out.”

  The young man paled, if that were possible. He shut his eyes, either to cut off the physical presence of his questioner, or the better to see the remembered images of which he spoke.

  “We went up to the triforium just before closing time. There was nothing to it, coming in as we did by the Bishop’s Postern. You can slink along the wall in shadow all the way, and bob’s your uncle. Once upstairs, we peeped over the edge, and there, down below, were the vergers looking for Reds under the bed. It was a bit of a giggle, really. Down at ground level you simply don’t realize how much room there is up there. You don’t even have to crouch down to stay out of sight, so long as you stay well over towards the outer wall.

  “Liz didn’t even wait till the vergers had gone to take her clothes off. All she had on was jeans and a sweater and a sort of G-string anyway. She took off everything, shoes and socks as well. By then, they’d turned off all the big lights, and there was just this silvery glow coming through the windows—was there a moon, I don’t know, maybe it was the stars—and she just stood there, naked.” The private vision became the only reality in the hushed room. “So beautiful I knew, whatever else it was, it couldn’t be bad to be with her, like that, in that place, even if it was a church. It couldn’t be a sin.”

  As if in instant derision of his own fantasy, Mosh Epperstein continued coarsely, “I had a hard on, you could have hung your jacket on it. I stripped off in such a hurry I broke the zip of my jeans. I took off everything, the way she had, and—it was the darnedest thing—” the eyes opened wide with the wonder of it—“the stone floor under my bare feet was not at all cold, as you’d expect. In fact, my whole body was as warm as toast, and it wasn’t because I was feeling randy as all hell either. It was as if all the holiness had risen up from the ground floor and got trapped in those galleries, how I don’t know. Only that it was wonderful.”

  Mosh Epperstein smiled, and Jurnet thought of Miriam, naked by moonlight.

  “I was mad to have it off with her then and there,” the young man went on. “But she took my hand, with a gentleness you wouldn’t believe, knowing Liz, and said, ‘First I want to show you.’ Anything she wanted was what I wanted, and we set off together, along the gallery, our bodies touching. It happened,” said Mosh Epperstein, “but it was a dream. Corridors, and arches folding into other arches like the figures of a dance. Pillars like tree trunks so tall you couldn’t see the branches, and the two of us walking naked hand-in-hand like it was through a jungle or some cavern under the sea.

  “She’d taken a torch with her, but we didn’t need it. She moved like a princess of her kingdom. She turned off into the gallery over the north transept and then led the way up a spiral stair and through a little door into the tower. The bells were hanging there, so black and powerful they seemed the real gods of the place, not that skinny guy down below hanging on his cross—”

  Troubled, Leo Schnellman interrupted, “You don’t have to go into every detail, Mosh—”

  “Oh, but I do! Right, Inspector?” Jurnet nodded. “You see? He has to hear it all just in case there’s something that doesn’t jive with the rest, or in case, in a moment of absent-mindedness, I let down my guard and make some seemingly trivial remark that gives the game away, and gets me booked, not just for a little civilized pot-smoking, but for murder as well.”

  “T
hat’s right,” said Jurnet. “You were in the tower. I must assume you went either up or down.”

  “O rare sleuth!” the other exclaimed. “Up it was. We climbed out on to the tower roof. There was only the spire above us, and she didn’t suggest climbing that, though, in the state I was in, I’d have followed her to the top of the weathercock if that was what she’d had in mind.”

  Mosh Epperstein paused; and Jurnet, against all his principles, felt a premonitory twinge of compassion.

  “Up there, at night, it’s not at all what you’d think. It doesn’t seem the top of a tower, or of anything else. It doesn’t seem joined to anything either—more a queer kind of raft anchored in space, an unidentified stationary object. It wasn’t cold, or if it was I didn’t feel it. There were just the two of us on this raft in the middle of the sky. Just Liz and me and a cartload of birdshit into which, being the born clown I am, I had to fall flat on my back!”

  His two listeners said nothing.

  “Oh, that was the peak all right! Everything afterwards was, literally, downhill all the way. Liz pretended it didn’t matter, but I could see how her nose wrinkled. Hell, if I could’ve walked out of my own skin, I’d have done it, I smelled so awful. When we got back to where Liz kept her cameras—to where, that is, she keeps the squares of foam rubber and the sleeping bags—she fished out a towel from somewhere and I did what I could with that.” There was a final hesitation before the man continued, with an incisiveness born of relief that at last the whole of it was out, “What I couldn’t do a damn thing with was my bloody cock. It had gone as limp as old flannel. I can’t tell you how I—” He swallowed. “Liz couldn’t have been sweeter. Said not to think twice about it, she was tuckered out anyway. She kissed me and got into one of the sleeping bags and was asleep in a minute, like a child.

  “I took longer. I lay there, looking up at the arches and thinking, of all things, about Little St Ulf. About how, in the story, he had been found castrated, which, in a kind of way, was what had just happened to me. When I finally dropped off, though, I must have slept like a log, because when I woke up it was broad daylight, there were noises coming from down below, and there was Liz, all dressed up in flowered muslin, bending over me.”

  “Noises from down below?”

  “For Christ’s sake!” Epperstein said. “I’m establishing an alibi. Noises. Voices. People about, passing the time of day. Definitely nobody being murdered, not even by me.”

  Jurnet asked, “Have you anything more to tell me?”

  “Only to wrap it all up, like in the fairy stories. What Liz did then was lift up her dress and she had nothing on underneath. Not a stitch. And again, just in case you didn’t think my cup was full enough already—” the lips twitching, the bony hands tense— “I couldn’t do a bloody thing. I hardly dared look her in the face, but when I did, when I saw the sheer, relishing triumph in those beautiful blue eyes—that was when it came to me that it wasn’t Little St Ulf who’d made me impotent, nor J. Christ either, for having the cheek to go screwing on his licensed premises, but Liz, my lovely Liz—that she and Stan had probably dreamed the whole thing up between them as an amusing way of passing an evening when there was nothing much going on in town.”

  The archaeology student got up to go. His ordeal over, he looked down at Jurnet with a smile that was almost friendly. “If, when you saw me, I looked anything like I felt, I can’t blame you for wondering what I’d been up to. You weren’t all that far out, either. What you saw was the face of a murderer.”

  “Except that you didn’t kill her,” Leo Schnellman put in quickly.

  Epperstein said sadly, “Do you have to rub it in?”

  Chapter Twenty One

  The evening exodus of cars from the city centre had already begun when Jurnet drove his car on to the Chepe, the open space outside the FitzAlain Gate which had been Angleby’s market place before even the Normans arrived to shift the commercial centre of the city into the shadow of the Castle. The detective parked, and switched on his radio, missing the opening sentences in the roar of homeward-bound engines revving up to left and right. Then the words got through.

  “… the League of Patriots headquarters in Farriersgate. What is believed to have been a petrol bomb was thrown through a ground-floor window, causing considerable damage to the three-storey building. A member of the League has been taken to hospital with burns which are not thought to be serious.”

  How they must be blessing Little St Ulf at the Norfolk and Angleby!

  Jurnet had already, contrary to the rules, rendered himself incommunicado so far as Headquarters Control was concerned. He made no attempt to reconnect the umbilical cord. Let Hale and Batterby get on with it, and the best of British luck to them.

  The detective got out of the car, locked it, and strolled through the FitzAlain Gate.

  What was it the Rabbi had said? “In that case, you must look for the truth you have overlooked.”

  Easy enough to say! Something flitted teasingly through the dark recesses of Jurnet’s consciousness, just beyond grasping. What the hell was it he had deposited there without filling in a paying-in slip? Something somebody had said? Or a moment of silence whose significance had passed him by; a lacuna more pregnant than words?

  It was no use. The detective lifted his head and stared mindlessly at the West Front, magnificent in the evening light.

  “Never interrupt a man lost in thought,” announced a voice at his side. “The shock of finding himself back without warning in the irrational universe could bring on the bends.”

  Professor Pargeter raised his moustache like the trapdoor of a silo and launched his great laugh into the air. Startled pigeons rose in flight; and Dr Carver beamed at his old schoolfellow with a tolerant affection.

  “I’m particularly glad to see you, Inspector,” the Dean said, his gold-rimmed glasses flashing in the last of the light. “We’d be happy to have your opinion. The Professor and I have been discussing what, in the circumstances, should be done about the Little St Ulf excavation.”

  “Like hell we have!” growled the Professor. “Flossie’s been handing down a diktat. He’s giving us our cards. Fill in the hole and call the whole thing off. Did you ever hear such balls?”

  Flushing like a boy, the Dean began, “The Bishop—”

  “Don’t try that one on me!” Professor Pargeter interrupted. To Jurnet, “You know, of course, there is no such animal—merely a cardboard cut-out worked by strings which they bring out on high days and holidays: a gaitered alibi for Flossie to hide behind, cloaking the awful tyranny with which—” jerking a thumb at the cathedral—“he runs that petrified wedding-cake.”

  “The Professor,” said the Dean with Christian forbearance, “will have his little joke.”

  “Never more serious in my life!” the Professor declared. “Just because some pimply juvenile has the ineptitude to get himself bumped off, this Philistine is proposing to close the books on the third greatest object of pilgrimage in medieval England.”

  “The Inspector,” stated the Dean, with some satisfaction, “has already made known to me his feelings on the subject. I know quite well he does not blame me. I only blame myself for not having had the imagination to conceive, before ever the project was embarked upon, what the possible consequences might be.”

  Professor Pargeter grumbled, “You’ll be wanting us to shift our stuff.”

  “No hurry,” the Dean assured him, happy to make a concession.

  “I’ll have to speak to Liz. She’s got a lot of valuable gear up there in the gallery that she’ll have to move out bit by bit. She’s going to take this hard, Flossie. She’s loved working in the cathedral.”

  The Dean smiled in acknowledgment of the aristocratic compliment. Jurnet, for a wild moment, was tempted, but restrained the impulse, to let the man know what went on in his patch after business hours. The Dean would have to be told one day. But not now, and certainly not in the presence of Pargeter who—in Liz Aste’s interest,
if no other—would be bound to turn the girl’s nocturnal cavortings into a tremendous jape.

  The Professor regarded his old schoolmate without love.

  “If she’s back to bumming round the discos for lack of something to do, we’ll know who to thank for it.”

  “She could always help out at the bookstall,” the Dean said, without apparent guile. “I’m sure Miss Hanks would be delighted to have her lend a hand.” He turned his attention to Jurnet, with that mixture of innocence and authority the detective found so disconcerting. “And you, Inspector? I only wish I could say, in the nicest possible way, that we could dispense with your services equally.”

  “Couldn’t wish it more than I do myself, sir.”

  Suddenly, whatever it was that had to be remembered shot upwards towards the light, only to subside once more into the amniotic darkness. He bade goodbye to the ill-assorted pair, the one in clerical black, the other in his bookie tweeds, and walked the length of the daisied lawn, from one stone general to the other. Turning the corner by the Song School, he came upon a little cluster of parents waiting by the Song School door; choristers emerging in ones and twos, their voices merry in the spring dusk.

  Some of the older boys, wheeling out their bicycles, showed their contempt for the babies who were being called for; but even these sophisticates, the detective was glad to note, were careful to keep together. Not one departed into the gathering dark with only his fears to keep him company.

  Arthur Cossey was not yet forgotten.

  Jurnet was level with the door when Christopher Drue came running out, to hurl himself at a slender woman with a triumphant shout. “I’m to sing solo. Mr Amos says I’m to sing solo!”

  As the woman laughingly disengaged herself, and smoothed down the boy’s unruly curls with a gesture that said more than words, Jurnet studied her with curiosity and a good deal of pleasure. Mrs Drue was good to look upon. She was possessed of a spare and shapely beauty that, admirable as it was, might have been a little forbidding were it not for the wide-spaced eyes, as eager and loving as her child’s, and the gentle curve of her lips. Her dark suit was like herself, being well cut, well made, and instinct with an understated elegance.