Ritual Murder

by S. T. Haymon

  “You also wrote some words up on the wall.”

  The boy tilted his head and looked up fetchingly through thick lashes. “It was naughty,” he admitted. Raising his head in charming defiance, “I still don’t think silly old Harbridge should have carried on like I’d committed the sin against the Holy Ghost.”

  Mrs Drue opened her pale lips to speak, then closed them as if the effort was too much for her.

  “Maybe not,” said Jurnet, “except that it wasn’t the first time, was it, he’d had to put up with your artwork in the wrong place. I expect he thought enough was enough. Even so, being the kind of man he is, he didn’t want to accuse you unjustly. That’s why he made you empty your pockets out—to see if there were any crayons or coloured pens. That’s when he found Arthur’s glass eye.”

  “My glass eye!” the boy insisted. “Arthur gave it to me ages ago!”

  “Mr Harbridge says Arthur had a very special feeling about that eye. Said it had magic powers and one day it was going to make his fortune. It was the one thing he’d never, by any stretch of the imagination, give away.”

  “Well, he gave it to me!” The boy broke into laughter again. “Is that why you think I killed Arthur? Because I’ve got his silly old glass eye?”

  “That’s why Mr Harbridge thought so.”

  “Potty old Harbridge! Still, he doesn’t know what a tremendous crush Arthur had on me—”

  “But potty old me does?”

  “I didn’t mean that!” Christopher blushed, glanced fleetingly at his mother, and back to the detective. “You know what I told you,” he whispered.

  “About you and Arthur and the dog dirt?”

  The boy nodded, head down so that the curls flopped forward, hiding his face.

  “I shall want to talk to you about that presently,” said Jurnet. “I shall want to talk to you about a lot of things.” The detective turned away, looking for someone in the little group behind him. He spied the head verger, standing disconsolate. “Thank you, Mr Quest.”

  The man looked up, startled.

  “Sir?”

  “You and Harbridge between you, really. But it was you who told me that the ladies always did the flowers fresh for Sundays.”

  “So they do.” Uneasy at being singled out for attention, “But I don’t see—”

  “Fresh for Sunday, like the choristers’ ruffs.” Jurnet turned towards Christopher’s mother, his voice warm with pity. “You weren’t much of a one for starch, were you, Mrs Drue? Too floppy one week, too stiff the next. Not like Mrs Cossey, who always got Arthur’s just right. And that was why—” the eyes of everyone left in the spire were fixed on the detective; including the eyes of the boy, bright with amusement and a certain detached admiration—“Christopher here borrowed it the morning Arthur was killed. He was one of the earliest in the cloakroom—he told me so himself—so how could he be so sure Arthur wouldn’t be coming along needing the ruff himself, unless he knew he was dead already?”

  “I told you,” the child said. “He was always early. I knew if he wasn’t there by then, he wouldn’t be coming.”

  The detective shook his head.

  “He wasn’t, you know. Early. The newsagent he worked for says he was always the last back from his round. He had to be, he had so far to go. He couldn’t do that round and be early into the cathedral.” He waited a little. Then, “Except the day he was killed, when he never delivered the papers at all.”

  Christopher Drue tilted his head to one side like a bird, and demanded, “Wasn’t it clever of me, the way I turned him into Little St Ulf?”

  Chapter Thirty Three

  “I’m glad I killed Arthur Cossey. Mummy says it’s a terrible sin to kill somebody and I ought to be sorry and pray to God to forgive me, but I honestly don’t think killing Arthur is a sin, and as she says I have to tell absolutely the whole truth I have to say what I think, haven’t I? And I feel pretty sure God will forgive me without any more praying than I do usually, because I don’t honestly think He thinks it is a sin either. I think Arthur was a kind of mistake, like King Herod or Jack the Ripper, that even God makes once in a while, and I shouldn’t be surprised if He’s really quite glad I have wiped Arthur off the face of the earth.

  “Actually it was an accident so it isn’t murder, and I hope you police will take notice of that because it is very important. But if it hadn’t happened then I am pretty sure it would have happened sooner or later, because if you had known Arthur you would have known he was someone who ought to be dead because he was so horrible. Of course God could have arranged to have him run over by a bus but for some reason best known to Himself He didn’t.

  “Everyone at school thought he had a crush on me and at first I thought so myself because of the way he used to follow me about and buy me sweets and marbles, etc. It is very hard to explain exactly how things happened the way they did because I always thought he was a drip and when I was there with my friends we always took the mickey out of him and he would just stand there with a silly grin on his face, but when there were only the two of us he was quite different, still a drip but very bossy and powerful.

  “It is something that is hard to put into words. I mean, for instance, when you have a crush on someone usually, you want to do whatever they want, because you want them to like you, but Arthur never did what I wanted, but only what he wanted. You won’t believe this but even when I was taking the mickey out of him when my friends were there I was only doing it because Arthur wanted me to. Anyone at school will tell you I am not really the type who takes the mickey out of people. I do not think it is very nice. I know it is hard to believe that anyone would actually want to have the mickey taken out of him but that only goes to show how awful Arthur was and how different from anybody else.

  “The funny thing is that with all the other boys I’m always the one who says what you do and what you don’t do. When we’re picking sides to play a game, it is always me who gets picked first. I once heard Mr Hewitt say to the headmaster, ‘He is a born leader,’ meaning me, and I can’t tell you how horrible it is to have a drip like Arthur make you do something when you really want to do quite the opposite.

  “I never wanted all those sweets Arthur gave me either. My mother will tell you I actually have a savoury tooth not a sweet one and at home I hardly ever eat sweets at all except just sometimes a liquorice allsort if I am constipated, and only then because Mummy tells me to. Sweets are bad for the teeth and I don’t want to have false ones when I grow up and have to take them out at night and put them in a glass of water. Just the same, when Arthur gave me fruit bonbons and coconut-ice and some awful gooey toffees they sell on the Market Place, I always ate them even though I felt like being sick sometimes, they were so horribly sweet. Arthur would say ‘Have another’ and something about the way he stood there holding out the bag—I would have to take one. I had to, I don’t know why.

  “I wasn’t afraid of him. It was more like a spell. He had this glass eye which he said his dad had left to him in his will and endowed it with supernatural powers so that he could make anybody do anything he wanted them to. I thought, if only I can get hold of it I will go down to the river and chuck it in and that will be the end of it, only I never got the chance, worse luck.

  “Another thing Arthur Cossey made me do was deliver papers and magazines for him. It wasn’t as bad as some of the other things except that I had to get up early when I didn’t want to because some of the places I had to go to were quite a long way away. Inside the papers were little packets which I had to be careful didn’t fall out. Sometimes I had to go back to the same places and collect some envelopes which had money in them. I know because one of the envelopes came unstuck once and there were a lot of pound notes inside.

  “I can tell from some of the questions Mummy and the policeman have asked me that they think Arthur and I must have done things together, I don’t like to mention what things but you know the kind of things I mean. I suppose the reason is that I cut off Arth
ur’s diddle, which I shall explain in a little while and which has nothing at all to do with anything like that. As a matter of fact, there are several boys in the school who do those things quite a lot, only don’t ask me to say who they are because that would be telling tales. All I will say is that Arthur wasn’t one of them, quite the opposite. He never touched anybody and he couldn’t stand being touched himself. In PE, if we had to form a circle and hold hands, or something like that, he used to pretend his shoelace had come undone or that he had pins and needles suddenly, anything to get out of touching.

  “The day I killed Arthur I got to the cathedral early because Arthur had told me to be there. I said what about your paper round, and he said bugger the paper round and he was going to put the papers in a black plastic bag so they looked like rubbish and leave them out for the dustman to take away.

  “I said what will Mr Doland say and he said bugger Mr Doland and he was thinking of turning in the paper round anyway. He said he had other plans but he did not say what they were.

  “He said I was to meet him in the cathedral where they were digging up Little St Ulf and when I asked why there he said it was to get some buried treasure. He said that when he had been going past those boards they have up all round it he had heard some people talking inside, and he heard that big man with the moustache who is sometimes there say that in the old days people used to bring offerings of gold and silver to Little St Ulf’s tomb and there was some evidence that the offerings had actually been buried in the tomb along with Little St Ulf’s body. Somebody else said, ‘There’s been blow-all so far,’ and then the man with the moustache, the one with the very loud voice, said he reckoned a couple of days more and they’d be down to the pay-dirt. Pay-dirt in case you don’t know is a word gold-miners use, meaning gold.

  “Arthur said that the people who did the digging never came there on Sundays so if we went there on a Sunday and found the silver and gold and took it away they would simply think it had never been there in the first place and we would be millionaires for the rest of our lives.

  “I wasn’t keen because it was stealing, and stealing from a saint which was even worse, especially in a cathedral with God looking down all the time, but Arthur only laughed and took out his glass eye and said it was more powerful than God and Little St Ulf put together.

  “At first I wasn’t going to go, and then I decided I would, partly because I always seemed to do what Arthur told me and partly because I knew that Little St Ulf had worked a lot of miracles in the past and I thought that perhaps if he looked down from Heaven and saw what Arthur was doing at his tomb he would be so angry he would turn him into a pig, or into a slug which would be even better. I thought once a saint always a saint, and I didn’t see why all the miracles had to happen in the Middle Ages. Anyway it was worth trying.

  “Nobody saw me coming into the cathedral, I am sure about that. Although it seems so open it is very easy, if you are a chorister and know the place the way we do, to go about like the invisible man. There are pillars and monuments of all kinds to dodge behind and all those passages in the walls for getting from one side to the other side without ever once stepping foot on the floor of the nave or the choir or the sanctuary or anywhere. It is a marvellous place really and very good fun besides being so holy.

  “That morning I could hear the Communion service going on in the St Lieven chapel. Otherwise it was very quiet. One of the vergers was messing about in the south aisle but I made sure he didn’t see me. I opened the door in the boards round the tomb and went inside. It said private but I didn’t take any notice, I’m sorry to say. Inside it was awfully dusty and there wasn’t anything much to see except a table and a big hole in the floor. Arthur hadn’t arrived and I was glad because it gave me time to say a prayer to Little St Ulf about working a miracle for me. There was some matting on the floor and I knelt down on it because I wanted Little St Ulf to know I was serious, not just bowing my head the way you do sometimes because everybody else is doing it, and I was still down on my knees when Arthur came in.

  “When I saw him I was going to get up but Arthur pressed his hand on my shoulder and told me to stay where I was. He said he was going to get down into the hole to look for the gold and the silver and if I stayed down on my knees he would be able to hand it up to me once he had found it. When he took a look over the edge and saw how dusty it was down there he took off his blazer and his trousers and put them on the table. He didn’t have any vest or underpants on which I don’t think was very nice, do you, just his shirt and school tie.

  “There wasn’t any ladder but the hole wasn’t all that deep, so Arthur took a three-legged stool that was there and put that in the hole and used that. I handed him down a trowel and he started scrabbling about but he couldn’t find any gold or silver just a lot of dust. All the time he was down there, though I didn’t say anything out loud, inside me I was praying hard to Little St Ulf to do what I asked.

  “After a long time Arthur gave up the search for the gold and the silver. He was in a very bad temper for having wasted his time on a wild-goose chase. He got up on the stool to get out of the hole but it was easier getting down than getting up and even though, as I told you, he hated to be touched, he told me to reach down and pull him up, which I did. Unfortunately, the bottom of the hole was very uneven and the stool, having only three legs, was very rickety. Just as I was about to take hold of Arthur it started to sway. Arthur was holding on to me so tightly I was afraid he was going to pull me into the hole as well, so to stop myself falling I grabbed at the nearest thing which was handy which just happened to be Arthur’s tie. It may have been the way he had tied the knot but personally I think it was Little St Ulf working a miracle, because what happened was that as I pulled it, the tie tightened round Arthur’s neck and his face went awful. He tried to say something but only a choky sound came out. His eyes went sort of fishy and round, like peppermint humbugs only not striped.

  “I honestly did not realize Arthur was getting killed. All I was thinking of was how to stop myself from falling into the hole. When he gave a kind of gurgle and his head fell to one side I was really surprised. He became very heavy and didn’t seem able to hold himself up any more, so all that was holding him up was me holding on to his tie.

  “I felt frightened then and let the tie go, and Arthur fell back on to the floor of the hole with an awful thump only of course, being dead, it didn’t hurt him. That was something at any rate. Fortunately too he had fallen on to the shallow part of the hole. I couldn’t pull him quite out of it but I pulled him most of the way.

  “At first I was going to run and fetch a verger, only I felt shy about saying what we had come to Little St Ulf’s tomb to do. I was afraid people might think it was my idea and not Arthur’s, and then where would I be? Once I mentioned the gold and the silver the verger would probably think I was a thief and call the police, even though I was innocent. I knew Mummy would be very upset. I thought at least I had better put Arthur’s trousers back on before I told anyone because otherwise, on top of everything else, they would probably think we had been doing things to each other when we hadn’t at all. So I went back to the table to fetch them, and that was when I saw the knife.

  “All the time inside of me I did not stop praying to Little St Ulf and I really believe it was him put the knife there just when I needed it. Arthur was lying half in, half out of the hole where Little St Ulf’s tomb was supposed to be and there suddenly came into my mind, I don’t know why, the way Little St Ulf had been found with his diddle cut off and a Jewish star cut into his body. So I thought, if I do that to Arthur people will think it was the Jews, not me, which will serve them right for killing Jesus and all that.

  “The knife was nice and sharp and I was very careful not to get any blood on me, and I knew from detective stories about wiping the knife so there weren’t any fingerprints.

  “At first I was going to leave Arthur’s blazer and trousers where they were and take away just the diddle and flu
sh it down the lav or something, but then I thought it would make it more mysterious if I took the clothes and hid them with the diddle in Bishop FitzAlain’s tomb. I thought even if somebody finds them there, the more mysterious the better.

  “So I took the glass eye out of Arthur’s blazer pocket and put it in mine, and then I took off his shoes and socks as well because he looked awfully silly with no trousers and his shoes and socks on. I bundled the clothes up, putting the diddle inside one of the shoes.

  “I put the stool back where it came from. There was a broom on the table and before I went I leaned over and swept the bottom of the hole so there would be no footprints and I swept it over the matting and dragged it along behind me so all the footprints there were rubbed out too. I held the broom with one of Arthur’s socks because of fingerprints, and I left it just inside the door. I really think I thought of everything.

  “Nobody saw me. I went by the triforium mostly, then down by a little stair which comes out almost at the side of the FitzAlain chapel. After I hid the clothes I went back up the stair, only this time by the passage into the north transept, so that when I came down, in case anybody was about, it would look as if I had just that moment come in by the Bishop’s Postern.

  “The whole thing didn’t take long at all and when I got into the cloakroom at the Song School I was still one of the earliest. We have a clothes brush there hanging on a nail and I gave myself a good brushing, I can tell you, because it is very dusty in Little St Ulf’s tomb and I hope the people who dig there wear masks because dust like that is very unhealthy and can make you ill.

  “Arthur’s peg and locker were the ones next along to mine, and when I saw his ruff hanging there all lovely and stiff and white I didn’t see why I shouldn’t wear it because he wouldn’t be needing it any more, ever.

  “I am sorry now that I took it because that was what gave me away, wasn’t it? Otherwise you might have blamed the Jews like I hoped you would. When Mr Harbridge found the glass eye in my pocket he thought that had given me away but he couldn’t really have proved, could he, not to a judge I mean, that Arthur hadn’t given it to me as a present like I said. If he had tried to prove it, I would have told the judge that Mr Harbridge had it in for me. I do not think he likes children. He made me miss a whole games period not long ago just for colouring a broken-down old tomb nobody ever looks at anyway. I promised to wash it off before school next day but he said, ‘Oh no you don’t my lad, you do it this minute,’ which I think was very nasty of him, don’t you? That was the reason why I didn’t just give the Bishop a moustache but wrote ‘Sod God’ on the wall as well, the way Arthur did, just to teach him, although I’m sorry to say that not being an artist like Arthur I couldn’t print it nicely the way he did.