by S. T. Haymon
Mrs Felsenstein crossed to the hearth, carefully keeping her housecoat away from the one-bar electric fire standing in front of the empty grate, and reached over to the wooden mantelshelf for the car keys. Holding them up in evidence: ‘Wasn’t that lovely of her?’
Jurnet nodded, a little jealous that Miriam could be so nice to other people.
‘Is Mr Felsenstein all right, then?’
‘If he doesn’t feel well enough, we shan’t go.’
‘Your husband seems to have to spend so much time in bed, I couldn’t help wondering –’
The woman sighed, fiddled with the keys before returning them to the mantelpiece.
‘He’s going through a bad patch, poor darling.’ She looked at the detective, her face shadowed by concern. ‘You aren’t here to speak to him, are you? He was up until twenty minutes ago. When he saw how much wool Miriam had left, he even tried to do a little work –’ she nodded in the direction of one of the knitting machines where a few rows of green ribbing, rigidly held to a straight edge, hung below the needles – ‘but he had to stop and go up. He’s had his pills, so he’s probably sound asleep by now.’
‘Not to worry.’ Jurnet smiled reassuringly into the worried face, and found himself surprised afresh at the woman’s transformation. It was the hair, he decided. Not beautiful hair like Miriam’s: quite ordinary hair, but soft about the face for once, instead of being pulled back severely like an old time school mistress.
Jurnet felt suddenly embarrassed that he had called. Such people went early to bed, and he must have interrupted her bedtime preparations. All the more foolish of her to have opened the door to him in the first place. When she moved, he became aware that underneath the rather flimsy housecoat she had nothing on.
He put his hand into his coat pocket and brought out the tin. ‘Actually, I just popped over to bring you this. I found it at the castle, after you’d gone.’
Mrs Felsenstein clapped her hands with pleasure, like a child. She took the tin from the detective, opened it, read the name scratched inside the lid as if to check it was really what she thought it was.
Jurnet said, ‘Sorry about the charcoal. I think that was my fault.’
The woman looked up, radiant.
‘It’s nothing. Charcoal’s always doing that. I can’t tell you how glad I am to have it back. I know it’s silly, but it happens to be just about the only thing I have left from when I was a child – sometimes, I think, the only thing that convinces me I ever was one.’
‘Glad it caught my eye.’
Mrs Felsenstein exclaimed gaily, ‘I’m going to make some cocoa. It ought to be champagne, a celebration, but cocoa’s the best I can offer. You do drink it!’ she added anxiously.
‘Hooked on it,’ replied Jurnet, who couldn’t stand the stuff. Wrily he wondered if he’d have found it easier to say no if Mrs Felsenstein had pulled her hair away from her face and pinned it up in the frumpish bun she normally went in for. On the other hand, tonight, still a slave in Egypt whilst Miriam escaped into the wilderness singing, even cocoa with a middle-aged woman with her hair in a bun was better than home with only an alley cat for company.
A prick of conscience accompanied the thought of the cat. The baked beans were going to be late tonight. He’d make up for it with a double portion.
Waiting for the cocoa to arrive, he wandered across to the knitting machines and, his back to the window, sat down at the one he designated as Mrs Felsenstein’s. A piece of blue knitting, patterned with white sheep processing nose to tail – the front or the back of a sweater, he guessed – hung down from the machine, the design programmed by the plastic-coated punch-card he spied behind the rack of needles. After a little, he turned on the switch and listened as the machine began to hum pleasantly. User-friendly, he nodded approvingly, wishing he had the nerve to move the carriage, produce his very own row of fleeces growing from the hooves up.
‘You do it like this,’ said Mara Felsenstein, reaching over his shoulder to move the carriage. The detective could feel her breast, generously rounded, pressing against his upper back as she leaned forward. ‘It’s terribly simple – not, perhaps, to do well, but to do well enough. The machine does it all for you. All you have to do, really, is keep track of when to increase or decrease, or cast off.’
‘Joining the pieces together can’t be easy.’
Jurnet would have liked to get up, but felt it would be not only impolite to do so, but worse: an implicit snigger.
‘Not my headache.’ The woman moved away. ‘That’s a job for the linkers. You should ask Miriam – she’s got everything organized down to the last stitch. They’re the ones who take the separate sections and turn them into a finished sweater. It’s more interesting work, as well as better paid, but it requires a degree of concentration I can’t be sure of – I mean, Leo may suddenly need me, and then I’d have to get up and leave whatever I was doing, no matter what.’
‘I suppose so,’ said Jurnet vaguely. He switched the machine off, feeling, for no sufficient reason, that he had somehow escaped a situation fraught with some peril.
He sat on the couch where Mrs Felsenstein indicated, and accepted the proffered mug of cocoa. She chose the floor for herself, on the hearthrug close to the electric fire, whose glow made her skin look downy, young.
Jurnet steeled himself to take a sip of the drink, and found it less revolting than he had feared.
‘Did you, by any chance,’ he asked, first sucking in his lips to trap the pinkish froth which coated them, ‘ever know a man named King, had the Punch and Judy show at Havenlea?’
‘The man who was killed? I saw it in the Argus.’ Mrs Felsenstein set her mug down on the floor and looked up at the detective. ‘No – I never knew him – why? Except that when Loy was a child and we used to go down to Havenlea for the day, we always had to make a beeline for the Punch and Judy. Nobody ever saw who was working them, of course – there was just a woman who came round with a wooden box for the money. Whether the man inside the tent in those days was the man who was murdered, I couldn’t tell you.’
‘Him or his father, I reckon, depending how long ago it was. I gather the Kings have run the Punch and Judy show at Havenlea for generations.’ Jurnet smiled. ‘That hardly constitutes knowing.’
‘Sometimes I felt I did,’ she replied seriously. ‘Know him, I mean. It was all so cruel and heartless – the things Punch did to everybody, always getting away with it, and acting as if it was all a great joke.
‘I always had to be the one to take Loy. Leo couldn’t stand it. He’d take a deckchair down by the sea and wait for us to come back. But Loy loved it. All the children did, I suppose because it was so – well, anarchic. The one place in their small world where right didn’t triumph, where honesty wasn’t the best policy. Punch got away with everything, and I sometimes felt – quite wrongly, I’m sure – that the man out of sight moving the puppets about must be the same, or he could never have gone on doing what he did year after year.’
Jurnet said, with a slight emphasis on the last word, ‘He didn’t get away with everything.’
‘No, of course not, poor fellow!’ Mara Felsenstein drank some of her cocoa, and asked, a frown of worry instantly ageing her, ‘What made you ask whether I knew him? Is his death connected with Loy’s in some way?’
‘I just wondered if your son had ever mentioned him to you.’ Jurnet evaded the question. ‘Mr King’s daughter works for Second Coming, and he and Loy had certainly met.’
The woman got up with a neat, economical movement and set her cocoa mug down on the mantelpiece. The glow from the electric fire penetrated the fabric of her housecoat, outlining the legs beneath, well-shaped but on the heavy side. She stood looking down at the detective with a troubled gaze.
‘Please don’t think I’m badgering you,’ she said, a little breathless. ‘I’m sure it must take an awful lot of time to put all the clues together. More than our linkers! Only, it’s so hard on Leo, this limbo, the way everythin
g drags on. It makes me so afraid for him –’
‘Not easy for you either, I’m sure of that.’ Jurnet did not need to simulate sympathy. ‘I wouldn’t want you to think that over at Headquarters we aren’t only too well aware of the strain you’re both under. The best I can say is, we aren’t hanging about, I can assure you of that.’
‘I didn’t mean –’ Mrs Felsenstein rearranged her thoughts, and began again. ‘It’s only, with time passing, doesn’t it get harder, less likely you’ll ever find out who did it?’
‘We’re nowhere near that point as yet.’ Jurnet got up from the couch, handed over his cocoa mug. ‘Delicious!’ he pronounced, almost meaning it. Mrs Felsenstein turned away to set the mug on the mantelpiece next to its fellow, the detective drifting back across the room to the knitting machine and the piece of fabric patterned with sheep, one after the other.
The woman joined him there and said, ‘Another row and then there’s a repeat, same as the others but with one black sheep among all the white ones. Miriam says it’s one of our best numbers.’
Jurnet laughed.
‘Be truer to life to have all the sheep black and just the one white one. Not such a good seller, though.’ He looked down at the woman. Even away from the fire, he thought, she looks young tonight.
He said, ‘I want you to believe that we’re making progress. We’ve been listening to what people have had to say, and even more, if you follow me, listening to what they haven’t.’
‘You mean they’ve been lying?’
‘Not necessarily. I mean that everybody has secrets – everybody, you and me included, if you don’t mind me saying so. Sometimes they are secrets we can hardly bear to reveal to ourselves, let alone to others; and sometimes they are secrets we long to share, even though, sometimes, we know the sharing will get us into bad trouble.’
Jurnet said, ‘I believe profoundly that whoever killed your son, like any other undiscovered murderer, finds the burden of the knowledge of what he has done almost impossible to bear, alone. Yet how, knowing the consequences, can he come out with it? That’s his problem, and ours too. That being so, we have to move on to the facts, to the mistakes he has made.’
‘Supposing he hasn’t made any?’
‘Impossible!’ the detective stated with confidence. ‘He may think he hasn’t, but he has; because, underneath it all, don’t you see, subconsciously, that’s what he wants – to be found out. All the time he goes about painstakingly covering up his tracks, deep inside he wants passionately to be rid of that intolerable load which is wearing him down. That’s why, invariably, he leaves clues that are unknown to his conscious self, sometimes little slips so silly even we, the police, pass them over, don’t recognize them for what they are; but clues that, sooner or later, have to lead us to him and him to us, his pursuers who are also his only rescuers.’
‘You make it sound like a Greek tragedy.’
‘I wouldn’t know about that. What I haven’t mentioned yet, though, is the third side of the triangle.’
‘What is that?’
‘Not what: who. The victim. Where does he fit into the picture? Because he has to, or there isn’t one. That’s why a police officer investigating a murder has to spend so much time asking nosey questions about what kind of bloke was he; reading other people’s letters, going through old school reports or the files of old newspapers.
‘Your son – forgive me – was killed by a blow on the back of his head. He couldn’t have seen the arm raised or the weapon descending, or he would have ducked, tried to dodge. There would have been a struggle, and there’s no evidence of anything like that. But I have a crazy theory –’ Jurnet went suddenly bright red at what he had already revealed of himself, and at what he proposed to reveal further; yet, under the almost mesmeric scrutiny of those wonderful eyes, the whites so pure, the pupils so brilliant, could not, or did not choose to, stop – ‘that every murder victim, even if death comes in the dark or while he’s asleep knows the identity of his murderer.’
Mrs Felsenstein whispered ‘Poor Loy!’ and covered her face with her hands.
Jurnet, furious with himself, said awkwardly, ‘There I go, rattling on. It must have been the cocoa.’
‘No, no! I’m very grateful –’
‘Don’t know what for.’ The detective settled his coat on his shoulders. ‘I must be getting along.’
The other took her hands away from her face. ‘Thank you again for bringing back my tin.’
‘My pleasure.’ The detective took a few steps towards the door; turned as if remembering his manners, and shook hands. Inquired: ‘Is there anything else I can do for you?’
‘There is one thing,’ Mara Felsenstein said. With thumb and forefinger she took hold of the zip fastener at her neck; pulled on it in a sweeping gesture that split the edges of her housecoat apart like a dehiscing seed-pod, revealing the naked fruit beneath.
‘If you don’t mind, that is. You can go to bed with me.’
Chapter Thirty Three
Jurnet drove home through the dark Good Friday night. The city was very quiet. Lucky for him, the detective thought, none of his tribe were on the prowl with their little bags ready to be blown into.
‘Cocoa!’ he could hear their incredulous laughter. ‘Tell us another!’
It had been wonderful beyond words, beyond wonder. Beyond guilt, beyond regret that it had happened. He drove homeward, filled with gratitude and a measureless joy that it had happened to him.
‘Was I all right?’ she had asked tremulously, when at last, on the bumpy old couch, they had drawn apart from each other, not too far apart.
She had sounded like a virgin, she the mother of a grown son. She had made love like a virgin, assuming there to be such a thing as a virgin without timidity, possessed of perfect discretion, and a delicate and instinctive knowledge of all that there was to be savoured in the coming together of a man and a woman. There had been a freshness, a radiance – Jurnet had to stop the car, draw in to the side of the road and sit quietly for a little, until the world returned to its accustomed orbit.
‘When can we do this again?’ he had demanded, transported; yet scarcely surprised when she had answered, with a loving finality that left no room for contradiction: ‘Never!’
Jurnet swung the car round into the entrance of the block of flats, enjoying, in his new-found awareness of the possibilities of existence, every movement of the car and of his own body mastering it. He parked, as usual, next to the resident rubbish, switching off the ignition and sitting still in the driving seat for a moment longer, neither thinking nor feeling, simply being.
Even so, ecstasy – if that was what it was – was a perishable quantity, short-lived as a spark. It was replaced by knowledge he could not stifle, nor pretend it was not so.
Coming into the driveway, the headlights, describing their turning arc, had briefly illuminated something.
Something.
Jurnet got out of the car, shut the door, and walked back to the street. In the gutter, slammed against the kerb where some passing vehicle had hurled it, lay the body of the cat. Its black coat was sticky and repellent, the left side of its face laid open in a grin of such manic ferocity that the detective’s eyes shut of their own volition.
What did you do with a dead cat beside light a candle to its memory, do penance for the rest of your days because you had got home so late that it had got tired of waiting; and, watching for you, for you alone, had forgotten for one fatal instant the street sense programmed into it from kittenhood?
Load it into one of the black plastic bags to await the dustman? Leave it where it was, for the street cleaners to clear away? Fling it over the hedge into somebody else’s garden and let them worry about it?
Jurnet went up to his flat, looked up the number of a vet and dialled it. ‘Mr Harvey Chance,’ the recorded message replied with a certain standoffishness, ‘is not available at the moment except for emergencies, in which case he may be reached at Angleby 37462. Surg
ery hours are 9 to 10.30 a.m. daily except Sundays. If you have any message, first give your name, address, and telephone number. Speak when the signal tone ceases. Thank you.’
When the signal tone ceased, Jurnet did not give his name, address and telephone number. He said, ‘My cat is dead. It was run over because I was too busy screwing to get back home and feed it. It was black, and it liked baked beans. I did not know its name. Thank you.’
He got the dialling tone again and phoned Dr Colton at his private address.
‘That’ll be all right,’ said the doctor, when he heard what Detective-Inspector Jurnet wanted. ‘Leave it outside the back door and I’ll see one of the mortuary attendants deals with it first thing in the morning.’ Despite the lateness of the hour, his voice was unexpectedly gentle. For once, he did not ask for any forms to be filled in.
Jurnet put the phone back and went into the kitchen. He fished about in the cupboard under the sink, and found a carrier bag with ‘Harrods’ printed on it. It pleased him to have found such an upmarket winding sheet. Across the landing, Mrs Petherton’s gramophone had begun its evening recital: ‘Love is the sweetest thing –’. Reminded of a job undone, the detective picked up the carton of beans, what was left of them.
He crossed to Mrs Petherton’s door and rang the bell. He had to wait a long time. When Mrs Petherton finally appeared, she looked at him with glazed eyes, and said in a haughty voice, ‘I never purchase anything at the door.’
‘Not selling – giving!’ Jurnet put on his jolly voice, plunked the carton down in the passage, and, with a hand firmly gripped under the woman’s elbow, propelled her back to the living-room.
It was a long time since he had been invited in, and the squalor of what had been a bravely bright little place appalled him. The gramophone shone immaculate on its special rug, everything else looked as if it hadn’t been touched for months. On the little tables and whatnots, thinner areas of dust among the thicker areas traced the bases of china crinoline ladies and the china gentlemen who had bent over their hands; now, no doubt, performing their elaborate courtesies on the shelves of the friendly bric-à-brac dealer. The grate was full of gin bottles, several of them broken. On the floral covers that swathed the sofa and the armchair, the chrysanthemums were greasy as from some unidentified blight. Mrs Petherton looked stoned and ill.