Stately Homicide

by S. T. Haymon

  Jurnet’s business at Bullen took him less time than he had expected, even though, after the initial exultation at finding what he had been looking for, he had proceeded – he who was normally so quick in his ways – with an odd deliberation, laying out the evidence on a table close to the window, and bringing a table lamp from its accustomed alcove to illuminate it. There had been a moment when the detective had stiffened, fancying he heard a step outside, the snap of a breaking twig: only to resume his work with a slight nod of satisfaction, or understanding.

  Well before the Superintendent and Sergeant Ellers were due he was back at the car, eyes straining into the night, which was blacker than ever, the sky blanketed with cloud. Miss Appleyard had switched off her light and the darkness was complete. For all his excitement, a familiar melancholy depressed the detective’s spirits. Death was a lonely thing, only life lonelier. Why did he always, on the trail of a killer and closing the distance between them minute by minute, feel himself the hunted rather than the hunter?

  The beam of headlights swinging round in a wide arc from the road was immensely cheering. In another moment, Jack Ellers, in the driving seat, braked to a halt alongside, and informed Jurnet through the window: ‘Jeep turned left into the road just as we were passing the Bullensthorpe turn-off. That OK?’

  ‘What I was hoping for. Saves us the trouble of lighting the fuse.’

  From within the car, the Superintendent, informal in an anorak of couture scruffiness, leaned across to say: ‘You lead on, Ben. We’ll follow. Everything’s laid on, just as you ordered, even unto the wellies.’

  ‘The wellies? I never –’ Jurnet stopped short, rendered speechless by admiration and loathing in equal measure.

  ‘Logistics,’ the Superintendent proclaimed, settling himself comfortably in his seat. ‘That’s the name of the game. No detail too large, none too small. That’s what I like to see.’ He inclined his head towards his subordinate in benign approval. ‘On the wet side, marshes!’

  They came to the coast from among the bracken-choked hills that tumbled down to the wetland, giving the coast road a wide berth and creeping into the car park of Hoope bird sanctuary with lights out and only the voice of a PC alongside murmuring which way to go. The night was as black as ever, but no longer impenetrable. Sound and smell had taken over from sight.

  From below rose the unique tang of the marsh, brackish and ancient, yet full of an astringent freshness to cleanse the lungs and send the blood coursing through the veins with renewed vigour. In a small wind which seemed to be blowing simultaneously from all directions, the reed panicles whispered ceaselessly against a clatter of elderly leaves. Somewhere close at hand, water gurgled on and on, as if making a small joke go a long way; whilst in the distance, sounding now near, now far, the sea broke on a shingly shore and retreated, hissing, for another try.

  Using his torch circumspectly, Jurnet counted ten men in all awaiting instructions, seven of them in uniform, the other three in well-worn levis and anoraks; all of them local lads with wind-chapped faces, and voices that curved up and over towards the end of every sentence like the combers homing to the beach. They listened to Journet’s briefing respectfully, and melted away into the darkness almost before he had finished speaking.

  The three from Angleby followed; at first gingerly, distrustful of a world as it might have been at the beginning of Creation – land, sky and water not yet quite separated; then with increasing confidence, filled with a sense of the airy spaces that surrounded them: an enlargement of consciousness which did not save the Superintendent from walking into a dyke from which he emerged wet to the thighs, but with spirits unquenched.

  Not much longer now.

  Jurnet, head down, intent on the narrow path between the reeds, suddenly became aware – of what, he could not say, except that there was something. How, back in the Coachyard, had the bookbinder described that mysterious prefiguring of dawn? Something left over from an earlier stage of man’s development – perhaps even earlier than that. An apprehension of life beginning.

  And ending.

  Behind him, the Superintendent took hold of Jurnet’s shoulders, twisted them gently, so that he was forced to raise his eyes from their preoccupation with where he put his feet. At first, nothing seemed changed, except that the wind had strengthened and now blew unremittingly from the sea. Then the detective realised that the darkness, without dissipating itself in any discernible way, had split in two laterally; the lower part dense and anchored, as against the continued nothingness above.

  Out of this nothingness, someone, something, essayed a tentative ‘coo-ee!’ which, even whilst the three, startled, peered upward in the attempt to discover its source, dissolved itself into a bubbling trill which lost itself in the reeds’ rustling.

  ‘Curlew,’ the Superintendent pronounced, with that calm assumption of knowledge which always made Jurnet want to poke him one in the kisser. ‘Unless it was a whimbrel’ – an admission of possible error which should have put all to rights, except what the hell was a whimbrel, anyway, when it was at home?

  Sergeant Ellers, in a voice whose tone encapsulated what the little Welshman thought of marshes in general and Hoope in particular, demanded: ‘What’s that big lump sticking up?’

  ‘That must be the barrow,’ replied Jurnet, who, in the hours of waiting, had had time to study a map.

  ‘Don’t talk daft! Over there!’

  ‘Not a wheelbarrow,’ the Superintendent put in. There he was, sod him, at it again! ‘A long barrow. A grave. Some Bronze Age chieftain, I suppose, who wanted to be buried on the cliff, in sight of the sea.’

  ‘Ruddy cemetery,’ snorted the Welshman, not sounding at all surprised.

  However the phrase went, Jurnet thought, turning away from the chubby, aggrieved face, and happy in the realisation that he could actually see it, dawn did not break. It crept up on you insidiously, before you had a chance to say no. Here I am, another day, and sucks to you.

  Day seeped over the marsh and revealed, beyond the reeds and the shallow pools that reflected the sky, a high pebble ridge between cliffs which shut out the sea. Not much of a barrier, it seemed to Jurnet, against the breakers banging away on the further side. That old chap in the barrow, or the followers who had borne him to his last resting-place, must have known the way the tides went, to keep him stowed high and dry and out of harm’s way, how many hundreds of years was it? Couldn’t hardly have been expected to take into account that one day some nosy parkers, in the name of archaeology or whatever, would be along to cart the old bones to a glass case in Angleby Museum, far from the sight of the sea and the sound of the curlews calling, to say nothing of the whimbrels.

  For a bird sanctuary, thought Jurnet, the place seemed a bit short on birds. A few gulls appeared over the ridge, planing inland on the wind: otherwise nothing. Such signs of life as were visible in the lightening day were of another kind. Rising doubled-up out of the marsh like some strange creatures out of the primeval ooze came the local fuzz. Up the steep side of the ridge they stumbled, dislodging little streams of pebbles as they went. They were a good third of the way up when the Superintendent gave a shout and pointed.

  From the seaward side, a head and shoulders had appeared, the head comical in a knitted cap topped with an outsize pompom. The next moment, a slender figure was running along the narrow spine of the ridge, as spare and economical as a figure on a Greek vase. By the time the Superintendent had got his binoculars to his eyes, a second figure, broader than the first and hatless, had come into view following after.

  ‘Good God!’

  The second figure was brandishing a whip, short in the handle but long in the greedy tongue that snaked through the air seeking its quarry. The wind, the waves, the reeds were too noisy: yet the watchers fancied they heard its vicious crack! as it cut through the sky. The front runner, far ahead, looked back over his shoulder and waved a hand, whether in derision or defiance it was impossible to say.

  Jurnet, too, be
gan to run, splashing through bog and reedbed, daring the quaking ooze not to support him. Behind him, he could hear his companions, but his attention was all for the two figures silhouetted against the dawn sky. He had the impression, though no sound reached him, that the one in the rear was shouting.

  All at once the second runner stumbled, and went down on his knees. The runner in the knitted cap turned, darted back; and with a sudden, quicksilver movement possessed himself of the whip. For a moment he raised it aloft, as if in triumph, and the detectives held their breath, waiting for the wicked leather to fall upon the prostrate enemy. But no blow was struck, and in another instant the runner was on his way again. The other man, disarmed, struggled slowly to his feet, and stood shaking his head from side to side, like a bear or a large dog.

  When he had again put a considerable distance between himself and his pursuer, the man in the knitted cap stopped once more. Head tilted back until it seemed that the absurd headgear must fall off, he whirled the whip about him, describing wide arabesques in the air. Like the ringmaster at the circus – the comparison came into Jurnet’s mind – about to introduce a new act.

  And suddenly there was exactly that. Jurnet caught his breath in incredulous wonder. In that instant, and as if conjured out of the newborn day, the air was full of birds, swirling up from the shoreline, their high, excited cries vibrating over the marsh. Rippling now dark, now light, they wheeled and banked, dipped and circled; seeming, to the viewers below, almost to touch the whip encouraging their performance. Then, like a perfectly trained corps de ballet, one movement melting seamlessly into the next, the birds flowed into an arrowhead pointing westward, and made their exit down the sky as mysteriously as they had come.

  The leading figure turned and began running once more. The other followed. The climbers were nearing the top of the ridge.

  ‘The cliff!’ Jurnet shouted over his shoulder, ignoring the fact that a long, cigar-shaped lagoon lay between him and his objective. ‘We can head them off!’

  He plunged boldly into the lagoon’s fringes, only to feel his wellies filling with water colder than any he could remember. A pair of affronted whooper swans that rose protesting from under his feet almost sent him headlong.

  Profiting by their colleague’s discomfiture, the Superintendent and the Sergeant contrived to find a safer way; waiting and saying nothing with exquisite courtesy as the Inspector struggled up beside them and emptied out his reeking boots.

  The cliff, while not all that precipitous, was coated with some kind of mossy growth slippery as glass. By the time the three police officers reached its top, even the Superintendent had lost some of his famous cool. The view from the top, of the young sun shrugging off its cloud cover, the sea bisected by a causeway of palest gold, should have been compensation enough for all their effort. But it was not.

  The two men had vanished.

  Sergeant Ellers exclaimed: ‘It’s just not possible!’

  A little below them, and to their left, the locals were by now spread out along the ridge looking flummoxed. Jurnet fished out the gadget he so hated to use that he usually forgot to carry it with him; got on to the little party’s leader, and gave a brief order. Then he set off again, at the double.

  ‘The barrow!’

  The top of the cliff, rabbit-cropped, was little less slippery than its side; but, their goal in sight, the three covered the ground sure-footedly. They circled the mound of the ancient artefact, ripping their clothing on the barbed wire which enclosed it, and ignoring the warnings of danger of everything from natural subsidence to unexploded mines; and found, on the seaward side, that most of the covering of earth and vegetation had fallen away, exposing the vandalised burial chamber and the large grey stones, some of them still standing, which once had supported its roof.

  All this Jurnet at once took in and did not see, his conscious attention absorbed by what was happening under his feet. On the floor of the chamber, the whip beside him like a discarded serpent, Jeno Matyas lay silent and unresisting among the rabbit droppings while Ferenc Szanto squeezed the life out of him.

  ‘Vermin!’ the blacksmith shouted. ‘Judas!’ The enormous hands tightened. ‘To steal from those who have received us in hospitality! To kill in this land which has given us life, and work, and human dignity –!’

  It took the combined strength of the three of them to pull the man off the still, recumbent figure. Not until Ellers sank his teeth into one of the hands did he finally let go of the thin neck on which the imprints of his great thumbs showed like the pug marks of some large animal. Only the timely arrival of four of the locals, to whom they thankfully delegated the task of subduing the maddened bull who went by the name of Szanto, enabled the three detectives to return their attention to the target of his frenzy and the object of all their seeking.

  The man’s powers of recuperation were amazing. Even as Jurnet bent over him he nodded as if in greeting, his head propped against the sandy wall of the chamber, but shrinking away from the ministering hands as if he preferred not to be touched. Already his face was returning to its normal pallor, the eyes that a minute earlier had been staring out of his head deep-set and contemplating the world with their customary air of humorous expectancy.

  The expectancy deepened to a passionate joy as suddenly, once again, the air above the barrow was full of birds that swished across the sky like the twirlings of a matador’s cape, before streaming away westward in their turn, another arrow fleeing the rising sun.

  When the birds had gone, Jeno Matyas said, his voice hoarse but contented: ‘They’ll be going across to the Lincolnshire coast to feed. They’ll be back when the tide changes.’ He swallowed with some difficulty, and then repeated: ‘When the tide changes –’ as if the words, for him, held some special significance.

  It was all Jurnet could do to quell an irritation with which, from long experience, he was only too familiar. Why the bloody hell did murderers so seldom look the part?

  The detective got out the gadget again, and transmitted a request for an ambulance and stretchermen. Listening, the smile on the Hungarian’s face widened. He began to laugh, a harsh jangle that seemed both to surprise and hurt him, for he put a hand up to his throat and held it there. Nevertheless, he persevered with the unsettling noise until Jurnet, between gritted teeth, felt impelled to demand: ‘Going to let us into the joke?’

  ‘Do I really have to spell it out?’ The Hungarian looked down at his legs, what there was to be seen of them. From a little below the thigh to a little above the ankle, and covering both limbs, lay one of the great stones that had once held up the chamber roof. A single foot which protruded from it stuck out at an angle which made it hard to accept that it was actually attached to a leg, the stone itself so flat as to make it quite implausible that human limbs were concealed beneath. The trousers from thigh to groin were dark with blood.

  Jeno Matyas said: ‘Thank you so much for laying on a lift. As you know, I am not really able to walk.’

  Chapter Thirty Four

  ‘In this country, it seems, it is not enough to say to the officers of the law, “Yes, I am a thief. Yes, I am a murderer. I confess!” I still have to be badgered to explain how and why I am a thief, how and why I killed Chad Shelden and Percy Toller. Such morbid curiosity! Is it, perhaps, because you think I may be a lunatic in addition – one who does not understand what he is confessing to? Or that to suggest cutting short the solemn rituals of the public trial is a kind of blasphemy?

  ‘Or is it because you yourselves harbour guilty consciences which require to be exorcised with appropriate ceremony before you can bring yourselves to cage me up like a wild animal, out of sight of the sea and the birds flying?

  ‘How refreshing your English justice is! How touching in its innocence! Your tongues are hanging out to hear my story, yet still you provide me, gratis, with a lawyer whose prime function appears to be to impress upon me that it’s no part of my business to do the prosecution’s work for them. Stay mum, and le
t the police bring forward their evidence, such as it is. And what can that be, I ask myself? Some old books that have been tampered with, a pair of cuff links; an essay for which the Open University is still waiting? Is there more? I hardly think so, for I have been very careful.

  ‘There I go again, making dangerous admissions! The lawyer, I fear, will be sadly disappointed in me. He takes me, I think, for an intelligent man. Nevertheless, I retract nothing. I am sorry for what I have done: I am not ashamed of it. It was, shall we say, a regretable necessity.

  ‘If it does not sound too absurd to put it so, there was nothing personal in my murder of Mr Shelden. Five months before ever he came to Bullen Hall I knew I should be obliged to kill him. Miss Appleyard came into my workshop one morning with a Book of Hours that needed a page repairing – a lovely thing, of the highest quality. She told me, in the way of conversation, that she knew I would be interested to hear that she had arranged for Mr Chad Shelden, the well-known writer of biographies, to take over as curator of Bullen Hall when Francis retired in five months’ time.

  ‘Oh, I was interested!

  ‘It was Ferenc Szanto, as you may or may not know, who first brought me to Bullensthorpe. What a stroke of luck it seemed, to fall in by chance with one of the great men of the 1956 rising! But when I saw the Bullen Library, I saw the finger of destiny.

  ‘Let me explain. I was an exile because, one day in Hungary, a bomb had gone off under a car in which a Soviet general was travelling. I had to get out of the country fast: but that did not mean I gave up the fight to free my homeland from under the heel of the Russian jackboot – only that I was forced by circumstances to change my modus operandi. Resolve and dedication, however deeply committed, are of themselves useless against an enemy armed to the teeth. We too had to have arms. And arms cost money.