by S. T. Haymon
“You’re expecting him back tonight, then?” Jurnet put the cup down. Another drop, and he’d bring up the lot.
“You ain’t drinking!” Millie’s beautiful eyes clouded over.
Jurnet said, “Waiting for it to cool off.” He took a deep breath, and swallowed all that remained in the cup.
Millie smiled beatifically.
“Now Joe’ll come.”
“Well,” said Jurnet, who needed to vomit, “I must be getting along.”
“You c’n come to tea any time,” said Millie, “now we got a vacuum fast.”
As, a few minutes later, rid of the dreadful brew, he leaned, shaky but revived, against the nearest Nissen hut, he felt a tug at his trousers—Willie, his straw hair bright even in darkness, his upturned face heavy with importance.
“I know where Joe goes!”
“You’ve not been following him about?” Jurnet’s fears for the boy’s safety eclipsed any satisfaction he might have derived from the information. “You’ll get yourself run over.”
The child drew himself up.
“I go to the chippie, don’t I? An ’fer the milk an’ the bread? I c’d go anywhere, if it weren’t too long t’ leave Ma.”
“That’s what I mean.” Jurnet hastily retrieved his error. “You can’t stay with your Ma if you’re busy following your Pa all over the place.”
“I weren’t following him! I jus’ come out of the grocery an’ I seen him on the other side o’ the street. So I thought I’d ask him for 10p for a sucker. Ma’d said I could ’ave one if there was any change, on’y there weren’t any. So I thought, Joe’s rich, I‘ll ask him.”
“Who told you Joe was rich?”
The boy looked puzzled. Then, “He just is. So I waited till I could get across—” he looked at Jurnet severely. “I’m always very careful. On’y by then he was all the way up the street, an’ I had to run after him—” The sentence petered out.
“Yes?” said Jurnet, encouragingly.
“I—” The little face creased and uncreased itself as the child struggled to convey feelings he could scarcely register, let alone put into words. The detective forced himself to stay silent, let the boy resolve his dilemma in his own way.
“Then,” said Willie, “I didn’ feel like a sucker arter all.” He looked hard at Jurnet, daring a contradiction. “I often don’t feel like one when I’ve just felt like one. He ’ adn’t seen me, so it didn’t make no diff’ rence.”
“Did you go on following him?”
“It weren’t far. He went down a street, an’ then he went inter a house.”
“Maybe he went to call on a friend.”
Willie made no attempt to hide his seorn.
“He’s got a lot o’ keys on the end of a chain in his trousers pocket. He took it out, an’ he took one of the keys an’ went in.” In case Jurnet still hadn’t caught on, “He never knocked.”
“Do you know what street it was?”
Willie’s face crinkled up again. This time it was a child crying.
“Yer know I can’t read!”
At that, Jurnet swung the boy up on to his shoulders again, the pain in his ribs swallowed in a greater one.
“Know what, young feller-me-lad? We’re going for a ride!”
“Ma—”
“The three of us! To show me that street. Think you can remember where it is?”
“Jest ’ cause I bleeding can’t read it,” Willie said savagely, “don’t mean I don’t know it!” After a moment he demanded, “What kind o’ car?”
“Rover. New model.”
“Rover!” But the cares were never far away. “Ma—” Willie began again.
“Look—” said Jurnet, setting the child on his feet again, “we don’t want Ma to bother her head, do we, with houses and keys and stuff like that. You sit in front and tell me quietly where to go, eh? And when we get to the house itself, if you recognize which one it is, just give me a tug of the trousers, like you did just now, OK? Only don’t pull ’em off, will you? Out in the street without my trousers, a police officer! That’d be a fine thing!”
To huge laughter at the thought of Detective-Inspector Benjamin Jurnet caught driving in his underpants, they came back to Millie, and caught her up in their glee. A ride! A ride in a new model Rover!
Upon Jurnet’s insistence that the two wrap up warmly, Willie, from under the trailer bench, brought out a fur coat of ambiguous pedigree which filled the detective’s mouth with hairs as he gallantly helped Millie into it. Willie himself had a duffle, dirty but warm.
“Jes’ wait till I tell Joe!” exclaimed Millie.
The two ran gaily ahead of him, finding their way between the scrapheaps like cats in the dark, Jurnet lumbering behind by torch-light. Their excited voices came to him from the other side of the fence.
“Purple!” That was Millie.
Willie shouted, “Blue, silly! Police cars are always blue!”
Jurnet, unable to discover where the two had made their exit, heaved himself over the gate again.
“It is blue, in’t it, Mr Ben?” Willie settled himself into the front passenger seat. “I tell ’er, but she won’t listen.”
“Purple!” cried Millie. Jurnet reflected that tomorrow, back at the police garage, the hairs on the back seat would require explanation.
He switched on the engine, put the car into gear, and pulled out from the kerb.
“You’re both right,” he said. “Blue in daylight, and purple after lighting-up time. So you’re both winners.”
“I told yer!” cried Millie, leaning forward and thumping her son on the shoulder.
Willie twisted round in his seat and shouted back triumphantly.
“An’ I told you!”
Both winners! Jurnet’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. Softly to Willie, so that Millie should not hear, he said, “Going the right way, Squire, are we?”
The right way led down Bridge Street as far as Bridge Gate, then veered away from the Close to follow the high wall which enclosed the Bishop’s garden. A little before the curving lane widened into a fine ceremonial space facing His Grace’s front door, Willie spoke low, and pointed.
Jurnet turned right and, a few hundred yards on in response to a further direction, right again.
He knew where he was now; but drove on nevertheless, so that Willie could have the pleasure of pulling his trouser-leg as they passed Mrs Cossey’s front door.
In the back, Millie stretched out her arms luxuriously.
“Wait till I tell Joe!”
Chapter Twelve
Professor Pargeter had been in Birmingham. Detective-Inspector Benjamin Jurnet took it as a personal affront that Professor Pargeter had been in Birmingham at the time when, in Angleby Close, events were happening for which, in the Inspector’s view, the Professor must bear a large portion of the responsibility.
It had not needed much inquiry to discover where the English Men had come by the knowledge of what had been done to the corpse of Arthur Cossey. Every one in Angleby who could spare forty minutes, and many who could not, made a point of tuning in to the Professor’s weekly lunch-hour programme on local radio.
“Pargeting” as it was called, was a combination of chat show, history lesson, and stand-up comedy which was deservedly popular. You never knew what to expect from the Professor—only that, at the end, somehow, along with the gossip and the blue jokes, you could reckon on emerging better informed than you had imagined possible on subjects as diverse as Neolithic droveways and Mayan concepts of time. The Professor—people were always saying it—could get away with murder.
That day he had got off to a good start, opening with the husband-and-wife team starring in a Noel Coward season at the Theatre Royal, a couple so manically intent on burnishing their togetherness image as to be totally unaware that, under the gentle promptings of their interlocutor, their exchanges were becoming bitchier by the minute. As for the closing item, a plea for the preservation of a nineteenth-century lu
natic asylum scheduled for demolition, it was impossible to decide whether the Professor were being serious, or guying over-enthusiastic conservationists.
Two good “Pargeting” pieces. Between, the Professor, having noted offhandedly that young Arthur Cossey, murdered in the cathedral, had been mutilated in precisely the same way as Little St Ulf before him—to wit, castrated, and scored from throat to navel with the interlaced triangles of the Star of David—had launched into a compelling five minutes on the fascination of magical signs in general.
“And now for an act of vandalism, perpetrated—would you believe it?—not by some of those disturbed adolescents for whom our hearts never stop bleeding, but by the wiseacres of our local Council—” and so on to the threatened asylum. Listeners were already wondering whether they were meant to grieve or rejoice over the impending fate of “this incomparable Romanesque escape into the East Anglian landscape” when the penny dropped, with all the thud of delayed shock. What was that again about Arthur Cossey?
Immediately after the programme, which he always insisted on broadcasting live, the Professor had left for Birmingham to deliver a lecture at the University. Located there and brought to the telephone to receive Jurnet’s call, he was cheerfully unrepentant.
“I bet Flossie’s wetting his knickers!”
“I haven’t spoken to the Dean.”
The Professor’s booming laugh came over the wire.
“When you do, give him a kiss from me.”
His voice expressionless, Jurnet said, “A young American tourist was seriously injured and is still unconscious.”
There was a silence. Then the voice at the other end said, “Know something, Inspector? Play the clown long enough, it’s the only bloody part you know how to.” There was another pause. Then, “I hope you don’t think I planned that little hullabaloo?”
Jurnet ignored the question. He said, “I think we should have a talk, sir. Today, if at all possible.”
“I’ll be back in Angleby by 8. Any time after that. I’m sure you know where I live. Inspector?”
“Sir?”
“If you think I had anything to do with the death of that child—”
After waiting, as it seemed to him, long enough, Jurnet asked again, “Sir?”
But the Professor had rung off.
When Rosie Ellers opened her front door to Jurnet, her plump, pretty face lost its habitual aspect of sunny unconcern. She rounded on her husband, shrugging on his raincoat in the little hall.
“Where were you, then, when the stones were flying?”
The little Welshman, rosy and unmarked, gave his wife a resounding kiss and edged round her to the door.
“Small is beautiful. Little fellow like me, he slips into the spaces between one bash and the next.” Regarding the Inspector with a pitying eye, “Stand out like a blooming lighthouse, what d’you expect?”
Rosie said, “The Inspector ought to be in bed. Running a temperature, I shouldn’t be surprised. And out without a coat and all!” She tut-tutted, and finished, “Couldn’t Jack run you home, Mr Jurnet, and then do whatever it is needs doing on his ownsome?”
“Looks worse than it is,” said Jurnet, who indeed felt terrible. But not as terrible as he would feel at home, on his ownsome.
“At least come in for a hot drink when you bring His Nibs back.”
Jurnet was glad to let his subordinate drive. He himself sat slumped in the passenger’s seat, watching the familiar streets stream past.
“What are we asking this bloke, exactly?” asked Ellers, troubled by the other’s silence.
With an effort, Jurnet pulled-himself together.
“We know he let the cat out of the bag after the Superintendent had particularly asked him not to. We’ve agreed that whoever killed the kid will want the peculiar nature of the inquiries made public, whether to give the old lies a fresh airing, or simply to deflect us from his real motive for murder. So—the Professor deliberately spilled the beans. Sinister, or just fucking irresponsible?”
“Can’t see a chap like that hobnobbing with those English Ape-Men.”
“Mosley in the ’30s was a bart, and look who he knocked bout with.”
“Oh, the ’30s—”
“What makes you think the ’80s are any different? You’ve read the English Men’s manifesto. They’ve had to wrap it up in gobbledegook to get it past Race Relations, but it’s all there—England for the English, and, in their book, that means white Anglo-Saxon Protestant.” He looked at the little Welshman with amused affection. “Can’t think where that leaves you, boyo.”
They were in the outer suburbs now, a well-heeled district that had once been a village.
Sergeant Ellers turned the car out of the main road into a lane where house lights glimmered an expansive distance back from the road.
“Take to the hills, I reckon,” he answered, smiling. “You and me both.”
“Ever been in Brum?” Professor Pargeter greeted them, glass in hand. He had opened the front door himself and ushered the two detectives into a spacious hall full of bits of broken pottery Jurnet’s old mum would long ago have put out for the dustman. “Don’t, if you value your life.”
Leading the way into a pleasant, book-lined room, he observed over his shoulder, “God alone knows how many bones lie bleaching beneath the Bull Ring, brave youths and beautiful maidens who never made it out of the labyrinth.”
It was not an auspicious beginning, and it did not get any better Jurnet, who was not frivolous by nature, and had never learnt to cope with frivolity, especially the academic variety, full of insensitive assumptions of a shared background, began to feel unwell again.
“Drink?” asked the Professor, replenishing his own glass at a side table loaded with decanters. He turned round and regarded his visitors, still standing, the tall and lean, the short and tubby, and burst out laughing. “Sit down, for Christ’s sake! You look like Laurel and Hardy!”
He waved the two towards a deep leather sofa, on whose edge they perched embarrassedly. He did not appear to expect a reply to his offer of drinks, and made no move to provide any. Positioning himself in front of the marble mantelpiece, and waving his glass in a gesture that sent the liquid swirling dangerously, he demanded, without further preamble, “If I told you, Inspector, that the only reason I put in that bit about Arthur Cossey was because my producer asked for a little something to separate the two main items, and I couldn’t for the life of me think of anything else on the spur of the moment, would you believe me?”
“Was it the reason, sir?” Jurnet began to feel better as he sensed a certain lack of assurance on the part of his questioner.
“You haven’t answered my question, so I’m hanged if I’ll answer yours! I’ll try again. What would you say if I said I did it as a gesture—call it a blow for freedom—after that self-important dunderhead of a Superintendent of yours—” a blush of shock suffused Sergeant Ellers’s face—“had the nerve to try and clap some kind of D Notice on me?”
“I’d say—did you do it as a gesture?”
The Professor rocked delightedly on his heels.
“Would you indeed? And if I went on to admit that, actually, the only reason I did it was to put Flossie’s nose out of joint—what then?”
Master of himself again, Jurnet returned, “I would say that none of those reasons, nor all three of them put together, would add up to an adequate excuse for instigating a riot.”
The Professor finished off his drink and set the glass down on the mantelpiece.
“Tell me—” he demanded. “Was Arthur Cossey’s body mutilated in the way I described, or was it not?”
“You know it was. We discovered it together.”
“Thank you!” An inclination of the head. “So at least you are not accusing me of perverting the truth, only of uttering it.” The man’s blue eyes were bright and angry. “There is, you must admit, a certain irony in being reprimanded by the police, of all people, for telling the truth.”
“‘A time to keep silence, and a time to speak,’ eh?” The anger faded, to be replaced by a rueful amusement. “Silence! From a professional blabbermouth! You don’t know what you’re asking!”
Jurnet said, “I reckon you know when to keep your mouth shut as well as the next man.”
“I don’t, you know.” And now the amusement, too, had gone, leaving only the rue. “Know me better, Inspector, and you’ll find that I wear my words as I wear my clothes—too loud, too sloppy, but what the hell? Anything to cover my God-awful nakedness.” He crossed the room to some shelves from which he took an object smaller than a tennis ball. When he came back to the fireplace Jurnet could see that it was, in fact, a small stone head, reduced by time to a pebble, almost.
“Would it surprise you—” Professor Pargeter inquired, strong brown fingers affectionately tracing a rudimentary curl on the ancient artefact—“would it surprise you to know that the main reason I took up archaeology was because it was so quiet?”
“If you say so, sir.”
“I do, Inspector! As you may have noticed, I’m a noisy person—too noisy by half. But the language of a fallen marble column, silent witness of a time of glory—” the man’s face took on an earnestness that Jurnet, who had seen it thus garnished often enough on the box, observed without notable conviction—“charred beams that speak silently of ancient pillage, even the siftings of some humble midden—there you have the essence of communication, once you’ve learnt to read the signs. Ah, if only the present could be as silent as the past! I’d be out of a job, but what a wonderful world it would be!”
“Silent’s the last word I’d use for it, at the moment. Thanks to you, sir, Little St Ulf’s shouting his sainted head off.”
“Sorry about that. I really am.” Professor Pargeter did not sound particularly sorry. He turned away and set the little stone head down, next to his empty glass. Back to the detectives, he inquired, “And the young man? How is he?”
