by S. T. Haymon
It was too much to hope for.
“Watch it, Ben!” the Superintendent advised, the kindliness thinning to let the underlying iron show through. “You’re letting your heart run away with your head again. You’ve let it be known that Fisher’s in police custody, and therefore not to be got at, and that should be enough.” He leaned back in his chair, seemingly in no hurry to get away to his golf-club dinner. “You’ll pass all this over to Hale and Batterby in the morning, of course?” Chuckling, “I suppose you know, Ben, anywhere else but here, you wouldn’t last ten minutes, the way you hog everyone else’s job without so much as a by-your-leave?”
“Can’t see why you should say that, sir, when I’ve just brought in a fellow says he murdered Arthur Cossey.”
“Congratulations.” With a smile that took away all offence, almost, the Superintendent tapped the type-written pages in front of him with a well-manicured nail. “He says he killed Cossey because the boy threatened to go to the authorities with some trumped-up story about having seen him beating his son, and he was afraid the child could be taken into care. Does that sound plausible to you?”
“Plausible that Arthur Cossey could have made the threat?” The other nodded. “Only too much so. He seems to have regarded the world as full of potential dupes.”
“How right he was, the little monster!” The Superintendent tapped the pages again. “Now tell me if this confession is worth the paper it’s written on.”
“It’s that, all right. For what it doesn’t say, maybe, as much as for what it does. Mightn’t be a bad ploy, assuming you’d done a killing, to make a confession with more holes in it than Swiss cheese, so no one’d take it seriously.”
“Does Joe Fisher have enough brains for that?”
“Oh, he’s quick, especially with a spot of danger to set the grey matter churning. A safe house and a clean bill of health at one go. Not bad, if you can bring it off.”
“What are the holes, would you say? You noticed the bit about the boy’s clothes?”
“Where he says he dumped them on the floor? One of the deliberate errors—who knows? He’d know about the state of the body, thanks to Professor Pargeter’s radio chat.”
“But the tomb? Could he have known of that as a potential hiding-place? I must confess I don’t quite see him as one of the Reverend Doctor Delf-Polesey’s readers.”
“Arthur may have mentioned something about quaint school customs. Harbridge, the verger, could have spoken of it to his sister-in-law, Mrs Cossey, at some time or other; and she could have passed it on. What interests me more, though, is what he says about the broom.”
“I missed that.”
“I might not have noticed either, if the Professor and I hadn’t almost fallen over it when we found the body. It had been left just inside the door, and it was pretty clear that the murderer had used in on his way out to brush out any of his footprints that showed up on that bit of drugget. The handle was tested for prints, but there was nothing. Now, when Joe describes what he saw at the dig—the table, the measuring sticks, and so on—he says there was a broom, lying across the table. And later on, after he’d killed the lad, he says that on his way out he scuffed about a bit to make sure he hadn’t left any prints behind in the dust. Nothing about using the broom to get rid of them.”
“Proof of innocence or another deliberate mistake?”
“That’s the sixty-four-dollar question. I haven’t forgotten I saw him in the cathedral before the murder ever happened, asking where Little St Ulf was buried.”
“Meaning he could have had a good look round then, and seen enough to be able to give a plausible description without having even been there on the day of the killing.”
“Exactly. If it wasn’t for that broom, that is. Because when I was having a word with Harbridge, earlier on, he told me it was getting on his wick, the way Pargeter and his lot were mucking up the north aisle and leaving it to the vergers to clear up after them. So, he said, he’d put a good hard broom on the table, where they’d be sure to see it, in the hope they’d take the hint and clean up their own mess from then on, instead of tracking it in and out all the time.”
“I can’t see how that conflicts with—”
“Put it there Saturday night, Harbridge said, after closing time. The night before the murder.”
Rosie Ellers’s cooking, like Rosie herself, was full-flavoured. Miriam, who regarded the discovery of fire as a male conspiracy to keep women chained to the kitchen stove, had once labelled it pornographic. If his wife should ever do in public what she did in the privacy of her kitchen, she had warned Sergeant Ellers, he, as a police officer, would have had no choice but to run her in for corrupting public morals.
For Jurnet to sit down to such a love-feast without his love by his side was a kind of gastronomic masturbation, an activity he had little taste for. Rosie watched with growing concern as the detective mashed his pâté diligently, fiddled about with the roast duck so as to make it look that he had eaten some, and begged off her justly famous crème brûlée on the unconvincing ground that he was full up to there.
“Ribs still playing you up?” she wanted to know.
“Nothing I can’t ignore, nine-tenths of the time.”
“In that case,” Rosie declared bluntly, “if you aren’t ill, you’re too old to be dying of love.”
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“You go on that way,” Mrs Ellers continued pitilessly, “the boys are going to stop calling you Valentino. Jack—” she appealed to her husband, sitting back rosy and replete, his waistband undone—“can’t you take him down to the station and stick a tube down him like what they did the Suffragettes?”
“Don’t go by the way he looks,” Jack Ellers replied callously. “He’s tougher than old boots, actually. ’Tisn’t love the Inspector’s dying of: it’s aggravation. Once he finds out who bumped off Little St Arthur, he’ll be as beautiful as ever he was.”
Jurnet said, “The Sergeant seems to have overlooked the fact that we already have a man in custody who has confessed to the crime.”
“Oh ah,” returned Sergeant Ellers, unimpressed. “The day Joe Fisher confesses to something he actually did they’ll be crowning me Prince of Wales.” The little Welshman belched delicately behind his hand, and continued, “You’ll no doubt be wanting to hear how I got on with the Honourable Liz.”
At that Rosie, like the well-trained police wife she was, got up from the table and went to do the dishes; leaving the kitchen door ajar, however.
Jurnet said, “You lived to tell the tale, at least.”
“Only just! Next time, I promise you, I’m going to put in for danger money. Aristocracy, too!”
“Spare me the lurid details. Just tell me—did she confirm Epperstein’s story?”
“Did she not! Once she got going on the subject of that poor mutt’s performance—or, more properly, lack of it—there was no stopping her. I hardly knew where to put my face, let alone various other portions of my anatomy. It was what you might call an illustrated lecture, see? Everything but the magic lantern slides. In the end I just shut my eyes and thought of England.”
“So long as you didn’t shut your ears as well. I want to know what she was up to while Epperstein was asleep.”
“You’ll find it hard to credit, but what she says she did, once our ramshackle Romeo had finally dropped off, was shin over to the gallery in the south transept where it appears Master Stan Brent was dossed down for the night, and have an extra good screw with him, to make up for what she’d missed out on over the other side of the premises.”
“You’re joking! What’s the Dean and Chapter running there in the Close, for God’s sake? A C of E knocking shop?”
“Just what I thought myself. I s’pose, though, if it could never occur to you in a million years that such and such a thing could possibly happen, you can’t hardly be expected to take precautions against it. What the lady—and believe me when I say I use the word loosely—says
she did next morning is, she and Brent waited till the Communion service started, and then slipped out of the South Door; went down to the river, to that café at the marina which always opens up early on Sundays. After they’d eaten, Brent went off. Liz says she doesn’t know where, and she came back to the cathedral to rouse Mr Epperstein from his slumbers.”
He paused, and Jurnet asked, as if he had expected more, “That the lot, then?”
“Not quite. After I left the Aste ancestral pad, I went down to the marina myself. I figured wiping the Hon Liz out of your memory wasn’t like wiping the coffee-mug rings off the table tops, and I wanted to have a word with whoever was on at the café early on Sunday. It was on the cards he, or she, might remember something.”
“Any luck?”
The little Welshman grinned.
“It turned out to be an Eyetie, and you know what they are. He remembered Liz so well he could have painted you a picture if his name’d been Leonardo da Vinci instead of Marcantonio. But what he remembered was that she and the bloke with her had a blazing row over the Early Morning Special—so much so that the fellow stamped out, leaving her to pay the bill.”
“From what I’ve seen of Mr Brent, that bit’s in character, anyhow. Did your Italian gather what the row was about?”
“His English isn’t too hot, unfortunately. He just had the impression the girl was pressing the fellow to do something or other, and he wouldn’t buy it.”
“Mm.” Jurnet filed away the information along with all the other pieces of the puzzle for which, as yet, he could find no place. “Funny thing, though. When I saw her a little later that morning, coming down the nave, she certainly didn’t give the impression of a girl who’d just had a blazing row with her beloved.”
“Well, she wouldn’t, would she? If what Mr Epperstein says is true, making a monkey out of him must have set her up for the day. Lovely girl, Liz. Praying Mantis to her friends.”
Rosie came back into the room with a cut-glass bowl full of fruit, which she set on the table. With an expert hand she peeled apples and pears, cut oranges into segments, apportioning them between small plates, along with grapes and bananas; placing her finished work before the pair at the table without inquiring whether they wanted it. She herself selected a bright green Granny Smith into which she bit without bothering to peel it. A trickle of juice oozed at one corner of her mouth, and Jurnet, who had been watching her mindlessly, suddenly reddened, looked down, and took a piece of orange from his piled-up plate.
Ellers, with genteel dexterity, spat grape pits into a cupped palm and inquired, “How are Millie and the kid going to manage with Joe in the clink? I suppose it’s bring on the social workers at long last, eh?”
“Not if Joe can help it. He phoned a solicitor—bloke by the name of Fendale, from Hiller, Upton’s—”
“Hiller, Upton’s,” echoed the Sergeant, in a tone that spoke volumes.
“Now, now,” Jurnet returned reprovingly. “Someone has to represent the villains. They have their rights like anyone else. Fendale seems a decent enough chap. He’ll see Willie gets money for food day by day, and generally keep an eye on things.” Guilt rose in Jurnet’s throat, mingling with the taste of the orange. He had promised the child to return in a jiffy. And he had not returned.
Rosie discarded her apple core and started in on a banana.
“Jack’s told me about them. Anything I can do?”
“Ta. I’ll bear it in mind.”
“Seems a lot to put on a child’s shoulders, that’s all. How old is he, exactly?”
“Officially, coming up to five and a half. Provided you don’t tell the Education Authority, seven.”
“Poor little mite!” Rosie was exclaiming when the telephone rang on the sideboard. “It doesn’t seem fair.”
Jack Ellers took the call.
“It isn’t,” Jurnet agreed. “But then, what is?”
Jack Ellers held out the receiver to his superior officer, stretching the cord to its limit.
“You’d better hear this, Ben.”
Jurnet took the phone; listened, and heard.
Chapter Twenty Four
When they got to the scrapyard the trailer was still burning. Nothing to what it had been before the fire engine arrived, one of the bystanders assured them, sounding aggrieved that the show was nearly over. Someone had sheared through the chain on the metal gates, and they stood open. A hose snaked from a hydrant, figures moved dark against the flickering light, or bright in the headlamps of the fire engine parked beside a small mountain of rusted bedsprings. An ambulance waited, a little further along.
The trailer was dying noisily as its wood warped, its metal twisted in the heat. A sudden crackle splayed a plume of sparks against the night sky.
PC Hinchley came limping to meet the pair, a sleeve of his tunic charred to a sticky web, the arm showing through blistered and swollen.
“I tried to get inside, sir. It went up like a ruddy bomb.”
He turned his face away from Jurnet’s bleak gaze, and the detective saw that the skin down one side was scorched and angry.
“Go and get that seen to!” he commanded harshly. And, on a softer note, “I’m sure you did what you could, Bob.”
PC Bly came up, having heard the last words.
“More than anyone could, short of Superman. Thought we’d lost him as well, for a bit.” Perhaps the man imagined some critical appraisal in the detective’s eyes: perhaps his own conscience troubled him, for he burst out, “The devil himself couldn’t have got in there, Mr Jurnet. By the time we were out of the car and across the street, flames were shooting out everywhere. Those two never had a chance.”
“No.” After a moment Jurnet asked; “Did you see anyone about?”
“Not a soul. Couple of cars passed earlier, young fellow called for a girl at one of the houses, and they went off towards the river. Otherwise, nothing. Blaker, down at the Water Gate, called in to say it was quiet as the grave over there too—except that, about ten minutes before the fire started, he came on, happy as a sandboy, to let us know some bloody owl was tuwhit-tuwhooing it up in some tree or other.”
“You kept the trailer under surveillance at all times?”
“Yes, sir.” The constable jerked his head in the direction of the street. “You can see where we’re parked. The trailer windows were lit up all the time—that is, until a couple of minutes before the place went up, when we reckoned they’d turned out the light to go to bed. The curtains were drawn, but they were thin, and the light showed through. Every now and then someone seemed to be moving about inside, but the curtains weren’t all that thin you could be sure.”
“I shall want a full report.”
“Yes, Mr Jurnet.”
PC Bly watched as the detective strode away towards the fire engine, followed by Sergeant Ellers: stiffened, wondering what more was in store when the tall, lean figure suddenly checked, turned, and came back.
Jurnet said, “I want you to know I’m satisfied you did everything possible in the circumstances.”
“Thank you, sir.”
The chief fireman, a square, strong man, pursed his lips doubtfully.
“Bomb? Could be, I suppose. More likely a gas cylinder. Wouldn’t be the first of them we’ve been called out to, nor the last.”
The contents of Joe Fisher’s pockets, for which he had been given a receipt at the police station, had not included the “gas bit”. (I’ll be back in a jiffy, Willie!)
Jurnet asked tonelessly, “How long before you’ll be able to get at the bodies?”
“Take a bit of time. That metal’s been white-hot. Two of them in there, so I hear.”
“Yes. A woman and a child.”
“Ah. Did something silly, I reckon, like leaving the stopcock open. Some people never learn till it’s too late.” The fireman sighed, and got back to business. “We’ve had a look already, far as we can, but there’s such a tangle there you couldn’t see an elephant, if there was one. They’ll be
underneath—what’s left of them.”
“Jack—” turning to Ellers—“will you call in for a van?”
The thought of Millie and Willie, barbecued on the bone, packed into polythene bags like some new convenience food, was suddenly more than Jurnet could bear;
He moved away from the trailer, past the fire engine, and the ambulance waiting to no purpose, into a darkness fitfully illuminated by the flames dying reluctantly behind him. Among the jagged ziggurats of waste metal a pyramid of perished tyres loomed suave and surprising. Several freezer chests lay on their sides, like dominoes flung down by a petulant giant. On one of them, a sign in shocking-pink fluorescent paint read: Happiness is a Baccaloni Lik-Stik.
The detective was not aware of grief. He felt empty, hollow, which was no more than he deserved, having done such poor justice to Rosie Ellers’s cooking. Burrowing further into the dark, he became aware of the small night noises of the scrapyard, the scuffle of mice and rats and whatever other creatures had staked out a territory for themselves among the rubbish. An owl hooted down by the river. PC Blaker’s pal, no doubt.
Nearer, some larger animal—a cat, perhaps, caught in iron ganglia from which it had been unable to free itself—breathed shallowly, in little mews that were beyond despair. Jurnet took out his flashlight and played it over the nearest pile. The light caught some flattened petrol cans with a pretty iridescence, but no creature in distress announced itself.
He went round to the other side and found Millie.
She lay, her cotton dress ripped open from neck to hem, staring up at the sky above a strip of rag tied over the lower part of her face. Her body was scratched and bruised, her thighs dark with dried blood. When Jurnet shone his torch into the beautiful grey eyes they blinked, but otherwise did not interrupt their incurious perusal of the heavens. Every now and again she mewed like a trapped cat.
