Ritual Murder

by S. T. Haymon

  “Millie!” The detective knelt down in the dirt, removed the gag, and slid a hand gently under the girl’s head. “It’s Mr Ben!”

  She gave no sign of recognition and, swallowing down the bitterness of saying it, he whispered into her dirty and delicate little ear: “Joe!” and again: “Joe!”

  For once the magic password had no effect. The girl lay inert. It looked as though Millie Fisher’s marvellous luck had run out at last. Unless, indeed, she had achieved yet another miraculous victory against all the odds: escaped into some world of her own choosing, where joy still reigned unconfined, and Joe, darling Joe, was forever at hand to look after her.

  Jurnet ran back towards the trailer; fetched Jack Ellers and the ambulance men, needed after all. With expert ease they moved the girl on to a stretcher, wrapped her in a blanket; lifted their burden ready to depart.

  Jurnet bent over the battered face.

  “Willie!” he begged. “Where’s Willie?”

  “Leave her be!” one of the ambulance men exclaimed, not at all in a friendly way.

  “Willie!” he persisted.

  No answer.

  After an hour of searching, Jack Ellers said, “We’ll have to come back in daylight. It’s the only way to be sure we haven’t missed anything.”

  “They may have done him over. He may need medical help. We’ve got to keep on looking.” Jurnet glared at the little Welshman, missing completely the concern incised on the chubby face. “No one’s stopping you from knocking off, if you feel you’ve had enough.”

  “Don’t talk daft! All I’m wondering is if he didn’t do the first thing you might expect—take to his heels and get the hell out of here. In which case he could be anywhere.”

  Jurnet shook his head.

  “He’d never leave his Ma.”

  “The kid could have been too frightened to remember he ever had one. Getting away would be all he could think of.”

  “Not Willie.”

  “OK,” Ellers agreed wearily. “In that case, I take it, you’ll be wanting me to call in to tell the lads to stop looking for him in the city. Tell Mr Hale and Mr Batterby they can go back to bed.” Jurnet looked at him without saying anything. “Look, they may simply have dumped him in the river. Or he could be in the caravan after all. The firemen say they can’t be sure till morning. An incinerated kid,” the Sergeant finished with calculated brutality, “doesn’t take up all that much room.”

  After a moment, Jurnet said, “I’m sorry, Jack. Find Bly and Blaker will you, and tell them to call it a day. You go along with them, and take Hinchley with you. Get him to the hospital, if you have to do it by force.”

  “I’m not leaving you here on your own.”

  “That’s all right, Sergeant.” The Superintendent was standing there, still in his evening clothes. “I’ll keep the Inspector company.” To Jurnet with, for once, no acid corroding the concern, “You should have let me know earlier, Ben.”

  Jurnet smiled, inexplicably soothed.

  “Hardly thought you’d be dressed for it, sir.”

  “Quite right,” said the Superintendent. “So we’d better find the boy quickly, hadn’t we, before I get myself messed up.”

  They began at the beginning, and worked their way back from the chain-link fence along Bridge Street as methodically as if no one had covered the territory before them. Aware of how small was the space into which a desperate child could compress itself, they circled each scrapheap at a snail’s pace, peering along the torch beams that penetrated the dark interiors beyond their reach. They lifted sodden mattresses and rotting cisterns, handling the revolting detritus with the exquisite care accorded to ancient artefacts, lest their prying precipitate an avalanche in which Willie might perish at the hands of his would be rescuers.

  Jurnet’s cracked ribs sent thuds of pain through his tired body. The Superintendent worked on imperturbably. Crafty fellow that he was, a born leader of men, he had produced from the boot of his car gum boots and a boiler-suit in which he looked not much less elegant than in his evening clothes. Jurnet would not have been surprised to see emerge from that cache, should the circumstances call for it, anything from deep-sea diver’s equipment to an astronaut’s space suit.

  “I take it—” the Superintendent remarked when, the last scrapheap accounted for, they drew breath in front of the first of the row of prefabs—“that whoever was responsible for what was done here tonight was safely holed up in the caravan before Hinchley and Bly even took up surveillance?”

  “Probably. Three of ’em, I reckon. Four at the most.” Jurnet omitted to specify the basis of his calculation: one to take care of Willie, one or two to hold Millie down; one to take his turn at rape. “If they’d come after, the light spilling out when the trailer door was opened would have given them away—even though, from the car, the PCs hadn’t what you could call a marvellous view of the door.”

  “And how was that?” the Superintendent inquired, in a tone that boded little good to the departed constables.

  “Not their fault,” Jurnet countered, quick as always to come to the defence of his brothers-in-arms. “The way the trailer was positioned made it impossible to park in Bridge Street and get a full frontal. I reckon that’s how, in the couple of minutes the trailer light was out and before the place went up in smoke, the bastards were able to slip out, and get Millie and the kid out—” he steeled himself to interpolate, “if they got the kid out—without being spotted. Hinchley and Bly chose the best spot they could find in the circumstances.”

  “Nothing to stop them getting out of the car and crossing the road for a better look.”

  “So they did, from time to time. But I’d particularly warned them to keep a low profile. If anyone was planning something, I wanted it to be along the street, where we could control the situation and nip it in the bud.” The same loyalty that impelled Jurnet to defend PCs Bly and Hinchley operated to prevent the detective from reminding the Superintendent that it was he who had disallowed protection round the entire perimeter.

  “My fault as much as theirs,” declared the Superintendent, a wonderful man. “It isn’t as though you didn’t warn me.”

  “I’m the one told the kid I’d be back in a jiffy.”

  “Let’s not compete in breast-beating, shall we?” The Superintendent bent his head under the low lintel and entered the first Nissen hut, Jurnet following. The place was stacked with bags of cement, most of them soaked with damp and oozing their contents in a grey slime that overlaid the floor.

  “One mystery at least I intend to clear up,” the Superintendent stated, sending torchlight in great sweeps round the walls, “and that’s how Mr Joe Fisher makes his living. This stuff hasn’t been touched for years.”

  Willie was not there among the cement, nor yet among the scaffolding poles, the wire-netting, the mouse-nibbled sacks, the offcuts of hardboard that filled Joe Fisher’s many mansions. The last building was full of old deckchairs, stacked layer upon layer like the early Christians in the catacombs. One day Jurnet meant to ask Joe Fisher to explain their presence and their preservation. In the meantime, their task almost at an end, the detective poked fiercely at the splintered frames, pushed aside frayed canvases stamped variously The Lido, Great Yarmouth BC, and Jacks of Cromer.

  And found Willie.

  The child was crouched in an angle of the building, in a space Jurnet had missed completely first time round, so well was it hidden by the piled-up chairs. He looked up, squinting in the torchlight, but showing no particular pleasure at being discovered.

  “Willie boy!” Jurnet scooped the stiff little body up into his arms. “Are you all right?”

  “Ma?”

  The boy struggled to be let down. Jurnet set him carefully on his feet, and said, with an artificial jollity it sickened him to hear issuing from his own mouth: “We’ve been looking for you all over!”

  The Superintendent heard voices, came over, and exclaimed: “Thank God!”

  Willie asked aga
in, “Ma?”

  Jurnet said, “She’s going to be fine.”

  Great gusts of grief shook the child.

  “I run away!”

  Jurnet picked the child up again, held him against his shoulder, and rubbed the thin little back. A baby to be burped of guilt, as it might be wind.

  Pro that he was, even so preoccupied, the detective’s eyes were intent on the beam of the Superintendent’s torch, sweeping the child’s hiding-place in a meticulous quartering; a care rewarded when it came upon a knapsack propped against a deckchair set on its side.

  Jurnet, who thought he recognized the knapsack as the one he had seen on the back of Stan Brent, said nothing: rocked Willie gently to and fro and awaited developments. The Superintendent set his torch down on the floor and, kneeling, undid the knapsack straps. From within he drew out a package wrapped in black PVC which he lifted gingerly by one corner and allowed to unroll itself. Out tumbled a little heap of honeycombed plastic strips, together with a number of small, semi-transparent envelopes, the kind used by stamp collectors.

  Not only by stamp collectors. Each envelope contained a small amount of a white crystalline substance. The Superintendent picked up one of the plastic strips and studied the tablets encased in them.

  Jurnet said, “Acid.”

  “Several thousand pounds’ worth, by the look of it.” The Superintendent transferred his attention to the envelopes. “And that’s not counting the heroin.” He gathered the little haul together and repacked it before picking up the torch and getting to his feet again, the knapsack dangling from his hand. “So now we know how Mr Joe Fisher keeps the wolf from the door.”

  “Not only Joe Fisher.”

  “Oh?” The Superintendent was alert, questioning. But Willie, worn out with grief and guilt, had gone to sleep at last, and Jurnet, putting a finger to his lips, made no reply.

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Sergeant Ellers came into the Incident Room and placed a typed list on Jurnet’s desk. Unlike that of his superior officer, the little Welshman’s chubby face gave no hint of the strains and stresses of the previous night. Well up on his toes, he waited to be told he had done well.

  Inspector Benjamin Jurnet, hollow-eyed and illshaven in the misty sunlight that filtered through the windows as if uncertain of its welcome, glanced down at the paper and made the effort to smile.

  “You’ve been up with the lark.”

  “Open early, newsagents,” returned the Sergeant, glowing in the other’s approval. “Got him while he was still parcelling up the papers for the boys to take out.”

  “Did you manage this time to get a word with the boy who’s taken over Arthur Cossey’s round?”

  “Not necessary, once I’d spoken with the boss—Mr Doland, that is. Before, I didn’t know what questions to ask. But now—! What he said is that no one’s taken over Arthur’s round—not in toto. If you’ll look down the list you’ll see why.”

  The Sergeant’s self-satisfaction was so artless that Jurnet, out of sheer affection, pretended not to see.

  “You tell me.”

  “The addresses, boyo! What’d make a fellow in Reresby Road, for instance, get his papers from a newsagent in Palace Plain, the other side of town? Must be at least half a dozen newspaper shops that are nearer. Or somebody in Market Lane who actually lives on top of the W. H. Smith’s? And there’s a bloke halfway to Cromer—well, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but you know what I mean—gets something called Practical Pig Management once a month, and that’s all.” The rosy face became redder. “Practical Pig Management! Laughs himself silly at his own wittiness, I shouldn’t wonder!”

  “How did Mr Doland explain his far-flung customers, and how Arthur could be expected to cover such a large area delivering to them?”

  “Said they were all customers the kid brought in off his own bat. Said he was surprised himself that anyone would want him to deliver from so far away, but so long as Arthur was willing, who was he to complain? Always first in and last back, he said, but that was the kid’s business. The boy told him they were all people he knew, and so he assumed they did it to do Arthur a good turn. The chap runs some kind of bonus scheme for the delivery boys, and any boy who brings in a new customer gets so many points which he can use up in the shop as credit for sweets or iced lollies or whatever. Come to think of it, Mr Doland’s just about the only one in this whole bloody investigation to put in a good word for Arthur. Newsboy of the Year nothing—Newsboy of the Century! Says no other boy came within miles of bringing in so many orders, not in all the years he’s been in business. And never a complaint from a customer till the day he died, when they were all phoning in asking what the hell. Seems Arthur missed his last delivery altogether. Took the papers out, but that’s the last anyone saw of them. Or of him either, for that matter.” The Sergeant leaned across the desk and pointed. “The ones with a tick against the name, they’re all Arthur’s lot.”

  “Hm. Not all of them out in the sticks. Some are quite close to Doland’s.”

  Jack Ellers grinned. “Shouldn’t be surprised they moved there for that very reason, with our lad collecting his cut for the lettings from the landlord or the estate agent. I tell you, if young Master Cossey hadn’t been cut off untimely, he’d have ended up running the bloody country!”

  “Done better as he is. Saint must surely rank above Prime Minister in the pecking order.” Returning to the list, “Any of these names familiar to you? I seem to recognize a couple myself.”

  “Some. I’ve put a cross against them. And Mr Batterby—I run into him in the car-park and he took a quick gander. Reckons there’s at least four he’s had to do with in the way of business, one time or other. I’ve dropped a copy off at Records, for them to fill in the form, if any, on the whole shoot.” The Sergeant shook his head in reluctant admiration. “Milk, newspapers, delivered to your door—so why not acid and pot and snow? That’s progress, man! You’ve got to hand it to him!”

  Jurnet inquired mildly, “And who’s him, when he’s at home?”

  “Joe Fisher, of course!” But the little Welshman, alive to the other’s every nuance of expression, faltered even as the name was spoken. “You mean, it isn’t Joe?”

  “He swears he never even knew the stuff was down there by the river. And that he’d no idea Arthur was doing any deliveries.”

  “Oh—” said Ellers, recovering his aplomb. “He swears!”

  “Joe doesn’t deny he’s obliged a few friends from time to time with the makings of a joint. Nothing more. And he says he always got that from Stan Brent. The one time—still to oblige that anonymous pal, naturally—he asked Brent to get him some LSD, the answer, Joe says, was a punch on the hooter.” Jurnet sat back reflectively. “Taking into account that Joe looks like he could gobble up a couple of Brents for breakfast and still find room for his bacon and eggs, that would seem to indicate a certain strength of feeling, wouldn’t you say, on the part of Mr B?”

  “That shit! He wouldn’t recognize a feeling if it stuck him up the rear end with a hatpin!” Ellers weighed the possibilities, and ended by asking, “What do you think, Ben?”

  “I think we’ll have a further word with the shit in question.”

  The detective chose not to expatiate on his interview with Joe Fisher. Breaking the news of what had happened to Millie, he had watched the man shrivel in a way he could never have believed possible had he not witnessed it with his own eyes: reduce in size so that the clothes he had filled like a character in a blue movie were all at once too large for him. Jurnet had driven him to the hospital, but left it to PC Blaker actually to accompany the prisoner to Millie’s bedside. He had chosen, instead, to wait in the car, appalled at the monstrosity of love, a deformation that could make a human being deflate before your eyes like a pricked balloon, give a child the fortitude to munch dog’s turds and keep on smiling, and encourage himself, the logically-minded Detective-Inspector Benjamin Jurnet, in the delusion that, with Rabbi Sehnellman’s help,
he would one day be able to accept on trust a God capable not only of engineering such humiliations, but of actually conning His victims into believing that He did it in their own best interests.

  From the hospital they had driven to the children’s home where Willie, sedated, tossed on his pillow, the little white face above the white sheet contorted with dreams that had Jurnet moving forward to shake the child free of them, only to be restrained by the disapproving hand of the nurse on duty. On the way back to his cell, Joe Fisher had begun to bawl like a child himself, and it had cost Jurnet all his self-control to stop himself from slapping the self-pitying bastard across the kisser. It was suddenly almost a pleasure to reflect that Millie, albeit the hard way, had learnt at last to do without him.

  Sid Hale came in, sad-eyed, and Dave Batterby, inflexibly determined to get his man, the right one if possible, otherwise the best that offered. Telephones rang, young constables with clipboards popped in and out, making busy noises. Presently, Jurnet knew, the Superintendent would arrive to be put in the picture, and later still, after elevenses, the Chief himself might descend from the heights for a moment of admonition or exhortation before, like Elijah—only in a lift, not a chariot of fire—ascending once more to that station in life to which Divine Providence and the Police Authority had seen fit to call him.

  What a lot of little busy bees they were, to be surel Jurnet got up without drama, laid the newsagent’s list in his Pending tray, and made a discreet sign to Ellers. The two detectives took their coats from the bentwood stand near the door, and thankfully took their way towards the Cathedral Close. As always in the freshness of the morning, the city looked innocent and purposeful. Somebody had scrawled a swastika on the boarded-up front of the Weisingers’ patisserie, but it did not look dangerous.

  Chapter Twenty Six

  The cathedral was having a busy day. At the bookstall, Miss Hanks’s hair-do was already showing signs of stress. The vergers had all they could cope with. In the distance Jurnet saw Harbridge, surrounded by visitors seeking information.