Ritual Murder

by S. T. Haymon

  The television announcer went on to the next item, but in the quiet, pleasant room—or so it seemed to Jurnet—the image persisted, imprinted on the air, and an echo of impish laughter was all but audible.

  The thought of that lovely child as one more victim of the madness which had gripped the city was intolerable. What was it he, the Great Detective, had missed? Jurnet strained every fibre and again, for a split second, his mind seemed to encompass something important and relevant, only to let it go. A mind, he thought disgustedly, like one of those slot machines you put your money into and a metal claw moves tantalisingly among prizes worth having, but in the event never retrieves anything but some of those revolting sweets at the bottom of the case.

  He couldn’t even win those!

  Before the two of them left, Mrs Drue took them upstairs to see Christopher’s room, a charming place that was playroom, study, and bedroom in one: shelves where the stuffed animals of babyhood consorted unself-consciously with the Scrabble and aeroplane models of maturity. The bed had a patchwork quilt, scarlet and white like a chorister’s get-up. On the desk under the window, among a mess of crayons and magic tricks and plastic soldiers out of breakfast cereals, a small hoard of glass marbles, contained in a wooden bowl, caught reflections of the electric light.

  Mrs Drue looked at the marbles and said, with the same brittle attention to every word, “As soon as I saw he hadn’t taken them I knew he couldn’t be in the cloister, not really. Except that, when he leaves home so early, as he did today, it’s always because there’s a game before school. I can’t think why he should have left so early, if he wasn’t going to play.” She turned her face towards Jurnet, who did not meet her eyes. “It is a mystery, isn’t it?”

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Outside Headquarters, as was to be expected following the Chief’s appearance on TV, the press was waiting: reporters and photographers, and the television men armed with their macho microphones which they thrust at their quarry like extensions of their own tight jeaned pudenda. Theoretically, Jurnet would have been the first to uphold the media’s right to inquire, the public’s right to know. Confronted with the nation’s fact-finders, his feelings were more equivocal. He detested their assumption of divine mission, their prurient curiosity, their intrusion into private griefs.

  “Bring on the hyenas!” he muttered to Sergeant Ellers, as the latter brought the car to a standstill at the kerb: emerging nevertheless to greet several of the hyenas by name, and to regret, with a convincing approximation of sincerity, that at the moment he had nothing to add to the Chief Constable’s statement, but be assured, as soon as there were any developments, etc, etc, …

  He came into the Incident Room feeling soiled by the encounter, and wondering why he had not gone straight home, if that was what you could call it, and to bed, such as it was without Miriam.

  The search had been called off until daylight.

  Jack Ellers said, “You look all in. I’ll drop you off home.”

  “I think I’ll have a cot put up here, thanks all the same. Something might come in. You never know.”

  Sensing the other’s depression, the little Welshman offered, “What’s the betting the little perisher’s scarpered on his own, just to get Mummy in a tizzy? These cherished cherubs have to break out once in a while, to stop’ em going round the bend.”

  “Yes, Jack. Good night, Jack.”

  Ellers persisted, “No need to take on before time. We don’t know that the kid’s dead.”

  “Want to bet on it?”

  “One thing I do know, boyo. I’m not going to bury the little bugger till I’m dead sure he’s stopped breathing.”

  When the Sergeant had gone, Jurnet roused himself and went along the corridor to the closet where the camp-beds were kept, and the pillows and blankets against any emergency. The polite young police-constable manning the duty desk, regretting his inability to leave his post, offered to summon up help at the double, but the detective said no; finding some obscure animal satisfaction in the labour of preparing his own holt or sett, or whatever was the correct word for a detective-inspector gone to earth in Police Headquarters. He thought vaguely of going down to the canteen for a bite, but decided against it, even though he could not remember when he had last eaten. He always had the habit, when absorbed in a case, of forgetting about food altogether; and then, the problem solved, of discovering himself hugely famished.

  The problem was not solved.

  He lay back on the bed, one hand behind his head, shoes and jacket off but otherwise clothed, lying carefully still so that, when morning came and it was time to give orders to the police officers who would take up the search for Christopher Drue, he would look a colourable facsimile of a leader of men, not a slob in baggy pants. There was a spare electric shaver in his desk drawer, so that was all right.

  In the morning, with luck, people would be coming forward who had seen the boy. That vivid, laughing face was one you remembered; not like Arthur Cossey, whom no one noticed because he, poor little tyke, had had the kind of face the eyes slid off, unregistering. Jurnet reckoned that, leaving the house at twenty to 8, the child must have got to the cathedral by ten past the latest: too late, probably, to run into any of the people there for 8 o’clock Communion. If you took your religion seriously enough to get yourself to church at that ungodly hour, you probably took care to arrive at the Lord’s table at the time stated on the invitation. Still, by that time one might expect other people to be about in the Close—the milkman, jogging canons, deaconesses walking their dogs. The cathedral cleaners, the vergers.

  Assuming he had gone to the cathedral in the first place.

  Ought he to give orders for the river to be dragged, the stretch by the cathedral staithe?

  It would be too much to say that Jurnet, staring up vacantly at the polystyrene tiles on the Incident Room ceiling, actually thought any of those thoughts: rather that they seeped into his mind unbidden, leakage from a tap that needed washering. Beneath, like the pulse of the double-bass in a symphony orchestra, guilt thrummed its insistent message. If I’d caught Arthur Cossey’s killer, no other child would now be in danger. After a time, his tired brain began to play tricks with the order of the words. If I’d caught Arthur Cossey, the killer would—and If I’d caught the child—

  Bloody hell!

  The double-bass thrummed him to sleep.

  Half Angleby had seen Christopher Drue, to say nothing of half Birmingham, Penzance, Aberystwyth, Berwick-on-Tweed, and almost any other town in the British Isles you cared to mention. The crisp white blouses of the WPCs manning the telephones wilted under the pressure of concerned citizens determined to be helpful.

  By contrast, the Close had never seemed more delightful: blossom and green, the stillness of stone. The golden weathercock shone on top of the spire, girded, as usual, with its ring of circling pigeons.

  “Silly buggers,” observed Sergeant Ellers, squinting into the morning sun. Turning his attention to the spire itself, “What’s it all for? Must be an easier way of finding out how the wind’s blowing.”

  Jurnet, who had slept badly on his makeshift bed, screwed up his eyes in the strong light. “Harbridge is the one to speak to about that. He told me once the spire was a holy of holies. Something to do with parallel lines meeting—I forget how it went.” He finished, “Not all we need to speak to Mr Harbridge about. Let’s get on with it, shall we?”

  The Dean and the head verger were waiting for them just inside the West Door. They looked depressed. Not surprising, Jurnet conceded. The cathedral might be God’s house, it was also theirs; and no house owner is keen to have strangers poking about the place, opening cupboards, running their fingers along the picture rails for signs of dust.

  Or looking for mislaid children in dark corners.

  The Dean, at least, cheered up when he saw that there were only the two of them. It seemed he had expected whole battalions of bobbies, spreading through the building like a blue blight.

/>   “There’ll be a couple of cars along any minute,” Jurnet explained. “Plain-clothes officers. Their orders are to wait inconspicuously just inside the doors in case we find we need them. I take it, sir, you’ve told Mr Quest about the keys?”

  “He has them here, as you requested.” The head verger handed over the laden ring with the air of the commander of a besieged garrison surrendering to a hated conqueror. The keys, each with its own neatly printed label, were few and of modern cut. “As I believe I’ve already told you, apart from the Treasury, where the insurers leave us no choice, we don’t do a great deal of locking up here.”

  Jurnet took the keys; found the ones marked Treasury, detached them from the ring, and handed them back.

  “I think you’d better hang on to these. Bad enough you have to let us in, let alone give us the run of the family silver.”

  The head verger’s large face reddened, but there was no disguising the relief that emanated from his portly frame.

  “Mr Quest,” the Dean said, with affection in his voice, “like all of us who serve this temple of the Holy Spirit, tends to lose his sense of proportion when he fears its peace threatened, in however worthy a cause.” He half turned, his spectacles flashing, skirts twirling about his black trousered legs. “I mustn’t keep you any longer from your work, your most necessary work, except to state my conviction—and we, after all, are the people who know the cathedral best—that the boy is not here.”

  When he had left them, Jurnet turned to the head verger.

  “We’ll start on the chapels, if that’s OK with you, and work our way round.”

  “Whatever you say, sir. Shall I tell off one of our men to accompany you?”

  “I don’t think we need trouble you,” Jurnet said easily. “Just one small point. Communion service yesterday—in St Lieven’s chapel as usual, was it?”

  “No, sir. That’s to say, there isn’t any usual. We use all the chapels in turn. Yesterday was St Ethelburga’s—south side of the ambulatory.”

  “I see.” Jurnet scanned the wide expanse of the nave. “Mr Harbridge off today? We’ll be wanting a word with the vergers.”

  “He’s in, as usual.” Mr Quest swivelled his magisterial gaze around, as if to conjure up the absent verger by act of will. His glance fell on the central altar, which was looking rather bare. “Ah! He’ll be in the cavea, doing the vases.”

  “The—?”

  “Cavea. Latin for birdcage, so the Dean says. It’s a joke for the cubbyhole next to the vestry where the Ladies’ Guild do the flowers. They always do them fresh for Sundays. Harbridge’ll be giving the vases a polish-up. The ladies, bless ’em, are willing enough, but they haven’t the elbow grease.”

  Jurnet commented, with professional sympathy, “All go, isn’t it, being a verger? Spit and polish, answer questions, clean up the kid’s messes—”

  “That was a funny thing yesterday,” Mr Quest said.

  “Oh ah?”

  “What you just said brought it to mind. After I told Harbridge to get on over to the Treasury—remember?—I sent one of the other vergers to clean up the sick behind the Bishop’s throne. And you know what? There wasn’t any!”

  “You don’t say!” Jurnet thought about this for a moment, and then inquired, “Did you take it up with Mr Harbridge?”

  “He said some woman with a little boy with her had come up to him and told him the kid had done it.” The head verger smiled indulgently. “Funny lot they are, some of the people you get here.”

  First the detectives looked into St Lieven’s chapel, where a glance through the wrought-iron railings was enough to make it plain there was no place to hide a child, or where a child might hide. A square of stone lighter than the surrounding area was the only reminder that here, only a little time before, the name of God had been taken in vain and aerosol. On the altar, St Lieven, mouth wide, proffered his bloody tongue with undiminished enthusiasm.

  Jurnet, knowing what to expect, kept his eyes averted. Jack Ellers exclaimed, “Looks like we go to the same dentist!”

  In the FitzAlain chapel, the plastered wall had been painted afresh. The place had the look of quarters taken out of circulation, the rush chairs removed from their neat rows and piled, rather precariously, against the wall.

  Again, there was no possible place for a child, unless it were the basement of Bishop FitzAlain’s tomb, where Arthur Cossey’s murderer had hidden his victim’s clothes, and where that child of long ago, imprisoned overnight, had emerged raving. It was unthinkable that the cathedral people had not already examined such a notorious hiding place; but, just to make it official, Jurnet bent over and levered out the metal grille.

  The two detectives, squatting on their haunches, peered into the dusty cavity where the stone skeleton of the richly bedecked gent upstairs lay grinning at a joke which had not lost its point in 400 years.

  This time the little Welshman’s comment was a heartfelt, “Hope we don’t go to the same doctor!”

  The Sergeant took the grille and fitted it back in its sockets. Jurnet straightened up, steadying himself against the tomb where the good Bishop slumbered with his accustomed tranquility. Yet—perhaps it was the sharp morning light, perhaps the unusual angle of the detective’s vision—there was something different about the reverend gentleman; a suggestion of raffishness Jurnet did not recall from his earlier visits to the chapel.

  Puzzled, he peered closer at the alabaster face beneath the painted mitre, and discovered that somebody had given the Bishop a Che Guevara moustache. An apparent attempt to remove the appendage from the porous stone had not been notably successful.

  Moved by a sudden inspiration, Jurnet strode across the chapel floor.

  “Give me a hand with these, Jack.”

  The two detectives just had time to move the piles of chairs from against the chapel wall when, behind them, the voice of Harbridge demanded harshly, “What do you think you’re doing?”

  Jurnet turned round and looked, not at the man standing there, but at the brush and the bucket of whitewash he held in his hands. Then, without speaking, the detective turned back to that portion of wall which had been hidden behind the chairs.

  An uneven patch showed where the wall had been recently washed: scrubbed, rather, to judge from the vicious striations across the plaster. It was clear that someone had gone at the job with vigour and without concern for the old surface.

  But not vigorously enough to obliterate the words deeply incised there—words Jurnet had seen before, only done then with a niceness of calligraphy which made the present straggling inscription doubly offensive SOD GOD.

  When the detective turned back to the verger, the brush and the bucket of whitewash were on the stone floor. The man had gone.

  Chapter Thirty

  While Ellers spoke urgently to the men on the doors to make sure no verger left the building, nor—supposing the man to have divested himself of his tell-tale garb—anyone answering to Harbridge’s description, Jurnet ran from the FitzAlain chapel, scarcely knowing which way to go, and choosing one direction rather than another simply because to stay still and wait upon events was not to be thought of.

  He ran through the presbytery and the choir, and veered into the north aisle under the organ loft, pushing aside sightseers without apology. His heart pounded, not with effort, but fear. One Little St Ulf was more than enough; two an obscenity, and three—For the first time, in that great stone ship, Jurnet prayed: if not to God, to Something, Someone.

  To notice within seconds of that appeal something which in his haste he might easily have missed, was a matter he set aside for later consideration. The door hidden in the shadows behind the old stove was an inch or two ajar.

  Jurnet launched himself at the narrow stair, ramming his body unmercifully round its unyielding spirals. On the first floor the parade of arches stretched away on either side, untenanted. The detective leaned over the parapet that gave on to the nave, and having, with his customary resistance to gadgets, pr
oviding himself with no other means of communication, shouted, “Jack! Up here!” on the chance that the little Welshman would hear him. Some trick of acoustics transformed his words into a roar that filled the enormous space like a warning of Doom. Whether Ellers got the message, Jurnet did not wait to discover.

  The way, he knew in his bones, though he still could not remember how he knew, had to be upward. He found another door, and a stair that took him into the tower, and there he found no fewer than three more passages, layered one upon the other in the thickness of the wall. He climbed until he seemed no longer to be part of the cathedral, but a disembodied being looking down from some distant star on a toy world below.

  At the very top of the tower, past the belfry and the silent bells, and when it seemed that, short of taking wing, there was no possible way of going further, Jurnet found yet another spiral tucked into the northeast angle of the mighty edifice; and pushing open yet another little door, he was out on the tower roof, under a spring sky, the flowery Close below him, the silver river threading the water meadows, and the distant pulse of city traffic filling the air.

  Disturbed by the detective’s arrival, half a dozen pigeons rose up from the roof and rejoined their comrades round the spire; and Jurnet knew for certain he was on the right track. On the sun-warmed leads, pigeon-pecked but unmistakably fresh, lay some bits of bread and green stuff that once had been part of a sandwich. The detective’s heart leaped with thankfulness at the sight.

  Ahead of him, filling in the view in a way that, at ground level, he could never have visualized, the spire receded out of sight above his head as if it went on for ever. A door in its base, like the door in the north aisle, stood a little ajar. Could it be that the man wanted to be found in his Holy of Holies?

  Jurnet went through the door into the spire and into another world. The shaft of daylight to which, leaving the door wide open, he had given entry only rendered more explicit the dusty darkness within. The very air seemed mummified, air that the spire’s builders had captured and enclosed back in the fifteenth century, and never allowed to escape. Overhead, at diminishing intervals, pencillings of grey outlined the meagre light let in by the tiers of louvred windows.