Death of a God

by S. T. Haymon

  Sitting there facing each other, the silence broken only by a gentle hum which Jurnet realized was the sound made by the machines when they were working, the two, intent upon what they were doing, presented a picture of calm companionship which moved the detective to hope his task might be less disagreeable than he had anticipated. Those two could support each other.

  Once the man stood up, and the detective had got a good look at him, he was less sure, so frail was the bent shape, twisted, with one shoulder higher than the other.

  ‘Excuse us, please!’ Mr Felsenstein exclaimed. ‘Mara thought you were the milkman.’

  Jurnet could not resist asking, ‘Do you always invite your milkman in for coffee?’

  ‘It is time for his break, is why. Before, he would go to the café, and we’d get no milk until he began work again, by which time, often, we were forgotten entirely, or, on a hot day, the milk had gone sour.’ The man smiled, the bony contours of his face dissolving into a droll humour. ‘So not kindness, you understand. We can take no credit for it. Expediency.’

  Mrs Felsenstein slid the carriage of her knitting machine backwards and forwards two or three times along its bank of needles, her lips moving in a silent count. Satisfied she had reached a point where it was safe to break off, she looked up and said pleasantly, ‘If the gentlemen will be good enough to tell us why they’ve called, Leo, perhaps we’ll offer them a cup of coffee too, just to show we can on occasion be kind without ulterior motive.’ Smiling at the two detectives: ‘That is, if they don’t mind it black.’

  Not one of the hysterical sort at least, Jurnet thought thankfully, though he should have gathered as much from his conversation with Miriam the night before. Yet, at first sight, his expectations having been aroused, he was disappointed by the reality – a woman of average height and rather heavy build, dressed in a black sweater and patterned skirt, with shoulder-length brown hair tied back from a face which was in no way out of the ordinary, save for the eyes.

  At a second glance, the eyes made up for everything else. Large and grey, they were the eyes of a child, disconcerting in their direct and uncomplicated gaze.

  Apart from the knitting machines and the two kitchen chairs on which their operators sat, the room contained only a small couch, its loose-cover of a beige fabric faded but crisp and fresh, two more chairs to match the others, and a small table whose flaps had been let down. Plain brown curtains, unlined; no carpet, except for a hearthrug, but polished floorboards that filled the air with the smell of wax polish only slightly spiked with overtones of sulphur from the fire of smokeless fuel which flickered dispiritedly in the narrow grate.

  Nothing to get into Homes and Gardens, that was for sure: but satisfying, in a way Jurnet could not easily account for. A home, not a collection of other people’s ideas of what a home should be.

  The woman sitting at the knitting machine was similarly her own and nobody else’s. Mara Felsenstein, the detective decided, feeling at the same time a little dismayed by the extravagance of the image, was – if her eyes were to be believed, and if eyes like that could lie, nothing was to be trusted – a woman of a startling purity of soul.

  She did not disappoint him when he told her that her son was dead, murdered. Leo Felsenstein groped blindly for the couch, collapsed on to it with his head in his hands, emitting a rusty noise that seemed to heave itself like vomit up from the depths of his protesting body. His wife sat deathly pale but silent, even managing a small smile when Sergeant Ellers brought her some of the coffee from the kitchen, and sipping obediently when the little Welshman lifted the cup to her lips.

  She did not sit long. She crossed to the couch with unfaltering step and went down on her knees by her husband, her full skirt spreading out over the floorboards. She pulled away the hands and laid her face against his.

  ‘Liebchen … Liebchen …’ she murmured. ‘It’s all right. We can bear it –’ And, looking up at the two detectives, hovering full of goodwill but embarrassed by the necessity of being there at all: ‘When he was a boy, Leo was in Auschwitz. He has had as much death as he can manage.’

  For a little, while they waited, she rocked the man in her arms, until the horrible sound abated. Then she said, without self-pity: ‘Loy promised to come by this morning, just for a quick look-in, before the group left. Just to say cheerio.’

  Jurnet said, ‘I don’t want to worry you now with questions –’

  ‘Oh, but you’ll have to, won’t you, sooner or later?’ The prospect did not appear to daunt her. ‘You want to catch whoever did it.’

  ‘That is certainly our intention.’

  The woman got up from the floor, sat down on the couch beside her husband and took a mis-shapen hand between her own two, strong, but red and roughened by work.

  ‘You’re cold, my darling.’ With a little laugh that seemed such a token of intimacy between the two of them that Jurnet was pierced through with shyness simply to have overheard it: ‘You were right as usual – I should have left the fire for you to do. All that mess and ash and coalite, and still hardly anything to show for it! Whatever will you say when you find out I’ve used up all your stock of papers just to get that miserable thing going?’

  Leo Felsenstein responded shakily, ‘One double sheet – how many times must I tell you? – torn into strips and crumpled up –’ He broke off, pulled his hand from the woman’s grasp and put it over his mouth. ‘The boy! The boy!’ he whimpered.

  ‘The boy,’ she agreed, recapturing the hand and kissing it on the palm with a tender delicacy. Looking up at Jurnet: ‘You’ll find him,’ she pronounced. ‘The murderer. You don’t look like a man to give up. But –’ and to Jurnet’s relief (there was such a thing as being too strong) the wonderful eyes, for the first time, spilled over with tears – ‘I can’t see how I – how we – can help. We know nothing.’

  Jurnet said gently, ‘It often seems like that, when in fact there are things – important things – you may know without realizing that you know them. We’ll talk about them later, when you feel able to. Letters your son may have written you, telephone calls. Things, however trivial, he may have said when he came to see you. Most of all, you know your son. We need to know him too.’

  ‘We know nothing,’ Mrs Felsenstein repeated, shaking her head. She had begun to tremble slightly. In the absence of the WPC, Sergeant Ellers, who knew the signs, looked about for something to drape round her shoulders; found a cardigan on one of the chairs and brought it over. The woman pushed it aside impatiently.

  ‘Loy never wrote letters. Not to us, at any rate. And we’re not on the phone. He popped in, just for a minute, Tuesday, the day he arrived in Angleby – the day before the concert – but he was in such a hurry Leo didn’t see him at all. He’d gone to bed early, and Loy wouldn’t let me disturb him. If I’d known there would never be another chance –’ She suddenly sobbed aloud, a sharp, crackling sound, cut off abruptly.

  ‘Forgive me –’ Jurnet cleared his throat. There was a limit to how long you could go on pretending a murder inquiry was a social call. ‘I take it you and your son were on good terms?’

  ‘Loy? Oh, yes!’ Mrs Felsenstein was looking as if the unlovely noise she had just made had surprised her. ‘It’s only that the life he’s led has taken him far away from us. What he wanted was to take us with him. Only –’ she looked round the humble little room with love and pride – ‘we didn’t choose to go. Did we, Leo?’ Her husband, slumped in a seeming daze of exhaustion, said nothing. Mrs Felsenstein went on, stumbling a little over the words, ‘I want you to know, Inspector, Loy was a loving and dutiful son. Always sending us money. We would send it back, of course – what did we need money for? – but in a little while he’d send it back again, as if he’d forgotten what we’d said. And then we’d have to send that back. It became a kind of game –’

  ‘Weren’t there letters with the money, at least?’

  ‘It wasn’t necessary. He knew we’d know where it came from.’

  ‘
You must have felt upset he couldn’t spend a bit more time with you when, for once, he was actually back in Angleby.’

  ‘A pop star’s life isn’t his own. We’d long ago accepted that. Besides, as I’ve told you, we did expect him, this morning. We quite understood that up to then he’d be much too busy with rehearsals, publicity appearances, and all the rest of it, to say nothing of the actual performance.’

  ‘Was the arrangement about this morning made on the Tuesday evening then?’ Jurnet felt obliged to persist.

  The woman looked at the detective with a kind of mournful amusement. ‘Do I gather I’m to have the honour of being your first suspect? His own mother! How terrible it must be to have the imagination of a policeman! But I mustn’t play games with you –’ the lovely eyes filled with fresh tears – ‘the road manager came round with a message. He said Loy would be looking in tomorrow – today, that is – before the group left town. He also brought two tickets for the concert, which we accepted, but later gave away to a friend, for her and her young man to use. It seemed a pity to waste them when they could give other people pleasure. I wouldn’t have said no to them anyway, so as not to hurt Loy’s feelings, but the truth is that pop concerts aren’t, as they say, our scene, not even when our son is the lead singer.’

  ‘‘‘Our son’’,’ Jurnet repeated stolidly. It seemed as good a time as any for getting that little matter behind him. ‘I understand Mr Felsenstein is not Loy’s natural father?’

  The woman looked at the detective, surprised, but in no way put out.

  ‘How clever you are, you police, to find out all about us so fast!’ After a moment’s silence she added, her voice low, ‘And have you also been clever enough to find out who the natural father is, and what is his address and telephone number?’

  ‘We’d hoped you could help us there.’ But Jurnet knew already, from the way Mrs Felsenstein had pronounced the two words ‘natural father’, as if they were words in a foreign language of whose meaning, without having a dictionary handy, she was uncertain, that the hope was groundless. ‘Naturally we feel under an obligation to get in touch, if only to let him know what has happened.’

  ‘Naturally!’ This time the irony was unmistakable. ‘The best help I can give you in that quarter, Inspector, is to let you know that Loy’s natural father – assuming he is still alive, as to which I have no idea – has no knowledge that he ever fathered him. When we parted he did not even know I was pregnant – I didn’t know it myself – and I never enlightened him.’

  ‘I see.’ Thankfully reverting to a former topic, Jurnet asked, ‘You mentioned the road manager. Dark chap with short legs, who would that be?’

  ‘That’s the one, poor man. Mr Scarlett. He also said that Loy had told him to ask if there was anything, anything at all, I wanted, and he’d see I got it, even if it was the moon.’

  ‘And what, if anything, did you ask for?’

  ‘I told Mr Scarlett to tell him to get his hair cut.’ She cried a little at the recollection, whilst the two waited, wondering when the real floodgates would open, cravenly hoping it might be after their departure. ‘Not that I expected him to take any notice – the moon would have been likelier! – so I wasn’t disappointed when I saw his picture in the Argus and there he was, hair flopping over his face same as usual!’ The woman’s eyes had become brooding, fixed on the past. ‘Even as a little boy, it was the same. Reach for the scissors or the shampoo and he’d vanish, anything to get out of having it done –’

  Jurnet said, ‘I’m afraid that I have to ask either you or your husband to make a formal identification –’

  ‘Not Leo!’ she returned immediately. Then, ‘Right away, do you mean?’

  ‘If you feel up to it, and you’d rather get it over –’

  ‘Is he – is his face –?’

  ‘Nothing like that.’ Jurnet added, despising his own hypocrisy, ‘He looks very peaceful.’

  ‘I’ll get my coat.’ Gently she disentangled her fingers from those of her husband, and stood up.

  Jack Ellers said, ‘I’ll keep Mr Felsenstein company till you get back.’

  ‘No!’ Leo Felsenstein struggled to his feet, and stood swaying. ‘I’m coming with you!’

  His wife answered with loving but dismissive kindness, ‘No, my darling. Not this time. This time is my business, my son. I bore him live and now I must see him dead, or I shall never truly believe it has happened.’ She kissed the thin, trembling figure full on the lips with an unselfconscious passion that made Jurnet draw in his breath sharply. ‘Besides, what will the milkman say if he doesn’t get his coffee?’

  Chapter Eleven

  In daylight, the foyer of the Middlemass Auditorium, lit from above by vast areas of glass which let in the frigid skyscape of an East Anglian March day, had quite lost its air of mystery. Warm as it was within doors, Sir Cedric Middlemass’s gods and goddesses had a pinched and diminished look. For all their brash coloration they stood, in that English light, revealed as what they were – refugees admitted on sufferance to massage the vanity of their self-proclaimed cultural betters. Winding his way between them to the little group forlornly awaiting his arrival, the detective felt closer to being a Jew than he had ever felt before.

  The three people who awaited him stood up as he approached, and drew together defensively.

  ‘Is that the policeman you phoned for?’ demanded a voice which came from none of them. From behind a tumescent hunk of tree topped with a head-dress of parrot feathers emerged a grey-haired man with metal-rimmed half-spectacles and a bad temper. He was followed by the man Jurnet had noticed onstage the night before telling the technicians how to do their job, the man with his vanished youth squeezed into clothes a size too small. Today he had exchanged his jackets and slacks for jeans and a denim blouson which, unbuttoned, disguised his waxing paunch with more success than he had any right to hope for.

  Despite this sartorial coup, the man didn’t appear to feel good. He stood glowering at Jurnet and the grey-haired man impartially.

  ‘Detective-Inspector Jurnet, Angleby CID.’ Jurnet announced himself in the tones of clipped reassurance television had taught the public to expect of its guardians of the law. Phonies always brought out the phony in himself. ‘Did you say ‘‘telephoned’’, sir?’

  The grey-haired man returned waspishly, ‘We certainly didn’t send a carrier pigeon!’ Peering over his glasses with eyes narrowed: ‘I suppose you have a warrant card?’

  Jurnet produced the evidence, then said pleasantly, ‘Matter of fact, sir, I’m here on another matter altogether, one of some importance. Still, if there’s any urgency, perhaps you could let me know briefly what the trouble is. No doubt another officer will be along directly in response to your call –’

  ‘In other words, tell it twice over! Typical! What makes you think, Inspector, that this, too, is not a matter of some importance?’ The grey-haired man directed a look of loathing at his denimed colleague. Effecting the introductions without grace: ‘I am Professor Whinglass, head of the Department of Archaeology. And this, as you may or may not be aware, according to whether you do or do not watch the quizzes and chat shows which abound on television –’ he made them sound like some new pond weed which had got out of hand – ‘is Professor Culliver, who occupies the Chair of Contemporary Institutions in this University.’

  There was no mistaking the contempt in the voice, or so the detective would have thought. Professor Culliver, however, appeared to mistake it completely. His face cleared, assumed a blend of self-satisfaction and mock-modesty which approximated to charm as near as made no matter.

  ‘Simon Culliver,’ he corrected, in a voice that was carefully young, like his clothes. ‘And whatever Lionel here may tell you, I want to go on record at once as saying that I utterly refuse to accept that any of the marvellous kids who were at the concert last night were responsible. Kids who are turned on by Second Coming simply aren’t like that.’

  ‘Like what, sir?’

&nb
sp; Professor Whinglass turned away without looking back to check that the others were following. He led the way between the breasts and the buttocks to a plinth faced with knapped flints which stood in a curved niche a little apart from the rest of the Middlemass Collection.

  ‘Like the bugger who did this,’ said the Professor of Contemporary Institutions.

  The figure on the plinth was no more than eighteen inches high, a woman in the last stages of pregnancy, the belly enormous, the udderlike breasts hanging to below the navel. Thick legs ended in stumps that paddled in the crude basin which made up the base of the statuette. The features, barely indicated, were flat and expressionless, save for a tiny mouth, stoic and implacable. Hair crimped into unlikely waves fell down the broad, strong back.

  Jurnet took in the statue at once; took it in whole even though, in actual fact, its head lay on the floor amid a mess of flaked chalk, whilst one breast reposed in the basin looking like a sloppily put together pork sausage. Shattered as it was, it was indestructible.

  Professor Whinglass said, as if mouthing a curse, ‘Out of all that ineffable junk they had to pick on this.’

  ‘What is it, exactly?’

  ‘We call it the Hob’s Hole Venus, after the place where it was found. Hob’s Hole is one of the many open-cast flint workings dating from Neolithic times to be found in the Norfolk Breckland, between Brandon and Swaffham. You’ve probably heard of Grimes’ Graves, where no less than 366 separate pits have been located. Hob’s Hole is just the one excavation, but approximately of the same period, around 2100 BC.’ Directing at the violated torso a look of desolation which for a moment transformed his dyspeptic countenance, the Professor continued, ‘We take it to be a votary figure to which those early miners brought offerings to ensure their safely in the tunnels and caves gouged out of the chalk. It is, of course, far from being the only figure of this kind to come to light, but in quality it is quite unique. None of the others comes within miles of it either conceptually or, in the context of the time, in audacity of execution. In its beauty it is in a class by itself.’