Death of a God

by S. T. Haymon

  Lacking Miriam on the other side of his front door, he was surprised at this sense of homecoming: but there it was. For once he was glad she had stubbornly refused his pleas to get the flat decorated; to instruct him in the mysteries of deep-freezes and micro-ovens so that he could provide a setting worthier of her. Even a three-piece suite and wall-to-wall carpeting, it seemed, had to wait upon his becoming a Jew.

  For tonight, at least, he was grateful to have nothing about his domestic ambiance which required living up to. Tonight, if never again, the slow-simmered underwear on the stairs smelled positively piquant, as if someone had added a soupçon of French knickers. On the landing, to complete his felicity, the cat sat waiting.

  The animal did not run to meet him: rose and arched itself indolently, rasping its paws through the tatty bit of coconut matting outside the flat door. The detective, absurdly elated, was fishing in his pocket for his key when the door across the landing opened. Mrs Petherton must have been listening for him.

  ‘I thought you were never coming!’ she exclaimed, in the waspish way she had on days when her pension was not quite due and the hombre at the Hacienda Bar was proving less than simpatico. ‘I told it to go away I don’t know how many times, but it just stared at me as if I was the one who had no business here. Naturally, I couldn’t bring myself to touch it, nasty, flea-ridden thing!’ At the sight of Jurnet taking out his key, she let out a dainty scream. ‘You’re never going to let it inside!’

  The detective answered kindly, wishing that he had some gin in the house to help a neighbour over a bad patch. ‘If it looks like it’s needed, I’ll get some flea powder first thing in the morning, I promise you. Either way, you don’t have to worry. I’ve never heard that cats’ fleas go for anybody or anything but cats.’

  ‘How can you be so sure? You’re not a vet. And what about my fur jacket? I’m sorry, Mr Jurnet’ – in her present mood, she did not sound at all sorry – ‘if you don’t get rid of that disgusting creature this minute, I’ll call the police!’

  ‘Oh dear!’ said Jurnet. ‘And I was hoping, since I’m on my own tonight, you’d keep me company over a glass of sherry. I’m sorry we’re out of spirits.’

  ‘Sweet sherry?’ the other inquired sharply.

  ‘Medium sweet.’

  Medium appeased, Mrs Petherton allowed herself to cross the detective’s threshold once the cat and its putative fleas had been safely locked in the kitchen. She drank three schooners of sherry and would have drunk a fourth if there had been more in the bottle. Having no cheese straws to offer, the detective proffered the cheesecake, which Mrs Petherton found acceptable, to the last crumb. The little woman was plainly even more skint than usual at the end of the week.

  It wasn’t much of a sacrifice for Jurnet to suggest she do him a favour; take his salad back to her own flat to consume later. He’d only bought it because Miriam had brainwashed him into believing that lettuce was essential to good health, sound teeth, and a successful sex life. For all he knew to the contrary, you couldn’t become a Jew without it.

  When Mrs Petherton had gone back to her flat, soothed with wine, Jurnet went into the kitchen to feed the cat.

  After opening three different tins of catfood, only to have each rejected in turn, he gave in: opened the baked beans and watched them disappear down the cat’s gullet with lightning speed. For himself, he uncovered another tin of sardines in the cupboard; ate them without appetite whilst the cat, pausing in a vigorous toilette which must surely have spelt annihilation to any fleas in the vicinity, regarded him with something approaching incredulity.

  Not pity, certainly. And quite right. Anyone who didn’t have the nous to hang on to his own beans deserved what was coming to him.

  Cats, for example, would have known better than to answer the phone. Nothing but doom ever came through the telephone. The only good news was a wrong number.

  When Jurnet picked up the receiver, Miriam began immediately, ‘I ran into Cecily Gordon in the street, and as she’s in charge of all the organizing, I thought it only right to let her know about the Seder as soon as possible.’

  ‘Let her know what about it?’

  ‘That you won’t be coming, of course.’

  ‘Shan’t I?’ Jurnet asked. Cats, he thought, having been stupid enough to pick up the phone in the first place, would, at that juncture, have had the sense to put it back on the hook. Either that, or throw it out of the window. ‘It’s the first I’ve heard of it.’

  ‘Then you’ve heard of it now.’ The voice at the other end of the wire did not disguise its tremulous exasperation. ‘We’ve never had a communal Seder before. We want it to be a lovely, joyous occasion –’

  ‘And you’re afraid the sight of my kisser will turn the chicken soup sour?’

  ‘Trust you to make a joke of it! We’ll be celebrating the first night of Passover, a festival of liberation and hope. And there you’ll be, soaked in death like a baba in rum. It’s hard enough to take at any time, but on Seder night of all nights I simply couldn’t stand it!’ There was a sound, a strangled catching of breath Jurnet could not quite identify.

  Miriam said in an altered tone, ‘You didn’t see me, but I saw you this evening, on the Market Place. I saw your face while Johnny Flowerdew was singing, and I saw – even at that distance I could see – it was all just washing over your head. All you were thinking about was how to catch whoever killed Loy Tanner.’

  ‘I saw you too. And you’re wrong. That’s what I should have been thinking, if I was earning my pay. As it was, all I was thinking about was how much I loved you.’

  There was a silence. Then a small voice said, ‘You must think me an awful bitch.’

  ‘No,’ Jurnet contradicted. ‘Though I have to admit there are times when you try hard. That tender, funny girl called Miriam who’s the light of my life – let her be our secret, eh? Just between the two of us. I promise not to tell anybody, OK?’

  ‘Moron!’ But the tone was sweet.

  ‘And, about the Seder – don’t worry. I shan’t embarrass you by turning up to be the hindquarter at the feast. In fact, I’m glad you reminded me. I doubt if I’d have been able to make it, anyway.’

  ‘You do understand, Ben?’

  ‘No,’ said Jurnet. Then: ‘It’s on Good Friday, right?’

  ‘Yes. Good Friday. It comes out at the same time, sometimes.’

  ‘Funny, that. If I hadn’t changed sides, who knows? Maybe the Bishop would have asked me to dinner instead. We could have had a lovely time, the two of us, arguing who crucified whom.’

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Angleby wasn’t big enough to boast of anything you could properly call a foreign quarter. Bergate was the nearest thing to it. There, towards the end of the nineteenth century, in the once elegant Georgian houses which had by then become warrens of the poor, large numbers of Italian immigrants had settled – masons and plasterers, makers of the beautifully finished shoes and gloves which were to earn the city an international reputation.

  In the backyards, in the tumbledown outbuildings which had begun life as the coach houses of the rich, wiry little men in rusty black clothing, with names like Raffaelli and Marcantonio, had stored the bags of sweet chestnuts which, in winter, they sold, hot and mealy, from portable stoves set up craftily on corners where the wind knifed in straight from the tundra. As the world turned towards spring, they dragged little carts out of their spider-webbed hibernation, and spruced them up till they looked like a Sicilian fiesta; filled them with a frozen custard yellow as butter, and dragged them to the Market Place, there to dispense cornets and wafers and ice-cream boats until once more the leaves fell, the days shortened, and it was time for roasted chestnuts again.

  Hitler’s bombers and town planning had, between them, wrought changes in Bergate by the time Jurnet drove along the wide thorough-fare to call upon Annie Falcone at the Red Shirt. It was no longer a residential street: offices, warehouses, car showrooms, several with an Italian name on the fas
cia. The Raffaellis, the Marcantonios and their ilk, prospering for the most part, had long moved on to the comfortable suburbs: yet, it seemed, a race memory remained, a neighbourhood loyalty.

  At lunchtime the Red Shirt was filled with Norfolk businessmen ampler of gesture than the patrons of pubs in other streets of the city. Every 26 October, the anniversary of that day in 1860 when Garibaldi entered Naples in triumph and proclaimed Victor Emmanuel King of Italy, the businessmen of Bergate would be notably late getting back to their places of work. Many toasts were drunk, eyes uplifted in homage to the faded relic which hung in a glass case over the bar – the very shirt in which Great-great-grandfather Falcone had fought his way through Sicily and crossed to the mainland, one of the legendary Thousand who had set Italy free.

  At night, the Red Shirt belonged to a different world. Then young people from all over the city crammed in to hear the latest group, to goggle or giggle at the topless singer whose top notes, like her bust, had gone a bit flat with age: a naughtiness the licensing justices and the police were happy to condone, finding it convenient to have local sin housed where they could put their hands on it, if need arose. True, a genuine villain might occasionally drop by to add a touch of class to the place, but by and large the Red Shirt was as innocent as only provincial sin could be.

  Over both worlds Annie Falcone, ever since the day her husband Joe had dropped dead of a coronary, presided with tact, humour, and an iron hand. Jurnet, from his days in the uniformed branch, remembered well how any brawling in the vicinity of the Red Shirt invariably took place off the premises, not on; which was more than you could say for a good many other pubs in the town superficially of better reputation.

  Dino, Annie’s latest live-in barman, if that was the right word for him, opened the door reluctantly to the detective’s knocking, and told him, with satisfaction, that Mrs Falcone was not at home. A shit, thought Jurnet, taking in the coarse good looks, the powerful shoulders running to fat. A thug with ambitions. Annie must be slipping. Unless, the years slipping away, she could no longer afford to be choosy.

  ‘I’ll wait outside.’

  On the pavement next to the entrance to the courtyard, a pile of sand, reinforced by thuds and bangings from somewhere at the rear, advertised bulding work in progress. Jurnet frowned at the obstruction and made a mental note to alert the PC on the beat to see that something was done about it. But the frown was for official purposes only. Within, the essential Jurnet, to the essential Jurnet’s surprise, was feeling altogether in lighter mood.

  The weather, he decided. The day, though chill as those which had preceded it, was sunny, the air tonic. Instead of waiting in the car the detective walked up and down until, ten minutes later, he saw Annie Falcone turn her Volvo estate out of the road into the courtyard, nosing it expertly past the builders’ clutter to a cleared space by the further wall.

  Jurnet went to meet her, noting, as she got out of the car and locked it, that she, too, was smiling: noting too that, in his opinion at least, she could still have done better for herself than Dino. For somebody who would never see forty-five again, she looked good. A little too plump, the hair a little too yellow, the line of the chin blurred: but the legs, the eyes, the mouth sensual and humorous, were still such as to set up vibrations.

  She came towards him teetering on her high heels, fur-coated, sweet-smelling, everything about her a little overdone, not through any error of taste but as if for the devil of it.

  ‘I declare, if it isn’t Ben Jurnet! What can I have been up to?’

  ‘You’re looking well, Annie.’ Shaking hands, allowing his own to be captured by her two, almost an embrace: ‘Well and happy.’

  ‘That’s because I’ve just come from church.’

  ‘A state of grace suits you.’

  The woman shook her head seriously.

  ‘Not to confession.’ Then: ‘I can guess why you’re here. In fact, if you hadn’t come, I was going to get in touch with you. What d’you think of that for telepathy? It’s about Loy, isn’t it?’

  Startled, Jurnet began, ‘But how did you –’

  ‘It had to be. Just as my going to St Joseph’s this morning had to be about him.’

  Jurnet suggested awkwardly, ‘You went to pray for the repose of his soul –’

  The smile broke out again, gloriously.

  ‘I went to give thanks that he’s dead!’

  They didn’t go upstairs to the flat because, as Annie asserted, what with the noise of the builders, you couldn’t hear yourself think, let alone speak. Downstairs, Dino was on the prowl, with his ears like antennae. And no, she didn’t fancy saying what she had to say, sitting in a car. Accordingly, the two of them set out on foot, their steps – though not as if either consciously turned them in any particular direction – tending away from Bergate, down the hill, towards Yarrow Bridge.

  They walked in silence, the woman in her perilously high-heeled shoes hanging on to his arm; the detective too preoccupied to notice the passing patrol car which braked suddenly to give its pop-eyed occupants a chance to check that they really were seeing what they thought they saw. They walked on to the narrow pavement of the bridge still arm in arm, Jurnet’s right sleeve all but brushed by the passing cars. When they came to the third embrasure along, the central of those minuscule lay-bys where earlier citizens of Angleby had dodged out of the way of ox-carts and prancing chargers, Annie turned aside, taking Jurnet with her up the step into the small alcove which overlooked the river.

  ‘This is where Francesca stood that day,’ she began, not in any mournful way, and loudly enough to be heard above the traffic. ‘Ever since Guido told me you were on the case, I knew that one day I’d stand here with you, just like this, telling you how it really was.’

  ‘Guido Scarlett, you mean?’

  ‘That’s right. Cousin of mine. Scarlatti was my maiden name, same as the fellow who writes music. Francesca had a piece of his in one of her music books. It was Guido’s papa changed the name to Scarlett. He wanted to father a real English gentleman, and look what he got!’

  ‘Was it through you Mr Scarlett got to work for Second Coming?’

  ‘How else? My connection with Loy Tanner. And that’s exactly what I want to tell you about.’

  Annie Falcone turned her face away from Jurnet so that he could see only her profile, following with apparent absorption a small ship laden with planks on its way upstream to the timber yard.

  ‘I don’t want to look at you,’ she explained, ‘and please don’t look at me, Ben, any more than you have to, because what I’m going to say isn’t at all nice. Connection I said, and connection I meant. Loy was Francesca’s first boy-friend and I seduced him. There! It’s out and I’m glad. I was between men and I needed someone. Oh, if I wanted to justify myself I could say I did it to head him off from trying anything on with Francesca – acted as a decoy so that, so far as my innocent little ninny of a daughter was concerned, he’d be satisfied with a kiss and a cuddle, once he knew that Mama was always on hand with the hard stuff.

  ‘But I don’t need to justify myself. Loy was a virgin kid of sixteen and I was in my thirties – right? – but all I can say is, that if I taught him a lot, he taught me a lot more. He knew things he could only have been born knowing. Things that came to him as natural as breathing. I can’t begin to tell you. Thanks to him, I discovered uses for my body I’d never known existed.

  ‘Do you understand what I’m saying!’ Despite her earlier warning to look away, the woman tugged at Jurnet, turned him to face her. Jammed into that small bricked space, they were close enough for the detective to see the hairline veins in her irises, the pores beneath the make-up. ‘I’m not talking about love, nor lust either, but about war! We fought each other in bed like wild things, we ate each other up. And when it was over we couldn’t wait to do it again.’

  She sighed, as if even the recollection was a drain on her resources.

  ‘With it all, it goes without saying, he hated me. Does th
at surprise you? He hated anyone to have power over him, so of course he hated his need of me, and me for supplying that need. And all the time we were destroying each other like cowboys and Indians, there was my little angel Francesca up in the seventh heaven over having her very first boy-friend of her very own.’ For once, the voice faltered: then, from somewhere, found fresh vitality, even a sardonic humour.

  ‘Well? That’s how it was, my friend, but hang on. You ain’t heard nothing yet! I don’t have to tell you the care I took that Francesca would have no idea what we two were up to behind her back. I never let Loy come to my room except when she was at school, or gone to music lessons or Sunday School. Never at night. With her room just across the landing from mine, I’d never take the chance. The way we carried on sometimes you’d wonder the bed didn’t go through the floor. And even when he did come, I always made sure the bedroom door was locked and bolted, just in case.

  ‘The afternoon she died, she’d gone for her piano lesson, and Loy and I were going hammer and tongs as usual, when I opened my eyes, and there, over the curve of his shoulder glistening with sweat, I saw Francesca standing at the open door, looking at us. Later on, I found out that the music teacher had been taken sick, and sent her home early.

  ‘The child stood there with a face like a cornered animal. It didn’t look like my Francesca. If I’d met her out in the street I’d have passed her by. Her mouth was open, but I don’t think any sound came out. What I did, I couldn’t tell you. My mind went blank. All I could see was that little animal face, and that open mouth.

  ‘Next thing I knew I could hear her feet thudding down the stairs, and then the slam of the outside door. Loy was already out of bed, cramming into his jeans, pulling his T-shirt over his head. He stuck his feet into his trainers, and before you could say knife he was off down the stairs after her. As for me, I just lay there like a log. I couldn’t begin to move, I couldn’t begin to think. I was still lying there, not a stitch on, when they came to tell me Francesca was dead.’