Death of a God

by S. T. Haymon

  ‘I’ll bear it in mind.’ I too smiled, as I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Since I don’t want Loy’s money, what does it matter to me who has it?’

  We parted the best of friends. The first day after that, that I felt Leo could safely be left on his own for a few hours, I took my shopping bag, went down to the station, and took a cheap day return to Havenlea. In my bag I put my plastic mac and my French cook’s knife, which Leo took pride in always keeping beautifully sharp for me. On top, for the look of the thing, I put a net of oranges.

  I hadn’t been to Havenlea since the last time we’d taken Loy there. It had always been later in the year when there were plenty of people about. Now, the emptiness of the place dismayed me. People would be bound to remember the solitary woman walking along the front with her shopping bag over her arm; her height, the colour of her coat, her eyes, her hair.

  On the other hand, if I were indeed the solitary woman, then there was no one else to see me; or, if anybody did, it would not be a real remembering. I looked so ordinary.

  The wind slapped strongly at my face, and I felt better. I have always enjoyed the wind off the sea. Suddenly certain that the Punch and Judy tent stood where it had always stood, and that the Punch and Judy man would be inside, waiting for me, I walked briskly along the promenade until, sure enough, there it was, the same as ever, red-and-white striped, with the little pennon flapping. There was a shelter a little before, into which I stepped out of the wind to unfold my mac and put it on. I took out my knife and held it carefully in my right hand, close against my side. Then I went down to the beach.

  A tuneless humming came from the tent, a sound with that unmistakable undertone of amusement, so that I knew it was Mr King at home. The fabric of the tent was pushed out of true, following the outline of a rounded back. Without stopping to think about it, I nudged a flap apart with an elbow, and plunged the knife in, knowing instinctively that once was enough. I didn’t get a proper look at Mr King at all, only a fleeting glimpse of a Punch as it keeled over, looking quite amused, I thought.

  I went back to the shelter, took off the mac and folded it back into its pouch. As it turned out, I could have done without it. In spite of all the blood, not a single drop showed on the plastic.

  Before catching the train back, I tried to find the café the three of us always used to go to – Loy had been mad on their pastries, and I could have done with a cup of tea. But where it had been there was now an amusement arcade.

  I didn’t get my cup of tea till I got back home, and then I had it with Leo, which was much better.

  Do you know, Mr Jurnet, what it means to be raped? Of course you don’t, so I’ll tell you, because I’ve been giving the subject a lot of thought.

  It’s a hateful and nauseating act of violence, but when you come down to it, it isn’t important. It doesn’t count, because it doesn’t touch you any way but physically. It isn’t at all sexual.

  Does that surprise you?

  I’ll go further and say that when you’re a virgin, as I was, and then you’re raped, as I was, first by Loy’s father and then by Loy’s father’s son, you are still a virgin in the only sense that has meaning. I tell you this because, apart from those two, you are the only man I ever slept with, and I would like you to feel that you went to bed with a virgin, untouched, even if she did offer herself to you like a whore.

  How I envied Miriam when I saw the two of you together! No: envy isn’t the word. I was happy for you both. I was just a little sorry for myself.

  I knew what had to happen to me sooner or later; that somewhere in His yellow-brick, tin-roofed heaven, the God of the Conventicle was lying in wait for me. Even before you told me about the way every murderer makes mistakes, conscious or unconscious, I was sure that if the police didn’t find me out, sooner or later He would. I’d go over everything I’d done, or said, again and again. It was like those picture puzzles they have in children’s books – how many mistakes can you spot? How many had I made? Not that it mattered, except in so far as I mustn’t be caught, so long as Leo had need of me.

  That’s how things would have gone along, until they came to the inevitable end, if you hadn’t happened to call round with my pencil box, the one thing left from my childhood that gives me pleasure. Now, it is doubly dear to me. Though, all said and done, it wasn’t so much after all – was it? – to want, just for once, to know what it was like, as a woman, to lie with a man in perfect love.

  I love you.

  Are you revolted at the thought of having made love to a woman who has killed three people? Yes, three. By the time you read this there will be, as they say, three notches on my gun. I’m going to kill Leo.

  Everything has come together so pat, I have to take advantage of it. The opportunity may never come again: Miriam lending us the car (you never thought to ask whether I too could drive, Mr Jurnet, did you? When I worked at the nursery school they paid for me to have lessons so I could pick the children up in the school minibus and drop them off home again); having to face the knowledge that there’s no longer any hope for Leo; and that you’re close on my heels, ready to move in any minute.

  Principally, though, I want to make an end because I haven’t the courage to tempt Providence all over again. Thanks to you, dear Mr Jurnet, I have learnt what happiness is, and I am, frankly, afraid to stay around longer in case I should discover that it is flawed like everything else.

  If the Law is really just, you won’t say I murdered Leo. You’ll class it as a mercy killing, which is what it is. With me locked up in prison, what’s the best he could hope for? A few weeks or months in hospital, no one to cherish him as I have cherished him. Truly, I am simply taking him with me for his own good.

  Please tell Miriam thank you for all her kindness, and how sorry I am to have to take her pretty car and risk messing it up. It all depends on whether it proves possible to do what I have in mind to do. I hope the car’s insured. She will understand, because she is that kind of person. Tell her about us if you want to: don’t, if you think better not. Either way, I promise not to haunt you, except as a happy ghost.

  Whatever you do, don’t pity me.

  Chapter Thirty Eight

  The Superintendent placed the pages of Mara Felsenstein’s statement face down in a pile on the desk, fidgeting with them a little to align the edges. When the task was completed to his satisfaction, he sat back in his chair, his face carefully blank. The other detectives in the room stood about, waiting for a sign.

  When it came, it was both more and less than they had expected.

  ‘At the time you went to bed with Mrs Felsenstein, had you any reason to suspect her of the crimes to which she has since admitted?’

  The silence was prolonged. Inspector Ben Jurnet was to have all the time in the world to examine his conscience and come to a conclusion.

  At last: ‘I – I don’t know, sir.’

  ‘Rubbish!’ At the mini-explosion, Jurnet’s mates relaxed. If the Superintendent was blowing his top instead of talking icily about disciplinary procedures, all was not lost. ‘What d’you mean, you don’t know?’

  ‘What I say, sir,’ Jurnet maintained doggedly. ‘At the time I’m quite sure I didn’t – not consciously, that is – or I’d never –’ He broke off, red-faced.

  ‘I never supposed you would,’ the other admitted with ill grace.

  ‘But subconsciously … I don’t know. I think there may have been something. Not so much to do with Mrs Felsenstein herself, but whether she wasn’t covering up for her husband. He was hardly ever about, and I don’t like what I can’t see. Was he as ill as she made out? Little things I couldn’t put my finger on bothered me. A bit like raffle tickets inside the drum, swirling round too quick to read the numbers –’

  ‘Until you put in your hand and drew out a slip-cover?’

  ‘I suppose you could say that. There it was, hanging on the line in the back garden, one of the first things that caught my eye the first time Jack and I came into that room
of theirs. That and the floor, clean as a whistle and smelling of polish, the scented kind. I should have guessed something was up.’

  ‘Some people are in the habit of keeping their homes clean.’ The Superintendent, who had once had occasion to call at Jurnet’s flat, and had not forgotten it, was not without bitchiness. ‘To say nothing of the fact that it was Easter, spring-cleaning time.’

  ‘Kind of you to let me off the hook, sir.’ But Jurnet shook his head. ‘We didn’t know where Loy Tanner had been done in, and we should have kept our eyes peeled. Murders are usually a messy business, and here was his mum, just cleaned up. I should have been on my guard, especially as there was the fireplace, choked with paper and ashes. I can’t believe any woman really house-proud would leave a grate in that condition.’

  Sergeant Ellers, anxious to share any blame that might be going, observed, ‘She knew it looked fishy, because she went out of her way to make some comment about how she ought to have left the fire for Mr Felsenstein to make –’

  They all fell silent, remembering the blazing pyre at the bottom of the flint mine. Then Jurnet went on, ‘She said something about having told Loy he ought to get his hair cut for the concert, but, as usual, he’d paid no heed. How could she possibly have known unless she’d seen him after the concert was over? That picture of him in the Argus appeared two days before: so, whatever she said, she couldn’t have known it from that.

  ‘It’s no good,’ he continued, scowling at his own inadequacy. ‘Easy enough to find the loose strands once you know where to look for them. We should have cottoned on when she called out, taking us for the milkman – or, if not then, the minute she told us she’d been expecting Tanner to drop by any time that morning. She sat at that knitting machine of hers with her back to the window, unable to see who was coming to the door. Yet she never gave a moment’s thought that it might be Loy coming up the garden path. It had to be the milkman, because she already knew, without being told, that it could never be her son, ever again …’

  On Jurnet’s instructions they had driven to Sebastopol Terrace: found Miriam’s car gone and the bright red door to Number 12 wide open as if awaiting them. They had found Mara Felsenstein’s confession stacked on top of her knitting machine, held in place by one of the weights which kept the ribbing even. Jurnet had held the small, plastic-coated object, elegant with its fluted rim, astonished at its heaviness in proportion to its size; but not wondering until later, when he had had time to read the blue-ruled pages covered in a painstaking schoolgirl script, whether he held in his hand the actual instrument of Loy Tanner’s undoing.

  Without Mara Felsenstein’s presence, the room had looked discarded. Somebody had taken the loose cover off the couch, leaving it neatly folded over the back. The upholstery revealed was truly hideous. No wonder the Felsensteins had covered it up: roses that looked more like jellyfish, swimming in a sea of sick. Without warning, Jurnet’s body remembered its chill slipperiness under the cretonne cover, sensed amid the ecstasy but unnoticed until that moment.

  A fine ending to a grand passion!

  The Superintendent was saying, ‘King! That’s the one really sticks in my craw. How could the woman take his threats seriously? He was in as deep as she was.’

  ‘Not quite, sir.’ Sid Hale, who had, until then, stood quietly by, put in a rueful demurrer. ‘King was a gambler. He banked on Mrs F. not knowing that a convicted person couldn’t inherit anyway, so there’d be no percentage in shopping her. But it’s a rum turn her ignorance cost him his life.’

  ‘Hm!’ The Superintendent considered this contribution, and apparently found it credible. ‘Gambler he certainly was. The way he ran that drugs racket of his! If the cargo weren’t so filthy one could almost admire the reckless disregard of precautions, the brazen cheek of the man. Boat from Holland making regular deliveries of butter and Dutch cheese to the rig. Butter and Dutch cheese! The fellows who run those oil platforms – what do they call them, for goodness’ sake, captains or station masters? – can’t have the sense they were born with. D’you know what the chap, whatever he’s called and I could think of a right name for him, said to regional drug squad when they told him what had been coming aboard his rig hidden in those nice red balls of Edam and wheels of Gouda? Bloater Herring told me. ‘‘It was very good cheese!’’’

  Sid Hale, always cheered by evidences of human folly, smiled without difficulty. ‘I gather the word is that Tanner put up the money for the operation, took his cut, but took no part in the actual pushing?’

  ‘So it seems, if you discount the £150 he took off the loony professor and presumably passed on to King for processing. Pure kindness of heart, or couldn’t bear to turn down business? Either way, it accounts for Tanner’s presence in Queenie King’s caravan after the concert.’ The Superintendent transferred his attention back to Jurnet. Placing a hand on Mrs Felsenstein’s testament with the solemnity of a hanging judge reaching for his black cap, he pronounced, ‘You understand, Ben, that I am not in any position to let you know what, if anything, the Chief proposes to do about this.’

  Jurnet, silently noting the promise of that ‘Ben’, said nothing. Jack Ellers, the court jester, chanced his arm.

  ‘Publish, of course! Call a press conference! You tell the Chief, sir! Do us a power of good!’ A cherubic smile spread over the little Welshman’s face. ‘With our public image, it can’t be bad to let the world know somebody loved a policeman!’

  Jurnet drove out to the University, taking a ridiculously long way round by the Castle Bailey; stopping on a double yellow line at a point from which, looking upward he could see – past the flowery mound and the keep crenellated against the sky – the rampart from which Robert Tanner had dangled in air until the last of his bones fell to earth in the first year of the reign of King James 1.

  A traffic warden, advancing gaily with her pad and pencil at the ready, clicked her teeth in annoyance when she recognized the car’s number, and returned her weapons to her coat pocket.

  No Anglo-Saxon hands signalling ‘Help!’ waved wildly among the daffodils.

  The caravans had gone from the University, leaving disagreeable shapes on the grass where they had stood. A gardener who saw Jurnet looking down at them, came over and said kindly, ‘Another couple of weeks and you won’t know they’ve ever been.’

  In the foyer of the Middlemass Auditorium, blinds made of green-dyed rattan were drawn across the skylights to shield the idols from foreign parts from the insidious English sun. The Hob’s Hole Venus was still missing from its pedestal.

  Back in the city, the car, as of its own volition – ‘my lap of honour’, Jurnet congratulated himself ironically – headed for Sebastopol Terrace, where, for a wonder, the largest of the estate agents’ boards proclaimed one of the ramshackle houses to be ‘UNDER OFFER’.

  The detective parked outside Number 12, and opened the garden gate, diverging from the path to cross the handkerchief of starved grass outside the front window. The first thing he saw, shading his eyes against reflections, was the couch with its slip-cover back on. The second –

  He went to the front door, found that the handle turned at his touch. In the living-room, a plaster on one side of his head, but otherwise no sicklier looking than usual, Leo Felsenstein sat at his knitting machine, working. The carriage moved smoothly backwards and forwards along the bank of needles. Sheep grew white and woolly on a field of green.

  ‘Inspector Jurnet!’ The man did not get up: nodded in excuse towards a pair of crutches leaning against his chair. ‘You must forgive me. I am not yet as mobile as I could wish.’

  ‘Please –’ Jurnet, embarrassed, stammered, ‘I didn’t expect to find you here.’

  ‘Where else should you find me but home?’

  ‘I meant – I didn’t know they’d discharged you from hospital.’

  ‘They didn’t. I discharged myself. They were killing me with kindness and I, as you must have guessed by now, am a survivor. Don’t search for words,’ Mr Felsens
tein added, with a gentle inclination of the head, as the detective cast about desperately for something to say. Did the man know, or didn’t he? ‘There aren’t any. Let us be content to understand each other.’

  ‘Saw you go out,’ said the duty sergeant. ‘Seeing it was marked personal, thought I’d better hang on to it.’

  ‘Ta.’ Jurnet took the large, expensive-looking envelope up the stairs with him, away from the man’s curiosity. Back at his desk, having slit it open with due respect for its rich creaminess, he read the contents, and laughed aloud.

  On double card, embellished with much silver, Detective-Inspector Jurnet was invited to attend the wedding of Miss Regina King to Mr Guido Scarlatti, the nuptial mass to be celebrated at St Joseph’s with a wedding breakfast at the Red Shirt to follow.

  There were two enclosures beside the prepaid postcard for RSVP; one a typed slip headed ‘Press Release.’

  This is to announce that Mrs Queenie King-Scarlatti, of the famous King family of Punch and Judy fame, in partnership with her husband Mr Guido King-Scarlatti, will be operating the ancestral Punch and Judy show on Havenlea beach from the Spring Bank Holiday on. Mr and Mrs King-Scarlatti are also happy to announce that the Punch and Judy show is also available for hire for children’s parties, Masonic functions and etc. For further information ring Havenlea 37629 any evening after 7.30.

  The third enclosure was a sheet of notepaper which had lost the crispness it had possessed on the day that Angleby’s leading gynaecologist had solemnly attested to Miss Queenie King’s virginity. In a bold diagonal across the page a childish hand had scrawled in red crayon: ‘CANCELLED.’

  Miriam had agreed to meet him in the little garden at the top of the Market Place. Dusk was deepening to dark as the detective, well ahead of the appointed hour, hurried across the road and past the cupressus, only to find that she was there even earlier, hands in the pockets of her white coat, her hair flaming orange in the orange light of the street lamp.