Death of a God (10 page)

The manager, who, as it happened, remembered gratefully the discreet way in which Detective-Inspector Jurnet had engineered the removal of the earthly left-overs of a suicide pact from – the nerve of some people! – the very four-poster which the Virgin Queen herself had once graced with her presence (£15 supplement, excluding VAT) made no further difficulties. Jurnet stepped out of the lift on the third floor to find a chambermaid with a pass key waiting for him.

Outside room 317 a pile of the day's papers lay uncollected.

‘Just unlock it, please. Don't knock.'

Jurnet waited until the woman, Portuguese and incurious as to anything that might happen so far from home, had retreated back down the corridor. Then he turned the handle and went in.

The room was dark with the darkness of four-star hotel curtains, lined and light-excluding. The detective found a light switch, switched it on, and made for the window.

He made no attempt at quiet: dumped the papers on the bed en route, purposely rattled the lid of the electric kettle. The shape hummocked under the bedclothes did not stir. Surprisingly, it was the whisper of expensive curtains sliding along their rails which brought Lenny Bale back to the land of the living. The man sat up in bed, squinted painfully at the tall figure silhouetted against the light, and demanded thickly, ‘Who the hell are you?'

Jurnet said, dispensing with preliminaries, ‘Detective-Inspector Jurnet, Angleby CID. I felt sure that, as his manager, you'd want to be told at the earliest possible moment about Mr Loy Tanner being dead. Murdered.'

The man in the bed stared, shook his head, scrubbed at the thick brown hair which, expensively layered, kept its shape even after a night in bed.

‘I'm dreaming this.'

‘Unfortunately not, sir. Mr Tanner was killed late last night or in the early hours of this morning.'

‘
I'm dreaming this
!' This time the words came out in a shout, the very volume of noise, it appeared, finally convincing the shouter that he was indeed awake. He flung back the covers and swung himself out of bed, a small man, naked and well-made, the body looking too young for the hung-over face which topped it. Jurnet noted wihout surprise the purple puncture marks on the whippy, muscular arms, and the scars of old ulcerations.

‘Loy, you bastard,' Lenny Bale demanded, looking up at the ceiling, ‘how could you do this to me?'

‘I haven't made myself clear –'

‘I heard you!' The other was striding up and down the room now, less grieving than aggrieved. ‘Loy's dead.'

‘Murder. Not suicide.'

‘Murder, not suicide!' the other mimicked derisively. ‘As if Loy of all people would be dead if he didn't choose to be!'

The man came to a stop in front of the dressing-table mirror; approached the glass as if he had glimpsed therein something, someone, seen for the first time. For a little he studied the image, his face expressionless. Then, before Jurnet could forestall him, he picked up an onyx ashtray and flung it at his reflection.

Just in time, Jurnet threw up an arm, felt something wet and warm sliding towards his wrist.

Lenny Bale, himself miraculously untouched among the sword-sharp splinters, turned away from the shattered glass and inquired, with a childlike wonder that anyone could ever have imagined otherwise, ‘How could a god like Loy ever have loved a bag of shit like that?'

The Superintendent stood at his open window, wrinkling his patrician nose. He complained sourly, ‘It smells like a funeral parlour!'

No one disputed the statement, though, to Jurnet at least, what wafted into Police Headquarters was no more than the usual daytime air of Angleby Market Place, an olfactory cocktail based on cabbages mainly, spiked with the zest of orange peel past its prime and the fragrance of the vinegar sloshed so generously over the tiny plates of seafood set out on the cockle stalls. For a moment, until sternly reminded by higher centres of his being that his days of eating shellfish were gone for ever, the detective's mouth watered – he had, after all, eaten nothing since that early rising – with longing for a taste of those delicate morsels forbidden by the Mosaic law. To his way of thinking, cockles never tasted better than when consumed in the open air, amid the shouting and banter of the Market Place; the inborn scepticism of Norfolk voices curving up and over towards the end of every sentence as if in wry acknowledgement that, properly understood, there were no such things as statements, only question marks, and anyone daft enough to expect answers had it coming to him.

Not that it was like that today. The quiet of the Market Place had been almost palpable: business poor, people talking in low voices, even the twittering budgies mum. Only the flower sellers, albeit a whit shamefacedly, could not disguise a certain satisfaction – understandable when even the roses of the day, if not the week, before, their stems flopping despite all that tight-wrapped polythene could do to arrest the decline, were going at a premium, so far did the demand outstrip supply.

Where they were going was no mystery. Making his way uphill, back to Headquarters, Jurnet had seen the great tumulus of flowers long before he actually reached the garden where the crosses had stood. The detective was relieved to see that the other two crosses and their attendant effigies had been taken away.

Calvary was never like that. Iris, roses, daffodils, tulips, piled up as if there were a grave beneath – as indeed there was, if one counted the daffodils; and an unending line of boys and girls with reddened eyes, a few weeping noisily, most of them shocked and silent, waiting to add their tribute to the rest. Even the photographers, darting about like water bugs on the skin of a pond, could not entirely devalue the real tears, the real sense of loss.

As Jurnet watched, an older woman, obese and ungainly, came forward, purplish channels irrigating the make-up which plastered her nose and cheeks. Mrs Lark, Chair of the Parks and Recreation Committee, tenderly placed a single dark red rose on top of the fragrant heap and went away, back towards the City Hall, a pink tissue long past its prime held to her trembling lips.

Who the hell
was
this Loy Tanner, so greatly mourned, and so very, very dead?

Back in his seat behind the wide desk which put a proper distance between the star and the chorus line, the Superintendent fidgeted with the papers in front of him, then flung out off-handedly, ‘Preliminary report on that van of yours, Ben. Enough prints, inside and out, to send our lovely new computer into hysterics. Not a single one clear enough to be of any use. Nothing to suggest the vehicle was used to transport a body. Further examination, of course, may reveal something of value.' He did not sound as if he would put any money on it.

Jurnet said, ‘Early days.'

The Superintendent was in no mood to be comforted. ‘No days are early where murder has been done.' He scrabbled among his papers once more and selected one with scorn. ‘It appears that the University, with a faith in human nature granted only to academics and the mentally subnormal, took on, as a temporary guard on the performers' caravans, a pensioned-off old retainer with – can you believe it? – an unpredictable sphincter muscle. In one of his rare surfacings from the jakes, this Argus-eyed Cerberus states that, some twenty or thirty minutes after the end of the concert, he saw Tanner leave the girl King's caravan and go out of the paddock by the gate which leads to the standing normally used by vans bringing supplies to the University. A few moments later he heard a vehicle start up, and a scrunch of tyres on gravel.' There was a pause before the Superintendent ended, ‘Assuming it was Tanner in the van, that would have meant he left by the back way, the tradesmen's entrance. The way round to the front had been blocked off earlier in the evening for fear of gate-crashers.'

Sid Hale, close to cheerfulness at finding things turning out as badly as he invariably expected, enquired hopefully, ‘And I suppose there was nobody on the back entrance either?'

‘Actually, there's a lodge with a resident keeper whose job it is to monitor all comings and going in that direction. Except that yesterday – what ills infest the groves of Academe! – it seems the poor fellow had an ingrowing toenail and had retired to his bathroom for a soothing soak of the same. He says –' rooting for the relevant note with the sick pleasure of de-scabbing a wound – ‘that he may have heard a vehicle leaving the University grounds, but then again, he may not. When his bath taps are turned full on, hot and cold together, they sound so uncommonly like a motor vehicle it'd be anybody's guess to know if it was one or if it wasn't.'

Sergeant Ellers, taking evasive action, volunteered, ‘The Chepe, sir. Where the van was found parked. It's bang opposite the Virgin. Their own car park's such a hassle to get in and out of, especially when you've had a drink or two, a lot of people going into the hotel leave their cars on the Chepe instead. And the Virgin's where Mr Bale's staying, isn't it?'

‘So it is, Jack. So it is.'

‘You have fight?' the Portuguese chambermaid had demanded, with, for the first time, a light of interest in her eye. She had entered the room with her pass key, without knocking. ‘I hear smash. I come see if is fight.' She surveyed the broken mirror with disappointment, the hairless nakedness of Lenny Bale with indifference. ‘You no have fight?' she asked, the animation fading from her face.

‘Sorry not to oblige,' Jurnet responded. ‘Seven years' bad luck, that's all. Have it put on Mr Bale's bill, and fetch me a Band-aid, there's a good girl.' The detective held out a gashed forearm, blood trickling between his fingers.

‘Is nothing,' the chambermaid pronounced, peering: but her eyes had brightened again. She lifted the hém of her white apron and unconcernedly tore off a wide strip along one side. With her strong brown fingers she bandaged the wound with a deftness Jurnet found altogether admirable, and said so.

‘In Spain one time I live three years with matador. Not very good matador.'

Lenny Bale complained peevishly, ‘I can't stand blood.' He got back into bed and pulled the covers over his head. He began to cry, his body shaking, the brass bedstead tinkling prettily.

The chambermaid left the room and returned a moment later with a dustpan and brush.

Jurnet said, ‘Take my advice, leave it for the blokes who'll have to come and fit a new one. I'm sure you can fix Mr Bale up with another room instead.'

‘Three doors down is nobody in.'

‘Then why don't you move Mr Bale's things in there? I'll make it OK with the manager.'

Obediently, without asking questions, the woman put her implements aside, opened the suitcase which stood on the luggage stand, and with stolid but sure-fingered efficiency packed it with the underpants and shirts from the drawers, the expensive toiletries out of the bathroom.

‘You see I put,' she admonished the detective, picking up an ornate signet ring, several gold chains, and a watch that looked expensive enough to buy all the time in the world, and dropping them into a side pocket of the Vuitton suitcase.

‘I see you put,' Jurnet confirmed with a smile. ‘I will also, when we arrive three doors down, see that you unput.'

The woman opened the door of the clothes closet, removed the shoes at the bottom and stowed them away, then took out the jackets and slacks which hung above. The clothes over her arm, she paused in passing the bed. The crying, muffled by the bedclothes, sounded not entirely believable.

‘Qué bandalho!'
she pronounced disdainfully.

Jurnet yanked off the blankets, not unkindly. ‘Time to go, Buster!'

Lenny Bale came quietly. The detective draped his unresisting form in one of the blankets, and led him out into the corridor. Waiting to be told which way to go, the man let the covering slip to the floor, making no move to retrieve it. An American lady of mature years who happened to be passing, ran an experienced eye over what was on offer and exclaimed ‘Cute!' before continuing unruffled on her way.

In the new room Bale made straight for the bed as if bent on resuming threnody where it had been rudely cut off in mid-flow. Jurnet, one hand clamped on a scarred arm, called across to the chambermaid, busy settling the man's clothes into their new home, ‘Got a dressing gown among that lot, señorita? Ah!' – accepting a feather-light cashmere gown, and forcing unwilling arms into the sleeves – ‘just the job. Ta! Now –' to Bale, brisk and businesslike – ‘no more wringing of hands and beating of breasts. Let's hear all about it.'

Lenny Bale slumped into a satin-upholstered armchair. ‘You came to tell
me
. I don't know a bloody thing.'

‘That's what they all say.' Jurnet, changing over to his rural routine, returned heartily. ‘Till they get going. Then it's all you can do to get them to belt up, there's so much they want to get off their chests. For a start, did you see Loy last night?'

‘I did not! I had to spend the whole day in London – and I mean the whole bloody twenty-four hours. Couldn't have been four in the morning when I started out –'

‘But you'd only just arrived in Angleby! Hardly seems worth the trouble of coming in the first place –'

‘Wasn't to know, was I? Guy from LA passing through unexpectedly. Big wheel in video, biggest on the coast. Phoned the office from Heathrow and they put him on to me here. Had a proposition. Lot of money involved –' Lenny Bale tightened his dressing-gown about him and knotted the girdle. It was obvious that the mere mention of money was a great energizer – almost, one might say with, in the circumstances, a particular aptness, a shot in the arm. ‘I couldn't let a chance like that slip.'

‘The group must have been a bit put out.'

The manager of Second Coming raised his head in unaffected astonishment. ‘Those punks? If it weren't for me, they'd still be hanging about on street corners, trying to cadge a joint.'