Death of a God (11 page)

‘I take the point. All the same, I suppose you did apprise them, of your change of plan?'

‘I phoned Guido, if that's what you mean. I'd already had a day to iron out any snags. Anyway, I told him I'd be back by evening –'

‘But, in the event, you didn't make it?'

‘I made the mistake of driving. I should have left the car in town and come back by train. By the time I got in I reckoned the concert must be about half through, but I was too tuckered out even to ring and ask how things were going. I took a couple of pills and went to bed.'

‘Hope your trip to London wasn't wasted.'

‘Let's say, the seed was sown.' A tinge of grey had crept into the expensively suntanned complexion. ‘If that's the lot, Officer, or even if it isn't, I've got to get some more sleep –'

‘I shall need the name and address of the guy from LA.'

‘My office will know. The name's Brown. Only you won't find him home. He was on his way to Hong Kong.'

‘Came a long way round, didn't he?'

‘Not if he wanted to see
me
. Now, if you'd kindly get the hell out of here –'

‘What about the others?' the detective countered, with a touch of fatherly reproof. ‘They're milling about, out there at the University, like sheep without their shepherd.'

‘Shit to that, and mind your own business.'

‘Oh, but I am,' Jurnet objected, still doing the artless bit. ‘My business is to find out who killed Loy Tanner.'

A sudden sob shook the slight frame. ‘Fat lot of good that'll do him.'

‘None at all. But hopefully it won't do any to the person or persons who killed him either.'

‘I want to go to bed!' Lenny Bale put his fists in his eyes like a thwarted child. ‘I don't want to think about it!'

‘Unfortunately, sir, it'll still be there when you wake up. That's the thing about death, it only gets deader.' The detective waited a little. Then: ‘One other thing you might be able to throw some light on. That white van of yours, the one with the rainbow on it. It was found this morning parked on the Chepe. Could well have been there all night.'

‘The Chepe?'

‘Name we have for that open space across from the hotel. Acts as a kind of overflow car-park for the Virgin. What I was wondering was whether Loy might not have come by after the concert for some reason.'

Lenny Bale received the suggestion with no apparent unease.

‘For none I can think of. If he did, it wasn't to see me.'

‘To find out how your business deal had gone, I thought –'

‘If you think I'd ever discuss a business deal with Loy, you don't know me – and you certainly don't know
him
.'

Jurnet protested mildly, ‘I'm doing my best.'

‘What I always say to them, it's a matter of trust. Either you accept without question that I'm doing my best for you, or you get out – right? Did you know –' the man demanded – ‘that Lijah Starling owns half a dozen streets in Brixton, to say nothing of a flat in Eaton Square and a villa outside Golfe Juan? All my doing, and he knows it. Johnny now, he's county, so he's gone into land. Thanks to me, he's got a couple of sporting estates in North Norfolk with more pheasants than you could count in a lifetime. Neither of them would ever dream of handing over a penny without I say so. Trust, you see. Complete trust.'

‘And Loy?'

The other shrugged. ‘Two-room dump back of King's Cross, and a beach hut at Havenlea, rented by the season.'

‘How's that? What did the lad do with his money?'

‘Don't ask
me
! Numbered account in Switzerland, for all I know, or krugerrands under the bed. Fair enough.' Bale's face, which had for a moment crumpled itself into furrows of childish spite, reassumed its aspect of incredulous grief. ‘His money, to do what he liked with –'

‘Wonder who'll come into it now he's gone.'

‘Guido said something about an old ma –'

‘You've never met the lady yourself, then?'

The other shook his head. ‘Not a chance. With Loy, everything was a secret. Ask him about his mother, he'd have sworn it was a virgin birth.' With a sharp upward look from under the thick eyebrows: ‘Did you know he couldn't bear to be touched physically? Touch his hand by accident and he'd jump like he'd been stung.' The man brooded upon this last for a moment, then finished, ‘I'll take a bet that's why he chose the guitar – a good excuse to put a hunk of wood between himself and anybody trying to get close.' Voice breaking: ‘Don't you find that terribly sad, when the world's so full of people longing to get close?'

Lenny Bale sat down on the bed. ‘I really am very tired.'

Jurnet looked at him carefully. Then: ‘Sleep,' he said, pulling back the bedclothes.

The detective went out of the room, disconcerted to find the Portuguese chambermaid following behind. He had quite forgotten her presence, so still had she stayed, quiet as a mouse.

Outside in the corridor he closed the door gently, and turned to her. ‘Hope you're not going to get into trouble over that apron on my account.'

‘Sod that apron,' the chambermaid said surprisingly. She looked up searchingly into the detective's face. ‘Who this Loy?' she demanded.

‘Who indeed?'

Jurnet went down to the ground floor, choosing the stairs in preference to the lift. He needed a short interval for thought. The Georgian staircase, swooping in graceful arcs from floor to floor, suited his purpose admirably.

Arrived once more at the desk, he spoke to the receptionist's back. ‘Anywhere here I can make a phone call?'

The receptionist turned reluctantly. Her carefully constructed face was a shambles. Out of the ruins a young girl peered out upon a world in desolation.

‘I just heard it on the radio. Have you heard the news? They've murdered him, the swine!'

Jurnet answered, ‘I did hear something about it.'

Jurnet found Johnny Flowerdew the hardest one to explain, to himself as well as his colleagues, as they foregathered in the Superintendent's room. The Superintendent himself had not disguised his derision.

‘Hereditary enemies!
The fellow's been having you on. Unless it's a publicity gimmick he's trying to manipulate us into giving currency to?'

‘I don't think so,' Jurnet persisted, in his mind's eye a vision of that knowing face, the dark smudges of suffering under the eyes. ‘Hereditary's what he said – but after he'd told me how it was, I couldn't help thinking maybe
heraldic
expressed it better. Like those knights in armour in old tapestries, forever threatening the blokes opposite with their lances, but nobody actually hurting anybody.'

‘A game, is that what you're saying?' The Superintendent sounded mollified. Robert Tanner, the great Norfolk rebel, had been one of his childhood heroes, and the historical conceit pleased him. ‘Just so long as you're not asking us to believe that Tanner's Rebellion is still alive and kicking 450 years after the event!'

Except that Johnny Flowerdew had asserted exactly that.

The young man had straightened his back against the dubious ergonomics of the plastic chair, issue No. 3760/ 259/M/ black, eyes narrowed as he peered past Jurnet and the dull green walls, and the snazzy blinds with vertical slats which proclaimed to all and sundry that, whatever some might think, Angleby police had made it to the twentieth century. The eyes, light blue and set in the head with a disconcerting shallowness, looked all the way back to a time when a boy king had sat on the throne of Tudor England, and in Norfolk the common people were being pushed out by sheep.

‘It all began as a local, a family, quarrel, really. The Flowerdews and the Tanners were neighbours, connected by a whole network of marriages and shared business interests. But –' courteously – ‘you know all about that.'

‘Don't be too sure! Tell me.'

‘What a time it was!' Johnny Flowerdew spoke as if he had been there. ‘A farming revolution was taking place, just like today. And just like today there were money mountains waiting to be picked up, fortunes to be made by the wide boys who weren't queasy about turning peasants out to starve and fencing in the common lands where they'd been pasturing their cows since the year dot. Still, as my revered ancestor John Flowerdew undoubtedly said, more than once: there's always a price to be paid for progress, so long as you make sure you aren't the patsy who has to pay it.

‘Every now and again, men driven desperate by hunger would go out and pull down the odd hedge or two, for all the good that did. Well, one day some of these hedge-levellers paid a call on John Flowerdew who, being the bloke he was, bought them off by paying them to go and pull down a hedge belonging to his old pal, Robert Tanner, instead.

‘‘‘Old enemy's'' what I mean, of course. For reasons I don't have to go into, those two had had their knives into each other for years. But it's a funny thing –' Carried away by the force of his own narration the young man jumped up, came over to the desk and bent towards the detective until each could feel the other's breath on his face. ‘Up to that moment Robert Tanner had been in on the land-enclosing racket as much as any other wheeler-dealer. Then, suddenly – whether it was the sight of those poor tykes, bones showing through their skin, or simply a pigheaded determination to get his own back on that twister Flowerdew – it doesn't do, does it, to assume that heroes invariably act from the highest motives? – from that day forward he's a changed man, throwing in his lot with the peasants, and risking everything as the captain of an army of 30,000 men in armed revolt –'

‘And,' interposed Jurnet, who had never had much use for heroes, win or lose, ‘ending up dangling from the ramparts of Angleby Castle, to say nothing of leading to a bloody death thousands of simple men who trusted him.'

‘That's the amazing thing. Robert Tanner was nobody's fool. He must have known from the beginning he hadn't a hope in hell. John Flowerdew must have split his breeches laughing when he saw him hanging up there, the crows pecking out his eyes.' Johnny Flowerdew laughed in his turn. ‘Funny, isn't it, the way time twists everything arsy-versy? A paradox, 'pon my soul! There they are, those villainous Flowerdews back in the reign of Edward VI, taking the bread out of the mouths of the poor by planting the very hedges which today's ecologicals throw themselves in front of bulldozers to preserve. So who's to say who's good and who's bad? But when I pointed out as much to Loy, was he wild!'

‘Don't tell me either of you took it seriously?'

The other stayed quiet for a moment. Then he said, ‘I didn't. Not at first, at any rate. When the two of us first met – it was in some lousy pub in Havenlea – and found out what each other's name was, I just thought, Flowerdew and Tanner, that's a coincidence. But Loy, he took it in deadly earnest, right from the start. Being a Tanner meant a lot to him. It was our karma, was what he said – Tanner and Flowerdew, two opposing poles, light and dark, good and evil, programmed by fate to be at each other's throats through all eternity –' Johnny Flowerdew suddenly covered his face with a long, white hand. When he took it away, his eyes were still dry, but stricken.

Jurnet said, ‘You never believed all that guff?'

‘I did and I didn't. I don't and I do.' Desperately: ‘He devised roles for us to play, don't you understand? For me and for Lijah, for Lenny, Guido, even that pinhead, Queenie. We might not have cared for his type-casting, but there we were, each with his own part no one could take away from us, ever. Now –' the voice, dry like the eyes, held something akin to terror – ‘we shall have to find out who we are, all over again.'

Jurnet had said, ‘I need to know what you did after the concert.'

Johnny Flowerdew answered tiredly, ‘I didn't do anything. I went back to the caravan, made myself some cocoa, and went to bed.'

‘Let's take that a bit slower, do you mind? You returned to the caravan, you say, the one you share with Mr Starling, right? Was Mr Starling with you? And what about Loy?'

The other shook his head.

‘No one ever knew where to find Loy after a gig. It was one of the unwritten rules – leave the boy wonder alone till he's once again fit for civilized society. Way we all feel after a show as a matter of fact – though me, I go for a mug of hot cocoa. Short of a complete blood change, best thing I know to bring down the adrenalin level and get beat out of your system till next time. As for Lijah, he's always the last one off the stage, letting down his own tension as he lets down his drums. Last night he and Guido came in just as the cocoa was boiling up. I told Guido there was plenty for three, but he didn't fancy any. He helped Lijah stow the drums under the seat, then he said good-night and went off.'

‘Back to his own van, I suppose?'

Johnny Flowerdew responded irritably, ‘I suppose. Am I my roadie's keeper? Hold on, though.' A moment's hesitation; then, on a note of apology: ‘That's not quite right. Lijah didn't want any cocoa either, and there was this bloke the University had laid on as a bodyguard, ninety if he was a day, out there in the freezing cold. Don't jump to any false conclusions.' The young man stared poker-faced at his interlocutor. ‘I am not a caring person. I am, if anything, insensitive and bone-selfish. It was simply that I couldn't stand pouring all that good cocoa down the sink. So I went outside and asked the poor old geezer if he could use a cup.'

‘Any trouble locating him?'

‘None at all. They've rigged up a couple of floods for us out there, and he was standing bang under one of them, as if he hoped it gave out a bit of warmth as well as light.'

‘He must've been glad of the cocoa.'