Death of a God (14 page)

One thing to be said for murder. You didn't die alone.

Jurnet fell asleep again, and again awoke. Someone, something, was in bed with him.
Miriam had come back!

As he stretched out a hand in incredulous joy, a velvety pelt brushed against his cheek. The cat gave a small mew and settled itself into the angle between the detective's shoulder and neck.

For a long time Jurnet stayed still, afraid to move. The smell of sardine, breathed rhythmically into his left ear, was not unpleasant. Gradually the man relaxed, dared to put a hand on the gently rising and falling body. At the touch, the cat gave a little twitch, whether of pleasure or irritation it was impossible to tell, but did not otherwise shift its position.

Jurnet slept, greatly comforted. When he awoke in the morning, the cat was gone.

‘Havenlea is heavenly' proclaimed the poster flapping on its hoarding at the entrance to the pier. Beneath the outsize lettering, her suntan bleached by the past winter's gales, a long-legged girl in a scarlet bikini bared her gums at passers-by in a wide, wide smile, the effect only a little diminished by the fact that somebody had blacked out several of her teeth and decorated her dewy upper lip with a fine handlebar moustache. As Jurnet and Sergeant Ellers emerged from the shelter of the car-park, the wind came at them with the roar of a maddened elephant. Failing to topple the rash mortals who presumed to walk the sea-front of Havenlea in March, it took out its wrath on the poster girl. With a rip and a swoop a well-stacked bosom took off for the Arctic, or perhaps the Antarctic, Circle, the wind seeming to encompass both Poles simultaneously. Two storm-tossed gulls, legs dangling, shied away screeching.

The little Welshmanm sang, the wind wrenching away every note before it was out of his mouth: ‘‘‘
I do love to be beside the seaside
!'''

‘When I was a kid,' said Jurnet, making himself heard above the tempest, ‘we used to come here for the day, and I'd sit on the beach with my bucket and spade trying to dig down to Australia. Just when I seemed to be getting somewhere, suddenly, there was that bloody sea seeping into the bottom of the hole. Put me off the briny for good and all.'

‘Today's not going to change your mind.' Beyond the arid expanse of beach the North Sea heaved as though it might throw up any minute. ‘Can you imagine, a few miles over the horizon, there are blokes actually living out there day after day? Earn a fortune on those rigs, so they say – must deserve every penny of it. No wonder they take the place apart when they come on shore leave.'

Crouched against the stinging air, Jurnet lifted his head tortoise-wise, and let his disenchanted gaze roam along the sea-front, the boarding houses whited sepulchres in need of a repaint, the ice-cream stalls battened down as if against an impending visitation of Hell's Angels.

‘I had a job on the rigs, I'd stay out there with a good book if this was the best I had to come home to.'

‘Don't be taken in by appearances, boyo. This is the heavenly face of Havenlea. Behind the quays is where it's all at, the original Sin City of East Anglia. Every night, candles in the front rooms and women hanging out of the windows with everything hanging out –'

‘I know all about that. They say that when old hookers die, they go to Havenlea. Ever seen one of 'em by daylight?' After a moment he added, ‘Come to think of it, we just did.'

The woman who had opened the door to them at the trim little house with its front garden paved with pebbles from the shore, in the midst of which a model windmill gyrated manically, had her hair in curlers, her left leg in plaster, and her nose caged like a sugar mouse in an ingenious construction of gauze and sticking plaster. At sight of the two detectives' ID cards she burst out with, ‘How many times I got to tell you lot I fell down the stairs before you believe it? I got to do it all over again to prove it to you?'

When Jack Ellers replied placatingly that all they wanted was a word with Mr King actually, her wrath waxed unabated.

‘And how many times I got to tell you Punchy weren't even home at the time? Children's party, over Martham way. Give you the bloody address, if you want.'

‘Mrs King –' Jurnet tried his luck with no more success than his subordinate. The woman rounded on him.

‘Where'd you get that Mrs King from? Social Security put you up to it, did they, bleeding nosey parkers? They do it just once more, I'm going to complain to Helsinki.
Miss
Adelina Rice, if you must know. And, for the umpteenth time, Punchy and I are
not
, repeat not, cohabiting.' With a wink and a sudden, startling change to a bawdy bonhomie: ‘Lost the habit, as you might say, poor old sod!'

Swift to take advantage of the unexpected change of climate, Jurnet asked, ‘Any idea when Mr King will be back?'

‘Why you asking? In trouble, is he?'

‘No trouble at all. His daughter Queenie gave me the address –'

‘Oh – her? Lady Punk de Punk. What's she gone and done this time?'

‘Nothing that I know of. Just a routine inquiry.'

‘I know your routine inquiries,' Miss Adelina Rice snorted. ‘End up in front of a routine beak with a routine fine and a routine warning not to do it again, leastways not in daylight. On the game, is she?'

‘Nothing like that.'

‘Pity,' said Miss Rice. ‘Do her a power of good.'

‘You don't happen to know where Mr King might be?'

With another of her disconcerting swings of mood, the woman snapped back, ‘Not where the old bugger
might
be, copper. Where he bloody well is. On the beach, where else, having it off with one of his fucking dolls!'

Jurnet had taken to Miss Jerome, the social worker, on sight: the neat, uncluttered form, the serene but penetrating regard.

‘Queenie says I'm to tell you anything about her you want to know.' The young woman smiled, and pushed a hand through her short, dark hair. ‘Not that I know all about her, any more than I do about any other client. It's simply that she was one of my first, so of course I remember her case well, especially the mistakes I made.'

‘Tell me.'

The woman touched a file which lay in front of her, but did not actually refer to it.

‘Her mother was already dead when I came in on it. She died when Queenie was five. She was nine years old and living with her Auntie May when I first came on the scene because the child had run away, run back home for the third time.'

‘What was the trouble?'

‘That
was
the trouble, in a way. That there wasn't any. The aunt was a warm, loving woman, only too happy to provide a home for her sister's child. The house was bright and inviting, the child was kept clean and well-fed. I suppose you could say,' Miss Jerome observed, a slight quirk to the corners of her mouth, ‘that, from the point of view of the Department, Queenie's trouble was that she loved her father.' The woman looked directly at the detective, a look cool and appraising. ‘What a social worker needs, Inspector, to make the wheels run smoothly, is, ideally, apathy. You've probably noticed the same thing in your own line of work. Nothing is more complicating than love.'

Jurnet muttered, ‘I've noticed.'

‘By that age, of course, we could have made arrangements which would have enabled the child to remain at home with her father all the time. That is, if Mr King had been a different kind of man.'

‘And what kind of man was – is – he?'

‘Extremely violent. Never to her, so far as we were aware. I never found a mark on her. But the women he brought home – and over the years there was a regular procession of them, not one of a type one would willingly choose for the role of surrogate mother – he treated with hatred and contempt, if not worse. Some of the things he did –' Miss Jerome broke off. Jurnet noticed that her face had become tinged with pink, her eyes fierce. ‘I've never actually counted the number of times he was up before the court. But, obviously, not an environment in which to leave a vulnerable child.'

‘Drink, was that the trouble?'

‘Unfortunately not.' There was a twist of irony to the young woman's well-shaped lips. ‘Unfortunately, because, although drink, of course, is itself a symptom, not a cause, it does give you something to latch on to, you can go on from there. But violence that erupts without apparent reason, that wells up from deep within the personality as an innate part of it –' The social worker shook her head, seeming to find her memories distressing.

To help her along, Jurnet asked, ‘Was it back to Auntie, then?'

‘I was very young and inexperienced. I knew that, despite the way things were at home, it couldn't be the right thing to separate Queenie from her father when she was so determined to be with him, despite everything; but I hadn't the courage to come out and say so. It's been on my conscience ever since. Not that it would have made any difference, probably, if I had. My case supervisor was all for placing her with a different foster mother or, if that didn't work out, putting her into a home. We had a case conference and everybody said the same.'

Miss Jerome fidgeted with the file, but still did not open it.

Then she said, with the suspicion of a sigh, ‘That's about it, really. The next seven years are a record of Queenie being placed here, there, and everywhere, and always, first chance she got, running home to Daddy and all the horrible things that were happening there. The longest time she stayed in any one place was in a children's home whilst her father was in prison for attempted murder. Actually, he had Queenie to thank it wasn't a murder charge. She'd hit him on the back of the head with a bottle as he was tightening his hands round the woman's throat. The day he was released from gaol Queenie ran away to be home with him.'

‘Did he return her love, as you remember?'

‘I never saw any sign of it. Unless the very fact that he kept his hands off her – and we were particularly mindful, in the circumstances, of the possibility of sexual, as well as physical, abuse – was his way of showing it. In the end, not to mince words, we simply gave up: checked periodically to make sure Queenie was physically OK, otherwise left it at that. I can't tell you what a relief it was when she became too old for our ministrations, such as they were.'

Miss Jerome smiled ruefully. ‘Not one of my greatest success stories. Particularly galling, in fact, as I had grown fonder of the girl than, by any purely professional criterion, I ever should have.'

Sounding to himself like the Superintendent, Jurnet said, ‘One must never become involved.'

‘I couldn't agree more,' said Miss Jerome. ‘One day, when you've the time, you'll have to tell me how it's done.'

All of a sudden, Jurnet realized, the wind had ceased to matter. Tatters of grey still scudded across the sky; last season's crisp bags, defiantly unbiodegradable, still tumbled along the promenade ahead of him. But the wind, possessing him like any other piece of moveable trash, had caught him up into its own element. He had become part of it as a swimmer, after the first shock of cold and wet, becomes part of the sea. The detective found himself smiling hugely as he and his companion gingerly negotiated a flight of sand-drifted steps down to the shoe-clogging grittiness of the beach.

Jack Ellers face lightened.

‘Allah be praised! An oasis! Date palms! Minarets! Veiled houris with emeralds in their belly buttons! Don't tell me it's a mirage, boyo! Don't tell me it's a mirage!'

Ahead, where the promenade, describing a decorative semi-circle, provided a certain degree of shelter, a red-and-white striped Punch and Judy tent bellied in the wind. From the apex of its peaked roof a white pennon flew bravely, folding and unfolding itself to disclose lettering which, as the two detectives drew nearer, could be deciphered as KING PUNCH. The tiny proscenium arch, with its protruding shelf or apron and its scalloped valance edged with gold braid, was shadowy and untenanted.

‘Hallo, kiddies!'

Before a startled Jurnet could decide where the piercing, nasal voice was coming from, there was Punch in all his magnificence, wearing his hump with pride and sitting on the narrow apron, his white-stockinged legs crossed above red satin slippers trimmed with rosettes of gold ribbon, one hand delicately picking at a nose of heroic proportions, the other extended in regal acknowledgement of his invisible audience.

‘Hallo, you little perishers! Back again, are you? And there was I hoping the cold winter, all that ice and snow, would have done for you once and for all, but no such luck. Heigh-ho! Here you are again, snotty-nosed as ever, dribbling at either end – ugh! Why your loving Mums haven't chucked you out with the rubbish years ago I'll never know.

‘Well, then!' The puppet, large and prosperous-looking, with a face of utterly engaging malevolence, moved his head from side to side, the beads on his cap catching the light. ‘Are you sitting comfortably? Don't worry, it won't last. First your left leg'll go to sleep, then your right. Next, your nose'll begin to itch, then your funny bone. Before you know it, you'll be screaming with backache, toothache, headache, diarrhoea, constipation, and St Vitus' Dance. Oh, we
are
going to have fun!'

Jurnet called out, ‘Anybody home?'

At the question, Punch uncrossed his legs, and bent forward, head down, hump up, as he positioned himself for a good look. Then, without warning, a head topped by a black velours hat, wide-brimmed and romantic, appeared on the little stage, all but filling it: opened its gash of a mouth and demanded, in accents harsher but less nasal, ‘Whadya want?'

The detective did not introduce himself immediately. Given the overall dimensions of the tent, the owner of the head and the hat must be standing on a step or a box to bring himself up to the level of the miniature proscenium. But had he been as tall as one of Dave Batterby's blanketless Dinkas, the fact of his height would have been less disconcerting to Jurnet than the face presented for inspection. Allowing for differences of scale, the puppet and the puppeteer were identical twins. True, the living man possessed none of the doll's debonair sparkle, but the great nose and the chin curving upward in a crescent to meet it, were carbon copies: the face of one clearly intended by providence to be a Punch and Judy man.