Death of a God (16 page)

Mr Luis Ferrol, a small man with a face which looked anything but foolish, said, in surprisingly good English, ‘The policeman asked who sees Loy Tanner on Wednesday night. I see him Tuesday, so is of no interest.'

‘Oh yes, it is!' Jurnet contradicted, a sudden conviction that at last he was on to something tangible sharpening his tone. Sergeant Ellers unobtrusively got out notebook and pencil. ‘Take your time, Mr Ferrol. What I want you to do is tell us exactly what you saw, and when, as close as you can make it.'

‘I speak of
Tuesday
night,' Luis Ferrol said severely, as if he had no great faith in either the intelligence or the accuracy of the Angleby police force. ‘Quite late, I think. I am on night duty and after eleven, about eleven and a quarter, perhaps, I go outside for a cigarette. Very strict ‘‘No Smoking'' in the kitchen, except for the chef. One day,' the man announced in a voice of dry precision, ‘I will be chef, and I too drop my cigarette ash on the
canard à l'orange
to show the fucking customers what I think of them.

‘From the kitchen,' Luis Ferrol continued, back to his normal tone, ‘is door to the car-park, and I am standing there smoking – not long because is very cold – when white van comes and Loy Tanner comes out.'

‘There was enough light for you to recognize who it was?'

‘Not enough. At first I think only, crazy young man to be out, the night so cold, in only T-shirt and jeans, no sweater, no anorak. Then he goes to the door into hotel for visitors, where there is plenty light, and I see it is Loy Tanner; and I think to myself, that one, he has his money to keep him warm.'

‘You're absolutely sure it was him?'

‘I am sure, because he go into hotel and in one minute he is out again, and he come to me more near than you are now. I think he sees the red of my cigarette and know I am there, by kitchen door.'

‘What did he want?'

‘In lobby of car-park entrance is a single lift which have notice to say ‘‘Annexe Only''. So he come out again and ask me if lift is OK for taking him to room 317.'

Jurnet's heart leaped. ‘You're sure you've got the right number?'

‘Sure. Is Fatima's floor, how I know. Sometimes, when I have afternoon off, and Fatima is on duty but not busy, I go to see her in room 317.' Mr Ferrol smiled confidingly, as one man to another. ‘I know 317 very well. You understand me? If 317 is taken, we go in 318 or 319 or whatever is empty. All good beds, but 317 best. Very good springs.' Frowning: ‘In summer, with many tourists, sometimes all rooms are taken. All morning tourists sightsee. Afternoons they say their feet kill them, they rest on bed. By time they are ready to walk some more, I must be back in kitchen for preparing dinner. But this time of year, no problem.'

Well, well, thought Jurnet, fascinated by this glimpse of the submerged underlife of a four-star hotel rising like scum to the surface. Still, not his business, thank goodness.

‘Did Tanner say anything else?'

‘Nothing. I tell him for 317 he must go through to the main hall, where is lift will take him to the third floor. He goes and does not say thank you.'

Jurnet and Sergeant Ellers exchanged glances.

Jurnet said, ‘Well, Mr Ferrol, I'm sure we're very much obliged to you for your help with our inquiry. Just for the record, Detective-Sergeant Ellers will get what you have just told us typed out, and ask you to sign it when you have read it through and are satisfied that it is an accurate transcript. I'm sure you won't mind waiting a few minutes longer.'

‘When you type what I tell about Fatima's rooms, will you show the manager?' The man did not sound bothered one way or the other.

The detective answered easily, ‘I do my job, and leave him to get on with his.' Turning to the woman, ‘And Miss Valdao – I hope I've got that right – thank you again for bringing Mr Ferrol along to see us.'

‘Nothing,' the woman protested: took Jurnet's hand and kissed it.

Ferrol said, ‘You come to Virgin restaurant, I see everything is very nice for you.'

Down at the other end of the room the young PCs were killing themselves.

‘Thanks very much.' Jurnet retrieved his hand as soon as he decently could. ‘One thing's for sure, though. After what you've just let on about the chef, I'll know not to order the duck.'

A slow, beatific smile suffused the sallow features of Luis Ferrol.

‘You want I should tell you what he does to the
boeuf en croute?
‘

‘Do you know what Jews do when somebody dies?' Lenny Bale demanded, when Jurnet and Jack Ellers, receiving no answer to their knock, and disregarding the ‘Do Not Disturb' sign, entered room 320 with Fatima's pass key. Second Coming's manager evinced neither surprise nor displeasure at the intrusion. ‘They sit about on low chairs for a week, and all their friends come round as if they were paying a social call. They bring cakes, and smoked salmon sandwiches, make tea, tell jokes. They call it a
shiva
. I was taken to one once, and it was marvellous. It made you see how it's possible to lose the one person who made life worth living and still go on loving God instead of cursing his guts.'

‘My information –' Jurnet spoke with careful detachment, avoiding the sly, sideways glance of his subordinate – ‘is that it's only done in the case of a close member of the family.'

‘And Loy, you mean, wasn't even a second cousin three times removed? Only my bloody life, that's all.'

Bale swivelled round on the stool on which he was perched in front of the dressing table; readdressed himself to the task with which he had been occupied when the detectives came through the door. A mess of cosmetics littered the dressing-table top. A fair sample of them had found their way to his face.

The man looked ghastly. The eyes were smudged about with purple shadow: improbable lashes, heavy with mascara, swept up and down in crazy arcs, depositing a stippling of sooty specks on to a skin powdered to a graveyard pallor. The mouth, deep crimson, was painted in a cupid's bow.

The man wore a sleeveless dress of purple lamé, slashed from hem to thigh and from neck to navel. Bracelets concealed some of the scars on the naked arms. Those that remained visible exactly matched the colour of the lamé.

Lenny Bale said, ‘Did I tell you I offered to have a sex change, if it would make him feel differently towards me?' He studied the travesty in the mirror with narrowed eyes, apparently not displeased with what he saw. Two large tears, filtering through the absurd lashes, compounded the ruin of the
maquillage
. ‘I'm sorry now I didn't go ahead with it. I ought to've, even if Loy did fall about at the idea. ‘‘That titchy chipolata!'' was what he said – that boy, you had to laugh! – ‘‘What difference could
that
make?'''

‘Mr Bale,' said Jurnet, reminding himself, with some effort, that there was a Jewish prayer which thanked God for the marvellous diversity of His creatures – ‘Will you please tell me exactly when on Tuesday Mr Brown of California telephoned you?'

‘Oh –' intent on drawing an ebony line through his left eyebrow – ‘who can say exactly? Some time in the afternoon.'

‘But how is that possible? You were out at the University all day overseeing the preparations for the concert. My information is that it was getting on for dark before you broke up.'

The man put his eyebrow pencil down.

‘You're right! Now I think of it, the call came through as I was getting myself a shower before dinner.'

‘Between 7 and 8 p.m., would that be?'

The other shrugged. ‘I suppose.'

‘How is it, then, it wasn't far from midnight when you phoned the roadie to tell him of your sudden change of plan – that you had to be back in London next day?'

‘I was in two minds. I'd never missed a gig before except for illness. It took me that long to decide. Anyway, I don't think it was as late as that.'

‘Mr Scarlett says it was.'

‘
Mr
Scarlett. You don't have to believe every word that midget tells you.'

‘How's that?'

‘He knows his job, I'll give him that. Only reason I keep him on. He affects me aesthetically. Still, I could give him the sun and the moon, and any harm he can do me, the shit, he'll do it.'

‘Why should he do that?'

‘Jealousy. Jealous of me and Loy being so close.' Bale swished the split skirt aside to show shapely limbs in spangled tights. ‘Jealous of anybody with a pair of gams to set the world on fire. Ask him, why don't you?'

‘I just did.'

Guido Scarlett was not in his caravan, the University deep in the peace of the Easter vacation. Eventually a gardener, raking the last of the old year's rubbish from under the oak trees, had pointed downhill towards the little river which formed the University's northern boundary.

The detective's shoes made little squelching noises and left tracks of a darker green on the sodden grass. The landscape had an air of unreality, the trees two-dimensional, a scribble of smoke rising lazily from the chimney of a farmhouse on the further side of the stream up to a smoke-coloured sky. Winter; except that the still air was pierced like an arrow with birdsong and a springtime racket of rooks. Two swans moved silently with the current, the ripples widening behind them.

Jurnet walked on, preoccupied, unseeing. The conviction that, if only he had the mother wit to recognize it, he already possessed enough knowledge to name the killer of Loy Tanner, tormented him with a hurt that was almost physical.

Once he had looked up the word
‘clue'
in a dictionary.
‘That which guides or threads a way through a maze.'
All right for lexicographers, when every copper knew that, nine times out of ten, it was just the opposite: a will o' the wisp luring you into the nearest bog with its delusive light.

What would have happened to that Ancient Greek bloke back in the labyrinth if the wool, the clue, he'd been unwinding had suddenly broken off and he couldn't find the end down there in the dark?

Maybe he ought to ask Miriam for a ball of her knitting wool to practise on.

As always, the thought, the mere name, of Miriam both lightened and intensified his mood. He looked about him and was suddenly astonished by the beauty of the scene: possessed by an unreasonable joy that even the sight of Guido Scarlett, down on his knees by the river, his face buried in his hands, could not entirely dispel.

Jurnet said, in his jolly-rozzer voice, ‘Come along, now! Things can't be as bad as all that.'

The man crossed himself and got to his feet; such a small elevation that the detective was shocked afresh by the disparity of scale between limbs and torso, embarrassed by having to make the man look up to speak to him. Humiliation should be a punishment deserved, not the visitation of a pitiless god.

‘What you want?'

‘A few words, that's all.'

‘Nothing I can tell you.'

‘Nothing?' Jurnet shook his head in a friendly way. ‘For a start, you could tell me why you're down here carrying on.'

‘Law against it, is there?'

‘Look,' said Jurnet, keeping the smile in place, ‘there's no call to be hostile. No one's against you, so long as your conscience is clear.'

‘Not
for
you, neither.'

‘That's where you're wrong, then – that is, if you meant what you said about loving Loy Tanner. If you did, you'd want to help us catch the bastard that did for him. But then, maybe, you were only kidding.'

‘What nobody understands,' said Guido Scarlett, low at first, then louder, ‘was the honesty of him. The rest of you – oh, you got manners, some of you. You lean over backwards to be nice to the poor handicapped bugger whose own mum took one look at him and lit out with a chap come to the door selling life insurance.' The man drew a trembling breath. ‘A little kid'll call out, ‘‘Look at that funny man, Ma!'' and his Ma hushes him up quick, because tha's manners, in't it? But that kid, let me tell you, he's got more sense than all you well-bred shitheads put together. I am what I am!' Guido Scarlett shouted. ‘Do I make myself clear? And that's what Loy – Loy out of the whole world – took me for –'

Jurnet interrupted tartly. ‘You are what you are all right, chum, which is a self-pitying bugger with a chip on his shoulder the size of a giant redwood. No wonder your legs are bandy, carrying that weight! So now, Mr Scarlett –' with a complete change of tone – ‘if we've finished with the histrionics, suppose you tell me exactly what you did with yourself Wednesday night, after the ball was over.'

There had been little enough to tell. Once the audience had gone, it had been the usual hassle. Take down the backdrop, disconnect the electrics, take a look that everything backstage had been left in decent order. Check that the lads hadn't left anything behind. ‘Only extra job I had to do, Lenny not being there, was to settle up with the programme sellers and the usherettes. I'd brought along the money in case –'

‘How was that, then?' the detective interrupted.

‘Phoned me the night before, didn't he? Must have been nearly midnight – about having to go up to town on something special that'd come up. He'd try to be back for the gig, but if not, well, I knew what to do.'

‘Did he say what the business was in London?'

‘You must be joking. I'm only the roadie. Dust beneath the fucking chariot wheels.'

‘After the clearing up was done, what then?'

‘Helped Lijah with his drums, like I always do. We brought them out to the caravan. Johnny was there already, making cocoa – yuk! I said good-night, went and took a leak, and got myself to bed.'

Jurnet said, ‘You haven't mentioned Loy.'

‘No one ever went near Loy after a gig, and he never went near nobody.'