Death of a God (2 page)

Both figures were strongly modelled, every muscle and tendon made explicit: stomach sucked in, the flesh taut over the arching ribs. By contrast, the central figure was a mere sketch, arms and legs seeming a bit too long, hands and feet a bit too large; otherwise, only a hint of nipples, no discernible navel, a blank oval of face obscured by straight reddish hair falling to the shoulders.

Could be, thought Jurnet, forcing himself to look, to make a judgement, it was this very lack of definition which made the image so compelling. Clever bugger, whoever had thought it up. Clever too, to have ducked out of making the Christ figure actually look like the third member of the pop group. Not even the Bishop could have stood for that. If it just so happened, drawing on your own imagination, you chose to fill in the blank with the features of Loy Tanner, the lead singer and darling of the charts, the responsibility was yours and nobody else's.

Only why, then, taking into account all that had been deliberately left out, had its maker fashioned a figure full frontal, not so much as a G-string, and equipped with a set of tools formidable enough to set any pagan fertility god drooling with envy?

Jack Ellers exclaimed in the accents of a stage copper, ‘Hello, hello, hello! What have we here, then?'

A small white van, driven too fast, had come hurtling round the corner into the roadway on the further side of the strip of garden. Abreast of the statuary, the driver slammed on the brakes and the vehicle slid, protesting, to a halt. Across the side of the van, a rainbow painted in psychedelic colours arched over the words, printed in Gothic black-letter:
Second Coming
.

The man who emerged from the driver's seat was a surprise and a discomfort. Not a dwarf exactly – too tall for that – but a grotesque, a massive torso set upon stumpy legs that moved as if in perpetual apology to the splendid body above. The face was dark and Italianate, the black hair curly and vigorous. The man wore an anorak over a shirt of bright checks, his Levis hacked short by a hand that had scorned to disguise its anger at the need for the alteration.

As the two detectives watched, the man rumbled bow-legged to the rear of the van, unlocked the doors, and took out a metal ladder and a large, patterned beach towel, both of which – with no regard for the daffodils – he tossed over the low wall which closed off the garden from the street. Jurnet, on the point of lecturing him on this want of respect for municipal flora, bit back the words as he observed the effort with which the man himself painfully negotiated the insignificant obstacle.

Once over, however, he propped the ladder against the cross where the black man hung, positioned the towel over his shoulder, and then scampered up the rungs with a surprising, simian ease, the grim face relaxing with the pleasure of, for once, doing something physical well. He took the towel in both hands and, bending forward, rubbed the braided hairdo energetically, the beads clicking like thrown dice, and then began a brisk towelling of the arms and chest, leaning dangerously out from the ladder to reach the parts furthest away.

Alarmed for his safety, Jurnet stepped forward and grasped the uprights, placing a steadying foot on the bottom rung.

So far from exhibiting gratitude, the man's face darkened.

‘How is it some geezers never learn to mind their own bleeding business?'

‘It
is
my business, chummy. Detective-Inspector Jurnet, in case you're interested. Someone give you permission, then, to muck up these flowers?'

‘Move off, man, will ya? You're making me nervous. The Bishop give me permission, if you must know. Got it direct from God, I shouldn't wonder.'

Jurnet shook his head.

‘Not in the Bishop's power, chum, to give you permission or not, as the case may be. Not even, with all due respect, God's. Property of Angleby Borough Council, paid for by the citizens of this fair city. My advice, if you doubt my word, come down from that ladder before you break your neck, go over to the Bishop's Palace and stamp on some of His Lordship's flowers and see how
he
likes it.'

The sun had come out strongly again. A myriad of tiny rainbows glimmered in the drops which still bedewed the bodies of the crucified men. The sight seemed to excite the man on the ladder to a frenzy. ‘Jesus!' He cast up his eyes despairingly at the bleached sky, and back again to Jurnet. ‘Stop me getting on with my job and we'll bleeding sue you!'

‘Oh ah? Sue me for what, would that be?'

‘You're the ones know the names. All I know is, stop me getting these three dried off proper and you'll be lucky to leave the court with the shirt on your back. They cost a bleeding fortune. Jesus!' The man wailed again as the sun seemed to grow brighter, to aim its shafts at his charges with brassy malice. ‘Look at that, for Christ's sake!' – pointing to a small, mottled swelling on the negro's left thigh.

Jurnet tilted his head, took a look. ‘Nothing but a bit of roughness. Could be anything.'

‘Could be, you mean, because he's been left out wet in the sun because some toffee-nosed dick won't let me get him dried off proper! Or could be because the fucking Israelite what made the three of ' em comes from some place it hasn't rained since the Ark and hadn't a clue what'd happen if they got wet and then dried quick by the sun. Ten minutes more of you holding me up and the whole bleeding bunch'll look like they've broke out with leprosy.'

‘You don't say!' Jurnet repressed a sudden impish conviction that the Israelite in question had known more about the English climate than he had let on. Then, as a Jew-to-be, atoning: ‘Why didn't you say so before? Any more towels in that van? We‘ll give you a hand.'

‘Queenie!' the man called, and the passenger side of the van opened, letting out a blare of pop music and a girl. The girl was very young, wispily blonde. Except for a quiff of fluorescent emerald rising spikily above a childishly bulging forehead, there was nothing special about her. What was special was the something in the man's voice when he called her name. Jurnet recognized that something – felt it reverberate deep down in his own throat as it did whenever he himself spoke, whenever he so much as thought, the name of Miriam.

The girl came out sulkily, as if the something meant nothing to her apart from boredom and irritation. She listened to what the man had to say, reached back into the van, jeans stretched tight over meagre buttocks, and straightened up with two more beach towels in her arms. With a flashy ease that could have been intended as a deliberate taunt to one who had just accomplished the same manoeuvre with so much effort, she skipped over the low wall, and walked unconcernedly to the foot of the ladder, mauling more daffodils as she came; surrendered the towels without curiosity into the waiting arms of the two detectives, and turned to go back the way she had come.

Jurnet said: ‘Mind the flowers, love,' – an admonition to which she made no answer other than to grind her dirty white track shoes even more remorselessly into the wet earth.

Back at the van, the passenger door re-opened, the music came tumbling out again. The girl stood on the pavement, one hand on the door handle, swaying to the guitars and the insistent drums. Singing along with them in a child's voice, piercing and off-key:

‘Behold thou art fair, my beloved, behold thou art fair.
Spun gold thy hair,
Thy lips a thread of scarlet, mouth most sweet.
How beautiful thy feet,
Jewels the joints of thy thighs,
And thine eyes,
Like doves soft and grey,
Mirrors of the day,
Fair as the moon, bright as the sun, and as fine.
I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine.'

‘She one of your group, then?' Sergeant Ellers inquired, drying the feet of the Christ figure with a tender regard for the spaces between the large, splayed toes.

‘Queenie?' Again Jurnet, doggedly working his way up towards the baby-bluer boxer shorts, registered the tone, the something. The man on the ladder paused in his work, his head a little to one side, listening. He smiled lovingly, his face transformed but not foolish. ‘That'd get us in the charts, I don't think! Queenie's our –' he hesitated, as if seeking the right word, and came out primly with: ‘our general assistant.'

‘That's nice.'

The smile disappeared. The ladder teetered alarmingly. ‘What you mean, nice?'

‘Touchy, aren't you? Nice. What I say. Just making conversation. You better look out up there, you'll be ending up in the Norfolk and Angleby in plaster.' The little Welshman stood back to admire his handiwork. ‘Kneecap's as high as I can go, unless you got another ladder with you.' And to Jurnet, mischievously: ‘You're the beanpole, Ben. OK if I leave the working parts to you?'

Jurnet did not deign to reply. The whole business had begun to give him a disagreeable feeling. What the hell had prompted him to act the Boy Scout – perform a
mitzvah
, as Rabbi Schnellman would put it, a good deed that was always, at the same time and by definition, a religious duty? Down below in the market some of the traders had come out from their stalls and were gazing up at the two detectives' efforts with undisguised amusement. Suppose some influential member of the Angleby Jewish community, suppose the Rabbi himself, should happen to come by? A fine religious duty for a trainee Jew to be out on the Market Place for all to see, drying off Christ's balls before they blistered in the sun!

The thought had no sooner lodged in Jurnet's mind than, being the man he was, he had persuaded the owner of the ladder to descend from it and pass it over to him, as being the one out of the three of them best fitted by nature to reach every furthest crevice of the three pendent bodies. Concentrating his attention upon the still damp surfaces as areas to be dried and nothing more, he worked onward and upward, towelling the outsize genitalia of the middle figure, the terrible eyeballs of the other two; gently dislodging the last of the wet from the crown of thorns. Sergeant Ellers held the ladder still, the short-legged man watching with no noticeable appreciation of what was being done for him: occasionally shouting up brusque reminders like, ‘Behind
both
ears, for Pete's sake!' and ‘That left armpit, man – I could wash my socks in it!'

Out on the pavement, beyond the low wall, the girl was still singing.

‘Set me as a seal upon thine heart, a seal upon thine
arm.

Nothing can do us harm.

I suck thy breasts, I breathe thy breath,

Our love is stronger far than death.
Our limbs like leafy boughs entwine.
I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine.'

Headquarters, that haven from the hurly-burly, that retreat among brothers who – even those who were in a position to slap you down and frequently did – were always on your side when it came to the crunch, seemed doubly welcoming to Jurnet as he and Ellers came out of the ambiguous sunlight into the no-nonsense of fluorescent strips that bathed one and all in the same dispassionate light. Even the little Welshman's: ‘Fine thing if the Super was looking out of the window and saw us,' could not defuse this feeling of wellbeing.

‘Even if it was in his line of vision – which it isn't, as you well know – helping distressed citizenry's the answer to that, Sergeant. What His Nibs is always on about.'

‘Distressed? That bugger? Didn't even say ta. And I'd thought two complimentary tickets at least.'

Jurnet regarded his chubby subordinate with genuine surprise. ‘Don't tell me you, the pride of the eisteddfod, would actually
choose
to spend an entire evening being deafened by that aural pollution, even for free?'

‘There you go again, showing your age! Life on this planet didn't come to an end with the Beatles, boyo, nor the Stones neither. Not that, if Shorty George back there
had
come across with the goods, I'd have felt able to squander them on myself. Flogged ' em – reluctantly, mind you – and with the proceeds bought a mink for Rosie, a Jag for me, and laid up the rest for the twilight of my days.'

‘Crazy!' commented Jurnet, making for the stairs. ‘Don't know about you, I think I've earned myself a cup of char –' Reminding himself, not too seriously, on the way down to the canteen, to ask the Rabbi if it was OK,
mitzvah
-wise, to reward yourself for something it was your plain religious duty to have done anyway.

The long, low room was crowded to overflowing, resonating with a cheerful noise that Jurnet absorbed with satisfaction, lowering himself into it as into the comfort of a hot bath. It was the real thing too, the Lord be praised. None of that tense mock-merriment such as preceded a match between Angleby United and one of the League big-shots – which was to say an advertised encounter with alien invaders arriving decked out in knuckledusters and broken-off bottle-necks in the club colours.

Not that demos were much better. These days, it seemed, you couldn't even take to the streets in aid of endangered woodlice without it all ending in tears and bloody noses, chiefly those of the police. As it was, PC Blaker, who rose respectfully from his egg and beans at the table to which the two detectives brought their brimming cups, and had to be urged hospitably to resume his place, could not conceal his gratification at being detailed for crowd control outside the University.

‘The hall there only holds 1,700, and that was sold out the day they put the tickets on sale. There'll be thousands coming along just to stand outside. Wanting to be part of it, the only way they can.'

‘Can't see why you're so cock-a-hoop.' Jurnet helped himself generously to the white sugar Miriam wouldn't have in the house, and leaned back comfortably. ‘Could be hairy. Like the Bacchantes in those Greek myths. Thousands of screaming dollies ready to stop at nothing to tear limb from limb the phantom lover they've been having it off with in their technicolour dreams and at last is there in the flesh – the mind boggles. Better you than me.'