Death of a God (28 page)

‘Isn't today that Passover feast you were telling me about?'

‘Er – yes, that's right,' the other said, too quickly. The little Welshman, too practised not to notice, was too tender-hearted to let his doubts show. ‘Got to get over to the synagogue. They can't start without me. Know what? We were slaves in Egypt, today we are free.' Jurnet smiled bleakly. ‘Turn yourself into a Jew, Jack, you don't just get yourself a new religion. You get a whole new set of ancestors thrown in.'

‘So long as it doesn't include a mother-in-law!'

Jurnet thought, I should be so lucky.

Just to prove to himself that he didn't give a damn one way or the other, he went to the new place in Shire Street, and, the sole customer in the pink, candle-lit ambience, ordered scampi and gammon, followed by something gooey with whipped cream. He ate fast, too fast for his digestion, fancying the waiters angry with him for being no more than one; tipped enough for four and went back to his car feeling – not for the first time nowadays when he ate forbidden food – that he had lost that round. It had long ago dawned on him that what he was engaged in was a contest rather than a conversion, one in which his opponent held all the aces, to say nothing of making up the rules as he went along.

By the time Jurnet reached the quiet suburban street which housed the synagogue, the shellfish and the ham, with the dessert on the sidelines egging them on, were engaged in a life-and-death struggle which could have only one outcome. The detective drew up a little down the street from the modest, stuccoed building, hopped out fast and jettisoned the lot in a forsythia bush.

One game to God.

The sound of singing was coming from the synagogue hall – one of those happy Hebrew melodies that were still pierced through with melancholy, as if to celebrate the impermanence of joy. Jurnet stood on the opposite pavement listening, wondering why he had come. Or rather, knowing and not knowing.

There was no window on to the street to which he could press his face like the Little Match Girl out of Hans Andersen; no possibility that Miriam, moved by some irresistible telepathic urge, would come out, see him standing there under the street lamp, and draw him back inside with both hands. All the same, he waited a little longer, if only to prove beyond doubt that miracles never happened; then shivering a little, for the night had become cold – walked back to the car and drove away.

The thought of his empty home hateful to him, he drove to the Chepe, parked the car and went through the Fitz Alain Gate into the Cathedral Close, dark after the city streets, the lamps low-powered in their cast-iron lanterns. The enormous bulk of the cathedral, that great stone ship becalmed in the water meadows, loomed above him: no moon to catch the tips of the pinnacles, or strike a silver reflection off the golden weathercock which swung against the sky at the point of the steeple. All was in mourning for the dead God. Never a hint that anyone, not even the bishop, had to know the plot-line from past Easters, if nothing else: that, give it a couple of days, everything would be coming up roses.

Only a couple of days, after all He'd been through! Jurnet felt a genuine pang. He had a sudden vision of God the father whipping the grave cloths off God the son with ‘Easter Sunday, lad! Time to get the show on the road!' And God the son, poor bastard, hanging on to the covers with his mutilated hands, and pleading, ‘Just another ten minutes, Dad!'

Confused as to where he belonged, and to whom, Jurnet thrust his hands deep into his pockets and turned to go. One hand closed over something hard and metallic. He fished out Mrs Felsenstein's tin and opened it, read the name
Mara Tanner
scratched on the inside of the lid; noted that, in its time in his custody, the stick of charcoal had fractured in several places and another pencil point had gone for a burton.

He shut the tin, lowered it back into his pocket with elaborate care. Went back to the car, and drove to Sebastopol Terrace.

The first thing he saw when he turned the car into the narrow cul-de-sac was Miriam's red Golf parked outside Number 12.

Miracles did happen, he thought for a wonderful moment before his habitual caution intervened to suggest a dozen alternative reasons for the car being where it was. Even so, he parked a little further up the street and approached the house with a stealthy step, just in case, behind the flimsy curtains which let the light through but prevented him seeing who was in the room, Miriam was there to be taken by surprise; just in case she would greet him with a kiss full on the lips. Just in case she would say cheerio to the Felsensteins and go with him lovingly, back to the synagogue and the singing.

The woman who opened the door to his knock was a stranger. All he could make out of her, indistinct in the dim little hallway, was that she had on some long garment, housecoat or dressing-gown, and wore her hair spread loosely about her shoulders. Only when the extraordinarily brilliant whites of her eyes caught a reflection from the street lamp did he recognize Mara Felsenstein.

Taken aback by her unwonted appearance, all his senses poised to call ‘Miriam!', he stammered feebly something about it being unwise to answer the door to nocturnal visitors without first ascertaining –

‘I know!' She cut the policemanly rebuke short with a contrite smile. ‘Leo's always saying we must get a chain.'

She brought him through to the living-room where, in the stronger light, he saw with astonishment that, dressed as she was, in a straight housecoat of some dark blue material with a slight sheen, and with her hair, damp from washing, curling in delicate tendrils about her ears, she looked still a girl, a girl worth looking at.

Not that he had all that much attention to spare for her. Miriam was not there. Was she in the kitchen? Or upstairs in the bedroom, asking Mr Felsenstein how he was feeling?

‘The car!' Mrs Felsenstein exclaimed. ‘You thought Miriam was here! I'm so sorry –'

‘I was coming here anyway,' said Jurnet, sternly relegating his fantasies to their proper place, wherever that might be. ‘I just happened to notice –'

‘What a shame! She left – oh, it must have been an hour ago, at least. She's really too good, and she makes so little of it, doesn't she, she won't take no for an answer. She brought some work round, and then she said that as she hadn't any use for the car over the weekend, she proposed to leave it outside. She said it looked like being a fine Easter after all, and, if Leo was feeling up to it, why not take a drive out into the country? Go out each day, if we wanted to – she wouldn‘t be needing the car back till Tuesday.'

Mrs Felsenstein crossed to the hearth, carefully keeping her housecoat away from the one-bar electric fire standing in front of the empty grate, and reached over to the wooden mantelshelf for the car keys. Holding them up in evidence: ‘Wasn't that lovely of her?'

Jurnet nodded, a little jealous that Miriam could be so nice to other people.

‘Is Mr Felsenstein all right, then?'

‘If he doesn't feel well enough, we shan't go.'

‘Your husband seems to have to spend so much time in bed, I couldn't help wondering –'

The woman sighed, fiddled with the keys before returning them to the mantelpiece.

‘He's going through a bad patch, poor darling.' She looked at the detective, her face shadowed by concern. ‘You aren't here to speak to him, are you? He was up until twenty minutes ago. When he saw how much wool Miriam had left, he even tried to do a little work –' she nodded in the direction of one of the knitting machines where a few rows of green ribbing, rigidly held to a straight edge, hung below the needles – ‘but he had to stop and go up. He's had his pills, so he's probably sound asleep by now.'

‘Not to worry.' Jurnet smiled reassuringly into the worried face, and found himself surprised afresh at the woman's transformation. It was the hair, he decided. Not beautiful hair like Miriam's: quite ordinary hair, but soft about the face for once, instead of being pulled back severely like an old time school mistress.

Jurnet felt suddenly embarrassed that he had called. Such people went early to bed, and he must have interrupted her bedtime preparations. All the more foolish of her to have opened the door to him in the first place. When she moved, he became aware that underneath the rather flimsy housecoat she had nothing on.

He put his hand into his coat pocket and brought out the tin. ‘Actually, I just popped over to bring you this. I found it at the castle, after you'd gone.'

Mrs Felsenstein clapped her hands with pleasure, like a child. She took the tin from the detective, opened it, read the name scratched inside the lid as if to check it was really what she thought it was.

Jurnet said, ‘Sorry about the charcoal. I think that was my fault.'

The woman looked up, radiant.

‘It's nothing. Charcoal's always doing that. I can't tell you how glad I am to have it back. I know it's silly, but it happens to be just about the only thing I have left from when I was a child – sometimes, I think, the only thing that convinces me I ever was one.'

‘Glad it caught my eye.'

Mrs Felsenstein exclaimed gaily, ‘I'm going to make some cocoa. It ought to be champagne, a celebration, but cocoa's the best I can offer. You
do
drink it!' she added anxiously.

‘Hooked on it,' replied Jurnet, who couldn't stand the stuff. Wrily he wondered if he'd have found it easier to say no if Mrs Felsenstein had pulled her hair away from her face and pinned it up in the frumpish bun she normally went in for. On the other hand, tonight, still a slave in Egypt whilst Miriam escaped into the wilderness singing, even cocoa with a middle-aged woman with her hair in a bun was better than home with only an alley cat for company.

A prick of conscience accompanied the thought of the cat. The baked beans were going to be late tonight. He'd make up for it with a double portion.

Waiting for the cocoa to arrive, he wandered across to the knitting machines and, his back to the window, sat down at the one he designated as Mrs Felsenstein's. A piece of blue knitting, patterned with white sheep processing nose to tail – the front or the back of a sweater, he guessed – hung down from the machine, the design programmed by the plastic-coated punch-card he spied behind the rack of needles. After a little, he turned on the switch and listened as the machine began to hum pleasantly. User-friendly, he nodded approvingly, wishing he had the nerve to move the carriage, produce his very own row of fleeces growing from the hooves up.

‘You do it like this,' said Mara Felsenstein, reaching over his shoulder to move the carriage. The detective could feel her breast, generously rounded, pressing against his upper back as she leaned forward. ‘It's terribly simple – not, perhaps, to do well, but to do well enough. The machine does it all for you. All you have to do, really, is keep track of when to increase or decrease, or cast off.'

‘Joining the pieces together can't be easy.'

Jurnet would have liked to get up, but felt it would be not only impolite to do so, but worse: an implicit snigger.

‘Not my headache.' The woman moved away. ‘That's a job for the linkers. You should ask Miriam – she's got everything organized down to the last stitch. They're the ones who take the separate sections and turn them into a finished sweater. It's more interesting work, as well as better paid, but it requires a degree of concentration I can't be sure of – I mean, Leo may suddenly need me, and then I'd have to get up and leave whatever I was doing, no matter what.'

‘I suppose so,' said Jurnet vaguely. He switched the machine off, feeling, for no sufficient reason, that he had somehow escaped a situation fraught with some peril.

He sat on the couch where Mrs Felsenstein indicated, and accepted the proffered mug of cocoa. She chose the floor for herself, on the hearthrug close to the electric fire, whose glow made her skin look downy, young.

Jurnet steeled himself to take a sip of the drink, and found it less revolting than he had feared.

‘Did you, by any chance,' he asked, first sucking in his lips to trap the pinkish froth which coated them, ‘ever know a man named King, had the Punch and Judy show at Havenlea?'

‘The man who was killed? I saw it in the
Argus
.' Mrs Felsenstein set her mug down on the floor and looked up at the detective. ‘No – I never knew him – why? Except that when Loy was a child and we used to go down to Havenlea for the day, we always had to make a beeline for the Punch and Judy. Nobody ever saw who was working them, of course – there was just a woman who came round with a wooden box for the money. Whether the man inside the tent in those days was the man who was murdered, I couldn't tell you.'

‘Him or his father, I reckon, depending how long ago it was. I gather the Kings have run the Punch and Judy show at Havenlea for generations.' Jurnet smiled. ‘That hardly constitutes knowing.'

‘Sometimes I felt I did,' she replied seriously. ‘Know him, I mean. It was all so cruel and heartless – the things Punch did to everybody, always getting away with it, and acting as if it was all a great joke.

‘I always had to be the one to take Loy. Leo couldn't stand it. He'd take a deckchair down by the sea and wait for us to come back. But Loy loved it. All the children did, I suppose because it was so – well, anarchic. The one place in their small world where right didn't triumph, where honesty wasn't the best policy. Punch got away with everything, and I sometimes felt – quite wrongly, I'm sure – that the man out of sight moving the puppets about must be the same, or he could never have gone on doing what he did year after year.'

Jurnet said, with a slight emphasis on the last word, ‘He didn't get away with everything.'

‘No, of course not, poor fellow!' Mara Felsenstein drank some of her cocoa, and asked, a frown of worry instantly ageing her, ‘What made you ask whether I knew him? Is his death connected with Loy's in some way?'