Death of a God (6 page)

‘Believe me, Mr Jurnet, I know a creepin' Jesus when I see one, specially one that's been giving all of us here on the market the willies, hanging up there in the garden all week like the washing hung out to dry. First go off, I reckoned some of the lads been having a bit o' fun after closing time, ho ho ho, I don't think. Sense of humour's a peculiar thing, I always say. But why me, for Christ' sake?' The nose flared momentarily purple with affront. ‘A whole van to unload, Mr Jurnet, an' me there on purpose to make an early start, never mind my fingers an' toes, to say nothing of you know what, dropping off wi' the cold. But I knew it weren't no good shifting the bloody thing somewhere else. You lot'd be bound to find out, you're so clever, an' think I was mixed up in it, some way. So I left it just as it were while I come up to the station to say what I'd found –'

There was another pause. The handkerchief reappeared, this time pressed into service to wipe lips that needed no wiping; that were dry, and trembled a little.

‘I come up them steps into the garden' – the tremor had transmitted itself to the words spoken – ‘I didn't go anywhere near those fuckin' crosses – I'm chapel myself, I don't go for graven images – I weren't even looking that way. All I wanted was to get it reported an' done with. But I did look, Mr Jurnet. I had to. Like someone said, ‘‘Over here, Nosey,'' an' then took hold of my head an' twisted it round. Even then, my first thought was, tha's funny! He can't be in two places at once.

‘An' then I looked again –'

Loy Tanner hung naked and dead on the centre cross in the Market Place garden. On either side, the effigies of Lijah Starling and Johnny Flowerdew still suffered their emblematic agonies. But they had become meaningless – or rather, Jurnet amended, obscene travesties, juxtaposed, as they now were, to the real live death that hung between them. The detective saw nothing contradictory about his choice of adjectives.

Violent death, in his book, did indeed have a life of its own. It was a monster to be exposed and disarmed, a monster and an obligation. An obligation put upon him Ben Jurnet, personally. A settling of accounts between a killer and a victim in no position to do the job himself.

Not that he personally felt any more drawn to the Loy Tanner who, the night before, had, against his conscious will, enslaved, enchanted and enraged him. In the beginning might be the beat, chum, but not in the end – oh, not in the end! No heart pulsated in that carcass tied to the cross by someone who, all too obviously, had been in too much of a hurry to make a proper job of it. It was a stranger who hung there, head flopped against one shoulder, lank hair over a face invisible save for a single eye which stared out at the burgeoning day with supreme incuriosity.

The Superintendent observed bad-temperedly, as if the sight of such sloppy workmanship offended him, ‘The wonder is he ever stayed put in the first place. One side's all right, but the other! Those cords round the wrists and feet, and that belt fastened round upright and waist together – if anything of a wind had blown up during the night he'd have come down like Humpty Dumpty, bringing the cross with him. Picture cord, is it, or what? We'll see. My guess is the belt's the fellow's own.' With a disdain that, in other circumstances, would have made Jurnet's mouth twitch at the corners: ‘It looks the kind of flashy rubbish a pop singer might wear.'

The detective, who had been studying with a kind of paralysed attention the thin line of pink-tinged ooze which, originating at the back of the dead man's head, had meandered a turgid way across throat and chest to deposit a terminal moraine just above the elaborate silver belt which had earned the Superintendent's disapproval, said, ‘I never noticed him wearing it last night, though he could have had it on underneath his sweater, I suppose, and not showing.'

The other, as Jurnet had known he would, made no attempt to hide either his astonishment or the dark suspicions that went with it. ‘Don't tell me
you
were at that concert!'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘Unplumbed depths,' commented the Superintendent with a dourness that for a moment made the other wonder if his superior officer weren't himself a Second Coming freak. ‘From all I hear of the demand for tickets, I can only hope you didn't queue for yours in police time.'

‘No, sir,' Jurnet returned neutrally, determined to provide the bastard with no further information, nor any explanation he wasn't entitled to. But then, immediately, because, bloody hell, there it was again, that inescapable compulsion to tell the bugger everything he ever wanted to know, more than he wanted to know: ‘Somebody passed on a couple they weren't using.'

‘Somebody must've wanted to get into your good books –' the tone was brazenly sceptical – ‘considering what they were fetching on the black market.'

‘Not me, sir. My fiancée –'

‘Hm!' The Superintendent said no more, Miriam being the one subject between them upon which it was silently understood that a strict communication blackout prevailed. Jurnet, for his part, squirmed in inward mortification.
Fiancée
– of all the wimpish words! Yet what could he have used instead? My life, my love, my live-in torment? He'd like to see the Superintendent's face if he had.

The Superintendent squinted up at the sky, daring it to be day before he was ready for it; then, turning to Jack Ellers, commanded peremptorily: ‘Sergeant, let the men know they've got another two minutes, not a second longer, to get that body on its way to the mortuary, or we're going to find ourselves with an audience bigger than they had at the Middlemass last night. As to that cross he's hanging on, I don't care how hard the frost is, I'll give them another five minutes to get it out of the ground and on its way. Pinner must have taken enough pictures to fill an album. From here on we'll have to make do with those.'

‘Yes, sir.' The little Welshman set off on his errand, happy to have something specific to do.

‘And make sure those screens go up at once,' the Superintendent called after. ‘Such as they are. Round Thompsett's stall as well. I'm assuming that by now that waxwork of Jesus is safely with Forensic, or if it isn't, I want to know why.' To Jurnet, with a friendliness as unexpected as it was welcome, and as chancy to put your trust in: ‘I'll leave it to you, Ben, to pick out some PCs you reckon impervious to the charms of the grief-maddened maidens who, I suppose, will be converging on the spot in their millions once the news is known. We'll be needing crash barriers too.'

‘Might be a good idea to get the other two crosses down right away as well. At least take away some of the drama.'

‘Absolutely right!' But the Superintendent shook his head all the same. ‘You know as well as I, Ben, the Police can't remove them just like that. Quite apart from the bishop excommunicating us with bell, book and candle, what that gorgon at Parks and Recreation might stir up by way of revenge I don't care to think. The damn things are supposed to stay up till Easter.'

‘I didn't know. Still, a crucifixion without Christ –' Jurnet began reasonably.

‘Even more delicate! Think of all the theologians who've been praying for that very thing! No – we'll have to pass this one to the Chief. Definitely a matter to be settled at the summit …'

In the garden above the Market Place, the screens had gone up at last, obscuring the effigies of Lijah Starling and Johnny Flowerdew from the waist down. At least the plaid jockstrap and the baby-blue shorts were no longer in evidence, Jurnet thought thankfully. The centre cross was down, and with it its burden of death. Over by the kerb, two men were shutting the rear doors of the mortuary van.

Absent, Loy Tanner was more than dead: null. Murdered, the last song sung, the pop star had been transformed into an intellectual exercise, a puzzle to be solved like it might be
The Times
crossword. No prizes offered for a correct solution, only a load of stick if you miffed it.

Carrion.

A brother.

For a moment, heavy with the weight of their thoughts, the two detectives stared into the awful emptiness between the two remaining crosses. Then they turned and made their way uphill, back to Headquarters: side by side, but not speaking.

‘One or more, that's the question.' The Superintendent leaned forward in his chair, his carefully tended hands moving fretfully among the photographs strewn about his desk, picking up here one print, there another, for a brief, dissatisfied glare before going on to the next, and the next. ‘Tanner looks light enough. All the same, no easy job to hold him in place while you get those cords tied and that belt cinched, all the time balanced on top of a ladder –'

‘I'll go for one myself.' Jurnet, standing with Sergeant Ellers at the further side of the desk, spoke with conviction. ‘Two would have made a neater job of it.'

‘Do you think so?' The Superintendent was in one of his perverse moods – which Jurnet, making all due allowance, recognized as his superior's personal reaction to violent death just as his, Jurnet's, was anger. What the detective had never succeeded in discovering was the real target at which the perversity was directed – the murderer inconsiderate enough to leave no visiting card, or the subordinates too thick to recognize a clue even if it stuck them up the what's-it with a meat skewer.

Unless it was the corpse itself, the dumb bugger, knowing all, yet silent as the grave.

The Superintendent went on with the same air of insult, ‘He, or they, had to get down that statue of Christ before they could string Tanner up in its place.'

‘Nothing to it,' Jurnet proclaimed confidently. ‘The hands and feet weren't really pierced. The nails were only for show. Each figure has rings at the back for hanging on to hooks which are fixed to both the horizontals and the verticals of the crosses. No more difficult than hanging up or taking down a curtain.'

‘Where'd you get that idea?' The Superintendent went back to his irascible turning over of the police photographer's handiwork. ‘I can't find anything here that shows –'

‘Can't you, sir?' Jurnet's tone was a little too innocent. ‘I must just have happened to notice it.'

‘Ben's right,' Sergeant Ellers confirmed, without batting an eyelid. ‘If you'd turned the Christ over at Nosey's stall you'd have seen the rings sticking out of the back.'

‘If you say so.' Glowering, the Superintendent latched on to another of Pinner's shots. ‘This one shows several blurred impressions where a ladder stood, or rather, was shifted about. Metal. Got one at home just like it.' Peering closely: ‘Fairly deep, all of them, so probably made before the frost set in and nothing to do with us.' Jurnet and Ellers exchanged glances, the latter's full of suppressed mirth. ‘For all we know, Mrs Parks and Recreation shins up there every day with a feather duster.'

Taking evasive action, the little Welshman inquired, ‘Anything yet from Dr Colton?'

‘Time you knew better than to ask! Just as light doesn't show up till it strikes something, so words don't exist for the good doctor until they're typed in triplicate, each copy on different coloured paper, for filing in three separate cubby-holes known only to himself and God.' Relenting: ‘I did, however, after several abortive attempts to reach him by phone, elicit a return call, in which he finally admitted, if with considerable reluctance, that Tanner was indubitably dead, most probably as the result of several blows from a blunt instrument which was on the small side but fairly heavy. As to the time of death – as usual, he wants to have a word with the Meteorological Office,
Old Moore's Almanac
and the man in the moon before committing himself.'

Jack Ellers asked, ‘Is he suggesting Tanner was actually killed right there in the Market Place?'

‘I'm quite sure he's doing nothing of the kind. All the indications are that he was killed elsewhere.' The Superintendent sat back and his patrician features suddenly relaxed into a smile of great sweetness. At the sight Jurnet's spirits lightened almost as much as if the smile had been intended for him.

‘What I like about Barney Colton,' the Superintendent said with a confiding affection, ‘what I honour the man for, is that, whatever the pressure, he will never compromise his integrity with facile guesses, not even to get an importunate superintendent off his back. Time of death is devilishly difficult to ascertain, and nothing's going to make Barney pretend it's an exact science when it isn't. For the moment, at least, we can usefully speculate only as to the time the body was placed on the cross.'

‘It certainly wasn't there around eleven,' said Jurnet, well aware of what he was starting. ‘There wasn't anybody then, except a few cats on the prowl. Apart from anything else, the floodlighting doesn't go off till 11.20. I can't see a murderer, however barmy, deliberately choosing to crucify his victim in the full glare of the floodlights. He'd be bound to wait until they went off.'

The Superintendent said coldly, ‘From what you say,
you
appear to have been about in the Market Place, Inspector.'

‘Yes, sir. My fiancée and I –' Jurnet's frown was occasioned less by being obliged once more to raise the curtain on what he did with himself in his own time than by the necessity of having to employ again that despised appellation – ‘fiancée and I stopped off there on the way back from the concert. We didn't know about the crosses staying up till Easter, and she wanted to take a closer look at them. They were certainly all present and correct at that time.'

Deciding he might as well get everything relevant off his chest once and for all, the detective continued, ‘She – my fiancée, that is –' he stammered a little, fancying, quite without foundation, the Superintendent's upper-crust face stiff with disdain – ‘she knows Tanner's mother. Miriam –' hanged if he was going to repeat the bloody word one more time! – ‘runs a knitwear-manufacturing business, and the woman is one of her outworkers. She'll need to be told.'