Ritual Murder

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• S T Haymon
  
• Preface
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chapter Five
  
• Chapter Six
  
• Chapter Seven
  
• Chapter Eight
  
• Chapter Nine
  
• Chapter Ten
  
• Chapter Eleven
  
• Chapter Twelve
  
• Chapter Thirteen
  
• Chapter Fourteen
  
• Chapter Fifteen
  
• Chapter Sixteen
  
• Chapter Seventeen
  
• Chapter Eighteen
  
• Chapter Nineteen
  
• Chapter Twenty
  
• Chapter Twenty One
  
• Chapter Twenty Two
  
• Chapter Twenty Three
  
• Chapter Twenty Four
  
• Chapter Twenty Five
  
• Chapter Twenty Six
  
• Chapter Twenty Seven
  
• Chapter Twenty Eight
  
• Chapter Twenty Nine
  
• Chapter Thirty
  
• Chapter Thirty One
  
• Chapter Thirty Two
  
• Chapter Thirty Three
  
• Chapter Thirty Four
  

Sylvia Theresa Haymon was born in Norwich, and is best known for her eight crime-fiction novels featuring the character Inspector Ben Jurnet. Haymon also wrote two non-fiction books for children, as well as two memoirs of her childhood in East Anglia.

The Ben Jurnet series enjoyed success in both the UK and the US during Haymon's lifetime:
Ritual Murder
(1982) won the prestigious CWA Silver Dagger Award from the Crime Writers' Association.
Stately Homicide
(1984), a skilful variation on the country house mystery, was praised by the New York Times as a ‘brilliantly crafted novel of detection … stylish serious fiction', and favourably compared to the work of Dorothy L. Sayers.

Anyone who has read
Death and the Pregnant Virgin
, or who knows Norfolk, will recognize that Norwich is the starting point for my city of Angleby. But only the starting point. The city and its inhabitants are the figments of my imagination; and no reference is made to any living person.

S. T.H.

Pretending it was more convenient, Detective-Inspector Benjamin Jurnet parked his car in a side street and came into the Close by an alley few even of the locals knew, unless they were the churchy kind, at home in the purlieus of the cathedral. He did not care to admit, even to himself, that the FitzAlain Gate, the main gateway with its high pointed arch and its niches full of maimed statuary, casualties of time, daunted him.

For that matter he did not care to admit that he found the entire cathedral precinct not much less daunting than its ceremonial entrance. Why it should be so was hard to say. The lovely old houses sunned themselves like cats in the spring warmth: you could almost hear them purr. Mists of blossom veiled the shining flints, the mellow brick.

Beautiful. But definitely not Ben Jurnet.

Never mind: the Superintendent had to have his little joke. It was one of the perks of power. Jurnet had seen it coming before ever a word was uttered: the barely perceptible tremor at the side of the mouth, the eyes widening in a predatory joy. If they hadn't disliked each other, the two of them, just that little bit, they could never have worked so well together.

The Superintendent explained, “Getting in touch was the Bishop's idea, but the Dean's the one you'll be dealing with. Dr. Carver.”

“Oh ah.”

“Not that, so far as I can see, there's a blind thing we can do, except make the right noises—”

“And what might they be, sir?”

“Now, Ben—” the Superintendent was smiling unashamedly— “don't be bolshie. One touch of that Latin charm and they'll be feeding out of your hand—”

The road ahead, leading to the Upper Close, was empty save for two pigeons, decorous in grey-blue, processing with ecclesiastical gravity. A woman in a cardigan and a flowered apron was polishing the brass plate at the side of a nobly pilastered door. In the Upper Close, two of England's least memorable military commanders, Old Boys of the Cathedral School which filled the north side of the wide quadrangle, turned their bird-spattered backs on each other at either side of a central lawn. Between them, and shocking as a Coke tin on the manicured grass, a redheaded young man in jeans and T-shirt lay fast asleep.

Jurnet grinned with pleasure at the sight, and went into the cathedral.

Dr Carver, the Dean, awaited him at their rendezvous, the bookstall, where a poorly favoured woman of indeterminate years, unnerved by the proximity of the great, was rearranging the postcards and the illustrated guides with a good deal of unnecessary fuss.

“Detective-Inspector Jurnet, sir.”

“Ah, yes!”

If there was any element of surprise in the encounter, it was all on the cleric's side. Jurnet found exactly what he had expected. Even discounting the long black coat with its ample skirts, there was no mistaking the stigmata of high ecclesiastical office: the air of cheerful authority, the courtesy that masked, over so courteously, the merest suggestion of threat. The Dean, on the other hand, might well have been unprepared for the tall, lean man with the dark, Mediterranean looks that, back at Headquarters and strictly out of earshot, had earned him the nickname of Valentino.

The two shook hands and the Dean said straightaway, in tones which told the detective all he needed to know of the delicacy of diocesan relationships, “The Bishop takes the view that we have a duty to let the police know what has occurred. Others—among whom, to be frank, I number myself—would prefer to treat what happened on Saturday as a purely domestic matter: one for which, particularly considering that any hope of apprehending the culprit, or culprits, seems doubtful in the extreme, we have no right to trespass on valuable police time. However—”

He sucked in his lips with a slight smacking sound which said more than words; turned without further ado and walked away, not looking back, rightly confident the detective would follow. Broad and purposeful, the Dean nevertheless looked strangely diminished beneath the vaulted roof, a matchstick of a man against the thick-girthed pillars of the nave.

All that bloody stone! thought Jurnet, following as expected. Even the roof was stone, high enough for angels but heavy on the spirits as last week's suet pud. Any angels up there, Jurnet reckoned—and in a brief suspicious glance upwards almost fancied he glimpsed some, tucked away among the exuberant nonsense of the vaulting—would be hanging upside down by their feet in bunches, like bats, too torpid with cold to spread their wings and fly.

The Dean led the way down the nave to the north transept and a wrought-iron screen where a man in the long grey gown of a verger stiffened respectfully at their coming, and opened a door for the two to pass through.

“Ah, Harbridge!” the Dean greeted him. “There you are!” And to Jurnet, “Mr Harbridge had to have four stitches. Turn round, Harbridge, so the Inspector can take a look.”

“'Tweren't nothing,” said Harbridge, turning obediently. He was a man in his fifties, on the short side, but with a look of wiry strength that had Jurnet guessing he had not exactly turned the other cheek to his assailant.

The detective commented, “You should've called us in, soon as they started making trouble. We'd have handled it discreetly.”

“I'm sure you would.” The Dean inclined his head in acknowledgment of constabulary tact. “Though I imagine that on Saturday the police were sufficiently occupied in the immediate vicinity of Yarrow Road, without having any further call on their resources. Besides—” looking at Jurnet with eyes of a candour that contradicted the clerical opportunist the detective had put him down for—“we were so tickled to see them, don't you know? Visiting football fans don't usually include a tour of the cathedral in their programme. It was certainly something to encourage rather than turn thumbs down on.”

“Taking a risk, all the same.”

“My dear fellow, what else are we in business for? Whilst I appreciate your concern, Inspector, you really mustn't confuse Angleby Cathedral with a branch of Marks and Spencer. This is not a supermarket where everyone who comes through the door is a potential shoplifter. On the contrary, all who enter here are offered, to take away with them freely and without obligation, that most precious of all treasures, life everlasting.” The Dean smiled. “But I embarrass you. Now that sex has become as platitudinous as old boots, religion—have you noticed?—is the one subject left that can still bring a blush to the cheek, even that of a policeman. The Bishop would be sorry to know I made you feel uncomfortable. Let me show you what His Grace particularly wanted you to see.”

St Lieven's chapel, on the further side of the wrought-iron screen, was an unassuming space occupied by a number of rush-bottomed chairs, an equal number of embroidered kneelers, and a simple oak table by way of altar. Cromwell's men who, 300 years earlier, had knocked most of the stained-glass out of the cathedral windows, had thereby rendered unnervingly explicit the details of a painting on the altar which had inexplicably escaped their attentions, a medieval representation of St Lieven in his bishop's robes, holding in a pair of pincers what at first sight appeared to be a raw frankfurter and, at second, his tongue.

“Very fine, isn't it?” The Dean followed the direction of Jurnet's revolted gaze. “Now take a look at our more recent masterpiece.”

Between the two round-arched windows of the chapel, a sheet of brown paper had been cellotaped to the wall. Harbridge reached up to remove it, taking, so it seemed to the detective, a long time over the job.

The Dean asked, “Well? What do you think of it?”

Jurnet's first impulse was to laugh, a purely nervous reaction. He did not feel in the least like laughing.

On the other hand, he did not feel shocked either, which was what was clearly expected of him. He looked away from what was revealed beneath the paper to the faces of the two men, both servants of the cathedral, bound to it by bonds of love and usage. He saw that they were sorely aggrieved by what they saw, and because he was, on the whole, a compassionate man, and one given a bit too easily to anger, caught something of their pain and their outrage.