Ritual Murder (23 page)

“Don't you think I've tried? I even spoke to Sandra about taking on the job—took her to see a bungalow I got out of the
Argus
. Bathroom an' two lavs, with low flush. Fit for a king! But she turned it down flat. Couldn't let down that Holy Joe of hers in the Close, would you believe it?” Joe Fisher thrust his face close to the detective's. “Millie's happy here, in't that right? An' Willie—that kid's got a head on him like a man o' forty. He'll keep me in my old age yet.”

Jurnet observed with satisfaction, “He hates the sight of you.”

“On'y natural, in't it?” The man chuckled indulgently. “My ol' man, I'd'a cheerfully drowned him in his bath for a Mars bar, on'y he never took one.” He tugged at his jacket pocket, and brought out a wad of ten-pound notes. “Fer Willie's sake—“ he pleaded.

“Put them away, or I'll chuck them in the river and you after.”

“I been frank wi' you, Mr Jurnet. I'm desperate.
You
tell me what t' do.”

“Ask the Citizen's Advice Bureau.”

“Mr Jurnet!” There was hurt and reproof in the man's voice. When he spoke again, after a measurable pause, there was something else that the detective was unable to put a name to. “In that case, I got no alternative, have I? I'm givin' myself up.“

“So you
did
throw that bomb!”

“Don't talk daft!” Joe Fisher said. “I told you about that. I'm givin' myself up for the murder of Arthur Cossey.”

“Well, Ben, what do you think?” The Superintendent, wearing evening clothes, sat back in his chair looking beautiful.

Jurnet, without being aware that he was doing so, glowered at his immaculately turned-out superior officer. Nothing could have convinced him, tired and unkempt as he was, that the Superintendent hadn't got himself up like that on purpose; one more skirmish in the undeclared war that was, in some way he had never quite been able to fathom, a mutual declaration of love.

He answered the question. “Hard to say. I'm sure his first thought was to find somewhere safe to hole up—and where safer than the nick? Then, too, he wanted to make sure the League of Patriots wouldn't go gunning for him either down at the scrapyard or over at Mrs Cossey's. Once they knew he was out of reach, where they couldn't touch him, the heat was off, for the time being at least.”

“The news-flash only said that a man was helping with inquiries.”

Jurnet said, “I had to keep to the usual form. What I've done, though, is have a word with a couple of blokes who, by now, will have spread it round town, and in the Lord Nelson and the Cock and Crow in Farriersgate in particular, that the man we‘re holding is none other than Joe.”

The Superintendent considered.

“I suppose that
is
all that needs to be done?”

Jurnet's hostility evaporated. One thing about the Super: you could count on him to say the right thing at the right time.

“I've sent Hinchley and Bly down to Bridge Street, just in case; and a chap to Mrs Cossey's, on the chance the Patriots know Joe lodges there. PC Blaker's off duty, but he tells me he intends to be down on the staithe anyway tonight, birdwatching. Seems a long-eared owl's been seen down there, and he's offered to keep an eye out on the side. Actually, I reckon it needs eight to ten men to cover the Fisher place properly, what with the river one side and the playing-fields at the back—”

It was too much to hope for.

“Watch it, Ben!” the Superintendent advised, the kindliness thinning to let the underlying iron show through. “You're letting your heart run away with your head again. You've let it be known that Fisher's in police custody, and therefore not to be got at, and that should be enough.” He leaned back in his chair, seemingly in no hurry to get away to his golf-club dinner. “You'll pass all this over to Hale and Batterby in the morning, of course?” Chuckling, “I suppose you know, Ben, anywhere else but here, you wouldn't last ten minutes, the way you hog everyone else's job without so much as a by-your-leave?”

“Can't see why you should say that, sir, when I've just brought in a fellow says he murdered Arthur Cossey.”

“Congratulations.” With a smile that took away all offence, almost, the Superintendent tapped the type-written pages in front of him with a well-manicured nail. “He says he killed Cossey because the boy threatened to go to the authorities with some trumped-up story about having seen him beating his son, and he was afraid the child could be taken into care. Does that sound plausible to you?”

“Plausible that Arthur Cossey could have made the threat?” The other nodded. “Only too much so. He seems to have regarded the world as full of potential dupes.”

“How right he was, the little monster!” The Superintendent tapped the pages again. “Now tell me if this confession is worth the paper it's written on.”

“It's that, all right. For what it doesn't say, maybe, as much as for what it does. Mightn't be a bad ploy, assuming you'd done a killing, to make a confession with more holes in it than Swiss cheese, so no one'd take it seriously.”

“Does Joe Fisher have enough brains for that?”

“Oh, he's quick, especially with a spot of danger to set the grey matter churning. A safe house and a clean bill of health at one go. Not bad, if you can bring it off.”

“What are the holes, would you say? You noticed the bit about the boy's clothes?”

“Where he says he dumped them on the floor? One of the deliberate errors—who knows? He'd know about the state of the body, thanks to Professor Pargeter's radio chat.”

“But the tomb? Could he have known of that as a potential hiding-place? I must confess I don't quite see him as one of the Reverend Doctor Delf-Polesey's readers.”

“Arthur may have mentioned something about quaint school customs. Harbridge, the verger, could have spoken of it to his sister-in-law, Mrs Cossey, at some time or other; and she could have passed it on. What interests me more, though, is what he says about the broom.”

“I missed that.”

“I might not have noticed either, if the Professor and I hadn't almost fallen over it when we found the body. It had been left just inside the door, and it was pretty clear that the murderer had used in on his way out to brush out any of his footprints that showed up on that bit of drugget. The handle was tested for prints, but there was nothing. Now, when Joe describes what he saw at the dig—the table, the measuring sticks, and so on—he says there was a broom, lying across the table. And later on, after he'd killed the lad, he says that on his way out he scuffed about a bit to make sure he hadn't left any prints behind in the dust. Nothing about using the broom to get rid of them.”

“Proof of innocence or another deliberate mistake?”

“That's the sixty-four-dollar question. I haven't forgotten I saw him in the cathedral before the murder ever happened, asking where Little St Ulf was buried.”

“Meaning he could have had a good look round then, and seen enough to be able to give a plausible description without having even been there on the day of the killing.”

“Exactly. If it wasn't for that broom, that is. Because when I was having a word with Harbridge, earlier on, he told me it was getting on his wick, the way Pargeter and his lot were mucking up the north aisle and leaving it to the vergers to clear up after them. So, he said, he'd put a good hard broom on the table, where they'd be sure to see it, in the hope they'd take the hint and clean up their own mess from then on, instead of tracking it in and out all the time.”

“I can't see how that conflicts with—”

“Put it there Saturday night, Harbridge said, after closing time. The night before the murder.”

Rosie Ellers's cooking, like Rosie herself, was full-flavoured. Miriam, who regarded the discovery of fire as a male conspiracy to keep women chained to the kitchen stove, had once labelled it pornographic. If his wife should ever do in public what she did in the privacy of her kitchen, she had warned Sergeant Ellers, he, as a police officer, would have had no choice but to run her in for corrupting public morals.

For Jurnet to sit down to such a love-feast without his love by his side was a kind of gastronomic masturbation, an activity he had little taste for. Rosie watched with growing concern as the detective mashed his pâté diligently, fiddled about with the roast duck so as to make it look that he had eaten some, and begged off her justly famous crème brûlée on the unconvincing ground that he was full up to there.

“Ribs still playing you up?” she wanted to know.

“Nothing I can't ignore, nine-tenths of the time.”

“In that case,” Rosie declared bluntly, “if you aren't ill, you're too old to be dying of love.”

“You don't have to tell me.”

“You go on that way,” Mrs Ellers continued pitilessly, “the boys are going to stop calling you Valentino. Jack—” she appealed to her husband, sitting back rosy and replete, his waistband undone—“can't you take him down to the station and stick a tube down him like what they did the Suffragettes?”

“Don't go by the way he looks,” Jack Ellers replied callously. “He's tougher than old boots, actually. 'Tisn't love the Inspector's dying of: it's aggravation. Once he finds out who bumped off Little St Arthur, he'll be as beautiful as ever he was.”

Jurnet said, “The Sergeant seems to have overlooked the fact that we already have a man in custody who has confessed to the crime.”

“Oh ah,” returned Sergeant Ellers, unimpressed. “The day Joe Fisher confesses to something he actually did they'll be crowning me Prince of Wales.” The little Welshman belched delicately behind his hand, and continued, “You'll no doubt be wanting to hear how I got on with the Honourable Liz.”

At that Rosie, like the well-trained police wife she was, got up from the table and went to do the dishes; leaving the kitchen door ajar, however.

Jurnet said, “You lived to tell the tale, at least.”

“Only just! Next time, I promise you, I'm going to put in for danger money. Aristocracy, too!”

“Spare me the lurid details. Just tell me—did she confirm Epperstein's story?”

“Did she not! Once she got going on the subject of that poor mutt's performance—or, more properly, lack of it—there was no stopping her. I hardly knew where to put my face, let alone various other portions of my anatomy. It was what you might call an illustrated lecture, see? Everything but the magic lantern slides. In the end I just shut my eyes and thought of England.”

“So long as you didn't shut your ears as well. I want to know what she was up to while Epperstein was asleep.”

“You'll find it hard to credit, but what she says she did, once our ramshackle Romeo had finally dropped off, was shin over to the gallery in the south transept where it appears Master Stan Brent was dossed down for the night, and have an extra good screw with him, to make up for what she'd missed out on over the other side of the premises.”

“You're joking! What's the Dean and Chapter running there in the Close, for God's sake? A C of E knocking shop?”

“Just what I thought myself. I s'pose, though, if it could never occur to you in a million years that such and such a thing could possibly happen, you can't hardly be expected to take precautions against it. What the lady—and believe me when I say I use the word loosely—says she did next morning is, she and Brent waited till the Communion service started, and then slipped out of the South Door; went down to the river, to that café at the marina which always opens up early on Sundays. After they'd eaten, Brent went off. Liz says she doesn't know where, and she came back to the cathedral to rouse Mr Epperstein from his slumbers.”

He paused, and Jurnet asked, as if he had expected more, “That the lot, then?”

“Not quite. After I left the Aste ancestral pad, I went down to the marina myself. I figured wiping the Hon Liz out of your memory wasn't like wiping the coffee-mug rings off the table tops, and I wanted to have a word with whoever was on at the café early on Sunday. It was on the cards he, or she, might remember something.”

“Any luck?”

The little Welshman grinned.

“It turned out to be an Eyetie, and you know what they are. He remembered Liz so well he could have painted you a picture if his name'd been Leonardo da Vinci instead of Marcantonio. But what he remembered was that she and the bloke with her had a blazing row over the Early Morning Special—so much so that the fellow stamped out, leaving her to pay the bill.”

“From what I've seen of Mr Brent, that bit's in character, anyhow. Did your Italian gather what the row was about?”

“His English isn't too hot, unfortunately. He just had the impression the girl was pressing the fellow to do something or other, and he wouldn't buy it.”

“Mm.” Jurnet filed away the information along with all the other pieces of the puzzle for which, as yet, he could find no place. “Funny thing, though. When I saw her a little later that morning, coming down the nave, she certainly didn't give the impression of a girl who'd just had a blazing row with her beloved.”

“Well, she wouldn't, would she? If what Mr Epperstein says is true, making a monkey out of him must have set her up for the day. Lovely girl, Liz. Praying Mantis to her friends.”

Rosie came back into the room with a cut-glass bowl full of fruit, which she set on the table. With an expert hand she peeled apples and pears, cut oranges into segments, apportioning them between small plates, along with grapes and bananas; placing her finished work before the pair at the table without inquiring whether they wanted it. She herself selected a bright green Granny Smith into which she bit without bothering to peel it. A trickle of juice oozed at one corner of her mouth, and Jurnet, who had been watching her mindlessly, suddenly reddened, looked down, and took a piece of orange from his piled-up plate.