Ritual Murder (27 page)

The Honourable Liz Aste did not look at all pleased.

Batterby, who, of them all, had had most to do with drugs in the city, said: “£125,000, £150,000, even, at street prices.”

The Superintendent, nevertheless, did not spare a glance for the packages strewn on the table in front of him. He did not look at the detectives either, sitting round the table as if waiting for the cards to be dealt. His gaze fixed upon some remote vista, not pleasing to the eye, he announced, “The truth is, we haven't a single bit of solid evidence to connect the girl with the death of Arthur Cossey. The most we can do is place her on our little list along with the others.”

Jurnet who, with his ribs re-strapped, was feeling fragile and unequal to the fray, ventured, “She says she needed him alive. There's something in that.”

“Unless he was threatening to give her away. And as to that—” and now it was at Jurnet, and at Sergeant Ellers beside him, that the Superintendent's hostility was nakedly directed—“our likeliest source of information, to wit Mr Stan Brent, refuses to say a word—except possibly, as I understand it, to complain to the European Court of Human Rights. In some way beyond my comprehension he seems to regard an intervention which undoubtedly saved his life as an unwarranted interference with his personal liberty.”

“Shock,” Jurnet interposed, his voice stronger with the certainty of what he was saying. “He feels violated. A psychological rape.”

“Rape?” The Superintendent did not sound notably receptive to the thesis, or at least, not from the source from which it came. “Then he'll get over it. They always do, sooner or later.” Jurnet, thinking of Millie Fisher, as the Superintendent, in his present mood, doubtless intended he should, said nothing. The other continued coldly, “Whilst in no way denigrating your personal courage, Ben, I can't say I'm best pleased when a suspect all but falls to his death with two police officers standing gawping within a couple of feet of him.”

Jurnet said, “We're not exactly proud of it ourselves, sir. Not that Jack could have done anything. He had his hands full with the girl. Seeing she'd just fed Brent an LSD sandwich unbeknown to him, it seemed a fair guess that what she had in mind was to give him a final push before he could start talking in earnest. But I should've moved faster. In the condition he was in I should never have let him get near the edge, and that's a fact.”

“Nearly went over with him, that's all!” Jack Ellers came stoutly to his comrade's aid. He looked at the Superintendent and decided to take a chance. “Maybe he should 'a done, at that. It would at least have shown willing?”

Wonder of wonders, the Superintendent's finely sculptured mouth twitched at the corners. The men round the table looked at the little Welshman with awed admiration. A communal sigh of relief hung in the air as the Superintendent addressed Jurnet in tones very different from what had gone before. “If you'd done any such thing, Ben, before we get this case tied up, I'd have had you on the carpet, if I'd had to scrape you off the nave floor to get you there!” A pause, and then: “
After
is another matter!”

The Honourable Liz, at first, had been quite specific. She knew nothing about the drugs found among her photographic equipment. She could only think that Stan Brent had secreted them there. She had been completely unaware of his activities as a drug pusher, the knowledge of which had come as a dreadful shock. Had she known, it hardly needed saying, she could never have contemplated any kind of relationship.

She had not known Arthur Cossey by name, though she supposed she might well have seen the child in the cathedral at some time or other without knowing it, since she understood he was in the choir. She had, alas, known of Brent's addiction to drugs, and had constantly pleaded with him to kick the habit. It had been her hope that the love of a good woman—

Yes, she had actually used those exact words, her eyes, lately so dull, bright with excitement. Poor, foolish Stan Brent, to imagine he could escape his ever-loving Liz!

That had been before the arrival of Professor Pargeter.

“Pargy!” She had thrown her arms round him and kissed him full on the lips before he could pull himself away with what seemed to Jurnet, watching, a kind of angry disgust; though whether with the girl or himself the detective had been unable to determine. “Darling Pargy! You've come to get me out of this horrible place!”

“I've come to do what I can to help, anyway. I've spoken to a solicitor—”

“Then you can bloody well speak to him again!” Liz Aste's welcome went into instant reverse. “I've already been offered scores of those. If
that's
the best you can do—”

“Now you're talking like a child.”

“Am I? Whose?”

“Liz—” The Professor faltered for a moment, not at all in character. Then, “Do you want me to telephone your mother?”

The girl shrugged her shoulders.

“Suit yourself.”

“Liz, you've got to take this seriously—”

“Are you quite sure that's what you want me to do?”

“Liz!”

“OK. Don't say. I didn't warn you.” The girl had looked up mockingly into the Professor's blue eyes, so like her own. She spoke over her shoulder. “Inspector! Could you get that dishy constable with the notebook back in here again? I've one or two revisions to make.” She certainly had.

Yes, she had pushed drugs, and it had been great fun. She wouldn't have missed it for worlds. There was this man called Cesario whom she had met in a London club and who, would you believe it, was the spitting image of Inspector Jurnet; and when, in the course of conversation, she had wished aloud she could think of some way to make a lot of money quickly, he had said he knew just the thing.

At first, what he had meant by that, it turned out, was getting her on the game. But when she had explained that she couldn't, as a matter or principle, bring herself to charge for what she had always given freely for the sheer joy of screwing, he had introduced her to some people who had set up the whole drugs operation for her, asking in return only a very reasonable percentage of the takings.

In the early days she had traded in pot only, and Stan Brent had been a big help; but then London sent down the names of people in Angleby who were in the market for the hard stuff, and he began to get very grotty. Seemed he had conscientious objections, which was a big laugh, coming from Stan Brent. Still, he had fixed her up with Arthur, who was a kid in a million, and everything had gone like a house on fire until the silly little muggins had got himself murdered, and Stan had refused categorically to have anything more to do with the heroin and the LSD.

Well, yes, as a matter of fact she
had
put a couple of domes into Stan's sandwich. She had only meant it as a lesson, a joke really. It had really been his own fault for thinking he could walk out of an understanding just like that, without giving notice or anything. If he had fallen over the parapet and got killed he'd have had only himself to blame. It wasn't as if she could take him before the Industrial Tribunal, or whatever it was.

All this the girl had related with relish, holding the Professor's hand the while, and watching with tumescent glee the Professor's progressive shrivelling as the narrative unfolded itself. She cheerfully volunteered enough names to make her the pin-up of the year of the drug squads of London and East Anglia. Only when asked why she had wanted a lot of money quickly, did she become coy.

At last she murmured, reddening like a schoolgirl, “You know, Pargy—the roof!” And when the Professor had stared at her in haggard incomprehension she had repeated impatiently, “The roof! The roof at Sydringham!”

For Jurnet's benefit she had gone on to explain that the roof at Sydringham, for years a martyr to damp rot, dry rot, and death-watch beetle, had lately entered a terminal phase; and all the Government had come up with was a measly £2,000. Two thousand pounds for the most perfect Palladian house in England!

“It isn't as if we're National Trust. The rain was coming in in buckets. Darling Siddy was at his wits' end.”

In other circumstances, the thought of one of England's stately homes saved from ruin by the profits of a drug-pushing operation might have brought a smile to Jurnet's face. As it was, there was too much ugliness, too much grief, too much death, between him and a smile; and he inquired merely, “Who's Siddy?”

It was the moment the Honourable Liz had been waiting for. She smiled tenderly at the Professor as she answered, “Lord Sydringham, of course. My father.”

“I take it,” said the Superintendent, as he and his underlings sat round the table, the girl's statement in front of them, “that Pargeter, and not the beetle in the roof, is the real key. Getting her own back on Daddy—the real, as against the official one.”

Jurnet nodded.

“Getting back at him, and at every man, I reckon. Drugs must have seemed just the job—not only encourage the bastards to destroy themselves, but make them pay for the privilege.”

“Sweet girl! But what about Arthur Cossey? Would she be capable of such a direct and brutal killing?”

“Oh, we're all of us capable,” Sid Hale put in unexpectedly, a note of reproof in his voice. “We're all of us capable.”

“Quite right, Sid.” Jurnet noticed without animosity how readily the Superintendent accepted from others what he would never countenance from Detective-Inspector Benjamin Jurnet. “I stand corrected. Let's stick to what matters, then—namely, opportunity and motive. As to the first, we know Elizabeth Aste was in the cathedral: she actually slept there on the Saturday night. As to the second—”

Jurnet said, “She told me she actually liked Arthur. Except for the newsagent, no one else, of all the people we've spoken to, has said that, not even his mum. Liz Aste said he was the only person she'd ever known with whom she had something in common.”

“And what was that?”

“That neither of them needed anyone else.”

To Jurnet's relief, the subject was not pursued, Dave Batterby launching into an elaborate analysis aimed, if not at clearing up the mystery, at least at impressing upon the Superintendent that Ben Jurnet was not the only bright hope of the Angleby CID.

“Neither of us needed anyone else,”
Liz Aste had declared, as if it were something to boast about; and Jurnet, pierced through with a sudden yearning for Miriam, had returned sharply, “Everybody needs somebody!”

“I don't,” the girl had insisted, before beginning to cry in a clumsy, unpractised way.

The attendant WPC waited a little, then got up from her chair and asked, “Like a cup of tea, love?”

Jurnet had said, “Make it two.”

He returned his attention to the meeting to find Batterby leaning back in his chair with an expression of becoming modesty on his face, and, on the Superintendent's a glow of approval in which it took a Jurnet to detect the underlying irony.

“That's a very valuable contribution—” The Superintendent had begun, when the telephone rang: an interruption so well-timed that Jurnet, whose admiration for his superior's powers was boundless, could easily have imagined it pre-arranged, if, after an instant's listening, the latter had not pushed the instrument along the table with an annoyance which seemed unrehearsed. “Seems you're wanted outside, Ben.”

Jurnet took the telephone, listened to what the sergeant at the desk had to say, and answered briefly. He got up. Then, cutting into the conversation without excuse, “I think we're all needed, sir. They can't find young Christopher Drue.”

The woman waiting at the reception desk was distraught but not dishevelled. The elegance was bonedeep, not to be dispelled even by the terror which so clearly possessed her. Only her voice had lost its cool self-possession.

Mrs Drue said, “I waited as long as I dared—longer than I should have, only I didn't want to shame him by phoning round asking if he was there. I had to give up calling for him: he was so afraid the other boys would call him a baby.” She moved her hands in a gesture of helplessness.

Jurnet did not insult her with facile reassurances.

“You've spoken to the School, of course?”

“Once I'd decided I couldn't wait any longer, I phoned everybody I could think of, however absurd it was to think he could possibly be there.” She managed what was almost a smile at her own foolishness. “I even started to put through a call to my husband—he's in Hong Kong on business—only, thank goodness, I had the sense to put the receiver back. No point in both of us going through this, unnecessarily.” She ended, with tremendous effort, “If it
is
unnecessary.”

The Superintendent said consolingly, “Let us hope that it is so. Above all, let us hope.”

Jurnet demanded, “What did the School say?”

“I phoned the headmaster at his home, and he said he would go over there and make such inquiries as he could, at that time of the day. But I couldn't just sit there, doing nothing, so I rang Mr Amos, and he said Christopher hadn't been at morning choir practice, and when he'd asked the other boys if they knew where he was, they'd said he wasn't in school, so he'd assumed he was under the weather or something. I rang the Deanery too, and spoke to the Dean's chaplain. He said he would go over to the cathedral and take a look round. The boys play marbles in the cloister, you know, and I thought—though I knew it was out of the question, really. The vergers would have thrown them out hours ago.” Again that helpless, hopeless gesture. “Then the headmaster phoned back to say he had checked the form register, and Christopher had been marked absent. Only he must have come to school because his bicycle was in the rack.”

Sergeant Ellers drove Jurnet and the Superintendent to the Close. The Superintendent, in the front passenger seat, spoke without turning round.