Ritual Murder (28 page)

“You realize what this could mean, Ben?”

“Yes, sir. Back to Square One.”

“Back to Square Minus One! All our painful delvings into motive go by the board. If there are two dead children instead of one, we're dealing with a maniac.”

“Unless—” Jurnet swallowed: it was not easy to speak so of the curly-haired imp with the taking ways—“unless young Christopher turns up minus his genitals, and with a Star of David cut into his chest.”

“And that's not mad?”

“Mad, yes. But maybe political.”

“Mad!” the Superintendent declared roundly, and spoke no further.

Dr Carver awaited them at the West Door. The Dean looked care-worn but not defeated. He and the Superintendent shook hands with a calm certainty which Jurnet, looking on, recognized for the first time as common to both men. Law and Divine Order against all the odds: a shared faith in the ultimate triumph of right.

“We weren't sure how you thought we best could help you. The staff have gone home, of course, and I thought it best not to recall them, for the time being. But I had Charles, my chaplain, fetch Mr Quest, our head verger. The headmaster, our Vice Organist, and Mr Hewitt, Christopher's form master, are holding themselves ready in the Song School, should you wish to speak with them.”

The Superintendent responded, “That
is
helpful.” And Jurnet said, “According to Mrs Drue, none of them saw Christopher today. They all assumed he was absent from school.” The Dean nodded, and Jurnet went on, “At the moment, and until we turn up somebody who actually saw the lad, apart from the fact that his bicycle has been found in the school rack we have no certain knowledge that he was ever on the premises today at all. And even the bike could have been placed there with intention to mislead.”

The Dean's eyes brightened behind their goldrimmed spectacles.

“You mean, it may be nothing to do with us, after all?”

“I didn't say that. Just pointing out the possibilities.”

“Of course.” The Dean, whose face had become rather red, went on quickly, “One thing you'll be glad to hear is that there's nothing at all at Little St Ulf's tomb. When we heard about Christopher we hurried there first thing, as you can well understand.” Dr Carver produced a handkerchief from his full-skirted coat, its whiteness startling against the dark cloth. He mopped his brow. “God be praised, at least His house has been spared a repetition of that particular infamy.”

It was not exactly the way the detective would have phrased it.

“Better not count your chickens,” he warned, with a bluntness that, despite the occasion, awakened a discreet twinkle in the Superintendent's eye. “A cathedral's a big place to hide a little boy in.”

The Dean's chaplain and Mr Quest had already made a hasty perambulation of the great building. They had found nothing.

“The light's so poor this time of day.” The young chaplain was breathing hard. Jurnet guessed, not without sympathy, that he was relieved not to have found the boy—not to have found him, that is, as dreadfully dead as Arthur Cossey. “The side chapels are gloomy enough, but up in the tower it's incredible. Only a couple of sixty-watt bulbs, would you believe it? Just the same, I'd swear there's no one there.”

Mr Quest did not take this too well; perhaps because the sixty-watt bulbs were part of his responsibility; perhaps because, like all the cathedral people, he loved the great stone pile with a passion that could not bear to hear a word spoken of it, unless it were in praise.

“No call for anything else!” he asserted, ignoring the upstart youth and addressing himself to the detectives. “Architect's lot, termite men, electricians, never up there but in daylight,
and
bring their own lights along. Reckon you'd better come back in the morning, if you want to take a proper look round.”

It was good advice, but they did not take it. The thought of Mrs Drue, waiting for news of her son, made it unthinkable that they should go home tamely to their beds without making an effort, however profitless. For the same reason, outside in the Close police-constables were flashing their torches in back gardens, falling over rockeries in the dark, clattering dustbin lids and frightening the lives out of ecclesiastical cats bound for a genteel evening on the tiles.

They did not find Christopher. They did not really expect to; but at least it enabled Jurnet to go back to his mother, waiting at home, and say truthfully that they had tried.

When, in company with Jack Ellers, he reported that there was nothing to report, Mrs Drue took the news with admirable calm; asked him to convey to all the police officers involved in the search her gratitude, and her apologies for putting them to so much trouble. Her self-possession was far more distressing than tears: a dry despair from which hope had already evaporated.

She proffered sherry, which the two detectives accepted in the hope it would encourage her to keep them company: if anyone needed the help of alcohol it was she. But she poured a bitter lemon for herself and sipped it desultorily as she sat with them in front of the television set, watching the Chief Constable as, grim-faced, he appeared on the News appealing for anyone with information to come forward, anyone who had seen, or thought he might have seen, the child at any time since his departure from home at 7.40 that morning.

A snapshot of Christopher in chorister's dress, with which she had provided the police, was shown on the screen; and even this did not break her. She merely remarked, carefully, as though words were a quagmire which might easily swallow her up if she put a foot wrong, “It should have been one in his school uniform, ideally. Only this was so clear, so like him—” The curly-haired child looked out from the box, acting angelic in his scarlet cassock with the white ruff at the throat, a demureness through which the latent, joyous mischief of the boy could be seen rising like bubbles to the surface of a glass of champagne.

The television announcer went on to the next item, but in the quiet, pleasant room—or so it seemed to Jurnet—the image persisted, imprinted on the air, and an echo of impish laughter was all but audible.

The thought of that lovely child as one more victim of the madness which had gripped the city was intolerable. What was it he, the Great Detective, had missed? Jurnet strained every fibre and again, for a split second, his mind seemed to encompass something important and relevant, only to let it go. A mind, he thought disgustedly, like one of those slot machines you put your money into and a metal claw moves tantalisingly among prizes worth having, but in the event never retrieves anything but some of those revolting sweets at the bottom of the case.

He couldn't even win those!

Before the two of them left, Mrs Drue took them upstairs to see Christopher's room, a charming place that was playroom, study, and bedroom in one: shelves where the stuffed animals of babyhood consorted unself-consciously with the Scrabble and aeroplane models of maturity. The bed had a patchwork quilt, scarlet and white like a chorister's get-up. On the desk under the window, among a mess of crayons and magic tricks and plastic soldiers out of breakfast cereals, a small hoard of glass marbles, contained in a wooden bowl, caught reflections of the electric light.

Mrs Drue looked at the marbles and said, with the same brittle attention to every word, “As soon as I saw he hadn't taken them I knew he couldn't be in the cloister, not really. Except that, when he leaves home so early, as he did today, it's always because there's a game before school. I can't think why he should have left so early, if he wasn't going to play.” She turned her face towards Jurnet, who did not meet her eyes. “It
is
a mystery, isn't it?”

Outside Headquarters, as was to be expected following the Chief's appearance on TV, the press was waiting: reporters and photographers, and the television men armed with their macho microphones which they thrust at their quarry like extensions of their own tight jeaned pudenda. Theoretically, Jurnet would have been the first to uphold the media's right to inquire, the public's right to know. Confronted with the nation's fact-finders, his feelings were more equivocal. He detested their assumption of divine mission, their prurient curiosity, their intrusion into private griefs.

“Bring on the hyenas!” he muttered to Sergeant Ellers, as the latter brought the car to a standstill at the kerb: emerging nevertheless to greet several of the hyenas by name, and to regret, with a convincing approximation of sincerity, that at the moment he had nothing to add to the Chief Constable's statement, but be assured, as soon as there were any developments, etc, etc, …

He came into the Incident Room feeling soiled by the encounter, and wondering why he had not gone straight home, if that was what you could call it, and to bed, such as it was without Miriam.

The search had been called off until daylight.

Jack Ellers said, “You look all in. I'll drop you off home.”

“I think I'll have a cot put up here, thanks all the same. Something might come in. You never know.”

Sensing the other's depression, the little Welshman offered, “What's the betting the little perisher's scarpered on his own, just to get Mummy in a tizzy? These cherished cherubs have to break out once in a while, to stop' em going round the bend.”

“Yes, Jack. Good night, Jack.”

Ellers persisted, “No need to take on before time. We don't know that the kid's dead.”

“Want to bet on it?”

“One thing I do know, boyo. I'm not going to bury the little bugger till I'm dead sure he's stopped breathing.”

When the Sergeant had gone, Jurnet roused himself and went along the corridor to the closet where the camp-beds were kept, and the pillows and blankets against any emergency. The polite young police-constable manning the duty desk, regretting his inability to leave his post, offered to summon up help at the double, but the detective said no; finding some obscure animal satisfaction in the labour of preparing his own holt or sett, or whatever was the correct word for a detective-inspector gone to earth in Police Headquarters. He thought vaguely of going down to the canteen for a bite, but decided against it, even though he could not remember when he had last eaten. He always had the habit, when absorbed in a case, of forgetting about food altogether; and then, the problem solved, of discovering himself hugely famished.

The problem was not solved.

He lay back on the bed, one hand behind his head, shoes and jacket off but otherwise clothed, lying carefully still so that, when morning came and it was time to give orders to the police officers who would take up the search for Christopher Drue, he would look a colourable facsimile of a leader of men, not a slob in baggy pants. There was a spare electric shaver in his desk drawer, so that was all right.

In the morning, with luck, people would be coming forward who had seen the boy. That vivid, laughing face was one you remembered; not like Arthur Cossey, whom no one noticed because he, poor little tyke, had had the kind of face the eyes slid off, unregistering. Jurnet reckoned that, leaving the house at twenty to 8, the child must have got to the cathedral by ten past the latest: too late, probably, to run into any of the people there for 8 o'clock Communion. If you took your religion seriously enough to get yourself to church at that ungodly hour, you probably took care to arrive at the Lord's table at the time stated on the invitation. Still, by that time one might expect other people to be about in the Close—the milkman, jogging canons, deaconesses walking their dogs. The cathedral cleaners, the vergers.

Assuming he had gone to the cathedral in the first place.

Ought he to give orders for the river to be dragged, the stretch by the cathedral staithe?

It would be too much to say that Jurnet, staring up vacantly at the polystyrene tiles on the Incident Room ceiling, actually thought any of those thoughts: rather that they seeped into his mind unbidden, leakage from a tap that needed washering. Beneath, like the pulse of the double-bass in a symphony orchestra, guilt thrummed its insistent message.
If I'd caught Arthur Cossey's killer, no other child would now be in danger
. After a time, his tired brain began to play tricks with the order of the words.
If I'd caught Arthur Cossey, the killer would
—and
If I'd caught the child
—

Bloody hell!

The double-bass thrummed him to sleep.

Half Angleby had seen Christopher Drue, to say nothing of half Birmingham, Penzance, Aberystwyth, Berwick-on-Tweed, and almost any other town in the British Isles you cared to mention. The crisp white blouses of the WPCs manning the telephones wilted under the pressure of concerned citizens determined to be helpful.

By contrast, the Close had never seemed more delightful: blossom and green, the stillness of stone. The golden weathercock shone on top of the spire, girded, as usual, with its ring of circling pigeons.

“Silly buggers,” observed Sergeant Ellers, squinting into the morning sun. Turning his attention to the spire itself, “What's it all
for
? Must be an easier way of finding out how the wind's blowing.”

Jurnet, who had slept badly on his makeshift bed, screwed up his eyes in the strong light. “Harbridge is the one to speak to about that. He told me once the spire was a holy of holies. Something to do with parallel lines meeting—I forget how it went.” He finished, “Not all we need to speak to Mr Harbridge about. Let's get on with it, shall we?”

The Dean and the head verger were waiting for them just inside the West Door. They looked depressed. Not surprising, Jurnet conceded. The cathedral might be God's house, it was also theirs; and no house owner is keen to have strangers poking about the place, opening cupboards, running their fingers along the picture rails for signs of dust.

Or looking for mislaid children in dark corners.