Ritual Murder (29 page)

The Dean, at least, cheered up when he saw that there were only the two of them. It seemed he had expected whole battalions of bobbies, spreading through the building like a blue blight.

“There'll be a couple of cars along any minute,” Jurnet explained. “Plain-clothes officers. Their orders are to wait inconspicuously just inside the doors in case we find we need them. I take it, sir, you've told Mr Quest about the keys?”

“He has them here, as you requested.” The head verger handed over the laden ring with the air of the commander of a besieged garrison surrendering to a hated conqueror. The keys, each with its own neatly printed label, were few and of modern cut. “As I believe I've already told you, apart from the Treasury, where the insurers leave us no choice, we don't do a great deal of locking up here.”

Jurnet took the keys; found the ones marked
Treasury
, detached them from the ring, and handed them back.

“I think you'd better hang on to these. Bad enough you have to let us in, let alone give us the run of the family silver.”

The head verger's large face reddened, but there was no disguising the relief that emanated from his portly frame.

“Mr Quest,” the Dean said, with affection in his voice, “like all of us who serve this temple of the Holy Spirit, tends to lose his sense of proportion when he fears its peace threatened, in however worthy a cause.” He half turned, his spectacles flashing, skirts twirling about his black trousered legs. “I mustn't keep you any longer from your work, your most necessary work, except to state my conviction—and we, after all, are the people who know the cathedral best—that the boy is not here.”

When he had left them, Jurnet turned to the head verger.

“We'll start on the chapels, if that's OK with you, and work our way round.”

“Whatever you say, sir. Shall I tell off one of our men to accompany you?”

“I don't think we need trouble you,” Jurnet said easily. “Just one small point. Communion service yesterday—in St Lieven's chapel as usual, was it?”

“No, sir. That's to say, there isn't any usual. We use all the chapels in turn. Yesterday was St Ethelburga's—south side of the ambulatory.”

“I see.” Jurnet scanned the wide expanse of the nave. “Mr Harbridge off today? We'll be wanting a word with the vergers.”

“He's in, as usual.” Mr Quest swivelled his magisterial gaze around, as if to conjure up the absent verger by act of will. His glance fell on the central altar, which was looking rather bare. “Ah! He'll be in the cavea, doing the vases.”

“The—?”

“Cavea. Latin for birdcage, so the Dean says. It's a joke for the cubbyhole next to the vestry where the Ladies' Guild do the flowers. They always do them fresh for Sundays. Harbridge'll be giving the vases a polish-up. The ladies, bless 'em, are willing enough, but they haven't the elbow grease.”

Jurnet commented, with professional sympathy, “All go, isn't it, being a verger? Spit and polish, answer questions, clean up the kid's messes—”

“That was a funny thing yesterday,” Mr Quest said.

“Oh ah?”

“What you just said brought it to mind. After I told Harbridge to get on over to the Treasury—remember?—I sent one of the other vergers to clean up the sick behind the Bishop's throne. And you know what? There wasn't any!”

“You don't say!” Jurnet thought about this for a moment, and then inquired, “Did you take it up with Mr Harbridge?”

“He said some woman with a little boy with her had come up to him and told him the kid had done it.” The head verger smiled indulgently. “Funny lot they are, some of the people you get here.”

First the detectives looked into St Lieven's chapel, where a glance through the wrought-iron railings was enough to make it plain there was no place to hide a child, or where a child might hide. A square of stone lighter than the surrounding area was the only reminder that here, only a little time before, the name of God had been taken in vain and aerosol. On the altar, St Lieven, mouth wide, proffered his bloody tongue with undiminished enthusiasm.

Jurnet, knowing what to expect, kept his eyes averted. Jack Ellers exclaimed, “Looks like we go to the same dentist!”

In the FitzAlain chapel, the plastered wall had been painted afresh. The place had the look of quarters taken out of circulation, the rush chairs removed from their neat rows and piled, rather precariously, against the wall.

Again, there was no possible place for a child, unless it were the basement of Bishop FitzAlain's tomb, where Arthur Cossey's murderer had hidden his victim's clothes, and where that child of long ago, imprisoned overnight, had emerged raving. It was unthinkable that the cathedral people had not already examined such a notorious hiding place; but, just to make it official, Jurnet bent over and levered out the metal grille.

The two detectives, squatting on their haunches, peered into the dusty cavity where the stone skeleton of the richly bedecked gent upstairs lay grinning at a joke which had not lost its point in 400 years.

This time the little Welshman's comment was a heartfelt, “Hope we don't go to the same doctor!”

The Sergeant took the grille and fitted it back in its sockets. Jurnet straightened up, steadying himself against the tomb where the good Bishop slumbered with his accustomed tranquility. Yet—perhaps it was the sharp morning light, perhaps the unusual angle of the detective's vision—there
was
something different about the reverend gentleman; a suggestion of raffishness Jurnet did not recall from his earlier visits to the chapel.

Puzzled, he peered closer at the alabaster face beneath the painted mitre, and discovered that somebody had given the Bishop a Che Guevara moustache. An apparent attempt to remove the appendage from the porous stone had not been notably successful.

Moved by a sudden inspiration, Jurnet strode across the chapel floor.

“Give me a hand with these, Jack.”

The two detectives just had time to move the piles of chairs from against the chapel wall when, behind them, the voice of Harbridge demanded harshly, “What do you think you're doing?”

Jurnet turned round and looked, not at the man standing there, but at the brush and the bucket of whitewash he held in his hands. Then, without speaking, the detective turned back to that portion of wall which had been hidden behind the chairs.

An uneven patch showed where the wall had been recently washed: scrubbed, rather, to judge from the vicious striations across the plaster. It was clear that someone had gone at the job with vigour and without concern for the old surface.

But not vigorously enough to obliterate the words deeply incised there—words Jurnet had seen before, only done then with a niceness of calligraphy which made the present straggling inscription doubly offensive SOD GOD.

When the detective turned back to the verger, the brush and the bucket of whitewash were on the stone floor. The man had gone.

While Ellers spoke urgently to the men on the doors to make sure no verger left the building, nor—supposing the man to have divested himself of his tell-tale garb—anyone answering to Harbridge's description, Jurnet ran from the FitzAlain chapel, scarcely knowing which way to go, and choosing one direction rather than another simply because to stay still and wait upon events was not to be thought of.

He ran through the presbytery and the choir, and veered into the north aisle under the organ loft, pushing aside sightseers without apology. His heart pounded, not with effort, but fear. One Little St Ulf was more than enough; two an obscenity, and three—For the first time, in that great stone ship, Jurnet prayed: if not to God, to Something, Someone.

To notice within seconds of that appeal something which in his haste he might easily have missed, was a matter he set aside for later consideration. The door hidden in the shadows behind the old stove was an inch or two ajar.

Jurnet launched himself at the narrow stair, ramming his body unmercifully round its unyielding spirals. On the first floor the parade of arches stretched away on either side, untenanted. The detective leaned over the parapet that gave on to the nave, and having, with his customary resistance to gadgets, providing himself with no other means of communication, shouted, “Jack! Up here!” on the chance that the little Welshman would hear him. Some trick of acoustics transformed his words into a roar that filled the enormous space like a warning of Doom. Whether Ellers got the message, Jurnet did not wait to discover.

The way, he knew in his bones, though he still could not remember how he knew, had to be upward. He found another door, and a stair that took him into the tower, and there he found no fewer than three more passages, layered one upon the other in the thickness of the wall. He climbed until he seemed no longer to be part of the cathedral, but a disembodied being looking down from some distant star on a toy world below.

At the very top of the tower, past the belfry and the silent bells, and when it seemed that, short of taking wing, there was no possible way of going further, Jurnet found yet another spiral tucked into the northeast angle of the mighty edifice; and pushing open yet another little door, he was out on the tower roof, under a spring sky, the flowery Close below him, the silver river threading the water meadows, and the distant pulse of city traffic filling the air.

Disturbed by the detective's arrival, half a dozen pigeons rose up from the roof and rejoined their comrades round the spire; and Jurnet knew for certain he was on the right track. On the sun-warmed leads, pigeon-pecked but unmistakably fresh, lay some bits of bread and green stuff that once had been part of a sandwich. The detective's heart leaped with thankfulness at the sight.

Ahead of him, filling in the view in a way that, at ground level, he could never have visualized, the spire receded out of sight above his head as if it went on for ever. A door in its base, like the door in the north aisle, stood a little ajar. Could it be that the man wanted to be found in his Holy of Holies?

Jurnet went through the door into the spire and into another world. The shaft of daylight to which, leaving the door wide open, he had given entry only rendered more explicit the dusty darkness within. The very air seemed mummified, air that the spire's builders had captured and enclosed back in the fifteenth century, and never allowed to escape. Overhead, at diminishing intervals, pencillings of grey outlined the meagre light let in by the tiers of louvred windows.

The detective found himself standing among towering, rough-hewn timbers, a dead forest whose tops were out of sight. He brought out his torch and shone it upward, revealing a complicated framework of struts and platforms which only later he was to learn constituted the framework round which the original stone shell had been erected. For a disorientating moment he saw that medieval jungle gym alive with stocky men in brown hoods and tunics and queer pointed shoes, each one of whom turned upon him a glance of amused comprehension out of eyes, one brown, one of bright blue glass, before resuming his interrupted labours. Jurnet blinked, and the vision vanished. Some metal ties which caught the beam of his torch had a reassuringly modern look. At least someone else beside himself and a possible murderer had been up here in 400 years. Best of all, and most to Jurnet's purpose, were the iron ladders which zigzagged from level to level as far up as the light reached; though the thought of a child, captive on one of those wooden shelves, unrailed and accessible only by a ladder that a murderous hand or foot could only too easily dislodge, made Jurnet's blood run cold.

He shouted up into the darkness, “Christopher! Christopher, are you there?”

The voice of the verger came back.

“Go away.”

It was a beautiful night, if you were dressed for it; spiked with the sweet treachery of spring. The little group of men on top of the cathedral tower looked pinched in the glare of the arc-lamps that, in summer, were used for the
son et lumière
performances which brought tourists by the coachload to the Cathedral Close. Below, by the West Door, the reporters and the television crews waited, fortified for their vigil with sheepskins and hip flasks. Beyond the FitzAlain Gate the crowds, allowed to come no nearer, stood silent, eyes on the spire, until the cold drove them home to watch the next act on telly, so much cosier than real life.

Up on the roof, the men shivered with cold and the suppressed anger that was part of knowing a child at risk and nothing to be done about it. Every now and again, Sergeant Ellers, seemingly unaware of what he was saying, muttered through clenched teeth, “The bastard!” The cathedral contingent, standing a little apart, consisted of the Dean, the head verger, and the young man from the Cathedral Architect's office whom Jurnet had last seen at the Little St Ulf excavation deep in conversation with Professor Pargeter. He had, presumably, been brought along to answer any question which might relate to the structure of the spire. The young man stood drawing nervously on a cigarette. Silently, without making a production of it, the Dean appeared to be praying.

Jurnet exclaimed, for the umpteenth time, “I don't understand it!”

“So much we've already gathered!” The Superintendent's voice was chillier than the night. Immaculate in wool and cashmere, he nevertheless, to Jurnet's way of thinking, looked, for the first time in their long acquaintance, untidy if not actually unkempt. The disorder, it dawned on his subordinate, was in his mind, not his dress. Just like the rest of them, the Superintendent hadn't a clue what to do.

Now he snapped, “Having advertised it so often, Inspector, perhaps you'd share your ignorance with the rest of us?”

“What I can't understand,” Jurnet said, not afraid to sound simple-minded, “is why he brought the child up here in the first place.”

“Do you know of a better place to conceal a body? The surveyor says that in the usual way they only go into the spire once in five years—and Harbridge would know very well there's another three years to go before the next time.”