Ritual Murder (7 page)

“Hadrian's Wall sounds interesting.”

“A ruin, Inspector. That's the beauty of it.” Pargeter looked about the cathedral with a jaundiced eye. “Henry VIII must have been out of his mind to leave a place like this standing. Just think what a ruin it would have made! To say nothing of posing enough problems to keep me and my fellow-practitioners off the bread-line till Doomsday. Instead of which, this otherwise delightful city is lumbered with this dreadful Waterloo Station of a place where the station-master can't even be certain the trains are running, let alone from what platform.”

Arrived at the wooden hoarding, he paused before the door marked “Private”.

“Only let myself in for this bit of nonsense because of the Dean. Flossie Carver. We were Cathedrans together. Hated each other's guts.” Professor Pargeter gave his moustache a twist that, had it indeed been attached to his upper lip by spirit gum, would have had it off without a doubt. “Ties like that mean something.”

Jurnet seized his opportunity.

“Padlock on the door'd be a good thing, don't you think? Kids might get in—hurt themselves.”

“Serve the little buggers right!” The Professor pulled the door open. A broom clattered to the ground.

Within the enclosure the air was gritty; a different kind of air from that which filled the rest of the cathedral. A battered table piled with files and boxes, a couple of three-legged stools, sieves and trowels, a bundle of graduated poles, some folded sacks and one bulging with lumps of masonry, were all covered with a grey dust that seemed adhesive, the deposit of some stranded sea.

By some trick of acoustics, the circumscribing boards vibrated strongly to the chords that Mr Amos, up in the loft, was conjuring from the organ; yet the notes themselves arrived debilitated, as if the music had vaulted across the fenced-off space, leaving a bubble below, a vacuum.

A frayed drugget stretched from the door to the hole in the paving; a hole roughly oblong, and of a depth varying between two-and-a-half and five feet.

All this Jurnet both saw and did not see. Just as he both heard, and did not hear, the Professor's rasping “My God!” He went down on his knees by the hole in the cathedral floor, his Sunday-trousered legs pressed into the dust. He knelt and he looked. He had no need to touch what lay there, half in and half out of the hole that housed the tomb of Little St Ulf. He had seen death often enough to recognize it for what it was.

Even when he had not seen it for 840 years.

The photographs were appalling. The photographs were worse than the real thing.

The real thing, true, was a boy, horribly murdered, horrifically mutilated. But sooner or later this real thing would be taken out of the mortuary drawer where it now lay tagged and dated like meat in a well-organized home freezer, packed into a coffin and lowered into the busy darkness of the grave, there to return, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in decent privacy. Give it a few years, plus worms that knew nothing about working union hours, and it would look like any other kid's skeleton: sad, OK, but socially acceptable.

Time was powerless to abate the horror of the photographs. In them the murdered child was abominable forever. The colour might fade a little from the tie buried deep in the skinny neck, the raw wound where there had once been a penis bleach silently in the official folder. But that livid Star of David hacked from throat to navel— Jurnet put the prints down abruptly.

The Superintendent looked up from his chair, across the width of the desk.

“For the moment, let's put aside the tempting overtones, shall we?” He reached over, picked up the top-most photograph, and studied it as coolly as if it were a holiday snap. “The thing is, are we looking at what it appears to be, or at a common or garden sex crime artfully dressed up to look like something else?”

“If it
is
a sex crime, it's certainly not a common or garden one.”

“True. The test will be, what comes next.”

“Sir?”

“We've released nothing as to the nature of the boy's injuries. But the killer knows, and if the inflection of those particular wounds was his prime motive—if, in short, he killed the boy simply to make it look like Little St Ulf all over again—he won't be able to wait to see it spread all over the media.” The Superintendent considered what he had just said, and found it wanting. “Not conclusive. He still might want to raise the biggest stink possible, to make sure we don't latch on to his simple, uncomplicated homicide.”

Jurnet said, “Either way, the kid's common or garden dead, that's for sure.”

“Now, Ben,” the other chided. “You're letting yourself get involved again. How many times do I have to remind you that detachment's the first requisite for a good copper? Not that there aren't days—” the hand holding the photograph had grown tense and white-knuckled—“when I find myself wondering whether the good Lord didn't dangle those quaint appendages on the male torso simply for the fun of seeing them crushed, burnt, stamped on, electric-shocked, cut off, or otherwise put in painful jeopardy.”

Jurnet said, “I'll remember what you said about being detached, sir.”

For a moment the Superintendent's face stiffened with annoyance. Then he laughed, unaffectedly.

“It's these bloody pictures.” He returned to the pile the one he had been looking at. “The corpse as ritual object, eh? T. S. Eliot knew what he was doing all right. Stage a murder in a cathedral, it becomes transmuted into an art form. I doubt they'd ever have thought twice about Becket if he'd been struck down in some Canterbury back alley.”

Jurnet forced himself to look at the photograph the Superintendent had discarded.

A common or garden kid, done to death in a sick and barbarous way. Thin arms, knock knees, pot belly showing through the unbuttoned shirt. Could never have been a Little Lord Fauntleroy at the best of times, but presentable enough, as Jurnet remembered him, in scarlet cassock and white ruff, paired with the kid with the chewing gum, filing into the stalls for choir practice.

Aloud he said, “Don't know about Canterbury. Reckon one Little St Ulf's enough for Angleby.”

“More than!” the other agreed readily. “Medieval superstition was bad enough in the Middle Ages, let alone today. Unless, maybe, it's that nowadays we simply make superstition respectable by calling it art. Both, after all, have their roots in the same need to propitiate the dark and unknowable forces in the Universe.”

“Too deep for me, sir.”

The Superintendent's face reddened with an irritation instantly suppressed.

“Me too, Ben. Words to cocoon the nastiness. Let's stick to the knowables, eh? Arthur Cossey, aged twelve years and nine months, murdered in the cathedral between the hours of 6.45 and 8.15 a.m. It seems that the climate of the cathedral poses special problems, and Dr Colton can't be more specific. So—what have we got so far on Arthur Cossey?”

Mrs Sandra Cossey's front doorstep, as white and welcoming as a new tombstone, should have prepared Jurnet and Sergeant Ellers for what to expect inside Number 7, Bishop Row. When Mrs Cossey opened the door, the sight of the apron she wore evoked for Jurnet an instant picture of a woman in cardigan and apron busy with her Brasso in the Close.

The recollection had point. For Sandra Cossey, polishing was evidently more than a means to a living: it was a way of life. Everything in the little parlour that could be polished—and a significant proportion of the furnishings appeared to serve no other purpose—flashed and twinkled with the deadly jollity of a set of false teeth. Jurnet could not remember ever being in a house so repellently clean.

The woman had made no undue outcry when she had first heard that her only son was dead. Jurnet had not thought less of her for it. Grieving was a creative activity for which you either had, or hadn't, a gift. By now, he saw, she had made some attempt to devise a proper role for herself; taken the rollers out of her hair, and put on a black skirt and jumper. From time to time she dabbed at her eyes—pale and bulging like her dead child's—with a white handkerchief carefully folded to show the drawn-threadwork in one corner. Only her slippers—pink and fluffy with a sequinned heart on the instep—troubled the detective a little, like a clue that did not fit in with the rest of the evidence.

The shame-faced pride that every now and again lit up her face was something else he was familiar with. The reporters would have been round, her name in the papers and on telly, the neighbours in and out of the place, as if she had suddenly done something remarkable. Few could resist the blandishments of fame, however dire the occasion.

He was glad she had not yet been told the full extent of her son's injuries.

“Tell us about Arthur,” he prompted gently. “We need to know what kind of boy he was.”

The woman looked up sharply.

“He weren't never in any trouble, if that's what you mean.”

Jurnet smiled reassurance.

“If he had been, I wouldn't be asking. We'd have heard of it. Kind of thing I mean, for instance—he had a good voice, didn't he? Must have, to be a Song Scholar. Things like that, general. They all go to make up a picture.”

“He did have a lovely voice.” Her own was thin and complaining. “Artistic as well. Like his Pa.”

Jurnet said respectfully, “I heard about Mr Cossey. Terrible thing that was.” He did not add that he knew Arthur Cossey's father had been pissed to the eyebrows when, five years previously, he had fallen from some scaffolding during repairs to the cathedral tower. “From what I hear, Mr Cossey was one of the most gifted masons they'd ever had working on the fabric.”

“He carved me there—did they tell you that? Left hand side as you face the altar, under a sort of arch.”

“Quite an honour! Terrible for you, though. Two tragedies, both in the same place. And a cathedral!”

Mrs Cossey became quite animated.

“Someone I know—” her pasty face coloured slightly—“went and paced it out. Hundred and five feet, he made it, give or take a few inches, from where Vince landed to where Arthur—” She twisted her handkerchief. “You wouldn't think God'd let things like that happen, not in a cathedral.”

“Not for us to question,” said Jurnet, who made his living doing just that. “And so you've had to bring Arthur up all on your own.”

“I've got my pension. And they've been very good, in the Close. I work for several people there. A very nice class of people—but then, it's only what you'd expect, isn't it?”

Jurnet, who had long ceased to expect anything of anybody, ignored the question, and asked, “And Arthur?”

“He was a very quiet boy, Arthur was. Anybody'll tell you.”

“Had a lot of little friends, did he?”

“Friends?” She repeated the word as if unsure of its meaning. Then, “Artistic, like I said. Spent all his time up in his room drawing. Made me stop calling it his room. His studio.”

“What about weekends? Did he spend his weekends in his studio too?”

“What with choir practice Saturday mornings and the services on Sunday, I didn't see all that much of him weekends.” As if suddenly afraid her answers might reflect on her maternal solicitude, “There was always a meal waiting, if his lordship chose to come in and eat it.”

“D'you know what he did weekends between times, when he
was
out? When he wasn't at the cathedral, I mean.”

“Mucking about, I suppose. What do kids do? Nothing bad, though. He always came back neat and tidy as he went.”

“Last Sunday, did he leave home wearing what he usually wore?”

“They always have to wear their blazers, even if it isn't a school day—” She broke off and looked at Jurnet. “You saw him, didn't you? After?” The detective nodded. “You must know what he was wearing.”

“He—he didn't have his blazer on.”

“It weren't more than three weeks old!” The thought made her cry a little. “He won't be able to flog it anyway, whoever did it. That'd be a real giveaway!”

“I only wish he would. We'd have him quicker than you could say Jack Robinson. You saw the lad go out with it on, then. What time would that have been?”

Mrs Cossey coloured a little.

“I never actually saw him go through the door. I have a bit of a lie-in Sundays. Arthur always was an early riser. Used to be out first thing on his paper round.” As if rebutting unspoken criticism, “I always set the table and leave the sugar crispies out the night before. The milk's in the fridge. He'd only got to take it out.”

“And did he, on Sunday? Take any breakfast?”

“I don't know about the milk. I didn't think to look, not expecting—” She took thought and said, “The crispies. Even if he didn't have them at the table, he never went out without filling up his pockets. He'd rather eat sugar crispies than sweets any day. Two packets a week he cost me. I used to say to him. ‘You'll ruin me or your teeth with your sugar crispies, you will. Arthur Cossey, and I don't know which'll be the first to go!'”

“And what did he say to that?”

Mrs Cossey looked startled.

“I don't know as he said anything. He was a quiet one, was Arthur.”

Things went better, upstairs, once Sergeant Ellers had suggested that he and his superior officer take their shoes off to avoid messing up her beautiful floors. The woman did not appreciate the effort it took the little Welshman, who was sensitive about his lack of inches, to make the suggestion; but she grew measurably more forthcoming as the detectives, stocking-footed on the landing, slid across the glassy linoleum to the door of Arthur's studio.

The room, judging from the type of dwelling, was the largest in the house. Despite appearances, there must be love here, Jurnet thought, heartened by the possibility, to give up the best bedroom for a child's hobby. Either that, or quiet Arthur Cossey had a knack of getting his own way.