Howard Jacobson - J

Der Strandryuber von Ludgvennok , the opera Wagner subsequently wrote about the village (and dedicated to Mathilde, who had by that time given him his marching orders), was rarely performed; this Densdell Kroplik ascribed not to any fault in the composition but to the lily-livered hypocrisy of the age.

‘All very laudable,’ Detective Inspector Gutkind conceded. As it happened, he had not only heard of Wagner, a composer beloved of his great-grandfather, but kept a small cache of Wagner memorabilia secreted in his wardrobe in fealty to that passion. He could even hum some of the tunes from his operas and went so far as to hum a few bars of the Siegfried Idyll to show Kroplik that he too was a man of culture. Nonetheless, ‘All very laudable but I have a particularly savage double murder on my hands, not a few high-spirited drunks kicking nine bells out of another,’ was what he said.

‘Your point being?’ Densdell Kroplik wanted to know. He was irked that the detective inspector had heard of Wagner, let alone that he could hum him. He wanted Wagner for himself.

He was sitting in his favourite chair by the fire. In all weathers a fire burned in the Friendly Fisherman. And on most evenings Densdell Kroplik, steam rising from his thighs, sat by it in a heavy seaman’s sweater warming and rubbing his hands. He cultivated a take it or leave it air. He knew what was what. It was up to you whether you wanted to learn from him or not.

‘My point being that it gets me nowhere to be told Port Reuben is back to doing what it has always done best.’

Densdell Kroplik shrugged. ‘It might,’ he said, ‘if you understood more about the passion for justice and honour that has always burned in the hearts of the men of these parts.’

‘I doubt that a passion for justice and honour had anything to do with the murder of Lowenna Morgenstern and Ythel Weinstock.’

Densdell Kroplik pointed a red, fire-warmed finger at the policeman. ‘Is that something you can be sure of?’ he said. ‘There was a famous five-way murder here about a hundred years ago. Two local women, their husbands, and a lover. Whose lover was he? No one was quite sure. Am I hinting at pederasty? I might be. All that was certain was that he was an aphid — which makes pederasty the more likely. Buggers, the lot of them. From the north or the east of the country, it doesn’t matter which. Somewhere that wasn’t here. A pact was what the coroner decided it had been, a love pact born of hopeless entanglement. They’d gone up on to the cliff, taken off their clothes, watched the sun go down and swallowed pills. What do you think of that?’

‘What I think is that it doesn’t help me with my case,’ Gutkind said. ‘A pact is suicide, not murder.’

‘Unless,’ Kroplik went on, ‘unless the villagers, motivated by justifiable disapproval and an understandable hatred of outsiders, had taken it upon themselves to do away with all five offenders. In which case it wasn’t a mass suicide but a mob attack in the name of justice and honour.’

‘And it’s your theory that the whole village could have done away with Lowenna Morgenstern and Ythel Weinstock?’

‘Did I say that? I’m just a barber with an interest in local history. All I know, from reading what I have read and from using these’ — he made a two-pronged fork of his fingers and pointed to his all-seeing eyes — ‘is that people have been subdued here for a long time. They have a proud history of torrid engagement with one another which has been denied expression. There’s no knowing what people might do — singly or in a group — when their natures rebel against repression.’

‘Well you might call it torrid engagement, I call it crime.’

‘Then that’s the difference between us,’ Densdell Kroplik laughed.

After which, to show he was a man who could be trusted, he gave the policeman a free haircut, humming all the while Brünnhilde’s final plea to Wotan to let her sleep protected by flame from the attentions of any old mortal aphid.

v

Kevern Cohen stayed aloof from the malicious speculations. He had flirted with Lowenna Morgenstern occasionally, when they had both had too much to drink, and more recently he had kissed her in the village car park on bonfire night. He was no snogger. If he kissed a woman it was because he was aroused by the softness of her lips, not because he wanted to wound them. Breaking skin was not, for Kevern, the way he expressed desire.

Lowenna Morgenstern had a wonderful mouth for kissing, deep and mysterious, the musky taste of wood-fire on her busy tongue.

‘Kissing you is like kissing flame,’ he had said, bending over her. ‘You should have been a poet, you,’ she told him, biting his neck until the blood trickled on to his shirt collar.

And now someone had killed her. The man found dead beside her could just as easily have been him.

Ailinn picked up on his sombre mood. ‘Did you know these people well?’ she asked.

‘Depends what you mean by well,’ he said. ‘I knew her to say hello to. Yythel I’d heard of but never met. He was a pub singer. Not from here. Lowenna was reputed to have a taste for musical talent. Her husband Ade is the church organist. A discontented, eering man. A hundred years ago he and his brothers would have stood on the cliffs with lamps and lured ships on to the rocks. Then he’d have laughed as they looted the wreckage. If he killed his wife he was just carrying on the family tradition.’

‘But then if he did,’ Ailinn said, ‘he’s only wrecked himself.’

‘Don’t we all,’ Kevern said.

She stopped to look at him. They were walking arm in arm in the valley in their wellingtons, splashing in puddles. The trickle of water called the River Jordan had swollen to the dimensions of a stream. The trees dripped. It would have been the height of fancy to think of it as nature weeping, but Kevern thought it anyway.

‘What do you mean don’t we all ?’

‘Did I say that?’

‘You did.’

‘Then I don’t know. I suppose I was feeling the tragedy of what’s occurred.’

‘But it’s not your tragedy.’

‘Well it is in a sense. It’s my village.’

‘Your village ! That’s not how you normally talk about it.’

‘No, you’re right, I don’t. Maybe I’m just being ghoulish — wanting to be part of the excitement.’

‘I’m surprised it still excites you. Don’t you have a lot of this sort of thing down here?’

‘Murders, no. Well, a few. But nothing quite as bloody as this.’

‘We have them too. .’ She pointed, comically, over her shoulder as she had done the day he met her. As though she were throwing salt. ‘. . Up there, if that’s north. People are unhappy.’

‘I suppose that was all I meant by saying don’t we all . That we all end up unhappy. You say yourself you walk in fear of unhappiness every hour.’

‘Unhappiness? I walk in fear of being hunted to my death.’

‘Well then. .’

‘Well then nothing. It’s not the same. The whales know who’s coming after them, but they still quietly feed their young. You have to risk it. I am still determined to be happy.’

‘I was only quoting your own words back to you. People are unhappy .’

She put her hands to his face and pulled at his lips, trying to force his melancholy mouth into a smile. ‘But we’re not, are we? Us? You and me?’

He let her fashion a smile out of him. His eyes burned with love for her. Part protective love, part desire. She could look dark and fierce sometimes, like a bird of prey, a hunter herself, but at others she appeared as helpless as a little girl, the foundling picked out of a children’s home in the back of beyond.