J by Howard Jacobson Page B

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 andYthel 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 byjustifiable 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