The Body Politic Read online

  Sloan had read somewhere once about a tribe in Borneo—or had it been New Guinea?—whose warriors went to war in elaborate painted head-dresses of feathers and who were nevertheless afraid of the dark. In consequence all their wars had to be fought from nine o’clock to five o’clock, so to speak—in daylight, anyway—and on fine days because any rain spoiled their martial hair-dos.

  “Moreover,” continued the Major, oblivious of Sloan’s train of thought, “since we usually fight on Sundays we always make a feature of luncheon.”

  Things, then, weren’t so very different after all from New Guinea—or had it been Borneo?

  “And then we normally have some sort of staged tournament or set competitive display in the afternoon for the children and the spectators and so forth.”

  “Fun and games,” said Detective Constable Crosby.

  “The real Simon de Montfort probably attacked just after half-past five in the morning, and that wouldn’t have done for the Camulos Society members at all.”

  Detective Inspector Sloan solemnly agreed that verisimilitude could go only so far and no further. He said, “Perhaps, sir, you would just tell me exactly what happened to William de Wilton.” He coughed. “Or should I say Alan Ottershaw?”

  Major Puiver was impervious to irony. “As you know, Inspector, it was a role that Bertram Rauly had been going to play.”

  “Perhaps you could tell me who knew about the switch,” suggested Sloan, trying hard to get down to brass tacks. “Apart from Ottershaw himself, that is.”

  “Me, of course,” said the Major, “because I arranged it with him. The Wardrobe Mistress—that’s Miss Mildred Finch—and probably the armourer. I don’t think the Dapifer did because he wanted to know where Bertram Rauly was going to sit at the feast. Said someone had asked him.”

  “Dapifer?” asked Sloan tonelessly.

  “A sort of steward. He was in charge of the eating and drinking. All the fare was medieval.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “Ah, there you have me,” admitted Puiver. “A lot of people knew about Bertram Rauly’s injured ankle, and of course Hazel Ottershaw knew about Alan taking his role. She could have told any number of people.” He cleared his throat in a hortatory way. “We call them roles rather than parts, Inspector, because we have a muster roll of the Camulos Society rather than a register of members. Or a cast list.”

  “And Mrs. Ottershaw, I suppose,” said Sloan, silently gritting his teeth, “had brought her husband along that morning because he was there?”

  “Like Everest,” put in Detective Constable Crosby, suddenly waking up and taking an interest in the proceedings like the Dormouse at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.

  “Just so,” said the Major. “Providential, you might say, I suppose.”

  If Alan Ottershaw had been inflicted with a fatal pellet that Sunday morning, thought Sloan, then it had indeed been Providential for him. In one sense, anyway. It had taken him straight to Kingdom Come.

  Aloud, Sloan said again, “Who else knew about the change in par—roles?”

  “I don’t know myself how many people Hazel and Alan told,” said Major Puiver. “I made a note on my muster roll naturally, and that might have been seen by other people. Must keep the paperwork straight otherwise you lose control.”

  Sloan hoped that Crosby was listening.

  “I must say,” carried on the Major, “the outfit fitted Ottershaw like a glove. Old Bertram’s kept his figure very well. He’s an old soldier, of course.”

  The little Major was still remarkably trim, too, noted Sloan to himself. He cleared his throat. “So, sir,” he said, “as far as you are concerned unless the other—er—participants had been told by someone else or seen your muster roll they might well have thought that Alan Ottershaw was Bertram Rauly?”

  “Indeed, yes,” responded Puiver.

  It was an unwonted complication as far as Detective Inspector Sloan was concerned. He changed his conversational tack, waving his arm towards Mellamby Chase. “This is all Mr. Rauly’s land, I take it, sir?”

  “It is indeed,” responded the Major warmly. “And held by something a little more tangible than cornage, too, I’m happy to say. The Raulys did well under the Tudors but better still under the Stuarts. That’s when they built Mellamby Place. When James I was on the throne.”

  “The wisest fool in Christendom,” said Sloan. Some historical quotations stuck in the mind longer than others.

  “Not much of a campaigner, of course,” said Puiver professionally, “but the Raulys themselves have always been soldiers. Right up to Bertram, that is.”

  “Don’t tell me that his sons have gone in for pacifism,” said Sloan. He’d had to restrain some very aggressive pacifists in his day and had scars to prove it.

  “No, Inspector.” Major Puiver shook his head sadly. “I’m afraid that’s the whole trouble. The pity of it, I suppose I should say.”

  “Trouble?” queried Sloan, his professional instincts aroused by the word.

  “He doesn’t have any sons.”

  “Oh, I see …”

  The Major said, “It’s worse than that.”

  “No daughters?” offered Crosby brightly.

  “No wife,” said Major Puiver, adding sombrely, “And no heir, either.”

  “He might still marry.” Sloan was bracing. “A man is only as old as he feels.”

  “Bertram had rather a bad time in tanks in the war,” said the Major obliquely.

  “What’s that got to do with——”

  “And sustained some—er—lasting wounds.” He coughed. “It was most unfortunate.”

  “Stapped in his vitals, was he?” asked Crosby cheerfully.

  “So,” asked Sloan bluntly, “what happens to Mellamby Place when he goes?” In the First World War it had been the barbed wire that had taken on a legendary significance as far as future fatherhood was concerned.

  “Ah,” said the Major, “that’s a very sore point.”

  “The National Trust?”

  “He doesn’t like institutions and anyway he can’t afford to endow the estate.”

  “A really wealthy man could buy it,” said Sloan.

  “He can’t abide the thought of strangers living here,” said the Major, adding significantly, “and won’t.”

  “Cats’ home?” put in Crosby. He didn’t like cats.

  “So?” said Sloan, ignoring this.

  “Bertram’s told everyone that he’s going to set the house on fire before he dies,” said the Major.

  TWELVE

  And the Widow and Child Forsake the Dead

  It was a full hour after that before Major Derrick Puiver finished his conducted tour of the mock battlefield and what he called—several times—putting Sloan and Crosby in the picture. He came to a halt at last in the garden of Mellamby Place.

  “We finished our day here, Inspector,” he said, waving an arm, “in the old tiltyard with a little staged tournament and some troubadours. As it happens the real battle was over quite early in the day too. Simon de Montfort was a good strategist and the King’s son—the Lord Edward, that is—although he was on the losing side at Lewes had learned a great deal about military tactics by the end of the conflict. Later on, of course, he did very well against the Scots and the Welsh.”

  Once again Sloan had a curious sensation that the little Major wasn’t really sure which century he was in. He brought him firmly back to the twentieth with a question. “How easy, sir, would it have been for any participant to have fired a real pellet at William de Wilton. I mean”—hurriedly—“at Alan Ottershaw?”

  The Major frowned. “You’re postulating a sort of der Freischütz, are you?”

  “Pardon, sir?”

  “A free shooter, Inspector. A marksman.”

  “In a way,” said Sloan cautiously.

  “It wouldn’t have been too difficult. Everyone taking part in the fighting was in their authentic heraldic colours.” He coughed. “You may have heard that in
the Camulos Society we pride ourselves on accuracy in all things.”

  “I had,” agreed Sloan. They had standards in the police force, too, but he wasn’t going to explain them now. Especially to a soldier.

  “The whole idea of heraldry,” said Puiver in a schoolmasterish way, “was that everyone should know who a knight was under his armour.”

  “So picking out William de Wilton wouldn’t have been difficult?”

  “I can’t remember myself now exactly what his arms were—gules on a chevron three crosses crosslet fitchee of the field, I think—but Miss Finch will know. She’s very sound on heraldic colours, too.”

  “But,” persisted Sloan, anxious to get at least one thing in a very confused situation absolutely clear, “am I right in thinking that there would have been no way in which anyone who didn’t already know about the changeover could tell that it was Alan Ottershaw inside that battledress and not Mr. Rauly?”

  “You are, Inspector. Quite right. They were much the same height, you see. All anyone would have been able to tell was that there was someone there being William de Wilton.” He gave a quick little cough. “Actually, as it happens, Inspector, we did have an—er—even more unknown quantity with us at the time.”

  “Sir?”

  “Death.” Major Puiver cleared his throat self-consciously. “I mean, of course, someone dressed as the Figure of Death.”

  “So we had heard.” Sloan turned over a fresh page in his notebook. “And would you be able to tell me who that would have been, sir, might I ask? I daresay it’s not everyone’s part.”

  “You don’t follow me, Inspector. By unknown quantity I meant that I didn’t have anyone on my muster roll as playing Death.”

  “I see, sir,” said Sloan impassively. “Death was an interloper, was he?”

  “I certainly hadn’t had anything to do with his being there,” said the Major energetically, “although the Figure of Death crops up a good deal in a lot of early-medieval literature—Piers Plowman and so forth. Sometimes, of course, he’s disguised as Winter.”

  “But you hadn’t expected to see him that day at the re-enactment?” said Sloan with exemplary patience.

  A moralist would have had a ready answer to that, but all the good Major said was, “Certainly not. I tried to question him myself but he only laughed at me and moved away.”

  Detective Constable Crosby stirred. “Wrong way round, that, isn’t it?”

  The Major swung round. “I beg your pardon, Officer?”

  “I thought soldiers were meant to laugh at Death, weren’t they?” said Crosby. “Not Death at them.”

  The detective instinct in Sloan asserted itself before Crosby got an answer to that. “I take it, Major, that Death didn’t speak in case you recognised his voice?”

  “Hadn’t thought of that,” admitted Puiver. “I just thought the fellow was being impertinent.”

  “Was it a male laugh?” asked Sloan curiously. Thanks to his mother, St. Francis of Assisi’s Sister Death had figured prominently in his bedtime stories as a child.

  “Yes,” responded Puiver instantly. “No doubt about that but it’s funny you should say something about my recognising him, Inspector.”

  “Sir?” Sloan searched about in his own memory: surely it had been in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales that Death had stalked about in disguise.

  The Major frowned. “I did have a feeling that I’d seen him before but I couldn’t for the life of me remember where or when. I couldn’t place him but I felt all along that I ought to have been able to, if you know what I mean. I told our debriefing committee so.”

  “And whose side was Death on?” enquired Crosby with genuine interest.

  He got a totally unexpected answer from Major Puiver, who said grimly, “Not poor old Peter Corbishley’s anyway.”

  “The Member?” said Sloan alertly.

  “None other,” said the old soldier. “Death kept on leaping up and down in front of him wherever he went and doing a sort of war-dance.” Puiver looked quite worried, and added seriously, “When he wasn’t doing that he was stalking the Member round the tiltyard. And that was all before the Member had a narrow escape at the foot of the tower.”

  “Tell me,” said Sloan.

  “A stone fell from the parapet. Missed him by a whisker.”

  “The time has come, Crosby——” Detective Inspector Sloan stopped and immediately corrected himself. “No, the time is long overdue, Crosby, for a visit to Miss Mildred Finch.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He led the way back to their police car, glancing at a piece of paper. “She lives at Capgrave Cottage, Church Street, Mellamby. Come along.”

  “Does that mean we’re late, sir?” asked Crosby, taking this literally, and hoping to seize on a good reason for a nice turn of speed at the wheel. Driving fast cars fast was his principal joy in life.

  “It does not.” Sloan laid a wallet of papers on the back seat of the police car. “Nor does it mean, Crosby, that the rate of the journey calls for white knuckles on the part of the driver.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Or the passenger.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Just pretend your name is Tod Morton, that’s all.”

  “Sir?”

  “Drive me to Capgrave Cottage as if you were an undertaker behind the wheel of a hearse.”

  Even so it was not long before Crosby was asking where in Church Street, Mellamby, to look for Miss Finch’s cottage. “There’s the church, sir, but I can’t see any names on the gates.”

  “Seeing that we call ourselves detectives, Crosby,” said Sloan, peering out of the car window, “we might just be able to tell which one is occupied by—what did that chap Rauly call her? A retired schoolteacher of an interfering disposition.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Crosby, adding insouciantly a moment later, “How?”

  “From the front garden,” said the rose-grower. “Gives a lot away, does a front garden.”

  “Yes, sir.” Crosby slowed the police car down in front of a garden that was a model of neatness.

  “No,” said Sloan at once. “Not serried ranks of lobelia and salvia with alyssum in between. Patriotic, of course, and a very popular layout in the last war, but not sufficiently imaginative, I think, for Miss Finch.

  The constable re-engaged first gear and drove the car forward.

  “Nor the London Pride and day lilies next door, either,” pronounced Sloan. “Ground cover, that’s all they are. Lazy beds.”

  “Why they don’t have numbers on their houses beats me,” said Crosby, driving past a dwelling whose front garden appeared to comprise only an out-of-hand buddleia without even slowing down.

  “A butterfly fancier,” diagnosed Sloan. “Drive on—ah, try the one with the delphiniums and the lupins over there,” commanded Sloan, his eye caught by a blaze of colour that would have done credit to Gertrude Jekyll. “Oh, and there’s a really good eremurus in the border with some Blue Butterfly scabious—this looks a lot more promising, Crosby. Let’s ask at this one.”

  A noisily defensive stance taken by a Bedlington terrier at the garden gate delayed the two policemen but brought a tall, gaunt-faced woman to the front door. As they advanced the policemen could see the words “Capgrave Cottage” carved on an oak board beside the door.

  Sloan introduced himself.

  “Police?” she said. “Ah, Constable Turton has been in touch with you then, has he? I hoped he might.”

  “Well …” prevaricated Sloan.

  “It’s disgraceful,” said Miss Finch. “I don’t know what this generation is coming to, I really don’t.”

  “No, Miss.” Sloan coughed and asked cautiously, “What have they been up to now?”

  “Didn’t Colin Turton tell you? It’s the churchyard over there.”

  The two policemen pivoted on their heels and obediently looked in the direction of the churchyard. As far as Sloan could tell at a quick glance all the rude forefathers of the village of Me
llamby were sleeping peacefully in their appointed places. “Something wrong, is there, Miss?”

  Miss Finch sniffed. “Not now but there was until I put it right.”

  “Ah.” Some citizens were better than others at the watch-keeping role.

  She pointed. “You see that notice on the churchyard wall?”

  “Yes, Miss.”

  “And what it says?”

  “No dogs,” said Sloan, feeling himself back in the classroom in an instant.

  “It does now.”

  “So?” If the police were at Mellamby for anything, it was to try to establish whether or not a serious crime had been committed: not to examine notices on walls.

  “Last night,” said Miss Finch censoriously, “it was changed.”

  “Really, Miss.”

  “Last night,” she paused impressively, “it read ‘Do snog.’”

  Detective Inspector Sloan’s mind sought swiftly through a range of possible responses with the speed of a computer and settled for “That won’t do at all, Miss. Can’t have that on the churchyard wall, can we?”

  “Certainly not,” said Miss Finch.

  “As it so happens, Miss, we hadn’t come about—er—that.” Sloan wasn’t sure off the cuff what degree of misdemeanour could be committed by perpetrating an anagram. Would the legal eagles down at the Police Station construe “Do snog” as an incitement to violence? Or as coming within that archaic catch-all a breach of the peace? He said, “Actually, Miss Finch, we’ve come about William de Wilton.” Which sounded just as arcane.

  “Have you?” Miss Finch looked the two policemen up and down. “You’d better come indoors then. Come along, Bebida.”

  The Bedlington terrier gave a joyous yelp and made straight for Detective Constable Crosby’s ankles.

  “Bebida! Come here at once.” Miss Finch smiled perfunctorily at the constable. “It’s the trousers, you know.”