The Body Politic Page 13

  “Quite so, Miss,” said Sloan before Crosby could speak.

  “I’m sorry,” said Miss Finch, “but she just doesn’t like men.”

  Like mistress, like maid, was what Sloan’s grandmother would have said to that, but Sloan himself, wise in his own generation, kept silent.

  A faint smile played along Miss Finch’s thin lips. “She goes for Bertram Rauly practically every time she sees him.”

  “Indeed, Miss?” Sloan and Crosby followed Miss Finch inside the cottage and into a small sitting room to the left of the front door. “Doesn’t she like Mr. Rauly, then?”

  “She does not.” Mildred Finch waved the two men into chintz-covered chairs. “No sense of history, that’s his trouble, Camulos Society or not.”

  “You would have thought,” murmured Sloan, “that living in a house like Mellamby Place …”

  “That’s the whole trouble,” said Miss Finch warmly. “You would have thought so, wouldn’t you, but Mr. Bertram Millington Hervé Rauly sees the most beautiful house in Calleshire as nothing but a millstone round his neck. Not as living history, which it is, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Miss.” On the shelf beside Miss Finch’s fireplace Sloan could see a fine example of barbola work. That was living history, too, but at a different level.

  “How he can bear even to talk of burning it down,” spluttered Miss Finch, “totally defeats me.”

  “Quite so, Miss.” Over Miss Finch’s shoulder Sloan could see a wooden board with a motto and border design tastefully etched out in poker-work. Perhaps it was Miss Finch who had fire on the brain. “He’s set on fire-raising, is he?”

  If Bertram Rauly did set fire to Mellamby Place, that would certainly give the barrack-room lawyers in the Police Station charge room further food for thought. After all it was presumably his own property, but as it would undoubtedly also be a listed building within the meaning of the Act perhaps they would get him for wilfully damaging an ancient monument or something. Although if Bertram Rauly were dead or dying at the time that wouldn’t do the Law a lot of good.

  “So he says.” Miss Finch pursed her lips. “He declares that he’s going to burn the whole house down before he dies.” She gulped. “And everything in it.”

  “I see,” said Sloan. Happy the man, someone had said once, who didn’t have any hostages to fortune in the way of a family. And yet without them fortune in its other sense didn’t seem to have much meaning in the long run.

  Miss Finch’s voice trembled with emotion as she said, “And he keeps on saying he’s getting old.”

  “He did fall, didn’t he?” said Crosby pointedly, diverted by neither barbola work nor pyrogravure motto.

  “Caught his foot in a hole in a carpet,” said Miss Finch. “Or so he says.” She paused impressively. “But I don’t suppose he told you that it was a Savonnerie carpet.”

  “No, Miss,” said Sloan. “He didn’t.” Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell would have said that the make of the carpet was immaterial: Miss Finch evidently didn’t think so.

  “He’s got three Savonnerie carpets,” said Miss Finch, whose own sitting room was covered in a good Axminster. She very nearly wrung her hands in anguish. “And he says he’s going to burn the contents of the house with it rather than have any dealers pawing over his things.”

  “Does he, Miss?” replied Sloan thoughtfully. An unknown number of those present at Mellamby Place at the ill-fated re-enactment of the Battle of Lewes had had grounds for believing that Bertram Rauly had been playing William de Wilton. And the man who had actually been playing William de Wilton that day had died—with the medieval equivalent of an arrow in him.

  “And the pictures,” moaned Miss Finch. “All those beautiful pictures.”

  “Got some good ones, has he?” asked Crosby chattily.

  Miss Finch looked at him. “Only one of the finest collections of Calleshire topographical drawings in existence.”

  Detective Constable Crosby looked quite unimpressed. “Can’t understand myself, Miss, why anyone gets all excited about a painting of something they can still go and look at.”

  Miss Finch drew breath: she was a living exemplification, Sloan decided, of the old saying that you can take the schoolteacher out of the classroom but you can’t take the classroom out of the teacher.

  “If they want to,” added Crosby, although Miss Finch had obviously already decided that he had no soul.

  “To say nothing,” continued Miss Finch, ducking the issue the Constable had raised, “of a series of oil paintings by Lady Butler.” Throughout a long career in the teaching profession Miss Finch had never liked taking on hopeless educational cases.

  “Lady Butler?” Sloan re-entered the conversation. He’d never heard of her.

  “The doyenne of British battle artists.” Miss Finch took pleasure in informing him. “A Victorian painter of great imagination.”

  “Seeing as she wasn’t there at the battles,” said Crosby egregiously, “she would have had to have been, wouldn’t she?”

  “I expect,” said Miss Finch with totally misplaced optimism, “that The Retreat from Moscow is the one you probably remember best.”

  Crosby shook his head. “No.”

  The only battle painting that was firmly fixed in Detective Inspector’s Sloan’s mind was of chubby little Italians having a go at each other in the Middle Ages. The Florentines knocking hell out of the Sienese at the Battle of San Romano and an artist called Uccello making his own way into the school history books with something he knocked up about it a couple of hundred years after the event.

  “Mr. Rauly has also got a representative collection of paintings by George Cattermole,” Miss Finch went on with her lecture. Sloan hoped that her schoolmistressish tendency to impart knowledge extended to the matter about which they had come to Capgrave Cottage.

  “Who’s he?” asked Crosby simply.

  “A well-known early-nineteenth-century watercolour artist who specialised in dramatic and romantic depictions of battle scenes. Mr. Rauly collects him.”

  “Does he, Miss?” Detective Inspector Sloan projected as much interest as he could summon up. They already knew that Bertram Rauly was a battle buff without Miss Finch’s stress on the pictures at Mellamby Place. What was really intriguing Sloan at this moment was the question of exactly how the same patterned chintz that covered Miss Finch’s chairs came to cling so tightly to her biscuit barrel as well. “Actually, it’s about the Battle of Lewes that we’ve come.”

  “Poor Alan,” said Miss Finch immediately.

  “You knew him, of course, Miss …”

  “Not well but as Hazel’s husband.” She gave Sloan a wry smile. “I used to tell her that she should put caraway seeds under his plate.”

  “Miss?”

  “It’s an old country recipe for keeping husbands at home.”

  “I’ll remember that,” promised Sloan. There was quite a lot of call down at the Police Station for something that kept husbands at home. Besides food.

  “It works for hens that stray, Inspector.”

  “Mr. Ottershaw strayed then, did he, Miss?” It didn’t, of course, follow that what worked down on the farm was effective round at the Police Station, Domestic Department.

  “No, no, Inspector. Certainly not. That’s not what I meant at all. It was only that in the nature of his work Alan Ottershaw was away a good deal and that’s never a good thing for a wife and small family.”

  “Quite so, Miss.” He’d heard that advanced as an argument against a prison sentence too.

  “It was a great shock to everyone his coming back so unexpectedly and dying just like that.” She shook her head. “A sad day for us all.”

  “Yes, Miss.” Sloan coughed. “Actually, Miss, what we want to know is exactly what he was wearing when he was taken ill.”

  Mildred Finch looked at the policemen very sharply but said only, “His costume. It was rather heavy and it was a very hot day.”

  “Yes, Miss,” responded Sloan
easily. “That’s one of the reasons why we thought we would have a look at it. And his armour and so forth.” He didn’t know if amateur armies had property baskets.

  “It’s in my spare bedroom,” said Miss Finch. “I mend it through the winter.”

  “The Camulos Society doesn’t fight in the cold, then, Miss?” said Sloan, following her up a narrow stair. Their likeness to the armies of New Guinea—or had it been Borneo?—grew at every turn.

  “No, Inspector, it doesn’t—do mind your heads on that beam, won’t you—oh, I’m sorry, Constable, I should have warned you earlier, I’ve got a notice somewhere which says ‘Duck or grouse’ but I can’t remember where it is—no, in the winter we revive the old custom of holding a Frost Fair.” She led the way into a room full of costumes. “Everything’s here.”

  It looked like it. There were garments everywhere and hanging behind the door was an old Leghorn hat, its fine floppy soft straw drooping now. Sloan couldn’t decide if it was an artifact of mock battle or Miss Finch’s own: Mademoiselle from Armentières could have worn it. So could Mata Hari.

  “A Frost Fair?” he said aloud.

  “That’s right. If it seems as if there’s going to be ice, Mr. Rauly dams the stream. If not, then we have it on the terrace.”

  The clothes in Miss Finch’s spare room looked a total jumble to Sloan, but she paused only a moment before plunging her hand into a pile on the bed and coming up with a loosely woven grey string jerkin. “Here we are, Inspector. Imitation chain mail with gules on a chevron argent three crosses crosslet fitchee of the field.”

  “As worn by Alan Ottershaw?” asked the policeman.

  “As worn by William de Wilton,” said the Wardrobe Mistress of the Camulos Society.

  THIRTEEN

  The Angel of the Lord Shall Lift His Head

  “The whole affair,” pronounced Superintendent Leeyes grumpily, “sounds to me, Sloan, to have been about as dangerous as a masked ball.”

  Like Sheikh Ben Hajal Kisra, the senior policeman at Berebury took an essentially heliotropic view of the world. Nor was there any doubt in anybody else’s mind—and certainly not in his—about who was the centre of the universe in “F” Division in the County of Calleshire Police Force.

  It certainly wasn’t a luckless Detective Inspector Sloan reporting on the police visit to the site of the re-enactment and the interviews with the Battle Commander and Wardrobe Mistress of the Camulos Society. There was no doubt about that.

  The Superintendent sniffed. “All this dressing-up so that nobody’s to know who’s who.”

  “That’s one of our problems,” admitted Sloan. He took a deep breath. “Especially Death.”

  “What’s that, Sloan? What did you say?”

  “Nobody seems to have known who the Figure of Death was, sir.”

  “What did he look like?” asked Leeyes. “Tell me that.”

  “I gather, sir, it was a purely representational figure,” responded Sloan. He himself had looked on death—and at it, too, which was something quite different—often enough to know the difference between fact and fiction. “It was played by a man covered from head to foot in black with the outlines of a skeleton painted in white on the material.”

  “Very realistic, I daresay,” grunted Leeyes. “And did Death get all the best lines, eh, Sloan? Is that what they’re complaining about?”

  “No, sir. The trouble is that Death was unaccounted for by the members of the Camulos Society and nobody knew who he was.”

  “An outsider?” suggested Leeyes as unselfconsciously as Geoffrey Chaucer himself.

  “Perhaps,” assented Sloan. “Anyway, it’s what makes his appearance important, especially in view of what happened to Alan Ottershaw.”

  Superintendent Leeyes, who never used a syllable when a grunt would do, grunted.

  “Major Puiver,” added Sloan, “said it was the sort of character that used to crop up a lot in the old Mystery Plays.”

  Leeyes was patently unimpressed. “It’s the new mystery we’re interested in, Sloan.”

  “Yes, sir. Of course, sir. That’s why I’d like to see if anyone in Mellamby recognises a character called Hamer Morenci as having been in the village that day.”

  “In case he’s your outsider?” divined Leeyes.

  “Ottershaw changed his mind about going back to Lasserta,” said Sloan, “after talking to the Member of Parliament on the Saturday afternoon and before he telephoned his firm to say so on the Sunday morning. The Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company has given me a copy of their tape-recording of the message.”

  “What they say is a copy,” said Leeyes automatically.

  “I propose to check that it’s her husband’s voice with the widow, sir.” The task might be in the line of duty but “nice work if you can get out of it” was how Sloan would describe that.

  “Anything that might make sense of all this larking about in fancy dress,” grumbled Leeyes, “would be a help.”

  “Yes, sir.” In the comic papers burglars always wore striped jerseys and carried bags marked “swag”: Sloan couldn’t remember why. Not at this moment. But it did make for a certain simplicity.

  “Whether it’s suits of armour or mock shrouds,” said the Superintendent.

  “They’re not quite suits of armour,” explained Sloan. The convicts of yesteryear had derived the broad arrowheads on their prison suits from the livery of the family of Viscount Lisle and Dudley: he did know that. “No, sir, what they were wearing was mostly a sort of imitation chain-mail knitted with grey string.”

  “It sounds to me,” said Leeyes trenchantly, “more like dirty dishcloth than armour.”

  “The helmets are stouter. They do cover the head and shoulders for safety’s sake.”

  “Safety!” said the Superintendent. “Pah! Much good a stout helmet did the deceased.”

  “Yes, sir.” Sloan seized his moment. “We’ve sent the—er—garments the deceased wore that day off to the scientific people but even with the naked eye you could see that they were torn in all sorts of places.” He hesitated and then went on more tentatively, “I’m afraid, sir, there’s another problem about identification.”

  “Unless,” insisted Leeyes, overriding this last, “you can see the whites of a man’s eyes, I don’t know how you can know who he is.” The Superintendent had been asked to leave an Adult Education Evening Class on Social Anthropology for this and similar heresies. “No point shooting until then anyway.”

  “It’s an extra complication, sir,” began Sloan uncertainly, going on to explain to Superintendent Leeyes about Alan Ottershaw standing in for Bertram Rauly at the last minute at the re-enactment. “So,” he concluded, “if anyone had intended harm to—er—William de Wilton, we don’t know if the victim was to have been Rauly rather than Ottershaw.”

  Leeyes rolled his eyes heavenwards and demanded of his Creator what he had done to deserve this carry-on in his bailiwick.

  Sloan hurried on. “As well as tracing the garments worn that day by the deceased in the hope that there might be a tear or a hole that would tell us something”—Sloan saw no point in mentioning banners with strange devices at this juncture—“we’ve looked at some weapons, sir.”

  “Well?”

  “I have examined the crossbows used by the Society and fear that a real pellet——”

  “Made of queremitte,” grated Leeyes.

  “—made of queremitte,” Sloan tacitly agreed to the one fact that so far seemed to be beyond dispute, “could have been fixed to the bolt as easily as one of the Camulos Society’s plastic balls of red dye.”

  “And do you have a second string to your bow, Sloan,” enquired Leeyes frostily, “or are you sure it was aimed at Ottershaw?”

  “I couldn’t say, sir. Not at this stage.” He hesitated and then added unwillingly, “There is even some doubt about whether Ottershaw—that is, William de Wilton—was the intended victim.”

  “And what, Sloan, might I ask, do you call that? Broadening t
he scope of your investigations? Or drawing a bow at a venture?”

  Sloan stifled a number of possible replies to this and said in a controlled voice, “I understand the Member of Parliament narrowly escaped injury.”

  “Unless you make yourself clear, Sloan,” snarled Leeyes, “you may not be so lucky.”

  “Yes, sir. I understand that Mr. Corbishley was watching the reenactment from the foot of Mellamby Motte when a block of stone crashed down alongside him.”

  “And did it fall or was it pushed?”

  “We don’t know, sir. Not yet.” Sloan frowned. “What we do know is that someone seems to have got it in for both Berebury’s Members of Parliament. I’m told that the Figure of Death pursued Peter Corbishley all day at Mellamby.”

  Superintendent Leeyes muttered something quite indistinguishable about Guy Fawkes.

  “And I hear,” continued Sloan, “that Ted Sheard had a parcel of live scorpions through the post.”

  “Following up the death threats, I suppose,” responded Leeyes absently, “though as to where you get hold of live scorpions in East Calleshire, Sloan, I wouldn’t know.”

  “No problem, sir. There are several possible sources, and we’ll be following them all up as soon as I’ve seen Mr. Sheard.”

  “I hear the death threats upset his secretary no end,” remarked Leeyes. “Sheard himself seems to have taken them in his stride. I suppose the hustings prepare you for anything.”

  “Yes, sir.” Sloan braced himself and said, “I’m afraid there’s yet another complication about the queremitte pellet.”

  “Don’t tell me, Sloan,” pleaded Leeyes theatrically. “Let me guess …”

  Rightly interpreting this as a purely rhetorical remark, Detective Inspector Sloan forged on. “After the re-enactment at Mellamby Place the Society members sat down to a grand luncheon in the form of a medieval banquet.”

  “Ah,” said Leeyes, “I know what that means, Sloan.”

  “You do, sir?” said Sloan, surprised.

  “No forks,” said the Superintendent. “They hadn’t been invented.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that, sir, but what I do know is——”