The Body Politic Read online

  “Of course they’re new, Sloan,” responded Dr. Dabbe. “To paraphrase the immortal John Webster, ‘Death now has ten thousand and one several doors.’”

  “I see,” said Sloan, although he didn’t. “Perhaps you would …”

  “The Intensive Care outfit at the hospital double-checks the patients on life-support machines in the morning,” amplified the doctor obligingly, “and if the recorders are still flat, then they triple-check them in the afternoon.”

  “And?”

  “And if the lines are still flat.” Dr. Dabbe waved his hands in an age-old gesture. “Then …”

  “Then they pull the plug out,” finished the Detective Constable for him, adding with chilling simplicity, “before tea.”

  SEVEN

  And the Mind Can Only Disgrace Its Fame

  The Member of Parliament for the East Berebury Division of the County of Calleshire projected nothing but helpfulness to the two policemen who visited him at his constituency headquarters in the town.

  He did it so well that Detective Inspector Sloan reminded himself that the very posture was probably part of the politician’s stock-in- trade. Peter Corbishley was holding his head at a slightly sideways angle, supported by two fingers of his left hand, and conveying a faintly quizzical attitude that was meant to demonstrate an alert interest without commitment. As it happened it was a position he assumed almost daily in Parliament while listening to debate—and at weekends while trying to sort out the difficulties of his constituents.

  “Ottershaw had problems all right, Inspector,” he said when he had heard the policemen out. “Or, more precisely, his employers did.” Peter Corbishley gave Sloan and Crosby a cogent résumé of the situation facing the Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company after Ottershaw’s road traffic accident. “Alan Ottershaw, poor fellow, had simply become a pawn in a power game overnight—and he knew it.”

  “In an international power game?” ventured Sloan, liking the idea as little as the Coroner had done.

  “In a power game with very high stakes,” said the Member, adding obliquely, “I daresay you know by now—you don’t have to tell me, Inspector—that you know as much about our need for queremitte as I do.”

  Detective Inspector Sloan couldn’t play the game of chess, but he did know how the pieces moved. “A pawn is the only piece on the board that can’t move backwards, isn’t it, sir?”

  “What? Oh yes, Inspector, that’s true. Very true. I’m sure Ottershaw would have put the clock to where it had been before he knocked the Lassertan down if he possibly could have done. However——”

  “Yes?”

  “I promised Ottershaw I would take up with the Home Office first thing on the Monday morning the important question of whether or not he could be extradited by the Lassertans.” He frowned. “I’m afraid I couldn’t tell the unfortunate chap then and there at the Garden Meeting exactly what sort of mutual arrangements we had with the Sheikhdom just like that.”

  “Quite so,” said Sloan, who let the Police Manual do a lot of his own remembering of legal detail for him.

  “I didn’t even know at the time whether we had an extradition treaty with the Lassertans at all—let alone whether it was a convention or simply a declaration—not off the cuff.”

  “I see, sir.” There had been a difference between a felony and a misdemeanour which those who were not of the Law found difficult to comprehend.

  “Or even a protocol,” continued the Member. He coughed. “I did, though, manage to have a word with one of the Parliamentary Under-Secretaries at the Foreign Office——”

  “Ah,” said Sloan encouragingly.

  “—about the Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company’s position.” A new thought appeared to strike the politician. “It’s just as well, Inspector, that Parliament is in recess just now.”

  “Just as well,” agreed Sloan, who was a member of a round-the-clock, round-the-calendar Force. “And what about the company’s position?”

  “Tricky,” said Corbishley. “Very tricky.”

  Sloan wasn’t surprised to hear it.

  “It’s the queremitte that makes the difference, of course,” said the Member.

  Sloan wasn’t altogether surprised to hear that either. He’d already established that queremitte was what Winston Churchill would have called “one of the sinews of war.” “We thought it might,” he said. This was generous of him since Crosby did not appear to have thought at all.

  The Member lowered his eyes a fraction: a sign well known to interrogation experts. “It seems, Inspector, that there might be more to the whole business than meets the eye.”

  “There often is,” said Sloan prosaically, forbearing to add anything about what the eye didn’t see, the heart didn’t grieve over. This was never the police view. “Tell me.”

  “The Parliamentary Select Committee looking into the cost to the Ministry of Defence Procurement of queremitte is—er—setting up a lot of waves just now.”

  “Anglo-Lassertan taking them for a ride, are they?” asked Detective Constable Crosby with interest.

  The politician’s response was professionally tempered. “It was when the Foreign Office chappie started talking about keeping the Ministry of Defence Procurement in the picture over Ottershaw’s problems,” said Peter Corbishley, “that I began to realise that matters might just get out of hand very quickly.”

  “If Ottershaw hadn’t died, you mean?” said Sloan in the tones of one anxious to get everything clear.

  “I didn’t know then that he had,” said Peter Corbishley with apparent frankness. “One way and another I spent most of the Monday in London talking about his predicament, which naturally I wouldn’t have done had I known about his having died from a heart attack.”

  “Naturally,” said Sloan.

  “I left Ottershaw to spend the Monday sorting out with his solicitor exactly what his employers—as employers, you understand—could make him do.”

  “And what they could do to him if he didn’t,” added Sloan. Nearly everyone forgot that in legal matters it took two to tango.

  “What’s that? Oh, yes, of course, Inspector. Well, as I said, I left him to talk to the lawyers about his situation while I applied myself to seeing how far the Lassertans could go. I didn’t see him at all on the Sunday—I understand he had been—er—conscripted into taking part in the battle——”

  “As William de Wilton,” rejoined Sloan solemnly.

  “—and until David Chadwick—he’s my Agent—telephoned me and told me the news, that’s what I thought Alan Ottershaw would be about on the Monday.”

  “Kicked the bucket by then, hadn’t he?” said Crosby from the sidelines.

  “Both the Lassertans and his employers,” observed Sloan with speed, “would appear to have had some kind of vested interest in making a human sacrifice out of Ottershaw.”

  “Just as well he was saved by the bell, then, wasn’t it?” remarked Crosby brightly. “If there is a fate worse than death, that is.”

  “Well …” temporised Peter Corbishley. The politician was too experienced to make an immediate comment, while Sloan made a mental note to explain to the Detective Constable the difference between a bell and a knell.

  “If,” said Detective Inspector Sloan equally carefully, “Lasserta didn’t happen to have this valuable seam of queremitte ore …”

  “Ah,” said Corbishley, sitting up very straight, “that would be different. Then I don’t suppose anyone would give you more than a handful of dates for it. There isn’t any oil there, if that’s what you mean.”

  “What about strategic importance?” As far as Sloan was concerned this wasn’t as easy to calculate now that the map was no longer coloured pink somewhere on nearly every page in every atlas.

  The Member of Parliament gave a hollow laugh. “In that part of the world, Inspector, who can say? Your guess would be as good as mine and we’d both probably be wrong.”

  Sloan cleared his throat. “Middle Eastern politics—�
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  “Are like the Schleswig-Holstein Question, Inspector.”

  “Sir?”

  “There are only three men who have ever understood that.”

  “Really, sir?”

  “One was Prince Albert, who was dead.”

  “Like Queen Anne?” ventured Sloan tentatively, since it seemed a historical matter.

  “The second,” swept on Corbishley, not listening, “was a German professor who became mad.”

  “Ah.” It was the most non-committal sound Sloan could make.

  “And the third was Lord Palmerston.”

  “Indeed, sir?”

  “And he had forgotten.”

  Detective Inspector Sloan brought the conversation firmly back to the realms of England and the present. “I understand, sir, that you yourself had been subjected to some harassment at Mellamby that weekend.”

  “That’s what ‘Government of the people, by the people, for the people’ means, Inspector,” said the Member, relaxing. “It made a change from having wholesale disruption from the University students at Berebury Town Hall, like last year.”

  “You had a heckler.” The fracas at the Town Hall last year had been the problem of somebody else at the Police Station. As he remembered, the Member hadn’t wanted any charges brought then when the undergraduates had started behaving like the Class of ’68.

  Corbishley laughed. “A heckler? That’s only the half of it, Inspector.”

  “Sir?”

  “You should see some of the letters I’ve had recently.”

  “Anonymous?” asked Sloan. There had been some new laws lately about sending anonymous letters in the United Kingdom.

  A smile twitched at the edges of the legislator’s mouth: he must have known that too. “Not exactly anonymous, Inspector. They’re all signed with a little drawing.”

  “The same drawing?”

  The Member nodded. “From the Zodiac.”

  “A sign?”

  “Oh, yes, Inspector. A sign and always the same sign. Sagittarius.”

  “The archer,” said Crosby surprisingly.

  “And I,” said the Member drily, “am always addressed as Capricorn.”

  “The goat,” supplied Crosby.

  Perhaps, thought Sloan, the constable did read after all. His horoscope.

  “But I,” continued the Member easily, “have done very well in comparison with Ted Sheard.”

  “The Member for West Berebury?”

  “None other. He told me, poor fellow, that he had a parcel of live scorpions in his post the other day.” Peter Corbishley gave a light laugh. “So I didn’t do too badly, did I, with just a heckler?”

  Bertram Millington Hervé Rauly was still limping slightly.

  “It was a very nasty sprain, Inspector. Caught m’foot in a hole in the carpet on the Saturday evening.”

  “Very unfortunate, sir.” The carpets in Detective Inspector Sloan’s modest semi-detached home in suburban Berebury did not have holes of a foot-catching size in them. Nor, of course, did he and his wife have as many carpets as the owner of Mellamby Place.

  “The one in the Long Gallery,” said Rauly.

  There wasn’t a Long Gallery in Sloan’s house to have a carpet.

  “My own fault entirely, Inspector,” continued Rauly. “I’m always very careful about the one on the stairs. I forgot all about the other.”

  So there were two carpets with holes in them at Mellamby Place, then.

  “Began,” said Rauly, “to think that someone’s hex was working.”

  “Hex?”

  “Bone-pointing to be exact, Inspector. Found a chicken-bone under m’chair at the Garden Meeting in the afternoon.” He frowned. “Don’t like that sort of thing.”

  Sloan cleared his throat. “And the sprain was the evening before the battle, I think you said, sir.” He made a note about the chicken-bone.

  “I did,” agreed Bertram Rauly. “And since,” he added with a perfectly straight face, “if you go sick in the Army you’re automatically deemed to be on a charge until the Medical Officer says you’re really ill, I sent for the sawbones the next morning. Didn’t want to be shot for cowardice in the face of the enemy or anything like that.”

  Sloan didn’t for the life of him know whether the landed proprietor was being serious or not: the real Battle of Lewes had, after all, been a very long time ago.

  “Dr. Lyulph said I’d probably sprained a ligament—and so I had,” recounted Rauly, adding drily, “He’s not an Army doctor, of course.”

  “No, sir.” Sloan refrained from saying anything about police surgeons, who really did have to have their wits about them.

  “Couldn’t put m’foot to the ground anyway, so I knew I’d done something damaging. Managed to hotch myself about the place all right after a while but it was damn painful, I can tell you.”

  “Yes, sir, I’m sure——”

  “And I definitely wasn’t up to being William de Wilton that day.”

  “So …”

  “So I telephoned Derrick Puiver. He was being the Battle Commander—we always have a Battle Commander in charge of Camulos Society battles, Inspector.”

  Then, thought Sloan privately, they were luckier than some in history who had had none. Or more than one.

  “And told him about your leg?” he said aloud.

  Bertram Rauly chuckled. “Better than that, Inspector, much better. I paraphrased the immortal words of the Marquis of Anglesey at Waterloo.”

  “Sir?”

  “When he was hit by a cannon ball Anglesey said, “I have lost my leg, by God!” The Duke of Wellington was beside him and he said, ‘By God, so you have!’”

  “Really, sir?” It was funny how the Duke of Wellington had got himself so well remembered.

  “What our Battle Commander said was, ‘Blast, I’ll have to find someone else.’ And that, Inspector, is how poor Ottershaw got to play the part.”

  Sloan made a note but said nothing.

  “He stood in for me while I hirpled about on the terrace getting in everybody’s way.” Rauly grunted. “Bad luck his dying on home leave like that.”

  “Very.”

  Sloan found himself being regarded by a pair of very bright china-blue eyes. “The Battle of Lewes couldn’t have had anything to do with it, could it, Inspector?” asked Bertram Rauly shrewdly. “Seeing that you are here and all that …”

  “We’re just checking up on a number of matters generally, sir.” Sloan was evasive.

  “This and that,” put in Detective Constable Crosby antiphonally.

  “Ottershaw’d been out of the country a lot, of course,” said the owner of Mellamby Place. “Doesn’t do the heart a lot of good.” Through the centuries younger sons of the House of Rauly had come to grief in all manner of hostile climes.

  “No, sir.” Sloan turned over a page in his notebook. “If you could just tell me a little more about the—er—re-enactment, that would be a great help.”

  “It was one of our better efforts, Inspector,” replied Bertram Rauly frankly. “The last battle the Camulos Society did before that was Waterloo and it turned out to be nearly as big a shambles as the real thing. So you will understand that this time the Committee was pretty determined to keep a tight hold on everything.”

  “Quite so, sir,” said Sloan, wondering what Detective Constable Crosby was making of all this. “Tell me, sir, exactly what sort of fighting did you all go in for at the Battle of Lewes?”

  Rauly waved a hand. “Mostly hand-to-hand stuff. Swords and so forth but for the actual killing——”

  “Actual killing?” queried Sloan sharply.

  “Within the context of the re-enactment,” said Rauly, grinning. “We use a sort of crossbow with a special bolt of plastic material instead of an arrow.”

  “I should hope so, too,” interposed Detective Constable Crosby in a sudden burst of rectitude.

  The corner of Rauly’s lip came down in a macabre twist. “Not as exciting as the real th
ing, of course, but I daresay you’re both too young to remember that.”

  “This plastic bolt …” said Sloan touchily. The unspoken quotation, “Go hang yourself, Crito. We fought at Arques and you were not there,” really struck home as far as Sloan was concerned.

  “Inside it,” said Rauly, “is some red dye. If that hits you, it’s touché.”

  “Touché?” echoed the Constable, puzzled.

  “It means you’re dead,” said Detective Inspector Sloan irritably. “And out of the game.” Of all the games people played, he wasn’t sure if this wasn’t the silliest. He’d been finished with this sort of activity by the time he was twelve.

  “Like Cowboys and Indians,” said Crosby intelligently, “with knobs on.”

  “Exactly like Cowboys and Indians,” agreed Bertram Rauly. “The extra ingredient as far as the Camulos Society is concerned is verisimilitude.”

  Sloan pushed his notebook into visual prominence. “I think it might be helpful if we knew who was—er—playing whom.” The emphasis as far as he was concerned was on the word “playing.” If he, Sloan, had a free Sunday morning in the summer time he spent it like most normal men did. Cutting the grass.

  “Major Puiver, the Battle Commander, will be able to give you the full list, gentlemen, but as far as I remember Simon de Montfort was the Member of Parliament’s Party Agent—a young fellow called Chadwick. David Chadwick. And the Curate was Gilbert de Clare. He was a bit of a wet.”

  It was quite impossible to tell whether Rauly meant the Curate or Gilbert de Clare.

  “The King and Queen were Adrian Dungey—he’s a vet in Rebble’s practice, I always have him for the dogs—and Hazel Ottershaw.” He screwed up his face. “I must say the outfit suited her very well. There’s something distinctly flattering about a coif. Pity they went out of fashion. And then there was the Lord Edward.”

  “Who was he?”

  “Henry III’s son,” said Rauly. “He was Edward I afterwards. You probably remember him as the Hammer of the Scots.”

  “And who played his part?” enquired Sloan.

  “The Vicar’s son—Michael Saunders. Then”—he grimaced—“there was Miss Mildred Finch, who wanted to be Fair Rosamund or Agnes Sorrel or someone equally unsuitable, but the period was wrong and I don’t know what she did in the end. The costumes, I think.”