The Body Politic Read online

  “Not that I’ve heard,” said Dungey. His next patient was a Pekingese with bad breath and he was only too happy to let its owner wait a little longer. “Let’s see, we’ve done all the interesting Civil Wars now, haven’t we?”

  “And the Wars of the Roses.” They had been a great success.

  “There’s always the Battle of Hastings,” said Dungey, “as long as I’m not King Harold. I never have liked,” he added lightly, “that bit about ‘’Arold, with his eye full of arrow on his ’orse with his ’awk in his ’and.’”

  Miss Finch toyed with Bebida’s lead. “I’ve been wondering about Crécy myself.”

  “Good idea. The same armour might do.”

  She leaned forward. “But what would be really interesting, Adrian, would be an Old Testament battle.”

  “That’s thinkable,” said the young vet with the boyish enthusiasm which his clients found so attractive. “Gideon and the Midianites, do you think? Gideon was a really great general. I think you could almost call him the first of the management-selection people. Sorted out the good soldiers from the rest by the way they drank. Some cupped their hands and kept their eyes open for the enemy and some just plunged their heads down. Did you know that?”

  “I,” said Miss Finch, “was wondering about Saul and the smiting of the Amalekites.”

  “Coming down like a wolf on the fold, you mean?” He grinned. “That would be great.”

  “They spared Agag, of course,” said Miss Finch enigmatically.

  “He was the one who had to step warily, wasn’t he?” said Dungey. “At least he did better than Harold.”

  “Coming down like a wolf on the fold would make a good charge,” said the retired schoolmistress. “I’ve noticed that a good charge always goes down well with Society members.”

  “Old Testament weapons might be a problem,” said Dungey, “even if the costumes were a doddle. I’ve never used a sling.”

  “Talking of costumes,” said Miss Finch severely, “you got King Henry Ill’s clothes into a pretty bad state at the Battle of Lewes.”

  “It was a great day,” said Dungey, stretching himself to his full height. “Until poor Alan collapsed I enjoyed every minute of it.”

  “Not everyone did.” She waved a hand. “Apart from poor Alan, I mean.”

  “Oh?”

  “Didn’t you hear?”

  “What?”

  “About the Member of Parliament.”

  “Peter Corbishley? Oh, old pinstripe isn’t a Camulos Society member,” said Dungey. “He only came back to Mellamby over the weekend to make a speech about Simon de Montfort and the first Parliament. David Chadwick said he’d persuaded him.”

  “I know, I know,” said Miss Finch grimly. “On the Saturday he’d just got well and truly into his spiel when an ambulance turned up for him.”

  “I didn’t know he’d been taken ill,” said Adrian Dungey, surprised.

  “He hadn’t,” said Mildred Finch. “That’s the whole point. The ambulance people insisted that they’d had a message that he’d had a heart attack.”

  “And he hadn’t?”

  “Never felt better in his life was what he said to them. He told the ambulance men that he was as fit as a fiddle.”

  The vet frowned. “Odd, that.”

  “Mind you,” said Miss Finch, “the ambulance crew didn’t believe him at first. Apparently they quite often have turn-outs to people who don’t realise how ill they are and who don’t want to go to hospital.”

  “I’ve always thought that being a vet is easier,” said Dungey, patting Miss Finch’s terrier, “isn’t it, Bebida? Not only can’t your patients talk but they can’t disobey you either.”

  “Or worry,” said Miss Finch unexpectedly, “about themselves or anyone else.”

  “True. So what happened in the end?”

  “Oh, the ambulance people went away after a bit and said they’d chalk it up as a hoax call. That wasn’t so important but on the Sunday it was much worse.”

  Dungey leaned forward. “Tell me.”

  “Mr. Corbishley was standing at the bottom of the Motte tower when a lump of masonry came down and only just missed hitting him on the head. It was a near thing, I can tell you.”

  Dungey didn’t seem very interested in the Member of Parliament. “The thing I thought was strange,” he said, “was that odd black Figure of Death that was leaping about.”

  “Not as strange as I thought it,” said Miss Finch astringently.

  “I know it fits in with the period and all that but I can’t remember his being on the muster roll.”

  “He wasn’t,” said Miss Finch.

  Dungey looked up sharply.

  “Moreover,” said Miss Finch, “I wasn’t responsible for his costume. I’d never even seen it before.”

  “So,” concluded the vet, frowning, “we had Death in our midst without recognising him?”

  “Just like in the old Mystery Plays,” said Miss Finch, adding, “with a little Thornton Wilder thrown in.” She was still cross with herself that she hadn’t thought to bring the tide To Kill a Mocking-Bird into her vote of thanks to the Member after his speech. “Staircase wit” Diderot had called that.

  “I can see that there’s a moral lurking about somewhere,” admitted Adrian Dungey, “but I must say something in all this doesn’t quite add up.”

  “Or,” said Miss Finch profoundly, “it adds up to something very funny.”

  NINE

  When the Last Sigh Is Heaved

  “One of the reasons, Sloan,” said Dr. Dabbe, “why the cremation procedure in this country is so comprehensive is that in the nature of things the process destroys the forensic evidence. If such there be.” The pathologist stared down at the queremitte pellet lying in an old Petri dish before him on his desk and amended this. “Nearly all the evidence.”

  “But it doesn’t affect the medical history, Doctor,” responded Sloan. “In fact I thought that cremation made writing down exactly what the patient died from all the more important.”

  He and Detective Constable Crosby had gone back to the hospital mortuary and were sitting in the pathologist’s office.

  “Naturally it does,” said Dr. Dabbe. “I’ve studied the certification in Ottershaw’s case. It would appear at first sight,” he said gravely, “to be all in order.”

  “Ah.”

  “But, then,” he added equally solemnly, “so did the death certificates of all those cases of cholera that the immortal Rudyard Kipling described as being of the white arsenic variety.”

  Sloan pulled his notebook out: there was clearly more to Kipling than met the eye. “You mean, Doctor——”

  “That the certification is probably quite correct as far as it goes. The cause of death was undoubtedly heart failure. I’ve had a good look at the hospital case-notes and they record everything you would expect to find in a patient expiring in that way—even unto the electrocardiogram readings.”

  “So the cremation certification procedure wouldn’t present any problems to—er—anybody?”

  “None. Ottershaw collapses at Mellamby. Brian Lyulph—he’s the local general practitioner—examines him, diagnoses a heart attack, and gets him rushed to the hospital here. They pop him straight into the Coronary Care Unit and stick him on a monitor. He goes into left ventricular failure. They try to defibrillate but without success so it’s——”

  “Curtains?” said Detective Constable Crosby. He didn’t like being in the pathologist’s office—there were too many pickled specimens of pieces of human anatomy on the shelves there for his liking, but he preferred it to being in the mortuary.

  “I couldn’t have put it better myself,” said the pathologist magnanimously.

  Detective Inspector Sloan pointed to the queremitte pellet. “What about that?” Now he came to think about it “curtains” did seem the right expression for a death followed by cremation. There was something very like the end of a play as they swirled together after the coffin had t
rundled forward—the last exit.

  “Ah, Sloan, what we haven’t gone into is the cause of the heart failure.”

  “I see, Doctor.” This wasn’t Sloan’s field and he knew it.

  “The House Physician at the hospital had noted in writing all the things he had been told about the patient.”

  “Good boy,” said Detective Constable Crosby.

  “Just back from a desert country after a long air flight, took jet-lag badly, a sudden return to this country in what would appear to be conditions of acute anxiety—the House Physician said the wife was a bit hazy about the detail, but she knew about the stress—with the whole bang shoot being topped up with an energetic morning fighting a mock battle in costume.”

  “Pretty convincing,” observed Sloan. “What you might call a cocktail of causes.”

  “Textbook,” agreed Dabbe. “Even the blood chemistry tied in because they checked. And even if there had been a post-mortem I doubt if this little queremitte chap here would have come to light unless the cadaver had been X-rayed.”

  “And there wouldn’t have been any call for that then, would there, Doctor?”

  “Not if nobody had any reason to suspect it was there in the first instance.”

  Sloan frowned. “Is there any way of knowing how it—er—got into him? The cremation people aren’t in any doubt that it did.” This was an understatement. Those at the crematorium to whom Detective Inspector Sloan had spoken had been emphatic to the point of vehemence that there was no way that the ashes could have been other than those belonging to Alan John Ottershaw, could have been interfered with, muddled or otherwise confused in any way whatsoever.

  “I can’t tell you at this late stage, Sloan, precisely how it was introduced into the deceased’s body, unless and until——”

  “Yes?”

  “—we know exactly what was in it. One might have a view after that.”

  “So it might have been swallowed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Or fired into him?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about the entry wound?” asked Sloan. “If there was one.”

  The pathologist tapped the papers on his desk. “According to these the deceased had had a friendly sword-fight that morning. You will be interested to learn that sundry small recent incisions were dutifully recorded as flesh wounds arising from—er—sporting activities. Nicely put, I thought that was.”

  “But——”

  “And, Sloan, let me remind you that while actors tend to make bigger entrances than they do exits, with flesh wounds it’s the other way round.”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  “Remember the death of Nelson?” asked Dabbe.

  Sloan started to say, “Kismet, Hardy …”

  Crosby stirred. “Nelson? You mean that nasty little one-eyed creep who drank himself to death under the railway arches?”

  “I meant Horatio of that ilk,” said the pathologist grandly. “The musket ball that killed him at the Battle of Trafalgar left a hole only eighteen millimetres across and they’ve got his coat to prove it.”

  “Talking of proving—” began Sloan.

  “With bloodstains?” asked Crosby with interest.

  “Below the epaulette and left of the top button,” said the pathologist.

  “About Ottershaw,” put in Sloan, valiantly trying to get back to the matter in hand. “We’ve established that they were using crossbows at this mock battle of theirs.”

  “Accommodating little weapons, Inspector,” said the pathologist.

  “I understand almost anyone can use them, too,” said Sloan, “which doesn’t help. Now, if it had been a long bow, that would have been different. It takes a strong man to use a long bow.”

  “A crossbow is what killed Richard the Lionheart, gentlemen,” said Dabbe. “Did you know that?”

  “No, Doctor,” said Sloan. “About Alan Ottershaw——”

  “Richard got it in the neck at Chalus,” said the pathologist. “The bolt, I mean.”

  “From the blue?” asked Crosby.

  “From the French,” said Dr. Dabbe.

  “About Alan Ottershaw,” said Sloan for the third time. The pathologist was very nearly as rooted in the past as the members of the Camulos Society.

  “He probably got it somewhere less sensitive than the neck,” said the pathologist. “Somewhere like the front of the thigh—unless, of course, it was a case of ‘I shot an arrow in the air, it fell to earth I know not where’.”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  “Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth,” said Dabbe. “A second-rate poet but a first-class translator.”

  “Quite so,” said Sloan stolidly. “We’ve made an appointment to see the—er—Wardrobe Mistress.”

  “Then,” said Dr. Dabbe, “the Forensic Science people will soon be able to tell you whether he was hit in his halidom or not. I can’t. But”—the pathologist’s mood and manner changed mercurially—“what they won’t be able to tell you—and neither can I—is whether there was any substance contained in that pellet which could have brought about a heart attack.”

  “But they do exist?” Sloan seized on what looked like a fact. They were short on facts so far.

  “Indeed, they do,” said Dr. Dabbe. “Most native arrow-tip and blow-dart poisons come into this category and so do whole pharmacological families of drugs in quite common medicinal use. Starting with the foxglove.”

  “What about scorpion stings?” asked Sloan suddenly.

  The pathologist frowned. “The venom causes intense pain. I do know that. But unless the pellet happened to hit the victim in the chest——”

  “Was aimed at the heart,” said Sloan mordantly.

  “—was aimed at the heart,” conceded Dr. Dabbe with unimpaired amiability, “he would have had so much pain at the entry site that he would have been bound to tell someone. That point would then have been examined at once and the entry wound found by the general practitioner on the spot.”

  “You’ve got to catch your scorpions, too, sir,” contributed Crosby, “and that doesn’t come easy in Calleshire.”

  “Quite apart from the fact that scorpions discharge an irritant poison designed to paralyse their enemies and prey,” continued the doctor. “Not a stimulant designed to bring about heart failure.” He turned to Crosby. “Catching scorpions isn’t a problem, Constable. Not in Calleshire, anyway. They’ve got plenty in the Biology Laboratories at the University and I daresay that animal research institute at Pletchford could rustle you up a few if you’re short.”

  “To say nothing,” said Sloan, making a note, “of Toad Hall or whatever they call that reptile place over at Almstone.”

  At very much the same time as Adrian Dungey was steeling himself to examine a Pekingese with offensive breath in his surgery at Mellamby in the English county of Calleshire, Sheikh Ben Mirza Ibrahim Hajal Kisra was granting an audience to Mr. Anthony Mainwaring Heber Hibbs at his palace at Bakhalla to the north of the capital of Lasserta, Gatt-el-Abbas.

  News of the death of Alan Ottershaw had reached the Sheikhdom of Lasserta rather more quickly than it had the Police Station in Berebury, but Sheikh Ben Hajal Kisra had chosen not to respond to the intelligence until now.

  Her Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador agreed (in a manner highly redolent of “The Tale of Solomon Grundy”) that Alan Ottershaw had been ill and was now dead and very nearly buried.

  “I understand,” said the Sheikh ambiguously, “that in the West these matters take time.”

  “Yes, indeed,” said Heber Hibbs.

  “In Lasserta,” said the Sheikh, “everything is always done by sundown.”

  “Lassertan celerity in all matters is very commendable,” observed the Ambassador cautiously.

  This was not strictly true.

  There was the little matter of the ancient rite still performed by the Lassertans known as the Massacre of the Kinsmen. This was the permitted swift and wholesale slaughter of the relatives of a new king uncertain
of his throne. While it was an aspect of Lassertan speediness that did not go down very well in the West these days, the Ambassador was bound to admit that it did make for a certain political stability and a secure monarchy. Nobody could say that there was anything tentative about Ben Hajal Kisra.

  “Expedition,” said the Sheikh, baring his teeth in what in a lesser man might have passed for a smile, “is the hallmark of good government.” Since queremitte ore had begun to be mined in Lasserta, the Sheikh had become considerably more knowledgeable about hallmarks.

  “Would that there were more nations who thought so,” responded the Ambassador with undiminished warmth. He had just realised that the Massacre of the Kinsmen was a practice that had, in fact, only died out in England with the Tudor Henrys, père et fils.

  “Yours,” said the Sheikh pointedly, “is a very slow government.”

  “The West is decadent in comparison with the East,” said the Ambassador shamelessly.

  Both men were only playing with words and knew it.

  They had, in fact, a common end, but a necessary ritual had to be worked through before it could be achieved. All production at the queremitte mines at Wadeem had in the event been temporarily suspended by an anxious Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company soon after Alan Ottershaw had left the country and before the Sheikh’s deadline had been reached. The Ambassador had been charged by a worried Foreign Office—spurred on by a concerned Ministry of Defence Procurement—with getting the mines working again. The Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company’s profile in this manoeuvre was too low to be visible at all.

  Sheikh Ben Hajal Kisra, who could do mental arithmetic on royalties per tonne of ore mined as well as the next man provided the sums were large enough, was just as keen as the Ambassador to have production at Wadeem restored but could not say so without losing face.

  In fact he said—or, rather, quoted—the exact opposite. “If necessary we can go back to the desert.”

  The Ambassador fixed his gaze on the baldaquin above the Sheikh’s head and said, “I hear—this, Your Highness, is just market gossip, you understand—”

  In another culture market gossip would be called “uninformed sources” and in yet another “newspaper speculation.” This, however, was the Middle East.