A Dead Liberty

by Catherine Aird

  “I see, sir.” This was old hat to Sloan, who had read it all in Inspector Porritt’s report, but there was no harm in hearing it again.

  “I asked Carline to call at the Old Rectory first to pick up Bill’s original drawings for me to look at again,” said Bolsover. “I wanted to be on the safe side before I signed on the dotted line.”

  “Quite so, sir.”

  “And then I told him to meet me at the Palshaw end of the tunnel at two o’clock. Only he didn’t come.”

  A small silence fell in the Bolsover drawing room.

  It was Crosby who broke it. “Gone to join the great majority, hadn’t he?”

  When Lucy Durmast had been a little girl at school she had gone through the same phases as all her friends as they came to grips with the meaning of words and the understanding of parts of speech. Trick questions were the order of the day. One which had gone the rounds had been the hoary old chestnut “Constantinople is a long word. How do you spell it?” to which the answer of the initiated was “I T.” (The father, though, who answered his daughter’s “Daddy, I’m hot” with “Hello Hot, I’m Daddy” was generally felt to be not playing the game.)

  Another popular question had been “What is the longest word in the English language?”

  Lucy had known the answer to that quite early on.

  Antidisestablishmentarianism.

  At the age of eleven going on twelve she had known the word but not what it meant.

  At the age of twenty-one going on twenty-two she now not only knew its meaning but was beginning to have a firm opinion on the subject itself.

  This had been provoked by a visit from the prison chaplain. She hadn’t needed to see him if she hadn’t wanted to. He had made that perfectly clear. Lucy had discovered to her own total surprise, though, that she had wanted to see him quite badly and she had found herself nodding her assent when she had instead really meant to shake her head when he asked.

  Until she met the Reverend George Conway, Lucy Durmast’s knowledge of prison chaplains had been confined to the solitary reference in Oscar Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”:

  And twice a day the Chaplain called

  And left a little tract.

  This clergyman had nothing in his hands when he came to see her.

  “Lucy Durmast?” he said, standing before her. “I’m George Conway. May I sit down?”

  She nodded.

  He was a neat, spare man, who somehow contrived to create a feeling of space about him, bringing dignity and grace to distinctly unpromising surroundings. Over the years he had developed an all-purpose opening gambit with his disparate flock. “How are you getting along?” he asked generally. “Managing?”

  She opened her hands in an age-old gesture of despair that needed no words.

  “All bad things come to an end, you know,” he said gently. “Just like all good things. Don’t forget that.” He gave her a quick smile. “There is always a light at the end of the tunnel and whatever you may think, it isn’t necessarily a train coming the other way.”

  She managed a half smile.

  “Well done,” he said. A half smile might not amount to much in the outside world. In a prison setting it was worth a great deal, and George Conway was quick to acknowledge this. “Letters getting through all right?”

  She nodded. Cecelia Allsworthy had written faithfully, saying nothing but conveying much love and affection.

  “And visitors?”

  She shook her head so violently that the chaplain quite mistook her meaning.

  “Problems?” he said quickly. “Do you want me to … oh, I see. You don’t want any visitors. I understand …” This was something he did comprehend too. Those there would always be who didn’t want to be seen in prison by their friends and family.

  Lucy’s agitation subsided.

  “Would you,” he asked diffidently, “like to talk to me about it?” In his time he had sat and listened to both bared souls and barefaced lying with the same expression of alert interest and total absence of condemnation, utterly confident in the power of his Creator to love saint and sinner alike.

  She looked at him, carefully weighing the situation. What she didn’t know was where Church and State overlapped. Antidisestablishmentarianism might well be the longest word in the English language but it didn’t help a lot at this particular moment. What she wanted to know was exactly where the Reverend George Conway’s allegiance lay. Was it with the Home Secretary or with His Grace the Bishop of Calleford?

  Or both?

  The Chaplain said, “Don’t feel you have to, of course.”

  No man can serve two masters, thought Lucy, even if they’re both establishment figures.

  “Burdens,” continued the chaplain matter-of-factly, “are usually easier shared.”

  Something from The Pilgrim’s Progress flashed through her mind: Christian had carried a burden, hadn’t he? Surely, though, his burden hadn’t slipped from him until the very end of his journey. Unconsciously she gave a little shiver and her shoulders sagged.

  “Sometimes,” persisted George Conway, missing neither sign, “even just talking to someone helps.”

  She nodded. She was finding it very difficult to think straight with him sitting opposite her, projecting humanity and compassion. What she needed to know was whether or not he had obligations to Caesar. Did he have to walk a delicate tightrope between Church and State? Look at poor Sir Thomas More …

  “Sometimes, though,” said the Chaplain equably, “people get by more easily by just taking one day at a time.”

  Something inside her wanted to say “Sufficient unto the say is the evil thereof” but she didn’t allow the words to pass her lips. Anyway you weren’t supposed to quote the Bible at clergymen: it was role reversal or something.

  “I’m sure that’s all we’re meant to do,” he went on with conviction.

  Oddly enough it was his use of the plural pronoun “we” that registered with Lucy at that moment. Prison was a place of “us” and “them”: not “we.” The chaplain was doing what he could to restore her to the human race …

  “And you, I hear,” he said lightly, “have taken some sort of unofficial vow of silence.”

  There was no mistaking her assent to that. She’d grinned before she could help herself.

  “Confounding all and sundry, I’m sure,” he said.

  She hung her head in mock penitence. They must have made an incongruous pair, thought Lucy, with a sudden flash of genuine humour. She wondered what an artist would have made of them as a subject. The prisoner and the clergymen—a conversation piece.

  Except that in another sense there hadn’t been any conversation.

  There had been communication though.

  The Reverend George Conway said cheerfully, “I shouldn’t worry too much about that if I were you.”

  She looked up.

  “You can’t,” he said, “be half as troublesome a prisoner as St. Paul was.”

  Her smile was sudden and spontaneous. She had forgotten that St. Paul had been in prison too.

  “And he didn’t keep quiet either,” said the chaplain. “A most articulate man, St. Paul.”

  The prisoner who oddly enough had been in Lucy’s mind most of all had been Napoleon Bonaparte. That, too, stemmed from a childhood memory of word games at school. After the longest word in the English language had come the longest palindrome. “Able was I ere I saw Elba” was ingrained in every schoolchild’s mind. The phrase had come back to her one night and summed up her own feelings so neatly that she hadn’t been able to get it out of her mind. She had never in a hundred years expected to feel any empathy with the French Emperor but she did now.

  The chaplain got up to go. “By the way,” he said, “there is something that St. Paul said that you mustn’t ever forget.”

  She looked at him.

  “That nothing shall be able to separate us from the love of God.” He lifted a hand in benediction and said, “God bless you, m
y child …”

  Suddenly overcome, Lucy Durmast was really and truly without words at that moment. She would have found them now if she could. She struggled to speak, but by the time she was able to do so the chaplain had gone.

  Crosby hunched his shoulders as they left the Bolsovers’ house. “Open and shut, if you ask me, sir.”

  Sloan nodded reflectively. “I suppose you could say that Inspector Porritt had got everything buttoned up except the girl’s statement.”

  “You can play your cards so close to your chest that they fall down your shirt,” said the constable graphically.

  Sloan didn’t say anything.

  “And you don’t have to help the police with their enquiries either,” sniffed Crosby. “It’s a free country.”

  “True,” agreed Sloan. Exercising the right of lawful protest came in there somewhere.

  “In America,” Crosby informed him, “they stand on the Fifth Amendment.”

  “You don’t say,” murmured Sloan. Crosby was an aficionado of the silver screen and thus well informed on the American Constitution.

  “Plead that,” said the constable, “and you don’t have to say a thing.”

  “It is a cardinal principle of English law, too,” Sloan reminded him, “that you don’t have to say anything that might incriminate yourself.”

  “Well, then …”

  “But if you stay silent,” pointed out Sloan, “everyone is entitled to draw their own conclusions from that silence.”

  “So all we’ve got to go on, sir, is evidence? Is that right?”

  “It is,” said Sloan cautiously, suspecting irony somewhere.

  “Well, then …”

  Eminent authorities on jurisprudence, conceded Sloan silently, might take longer to reach the same conclusion, but it stood.

  “And there isn’t any contrary evidence?” asked Crosby. “Nothing to show she might be innocent?”

  Sloan considered this carefully. Actually there had been something that niggled, something that didn’t quite tie up. “There’s a list of things that Inspector Porritt found in the deceased’s car afterwards.”

  “The tunnel plans?”

  “Those,” agreed Sloan, “and something else.”

  Crosby stood still and waited, his hand on the police car door.

  “Some leaflets,” said Sloan, “protesting about the nuclear waste plant at Marby.”

  SEVEN

  Nebulae—Sprays

  None of Kenneth Carline’s flat-mates had the look of nuclear protesters. The two policemen saw them that evening after work at their dwelling place—a portion of a large old house in Calleford long ago divided up into flats. The owner lived on the ground floor and acted as concierge. Gerry Porteous, who answered the door, was a short-back-and-sides man and gave his occupation as trainee accountant.

  “We come old, Inspector,” he said, “because it’s a long training.”

  Sloan nodded. He himself was old enough now to find age relative.

  Alan Marshall, it transpired, worked for the Calleford office of an extremely superior firm of land agents and surveyors, and Colin Jervis, the third man there, for a bank. All three were sturdily built and, if the scattered accoutrements of various games were anything to go by, were more devoted to sport than to politics.

  Another pointer to their interest in things non-political was that the mention of the word “police” did not arouse noticeably strong reactions. Nobody shouted anything offensive—indeed, Alan Marshall actually pushed a chair forward for Sloan.

  “We’re just going over one or two things again before the trial,” said Sloan generally.

  Three young men waited attentively for him to go on.

  “You might have had some further thoughts too,” said Sloan.

  Porteous for one shook his head.

  “You never know,” remarked Crosby from the sidelines.

  “There isn’t anything we haven’t thought of,” said Porteous heavily.

  “It was worth an ask,” said Crosby.

  Sloan didn’t say anything. A man could only be young once but he could be immature forever.

  Alan Marshall stirred. “Anyway, Inspector, we told the other policeman everything.”

  “Not that there was a lot to tell.” Colin Jervis shrugged his shoulders expressively. “It was just an ordinary weekend for us.”

  “The only thing that was different …” began Porteous.

  “Yes?” said Sloan. It was part of his own professional calling that he was interested in any change in a pattern.

  Gerry Porteous said, “The only thing that was different was that Ken didn’t go to the Kipper Club with the others.”

  “Kipper Club?” said Sloan swiftly.

  “It’s a tradition that the team meets for a late breakfast every Sunday morning after the match,” said Porteous.

  “We have kippers,” expanded Marshall helpfully.

  Jervis, too, seemed to think some gilding of the lily was called for. “It works as a sort of roll call for the fifteen after Saturday night.”

  “And Carline didn’t come that last Sunday?” asked Sloan patiently.

  “That’s right,” said Porteous. “He said he was too bruised.”

  “He’d got a real bashing in the game on the Saturday, you see,” said Jervis.

  “Some beggar seemed to have it in for him all right,” said Porteous.

  “Mind you,” said Jervis, “Luston play rough at the best of times.”

  “Needle match, of course,” observed Marshall. “I suppose you could call it a sort of local Derby.”

  This wasn’t news to Sloan or Crosby. Policemen from Berebury were regularly drafted to the stadium at Luston on Saturday afternoons for crowd duty.

  “A marked man, that’s what he said he was,” weighed in Marshall.

  Policing a stadium was an analogy dear to the heart of lecturers at the Cadet Training College. The perfect example, it was said, of the measured need for policemen, was a football stadium. Empty and one policeman could take care of it: full of spectators and four hundred couldn’t.

  “And he was so rotten on the Sunday morning after the match that he didn’t go to the Kipper Club?” Sloan hoped he’d sorted this out at last.

  Three men nodded.

  “But all right by Monday morning, though?” persisted Sloan.

  “Nearly all right,” said Gerry Porteous.

  “He looked a bit of a mess,” said Marshall.

  “Two lovely black eyes?” suggested Sloan crisply.

  “More of a cauliflower ear,” said Marshall.

  “He must have been on the ref’s blind side all afternoon,” said Porteous.

  Detective Constable Crosby’s wayward interest was aroused at last. “Where was he in the scrum?”

  “Middle row.”

  “Dangerous place,” remarked Crosby.

  “Not as dangerous,” said Marshall soberly, “as lunch with a lady.”

  “True,” said Crosby.

  In his mind Sloan likened middle row forward on the Rugby field to the second row in a police line of defence against a crowd. The front row, arms linked, took the brunt, but when the set scrum collapsed, so to speak, the greater danger fell to the second row. What came out of the maul when the contest was the Police Force versus the Mob was usually injuries.

  Demonstrations reminded Sloan of something else.

  “Was Carline,” he asked all the young men, “caught up at all with the nuclear waste disposal plant at Marby juxta Mare?”

  Gerry Porteous frowned. “Did the noble firm of William Durmast build that? I don’t think they did.”

  “I’m pretty sure,” said Marshall, “that Ken once said that the atomic-energy authorities had some specialist construction people down for Marby.”

  “Not everyone’s cup of tea,” contributed Jervis, “atomic waste.”

  “Horses for course,” said Crosby.

  Sloan explained that he hadn’t meant that. Had Carline been an activ
ist in nuclear protesting? he asked.

  Three young men shook their heads.

  “Not his scene at all,” said Colin Jervis emphatically.

  “He was against politics anyway,” said Gerry Porteous somewhat naïvely.

  Detective Inspector Sloan was not sufficiently exalted in rank to attend meetings of the Berebury Watch Committee let alone those of the Calleshire Police Committee, but he knew that, like the poor, politics were always there.

  “Especially African ones,” added Porteous.

  Sloan lifted an eyebrow.

  “Ken had had to do some of the groundwork calculations for this new town in Africa that his firm are building,” explained Porteous. “The preliminary brief for the quantity surveyors and so forth.”

  “Well?”

  “Politics came into that.”

  Sloan could well believe it.

  “It was the missionaries really,” said Alan Marshall. “Ken told us all about it.”

  Sloan nodded. Politics and religion were hard forces to harness. Many a world leader had found that out for himself.

  Colin Jervis said, “Blow me if some missionaries hadn’t delivered a load of mattocks to Dlasa for ground clearance without so much as a by-your-leave.”

  “Not a good thing?” hazarded Sloan.

  “Completely upset the local economy,” pronounced Colin Jervis with all the authority of one who worked in a bank.

  “How?” enquired Sloan warily. Economics were a closed book to him. They constituted a strange, illogical territory where two and two didn’t always make four, where success in production was nearly as hazardous as failure.

  “In Dlasa,” explained Jervis, “the bride-price was paid in mattocks.”

  “I see,” said Sloan. He’d heard somewhere that the questions in economics examination papers stayed the same from year to year and it was the correct answers that changed. He could well believe it.

  “With an excess of mattocks,” said Jervis, “the barter system broke down.”

  “Mattocks,” chimed in Gerry Porteous, “being a sort of currency.”

  “And it had been devalued?” asked Sloan. Devaluing the currency was a crime in a class of its own: one that Sloan did understand. He and his wife Margaret, had once been taken on a guided tour of a ruined Scottish castle. The curator had waxed eloquent on the iniquities of the wicked earl who had owned it in the sixteenth century and reeled off a positive Newgate Calendar list of his crimes. Murder, rapine, pillage, blackmail and abduction had been made to seem very run-of-the-mill by the curator, who had been working his way up to a dramatic climax. With lowered voice he had finished on a high note, “And he even fiddled the currency, too.”