A Dead Liberty

by Catherine Aird

  “Not an easy colour,” agreed Sloan. His wife, Margaret, had long ago averred that no woman over thirty could ever look really smart in pink.

  “Especially in winter,” put in Detective Constable Crosby unexpectedly. “A cold day, wasn’t it?”

  “Very.”

  “Sergeant Watkinson said it was cold enough to do some serious damage to a brass monkey,” said Crosby, “and that was before he broke his leg.”

  “In the end,” said Mrs. Allsworthy regretfully, “it didn’t matter all that much what anyone wore. All that anyone looked at was that great big banner.”

  “I hear it came right down over the top of the tunnel entrance,” said Sloan.

  “Portal,” said Cecelia. “You’re not supposed to call it an entrance. Ah, here’s Hortense … Is the kettle really boiling?”

  The French girl said, “Really boiling, Cecelia, I promise,” and set down a tray with everything on it for tea save the teapot.

  While Mrs. Allsworthy went off in the direction of the kitchen and the really boiling kettle, Detective Inspector Sloan took his first good look at Hortense. She was wearing a mottled green skirt and a burgundy-coloured blouse, and she was younger than he had thought at first. “And how do you like England, mademoiselle?” he asked kindly.

  Detective Constable Crosby took his first good look at Hortense too—and then another.

  Hortense answered Sloan but she looked at Crosby. “It is very cold in the spring,” she enunciated as carefully as Eliza Doolittle. “At home now it is warm and very beautiful.”

  Crosby straightened his collar.

  “I miss the … the smells so much.” She looked up anxiously. “Is that the wrong word?”

  “Scents, miss,” said the detective constable huskily. “That’s the word you’re looking for.”

  “Perfume,” said Hortense. “That is the word I seek. I come from Provence, messieurs, you see. From a jasmine farm.”

  All the perfumes of Arabia, thought Sloan inconsequentially. That was something that had cropped up in a famous murder.

  “I miss the mimosa, too,” she said to Crosby, lowering her eyes just a trifle.

  The detective constable looked at the petite French girl as if she were made of porcelain and might break at any moment.

  “Especially in spring.” She lowered her voice a fraction too.

  “The spring …” agreed Crosby in a strangled voice.

  “Tea!” announced Mrs. Cecelia Allsworthy, coming back into the room with a teapot of a thoroughly satisfactory size.

  ELEVEN

  Vapores—Inhalations

  Ronald Bolsover’s secretary said, “He won’t keep you waiting long, Inspector. He’s got someone with him at the moment.”

  Sloan could see this for himself. The firm of William Durmast, Ltd., was situated in a house with a very attractive Georgian front in the middle of the Rushmarket in Calleford. The back of the building was another matter. It was a higgledy-piggledy of periods and styles, and wherever possible, walls and sections of roof had been cut away and large windows inserted. In a design office natural light was at a premium and Sloan was aware that Ronald Bolsover needed it for his work as much as anyone. There were three architect’s drawing stands in his room and two interior walls had been removed to hip height and glass substituted to borrow as much light as possible from the outside world.

  As Inspector Porritt had faithfully reported, Ronald Bolsover’s secretary would have been in a position to see her employer’s every action but not hear what was being said in his room. Sloan stood by the deputy chairman’s secretary’s desk now and watched Bolsover through the glass partition as he was talking to another man.

  The secretary misinterpreted his interest for impatience. “Mr. Bolsover’s nearly finished with his other visitor.”

  “Thank you, miss. There’s no hurry at all.” He tapped his papers. “We’re just checking up on the day Kenneth Carline died.”

  “Poor Ken,” she said at once, adding defiantly, “and poor Lucy even if she did do it.”

  “You knew them both?” He should have remembered that.

  “Of course,” she said. “Ken had been working here for the best part of two years and I remember Lucy as a little girl.”

  “Aaaarh,” said Sloan as encouragingly as a doctor. “You won’t have forgotten that Monday morning, then.”

  “Certainly not. He—Ken, that is—had arranged to see Mr. Bolsover at half-past eleven. Mr. Bolsover had told me so himself the previous Friday afternoon, and I put it in his diary. He was very busy that day what with Mr. Durmast being in Africa and having this appointment at Palshaw at two o’clock about the tunnel, to say nothing of its being a Monday, which is always a rush.”

  “Quite so,” said Sloan. Work came in unexpected bursts down at the police station too, but not as a rule on Monday mornings. Crime tended to build up towards the end of the day and towards the end of the week. The crescendo usually came on Saturday evenings.

  “And Ken came down from his own room upstairs just before the half hour.” She looked rueful. “I must say he looked a real sight what with his bruises and everything. He said ‘You should have seen the other fellow, though, Mary.’ I said Rugby wasn’t a very nice game if that’s what happened to people playing it, but he only laughed. I could tell Mr. Bolsover didn’t like to see him looking like that, though, because after Ken had gone in there I saw him open up his first-aid box and put a piece of sticking plaster on a graze behind Ken’s ear that was still oozing.”

  “Mr. Bolsover didn’t give him anything to eat or drink though, did he?” murmured Sloan, one eye still on the deputy chairman of Durmast’s. Ronald Bolsover was still talking animatedly to his visitor, using his hands in a Gallic way a good deal as he spoke.

  “No, Inspector.” She was adamant about that. “There’s a coffee machine in the front hall anyway. Everyone uses that when they want a drink.”

  “How long was Kenneth Carline in with Mr. Bolsover?” asked Sloan, although he knew the answer already.

  The secretary repeated what she had told Inspector Porritt. “About half an hour. They were looking at the Palshaw Tunnel plans for most of the time. Then Ken came out and asked if he could use my telephone to ring Lucy Durmast.”

  “You actually heard him talking to her, then?” said Sloan. Mr. Bolsover’s visitor was beginning to show signs of preparing to take his departure.

  The secretary nodded. “Ken asked Lucy if he could call at the Old Rectory to collect some plans from her father’s study before he met Mr. Bolsover at the tunnel at Palshaw. Then she must have asked him to stay to lunch because he said ‘Thank you, that would be very nice’ and that he would try to be there by one o’clock.” She looked Sloan straight in the eye. “He was like that. Always polite.”

  “I’m sure,” murmured Sloan.

  “Lucy must have asked Mr. Bolsover to lunch too because I heard Ken say he was sure he wouldn’t be able to come as well because he’d got something else to do before they met at Palshaw at two o’clock.”

  Sloan listened attentively. What the secretary was saying gibed in every way with what Cecelia Allsworthy had told him about Lucy Durmast’s end of the conversation. The spur-of-the-moment invitation and the preparation of the scratch meal appeared to be genuine. There was, of course, nothing to prevent them both being the ingredients of a murder …

  “And what was it Mr. Bolsover had to do,” asked Sloan, “and so couldn’t go to lunch with Miss Durmast as well?”

  The secretary pointed to her notebook. “His letters. Mr. Bolsover doesn’t like using a Dictaphone. He likes his letters taken down properly in shorthand.”

  Sloan could see that he was expected to see the traditional as a sign of virtue and accordingly nodded his approval.

  “Mr. Bolsover dictated a lot of work to me right up to lunch-time. In fact,” she said, “rather after lunch-time. I was very late going to lunch myself that day and Mr. Bolsover couldn’t have had time for anything
much to eat himself. Not if he was going to get to Palshaw by two o’clock, which was when his appointment was for.”

  “I see,” said Sloan. Mr. Bolsover’s present visitor had at last risen to his feet and had begun to take his farewells. It was rather curious, seeing him do it without being able to hear a word through the glass, not unlike watching an old-fashioned mime.

  Or a silent film, perhaps.

  Actions without words.

  The death of Kenneth Carline had been curiously without speech, too.

  Almost a dumb show.

  A sudden unexpected invitation followed by a slow and unexpected death.

  And even after that wordlessness.

  Except for a disembodied voice talking about gates that would be open that should have been locked and keys that should not have been there at all. Which might or might not have had anything to do with the situation.

  There were absences which were disturbing, too, rather than presences, which might have been helpful.

  The accused’s father had gone abroad before the action began: Prince Aturu so soon afterwards as to represent a further worry. Where did the African Kingdom of Dlasa and its new town at Mgongwala come into all this?

  If it did.

  Sloan wasn’t even sure if it would help if he saw a replay of such action as had taken place here at Durmast’s. The mental imagery of the rewinding of a silent film though made him turn his mind to Crosby. He shifted his gaze to see whether the detective constable had been as absorbed by the peepshow the other side of the glass screen as he had been. Crosby, it was apparent, wasn’t even looking in Ronald Bolsover’s direction. He had drifted over towards one of the windows and was staring out over the assorted roof-scapes towards the Minster.

  A movement inside the goldfish bowl that was Bolsover’s office attracted Sloan’s attention. The deputy chairman’s visitor was making for the door. Sloan was struck by how unselfconscious both men appeared behind their screens: the play within the play, almost. A similar sense of isolation must be engendered in patients in hospital being barrier-nursed: often enough they had to be content with a glimpse of their loved ones through glass. A distant wave wasn’t the same as warm human contact …

  “Mr. Bolsover will see you now, Inspector,” murmured the secretary at Sloan’s side.

  “Come along, Crosby,” commanded Sloan.

  The constable turned reluctantly from the window. “Did you know, sir, that on a clear day you can see …”

  “Crosby!”

  Ronald Bolsover rose to his feet as they entered. “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, gentlemen …”

  In Her Majesty’s Prison Establishment for Women and Girls at Cottingham Grange there was also a certain amount of standing upon ceremony before a visitor was shown into the presence of the person holding the reins of office. Rather more in fact than obtained at the headquarters of the firm of William Durmast. At Cottingham Grange it was the governor’s room outside which other people waited. And in Lucy Durmast’s case she was one of a considerable queue.

  First there were those who wanted to see the governor and after them there were those whom the governor wanted to see. Lucy came into the latter class. She didn’t know why. She had simply been told that morning by her wing officer that the governor wished to see her. Even had she not been adopting her Trappist-like stance and had chosen to ask what the governor wanted to see her about she was doubtful if she would have been given an answer. The normal give-and-take of human exchange was conspicuous by its absence in the highly structured world of prison.

  One by one those in front of Lucy were admitted to the governor’s office and their problems and transgressions dealt with. Lucy was no longer sure that the two were not indistinguishable—that was something that a prison sentence had taught her. More than once what she had learned while listening to her fellow prisoners talking had sent her mind back to one of her set books in the sixth form at school. Once read she had put it behind her and turned to more interesting works of literature. In her wildest dreams she had never expected to be giving fresh thought to Samuel Butler’s Erewhon.

  The first thing that all the class remembered was that “Erewhon” was an anagram of “Nowhere” and that was certainly true of the land that Samuel Butler described. The second thing that nobody forgot was that in “Erewhon” it was illness and disease that incurred moral obliquity, and crime that became a matter for condolence and treatment. Butler would have put the sick in prison and the committers of crime in hospital. When young and still sure of finding an answer to life’s perplexities this had seemed arcane treatment indeed.

  The queue outside the governor’s office shuffled forward, but Lucy was almost unaware of being in it.

  She was less starry-eyed now and more inclined to the view that there weren’t as many solutions as there were problems. Her own shining lance of youth had been both tarnished and blunted by Kenneth Carline’s death and what had followed. Her mind slid away from both Samuel Butler and Kenneth Durmast as she thought about Don Quixote and his lance. She felt a momentary flash of fellow feeling with that eccentric knight. Tilting at windmills was easier and safer than tilting at a lot of other things.

  “Quiet there!” someone shouted.

  Lucy didn’t even hear them. She was considering Samuel Butler’s answer. It had taken on a new interest since she had been in prison herself. There were those about her in plenty in Cottingham Grange who, even to Lucy’s lazy eye, were suitable cases for treatment. Her doctor grandfather had always linked illness with guilt—or had it been guilt with interest? She wasn’t sure now which it had been and was pursuing this interesting train of thought when someone called her name. She looked up.

  “Give your name and number to the governor,” said a commanding voice.

  Lucy stood in front of the governor silent but in an attitude of polite attention. Dumb insolence would have been alien to both her nature and her intention.

  “Ah, Durmast,” said the governor pleasantly. “We have a little problem about something in your post.”

  Lucy looked up. Incoming mail had not been one of the things that had worried her in Cottingham Grange. Her father was no great correspondent at the best of times: when totally immersed in a project he seldom put pen to paper other than on a drawing board, although he might have written home for something he had forgotten. Letters from Cecelia Allsworthy couldn’t conceivably pose a problem …

  “It’s not a letter exactly,” said the governor. There was something in a folder on her desk but Lucy couldn’t see what. “More of a—well, a communication really.”

  Lucy looked quite blank.

  “We wondered if you could perhaps explain it to us before it is given to you.” She coughed. “You will understand that we have always to be very careful in the—er—custodial situation.”

  Lucy had heard a variety of euphemisms for prison—mostly from fellow inmates and quite unrepeatable—but “custodial situation” was a new one to her.

  “It would appear,” continued the governor, “to have a symbolic meaning of some sort.”

  Lucy tilted her head sharply.

  “The message—if indeed it contains a message—is conveyed on a sort of raffia.” The governor opened the file on her desk and produced a rough square of loosely woven dried grass matting. “As you will see there is a drawing of a highly ritualised nature of a bird in the top left-hand corner, and in the bottom right what appears to be a sword of some sort.”

  Lucy paled.

  “Some hair,” the governor continued her description, “has been interwoven under the bird’s beak.” She seemed oblivious of Lucy’s pallor as she picked the object before her up. “And,” continued the governor, lifting it clear of her desk, “suspended from the whole thing are a row of teeth.”

  As the teeth fell downwards in an unseemly fringe beneath the square of grey grass matting, Lucy Durmast’s reaction scaled fresh heights of non-verbal communication.

  She fainted.


  TWELVE

  Pulveres—Powders

  It was always interesting, decided Detective Inspector Sloan, to meet someone for the second time—if only to check that one’s recollection of the first meeting still stood.

  Ronald Bolsover was brisker in his office than he had been at home, but this came as no surprise to Sloan, whose own pace slowed down too as he crossed his domestic threshold. All the modern appliances of efficiency were there in the office as well and they made for a certain quickening of tempo. So did the fact that the occupants were visible—even if not audible—to the rest of the office. It would be a self-confident man who sat back and twiddled his thumbs at Ronald Bolsover’s desk in full view of the rest of the staff.

  Not that Bolsover appeared to hurry either. Here was a deliberate, careful character, probably the ideal anchorman to a restless energetic chairman. Every born leader needed a patient number two and Ronald Bolsover might well be the natural consolidator, the sort of man you did leave to hold the fort. He waved both policemen into chairs and looked expectantly at Sloan.

  “Just a few routine points, sir,” said the detective inspector easily. “About things we didn’t know about when we saw you before.”

  “That sounds hopeful.” Bolsover cocked his head alertly.

  Sloan wasn’t sure if hopeful was the word he would have chosen himself. He wasn’t even sure where hope came in in a murder investigation. That truth will out, perhaps, but he wasn’t absolutely sure about that. There was a German proverb he had heard somewhere about the truth sometimes being too sad to be borne. He cleared his throat and asked more mundanely if Bolsover could tell them anything more about the official opening of the Palshaw Tunnel.

  The deputy chairman of Durmast’s grimaced. “As a public-relations exercise, which it was meant to be, it was a disaster of magnitude one. There are no two ways about that. Nobody could get the Press to take an interest in anything except the demonstration.” He moved to an intercom. “I’ll get the prints brought in.”