The Body Politic

by Catherine Aird

“There’s always some trouble out there,” declared Leeyes profoundly. “You’ve only got to look at yesterday’s newspaper or in the Old Testament. Take your pick.”

  “Yesterday’s newspaper?” said Sloan, wondering if he’d missed something he should have seen. “Was there a——”

  “It’s always the same,” said Leeyes loftily. “‘Trouble in the Middle East’.”

  “Quite so,” said Sloan, deciding that the Superintendent was taking the broad historical view: Leviticus to Mossadeq—if not later—so to speak. “Actually, this chap Ottershaw had just come back from Lasserta.”

  “Lasserta?” Superintendent Leeyes cocked his head alertly. “That’s where we get our queremitte from, isn’t it?”

  Sloan gave an inward sigh. The Superintendent’s knowledge was as quixotic as his ignorance. Both were quite unpredictable. There was no more reason why he shouldn’t have known about sugging than that he did know about the ore from which queremitte was extracted.

  “Can’t do without queremitte,” pronounced Leeyes briskly. “The Defence people need it for one of their fancy new weapons, don’t they? Stands very high temperatures or something when it’s put with something else.”

  “Yes, sir.” Sloan nodded. “I don’t know the fine detail but I’m told that it’s a synergic agent absolutely essential for one whole range of weaponry.” He gave a wry smile. “And I can confirm that it stands very high temperatures.”

  Leeyes grunted. “And has this got anything to do with the—er—deceased?”

  “I don’t know, sir. All I know is that a very small hollow pellet was included in the urn containing his cremated remains, which were to be delivered to his widow for interment.”

  “Not a lot to go on, Sloan, is it?”

  “No, sir.” He coughed. “And when the undertaker enquired what the cause of death had been—”

  “The official cause of death,” interjected Superintendent Leeyes cynically. His view of the medical profession was decidedly less than reverential.

  “The official cause of death,” amended Sloan, “the undertaker was told that it was thought to have been due to heart failure and certified accordingly.”

  Leeyes grunted.

  Sloan hurried on. “The only complaint by anyone so far, sir, seems to have been about the length of time the ambulance took to get out of Mellamby.”

  “Busy with Inspector Harpe’s Sunday afternoon smash-ups, were they?” suggested Leeyes pleasantly. Inspector Harpe was in charge of Traffic Division at Berebury, and that meant that road accidents were his pigeon.

  “The ambulance people had had a rush turn-out the day before to the same place,” said Sloan. “In response to some cock-and-bull story about the Member of Parliament having had a heart attack after a load of hassle with a heckler.”

  Leeyes made an enigmatic sound that could have meant anything.

  “They chalked it up as a false alarm, malicious intent,” said Sloan, “but, human nature being what it is, I daresay they didn’t hurry the second time.” They knew quite a lot at the police station about human nature being what it was.

  “For the real thing?”

  “According to Tod Morton, sir, yes.” Sloan saw no reason to mention Fred Tompkins, the hospital porter. “I haven’t seen the death certificate myself yet.”

  “But all of this was before this—er—alleged pellet was found?” Nobody had ever been able to say that Superintendent Leeyes hadn’t got a clear eye for essentials.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Ahah.”

  “The doctors don’t know about the pellet yet, sir.” Sloan cleared his throat and explained conscientiously, “Of course, a heart attack may well have killed him as they say it did. We don’t know.”

  “Are you trying to tell me, Sloan,” grated Leeyes, “and not very clearly, if I may say so, that there was no post-mortem examination of the deceased?”

  “I am, sir.”

  Leeyes grimaced. “So when you said you hadn’t got a lot to go on, Sloan, you meant it literally?”

  “I did.”

  “H’m,” said Leeyes. His professional relationship with Dr. Dabbe, the consultant pathologist to the Berebury and District Hospital Management Group, was a stormy one to say the least, but the Superintendent always took due note of the doctor’s post-mortem findings with the grudging respect of one specialist to another.

  “Just this pellet, sir, that’s all. And,” he reminded his superior officer, “there may well be a perfectly innocent explanation for its having been in Ottershaw’s body in the first place.”

  “I daresay,” growled Leeyes, “that any defence counsel you care to mention could come up with six before breakfast, but that hasn’t got anything to do with it, Sloan, has it?”

  “No, sir.” Detective Inspector Sloan assented to this promptly. What the Superintendent had said was perfectly true: if there was even one possible explanation that was not an innocent one, then the police had a duty to explore it. “I’m afraid that this pellet is all there is at the moment.”

  “What about the cremated remains?” As always the Superintendent’s view was a literal one. “You’ve got them, haven’t you?”

  “Mortons, the undertakers, have them,” replied Detective Inspector Sloan carefully. “I’m not quite sure what our legal standing is with regard to the ashes at this precise juncture.”

  “Stop talking like a solicitor, Sloan, and get on with it.”

  “But I do know that the undertakers haven’t actually despatched them to the family yet. Young Tod Morton promised to hang on to them for a bit.”

  “That’s something, I suppose,” allowed Leeyes.

  “But they will have to hand them over to the family fairly shortly, sir, unless …” He let the rest of the sentence trail away unfinished.

  “What is their ultimate destination?” demanded the Superintendent. “Does young Morton know that?” He scowled. “Is the widow going to keep them on the mantelpiece in her egg-timer or anything silly like that?”

  “I understand, sir,” rejoined Sloan, “that there is a small area of churchyard outside the east window of St. Martin’s Church at Mellamby reserved solely for the interment of ashes.”

  “Hrrrrrrmph.”

  Sloan hurried on. “Tod Morton tells me that Mrs. Ottershaw had asked him to arrange for her husband’s ashes to be placed there in—er—due course.”

  “Mine,” said the Superintendent unexpectedly, “are going to be scattered over the Berebury Golf Course.”

  “Really, sir?” Sloan managed to keep his face straight with difficulty.

  “The eighteenth fairway,” said Leeyes.

  And Sloan managed to refrain from saying that it was more the date of the ceremony than the last resting place of his ashes that would interest the Superintendent’s underlings at Berebury Police Station.

  “Just where a good second wood shot from the tee reaches,” amplified Leeyes, “with a following wind, of course.”

  “Naturally,” concurred Sloan. Presumably a good following wind came in handy when ashes were scattered, too.

  “It’s a very tricky approach to the green from there, Sloan.”

  “Talking of tricky approaches, sir——” Sloan tried to seize his moment.

  “And I never seem to quite get the distance.”

  “—I think we ought to be on the safe side, sir, and——”

  “It’s too far for a number seven iron.”

  “—talk to the Coroner,” persisted Sloan. “Just in case.”

  “And too near for a number five.”

  “What about a number six?” suggested Sloan involuntarily—and immediately regretted doing so. When Queen Victoria had complained about the number of sparrows in the Crystal Palace, the Duke of Wellington had said, “Try sparrowhawks, ma’am,” but then he had won the Battle of Waterloo and he was Prime Minister at the time. Police Superintendent Leeyes might not feel the same way about being advised by one of his detective inspectors.


  Especially by someone who did not even play golf.

  Which, as Sloan understood it, meant that he was not so much off the green as beyond the orange pale.

  “Never carry a number six iron,” retorted Leeyes speedily. “Of course you must talk to the Coroner, Sloan.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “After you’ve found out how long this pellet had been in the body.”

  “Naturally, sir.”

  “If you can.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “If it was while the deceased had been playing Cops and Robbers at the age of twelve or had a friend learning to use an air rifle at fourteen, then I don’t think we need be too interested.”

  “No, sir.”

  “But if it was the week before he died, we are.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’ll have to talk to the metal specialists first.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ve already asked Sergeant Gelven to find out when queremitte was first mined and so forth.”

  “Gelven?” Superintendent Leeyes jerked his head up. “You can’t have Sergeant Gelven. They’re short on the detective side this week over at Calleford and they need a good man. He’s reporting there first thing in the morning.”

  “I see, sir. Sorry, sir, I didn’t know.”

  “You’ll have to make do with Crosby.”

  “Yes, sir.” Detective Inspector Sloan sighed. “I’m afraid the investigation may take a little longer then. I don’t think Crosby has had any experience with either ballistics or heavy metals.”

  Detective Constable W. E. Crosby was the newest member of the Criminal Investigation Department at Berebury Police Station—and the most jejune.

  “Then it’s high time he learned,” responded Leeyes instantly. “And,” he added, “not only are there men in the Force who know everything about bullets in every shape and form, but my painful experience is that they’ll all be dying to tell him. Take my advice, Sloan, and don’t let them start talking to you about trajectories, or you’ll never get your tea.”

  Nowadays news travels round the world with something approximating more to the speed of light than that of sound and, in the global village that the world has in consequence become, very little remains secret for long.

  The first intelligence to reach the Sheikhdom of Lasserta from London did so very quickly indeed. It arrived well within the deadline set by Sheikh Ben Hajal Kisra for the sequestration of the Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company’s assets there, and it was to the effect that Alan Ottershaw would be coming back to face the music.

  There had never been any embargo about telling it not in Gath or publishing it not in the streets of Askelon lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, so when Malcolm Forfar, the company’s chief executive in Lasserta, heard the news at the firm’s headquarters at the minehead at Wadeem, he promptly sped into Gatt-el-Abbas to talk to the Ambassador.

  “I wonder what Ben Hajal Kirsa’ll do now?” said Forfar without preamble. “Have a show trial, do ye think?”

  Anthony Heber Hibbs waved the mine manager into a chair while his amiable wife Mollie (affectionately known throughout the entire British colony as the Diplomatic Bag) tactfully withdrew. “What will you have to drink?”

  “What? Oh, a long Roman, please.” Forfar was a hard-bitten Scot whose favourite tipple was Glen Morangie malt whisky, but he did not say so. Instead he exploded with: “Talk about brinkmanship!”

  “Time, my dear fellow, is an ingredient of diplomacy,” said the Ambassador. “One long Roman.”

  “Thank you.” Forfar accepted the ice-cool drink of lime juice and soda water called “Roman” by the expatriate British on the strength of the ancient Latin tag about when being in Rome, doing as the Romans do. The consumption of alcohol was not permitted in the Sheikhdom of Lasserta.

  “And timing,” added Heber Hibbs, sitting down himself, “is one of the tools of the trade of diplomacy.”

  “I daresay it is,” responded the mine manager warmly. He had spent most of the previous weekend devising ingenious ways to scuttle the mining works in the best Graf Spee tradition. “But, man, just waiting for orders is a gey hard business.”

  “Yes, indeed,” agreed the Ambassador soothingly. His own instructions came direct from Whitehall and therefore he was not only accustomed to waiting for them but, by now, more or less reconciled to their ambiguity. Governments of every complexion always liked to keep all their options open for as long as possible.

  And to have a scapegoat handy if things did not work out well.

  Malcolm Forfar sank the lime-juice drink without relish and said, “Do you know what I was supposed to do the minute we got to the Sheikh’s deadline for Ottershaw’s return?”

  “Tell me,” said Anthony Heber Hibbs, who had already heard the answer to this from sources euphemistically referred to as “close to Whitehall.”

  “Suspend production!” Forfar snorted, losing the panloaf Scots he usually spoke. “I ask ye, man! What guid in the world would suspending production do?”

  “In itself, nothing,” said the Ambassador. “As a gesture, I suspect quite a lot.”

  In the diplomatic world gestures had almost as great a significance as in the anthropological one. They had, it transpired, none at all in the engineering field.

  “Cutting off your nose to spite your face, if you ask me,” declared Forfar. “That’s all that is. I can tell you, foregoing output never did a company any good.” He paused and added, “Unless you’re in diamonds, of course.”

  Neither, thought Heber Hibbs, did disagreeing with your ground landlord, but he did not say so. “Tell me,” he said instead, “is suspending production technically very difficult?”

  “Well, no,” said Forfar grudgingly. “We have to do it from time to time anyway to check our shafts and lifting gear and so forth, but it’s not good practice to do it when you don’t have to. We work to some pretty tight schedules for some of our customers, I can tell you.”

  That the main purchaser of the ore containing queremitte mined by the Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company was the Ministry of Defence Procurement was left unsaid by both men.

  “This accident in which Ottershaw was involved,” began Heber Hibbs again after a suitable interval.

  “What about it?”

  “I suppose you’re sure it was an accident?” The Ambassador introduced a new train of thought at exactly the right moment, casually posing a question that had been put to him rather more urgently by Whitehall. And in code, too.

  The engineer frowned. “You’re not the only person who wants to know that.”

  “No?”

  The engineer frowned. “For starters I’ve had the Defence Procurement people sniffing round asking the same question.”

  The Ambassador hadn’t known that. “And?” he asked, since hors d’oeuvres was usually followed by a main course, “who else?”

  “It was the first thing my firm wondered, too.” Malcolm Forfar added with the supreme indifference of the engineer to wider affairs, “They’ve got a Parliamentary Select Committee on their tails. Did you know that?”

  “Once they get going,” said Heber Hibbs profoundly, “select committees sit on everyone’s tails.”

  “They don’t like the cost of queremitte,” said Forfar simply.

  “No. I can see that they might not.” He reached for Forfar’s empty glass. “Tell me, what did happen?”

  Forfar shrugged his shoulders. “All I can tell you is what Ottershaw told me. He said that he was driving down towards the market here in Gatt-el-Abbas when this Lassertan fellow just stepped out in front of his car. Came out from behind a parked lorry without looking was what Ottershaw told me. Anyway,” carried on Forfar, waving away the suggestion of another Roman drink, “he didn’t have any warning or time to stop or anything. First thing Alan knew about it was this chap’s head hitting his windscreen. He never had a chance.”

  “That,” remarked the Ambassador drily, “would seem to have gone for both o
f them.”

  “You know what these Lassertans are like,” said Malcolm Forfar. “They’ve got about as much road sense as hedgehogs.”

  Her Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador concurred with a nod. The motor car had come late to Lasserta and then the Sheikhdom’s road-traffic accident statistics demonstrated a touching faith in an after-life. “What we don’t know, Forfar,” he said, “and what we may never know is something important about the victim.”

  The mine manager looked up.

  “Did he fall,” said Heber Hibbs slowly, “or was he pushed?”

  FIVE

  And Pain Has Exhausted Every Limb

  There might have been no post-mortem examination of the body of the late Alan John Ottershaw: there certainly was one on the Camulos Society’s portrayal of the Battle of Lewes. The Committee met in full session as soon as Alan Ottershaw’s death and funeral were beginning to recede in public memory. The Secretary had just managed not to refer to a death in action when making his report—but it had been a near thing.

  “Sorry I’m late,” said Adrian Dungey, the veterinary surgeon, sliding into his seat after the Committee meeting had started. “I had an emergency call to Toad Hall.”

  “Batrachomyomachy broken out?” suggested Bertram Rauly.

  “That sounds nasty,” said a Committee man.

  “Is it infectious?” asked somebody else. “Like foot and mouth?”

  Adrian Dungey gave a light laugh. “Nothing like that I’m happy to say. Batrachomyomachy was a battle between frogs and mice, wasn’t it, sir?”

  Bertram Rauly nodded. “It’s one of those things that the Greeks had a word for.”

  “Would the battle do for the Camulos Society?” asked the Secretary. “Not that we’re short of ideas,” he added hastily.

  “We wouldn’t need an armourer, Adrian, for a battle between frogs and mice, would we?” said the Treasurer. Adrian Dungey, good with his hands, acted as the Society’s armourer at battles calling for metal weaponry. “I’m afraid I haven’t had the benefit of a classical education, you see.”

  The young man smiled. “I daresay toothpicks would do. Shall we call the Frog general Jeremy Fisher?”