The Body Politic

by Catherine Aird

“As long as you don’t call him Pétain,” growled Bertram Rauly, who had escaped from the beaches of Dunkirk by the skin of his teeth.

  “And the Mouse one Field Marshal Michael …”

  “Before we get on to our next battle,” said the Chairman importantly, “there are one or two little matters arising out of the last one to be cleared up.”

  It was some little time before these were disposed of and the Secretary could move on to the correspondence.

  “I’ve had a letter,” he announced, “from the University of Calleshire—well, from an undergraduate there, actually. His name is Richard Godstone and he’s at Almstone College at the University.” The Secretary waved the sheet of paper in his hand at the Committee members. “It says here that he and his friends want to know if the Camulos Society would consider having a re-enactment of Guy Fawkes attempting to blow up the Houses of Parliament.”

  “No battle there,” objected a purist.

  “Somebody shopped him, didn’t they?” said another member immediately. “Lost their nerve at the last minute and turned him in.”

  “Not a lot of action in either case, was there?” objected the Treasurer, dismissing thus one of the most fraught periods of English history.

  “A late autumn meeting would be quite an idea, though,” mused the Secretary. “And a bonfire for the children.”

  “The bonfire,” pointed out Bertram Rauly astringently, “was for Parliament.”

  “And fireworks,” said the Secretary. His two sons liked fireworks.

  Major Puiver’s response was even more pertinent. “What’s in it for them? The students, I mean.”

  “There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” concurred the Chairman sagely.

  The Secretary turned the page over. “They say they’re making a study of Parliament and some of its members.”

  “So did Guy Fawkes,” said Adrian Dungey, “didn’t he?”

  “And they would like to participate in a full-scale and historically accurate reconstruction of the episode.”

  “Episode!” snorted the Major. “That’s a fine way of describing one of the——”

  “They tortured Guy Fawkes, didn’t they?” intervened the purist with all the detachment that some three hundred years and more could bring.

  “If they’re looking for old cellars,” drawled Rauly, “and I daresay they are, they can use the old Motte.”

  “Provided they don’t blow it up, of course,” added the Treasurer. Getting insurance cover for the Camulos Society had not been easy.

  “Or knock it down,” said Adrian Dungey. “Did you hear about the piece of stone that came down during the re-enactment? It just missed the Member.”

  “That’s being looked into,” replied Bertram Rauly rather shortly. “By the way, was anything unusual found on the field of battle afterwards?”

  “How unusual?” enquired the Chairman. “Somebody left a crossbow out in the long grass.”

  “Chicken-bones,” said Rauly unexpectedly.

  “But, Bertram, we had pheasant for luncheon.”

  “Exactly.”

  Her Majesty’s Coroner for East Calleshire, Mr. David Locombe-Stapleford, was a solicitor in late middle-age to whom the epithet “crusty” might truly be applied.

  He was almost archetypal in appearance and in manner, having inherited both the appointment to the office of Coroner and a long-established legal practice in the town of Berebury from his father. The archaic electrical fittings in his office in the town stemmed from Mr. Locombe-Stapleford’s grandfather’s time, but the roll-top desk and the chairs into which he waved Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby were from an earlier epoch still.

  The Coroner was an autocrat of the old school and was afraid of nothing and nobody. Except, it presently transpired, of creating a precedent.

  “If I understand you correctly, Inspector,” he said, adjusting his glasses, “you are asking me to enquire into some ashes.”

  “That is so, sir.” Sloan hadn’t sat on a black horse-hair chair for a long time and was surprised all over again at how uncomfortable he found it.

  “It is a misdemeanour,” said the old solicitor sternly, “to prevent the holding of an inquest, which ought to be held, by disposing of the body. Price, Queen’s Bench Division, 1884.”

  “Yes, sir. Quite so.” Detective Inspector Sloan wasn’t really concerned about simple misdemeanours. He had something quite different in mind. “It isn’t exactly——”

  “And, in any case, Inspector, a body is no longer a sine qua non for an inquest.”

  “No,” agreed Sloan hastily, before the Coroner started rummaging about in his memory for when that had become the rule.

  “A presumption,” he continued frostily, “that there has been a body is quite sufficient for the law to act.”

  “Yes, sir, I am aware of——”

  “There is, in any case, often evidence that a body has existed,” rumbled on the Coroner, “which may not now be present.”

  Detective Constable Crosby, who didn’t like flying, said unexpectedly, “A name on a passenger list.”

  Sloan hadn’t even realised that the Detective Constable had been listening: he didn’t usually.

  “After one of the atomic bombs had exploded, gentlemen, there was just a shadow of a man on the ground where he had been standing.” Mr. David Locombe-Stapleford had never entered an aircraft and had no intention of doing so, but he was accustomed to keeping ahead of detective constables.

  “The Turin Shroud,” contributed Detective Inspector Sloan, whose mother was a great churchwoman.

  “The Motorway Man.” Mr. Locombe-Stapleford could cap detective inspectors, too, with ease. “No doubt you remember the case, Inspector? My confrère over at Luston only had a hole to go on.”

  “A man-shaped and a man-sized hole,” responded Sloan, a trifle stiffly. His own opposite number in the Luston Division had come in for a good deal of ribbing about the Motorway Man. It had taken a lot of valuable police time and energy to consign Luston’s Motorway Man into the same generic category, so to speak, as the Piltdown one.

  “A hoax, nevertheless,” said the Coroner severely, “perpetrated by those who ought to have known better.”

  “They made a mould which disintegrated without trace after the concrete was set, didn’t they?” said Detective Constable Crosby chattily, his wayward interest momentarily diverted by the sight of Mr. Locombe-Stapleford pulling down an antiquated electric light with a green glass shade. It worked from a white porcelain pulley and counterweight suspended from the ceiling. And it resembled nothing so much as an artifact in the office of a sheriff in a Spaghetti Western.

  “So, Inspector,” said the Coroner, centering the lamp over his desk, “you are inviting me to enquire into some ashes, or, rather, the death to which they relate?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you wish to prevent their return to the deceased’s relatives?”

  “Not so much prevent,” said Sloan cautiously, “as delay.”

  “Interfere with their disposition, then,” amended the solicitor. “I take it that what you want is to obstruct the crematorium authorities’ normal procedure?”

  “I have reason to believe, sir, that the death certification in this case might not have been totally accurate.”

  “I am reliably informed, Inspector,” Mr. Locombe-Stapleford said with some acidity, “that the same thing might be said of approximately half of all cases where the cause of death is based on clinical information alone——”

  Detective Constable Crosby leaned forward with interest. “How do they kn——”

  “—where there has subsequently been a post-mortem examination,” finished the Coroner triumphantly.

  “There wasn’t an autopsy in this case,” said Detective Inspector Sloan with commendable restraint. “I understand that the certifying doctors were satisfied that the deceased died from heart failure.”

  “At least,” sniffed Mr. Locombe-S
tapleford, “they don’t appear to have belonged to the ‘give it a long name and nobody will ask any questions’ school of medicine, do they, Inspector?”

  “I couldn’t say, sir, I’m sure,” said Sloan austerely. “All I can say is that I am advised by the Regional Forensic Science Laboratory that a metal pellet said to have been found in the deceased’s ashes at cremation was of recent manufacture and had not been in the body long enough for oxidisation to have taken place.”

  The Coroner brought the rise-and-fall electric fitment down as far as it would go, the better to concentrate its light on a sheet of paper in the middle of his blotting pad. “What I need to know, Inspector,” he said, “is whether this death has given rise to a reasonable doubt in your mind or anyone else’s about the cause of death.”

  “Yes,” said Sloan simply, adding, “although at this stage unfortunately we do not know whether or not the pellet had any bearing on the death.”

  “Gunshot wound?” The Coroner was of a vintage to know what the letters “g.s.w.” stood for.

  “Not exactly, sir, although it might have been shot with a gun.”

  “Umbrella jab?” The Coroner was obviously more up to date than he seemed.

  “Too soon to say.”

  Mr. Locombe-Stapleford unscrewed the cap of an old-fashioned fountain pen. “Which is why you wish to—er—postpone the proposed inhumation of the ashes?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And why you wish me, Inspector, acting in my capacity as Coroner, to order an autopsy?”

  “An examination of such remains as there are,” qualified Sloan.

  “I see.” Mr. Locombe-Stapleford looked shrewdly at the policeman over the top of his glasses.

  By nothing more than a whisker Sloan avoided a natural tendency to say “please” inculcated in him at a very early age by a mother who placed a high value on the word. Instead he waited in what he trusted was a courteous silence as the Coroner rumbled on.

  “While you,” said Mr. Locombe-Stapleford, “investigate a death after a duly certified cremation has taken place.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Sloan. Never apologise and never explain was what Benjamin Disraeli had advised. Prime Ministers, it seemed, were strong on advice.

  “H’m.” Mr. Locombe-Stapleford’s pen hovered over the sheet of paper on his blotting pad. “Give me the deceased’s name and last-known address.”

  “Alan John Ottershaw,” complied Detective Inspector Sloan, “of April Cottage, High Street, Mellamby, but he’d only just got home from abroad.”

  He wished he hadn’t mentioned the fact. If there was one matter on which all the coroners he had ever known were equally sensitive to, it was whether or not a body lay within their jurisdiction.

  “Abroad?” barked the Coroner, immediately laying down his pen. His writ ran no further than halfway across the county of Calleshire.

  “The Middle East,” Sloan answered him, equally unhappily. “The Sheikhdom of Lasserta, to be precise.”

  Mr. Locombe-Stapleford frowned. “So this—er—pellet could have been—er—introduced into the body of this man while it was not in England?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Sloan. As far as the Coroner was concerned the phrase “not in England” was probably the ultimate in every sense. In sentiment it might have come straight from John of Gaunt’s “sceptr’d isle” speech. Or Robert Browning’s “Oh, to be in England now that April’s there.”

  “Such a circumstance,” said Mr. David Locombe-Stapleford severely, “could make for difficulties.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Sloan. “There is something else, too …”

  “They look upon sudden death quite differently abroad,” the Coroner swept on.

  That, thought Sloan to himself, was pure Kipling if anything was.

  “Quite differently,” repeated the Coroner.

  The lesser breeds without the law, was how that poet had put it: Sloan wondered if the Superintendent knew that.

  “And hot countries have other customs, anyway,” said the Coroner unspecifically.

  Sloan nodded, forbearing to mention sky burial.

  “But not so many procedures,” said Mr. Locombe-Stapleford, reaching for another form with evident satisfaction.

  “No, sir.” Sloan was with him there. Any country whose procedure for burial at sea required the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food to be notified under the Dumping at Sea Act 1974 was not short on attention to detail.

  He ventured to say so to the Coroner: and regretted it immediately.

  “That Act, Inspector,” came the precise response, “only applies within the three-mile territorial limit.”

  Sloan might have known. It was the “not in England” syndrome all over again beyond those three important miles.

  “The position outside territorial waters,” said the Coroner, “is less certain.”

  The silver sea in which this sceptr’d isle was set, thought Sloan irreverently, wasn’t entirely covered by the Dumping at Sea Act, then.

  “But,” said the Coroner, “the Removal of Bodies Regulations 1954 probably apply.”

  “No good dying on board ship, either, then, is it?” remarked Detective Constable Crosby cheerfully.

  “Ah,” responded the Coroner alertly, “dying on board ship is, paradoxically, quite a different matter.”

  Sloan waited.

  “Then, the body can be disposed of as part of the normal working of the ship.”

  “Well, I never!” said Detective Constable Crosby, while Sloan had almost come round to the view that there was something to be said for sky burial after all.

  The Detective Inspector returned to the matter in hand. “As I was saying, sir, there is something else.”

  “Well, Inspector, what is it?” The Coroner looked up, pushing the task light to one side.

  “This pellet that has been found in the remains …”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s made of queremitte.”

  “Queremitte?” The Coroner’s general knowledge wasn’t as good as that of Superintendent Leeyes.

  Detective Constable Crosby repeated, parrot-fashion, something he had only just learned. “Queremitte is a very hard metal which is the principal export of the Sheikhdom of Lasserta.”

  SIX

  When the Will Has Forgotten the Life-Long Aim

  April Cottage was set in the middle of the High Street at Mellamby and was not far from the parish church of St. Martin’s. It was Mellamby Motte, though, that still dominated the view. The de Caqueville family, the builders of the earliest castle at Mellamby, had chosen their site well, and its remains—only the original keep was standing now, the bailey having been spoiled long ago—caught the eye from all over the village of Mellamby.

  On the working principle that time spent on reconnaissance was seldom wasted, Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby had had a word with the local village bobby before calling on Alan Ottershaw’s widow.

  “She’s called Hazel,” said Police Constable Colin Turton, “and she’s a local girl. Old Rebble, the vet’s daughter, actually. She’s got a by-name, too, in the village.”

  Sloan leaned forward attentively. They had habitual criminals with nicknames which gave a clue to the characteristics of the person. Mrs. Gasmeter Bradley, for instance, specialised in just one thing.

  Constable Turton frowned. “They call her ‘Hamamelis’ or something like that.”

  “Witch-hazel,” translated Detective Inspector Sloan, quondam gardener.

  “Oh, I remember.” Constable Turton’s face cleared. “The stuff they used to rub on bruises.” He hesitated. “Or was that arnica?”

  Detective Constable Crosby wasn’t interested in homely remedies. “What’s she like?” he asked.

  “Hazel Ottershaw?” Turton raised his eyebrows expressively. “Good-looking. Stylish, too. Mind you, there’s never been any shortage of money in that outfit.”

  “That helps,” said Crosby. “Great stuff, mo
ney.”

  Sloan wasn’t so sure about that, but this was no time for debate. “Go on.”

  “As well,” Turton said, “as being married to a mining engineer who can’t have been doing too badly, thank you, her father is the senior partner of the biggest veterinary practice in this part of the world.”

  “Why,” asked Sloan, with an eye for essentials, “wasn’t she out in Lasserta with her husband?”

  “Couldn’t stand the heat,” said the village policeman, “or so I hear. And then they had two babies in quick succession. I gather this place her husband was stationed at—Wadi something or other—was no place for small children.”

  April Cottage, Mellamby, Calleshire, on the other hand, it presently transpired, was a good place for small children.

  “My mother lives just up the road, you see,” explained Mrs. Hazel Ottershaw to the two detectives. She was indeed a good-looking girl, with as good a pair of ankles as Sloan had seen in many a long day and the fine, semi-translucent skin which usually went with freckles. “She’s been a great help with Julian and Kate …” Her voice faltered. “I really don’t know what I should have done without her.”

  “No, madam. Quite so.”

  “When you telephoned, Inspector, I asked her to come down so that there would be someone to look after them while you were here.” Her face clouded. “They don’t understand, you see. They’re too young, poor little lambs.”

  “No, madam. Naturally they don’t.” Detective Inspector Sloan was using this form of address advisedly, although Hazel Ottershaw couldn’t have been all that far on in her twenties. In his view, grief and a decent formality went together: there was a certain dignity to be observed in proper mourning, and an instinctive unapproachability.

  Hazel Ottershaw’s responses were almost rigidly studied and polite, too. “I’m afraid they’re not going to remember their father either, Inspector,” she said in a voice that was slightly shaky. “They’re too young. It’s very sad, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, madam.”

  They had found Hazel Ottershaw sitting alone in a room with the blinds half down. Those shafts of sunlight that were streaming into April Cottage were full of dancing dust-motes and there was about the place the stillness and inanition that customarily follow a bereavement. Detective Constable Crosby hadn’t liked the half-dark and had audibly stubbed his toe on a reproduction Pembroke table.