The Body Politic

by Catherine Aird

  Sloan made a note. A pellet might have made a hole in a costume.

  “Miss Finch?” he said.

  “A retired schoolteacher of an interfering disposition,” said Rauly. “Lives down by the church.”

  Sloan made another note.

  Rauly said, “It was because of the Agent—David Chadwick—that we happened to have the Member with us on the Sunday as well as the Saturday.”

  “Don’t tell me he got dressed up, too.” Sloan had never seen Peter Corbishley other than properly clad for a public appearance.

  Rauly shook his head. “Not he. No, he came out again because of Simon de Montfort.”

  “David Chadwick?” said Sloan, thoroughly confused.

  “No, the real Simon de Montfort. He was the man who—so to speak—started Parliamentary government.”

  “Did he?” said Sloan.

  “Got a lot to answer for, hasn’t he, Inspector?” Rauly was grinning again.

  “The Member, then,” hazarded Sloan, “was there to make a speech?”

  “At the end of the day,” assented Rauly gravely. “He spoke about the Battle of Lewes and the Provisions at Oxford and the first recorded Parliament. Two burgesses from every shire or something like that.”

  “Bully for him,” said Detective Constable Crosby. He’d been on duty once at a rural polling station on voting day and had been bored beyond belief.

  “So,” said Sloan, unsure whether Crosby had meant Simon de Montfort or Peter Corbishley, “you had your battle all right, sir.”

  “We did, indeed, Inspector,” said Bertram Rauly, “but if anyone had been going to die afterwards I would have thought it would have been the Member rather than Alan Ottershaw.”

  Sloan lifted an enquiring eyebrow.

  “There was someone who was present at the re-enactment dressed as the Figure of Death. You know the sort of thing, Inspector.”

  “I can’t say that I do, sir.”

  “Someone covered from head to foot in black with a skeleton painted on the outside in white.”

  “Very realistic, sir, I’m sure.”

  “He seemed to me to be stalking Corbishley. David Chadwick, his Agent——”

  “Simon de Montfort.”

  “—he noticed it, too, and got quite worried. Everywhere the Member went Death went too.”

  “There must be a moral there somewhere, sir,” said Sloan lightly. If Crosby started to say anything about Mary and her little lamb he’d slay him then and there.

  “That’s just it, Inspector. Death turns up in a lot of early medieval literature. Take Everyman for instance.”

  “I daresay he gets all the best lines, as well, sir.”

  “What’s that? Oh, yes, I’m sure he does.” Bertram Rauly acknowledged this politely. “It wasn’t that. No, the funny thing was that we didn’t know who he was. Nobody knew.”

  “Nobody?”

  “Not even the Battle Commander,” said the owner of Mellamby Place. “Derrick Puiver hadn’t got Death on his list of combatants at all. He didn’t even know whose side he was on or how he came to be there in the first place. Odd, wasn’t it?”

  EIGHT

  And a Man Is Uncertain of His Own Name

  “Death!” thundered Police Superintendent Leeyes across his desk at Berebury Police Station. “What do you mean, Sloan, that someone was playing Death at Mellamby?”

  “In costume, sir, at the re-enactment.” The Detective Inspector had added the information to his report on his visit to Mellamby Place.

  “Do you mean to stand there, Sloan,” demanded Leeyes, “and tell me that the deceased had been playing Cowboys and Indians the day he was taken ill?”

  “Soldiers, sir,” said Sloan, clearing his throat. “Not Cowboys and Indians.”

  “Comes to the same thing,” snapped the Superintendent. “Whatever they were playing at over at Mellamby they were old enough to know better. Death, indeed! Whatever next?”

  Sloan himself knew better than to argue. “Yes, sir.”

  “With guns, you said,” continued Leeyes with manifest disapprobation.

  “After a fashion,” agreed Sloan uneasily.

  “What does that mean?”

  “The Committee of the Camulos Society sanctioned two sorts of weapons for the Battle of Lewes.”

  “Stone the crows, Sloan,” exploded Leeyes. “Who do they think they are? A bench of licensing magistrates?”

  “Swords,” persisted Sloan, “and crossbows.”

  “Oughtn’t to be allowed,” grumbled Leeyes. “Dangerous implements, that’s what they are. Both of ’em.”

  “You don’t need a licence for either,” Sloan pointed out pertinently.

  “Well you should,” declared Leeyes, “and for everything else you can hit a policeman with—let alone a rabbit.”

  Detective Inspector Sloan, veteran himself of several confrontations with angry young men, said a silent “Amen” to that, and continued aloud: “I don’t know yet, sir, if a crossbow was dangerous to Alan Ottershaw or not.”

  Leeyes grunted.

  “It is known, sir, that he had a sword-fight with another—er—member of the cast called Dungey, Adrian Dungey. He’s one of his father-in-law’s junior partners.”

  Superintendent Leeyes snorted aloud.

  “But,” finished Sloan, “a queremitte pellet couldn’t have come from a sword-fight.”

  Leeyes sniffed. “Are you trying to tell me, Sloan, and not very clearly I may say, that it could have got into the deceased from a crossbow?”

  “I’m seeing the Battle Commander as soon as I can get hold of him,” responded Sloan obliquely.

  “Battle Commander?” Superintendent Leeyes’ bushy eyebrows shot up. “It’s worse than model railways, and they’re bad enough.”

  “Enthusiasts,” said Sloan. “That’s all that they are, sir.”

  “So are quite a lot of law-breakers,” retorted Leeyes swiftly. “You name it, Sloan, and we’ve got enthusiasts for it on our books—from speeding to little girls.”

  “Quite so, sir.” Now he came to think of it, he, Sloan, was something of an enthusiast himself when he had the time. For growing roses.

  “To say nothing of those who go in for art for art’s sake.”

  “Sir?” Sloan’s puzzlement was genuine.

  “Forgers and fraud merchants.”

  “I gather,” said Sloan, coming back to the point with the tenacity of a Robert the Bruce, “that the Battle Commander of the Camulos Society is a cross between an organiser and a referee.”

  Leeyes grunted. “And he’s going to be persuaded to show you a crossbow, is he?” He leaned across his desk. “Tell me, Sloan, what do the Camulos Society use for ammunition when they’re not shooting queremitte pellets at each other—if they were, of course?”

  “Red dye,” said Sloan, “contained in plastic balls which burst on impact.”

  “I see,” said Leeyes. “Dye and you’re dead.” He seemed pleased with the witticism and added, “Do they get a lot of men who are dead but won’t lie down or are they all on the Berebury Town Watch Committee?”

  “I think the Camulos Society would regard that as cheating,” said Sloan, into whose mind had floated a couple of lines of verse which had struck a chord in his schoolboy consciousness and had remained in his memory ever since:

  I’ll lay me down and bleed awhile

  And then I’ll rise and fight again.

  He’d taken a lot of persuading by the English teacher that that wasn’t a heroic couplet.

  “What we used to say in our street when I was a lad was ‘Bang, bang, you’re dead,’” observed Superintendent Leeyes unexpectedly.

  “Indeed, sir?” Sloan noted the remark for passing on to his friend, Inspector Harpe, the Traffic Inspector, the next time they met in the canteen. There was considerable speculation at Berebury Police Station about whether Superintendent Leeyes had ever been young.

  “What about the widow, Sloan?” his superior officer was saying n
ow.

  “We’ve seen her, sir.”

  “I didn’t mean to look at,” said Leeyes impatiently. “I meant did she stand to gain or lose by her husband’s dying?”

  Sloan coughed. “I hadn’t thought about that yet, sir. It’s what you might call early days yet. All we’ve got so far is a hollow pellet.”

  “You should always think about that, Sloan. Always.” The Superintendent had a Dickensian view of widows.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well?”

  “From what Constable Turton was telling us Hazel Ottershaw has never had to want anyway, being the vet’s daughter.”

  “These big companies usually look after their own people quite well, too.” Leeyes shrugged. “And nobody can say that the Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company isn’t big.”

  “After what the Member of Parliament said,” added Sloan, “I’m arranging to see them as soon as I can.”

  “By the way, Sloan, while you’re out and about there’s something else you can do.”

  “Sir?” He hadn’t even had time to look into the possible sugging in the shopping parade yet.

  “It’s the Member of Parliament for the West Division.”

  “Ted Sheard?” Detective Inspector Sloan turned over a new page in his notebook and waited.

  Superintendent Leeyes picked up a message flimsy from his desk. “He’s been having death threats through the post. Or so he says.”

  “Were they signed?” enquired Sloan.

  “That’s for you to find out,” said the Superintendent, “but one thing is quite certain, Sloan, and that’s that they’ve been posted here in Berebury.”

  To some people the twin professions of veterinary science and human medicine would seem to have everything in common, and at first glance this thought would pass muster. Indeed, disaffected patients of busy medical practitioners were wont to declare that their pets were treated by the vet with a care and consideration apparently well beyond the call of medical duty.

  And worried farmers sometimes brooded on the fact that at least medical and surgical and hospital treatment for themselves and their families was free at what was the time of need for the patient and the point of sale for the veterinarian. Some of them were not above soliciting the opinion of the doctor on an ailing animal if he were at the farm visiting an ailing relative.

  That both schools of thought were wrong would have been apparent had they happened to have overheard Dr. Brian Lyulph, general medical practitioner of Mellamby, talking to old Andrew Rebble, veterinary surgeon of the same parish, and father of Hazel Ottershaw.

  The enquiries of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Calleshire Constabulary had not gone unnoticed by either man.

  “If it wasn’t a heart attack, Andrew,” said Lyulph wearily, “then I’m damned if I know what it was.”

  Old Rebble nodded a grizzled head. Known himself over half the county as a good man with a labouring cow or an injured horse, he knew that Brian Lyulph was equally sound with ill humans. “Always start with the simple,” he said.

  That was part of the diagnostic process of both professions.

  “And,” he went on, “common diseases occur most commonly.”

  That was another.

  “God knows,” responded the doctor, tacitly acknowledging this, “Alan had everything you’d expect in the way of the signs of a heart attack, let alone symptoms.”

  It was a phraseology comprehended by the vet and he nodded again. His patients only had signs. Symptoms—that which the patient complained of—were a luxury denied to veterinary surgeons.

  “He was sweating,” said the doctor, “and he was having difficulty in breathing. In fact he was quite dyspnoeic.”

  Old Rebble jerked his head. “I know. I saw him myself.”

  “I’d forgotten that,” admitted Lyulph. “He’d been sick, of course. There was vomitus all over his rig-out.”

  “There was marked pallor, too,” said the vet, lapsing into the impersonal vernacular of both professions. They were both of them talking about a patient now, not a person.

  “He was almost beyond speech by the time I got to him,” said the doctor. “I’d been dusting off the Member of Parliament after that near miss with a lump of stone at the foot of the tower. He was all right, though.”

  “Alan wasn’t.” Rebble’s expression was grim. He had a young widowed daughter and two grandchildren to think about now.

  “No,” acknowledged the doctor readily. “The poor fellow was obviously in great pain. I gave him a hypodermic injection of morphia statim—I didn’t want to waste time trying to raise a vein at that stage.”

  “He was clutching his heart when I got there,” said the victim’s father-in-law, “so it hadn’t worked by then.”

  “His pulse was all over the place, too,” said Lyulph. “When I could find it,” he went on, his voice pregnant with meaning.

  Old Rebble nodded.

  “And pretty rapid,” said the doctor, obviously enumerating to himself a mental list of signs. Not for the first time, Rebble judged. “His blood pressure was way down,” added Lyulph.

  “It would be,” said the veterinary surgeon. Animals had hearts, too.

  And heart attacks.

  “He had a cardiac arrhythmia, of course.” Dr. Brian Lyulph was accounting to a well-informed relative. But only in a way.

  “I thought he would.”

  “I found ventricular extrasystoles as well as an almighty tachycardia.” He grimaced. “I thought he was going into ventricular fibrillation then and there.”

  “That happened in the Accident and Emergency Department at the hospital,” said the vet sadly. “I went in with him and Hazel, too, remember? Though they sent us out into the corridor when he went into acute failure.”

  “The ambulance took its time,” said Lyulph, unsure if there was an unspoken criticism in the air. “I was in half a mind to take it up with their Controller but I didn’t in the end.”

  “It couldn’t have been that the men didn’t know the way,” growled Rebble. “I recognised ’em. They were the same two fellows who came out the day before for that false call-out to the Member.”

  “I shouldn’t think there’s anything wrong with his heart,” said Lyulph. “Cool as a cucumber.”

  “Nor with Bertram’s,” said the vet. “Do you know he walks right through the Chase every day? In season and out.”

  “Sportsmen like Rauly always get the right kind of exercise,” said the general practitioner, who was too busy for either sport or exercise. “He doesn’t overeat, either.”

  “You can’t fatten thoroughbreds,” said the vet absently.

  “I can’t honestly say, though, that Alan would still be alive today if the ambulance had got there any more quickly,” said Brian Lyulph, coming back to what was worrying him.

  Old Rebble was too experienced in the way of the world to ask him if he really meant what he had said. “Shouldn’t have wanted a cabbage for a son-in-law,” he said gruffly instead.

  Lyulph grunted. “They shoot horses, don’t they, but not men.”

  The ability to administer a coup de grâce legally was a powerful weapon in the armentarium of the veterinary surgeon but officially denied to the registered medical practitioner.

  “And for all that the police want to talk to me.” Lyulph shook his head worriedly. “I can’t tell them anything more than I’ve told you, Andrew. I completed my part of the cremation certificate in all good faith.”

  “That’s what Hazel wanted,” said Hazel’s father. “The young chap at the hospital said he could do the first part and she was very anxious that you did the other as you knew them both.”

  “The crematorium’s medical referee wasn’t unhappy,” said Lyulph, “so I can’t for the life of me understand why the police should be snooping around and wanting to see me.”

  “Neither can I.” Old Rebble looked even older. “But, let’s face it, they’ll have their reasons.”

  “I’m very
much afraid so.”

  The two men sat together in silence for a long moment, and then Andrew Rebble spoke. “Brian, we’ve known each other for a long time …”

  Lyulph looked sharply across at the older man.

  “I hope,” continued Rebble, “that we understand each other, too.”

  Lyulph’s expression changed subtly and began to assume its usual mask of professional inscrutableness. “So?”

  “So, if there was anything—er—at all out of the way—untoward, say—about Alan’s death, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”

  “There wasn’t,” said the doctor flatly. “Or, if there was, I didn’t spot it.” He got up to go, more worried now than when he had come. “By the way,” he said, attempting to leave on a lighter note, “what did you prescribe for John Newby’s sheepdog?”

  The veterinary surgeon frowned. “It had a bad ear, didn’t it? Oh, canker powder.”

  Lyulph grinned for the first time. “It’s cured John’s chronic middle-ear infection. Can you do anything for his hiatus hernia? I can’t.”

  “Nice little creature, isn’t she?” said Adrian Dungey. “Don’t let her put on too much weight, will you?” The young veterinary surgeon gave Miss Mildred Finch a quick professional smile as he patted her Bedlington terrier on the head. “You’ll both live to regret it if you do.”

  “Certainly not,” said Miss Finch, who didn’t carry any spare weight herself, and whose dog Bebida was exercised and fed strictly according to the book.

  “We see far too many chubby chops here for their own good.” Adrian Dungey was the veterinary practice’s small-animal specialist and, just as paediatricians develop dialogue skills with very little children, so he had come to extend his vocabulary of small talk with their owners. In the same way as his senior partner, old Rebble, had a good working rapport with the farmers of the district, so Dungey had a considerable following among the many single women with pets in the Mellamby area.

  Miss Finch resumed possession of her dog but was clearly in no hurry to leave the consulting room. “Have the Committee decided on our next engagement yet, Adrian? I shall need as much time as possible if I’ve got to do the costumes again.”