The Body Politic

by Catherine Aird

  “It is an old Lassertan proverb,” responded Sheikh Ben Hajal Kisra, “that what is spoken in the souk today happened yesterday or tomorrow.”

  “I hear,” repeated Anthony Heber Hibbs mendaciously, “that Your Highness’s neighbour to the north is even now actively considering allowing a geological survey team into his benighted country.”

  Sheikh Ben Hajal Kisra, as always, stiffened at the mention of his northern neighbour. The Sultanate of Zonaras was seldom even named in Lasserta, and exploration shafts there looking for queremitte or anything else were certainly not to be encouraged.

  “It would be a pity,” remarked the Ambassador guilelessly, “if Lasserta—er—went back to the desert and Zonaras so to speak came in from it instead.” He very nearly used a metaphor about coming in from the hot but thought better of it just in time.

  His Highness Sheikh Ben Mirza Ibrahim Hajal Kisra said in a detached way, “The debt of death to Lasserta has been repaid.”

  The Ambassador nodded. Lassertans lived by the Mosaic law of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

  “A death for a death,” said the Sheikh.

  The Ambassador lowered his head in assent again, still keeping silent. The Foreign Office had told him that Alan Ottershaw’s illness had appeared to have been genuine, but neither he nor Malcolm Forfar of the Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company had seen fit to apprise the Lassertans of this.

  “I have decreed,” said the Sheikh, “that no servant of the Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company shall drive a vehicle in Lasserta ever again.”

  The Ambassador bowed. Under Mosaic law that would be a speedometer head for a steering arm. Or something.

  “In future,” declared the Sheikh, “my people will do their driving for them.”

  “An excellent idea, Your Highness,” said Anthony Heber Hibbs. “What could be better?”

  “Then,” said Ben Kisra, “nothing so unfortunate as the murder by motor car of a Lassertan by a European can occur in future.”

  “A very wise precaution,” agreed the Ambassador blandly, totally suppressing the view expressed in cable after cable by a preternaturally suspicious Whitehall that for “accident” one should read “incident.” “It would be preferable,” he added carefully, “not to have production at risk a second time.”

  The Sheikh said nothing.

  “A steady extraction of ore,” went on Heber Hibbs, “would seem to be in the best interests of everyone, except, of course,” he added, “the Sultan of Zonaras.”

  There was yet another pause while a knighthood for the Ambassador in the next Birthday Honours hung in the balance.

  “So be it,” said the Sheikh, clapping his hands in the Lassertan equivalent of the Royal Assent, adding gnomically, “Death is a camel that lies down at every door.”

  TEN

  And the Last Tear Shed

  Detective Constable Crosby didn’t really want to visit the premises of Morton and Son, Funeral Furnishers. “Couldn’t Tod come round to us, sir?” he asked when he was told about it.

  “No, Crosby, he couldn’t.” Detective Inspector Sloan was quite firm. “If he’s got any records about the deceased then they’ll be there, not at the Police Station.”

  “I don’t see how he can tell us anything, anyway,” objected the Constable.

  “When the Superintendent says to leave no stone unturned, Crosby, he means it.” This was unfair and Sloan knew it: his own inclination was to thoroughness too.

  Crosby changed tack. “Tod might be out on a job when we get there.”

  “Then we’ll wait,” said Sloan.

  “Wait there?” Crosby sounded even more unhappy.

  “Why not? After all, Mortons do call it a funeral parlour.” Detective Inspector Sloan collected up his notebook and started for the door. “And if Tod isn’t there we can always sit down quietly and wish we’d led better lives.”

  In the event they didn’t have to.

  Tod Morton had just got back to his office after arranging a funeral when the two policemen arrived there. He continued taking off his black Edwardian-style frock-coat, and then hung it carefully on a coat-hanger.

  “I can remember,” remarked Sloan, “when that sort of rig-out used to spell trouble down at the Police Station.”

  “That wasn’t yesterday,” said Tod respectfully.

  “Teddy-boys used to wear it—velvet collars and all.” Sloan settled himself more comfortably into a chair that was clearly meant for the newly bereaved.

  “It’s all right still if you’re a man,” said Tod gloomily, “but there are ladies coming into the business more and more these days——”

  “Nothing’s sacred any more,” said Crosby histrionically.

  “—and they have the devil’s own job not looking like the Wicked Fairy at the Christening. Everything except the broomstick.”

  They had Equal Opportunity down at the Police Station, too. That meant that the women got the rough end of “domestics.”

  “Doesn’t do the trade any good at all, I can tell you,” said Tod. “The only thing the ladies are good for is a laugh, that’s what I say.” He glanced quizzically at Sloan. “You’re not here for a laugh, though, are you, Inspector?”

  “No, Tod.” Sloan looked round the subtly furnished waiting room. “Like everyone else who calls here, it’s strictly business.”

  “I thought,” said the young undertaker, “that it might be a case of ‘don’t ring us, we’ll ring you.’”

  “And we thought, Tod, that your memory might work better on your home ground.”

  “Fair enough.” Tod insinuated himself into an ordinary jacket and looked years younger at once. “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything you can remember about the Ottershaw funeral,” said Sloan.

  “Ah, Inspector, there was something then.”

  “A pellet,” replied Sloan smoothly. “The one which you showed us.”

  “So you’re not telling.”

  “It’s always the coppers who ask the questions, Tod. You should know that.”

  “Like what sort of questions?”

  “How did you get on with the widow?”

  Tod relaxed. “The first thing you grasp in our line of business, Inspector, is that it doesn’t do to call ’em widows. Not as soon as that. They don’t know who you mean and to begin with they never think it’s them.”

  “Learned that at your father’s knee and other low joints, did you?” asked Crosby sardonically.

  Tod looked pained. “The state of widowhood takes time to get used to, that’s what I meant, and we just don’t use the term first time round. Besides,” he said readily enough, “it was the father-in- law who made all the arrangements. He told us his daughter was much too upset to do anything and we were to get in touch with him if there were any queries. Seemed a sensible sort of a fellow. Businesslike, anyway.”

  Sloan nodded. Undertaking was probably the only trade where you had to mix sentiment with business to do well.

  “And not young. I should say he was getting on for sixty-five. I could turn his name up for you, if you like.”

  “It was Andrew Rebble,” said Sloan. “He’s the veterinary surgeon at Mellamby.”

  “He seemed to know the form,” said Tod, “which is always a help.”

  Detective Constable Crosby stirred. “You have trouble with first-time buyers, then, do you, Tod?”

  “You try explaining death certificates and burial orders to the nearest and dearest,” retorted Tod a trifle heatedly, “straight after their first death in the family and you’ll soon find out all about the little local difficulties.” He drew breath and carried on in the same vein. “And that’s without bringing in the sextons and the grave-diggers. On a bad day Cemetery Sid can complicate the simplest funeral. In my humble opinion children should be taught all about funerals at school. To my mind they teach ’em a deal too much about life and not half enough about death.”

  “All right, all right,” said Crosby pacifica
lly. “No need to get aerated. Sorry I asked.”

  “To say nothing about vicars,” Tod went whingeing on. “Officiating clergymen aren’t always sweetness and light by any manner of means. Oh, no, not when they’re standing out on the clay among the dripping yew trees in the rain.”

  Detective Inspector Sloan tapped his notebook with his pencil. “Were there, in fact, any problems with this funeral, Tod? About certificates and so on?”

  “Not that I know of,” said Tod, his ire subsiding as quickly as it had arisen. “Like I told you, Inspector, it was certified as heart failure. The client hadn’t died of anything contagious or the hospital would have told us. There’s a communicable diseases routine, you know.”

  Sloan nodded. An undertaker, of course, would be one of the people who would know the difference between infection and contagion.

  “Can’t be too careful, can you, Inspector, with all these new diseases about. Get rid of one like smallpox and up pops Aids. Seems there’s always going to be a plague around of one sort or another.”

  “About the funeral, Tod,” Sloan reminded him.

  “Ah, yes, the funeral. Where was I?” He frowned. “I remember now. This Mr. Rebble comes along and makes all the arrangements, like I said. Only two cars wanted because they all live near the church and it’s family only at the cremation.”

  “Those cars that you use—” began Crosby, finding something that did interest him at last.

  “And then …” said Tod.

  “Yes?” Sloan’s pen was poised over his notebook.

  “Then the deceased’s employers came into the picture.” He screwed up his brow in an effort of recollection. “The Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company. I think they must charge their wreaths to their advertising budget.”

  “Very probably.”

  “Well, they hired the rest of the fleet to collect them at Berebury Station.”

  “And get them to the church on time?” suggested Crosby mordantly.

  “You’ve got it in one,” said Tod.

  “Tell me about them,” Sloan invited the undertaker. The Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company was high on his list of those to be interviewed as soon as possible.

  Tod Morton didn’t need asking twice. “A funny lot, they were, Inspector. It was like they were in uniform. All dressed the same. Black, of course. Their leader was a short, thick-set chap.”

  “So was Napoleon,” said Sloan. “Go on.”

  “The rest moved in a sort of … a sort of phalanx behind him. A bit like ducklings following a mother duck. Watched everything like a hawk, their great white chief did, and all the others watched him.”

  “What was there to watch?” asked Sloan.

  “Not a lot.” Tod scowled. “Not that I can remember, anyway.”

  “You collected the body from the hospital mortuary first,” prompted Sloan.

  “And brought it back to our Chapel of Rest.” Tod brightened. “We’ve got a lovely Chapel of Rest, Inspector. Would you like to see it?”

  “No,” said Sloan. “Go on.”

  “On the day of the funeral our hearse takes the coffin over to Mellamby Church—”

  Detective Constable Crosby chose this moment to chant with unseemly levity, “It wasn’t the cough that carried him off, it was the coffin they carried him off in.”

  “Straight to the church?” enquired Detective Inspector Sloan, deciding to rise above this.

  “That’s right, Inspector,” said Tod. “The widow didn’t want the children to see it.”

  “And then?”

  “The Vicar meets us at the undertaker’s rest.”

  “The what?”

  “The lych-gate.” Tod grinned. “Didn’t you know that was what they were?”

  “No,” said Sloan.

  “Before clocks,” said Tod Morton, “the family’d take the coffin as far as the lych-gate and just wait there until the parson came to take the funeral service.”

  “Would they, indeed?” said Sloan. “Well, we’ve got clocks, Tod, and they’re ticking away.”

  “The Vicar leads the way from there on and we move into God’s Acre. You know what that is, don’t you?”

  “Just keep going, Tod, that’s all.”

  “And we get to the church.”

  “Dead on time,” remarked Crosby unnecessarily.

  “What about the service?” asked Sloan. He would deal with Crosby later.

  “Ah,” said Tod, “I’m afraid you’ll have to ask someone else about that.”

  “You didn’t stay?” Sloan was surprised.

  “Have a heart, Inspector. How many times a day could you bear to listen to ‘For All the Saints Who from Their Labours Rest’ followed by ‘Abide With Me’?”

  Sloan agreed that it might get a man down in the long run.

  “Better than ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,’” said Crosby irreverently.

  “I buried a butcher and grazier once,” said Tod, momentarily diverted, “and they sang ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’ at the service.”

  “They never!” said Crosby.

  “Tod,” began Sloan dangerously, “the Ottershaw funeral …”

  “All right, all right.” Tod jerked his head in the direction of sounds coming from his yard. “Like I said, I didn’t stay myself and the boys——”

  “The pall-bearers?”

  “Them.” Tod nodded. “Melvin and his mates—they went and sat out on a grave somewhere. They like the table-top ones best for sitting.”

  “Marble chips would be uncomfortable,” said Crosby. “I can see that.”

  Sloan tapped his notebook. As he remembered it, table graves had been designed to frustrate nineteenth-century resurrectionists, not for providing seating for pall-bearers. “And had a smoke, I suppose?” he enquired.

  “All except Garry,” replied Tod.

  “What did Garry get up to?” asked Sloan, resigned now to hearing everything—but everything—about Alan Ottershaw’s funeral as patiently as he could.

  “He’s into churchyard flowers.”

  “Pinching them from the graves and selling them, you mean?” asked Crosby. Some of the offences which he had been taught about at the Police Training School were more heinous than others.

  Tod looked pained. “Certainly not. Looking for wild flowers.”

  “Pansy, is he?” suggested Crosby.

  It had not occurred to Detective Inspector Sloan that a conversation about flowers could get out of hand so easily. At the back of his own mind there was lurking something of Wordsworth’s that he had been made to learn at school about churchyard flowers. In his view William Wordsworth was not a man’s poet at all but the imagery of those verses had stuck through the years. It had conjured up a scene of grave mounds large and small. And a courteous parson—“the calm delights of unambitious piety, he chose, and learning’s solid dignity.” There had been the memory of a woman, too. Ellen, poor Ellen. That was it. Learning’s solid dignity had been heavily stressed at Sloan’s school. He said aloud, “What did you do then, Tod, while the service was going on?”

  “Popped out of the west door because it’s at the back, see?”

  “And so nobody sees you skiving off,” said Crosby, who knew more than a little about skiving himself.

  “You’ve got it in one,” acknowledged the undertaker, grinning. “First of all I went round and had a quick decko at where the ashes were to go.”

  “Under the east window, you told me,” said Sloan.

  “That’s right. You’d be surprised how often it’s under the east window, Inspector.”

  “Would I?” asked Sloan, who thought he would no longer be surprised at anything.

  “That’s a sort of harking back to the olden days.”

  “Is it?” said Sloan, mystified. Tod was too young to be automatically associating the olden days with the golden days.

  “When they used not to allow the unconsecrated to be buried in churchyards.”

  “Felons, you mean?” contributed Crosby intelli
gently. “And Susansides?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What’s that got to do with—” began Sloan.

  “So,” said Tod, “they used to bury them outside the churchyard but as near to the altar as they could get.”

  “Making the best of both worlds,” responded Sloan before he’d quite thought the remark through.

  “That’s right,” said the undertaker. “And those clients who aren’t really and truly into cremation even though they have it done, they go for having the ashes chest interred in the churchyard under the east window.”

  “Then what did you do?” asked Sloan valiantly. “After you’d inspected the ground.”

  “Went back to the west door and kept an ear open for clues about when the service would be over. An organ is a great help at a funeral.”

  “I’m sure,” said Sloan astringently.

  “Mind you, Inspector, the Vicar took his time anyway, so I was all right. Sometimes you get a real speed merchant.”

  “A quicker vicar,” suggested Detective Constable Crosby insouciantly, “or a faster pastor.”

  “And then you can be in trouble,” finished Tod.

  “Trouble?” rasped Sloan. “What sort of trouble?”

  “Too early at the crem, of course,” said Tod, surprised. “That’s always bad.”

  “Yes, I can see that,” agreed Sloan. Every man to his own trade.

  “But if the family go in for people speaking verse and suchlike, then you know they’ve worked the timing out properly and that it will be all right.” The undertaker warmed to his theme. “If I had a fiver for every time I’ve heard Tennyson’s ‘Crossing the Bar’——”

  “The Ottershaw funeral, Tod,” said Sloan again. As a working policeman he did not himself subscribe to the old Poet Laureate’s sentiments about letting there be no moaning at the bar when he put out to sea. He, Christopher Dennis Sloan, was all in favour of decent mourning and had instructed his wife Margaret on the matter. Not pompes funèbres with black plumed horses but a proper send-off all the same. With roses. If in bloom.

  He gave himself a metaphorical shake. This was what came of conducting interviews in an undertaker’s parlour.