“Dangerous Dan McGrew?” said Crosby.
“None other,” said Dabbe. “Well, ‘The Cremation of Sam McGhee’ comes from the same stable. Don’t you remember:
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold.
“No, Doctor,” said Sloan truthfully.
“Ah, well,” said Dabbe generously, “you can’t know everything.” He brightened. “I can tell you—Geiger counters being what they are—that the person to whom these ashes belonged hadn’t been subject to irradiation.” He looked at Sloan. “I don’t suppose, though, that’s a lot of help.”
“Not at this stage,” said Sloan politely.
Dabbe ushered the two policemen through into his office and motioned them into the chairs there. “I got your call about Bertram Rauly’s broken tooth and I’m afraid I can’t even help you there.”
“We couldn’t afford to overlook any possibility, Doctor.” That, after all, was what police work was all about.
“I can’t tell you if what broke it was a queremitte pellet and, which is worse, I can’t tell you either if the queremitte pellet that did get into the deceased had been ingested or introduced into his body through the skin.”
Sloan wasn’t surprised. “After all, nobody knows for sure whereabouts in his body it was, do they? Not now.”
“Nor do we know,” the pathologist reminded him, “whether or not the queremitte pellet had anything to do with his death.”
“No …”
“Or, if it did, whether or not the aforementioned pellet did contain a noxious substance.”
“No, Doctor …” Sloan had to admit that what they did not know would fill a policeman’s notebook. He made a mental note to remind himself to check if the combatants of the Camulos Society had partaken of the spirituous equivalent of the stirrup-cup before the battle—or did they have lemon slices at half-time?
“And if it did,” continued Dabbe, “whether or not it was taken by the deceased deliberately.”
“Suicide?” exclaimed Sloan involuntarily. “I hadn’t considered that.”
“We can’t afford to overlook any possibility, Inspector.” Dabbe frowned. “I must say if I had to choose between that and death by a thousand cuts in Lasserta I might opt for felo de se myself.”
“But Ottershaw didn’t have to go back,” said Sloan before he realised that this was another aspect of the case he hadn’t really thought through properly. That telephone call to the Anglo-Lassertan offices was very nearly as mysterious as the pellet in the ashes.
“Your pigeon, Sloan, not mine.” Restored to his everyday clothing, the pathologist looked almost human. “I take it you’ve looked into the availability of queremitte?”
“Not a lot of help to be had there, Doctor. We’ve established that the pellet in the ashes had been made out of the small samples of the stuff that the firm itself distributes to schools and universities and so forth for teaching and experimental research purposes. And to potential customers.”
“Our Army,” said Dabbe cheerfully, “and I sincerely hope to nobody else’s.”
Sloan ignored this tempting by-way. “These samples are spool-shaped and hollow. They even look a bit like shot. All anyone would have to do would be to cut one in half and seal off the open end with something soluble after they’d put something in it.”
“I thought it was a hard metal and that was why the Army liked it,” remarked Dabbe.
“They put it with something else—they don’t want to tell us what—for what they call its enhancing effect.” Even the Services had Public Relations Officers these days.
“Synergism,” said the doctor.
“If you say so, Doctor,” said Sloan. “Anyway, that’s where the great hardness comes in.”
“Makes a change from a platinum-iridium alloy, in any case,” said the pathologist. “Fired by an umbrella-gun,” he added as Sloan’s expression remained uncomprehending. “With a fatal dose of ricin in it.”
“Ah, yes, of course, Doctor.” A precedent would make its mark in every discipline. “I’d forgotten that …”
There was a moment of quietness in the pathologist’s room and then Dr. Dabbe spoke again, this time more diffidently. “There is, of course, another approach to the problem raised by the death of Ottershaw.”
“Yes, Doctor?” Sloan was all in favour of lateral thinking.
“Starting, Sloan, with what is known about the deceased’s last illness.”
“A heart attack,” said Crosby.
“Exactly.” Dr. Dabbe turned towards the Detective Constable. “We already know, for example, don’t we, that the deceased wasn’t done to death with ox-bones like poor St. Alphege.”
“Yes …” agreed Crosby with caution.
Sloan said nothing. Lateral thinking could obviously go a long way round to get to wherever it was going.
“After all,” continued the pathologist, “two duly authorised registered medical practitioners certified that Alan John Ottershaw had died from a heart attack.”
Sloan’s expression became even more cautious than Crosby’s. He could metaphorically hear the sound of deep calling to deep as professional solidarity raised its ugly head. Doctors always hung together so that they weren’t sued separately.
“While it is, of course, theoretically possible,” carried on Dr. Dabbe, “that two serious errors of medical judgement were made, it is, you must agree, somewhat unlikely.”
“What about collusion?” asked Crosby, much perkier now that he was out of the mortuary.
“That’s your pigeon, too,” countered Dabbe, “but to whose benefit? No, what I have been doing is looking at the problem from the other end.” He pulled a sheet of paper towards him. “Let us suppose for the sake of argument that the pellet itself did not cause death.”
Sloan waited, attentive but silent.
“Injury,” amplified the pathologist, “or even metallic poisoning, would not have given rise to those signs.”
Sloan nodded.
“But suppose that a substance contained in the pellet did.”
“Like the ricin,” said Crosby.
Detective Inspector Sloan leaned forward. “You mean, Doctor, that the heart failure might have been the outcome of poisoning?”
“Precisely, Inspector, and yes, Constable. It is a theoretical possibility and therefore must be considered.”
“Scorpions?” asked Sloan swiftly.
“Not scorpions,” responded Dabbe. “Their sting is painful but not usually fatal.”
“What, then?”
“Sting-rays, venomous fishes, some newts, the kokoi frog …”
“In Calleshire?” said Crosby sceptically.
“Someone found some scorpions for Ted Sheard,” said Sloan quietly. He reached for his notebook. This was something a policeman could get to grips with. “And what poisons would have that effect, Doctor?”
“The sympathomimetic agents.”
Sloan subsided back into his chair without attempting to write anything down. He might have known that what the doctor would say wouldn’t be simple. It seldom was.
Dabbe frowned. “All I can say is that it is a proposition that would account for both the pellet and the heart failure.” He essayed a quick smile across his desk. “I wouldn’t go to the stake for it, Sloan. It’s only what the scientific people would call a tenuous hypothesis.”
“These agents you mentioned, Doctor.”
“Epinephrine and its group of related drugs.”
The gardener in Sloan appreciated that drugs—like plants and people—came in families and had relations. The policeman in him took note that a working possibility of poisoning existed.
The pathologist squinted down at the sheet of paper on his desk and said with unusual care, “If we’re talking about this sort of thing …”
“We are, aren’t we?” said
Crosby, suddenly alert.
“Then one would have to include the venoms, too.”
Crosby brightened still further. “Arrow poisons, you mean, Doctor?”
Sloan had often wondered if the Detective Constable’s reading had ever got beyond the comic-paper stage.
The answer had to be wrung out of the pathologist. “I’m afraid we can’t rule them out,” said Dr. Dabbe regretfully.
It was Detective Constable Crosby, though, who had the last word. “The evidence still doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, does it?”
“Where have we got to so far, Crosby?” asked Detective Inspector Sloan presently.
“The railway station, sir,” responded the Constable from the driving seat of the police car and taking the question literally. “A bit to go yet to the police ditto.”
Sloan tried again. “And what have we got so far in the little matter of Regina versus whoever killed Alan Ottershaw?” His lips tightened. “If they did, that is.”
“An appetite,” said Crosby with fervour. “I could eat a horse.”
Detective Inspector Sloan, who had been trying not to dwell on the fact that his wife Margaret had promised him a home-made steak-and-kidney pudding for dinner, said, “We’ve got a pellet made of queremitte.”
“And that’s all we have got,” responded Crosby morosely, “isn’t it?”
“A queremitte pellet,” continued Detective Inspector Sloan in a minatory way, “found in the cremated ashes of a man who comes home from abroad and dies two days later.”
“Even that’s not a lot, is it, sir?”
“We have also got an unconfirmed story—” meticulously Sloan corrected himself: “a story awaiting confirmation about a road accident that might or might not have been a genuine accident.”
“In foreign parts, though,” put in Crosby with a speed that would have done credit to Zeno himself.
“Where the victim of the road accident was already dead.”
“It happens,” said Crosby, quondam Traffic Division policeman, “all the time.”
“And where the car driver, just before he himself dies—”
“Or is murdered,” said Crosby changing gear.
“Or is murdered.”
“In another country,” said the xenophobe.
“In another country,” echoed Sloan irritably, as always reminded by the phrase of a hymn whose meaning teased his mother. It began easily enough with “I vow to thee, my country”; it was the start of verse two which had always puzzled her. The first line of this was “And there’s another country I’ve heard of long ago” and arguments about it invariably ended inconclusively with Mrs. Sloan senior saying, “I’m sure the author had Heaven in mind but why doesn’t he say so?”
Detective Constable Crosby hadn’t had Heaven in mind. Nor, come to that, had Sloan. “In another country,” he said heavily, “from which the car driver just before he dies declares himself—on a tape-recorder—willing, even anxious, to go back to Lasserta to—er—face the music. Although,” he added because this seemed obscurely important, “his nearest and dearest do not appear to have known this.”
If Sloan had been telling all this to the Assistant Chief Constable, that pillar of the Establishment would have said “Floreat Etona” or something similar at this point, he being a great man for a Latin tag.
All Detective Constable Crosby said was: “Doesn’t make sense, does it, sir?”
The trouble was that he said it nonchalantly waving a hand in the air while overtaking a bus in the face of an oncoming lorry.
“We have also got,” said Sloan between clenched teeth as the police car slid through a terrifyingly narrow gap, “a Member of Parliament who was being heckled by an unknown man, pursued by a character dressed as Death, being harassed by false calls to the ambulance service and narrowly escaping death from falling masonry.” He drew breath and said with mounting acerbity, “Does any of that strike you as at all strange, Crosby?”
“Politics,” responded Crosby dismissively. “All’s fair in love, war, and politics.”
Major Puiver would have said the Constable had got the battle order right: Bertram Rauly might not have done. He suspected that Ted Sheard would have said he had got it wrong. With a man like Peter Corbishley you would never know.
Sloan pursued his catalogue of what might or might not be evidence in what might or might not be a murder case. “We have also got another Member of Parliament of the opposite persuasion who is similarly being subjected to death threats and who is being sent live scorpions in his mail.”
“Why not letter bombs?” asked Crosby. “Much more effective.”
“Why not, indeed?” murmured Sloan seriously. “That’s something we should think about.”
“Sir, there’s a good place to eat at——”
“And we’ve also got a highly eccentric landowner who has made no secret of the fact that he intends to burn down his historic house—it’s almost a stately home—before he dies.”
The philistine at the wheel of the police car said, “Well, it’s his, isn’t it?”
“Miss Finch would say you have no soul, Crosby.”
Crosby said something almost as uncomplimentary about Miss Finch.
“The view of Miss Finch,” said Detective Inspector Sloan, “is that Mellamby Place is part of the heritage of the nation.”
“So are ruins,” said Crosby ineluctably.
“And Miss Finch is one of the few people to have known that it wasn’t Bertram Rauly who was in the costume of William de Wilton but the aforementioned Alan Ottershaw, deceased.”
“Who may or may not have been murdered,” said Crosby, driving triumphantly under an imaginary chequered flag at the entrance to the Police Station car park.
The message that awaited them could not have been more bizarre.
SIXTEEN
And the Pride Must Fall
“Do you mind saying that again, sir?”
“Takes a bit of believing, Inspector, doesn’t it?”
“Let’s call it unusual, sir, shall we?” Both policemen were sitting in Peter Corbishley’s house while the Member of Parliament repeated his story.
“I just went into Bert Swallow’s barber’s shop for my usual haircut.”
Sloan nodded. The Member was a short-back-and-sides man if ever he saw one. He said, “By usual, sir, do you mean regular?”
“Good point, Inspector. Yes, I do. As near to the first of the month as I can get there.”
“Rabbits,” said Crosby.
“Parliamentary duties permitting, of course,” continued the Member suavely.
“Quite so,” said Sloan. There were some callings where getting your hair cut was part of a man’s duty.
“Besides,” the Member added drily, “my Agent likes it.”
“Your appearance?” Sloan had always suspected that in politics it was the image that counted more than the man.
“My listening to what Bert has to say. He calls it keeping in touch with the grass roots.”
“I understand,” said Sloan austerely, “that taxi drivers have influence, too.”
“My Agent sees Bert Swallow as the Calleshire equivalent of the man on the Clapham omnibus,” said Corbishley. “Bert always gives me the—er—state-of-the-art view of current affairs.” He hesitated. “That is one of the reasons why what has happened is so strange.”
“So you were known to go there, sir, and roughly when.”
“That is correct, Inspector.”
“And when you went there you were known?”
“Oh, yes.” The Member squared his shoulders. “It is still surprising in this day and age to learn that someone was willing, not to say anxious, to give Bert Swallow good money for keeping some of my hair after he had cut it and giving it to him.”
“Very strange,” conceded Sloan.
“But not funny. In fact it doesn’t make sense.”
“No.”
“The man didn’t want a lot of hair, Bert said, but h
e did need to be sure that it had come from my head.”
“And what did Bert say to him?”
“That he’s got a good sharp open razor by him and he’d be willing to use it if the man so much as set foot in his shop again. On his throat.”
“Did he give you a description of the man?”
“Young and not very clean, he said, and in need of a haircut.”
“He would say that, wouldn’t he?” said Crosby.
“Clothes?” asked Sloan steadily.
“Jeans and an old coat,” said Corbishley.
“No one that you can call to mind, sir?”
“No.”
“Or have reason to suspect?”
“No.”
“We’ll go along and see Bert Swallow,” undertook Sloan, “and ask him if he’d know this person again.”
“Bert said he would recognise him by his walk,” said Peter Corbishley.
“That’s something,” said Sloan. “Sir, there was something else we were going to ask you. Have you been invited to speak at the University of Calleshire lately?”
Peter Corbishley nodded. “Yes, indeed, Inspector. A group of Social Psychology students attending a seminar invited me to address them on the subject of ‘Conflict and Stress.’ Why?”
“I just wondered,” said Sloan. He was struck by another thought. “One more thing, sir. When this character at the barber’s asked Bert for your hair he didn’t say anything to him about keeping quiet about it or not telling you, did he?”
“No.”
“Odd, that, sir,” said Sloan, “isn’t it? When you come to think about it …”
The Member stared at him.
“It’s all very well, Sloan,” Superintendent Leeyes was saying half an hour later, “for you to list what may look like the material factors in the case.”
“If there is a case.” Sloan put in his usual caveat with a certain astringency.
“But what I want to know, Sloan,” swept on Leeyes majestically, “is what you are going to do about it all.”
“Well, sir,” began Sloan cautiously, “first of all on the Parliamentary front, so to speak …”
“Yes?”
“I’ve sent Detective Constable Crosby to look into the availability in Calleshire of live scorpions.”
The Body Politic Page 16
