The Body Politic

by Catherine Aird

  “That’s what I thought you said, Doctor. And the Battle of Lewes was between the Baron’s side—that is Simon de Montfort and his pals—and the King’s party.”

  “You know it was, Sloan. That’s all old hat. Besides, you told me so yourself. It was what the re-enactment was all about. What’s worrying you?”

  “I missed something,” said Sloan. He looked down at the Major’s protruding foot, suddenly chilled. “Something that was right under my nose.” He raised his voice. “Crosby, come over here a moment. I want you.”

  Detective Inspector Sloan had never been in this sort of a Chase before: at least not in the variety of woodland that had once upon a time provided good hunting for a king.

  King John, he thought Bertram Rauly had said. He’d been a bad king, hadn’t he? The bold barons had made him sign on the dotted line—or its medieval equivalent—in a field called Runnymede and then, as every schoolboy knew, King John had gone and lost his baggage train with the Royal treasure in it in the Wash.

  A simple pun on the name of an East Anglian delta had stuck far longer in Sloan’s mind than any scholarly lecture delivered in the classroom. There must be a moral there somewhere.

  He was sorry his quarry had taken to the woods. He must have heard Crosby being called and then seen the two policemen walking purposefully towards him.

  And put two and two together and taken to his heels.

  He’d left the others still standing in an uneasy group and shot suddenly northwards, skimming the water that downstream became the River Pletch and plunging into the Mellamby Chase.

  Sloan and Crosby had started to run after him, but he’d gained ground early on and by the time the two policemen reached the wood the man was nowhere to be seen. Behind him Sloan was dimly aware of the rest of the group bringing up the rear—but slowly—rather as the body of the hunt follows the Master and the Huntsman.

  They were chasing a man who had the cunning of a fox and the fleetness of a hare and it wasn’t easy. Almost at once it became considerably more difficult. The forest way divided.

  “You go left, Crosby. I’ll take the right fork.” He shouldn’t have been panting quite as soon as this, surely?

  Crosby loped off obediently and was lost to sight almost at once although Sloan continued to hear him lunging through the trees. What he should have done, of course, was to send Crosby back to report and to summon up reinforcements, although it would take a small army to search the Chase. Derrick Puiver’s mind would have worked that way. Sloan thought about the poor little Major who was dead now and who shouldn’t have been, not if he, Christopher Dennis Sloan, had had his wits about him. He couldn’t think how he had come to overlook something so glaringly obvious. Perhaps it was because everyone had told him about it.

  Trees not planted by the hand of man had a random quality about their distribution which hindered pursuit. Sloan ran on, checking himself at the point where he saw a broken twig. He had chosen the same route through the forest, then, as the man whom he sought: which was a comfort. But had the man chosen to leave the track and lie low, then he, Sloan, might even be running away from him.

  That applied, too, if he had climbed a tree like King Charles II. An oak tree that had been, hadn’t it? And in consequence numberless children had celebrated Oak Apple Day ever since.

  Sloan noticed another snapped twig, this time on the ground.

  So he was still behind him whom he sought—he hadn’t overshot the mark. Sloan travelled onward as quickly as he could, as alert now as any huntsman of old. He was without a weapon though and that might be important. He would just have to do what the Assistant Chief Constable called playing a cadenza and improvise.

  From somewhere behind him in the Chase he could hear someone calling him: the words had a familiar ring but it was a full half minute before he caught their import.

  “Yoicks!… Yoicks!… Tallyho!…”

  Unless Sloan was mistaken that was a spiritual descendant of the de Caquevilles giving voice to an ancient hunting cry that too came directly from the Norman French incitement to hunt of Trout tro ro rot illocques illoloco. So must the Chase have resounded in olden times at earlier hunts when the aim was sport and food.

  What Sloan was pursuing was justice.

  “View halloa!” bellowed Bertram Rauly from somewhere to Sloan’s left. That meant he’d heard something, didn’t it? Rauly must have made good speed for an older man, but then he knew every inch of the Chase.

  Sloan could hear Crosby’s voice, too, faint but pursuing. “He’s coming your way, sir.”

  “View halloa!” repeated Bertram Rauly lustily. “Tantivy!”

  Sloan veered in the direction of the hunting call. Didn’t it mean “found” in hunting parlance?

  Then Sloan saw where their quarry had left the main path—his tracks still showed in the forest carpet. He’d doubled back, which was how he’d been seen by the others. Sloan followed almost without thought. In fact, oddly enough, it was the Assistant Chief Constable’s definition of a cadenza that occupied his mind: a passage for a solo instrument at or near the end of a movement, sometimes improvised.

  Sloan froze.

  He’d rounded an ancient oak and there in the middle of a little glade stood his man, preternaturally still, only his eyes moving.

  For a full moment neither hunter nor hunted moved.

  Then Sloan saw the man’s right hand move quickly to a pocket. Summoning up all his strength, the policeman flung himself forward in a flying tackle just as Detective Constable Crosby came plunging out of the undergrowth, Bertram Rauly hard behind him.

  “Adrian Dungey,” Detective Inspector Sloan addressed a figure on the ground, “I arrest you for the murder of Alan John Ottershaw.”

  “And Derrick Puiver,” said Detective Constable Crosby.

  NINETEEN

  Dominus Illuminatio Mea

  “I’m waiting, Sloan,” said Superintendent Leeyes.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I take it you do have an explanation?”

  “In a manner of speaking, sir.” He hesitated. “I’m not quite sure exactly where to start.”

  “In the beginning,” thundered Leeyes. “Like Genesis.”

  “Yes, sir.” He toyed for one wild moment with the idea of saying “Adam and Eve and Pinch-Me” but put the thought out of his mind almost immediately and said instead, “It all began with a simple road traffic accident in Gatt-el-Abbas in the Sheikhdom of Lasserta.”

  “Simple?” growled Leeyes, who, like the Foreign Office, always favoured the conspiracy theory as a first option. “Are you sure?”

  “As sure as we can be. Accidents do happen.”

  “Not according to the psychologists, they don’t,” maintained Leeyes stoutly, “but go on.”

  “The Sheikh of Lasserta immediately saw some mileage in the accident from his point of view—a chance of putting the screws on the company and so forth.”

  “The ability to see where the advantage lies is the essence of successful business,” pronounced Leeyes.

  “Very probably, sir.” That sounded to Sloan suspiciously like a quotation from an Adult Education Class on “Business and the Community.” “When the Sheikh started making threatening noises the company withdrew Ottershaw as quickly and as quietly as they could.”

  “We know that,” said Leeyes impatiently.

  “We knew it later, sir. The trouble was that they didn’t tell anyone at the time.”

  “Why should they have done?” asked Leeyes.

  “It might have helped, sir, if he’d telephoned home before turning up there.”

  Leeyes grunted. “Like that, was it?”

  “I’m very much afraid so,” he said. “And I should have spotted it earlier.”

  Leeyes said nothing.

  “When I interviewed Mrs. Ottershaw,” said Sloan, “she told me that the first thing she knew of her husband’s being back in the United Kingdom was when she heard his key in the latch.”

  “And
that was true?”

  “As far as it went,” said Sloan. “It would have been better if someone had got up to bolt the door.” Perhaps the old ballad had had more meaning than he’d realised.

  “Flagranti delectissimo,” pronounced Leeyes with all the vigour of a man who had some Latin and no Greek. A little bit of bread and no cheese was what Sloan’s mother had called that.

  “Precisely, sir. Poor Ottershaw now had two things to worry about. My guess is that he put the domestic difficulties on ice during the day on the Saturday and got on with seeing about the Lassertan end of things. After all that was literally a matter of life and death or, if not that, at any rate his job.”

  Leeyes grunted. “And he wasn’t to know that the Mellamby end of things was going to be a matter of life and death too.”

  “No.” Sloan frowned. “I don’t think that ever occurred to him. By the end of the Saturday afternoon he’d seen Peter Corbishley and felt that he’d got somebody really rooting for him.”

  “Marvellous, isn’t it,” said Leeyes, “how these politicians always manage to give that impression? And what had been going on with the two Members, might I ask?”

  “Oh, that was something quite different.” Sloan turned back the pages of his notebook. “I’m afraid, sir, that comes under the heading of experimental psychology.”

  “So does sparing the rod and spoiling the child.”

  “This purported to be a study of the effects of autosuggestion on two local public figures by an undergraduate called Richard Godstone for his dissertation. Unauthorised, of course,” added Sloan hastily. “His tutor was apologetic but not unbearably surprised.”

  “Death and his brother, Fear.”

  “Er—quite so, sir.” St. Francis of Assisi wouldn’t have liked that: nor would Sloan’s mother. “Anyway, it didn’t work. Neither Member was deflected from his duty.”

  “Or scared to death?”

  “No, sir. I gather the students were very disappointed that Ted Sheard didn’t even mention the harassment when he addressed the Social Psychology group at Almstone College. Peter Corbishley didn’t propose to, either.”

  “I suppose they didn’t think windbags could be tough,” said Leeyes uncharitably. “They’ll learn. But it was nothing to do with the Ottershaw affair?”

  “My theory—it’s only a theory, mind you, sir, because Hazel Ottershaw isn’t saying anything to anyone—is that Alan Ottershaw devoted the Saturday evening to seeing what could be done on the domestic side. The trouble is that Adrian Dungey did the same thing with a very different end in view.”

  “Murder?”

  “Very clever murder.”

  “Well, he is a professional man.”

  Sloan let this calumny on education pass. “He went out to Toad Hall—he is their vet, anyway—and collected some venom from the kokoi frogs there. Colombian Indians use it as an arrow poison.”

  “So he’s spilled the beans,” concluded Leeyes.

  “Yes, sir.” The attractive boyishness of Dungey was a thing of the past now but he was willing—anxious, even—to tell the police how clever he had been. “This venom has an effect on the heart similar to that produced by a heart attack and is known as batrachotoxin.”

  “And is what went into the pellet?” said Leeyes.

  “Yes, sir. It was then lightly sealed in with a wax that has a low melting-point.”

  “Thought of everything, hadn’t he?” sniffed Leeyes.

  “Nearly,” said Sloan. “If the queremitte was found, someone from the Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company was bound to be suspected first.”

  “Supplied by Hazel Ottershaw?”

  “She’s not saying.”

  “And if the ashes were interred as planned nobody would have been any the wiser.”

  “Yes, sir. The beauty of the scheme was that the pellet would have been delivered back to the undertaker.”

  “So it was curtains for Ottershaw all right.”

  “Yes, sir.” The swishing together of the curtains was what Sloan didn’t like about cremation. “After seeing the Member I think he must have gone into the question of reconciliation with his wife.”

  “It never works,” commented Leeyes, not one of nature’s optimists.

  “It didn’t—at least as Hazel Ottershaw declines to comment, we can only conclude that by early on the Sunday morning Alan Ottershaw—rightly or wrongly—had decided that the situation would be best resolved by his going back to Lasserta.”

  “Next best thing to being a mari complaisant if you ask me,” said Leeyes trenchantly.

  “I don’t think so,” said Sloan. “You see, sir, he’d got something else to do first.”

  “What was that?”

  “Beat the living daylights out of Dungey.”

  “Good idea,” said Leeyes warmly, “but——”

  “That’s what put me on to him in the end,” said Sloan, “but I should have got there sooner.” He supposed that was the lament of all detectives.

  “Are you going to tell me, Sloan, or shall we go on playing guessing games?”

  “Adrian Dungey was playing King Henry III at the re-enactment and Ottershaw stood in as William de Wilton.”

  “Well?”

  “At the real Battle of Lewes, sir, they were both on the same side. King Henry and William de Wilton should never have been fighting each other like that, should they?”

  “Didn’t give the sword-fight a second thought myself,” admitted Bertram Rauly, “although it did cross my mind that I couldn’t have given the King the pasting that William de Wilton did.” He looked squarely at Sloan and Crosby. “It was a sort of play within the play, wasn’t it?”

  “Like Hamlet,” agreed Sloan.

  The landowner stroked his chin. “And the falling stone from the tower?”

  “The first time,” said Sloan, “the students who were harassing the Members of Parliament pushed one block over just to shake Peter Corbishley. He was in no real danger. In fact, when we came to look closely at all the incidents relating to the Members of Parliament, one of the things that stood out was that nothing really happened to either of them. As my constable pointed out, if injury had been intended they’d have been sent letter bombs, not anonymous letters.”

  Crosby squinted modestly down his nose.

  “The second stone fall, of course,” said Sloan, “was quite a different matter.”

  “But why kill poor Puiver? He didn’t have anything to do with Ottershaw or Dungey,” said Rauly.

  “No, sir,” said Sloan, “but Major Puiver had said publicly that he had recognised Death’s walk—which indeed he had. I fear Dungey took advantage of that. What the Major couldn’t remember was where he had seen that walk before—but, of course, it had been the previous day when the same man had been heckling Peter Corbishley.”

  “So that’s what it was.” Rauly’s brow cleared. “And it would have been him who did that funny bit of bone-pointing under the platform party.”

  “Most probably, sir.”

  “But why kill poor Puiver? He had nothing to do with Ottershaw.”

  “To put us off the scent.”

  “A diversion?” Former tank commanders understood about diversions.

  “I think so, sir. It must have been obvious that the police were on to something or we wouldn’t have been round asking questions. He probably thought he ought to widen the field for us.”

  Bertram Rauly stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Dungey was the Camulos Society’s armourer, so the technicalities wouldn’t have been difficult for him. He had the expertise.”

  “He had access to the poison, too,” said Sloan.

  “I didn’t know there were so many frogs in Calleshire,” said Crosby feelingly. “Or mice.”

  “The other matter which doubtless concerned him no end was how much Alan Ottershaw had committed to tape when he rang his firm.”

  “Worrying for him,” agreed Bertram Rauly in a voice devoid of sympathy.

  “I think Dun
gey just kept the queremitte pellet in his pocket until the right moment presented itself,” said Sloan.

  “And then,” supplemented Crosby, “popped it into his crossbow instead of a plastic dye one.”

  “Nobody would have noticed in that melee,” commented Rauly. He raised an eyebrow. “Very nearly the perfect murder, eh, Inspector? Oh, by the way …”

  “Yes?”

  “I think I’ve settled Miss Finch’s hash.”

  “You have, sir?” Sloan looked up with real interest. “How?”

  A wicked look came over Bertram Rauly’s face. “I offered to leave Mellamby Place to her. Haven’t had a squeak out of her since.”

  “Not …?” Mrs. Heber Hibbs’ eyes widened in spite of the everpresent Middle Eastern sunshine.

  “Yes!”

  “But he didn’t just swallow it, did he?” Like the admirable wife that she was, Mollie Heber Hibbs was listening with flattering attention to her husband’s account of the Sheikh’s banquet the night before for the Chairman of the Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company. Women played no part in Lassertan hospitality.

  “He did,” said the Ambassador.

  “Perhaps,” shrugged Mollie Heber Hibbs kindly, “he thought he should because he was the guest of honour.”

  Anthony Mainwaring Heber Hibbs was not prepared to ascribe any such sense of duty to Hamer Morenci. “All he did,” he reported accurately, “was to pretend to chew it.”

  “That’s no good, is it?” responded his wife loyally.

  “None.”

  “But you had told him, darling, hadn’t you?”

  “Several times,” said Mr. Heber Hibbs. “I told him that I would indicate if the dish were to be served. And I stressed the importance of chewing that particular course very, very thoroughly, giving signs that he was enjoying it. If he could.”

  Mollie Heber Hibbs stared at him, still wide-eyed. “Didn’t he listen, then?”

  “He listened,” said her husband judicially, “but I don’t think he heard.”

  “What about the nice young aide he had with him?”

  “The PR man? Oh, he was all right.”