The Body Politic

by Catherine Aird

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  The Body Politic

  A C. D. Sloan Mystery

  Catherine Aird

  For Arnie et al.

  donum memoriae causa

  The chapter headings are taken from Dominus Illuminatio Mea by R. D. Blackmore

  ONE

  In the Hour of Death

  “Why don’t you drop dead?”

  The question came from somewhere over on Peter Corbishley’s right and he wasn’t quite sure at first whether he had actually heard it at all or whether it had just been a figment of his imagination. The current Parliamentary session had, after all, been an unusually hard and tiring one.

  This last doubt, at least, was resolved almost immediately.

  “I said,” repeated the voice with unmistakable clarity, “why don’t you drop dead?”

  This time there was no possibility that Peter Corbishley had been dreaming: he had heard the voice all right. And there was no confusion about whence the voice had come either: its owner was a man standing near the back of his audience and slightly to the right of the assembled company. Peter Corbishley picked him out of the crowd without difficulty as soon as he spoke for the second time. When he had pinpointed the man’s position in the crowd, Corbishley felt a little happier. He was a great believer in the old aphorism “know thine enemy,” and at least he knew now from where the man was standing that he was dealing with an experienced heckler.

  The interrupter’s location in this particular quarter of the group came as no great surprise to the Member of Parliament for the East Berebury division of the County of Calleshire. Practised hecklers were traditionally to be found on the fringes of a politician’s audience. Even a Sunday morning orator from Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park knew that. It was the inexperienced troublemakers who made the elementary mistake of sitting in the front row where they were much more easily contained by stewards and, more importantly, placed where almost no one in the audience could hear them or see what they were up to.

  Since on his part Peter Corbishley was an experienced speaker too, he did not even turn his head in the man’s direction but, instead, carried on with his prepared oration. This did not mean, though, that he didn’t go on thinking about the interrupter.

  It wasn’t that he was at all put out by the heckler—Peter Corbishley had been the sitting Member for the East Berebury constituency of Calleshire for nearly twenty years now and was therefore pretty well inured to interruption by both political friend and political foe, to say nothing of Mr. Speaker—only that he was faintly surprised by the actual occasion at which the man had chosen to voice his feelings. The annual summer garden party at Mellamby—for that was what it really was—had been traditionally always more of a social event than a political one.

  “Why don’t you drop dead?” The voice came again in just the same tone.

  The meeting at the village of Mellamby had never been exactly a fireworks party. Political platitudes followed by strawberries and cream summed up the afternoon quite well as a rule.

  Never raspberries, so to speak.

  Until now, that is.

  Peter Corbishley ignored both the heckler’s remarks and his invitation to drop dead. Instead he tightened his grip on the notes in his hand and continued to deliver himself of his traditional end-of-the-summer session speech to the assembled members of the Mellamby and District Branch of the Berebury Conservative Association.

  It was usually one of the quietest meetings in his constituency calendar, coming as it did when the school holidays were in sight and interest in affairs of state was yielding to anxieties about the harvest and the condition of the pound sterling on the foreign exchange. Medieval conflicts had seldom begun until the crops had been safely gathered in—Corbishley was something of an historian manqué and had made some studies of the causes of war and the timing of battles—and armchair economists, he had realised long ago, tended to take an instant stance on international fiscal policy only after they had bought their holiday travel currency.

  What had led to the good turn-out of members at Mellamby this afternoon and therefore ensured the Member a worthwhile audience was not an interest in politics at all but the venue of the meeting. The annual summer meeting of the Branch of the Association was always held—by special invitation—at Mellamby Place, which was by far the grandest house in the neighbourhood. It was this, he knew perfectly well, rather than the presence of the Member of Parliament, which accounted for the floral dresses of the ladies and the tidy attire of their farmer husbands. It wasn’t every day of the week by any means that the inhabitants of the village of Mellamby and its environs took afternoon tea on the terrace of Mellamby Place at the invitation of its owner.

  Thus reminded, Peter Corbishley cast a covert glance at their host to see how he was taking the heckler’s interruption.

  Throughout the history of Calleshire the Raulys of Mellamby had been celebrated as men of action, and the present—and last—of that ilk, Bertram Millington Hervé Rauly, was no exception. Moreover, he belonged to that exalted class of persons who saw no need whatsoever to consult with anyone else at all before embarking on the course of action of his choice. And certainly not before holding a political meeting in his own grounds. The family motto, Amicis quaelibert hora, emblazoned above the splendidly embellished chimneypiece in the Great Hall of Mellamby Place meant that any hour was all right for friends. “And everyone else can go to hell,” its owner was wont to add, when pointing it out.

  So far, Peter Corbishley was happy to see, Bertram Rauly was sitting quietly on the little platform that had been improvised on the terrace on the south-facing aspect of the house. He was on the other side of the Branch Chairman, Major Derrick Puiver. Not, Peter Corbishley would have been the first to admit, that Bertram Rauly’s apparent quietness meant that he wasn’t contemplating action. Throughout history great landed proprietors have been notoriously sensitive to intruders of any nature, and Rauly might just be taking the man’s measure or, rather less happily, measuring his distance.

  The Chairman of the Branch Association was, the Member of Parliament knew, unlikely to be taking such a relaxed view. The Major was a born worrier and, as such, admirably suited to have been in full command of a Supplies Depot in the Korean War. In his mind’s eye Peter Corbishley could imagine the Major now running through a mental list of increasingly unfortunate scenarios. Like having a real nutter on their hands. Or worse. A zealot.

  At least, thought the Member philosophically, it made a change from having barracking undergraduates from the University of Calleshire around. Cohorts of these were apt to turn up at his meetings; and not bent on the pursuit of pure learning either.

  Actually, now he came to think about it, the heckler did look a little out of the ordinary. Assured the Bertram Rauly was at least sitting quietly for the time being—and only then—Peter Corbishley had allowed his gaze to drift in the direction of the man without its appearing to do so. The dissident member of the audience—he certainly wasn’t a member of the Association if he behaved as he was doing—was thin and rather wild-looking and a little bit younger than Corbishley had expected. His hair was almost as long as a woman’s and his voice shook with feeling as he shouted for the fourth time at Peter Corbishley.

  “Why don’t you drop dead?”

  The Member of Parliament carried on with his speech with practised smoothness. The moment at which a public speaker acknowledged the existence of a heckler—if, indeed, he ever did—was a matter of fine political judgement, and the politician in Corbishley wanted to know what this
particular heckler had in mind—beyond his, Peter Corbishley’s, own immediate demise, that is—before he entered into any sort of dialogue with him.

  “You heard me!” declared the heckler in tones designed to carry.

  Since everyone present on the lawn in front of Mellamby Place, to say nothing of those attending to the preparation of the strawberry tea on neat little tables under the immemorial elm trees beyond, must also have heard what had been said, Peter Corbishley did not attempt to deny it. Instead he continued to expound his views on the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Community. The Member of Parliament automatically corrected his own train of thought as he did so.

  It was only his views on the Common Agricultural Policy and its interventionist and set-aside practices which were fit to print that he was expounding. And by the well-known phrase “fit to print” he really meant that which he was prepared to see attributed to him in the local newspaper.

  For a working politician Peter Corbishley was a fundamentally honest man.

  A slight stirring to his left indicated to the Member that while Bertram Rauly might not be worried by sundry interruptions the Chairman of the Branch Association certainly was. Major Puiver liked everything cut and dried: it was this very characteristic that had made his operation in the field of supplies such a success. In those far-off days when the Major had gone to war there had been no such thing as a computer to help with the knotty classification of such essential items of modern warfare as “Bottles, water, rubber, hot, officers for the use of.” Any capacity that the little Major might ever have had for dealing with the unexpected—a sudden run on winter battledress for instance—had withered and died long before he first drew his pension.

  Peter Corbishley shot a quick glance at Major Puiver now and took in the fact that he had already started to perspire just a little along his hair line. The Member knew that it wasn’t just the heat of a lovely summer’s day that had caused the beads of sweat to appear. It was the lurking fear that a public pronouncement might become necessary which did that. The Major’s gallantry was specific to the military and did not extend to public speaking. Like Demosthenes, he suffered from stage-fright.

  The Member had been told more than once by David Chadwick, his Party Agent, that the Major’s main anxiety as Chairman of the Mellamby Branch of the Association was that the official speaker would be late in arriving at a Branch meeting and he, Derrick Puiver, would have to extemporise on his carefully prepared Chairman’s remarks to fill the gap.

  Not that Peter Corbishley minded about this. What he really disliked were branch chairmen who did enjoy his delayed arrival and who then embarked on their own State of the Nation speech while the audience was waiting for the Member to arrive—and who didn’t stop and sit down when he did. Corbishley had known the schedule of more whistle-stop tours of the constituency at election time to founder on this than on awkward questions from those in the audience.

  The voice at the back became more strident. “I said, ‘Why don’t you drop dead?’”

  The Member of Parliament might have deemed it prudent not to look in the heckler’s direction. No such thought appeared to have occurred to Bertram Rauly. He was considering the man with the undisguised interest of a sportsman contemplating a new species of game. Of one thing Peter Corbishley was quite sure, and that was that nothing really worried Rauly, who had collected a DSO and an MC as a tank commander in the Western Desert for actions so flamboyant that it was rumoured that even Field-Marshal Rommel had been surprised. Peter Corbishley just hoped that the owner of Mellamby Place didn’t happen to have a loaded gun too readily at hand.

  The original owners of Mellamby Motte, the de Caquevilles, who were said to have come over with William the Conqueror, would never have been without a weapon of one sort or another within reach either. Corbishley spared a glance in the direction of the ruins of the great Norman keep beyond the house. Sited on a natural mound on the land, and given a licence to crenellate in 1272, the tower of the old castle still caught the eye. The occupants of Mellamby Motte would always have had oil on the boil, in a manner of speaking, against the arrival of unwelcome visitors.

  And crossbows at the ready for enemies.

  He brought his gaze back to the home of the Raulys. Mellamby Place was a fine Jacobean house set on a little plateau not far from the castle ruins. Its site, the historians said, was probably the jousting ground of the old castle: this view was lent further weight by the fact that the south lawn was still known as the tiltyard.

  The only tournament that seemed to be engaged today was between one middle-aged and overworked Member of Parliament and an unknown heckler. Tomorrow, Peter Corbishley reminded himself, would be different. Tomorrow contemporary politics were to give way to the memory of an old battle. The Camulos Society were going to re-enact the celebrated clash between King Henry III and Simon de Montfort at the town of Lewes in Sussex in 1264.

  Peter Corbishley would be there, of course, and would say a few words—had not Parliament itself come about because of Simon de Montfort?—but it was today’s proceedings that were his real concern just at this moment.

  He corrected himself even as he turned over his written speech at an oblique and decidedly ambiguous reference to the Common Market’s unfortunate “butter mountain.” Mention of this and of the “wine lake” and similar economic embarrassments reminded him irresistibly of Hans Christian Andersen’s Witch’s Gingerbread House and other nursery stories of his childhood, and he skated quickly over the knotty problem of production surpluses in a sudden welter of words.

  “Furthermore …” Even as the Member of Parliament spoke to an audience comprised mainly of farming families who had a keen interest in an agricultural policy of their own and who were therefore giving him their close attention, his own mind was elsewhere. The only part of today’s proceedings which was really worrying him was a meeting he had lined up after tea with an anxious constituent.

  “Why don’t you drop dead?”

  This time the Member scarcely heard the interruption to his speech. The person in the audience who was causing Peter Corbishley genuine concern was certainly not the heckler. Unless, that is, the heckler was called Alan John Ottershaw. Which he very much doubted.

  Corbishley didn’t even know Ottershaw by sight and so could not attempt to pick him out from among those sitting or standing in front of him. All that the Member of Parliament knew about Alan Ottershaw was that he was relatively young and—since he had just flown home from the Middle East, where he worked—probably the possessor of a good tan. He wasn’t likely to recognise him anyway, since Ottershaw had always worked abroad and, as far as the Member knew, he had not met him before.

  The man had married a girl from Mellamby and she had stayed on with their children in their house there: which was how it was that Alan Ottershaw came to be one of Peter Corbishley’s constituents. At this particular moment the Member of Parliament could have wished Alan Ottershaw’s English base had been anywhere else but the Parliamentary division of East Berebury in the County of Calleshire.

  Or that he hadn’t had the misfortune to have been involved in a road traffic accident in the Sheikhdom of Lasserta last week.

  Peter Corbishley continued with the delivery of his speech, his mind dwelling on what he knew about Alan Ottershaw and his problems. A pedestrian had stepped out into the road in front of Alan Ottershaw’s car in Lasserta, had been run over by the vehicle, and had died of his consequent injuries. An angry crowd of Lassertans, no lovers of expatriate mining engineers from the West at the best of times, had gathered round the luckless driver and made loud allegations of dangerous driving.

  A charge of culpable manslaughter had been laid against Ottershaw with alarming speed. Well before any summons could be served, however, his employers, the giant Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company, had spirited him swiftly out of the country and back to England. In Lasserta the penalty for killing either a man or a camel was death. (In certain highly specific circum
stances the killing of a woman did not even rate as crime.)

  So far, as the record went, so good.

  Unfortunately the success of this manoeuvre had been very, very limited.

  The real trouble had begun when the Lassertans had requested the immediate return of Alan Ottershaw to stand trial in Gatt-el-Abbas, the capital of Lasserta.

  The Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company’s predictable stance on this had been that the presence of their employee was urgently required in their London office for consultations.

  In that case, the Sheikh of Lasserta had decreed to Malcolm Forfar, the head of the firm in Wadeem, where the minehead was, the Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company could remove itself from the Sheikhdom of Lasserta within forty-eight hours.

  Before Malcolm Forfar could even draw breath the Sheikh had added a rider with a wolfish grin. “Or else …”

  Forfar had waited, now quite unable to breathe.

  “Or else,” said the Sheikh, “its assets will be forfeit.”

  Reeling, the head of the firm had telexed London.

  That had been on the Thursday afternoon, London time.

  Ever since then the Board of the Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company had been locked in deadly conclave in its prestige offices in Mayfair. The fact that it was now forty-eight hours later and no balloon had yet gone up had been due solely to the good offices of Her Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador in Lasserta.

  Apprised of the situation by a distraught Malcolm Forfar, Mr. Anthony Mainwaring Heber Hibbs had demonstrated that he wasn’t quite the old fuddy-duddy that the man from the mining company had always thought him. And that social and diplomatic skills, while not, naturally, in the same class of importance as mechanical expertise and experience, did have their place in the rich tapestry of international affairs.

  Granted audience by the Sheikh of Lasserta without difficulty (happily he shared the Sheikh’s interest in hawking), Mr. Heber Hibbs was far too wily a diplomat to attempt to discuss Alan Ottershaw and the road accident with Sheikh Ben Mirza Ibrahim Hajal Kisra. Instead, the Ambassador, who had learned a thing or two besides games on the playing fields of Eton, concentrated his efforts entirely on persuading the Sheikh to extend the time period of the ultimatum. Shotgun decisions did not as a rule leave room for manoeuvre, and room for manoeuvre was undoubtedly what the Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company needed at this moment.