The Body Politic

by Catherine Aird

  Warwick the Kingmaker couldn’t have done better.

  “What about Bertram being Richard, Earl of Cornwall instead?” persisted the youngest member of the Committee.

  “He ran away,” said the Chairman.

  “As well as being a first-class twit,” said someone else.

  “Prince Edward, then?” suggested the youngest Committee member, even though he had been hoping for the part himself. The dashing young man on the flying steed was a dream of a part to play.

  “Forty years ago, yes,” decreed the Chairman. “Now, no.”

  In the end they settled that Bertram Rauly should play the Royalist William de Wilton and thus be killed before luncheon.

  THREE

  When the Heart Beats Low

  It was the best part of ten days later before Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan heard anything about the Battle of Lewes, Mark II, and then only very obliquely.

  Detective Inspector Sloan—for obvious reasons known as “Seedy” to his family and friends—was the Head of the Criminal Investigation Department of “F” Division of the Calleshire County Constabulary, and his headquarters were at the Police Station in the market town of Berebury. He lived in the town, too, and by virtue of this, as well as of his avocation, knew a good many of the other people who worked and had their being there.

  He knew young Morton—always known as Tod—on both counts.

  “Morning, Inspector.” Young Morton might not have had his business clothes on, but he was still dressed with conspicuous formality for someone of his age.

  “Morning, Tod.”

  “Got a minute?”

  “For you, Tod, yes.” Sloan had known Tod’s father for years, and Tod himself ever since he was a lad. Morton and Sons were the oldest-established and best-run firm of funeral furnishers in Berebury, and one way and another Detective Inspector Sloan had had quite a lot to do with them in his time. Young Tod—although he wasn’t as young as all that—was in the process of taking over the bulk of the work of the firm from his father in the best way possible for a son to step into his father’s shoes. Unobtrusively.

  Morton senior was still very much in evidence at all important funerals. Wearing his frock-coat complete with its velvet collar and carrying a black top hat and gloves, he continued to lead the way out of the church for the last journeys of the more distinguished citizens of the town. Nobody could deny that he had a certain gravitas which went well with ceremonial. Young Tod hadn’t quite acquired that yet, although he was trying hard.

  “Sit down.” Sloan pointed to a chair. “How’s trade?”

  “Mustn’t grumble.”

  “No …” Sloan knew farmers who had stopped grumbling about the weather because everyone expected them to complain, but he wasn’t sure what worried undertakers. Miracle surgery, perhaps. He did know, though, that young Tod had just bought a new car that wasn’t Berlin black in colour, so business couldn’t be too bad.

  “As long as folk don’t take to sky burial,” said Tod, “I reckon Morton and Sons’ll be all right for a bit.”

  “Sky burial?” queried Sloan.

  “The Chinese go in for it,” said Tod.

  “Bit of a contradiction in terms, isn’t it?” hazarded Sloan curiously. “Sky burial.”

  “We’re not really worried.” Tod Morton grinned. “I don’t think it’ll ever really catch on in Calleshire. Besides, you need vultures.”

  “I get you. One dies, one lives.” Even while he was speaking, Detective Inspector Sloan was casting his mind back over last week’s sudden deaths in his patch. He couldn’t remember any coming to police notice that might have caused Morton and Sons any difficulty. There hadn’t even been a sticky inquest. “What can I do for you, Tod?” he asked with genuine interest.

  “It’s probably not important.”

  “All the better in my job,” said Sloan, “if it isn’t important.”

  He was a policeman, not a doctor. He actively preferred to be consulted about the trivial rather than the really significant. In his work the important usually meant that there was serious mischief to or by someone in the offing. He paused. Now that he came to think of it, so it did in the doctor’s surgery too. He put the thought to the back of his mind for further consideration at some mythical period in the future when he had more time for philosophising and looked encouragingly in Tod Morton’s direction.

  “And it may be nothing,” said that young sprig of the firm.

  “You wouldn’t have come to see me about nothing, Tod,” said Sloan with inexorable logic.

  Tod twisted his lips. “It’s such a small thing …”

  “Great oaks from little acorns grow,” responded Sloan prosaically. Watergate had started with the tiniest leak: fingerprints weren’t exactly large items either, and they had hanged many a murderer.

  “So small,” said Tod, “that it nearly got missed.”

  “Ah,” said Sloan. So Tod had meant “small” literally.

  The mortician put a hand in his pocket and brought out a matchbox which he laid with care on Sloan’s desk without opening. “It’s like this, Inspector.”

  “I’m all ears,” said Sloan.

  “By the time someone gets to be cremated——”

  “A customer?”

  “We prefer to call them ‘clients.’”

  “Client, then,” said Sloan peaceably.

  “These days,” said the undertaker, “by the time he gets to be cremated, a client tends to have accumulated a fair bit of metal under his skin.”

  “Foreign bodies?”

  “We do those, too, Inspector.” Tod Morton very nearly pulled out a business card. “Had an Italian chap only the other day—his family wanted the full treatment.”

  “Not that sort of foreign body, Tod.”

  “They really understand about funerals in Italy,” Tod said on a wistful note.

  “They have a lot of them in the family,” said Sloan drily. “Now, what is it that you want to show me?”

  Tod leaned forward. “Like I was saying, Inspector, by the time a client gets to us, the hospital has often stuck a fair bit of metal into him one way and another.”

  Sloan nodded. It was a wonder that it wasn’t known as “medical hardware.”

  “To say nothing of Kaiser Bill and old Adolf.”

  “What have they got to do with it?”

  “Shrapnel,” said Morton. “There’s still a lot of it about from one war or another.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, the relatives don’t want what hasn’t melted given back to them with the ashes, do they? Not unless it’s precious metal and they don’t get that back anyway.”

  “I suppose not.” It was an aspect of cremation which hadn’t occurred to Detective Inspector Sloan.

  “Not very nice, some of the things the hospitals leave inside you.” Tod Morton waved a hand. “Hips, knees——”

  “Useful enough in life, though,” pointed out Sloan.

  “Very,” agreed Tod swiftly. “Clever chaps, some of them up at the hospital. Not all of them, though,” he added thoughtfully.

  “These foreign bodies …”

  “The cremation people have to remove them before the ashes go back to the relatives. Right?”

  “I can see that they would have to.”

  “Believe you me,” said Tod, “a hip joint is as big as a window catch.”

  “I believe you, Tod,” said Sloan patiently.

  “Looks a bit like one, too, come to that.”

  The sight of a replacement hip joint was something Sloan had been spared so far. But then he hadn’t reached the age of spare-part surgery yet.

  “And there’s only the one way of collecting metal easily that I know,” said Tod.

  “A magnet.”

  “That’s right, Inspector.”

  “So?”

  “So even when the magnet gets to work on this client’s ashes——”

  “Which client, Tod?” prompted Sloan gently.

&
nbsp; “Oh, didn’t I say? Sorry. A man, name of Ottershaw. Alan John Ottershaw from Mellamby.”

  Sloan wrote that down. “Well?”

  “This comes up.” Tod Morton pointed to the matchbox but still made no move to open it.

  “So?”

  “It was in with the ashes when they gave me the urn at the crematorium.” He flushed. “I sort of spilled them by mistake on my desk.”

  “And when they say they’re Alan John Ottershaw’s ashes, Tod, they mean it?”

  “’Course they do,” said the young undertaker earnestly. “The cremator only does one at a time anyway so they couldn’t be anyone else’s. You can go and watch if you’re an executor and feel strongly about that sort of thing. Have to, if you belong to some religions.”

  “All right then. So you collect the ashes of the late A. J. Ottershaw and what comes up?”

  Tod shook his head. “Ah, there you have me, Inspector. I don’t know what it is.”

  “All you know is that it isn’t made of ferrous metal.”

  “Do I? Oh, yes, I’ve just said that the magnet goes over the ashes first, haven’t I?”

  “You have.”

  “Then it isn’t easily crushable either,” said Tod, “because the remains are reduced by crushing after that.”

  “What isn’t?” prompted Sloan.

  Tod became diffident again. “It may be nothing at all, of course.”

  “It can’t be nothing,” said Sloan logically.

  “Well, an Oriental dental filling or something fancy like that. They said he’d been working abroad.”

  “But it may not be,” reasoned Sloan. “You wouldn’t have brought it here to show me unless there was a chance that it wasn’t nothing, would you?”

  A pedant might have had some trouble with that convoluted statement, but young Tod Morton knew exactly what Sloan meant. “No,” he agreed at once. “That’s true. I wouldn’t.”

  “So?”

  The matchbox still lay on Sloan’s desk between the two men. Tod Morton, though, made no move to open it, but instead continued with his narrative. “So I showed it to Dad.”

  “And what did he say?” Tod’s father was the grandson of the eldest son in the firm of Morton and Sons and knew the undertaking business backwards.

  “That you can’t be too careful these days.”

  Sloan nodded. It was a philosophy that had held good through the ages and doubtless helped account for the business longevity of Morton and Sons as well as many a more famous House.

  “What with umbrella guns and that sort of thing,” added Tod.

  Progress took strange forms: Detective Inspector Sloan would be one of the first to admit that. “And what,” he enquired, “did you do after that?”

  “Tried to find out what the guy—the client, that is—was supposed to have died from.”

  “Ah.” Sloan jerked his head. “And that’s sometimes easier said than done, I suppose.”

  “It wasn’t difficult, Inspector.” Tod looked surprised. “The funeral director collects the medical forms from the doctors so he sees the cause of death then, but I had a word with Fred Tompkins anyway.”

  “Who’s Fred Tompkins?”

  “The mortuary porter at the hospital.”

  “Good idea,” said Sloan warmly. Administrators and doctors never told anybody anything in case it was used in evidence afterwards. In Sloan’s experience, not only did ward-maids and hospital porters usually, but not always of course, have the beans—well, some of them, anyway—but, more importantly, were nearly always prepared to spill them if they had.

  Especially to an old friend.

  “Fred said,” carried on Tod Morton, “that this guy had snuffed it from a heart attack. Not anything out of the ordinary.”

  “Or we’d have heard,” responded Sloan with confidence. “And there haven’t been any coroners’ inquests in Berebury for a couple of weeks now.”

  “Not even medically unusual, Inspector,” said Tod, waving a hand to encompass the whole Police Station. “Let alone your sort of unusual.”

  “Ah.” The medically unusual was only interesting to the Criminal Investigation Department if it arose from illegal homicide in any shape or form. Or criminal negligence. Nature could do her worst and leave the police unaffected. And often did.

  It was funny how people never thought of her as Mother Nature then; that was when they remembered the “red in tooth and claw” bit.

  “The only thing that was at all out of the way was that this guy Ottershaw had just come back from abroad.”

  “Had he?” That might well put a different complexion on what was in the matchbox. “Whereabouts abroad?”

  “The Middle East,” Tod Morton said. “He worked in the Sheikhdom of Lasserta.”

  “I see.” Sloan drew a doodle on his notebook.

  “Mining engineer, he was.”

  “It would say so on the cremation form, I suppose,” said Sloan.

  “Not only that,” said Tod expansively, “but Fred said that the wife had told the doctors that he worked with some odd metal out there.”

  “Lasserta.” Sloan cast about in his mind for whatever else came from the Middle East as well as crude oil. He had heard that they mined something else unusual in that part of the world and nowhere else, but he couldn’t now remember what it was.

  “Fred Tompkins didn’t know what this stuff was called but he did know that the doctors had talked to the Health and Safety people in case there was something tricky about this particular ore that they ought to have known about.”

  “And was there?”

  “Not that they knew,” said Tod, twitching his shoulders expressively. “Which doesn’t mean much, does it? Dad says some of them don’t even know which way is up.”

  “Didn’t they have a post-mortem?”

  Tod shook his head. “Seems there was a doctor at this ‘do’ out at Mellamby that Ottershaw collapsed at. He told the ambulance people that it was a heart attack and to get a move on.”

  “But it was no go?”

  “That’s right,” said Tod. “He was unconscious but alive when they got to the hospital but he didn’t last long. Fred said they had him in their Coronary Care Unit but it didn’t do him any good.”

  Sloan leaned back in his chair. “So what brings you, Tod?”

  Morton pointed to the matchbox. “That, Inspector. Whatever it is.”

  “Surprise me,” invited Detective Inspector Sloan.

  Morton opened the matchbox with all the concentration of a schoolboy with a captured Camberwell Beauty butterfly, teased a little wad of cotton wool to one side and said, “There, Inspector. Look.”

  Sloan looked. What he saw was a very small metal pellet.

  “The trouble,” said Tod Morton, “is that——”

  “It’s hollow,” finished Detective Inspector Sloan for him.

  FOUR

  And the Eyes Grow Dim

  “Looking for work, are you, Sloan?” barked Police Superintendent Leeyes.

  “No, sir.”

  “Because if you haven’t got enough to do, you can get on with a bit of collar-fingering down in that new shopping arcade in the High Street.”

  “It’s not that at all, sir.”

  “They tell me that there’s a young woman down there doing that new thing which someone was trying to explain to me.”

  “Sugging, sir.”

  “Sounds foreign to me.”

  “It isn’t, sir.” The Superintendent’s xenophobia was a by-word in the Calleshire Force. “It goes on all the time.”

  Leeyes sniffed. “I’ve never heard of it, Sloan, but then I’ve only been in the thief-taking business all my life.”

  “It stands for ‘selling under guise,’ sir.”

  “That poet fellow—you know who I mean, Sloan.”

  “Kipling, sir?” The Superintendent was a great one for attending Adult Education Classes in the long winter evenings. The sessions on “Rudyard Kipling—The Man and the Wr
iter,” had made a great impression on him.

  “That’s the fellow. You remember what he said, Sloan, don’t you?”

  “‘The crimes of Clapham are chaste in Martapan,’” said Sloan. The entire complement of the Berebury Police Station knew the quotation by heart now. Actually Detective Inspector Sloan, rosarian when off-duty, had even looked it up once and found the line before that one even more interesting: “The wildest dreams of Kew are commonplace in Katmandu.” He’d like that.

  “Sugging,” said Superintendent Leeyes firmly, “sounds more like Martapan than Clapham to me.”

  “It isn’t, sir,” insisted Sloan. “It’s going about with a clipboard and a questionnaire pretending you’re doing a survey and then, when you’ve got the person’s name and address, trying to sell them something.”

  Leeyes scowled. “Having craftily found out first whether they can afford it.”

  “And if they’re the sort of person likely to be in the market for that particular item,” said Sloan. “Yes.”

  “Clever stuff,” pronounced Leeyes. It was the ultimate accolade.

  “I’ll see to this woman,” Sloan promised. “Now, sir, about this hollow pellet that Tod Morton—er—retrieved from some ashes.” He explained what had been discovered in the cremated remains of Alan Ottershaw of Mellamby.

  “Ottershaw, did you say?” grunted Leeyes. “Never heard of him. Anything known?”

  “Not in the police sense,” said Sloan cautiously, adding, “yet.”

  “And what, pray, is that supposed to mean?” enquired the Superintendent at his most Churchillian.

  “I did a bit of asking about over at Mellamby where he came from, sir.”

  Leeyes frowned. “Who is our man there at the moment?”

  “Constable Turton. He covers all the villages out that way.”

  “He’s young, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, sir.” The Superintendent had reached an age when youth had become an indictment in itself.

  “Go on, Sloan. Tell me he’s keen as well.”

  “He told me, sir,” said Detective Inspector Sloan with quite a different emphasis, “that Alan Ottershaw had come home unexpectedly from the Middle East because of some trouble out there.”