The Body Politic

by Catherine Aird

  “But it was a grand fight all the same.”

  Sloan made a note. Shakespeare had been right about old battles being remembered with advantages. All old battles.

  “Although naturally I deeply regretted it afterwards in case all the extra exertion had contributed to his death.”

  “Naturally, sir.”

  “I wasn’t to know, you see.”

  “No.” Sloan took his part in the coda of contrition.

  “Moreover we all knew that King Henry III fought like a Trojan at the real thing.”

  Crosby smirked. “What you might call a Battle Royal.”

  “No,” said Detective Inspector Sloan, policeman.

  “No,” said Adrian Dungey, veterinary surgeon and wargame enthusiast.

  “No?” said Crosby, looking slightly bewildered.

  “Battle Royal,” said Dungey hortatively, “is the opposite of single-handed combat. It’s a general squabble.”

  “A free-for-all?” Crosby brightened. It was the sort of engagement he favoured himself.

  “The term,” contributed Detective Inspector Sloan out of his own experience, “also applies to cock-fighting, of which crime, Crosby, I’m happy to say, we do not have enough in this manor for you to have seen.”

  “Not a lot of it about,” agreed the vet. “Not now.”

  Sloan came back to the purpose of his enquiry with the constancy of a self-righting Russian doll. “This fight you had with the deceased, sir …”

  “Yes, Inspector?”

  “Whereabouts on the—er—battlefield did it take place?”

  Adrian Dungey relaxed. “Near the foot of the ruined tower of the Motte, Inspector. You see, as far as we can establish, King Henry III stayed around Lewes Castle all through the battle until he was taken prisoner.” His boyish eagerness reasserted itself as he talked. “There’s a lot of verse about the Battle of Lewes, you know.”

  “No, sir,” said Sloan. “I didn’t.”

  Dungey promptly declaimed:

  A little bande arounde the Kyng,

  Unflinching kept their grounde.

  “Did they?” said Sloan heavily.

  Undeterred, Dungey carried on quoting:

  But all in vain—th’exulting foe

  Rush’d onwards on his ire—

  And Henrye and his faithful friendes

  Unwillinglye retire.

  “And after your encounter with the deceased, sir?” The only verse that came immediately to Sloan’s mind was from a Scottish ballad:

  But I hae dream’d a dreary dream,

  Beyond the Isle of Skye,

  I saw a dead man win a fight,

  And I think that man was I.

  From all accounts what went for the Earl of Douglas at the Battle of Otterbourne had gone for Alan Ottershaw too.

  Dungey said easily, “Oh, I just joined in the general fighting until the Battle Commander called the field to rest at half-past twelve.”

  “Time for din-dins, was it?” said Crosby, demolishing the carefully contrived atmosphere of the High Middle Ages at a stroke.

  Detective Inspector Sloan hastily changed tack, asking the vet, “Were you round about the tower when the piece of masonry came down?”

  Dungey’s eyes narrowed, his manner instantly sober again. “I was. And I shan’t forget that in a hurry.”

  Crosby stirred. “Did it fall or was it pushed?”

  “I can’t tell you that.” He shook his shoulders slightly. “All I can tell you, gentlemen, is that it was a very near miss. Poor old Peter Corbishley damn nearly had his chips, I assure you. Not that it shook him—or, if it did, he didn’t let it show.”

  Sloan nodded. There were, he knew, public figures so in control of their own image that they could almost override reality.

  “Major Puiver started to climb up to the parapet—there’s a stairway up inside the tower—but by the time he got even halfway up whoever had hefted the stone over—if they had, of course——”

  “If they had,” agreed Sloan.

  “—wasn’t there any more.” Adrian Dungey shrugged his shoulders. “But it was that sort of day. A lot of comings and goings.”

  “More’s the pity,” said Crosby, who liked things easy.

  “The death and dislocation of war,” quoted Sloan gravely.

  “I thought,” said Dungey, “that I’d caught a glimpse of the Figure of Death up there myself while Alan and I were fighting down below, but I may have been wrong.”

  “Death,” said Sloan, conscious of sounding rather like an Old Testament prophet, “seems to have been everywhere that day.”

  “The Major told me he thought he recognised the man’s walk. Seen it before somewhere, he said, but he couldn’t be sure where.” Dungey shrugged his shoulders. “He couldn’t place him, anyway, and neither could anyone else. And, of course,” it was the vet’s turn to sound profound, “Death didn’t speak.”

  “As silent as the grave, was he?” said Crosby jauntily. He seemed to have cheered up suddenly because he waved a playful hand in the vet’s direction and said, “Considering how little a tongue weighs, it’s funny how few people can hold it, isn’t it?”

  Ted Sheard, the Labour Member of Parliament for the West Berebury Division of Calleshire, was as hard-working and as committed as Peter Corbishley. Where they differed was in style: Robin Good-fellow had nothing on Ted Sheard.

  His Party Headquarters were over in the west of Berebury amidst the rows of little artisans’ dwellings built to house the influx of railway workers to the town of more than a century before. He ran a constituency surgery there, and from this unpromising power-base waged unrelenting war on unfeeling bureaucracies, dilatory national bodies, and a judicial system that, in his view, fed on the hopelessly incompetent. On every possible platform he campaigned for a Brave New World for society’s casualties.

  The Member of Parliament for West Berebury, like the Member for East Berebury, couldn’t for the life of him think why anyone should send either him or Peter Corbishley death threats.

  “Let’s hope it isn’t for the life of you, sir,” said Detective Inspector Sloan soberly. “Tell me about them.”

  “They started coming through the post after Easter,” said the Member, “and they addressed me as Taurus.”

  “As in the Zodiac?”

  “Precisely, Inspector.”

  “Signed?”

  “By someone calling himself Scorpio.” He paused. “Or herself. Or themselves. It was a drawing.”

  “The Scorpion,” said Crosby intelligently.

  “To begin with, they were just simple messages like ‘Your hour is come’ and ‘Death is nigh.’ They sort of worked their way up to live scorpions. By way of a butterfly, actually.”

  “A butterfly?” said Detective Constable Crosby, interested in the oddness.

  “Well, that’s what I thought it was at first.” Sheard grinned. “Turned out to be a Death’s Head Moth. I got the spike after that all right. Until then I thought I might have had some of the animal rights campaigners after me.” He looked shrewdly at Sloan. “They get up to all sorts of things.”

  “We know,” said Sloan. “We know.”

  “All in a day’s work, I said to myself, at first,” remarked Sheard, “hate-mail, although I must say that the letters put my girl in a bit of a two and eight.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I know you can’t please all the people all the time but—”

  “But some of them you can’t please any of the time,” finished the policeman for him out of the depths of his own experience.

  “I thought I’d just got on the wrong side of some nutter although there was no other message with them. That was to begin with, you understand.”

  “So things got worse?” deduced Sloan.

  “I’ll say,” responded the Member. He was a large cheerful man who must have found it quite difficult to look down-hearted whatever the circumstances. “One morning I found a socking great effigy of myself swinging on my front gate. It couldn
’t have been there long because it was the morning after a late-night sitting of the House and I only got back from Westminster just in time for an early breakfast.”

  “Nasty,” observed Sloan.

  “It’s a funny feeling, Inspector, I can tell you, cutting down a dummy figure of yourself.”

  “Like a goose grazing on your grave,” contributed Crosby helpfully. “You know, when your flesh goes pimply all of a sudden.”

  “And funnier still,” said Ted Sheard grimly, “when you find that a meat skewer has been stuck through its heart.”

  “Voodoo …” said Crosby.

  “It doesn’t make sense someone wanting both Members of Parliament dead,” said Sheard. “One or the other and it might be politics. But not both.”

  “Who do?…” chanted Crosby.

  “I thought at first it might be the university students up to their usual tricks, but then I got an invitation to talk to them at Almstone College and they were all right on the night.”

  “You do …” finished Crosby.

  “Crosby!” admonished Sloan.

  “Well, that’s what they used to do in the old days, wasn’t it?” said the Constable defensively. “When they wanted someone to die they stuck a pin through the heart of a wax image. When they wanted someone just to suffer they stuck it where they wanted it to hurt.”

  “Thank you very much, Constable,” said the Member feelingly before Sloan could speak. “Actually, I got that far on my own and then when I compared notes with Corbishley I thought I’d better let you people know.”

  “Quite right, sir,” said Sloan. “Quite right. And you confirm that all these threats only indicated the one thing that the writer wanted you to do?”

  “Die,” said Sheard tersely. “Oh, I got the message all right. Somebody out there means me to keel over and turn my toes up, though don’t ask me why.”

  “And you’ve never had any death threats before?”

  “Not anonymously through the post, Inspector.”

  There was something in the way that Ted Sheard spoke which made Sloan look up sharply.

  The Member grinned and said impishly, “I’ve been getting them regularly for years from someone else.”

  “Sir?”

  “My doctor.”

  “Ah.”

  “He threatens me with death every time he sees me.”

  “Oh?”

  “Makes me stand on the oldest biofeedback machine of them all and then starts wringing his hands.”

  “What’s that machine then, sir?” asked Sloan, suspecting a catch.

  “The weighing scales. And,” Sheard went on genially, “then he says I must give up eating, drinking, smoking and working.”

  “Or else?” said Sloan, entering into the spirit of the exchange.

  “Or else a by-election, Inspector. And since the first duty of a politician is to be re-elected that wouldn’t do at all. He thinks I should take more exercise, too, but then he’s not in politics.” He frowned. “Well, only medical politics.”

  “And you have no idea why anyone should be gunning for you and Mr. Corbishley?” asked Sloan. At least neither Member showed any sign of persecution mania: which was a help to a hard-pressed police force. Paranoia was difficult for anyone to deal with.

  “I daresay we’ve both got enemies, Inspector,” said Sheard philosophically. “All God’s parliamentary chillen got enemies.”

  “Except, sir, that it would seem to be a plague on both your houses, so to speak.” You couldn’t beat the Bard for aptness.

  “Rouge et noir, Inspector, you might say,” agreed Sheard slyly, “rather than Rogue ou noir.”

  “Sir?”

  “Do you play roulette, Inspector?”

  “No, sir. I find I get enough excitement in my daily work, thank you.”

  “I didn’t mean Russian roulette, Inspector.”

  “Neither did I, sir.”

  “Rouge et noir would be backing both sides of the table. Red or black is the usual way of playing.”

  “I take your point, sir,” said Sloan, suppressing a strong desire to quote W. S. Gilbert’s couplet about every child born alive being either a little Liberal or a little Conservative. Instead he said, “Have you ever heard of the Sheikhdom of Lasserta, sir?”

  A remarkably discerning look overtook the Parliamentarian’s professional geniality. He said quietly, “I’ve heard of queremitte, Inspector, if that’s what you want to know.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “A very valuable product indeed,” advanced the Member.

  “So I understand, sir.”

  “It’s ore has been of great interest to various Parliamentary Select Committees,” mused Ted Sheard. “I serve on one of them myself as it happens.” He looked up quickly and said in quite a different tone of voice, “But you already knew that, Inspector, didn’t you?”

  Sloan coughed. “Yes, sir. As it happens, I did.”

  “You’ll have done your homework before you came to see me.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “Quite so, sir.”

  Sheard twisted his lips. “To go back to roulette, Inspector.”

  “Sir?”

  “I should say for a start that anything to do with queremitte would up the stakes in any game you care to mention.”

  “So would I, sir,” agreed Sloan softly.

  “An altogether different ball game from live scorpions, gentlemen, in spite of the Parliamentary overtones.”

  “I don’t think I know about those, sir.”

  “The Old Testament, Inspector.” The Member stretched his arms outwards and upwards. “Don’t look so surprised. I used to be a lay preacher before I went in to politics and scorpions rang a Biblical bell.” In a fine declamatory style and in a rich intonation designed to carry, Ted Sheard delivered the words “My Father has chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions. First Book of Kings, Chapter Twelve.”

  Crosby stirred. “I don’t see what——”

  “We have Whips, Constable,” he explained gently, “in the Houses of Parliament. To see that we vote.”

  “And what we have to remember about the Old Testament, Crosby,” said Detective Inspector Sloan as he settled himself back into the passenger seat of the police car, “is that Exodus follows Genesis a long way before you get to the First Book of Kings.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Sloan hunched his shoulders forward. “And all this case is doing at the moment is getting more complicated.” He pulled his notebook out. “Remind me to ask Peter Corbishley if they’ve asked him to speak at Almstone College too.”

  “Yes, sir.” Detective Constable Crosby changed the gears of the engine upwards as if rehearsing for the Mille Miglia. “How come that character we’ve just met knows about both roulette and the Bible? That’s not natural.”

  “I expect he’s what they call a polymath. And his name, Crosby, let me remind you is Edward Montague Hopperton Sheard, although I think he likes to be called Ted.”

  “If you ask me,” said Crosby, taking a corner as if a race depended on it, “I think he likes to be called to dinner.”

  FIFTEEN

  And Power Must Fail

  Dr. Dabbe, the consultant pathologist, was hard at work when Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby were shown into the mortuary. He gave the two policemen a friendly wave of greeting and called out, “Won’t keep you a moment, gentlemen. Just tying a few loose ends, you might say.”

  Crosby averted his eyes.

  “So are we, Doctor,” said Sloan evenly. “If we can.”

  “At the moment,” contributed Crosby with a wholly artificial jauntiness, “we seem to have as many as a packet of spaghetti.”

  The pathologist busied himself for another few minutes over something dreadfully inert on an operating table, and then he straightened his back and spoke to his assistant. “There we are, Burns, all done. He’s fit for an identity parade now. Even his worst enemy would know him.”r />
  The perennially silent Burns nodded.

  Dr. Dabbe turned his back on his assistant, motioning him to undo the strings of his gown. He spoke, though, to Sloan. “I’m very sorry to have to tell you, Inspector, that this is going to be one of those times when the old rubric about pathologists doesn’t run true.”

  “What’s that, Doctor?” asked Sloan, mystified.

  “As you may know, Inspector, the physician knows everything and does nothing.” He turned his head. “Thank you, Burns, that will do nicely.”

  Sloan didn’t know a lot about physicians and their laissez-faire attitude to life. And death.

  “And the surgeon,” quoted Dabbe, “knows nothing and does everything. Burns, my gloves.”

  Sloan had always been afraid of that. Activists, that was what surgeons were.

  Dabbe grinned. “You don’t need me to tell you anything about psychiatrists, do you now, Sloan?”

  “No, Doctor.”

  “They know nothing and do nothing,” he said briefly. “My cap, Burns. Catch.”

  Sloan agreed with this statement with a ready fervour while Dr. Dabbe moved towards the washhand basin in the corner.

  “As for the pathologists …” Dr. Dabbe paused.

  Detective Constable Crosby leaned forward curiously. “What about the pathologists then?”

  Dr. Dabbe halted in the act of scrubbing his hands. “Ah, usually the pathologist knows everything but too late to do anything. Burns, a clean towel, please.”

  “Not in this case?” Sloan had got the message all right.

  “’Fraid not, Inspector. This pathologist only knows that the ashes you brought here are of homo sapiens.”

  “Human,” said Crosby intelligently.

  “Not something played for by opposing cricket teams,” agreed Dabbe gravely.

  “Or someone’s favourite pet,” said Sloan. Luston’s Motorway Man—the trick perpetrated on his opposite number at Luston—had bitten deep.

  “Pure Sam McGee,” Dabbe assured him.

  “Pardon, Doctor?”

  “Shame on you, Sloan,” chided the pathologist. “I’m sure you’ve heard of ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew.’”

  “Yes, Doctor,” said Sloan evenly.