Chapter and Hearse (28 page)

Henry bowed, concealing his inward amusement at the way in which the Duke – like everyone else – had ducked out of pronouncing the Ambassador's name. Fortunately an extensive training at the Foreign Office had encompassed practice with saying Polish titles out loud.

‘Count Zeczenbroski,' said Henry, bowing again slightly whilst resisting the temptation to click his heels together as well. ‘I don't know how long you've been in post there but I'm sure you'll know our man in Lasserta.'

‘Indeed,' said the Count, shaking hands warmly. ‘Your Mr Heber-Hibbs and I are old friends. In fact, his boy Anthony plays with my own son. A good man.'

‘Who lies abroad for the good of his country,' Henry completed the definition of an Ambassador with practised ease. The sheikhdom of Lasserta was in theory not really big enough in size or history to merit an ambassador-in-residence from either Great Britain or Poland, or, for that matter, few of the other European countries who saw fit to be represented there at that diplomatic level. However, since the sheikhdom was sitting on the only known supply of queremitte ore on the planet outside the Soviet Union, they were all there all the same.

In strength.

This was understandable, since queremitte was an element of great value in the armaments world. It was thus much sought after by those nations who were arming – or rearming – as fast as they possibly could. Countries who had already put ‘guns before butter', so to speak, had almost exhausted their stocks, while those nations that had only just come under starter's orders in the arms race were even more anxious to secure supplies of one of the hardest-wearing of all known metals to aid them in their hasty manufacture of new weapons.

‘And you left the Sheikh well, I trust?' Henry enquired. Of one thing he could be quite sure and that was that the young son of Sheikh Ben Mugnal Mirza Ibrahim Hajal Kisra would not be mixing with the sons of any of the ambassadors at his court. The Sheikh played his cards far too close to his chest to risk anything being given away by childish babble. And there was also the very real fear of the kidnap and ransom of his heir.

‘In great form, I assure you,' said the Count. He smiled politely as an overweight man with a red face overtook them on their way into the castle's ballroom.

‘The Lord Lieutenant,' murmured Henry. ‘A great man in the saddle in his day, I understand.'

The Count, whose own sport was duck-shooting on the Pripet Marshes, acknowledged this fact with a cursory nod before passing on to Henry some information of his own. ‘I understand,' he said in a voice rather below that used in normal conversation, ‘that your man in Lasserta has been beaten at the post by a very unfriendly power.'

Henry bent his head towards Count Zeczenbroski. ‘Indeed?' he said, not showing by even the flicker of an eyelid that this fact was not only not news to him but the very reason for his own presence at the castle tonight.

‘It is said that that young man over there –' here the Count indicated a handsome blond man who was squiring a tall, elegant girl in a dress of deep electric blue – ‘has obtained a verbal agreement to the assigning of the queremitte mining rights to his government.'

‘He is their Military Attaché,' observed Henry mildly, ‘so perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised.' The blond young man was one of the reasons that Henry was at the hunt ball, but he did not say so. Yet another reason was the well-built girl with whom the man was now starting to dance. She had a vaguely foreign look and a slightly old-fashioned evening bag on her arm. They were a well-matched pair – she was nearly as tall as the Military Attaché and was dancing with notable verve. ‘Besides, what does a verbal agreement amount to in these modern times?'

‘If it's from the Sheikh, everything,' the Polish Ambassador replied. ‘It is said that the word of the Sheikh is his bond.'

‘Tell me then, Count, how did that young man manage to persuade the Sheikh to part with his precious ore verbally?'

The Count raised his shoulders ever so slightly and opened his hands in an age-old gesture. ‘My dear Mr Tyler, who knows? There was some talk, I understand, of – what shall I call it? – leverage…'

‘Really?' said Henry Tyler, feigning a well-bred astonishment. A man did not have to be a linguist to translate that word into the uglier one of ‘blackmail'.

The Ambassador leaned forward and spoke in confidential tones. ‘Something to do with a secret distillery having been found in the hills to the north was what I had heard,' volunteered Count Zeczenbroski after he had made sure no one was within earshot.

‘A distillery,' concurred Henry Tyler, nodding sagely, ‘would not have gone down very well in Gatt-el-Abbas.' In the capital of Lasserta, consumption of alcohol in any shape or form was deemed a flogging matter. If the Sheikh was known to have been guilty of this, then his throne would have been in very real danger.

The Count became even more confidential. ‘I gather the Sheikh got quite fond of the stuff while a pupil at Sandhurst.'

‘And that particular Military Attaché knew about it?' said Henry, looking across at the blond young man.

Had the Count had a fine waxed moustache he would undoubtedly have twirled the ends of it when he asked, ‘About the fondness or the distillery?'

‘Either, my dear Count,' said Henry smoothly, ‘or both.'

There had been no need at all for him to pose the question since Henry already knew all about the Sheikh's weakness for a dram of whisky from His Britannic Majesty's Ambassador to the sheikhdom, Mr Godfrey Heber-Hibbs. His note to the Foreign Office had explained that there had been a batch of wild, hard-drinking Scots in the Sheikh's cohort during his terms at Sandhurst who had led him astray in the matter of that golden liquid which was so strictly forbidden in Lasserta. The distillery which had been ‘discovered' many miles to the north of the Sheikh's palace at Bakhalla had, Henry also knew, been planted there by the aforementioned Military Attaché on behalf of his political masters. A promise to keep it secret in return for sole access to the queremitte would have been easy enough to extract from a Sheikh occupying a distinctly uncertain throne. Unlike the redoubtable Lion of Judah, Ben Mugnal Mirza Ibrahim Hajal Kisra did not, by any means, have all of his people behind him. And some of those who were behind him were there only for the purpose of trying to stab him in the back …

‘I gather,' said the Polish Ambassador cautiously, ‘that his having been led astray in the respect of alcohol at your military academy was not unknown among a certain group of his contemporaries.'

‘Ah…' said Henry expressively.

What neither the Polish Ambassador nor, he hoped, anyone else knew was that the fake distillery in the desert had disappeared as secretly as it had arrived – thanks to the nifty overnight spadework of some active ‘gardeners' temporarily on Mr Heber-Hibbs's staff in Lasserta. The odd mentions of the word ‘mirages' in such local papers as there were had been dropped casually by the Ambassador's press attaché.

Henry looked up. ‘You must excuse me now, Count. I see an old friend in need of a partner…'

Henry crossed the ballroom and soon was taking to the floor with the wife of the High Sheriff.

‘George was never a dancer,' complained George's wife, Judy, allowing herself to be swept to her feet, ‘and now he won't even try.'

‘One of the delights of growing older,' said Henry diplomatically, ‘is that one doesn't have to do what one doesn't like doing any longer.'

Judy, Henry knew, did like dancing and in a moment they were stepping it featly round the ballroom. This enabled Henry to keep an eye on the blond young man and his tall, elegant partner, who were doing much the same but considerably closer together.

This pattern was repeated after supper in the castle's famous dining room, a long saloon dedicated to trophies of the chase. To the outside observer, it seemed that a chase of an altogether different – but as old a – kind was going on between the Military Attaché and his lady companion. Their dancing was becoming wilder and wilder, and more and more intimate. The girl appeared almost abandoned in her gyrations, while the young man would seem to have too much drink taken.

After yet another turn of the ballroom, Henry saw him pulling the girl towards a door that Henry knew gave eventually on to a flight of stairs and thence to the upper storeys of the castle.

The girl appeared to stumble and then regained her balance. She let the man take her hand and they went off together through the door.

‘What it is to be young!' said Judy, watching them go.

‘I dare say they're going in search of a little night air,' murmured Henry. ‘It's pretty warm in here.'

‘It reminds me of the evening that George and I—'

‘Judy, my dear,' he interrupted the Lord Lieutenant's wife suavely, steering her off the dance floor, ‘I simply must return you to George now or he'll be after me for alienation of affection…'

This done, Henry began to make his way out of the ballroom himself.

Before he could do so, the girl from the dancing pair came rushing into the room in great distress, her electric blue dress all dishevelled. ‘Monsieurs, help! Help!' she cried. ‘Hans, he ‘as gone and jumped out of the landing vindow…'

Henry strode towards the door.

‘No, no, m'sieur,' she called out urgently, barring his way. ‘Not up there. Down ‘ere. He is lying outside on the ground.' She gave a great cry. ‘He asked me to marry him, you see.'

‘And?' barked the High Sheriff, who might not have been a dancer but was still quick on his feet. He had reached the girl nearly as quickly as Henry.

‘And when I said I wouldn't, he opened the vindow and jumped out.' She gulped. ‘It's all my fault. He always said 'e would kill himself if I wouldn't marry 'im.'

‘He did, did he?' said the High Sheriff.

‘But, moi, I didn't believe him.' She started to sob. ‘He's dead! I know he's dead – it is such a long way down to the ground in this place.'

‘This way,' said the Duke of Calleshire, making for a different door, while Henry edged ahead of the Lord Lieutenant.

The girl continued her loud keening. ‘Poor Hans, oh, poor Hans, but, m'sieur –' this to the Lord Lieutenant, now an unhealthy shade of purple, and clearly wanting to follow the Duke – ‘I can tell you, 'e was not ready for marriage. No, not yet, but 'e was much too young to die.'

Henry shot after the Duke, a man who presumably knew the quickest way to ground level. Spread-eagled on the drive before them lay the body of the blond young man. Even at a distance Henry could tell that the fellow was dead – it wasn't only vultures who could recognize absence of life from afar.

So could experienced men.

And women.

Henry reached the body and then turned and looked back at the castle.

There was something wrong, but he couldn't think for the moment what it was. He stood, taking in the scene as quickly as he could and concentrating furiously. Then it came to him.

He slipped quickly away from the men standing over the body of the blond young man and hastened back into the castle. As he shot up the stairs to the ballroom, he met the Lord Lieutenant, quite choleric now, hurrying down. ‘I'm ringing for a doctor,' Henry said, dashing past the man.

He didn't do any such thing, but instead rushed up to the first-floor landing. There were three windows there, all closed, but only one unfastened. He flung it open just as the High Sheriff, nobody's fool, looked up. Henry waved at him. After the High Sheriff had turned his attention back to the body, Henry ran his finger along the underside of the sash window to make sure there was no blood there – the girl, well trained in unarmed combat as she had been, might, after all, have had to bring it down on the man's fingers before he would let go. What she had forgotten to do was open it again after she had pushed him out.

*   *   *

‘And was it all very splendid?' asked his sister, Wendy, later when he did visit her. ‘Apart from that poor young man's suicide, of course. Though I do understand if he was really in love … He wasn't English, was he?'

‘No.'

‘Ah, that explains it,' she said, adding rather complacently, ‘Tom was beside himself until I said I'd marry him.'

‘I remember.' He smiled.

‘But what about the girl?' Wendy recollected herself. ‘She was foreign too, wasn't she?'

‘So it was said,' agreed Henry. ‘She left the country before the inquest – though she'd given the police a statement, of course.'

‘And you?' asked his sister anxiously. ‘How did you get on?'

‘Oh, I just had a watching brief, that's all. You might say that I did a bit of light dusting – a woman's work is never done, is it? By the way, Wendy.'

‘Yes?'

‘Light green is out this year.'

‘Oh…' Her face fell. ‘So what colour is in, then?'

‘Electric blue. I noticed specially…'

Dummy Run

‘I'm sorry to trouble you, Inspector Sloan.' The voice of the Station Sergeant on the internal telephone at the police station at Berebury interrupted the Detective Inspector while he was working in his office. ‘But I'm afraid we've got a bit of a problem down here in the custody suite.'

‘Who with?' enquired Sloan immediately, since it was unlikely that any problem arising in what he still thought of as the charge room would be of a vegetable or mineral nature, and cars came under Traffic Division anyway. At any police station the most probable problem would be animal – human animal, that is.

‘An old sparring partner of yours and mine,' replied the Sergeant.

Sloan sighed. He had been attempting to tackle some paperwork that was too sensitive to be put on any computer – which was saying something about the security of computers – and too important to be left to Detective Constable Crosby. This said quite a lot about the skills of that junior officer, who was at this very moment waiting outside his door while Sloan thought of a job for him to do that was within his slender capabilities. The paperwork was long overdue in its rightful place in his locked filing cabinet which didn't help.