The Body Politic (18 page)

“Ah,” said Leeyes, “I know what that means, Sloan.”

“You do, sir?” said Sloan, surprised.

“No forks,” said the Superintendent. “They hadn't been invented.”

“I wouldn't know about that, sir, but what I do know is——”

“And Charles Laughton throwing chicken legs over his shoulder and on to the rushes on the floor.”

“Talking of chicken legs, sir,” put in Sloan rather desperately, “someone seems to have been trying to put a hex on someone at Mellamby.”

“As Henry VIII, of course, Sloan, unless you're too young to remember?”

“Quite so, sir,” Sloan sighed. “At Mellamby it was Adrian Dungey as Henry III. He and Simon de Montfort sat at the top table with the Member of Parliament, who made a speech.”

“Ha! And what did our revered Member have to say at Mellamby?”

“I don't know, sir. I was more concerned with what they had to eat after the battle.”

“Quite right,” said Leeyes warmly. “Always more important. What was it?”

Sloan consulted his notebook. “Mortrews de fleyssh, Brewet, Pheasant, and Blamanger.”

“Strewth!” exclaimed Leeyes.

“The Curate read Medieval History at Oxford and wanted them to get it right. They made him Pantler.”

“Go on, Sloan, tell me. I can't bear the suspense.”

“First cousin to a butler, sir.”

“That's what I thought,” he said unfairly. “What did they drink?”

“Home-made mead, sir. And in between each course they had something called a subtlety to clear the palate.”

Leeyes muttered something inaudible.

Sloan hurried on. “The important thing from our point of view, sir, is that Bertram Rauly—the owner of the whole outfit—had a bit of an accident at the banquet.”

“Too much mead?” suggested Leeyes solicitously, “or a surfeit of lampreys?”

“Some lead shot in the pheasant,” said Sloan. “Or that's what he thought. He broke a tooth.”

“I'm very sorry having to trouble you again, Mrs. Ottershaw,” said Detective Inspector Sloan. The two policemen were back in April Cottage at Mellamby.

“I wasn't doing anything,” said Hazel Ottershaw listlessly.

“Quite so,” said Sloan.

“My mother's got the children,” the widow waved a hand round the sitting room, “and it's funny but there doesn't seem anything to do any more. Nothing important, anyway.” She smiled wanly. “Which is silly when you come to think about it, isn't it?”

Detective Inspector Sloan nodded sympathetically.

“Because Alan was away so much that you'd think it would be the same as if he was only back in Lasserta.” Her voice fell away. “Only it isn't.”

“No, Madam. Nothing's the same any more.” It never was after a spouse died. Even he, Christopher Dennis Sloan, still happily married, knew that. Even if the poet was notoriously silent on what happened after the Moving Finger had writ. The author of
Omar Khayyám
had dwelt more on the fact that nothing could lure it back to cancel half a line.

And they all knew that.

“Everything's different,” said the new widow, a note of surprise still in her voice. “Everything.”

“Just so, Madam.”

“People have been very kind, though,” she murmured. “Very kind.”

“I'm afraid, Madam,” said Sloan, “that you are going to think me very unkind …”

She looked up at him. “I don't understand, Inspector.”

“It's not easy to explain.”

“What isn't?” There was a sudden sharp note in her voice now.

“We want you to do something for us.”

“For the police?”

“Please.”

“Of course.” She sat up quite straight and braced her shoulders. “Naturally, Inspector, anything I can do to help the police, I will. Although I must confess I don't see in what way I could—”

Detective Inspector Sloan reached into an inside pocket. “Your late husband worked in Lasserta, which, Madam, as you don't need me to tell you, is one of the more politically sensitive parts of the world.”

She opened her hands expressively. “The Middle East …”

“Exactly.” Sloan didn't know the degree of difficulty and danger that divided a trouble-spot from a running sore, but his mind was on other things anyway.

“It's always been like that, Inspector.”

“Yes, Madam.” Sloan kept his eye on Mrs. Ottershaw's face. “Your late husband also worked for a company mining a politically sensitive metal.”

She nodded: no company wife needed telling that. “Queremitte.”

“I understand you told the doctors at the hospital who were treating your husband that his unexpected return had had something to do with some difficulty in Lasserta.”

She raised her head up and braced her shoulders. “That's what he told me, Inspector, when he got back from Wadeem.”

“Some sudden difficulty?”

“Oh, yes. Very sudden. I didn't know anything about it until he arrived back home.”

“But he didn't tell you exactly what it was about?”

She passed a hand in front of her eyes. “He said it was trouble of some kind after a road accident.”

“That all?”

“Yes. He told me his firm were anxious that he shouldn't discuss the details so——”

“So he didn't?”

She looked up, surprised. “Of course not, Inspector.”

“As it happens,” said Sloan formally, “his firm has confirmed this.”

“Then what can I do for you?” she asked, slightly more distant in her manner too.

“At some time during the Sunday morning—the day that he died—the Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company recorded a message from your husband on their answering machine.”

“From Alan?” This was patently news to Alan Ottershaw's widow. She paled.

“They say so.”

Hazel Ottershaw's head came up with a jerk. “What did it say?”

“You didn't know about it, then, Madam?”

“No … no, I didn't even know he'd rung them. Mind you, Inspector,” she recovered herself quickly and essayed a small smile, “I was pretty busy that morning what with the children and getting ready for the re-enactment. I might have been upstairs when Alan telephoned them.”

“So,” ventured Sloan carefully, “you didn't know what he had been going to say to them?”

“No …” she said more slowly. “I didn't.”

“And he didn't tell you afterwards that he had rung them?”

“No. No, he didn't. Not that there was a lot of time for chat that morning.” She looked at him anxiously. “Is it important, then?”

Sloan didn't give Hazel Ottershaw a direct answer. Instead he said, “It would appear from what was on the tape of the answering machine that the call to the Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company from your husband originated in a public telephone kiosk.”

That did startle Hazel Ottershaw.

“I didn't know about that … But … So …” She struggled for speech but gave up, and stiffened and sat up very straight indeed.

“So?” Detective Inspector Sloan hadn't needed a lecturer in psychology to teach him the technique known as repetitive listening. He had found out when he was still virtually a boy on the beat that the best way of getting anyone to go on talking was to repeat after them the last words that they had spoken themselves. This practice of echoing was even more effective in getting people to go on talking than encouraging nods or enthusiastic agreement.

It didn't work with Hazel Ottershaw. Not this time. She shook her head and said, “Nothing, Inspector. I wasn't going to say anything.”

“The Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company recorded the message,” said Sloan smoothly.

Hazel Ottershaw said nothing.

“And acted on it.”

“So?” she said interrogatively, running her tongue over lips that appeared now to be dry.

“So we would like you to confirm the voice on the message tape as being that of your husband.”

“I see.” She moistened her lips again. “Yes, of course. If it is,” she added.

“Naturally,” said Sloan. “Crosby, the tape-recorder, please.”

He watched the Detective Constable set up the machine, one half of his mind automatically registering Hazel Ottershaw's body language, the other half well back in his own life-time.

When he, Christopher Dennis Sloan, had been a callow youth he had got caught up with attending a Brains Trust at his mother's church. Only as a member of the audience, of course—public speaking was neither his forte nor his ambition. A kindly clergyman had found adult foils for those who did favour this form of Chinese torture and set the stage for the occasion.

He had also set the questions.

One—or, rather, its answer—had seared its way into Sloan's burgeoning adolescent consciousness.

If, the Chairman had asked his Panel, you could hear again any voice from the past, whose would it be?

Jesus Christ had been the first to be suggested, and William Shakespeare next.

The schoolmaster in the team had opted for the Greek Demosthenes. He would, wouldn't he, someone had muttered, even though a great orator was a logical choice in the circumstances.

The answer that had shaken a younger Sloan had come from the Mayor—the most self-confident and successful of all the Panel members: sixty if he was a day, and known throughout the town as a stern man of business. “My mother's,” the hard-bitten Mayor had mumbled in a low voice, his complexion going a dull turkey-cock red.

“Ready, sir,” murmured Crosby. “Shall I switch it on?”

“I'm sorry having to do this, Madam,” said Sloan.

Hazel Ottershaw's face took on a rigid expression from which all emotion had been expunged and as the cassette started to turn she braced her shoulders as if readying herself for a body blow.

Even Sloan had found it eerie listening to the voice of a man so recently dead. He knew that words spoken
in articulo mortis
—at the point of death—had a special significance in law. And in religion, too, come to that. They were deemed likely to be true because it was believed that the safety of a man's immortal soul overrode his fear of other men's justice.

But that proposition required that the dying man knew as he spoke the words that he was going to die.

Alan Ottershaw hadn't known on that Sunday morning when he telephoned the Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company that he would be dead by evening.

Not as far as Sloan knew anyway.

And yet Ottershaw had spoken them like a man condemned.

His voice had been flat and formal as he had left his message with his London office. Its import was simple. He had thought a lot about the man he had killed in the road accident in Lasserta and wanted to go back to Gatt-el-Abbas to face the music. He felt that this was the right and proper course of action on his part. He hadn't—and at this point a note of earnestness came into his voice—realised that coming home to try to evade Lassertan justice would lead to so many complications. He hoped that the firm would arrange his immediate return to the Sheikhdom whatever the consequences …

His widow was listening intently, sitting with her head bent forwards and downwards at an attentive angle which somehow contrived to obscure her face from the full view of the two policemen. Nothing, though, could hide her sagged shoulders or disguise the fine tremor present in her hands. Sloan had once read that the painter, Renoir, had always held that the hands revealed more of the person than the face and, policeman that he was, he kept his eye on Hazel Ottershaw's hands now. She, too, must have perceived the little shake there because she suddenly clenched them into tight fists that stayed still.

Crosby switched off the tape-recorder while Alan Ottershaw was still speaking. Sloan waited for her to say something. Hazel Ottershaw, though, her face drained and white, seemed to be having difficulty in formulating words. She visibly struggled for speech but no sound came and in the end she only nodded at him.

He still waited for what she had to say.

It seemed to the policeman to be important to know what it would be. Alan Ottershaw's widow had said that she hadn't known about the message on the tape and since it had been conveyed audibly on a public payphone that might well be true. Before she—or, indeed, Sloan—had known about the telephone call to the Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company she had insisted to him that her husband had come back from his talk with the Member of Parliament reassured.

And yet the Member of Parliament had told the two policemen that he had promised to do all he could to prevent Alan Ottershaw being sent back to Lasserta by his employers or extradited by the Lassertans to stand trial.

He had said that this had been what the mining engineer had wanted him to do, but urgently.

A Member of Parliament—no, two Members of Parliament—who seemed to be the targets for something sinister, too.

Her face still working, Hazel Ottershaw said painfully, “Yes, Inspector, that was Alan's voice.”

“Do you know what it was, madam, that made your husband decide to go back to Lasserta?” From where Sloan sat at the moment, that, whatever it was, had been an overnight conversion.

She obviously didn't trust herself to speak. She just shook her head.

Sloan still kept his eye on her face as he reached inside the wallet of papers which he had brought with him. He took out a photograph and handed it to Hazel Ottershaw, asking, “Do you recognise this man?”

“It's Hamer Morenci, Inspector.” Her voice was little more than a whisper. “He's the head of Alan's firm. He spoke at Alan's funeral.”

“We know about that,” said Sloan. “What we want to know is whether you saw him at Mellamby the day your husband died.”

“No,” she said at once. Then “Yes …” Her face crumpled. “Oh, I don't know …”

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