The Body Politic (19 page)

For Even the Purest Delight May Pall

“Yes,” said Adrian Dungey much more positively.

At least the next person to look at the same picture appeared to know his own mind.

Which Hazel Ottershaw hadn't.

“Yes, Inspector,” repeated the young veterinarian. “I'm almost sure I saw the man in this photograph here in Mellamby on the day of the battle and I'll tell you why.”

Detective Inspector Sloan looked at him encouragingly. Touches of corroborative detail were always welcome additions to any statement given in a police context.

“Because,” said Dungey, “when the Chairman of Anglo-Lassertan got up to speak at poor old Alan's funeral, I had a definite feeling that I'd seen his face before somewhere but at the time I couldn't think where.” He tapped the photograph of Hamer Morenci. “And this explains it. It must have been at the Battle of Lewes.”

“Can you remember, sir, exactly where you might have seen him on the day of the re-enactment?” A certain obstinate refusal to be party to the play-acting of the Camulos Society prevented Sloan from using the word “battlefield.” “It might help us if you could.”

The two policemen were sitting in the veterinary surgeon's consulting room whither they had been ushered after a brief delay in the waiting room. The vet's receptionist had slipped them in ahead of an Alsatian dog with a sore paw and after a tortoiseshell Persian cat whose problems were not apparent to a lay observer.

The veterinary practice kept some budgerigars in a bird cage in the waiting room to distract unwell cats, presumably on the same principle that Sloan's dentist had a goldfish tank in his waiting room to occupy the attention of his anxious patients. The Alsatian dog had taken a keen interest in the Persian cat, the cat had watched the budgerigars, and Sloan had run his eye over his notes. There had been nothing but old magazines to amuse Detective Constable Crosby, which was a pity because he was easily bored.

Adrian Dungey shook his head at Sloan's question. “Sorry, Inspector, I'm not sure that I can. You've got to remember that it was a real mêlée that day from the middle of the morning onwards—from the moment when church came out until the end of the afternoon.”

“So we understand,” said Sloan neutrally. Going to church before a battle was a very old tradition indeed. He remembered that somewhere in Sir Thomas Malory's
Morte d'Arthur
a knight—was it the great and good Sir Lancelot himself?—had actually kept vigil there the night before a conflict. He gave himself a little mental shake: he must remember that his job was usually with the small and the bad. “Go on,” he said.

“It was bound to be a bit of a muddle,” Dungey responded, “seeing that it was a cross between a pageant and a beanfeast.” He jerked his head.

“To say nothing of all and sundry being welcome to come and watch—old Bertram Rauly's nothing if not generous.”

“Something for everyone, you might say,” observed Sloan.

“Even Hamer Morenci,” added Crosby.

“I suppose,” said Dungey, frowning, “that his boss might have come down to Mellamby to see Alan about work. After all, he was the head of his firm and there did seem to have been something very odd indeed about Alan's coming home so suddenly.”

“Indeed, sir?” Detective Inspector Sloan's intonation was at its silkiest.

“I didn't get to talk to him about it myself, Inspector. No time. Besides, he might not have told me. None of my business anyway, of course.”

“Ah.”

“Hazel might know.”

“I'm told,” ventured Sloan, “that you had something of a fight with the—er—deceased yourself.”

Adrian Dungey's face lit up. “I'll say, Inspector! Alan was in magnificent form then. I had to watch my footwork, I can tell you …” His eagerness crumpled away. “The doctors thought he might have overdone it, you know.”

Sloan nodded.

“The fighting coming on top of the jet-lag.” He essayed a weak smile. “A bit like poor old King Harold force-marching it to Hastings to meet William the Conqueror straight after coping with Harold Hardrada and Tostig at Stamford Bridge.”

“Just so,” murmured Sloan. No one could say Adrian Dungey wasn't as far into war games as Bertram Rauly and the little Major.

“To say nothing of the change in temperature.”

“Very taxing, I'm sure, sir.” Sloan decided the vet was talking about England and Lasserta now and not Stamford Bridge and Hastings: and Crosby did not appear to care.

“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?”