The Body Politic (7 page)

The Coroner brought the rise-and-fall electric fitment down as far as it would go, the better to concentrate its light on a sheet of paper in the middle of his blotting pad. “What I need to know, Inspector,” he said, “is whether this death has given rise to a reasonable doubt in your mind or anyone else's about the cause of death.”

“Yes,” said Sloan simply, adding, “although at this stage unfortunately we do not know whether or not the pellet had any bearing on the death.”

“Gunshot wound?” The Coroner was of a vintage to know what the letters “g.s.w.” stood for.

“Not exactly, sir, although it might have been shot with a gun.”

“Umbrella jab?” The Coroner was obviously more up to date than he seemed.

“Too soon to say.”

Mr. Locombe-Stapleford unscrewed the cap of an old-fashioned fountain pen. “Which is why you wish to—er—postpone the proposed inhumation of the ashes?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And why you wish me, Inspector, acting in my capacity as Coroner, to order an autopsy?”

“An examination of such remains as there are,” qualified Sloan.

“I see.” Mr. Locombe-Stapleford looked shrewdly at the policeman over the top of his glasses.

By nothing more than a whisker Sloan avoided a natural tendency to say “please” inculcated in him at a very early age by a mother who placed a high value on the word. Instead he waited in what he trusted was a courteous silence as the Coroner rumbled on.

“While you,” said Mr. Locombe-Stapleford, “investigate a death after a duly certified cremation has taken place.”

“Yes, sir,” said Sloan. Never apologise and never explain was what Benjamin Disraeli had advised. Prime Ministers, it seemed, were strong on advice.

“H'm.” Mr. Locombe-Stapleford's pen hovered over the sheet of paper on his blotting pad. “Give me the deceased's name and last-known address.”

“Alan John Ottershaw,” complied Detective Inspector Sloan, “of April Cottage, High Street, Mellamby, but he'd only just got home from abroad.”

He wished he hadn't mentioned the fact. If there was one matter on which all the coroners he had ever known were equally sensitive to, it was whether or not a body lay within their jurisdiction.

“Abroad?” barked the Coroner, immediately laying down his pen. His writ ran no further than halfway across the county of Calleshire.

“The Middle East,” Sloan answered him, equally unhappily. “The Sheikhdom of Lasserta, to be precise.”

Mr. Locombe-Stapleford frowned. “So this—er—pellet could have been—er—introduced into the body of this man while it was not in England?”

“Yes, sir,” said Sloan. As far as the Coroner was concerned the phrase “not in England” was probably the ultimate in every sense. In sentiment it might have come straight from John of Gaunt's “sceptr'd isle” speech. Or Robert Browning's “Oh, to be in England now that April's there.”

“Such a circumstance,” said Mr. David Locombe-Stapleford severely, “could make for difficulties.”

“Yes, sir,” said Sloan. “There is something else, too …”

“They look upon sudden death quite differently abroad,” the Coroner swept on.

That, thought Sloan to himself, was pure Kipling if anything was.

“Quite differently,” repeated the Coroner.

The lesser breeds without the law, was how that poet had put it: Sloan wondered if the Superintendent knew that.

“And hot countries have other customs, anyway,” said the Coroner unspecifically.

Sloan nodded, forbearing to mention sky burial.

“But not so many procedures,” said Mr. Locombe-Stapleford, reaching for another form with evident satisfaction.

“No, sir.” Sloan was with him there. Any country whose procedure for burial at sea required the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food to be notified under the Dumping at Sea Act 1974 was not short on attention to detail.

He ventured to say so to the Coroner: and regretted it immediately.

“That Act, Inspector,” came the precise response, “only applies within the three-mile territorial limit.”

Sloan might have known. It was the “not in England” syndrome all over again beyond those three important miles.

“The position outside territorial waters,” said the Coroner, “is less certain.”

The silver sea in which this sceptr'd isle was set, thought Sloan irreverently, wasn't entirely covered by the Dumping at Sea Act, then.

“But,” said the Coroner, “the Removal of Bodies Regulations 1954 probably apply.”

“No good dying on board ship, either, then, is it?” remarked Detective Constable Crosby cheerfully.

“Ah,” responded the Coroner alertly, “dying on board ship is, paradoxically, quite a different matter.”

Sloan waited.

“Then, the body can be disposed of as part of the normal working of the ship.”

“Well, I never!” said Detective Constable Crosby, while Sloan had almost come round to the view that there was something to be said for sky burial after all.

The Detective Inspector returned to the matter in hand. “As I was saying, sir, there is something else.”

“Well, Inspector, what is it?” The Coroner looked up, pushing the task light to one side.

“This pellet that has been found in the remains …”

“What about it?”

“It's made of queremitte.”

“Queremitte?” The Coroner's general knowledge wasn't as good as that of Superintendent Leeyes.

Detective Constable Crosby repeated, parrot-fashion, something he had only just learned. “Queremitte is a very hard metal which is the principal export of the Sheikhdom of Lasserta.”

SIX

When the Will Has Forgotten the Life-Long Aim

April Cottage was set in the middle of the High Street at Mellamby and was not far from the parish church of St. Martin's. It was Mellamby Motte, though, that still dominated the view. The de Caqueville family, the builders of the earliest castle at Mellamby, had chosen their site well, and its remains—only the original keep was standing now, the bailey having been spoiled long ago—caught the eye from all over the village of Mellamby.

On the working principle that time spent on reconnaissance was seldom wasted, Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby had had a word with the local village bobby before calling on Alan Ottershaw's widow.

“She's called Hazel,” said Police Constable Colin Turton, “and she's a local girl. Old Rebble, the vet's daughter, actually. She's got a by-name, too, in the village.”

Sloan leaned forward attentively. They had habitual criminals with nicknames which gave a clue to the characteristics of the person. Mrs. Gasmeter Bradley, for instance, specialised in just one thing.

Constable Turton frowned. “They call her ‘Hamamelis' or something like that.”

“Witch-hazel,” translated Detective Inspector Sloan, quondam gardener.

“Oh, I remember.” Constable Turton's face cleared. “The stuff they used to rub on bruises.” He hesitated. “Or was that arnica?”

Detective Constable Crosby wasn't interested in homely remedies. “What's she like?” he asked.

“Hazel Ottershaw?” Turton raised his eyebrows expressively. “Good-looking. Stylish, too. Mind you, there's never been any shortage of money in that outfit.”

“That helps,” said Crosby. “Great stuff, money.”

Sloan wasn't so sure about that, but this was no time for debate. “Go on.”

“As well,” Turton said, “as being married to a mining engineer who can't have been doing too badly, thank you, her father is the senior partner of the biggest veterinary practice in this part of the world.”

“Why,” asked Sloan, with an eye for essentials, “wasn't she out in Lasserta with her husband?”

“Couldn't stand the heat,” said the village policeman, “or so I hear. And then they had two babies in quick succession. I gather this place her husband was stationed at—Wadi something or other—was no place for small children.”

April Cottage, Mellamby, Calleshire, on the other hand, it presently transpired, was a good place for small children.

“My mother lives just up the road, you see,” explained Mrs. Hazel Ottershaw to the two detectives. She was indeed a good-looking girl, with as good a pair of ankles as Sloan had seen in many a long day and the fine, semi-translucent skin which usually went with freckles. “She's been a great help with Julian and Kate …” Her voice faltered. “I really don't know what I should have done without her.”

“No, madam. Quite so.”

“When you telephoned, Inspector, I asked her to come down so that there would be someone to look after them while you were here.” Her face clouded. “They don't understand, you see. They're too young, poor little lambs.”

“No, madam. Naturally they don't.” Detective Inspector Sloan was using this form of address advisedly, although Hazel Ottershaw couldn't have been all that far on in her twenties. In his view, grief and a decent formality went together: there was a certain dignity to be observed in proper mourning, and an instinctive unapproachability.

Hazel Ottershaw's responses were almost rigidly studied and polite, too. “I'm afraid they're not going to remember their father either, Inspector,” she said in a voice that was slightly shaky. “They're too young. It's very sad, isn't it?”

“Yes, madam.”

They had found Hazel Ottershaw sitting alone in a room with the blinds half down. Those shafts of sunlight that were streaming into April Cottage were full of dancing dust-motes and there was about the place the stillness and inanition that customarily follow a bereavement. Detective Constable Crosby hadn't liked the half-dark and had audibly stubbed his toe on a reproduction Pembroke table.

“What makes it worse, Inspector,” she continued, her tightly controlled speech beginning to relax a little, “is that Julian at least had got quite used to Alan coming and going.”

“Quite so, madam,” he said. Hazel Ottershaw was not to know that Detective Inspector Sloan welcomed her use of her husband's name as a good sign. Death, like birth, came to half a million homes a year in the United Kingdom. It was a statistic which often got forgotten, even by policemen, but reaction to the event did tend to follow a pattern and the ability of those to whom the deceased had been near and dear to refer to him or her by name was an important milestone in bereavement.

They were too late, all the same, noted the policeman in Sloan automatically, to observe a physical manifestation—the rocking motion of profound grief—which crossed every cultural barrier the world over.

Hazel Ottershaw visibly braced herself to look him full in the face and said starkly, “Only there isn't going to be any more coming ever again after this going, is there?”

“No, madam, I'm afraid not.”

“And the children aren't going to understand.”

“No.” Sloan's own responses were equally stark. It was part of his own personal credo that widows should be steered away from fools' paradises. “I trust, madam, that you won't have to move house or anything like that, will you?” If there was one thing in his experience that compounded the grief of the recently widowed it was moving house while still in a state of shock.

“No,” she shook her head quickly. “That's one great blessing, I can see that, and I'm very thankful. April Cottage is ours—I mean, mine. It was a wedding present from my father. His assistant vets always used to live here until Alan and I got married. Now, they have to find lodgings——” She turned her head sharply as an older woman came through the door. “Ah, Inspector, this is my mother.”

Mrs. Rebble was a plump, comfortable-looking woman. She was carrying one child in her arms as she came into the room and had another clutching at her skirt. She also appeared to be accomplishing the difficult double-act required of those close to the recently bereaved of both sharing their distress and being practical too. She pointed to the half-drawn curtains. “Darling, do you think we could have just a little more light? The poor gentlemen won't be able to see what they're writing.”

“Thank you,” said Sloan politely.

Detective Constable Crosby, whose big toe was still hurting after its encounter with the table, regrettably saw fit to say under his breath, “She should have the light so she can see to tell the truth.”

Sloan, promising himself that he would deal with Crosby later, hoped that neither Hazel Ottershaw nor her mother had heard him.

“Stay with Mummy, darlings,” Mrs. Rebble said to the children, “while Granny brings in some tea.”

Detective Constable Crosby almost fell over himself in being helpful with the tea-tray. Whatever strange ambition had drawn him into the police force, it wasn't to run the risk of being a child-minder.

“Julian has been as good as gold in the kitchen,” remarked Mrs. Rebble, returning with a large pot of tea. Crosby followed with a jug of hot water like a vice-regal train bearer. “He's been playing with some Plasticine.”

Sloan, who would never be able to equate goodness with Plasticine, accepted a cup of tea and came back to the matter in hand. “As I explained on the telephone, madam,” he said to Hazel Ottershaw, “we're just checking up on your husband's sudden death.”

“Because he'd been abroad such a lot?” she asked.

“In a way,” said Sloan evasively. “Can you tell me anything about his last visit home?”

“I wasn't expecting him,” said Hazel Ottershaw, releasing her hold on her small son. “He arrived home quite out of the blue late on the Friday night by the last train. He told me he'd only just caught that by the skin of his teeth and hadn't had time to ring me or anything like that.”

“He wasn't due back?”

She shook her head. “Not for ages.”