The Body Politic (10 page)

“We're just checking up on a number of matters generally, sir.” Sloan was evasive.

“This and that,” put in Detective Constable Crosby antiphonally.

“Ottershaw'd been out of the country a lot, of course,” said the owner of Mellamby Place. “Doesn't do the heart a lot of good.” Through the centuries younger sons of the House of Rauly had come to grief in all manner of hostile climes.

“No, sir.” Sloan turned over a page in his notebook. “If you could just tell me a little more about the—er—re-enactment, that would be a great help.”

“It was one of our better efforts, Inspector,” replied Bertram Rauly frankly. “The last battle the Camulos Society did before that was Waterloo and it turned out to be nearly as big a shambles as the real thing. So you will understand that this time the Committee was pretty determined to keep a tight hold on everything.”

“Quite so, sir,” said Sloan, wondering what Detective Constable Crosby was making of all this. “Tell me, sir, exactly what sort of fighting did you all go in for at the Battle of Lewes?”

Rauly waved a hand. “Mostly hand-to-hand stuff. Swords and so forth but for the actual killing——”

“Actual killing?” queried Sloan sharply.

“Within the context of the re-enactment,” said Rauly, grinning. “We use a sort of crossbow with a special bolt of plastic material instead of an arrow.”

“I should hope so, too,” interposed Detective Constable Crosby in a sudden burst of rectitude.

The corner of Rauly's lip came down in a macabre twist. “Not as exciting as the real thing, of course, but I daresay you're both too young to remember that.”

“This plastic bolt …” said Sloan touchily. The unspoken quotation, “Go hang yourself, Crito. We fought at Arques and you were not there,” really struck home as far as Sloan was concerned.

“Inside it,” said Rauly, “is some red dye. If that hits you, it's touché.”

“Touché?” echoed the Constable, puzzled.

“It means you're dead,” said Detective Inspector Sloan irritably. “And out of the game.” Of all the games people played, he wasn't sure if this wasn't the silliest. He'd been finished with this sort of activity by the time he was twelve.

“Like Cowboys and Indians,” said Crosby intelligently, “with knobs on.”

“Exactly like Cowboys and Indians,” agreed Bertram Rauly. “The extra ingredient as far as the Camulos Society is concerned is verisimilitude.”

Sloan pushed his notebook into visual prominence. “I think it might be helpful if we knew who was—er—playing whom.” The emphasis as far as he was concerned was on the word “playing.” If he, Sloan, had a free Sunday morning in the summer time he spent it like most normal men did. Cutting the grass.

“Major Puiver, the Battle Commander, will be able to give you the full list, gentlemen, but as far as I remember Simon de Montfort was the Member of Parliament's Party Agent—a young fellow called Chadwick. David Chadwick. And the Curate was Gilbert de Clare. He was a bit of a wet.”

It was quite impossible to tell whether Rauly meant the Curate or Gilbert de Clare.

“The King and Queen were Adrian Dungey—he's a vet in Rebble's practice, I always have him for the dogs—and Hazel Ottershaw.” He screwed up his face. “I must say the outfit suited her very well. There's something distinctly flattering about a coif. Pity they went out of fashion. And then there was the Lord Edward.”

“Who was he?”

“Henry III's son,” said Rauly. “He was Edward I afterwards. You probably remember him as the Hammer of the Scots.”

“And who played his part?” enquired Sloan.

“The Vicar's son—Michael Saunders. Then”—he grimaced—“there was Miss Mildred Finch, who wanted to be Fair Rosamund or Agnes Sorrel or someone equally unsuitable, but the period was wrong and I don't know what she did in the end. The costumes, I think.”

Sloan made a note. A pellet might have made a hole in a costume.

“Miss Finch?” he said.

“A retired schoolteacher of an interfering disposition,” said Rauly. “Lives down by the church.”

Sloan made another note.

Rauly said, “It was because of the Agent—David Chadwick—that we happened to have the Member with us on the Sunday as well as the Saturday.”

“Don't tell me he got dressed up, too.” Sloan had never seen Peter Corbishley other than properly clad for a public appearance.

Rauly shook his head. “Not he. No, he came out again because of Simon de Montfort.”

“David Chadwick?” said Sloan, thoroughly confused.

“No, the real Simon de Montfort. He was the man who—so to speak—started Parliamentary government.”

“Did he?” said Sloan.

“Got a lot to answer for, hasn't he, Inspector?” Rauly was grinning again.

“The Member, then,” hazarded Sloan, “was there to make a speech?”

“At the end of the day,” assented Rauly gravely. “He spoke about the Battle of Lewes and the Provisions at Oxford and the first recorded Parliament. Two burgesses from every shire or something like that.”

“Bully for him,” said Detective Constable Crosby. He'd been on duty once at a rural polling station on voting day and had been bored beyond belief.

“So,” said Sloan, unsure whether Crosby had meant Simon de Montfort or Peter Corbishley, “you had your battle all right, sir.”

“We did, indeed, Inspector,” said Bertram Rauly, “but if anyone had been going to die afterwards I would have thought it would have been the Member rather than Alan Ottershaw.”

Sloan lifted an enquiring eyebrow.

“There was someone who was present at the re-enactment dressed as the Figure of Death. You know the sort of thing, Inspector.”

“I can't say that I do, sir.”

“Someone covered from head to foot in black with a skeleton painted on the outside in white.”

“Very realistic, sir, I'm sure.”

“He seemed to me to be stalking Corbishley. David Chadwick, his Agent——”

“Simon de Montfort.”

“—he noticed it, too, and got quite worried. Everywhere the Member went Death went too.”

“There must be a moral there somewhere, sir,” said Sloan lightly. If Crosby started to say anything about Mary and her little lamb he'd slay him then and there.

“That's just it, Inspector. Death turns up in a lot of early medieval literature. Take
Everyman
for instance.”

“I daresay he gets all the best lines, as well, sir.”

“What's that? Oh, yes, I'm sure he does.” Bertram Rauly acknowledged this politely. “It wasn't that. No, the funny thing was that we didn't know who he was. Nobody knew.”

“Nobody?”

“Not even the Battle Commander,” said the owner of Mellamby Place. “Derrick Puiver hadn't got Death on his list of combatants at all. He didn't even know whose side he was on or how he came to be there in the first place. Odd, wasn't it?”

EIGHT

And a Man Is Uncertain of His Own Name

“Death!” thundered Police Superintendent Leeyes across his desk at Berebury Police Station. “What do you mean, Sloan, that someone was playing Death at Mellamby?”

“In costume, sir, at the re-enactment.” The Detective Inspector had added the information to his report on his visit to Mellamby Place.

“Do you mean to stand there, Sloan,” demanded Leeyes, “and tell me that the deceased had been playing Cowboys and Indians the day he was taken ill?”

“Soldiers, sir,” said Sloan, clearing his throat. “Not Cowboys and Indians.”

“Comes to the same thing,” snapped the Superintendent. “Whatever they were playing at over at Mellamby they were old enough to know better. Death, indeed! Whatever next?”

Sloan himself knew better than to argue. “Yes, sir.”

“With guns, you said,” continued Leeyes with manifest disapprobation.

“After a fashion,” agreed Sloan uneasily.

“What does that mean?”

“The Committee of the Camulos Society sanctioned two sorts of weapons for the Battle of Lewes.”

“Stone the crows, Sloan,” exploded Leeyes. “Who do they think they are? A bench of licensing magistrates?”

“Swords,” persisted Sloan, “and crossbows.”

“Oughtn't to be allowed,” grumbled Leeyes. “Dangerous implements, that's what they are. Both of 'em.”

“You don't need a licence for either,” Sloan pointed out pertinently.

“Well you should,” declared Leeyes, “and for everything else you can hit a policeman with—let alone a rabbit.”

Detective Inspector Sloan, veteran himself of several confrontations with angry young men, said a silent “Amen” to that, and continued aloud: “I don't know yet, sir, if a crossbow was dangerous to Alan Ottershaw or not.”

Leeyes grunted.

“It is known, sir, that he had a sword-fight with another—er—member of the cast called Dungey, Adrian Dungey. He's one of his father-in-law's junior partners.”

Superintendent Leeyes snorted aloud.

“But,” finished Sloan, “a queremitte pellet couldn't have come from a sword-fight.”

Leeyes sniffed. “Are you trying to tell me, Sloan, and not very clearly I may say, that it could have got into the deceased from a crossbow?”

“I'm seeing the Battle Commander as soon as I can get hold of him,” responded Sloan obliquely.

“Battle Commander?” Superintendent Leeyes' bushy eyebrows shot up. “It's worse than model railways, and they're bad enough.”

“Enthusiasts,” said Sloan. “That's all that they are, sir.”

“So are quite a lot of law-breakers,” retorted Leeyes swiftly. “You name it, Sloan, and we've got enthusiasts for it on our books—from speeding to little girls.”

“Quite so, sir.” Now he came to think of it, he, Sloan, was something of an enthusiast himself when he had the time. For growing roses.

“To say nothing of those who go in for art for art's sake.”

“Sir?” Sloan's puzzlement was genuine.

“Forgers and fraud merchants.”

“I gather,” said Sloan, coming back to the point with the tenacity of a Robert the Bruce, “that the Battle Commander of the Camulos Society is a cross between an organiser and a referee.”

Leeyes grunted. “And he's going to be persuaded to show you a crossbow, is he?” He leaned across his desk. “Tell me, Sloan, what do the Camulos Society use for ammunition when they're not shooting queremitte pellets at each other—if they were, of course?”

“Red dye,” said Sloan, “contained in plastic balls which burst on impact.”

“I see,” said Leeyes. “Dye and you're dead.” He seemed pleased with the witticism and added, “Do they get a lot of men who are dead but won't lie down or are they all on the Berebury Town Watch Committee?”

“I think the Camulos Society would regard that as cheating,” said Sloan, into whose mind had floated a couple of lines of verse which had struck a chord in his schoolboy consciousness and had remained in his memory ever since:

I'll lay me down and bleed awhile

And then I'll rise and fight again.

He'd taken a lot of persuading by the English teacher that that wasn't a heroic couplet.

“What we used to say in our street when I was a lad was ‘Bang, bang, you're dead,'” observed Superintendent Leeyes unexpectedly.

“Indeed, sir?” Sloan noted the remark for passing on to his friend, Inspector Harpe, the Traffic Inspector, the next time they met in the canteen. There was considerable speculation at Berebury Police Station about whether Superintendent Leeyes had ever been young.

“What about the widow, Sloan?” his superior officer was saying now.

“We've seen her, sir.”

“I didn't mean to look at,” said Leeyes impatiently. “I meant did she stand to gain or lose by her husband's dying?”

Sloan coughed. “I hadn't thought about that yet, sir. It's what you might call early days yet. All we've got so far is a hollow pellet.”

“You should always think about that, Sloan. Always.” The Superintendent had a Dickensian view of widows.

“Yes, sir.”

“Well?”

“From what Constable Turton was telling us Hazel Ottershaw has never had to want anyway, being the vet's daughter.”

“These big companies usually look after their own people quite well, too.” Leeyes shrugged. “And nobody can say that the Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company isn't big.”

“After what the Member of Parliament said,” added Sloan, “I'm arranging to see them as soon as I can.”

“By the way, Sloan, while you're out and about there's something else you can do.”

“Sir?” He hadn't even had time to look into the possible sugging in the shopping parade yet.

“It's the Member of Parliament for the West Division.”

“Ted Sheard?” Detective Inspector Sloan turned over a new page in his notebook and waited.

Superintendent Leeyes picked up a message flimsy from his desk. “He's been having death threats through the post. Or so he says.”

“Were they signed?” enquired Sloan.

“That's for you to find out,” said the Superintendent, “but one thing is quite certain, Sloan, and that's that they've been posted here in Berebury.”

To some people the twin professions of veterinary science and human medicine would seem to have everything in common, and at first glance this thought would pass muster. Indeed, disaffected patients of busy medical practitioners were wont to declare that their pets were treated by the vet with a care and consideration apparently well beyond the call of medical duty.

And worried farmers sometimes brooded on the fact that at least medical and surgical and hospital treatment for themselves and their families was free at what was the time of need for the patient and the point of sale for the veterinarian. Some of them were not above soliciting the opinion of the doctor on an ailing animal if he were at the farm visiting an ailing relative.