The Body Politic (6 page)

And to have a scapegoat handy if things did not work out well.

Malcolm Forfar sank the lime-juice drink without relish and said, “Do you know what I was supposed to do the minute we got to the Sheikh's deadline for Ottershaw's return?”

“Tell me,” said Anthony Heber Hibbs, who had already heard the answer to this from sources euphemistically referred to as “close to Whitehall.”

“Suspend production!” Forfar snorted, losing the panloaf Scots he usually spoke. “I ask ye, man! What guid in the world would suspending production do?”

“In itself, nothing,” said the Ambassador. “As a gesture, I suspect quite a lot.”

In the diplomatic world gestures had almost as great a significance as in the anthropological one. They had, it transpired, none at all in the engineering field.

“Cutting off your nose to spite your face, if you ask me,” declared Forfar. “That's all that is. I can tell you, foregoing output never did a company any good.” He paused and added, “Unless you're in diamonds, of course.”

Neither, thought Heber Hibbs, did disagreeing with your ground landlord, but he did not say so. “Tell me,” he said instead, “is suspending production technically very difficult?”

“Well, no,” said Forfar grudgingly. “We have to do it from time to time anyway to check our shafts and lifting gear and so forth, but it's not good practice to do it when you don't have to. We work to some pretty tight schedules for some of our customers, I can tell you.”

That the main purchaser of the ore containing queremitte mined by the Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company was the Ministry of Defence Procurement was left unsaid by both men.

“This accident in which Ottershaw was involved,” began Heber Hibbs again after a suitable interval.

“What about it?”

“I suppose you're sure it was an accident?” The Ambassador introduced a new train of thought at exactly the right moment, casually posing a question that had been put to him rather more urgently by Whitehall. And in code, too.

The engineer frowned. “You're not the only person who wants to know that.”

“No?”

The engineer frowned. “For starters I've had the Defence Procurement people sniffing round asking the same question.”

The Ambassador hadn't known that. “And?” he asked, since hors d'oeuvres was usually followed by a main course, “who else?”

“It was the first thing my firm wondered, too.” Malcolm Forfar added with the supreme indifference of the engineer to wider affairs, “They've got a Parliamentary Select Committee on their tails. Did you know that?”

“Once they get going,” said Heber Hibbs profoundly, “select committees sit on everyone's tails.”

“They don't like the cost of queremitte,” said Forfar simply.

“No. I can see that they might not.” He reached for Forfar's empty glass. “Tell me, what did happen?”

Forfar shrugged his shoulders. “All I can tell you is what Ottershaw told me. He said that he was driving down towards the market here in Gatt-el-Abbas when this Lassertan fellow just stepped out in front of his car. Came out from behind a parked lorry without looking was what Ottershaw told me. Anyway,” carried on Forfar, waving away the suggestion of another Roman drink, “he didn't have any warning or time to stop or anything. First thing Alan knew about it was this chap's head hitting his windscreen. He never had a chance.”

“That,” remarked the Ambassador drily, “would seem to have gone for both of them.”

“You know what these Lassertans are like,” said Malcolm Forfar. “They've got about as much road sense as hedgehogs.”

Her Britannic Majesty's Ambassador concurred with a nod. The motor car had come late to Lasserta and then the Sheikhdom's road-traffic accident statistics demonstrated a touching faith in an after-life. “What we don't know, Forfar,” he said, “and what we may never know is something important about the victim.”

The mine manager looked up.

“Did he fall,” said Heber Hibbs slowly, “or was he pushed?”

FIVE

And Pain Has Exhausted Every Limb

There might have been no post-mortem examination of the body of the late Alan John Ottershaw: there certainly was one on the Camulos Society's portrayal of the Battle of Lewes. The Committee met in full session as soon as Alan Ottershaw's death and funeral were beginning to recede in public memory. The Secretary had just managed not to refer to a death in action when making his report—but it had been a near thing.

“Sorry I'm late,” said Adrian Dungey, the veterinary surgeon, sliding into his seat after the Committee meeting had started. “I had an emergency call to Toad Hall.”

“Batrachomyomachy broken out?” suggested Bertram Rauly.

“That sounds nasty,” said a Committee man.

“Is it infectious?” asked somebody else. “Like foot and mouth?”

Adrian Dungey gave a light laugh. “Nothing like that I'm happy to say. Batrachomyomachy was a battle between frogs and mice, wasn't it, sir?”

Bertram Rauly nodded. “It's one of those things that the Greeks had a word for.”

“Would the battle do for the Camulos Society?” asked the Secretary. “Not that we're short of ideas,” he added hastily.

“We wouldn't need an armourer, Adrian, for a battle between frogs and mice, would we?” said the Treasurer. Adrian Dungey, good with his hands, acted as the Society's armourer at battles calling for metal weaponry. “I'm afraid I haven't had the benefit of a classical education, you see.”

The young man smiled. “I daresay toothpicks would do. Shall we call the Frog general Jeremy Fisher?”

“As long as you don't call him Pétain,” growled Bertram Rauly, who had escaped from the beaches of Dunkirk by the skin of his teeth.

“And the Mouse one Field Marshal Michael …”

“Before we get on to our next battle,” said the Chairman importantly, “there are one or two little matters arising out of the last one to be cleared up.”

It was some little time before these were disposed of and the Secretary could move on to the correspondence.

“I've had a letter,” he announced, “from the University of Calleshire—well, from an undergraduate there, actually. His name is Richard Godstone and he's at Almstone College at the University.” The Secretary waved the sheet of paper in his hand at the Committee members. “It says here that he and his friends want to know if the Camulos Society would consider having a re-enactment of Guy Fawkes attempting to blow up the Houses of Parliament.”

“No battle there,” objected a purist.

“Somebody shopped him, didn't they?” said another member immediately. “Lost their nerve at the last minute and turned him in.”

“Not a lot of action in either case, was there?” objected the Treasurer, dismissing thus one of the most fraught periods of English history.

“A late autumn meeting would be quite an idea, though,” mused the Secretary. “And a bonfire for the children.”

“The bonfire,” pointed out Bertram Rauly astringently, “was for Parliament.”

“And fireworks,” said the Secretary. His two sons liked fireworks.

Major Puiver's response was even more pertinent. “What's in it for them? The students, I mean.”

“There's no such thing as a free lunch,” concurred the Chairman sagely.

The Secretary turned the page over. “They say they're making a study of Parliament and some of its members.”

“So did Guy Fawkes,” said Adrian Dungey, “didn't he?”

“And they would like to participate in a full-scale and historically accurate reconstruction of the episode.”

“Episode!” snorted the Major. “That's a fine way of describing one of the——”

“They tortured Guy Fawkes, didn't they?” intervened the purist with all the detachment that some three hundred years and more could bring.

“If they're looking for old cellars,” drawled Rauly, “and I daresay they are, they can use the old Motte.”

“Provided they don't blow it up, of course,” added the Treasurer. Getting insurance cover for the Camulos Society had not been easy.

“Or knock it down,” said Adrian Dungey. “Did you hear about the piece of stone that came down during the re-enactment? It just missed the Member.”

“That's being looked into,” replied Bertram Rauly rather shortly. “By the way, was anything unusual found on the field of battle afterwards?”

“How unusual?” enquired the Chairman. “Somebody left a crossbow out in the long grass.”

“Chicken-bones,” said Rauly unexpectedly.

“But, Bertram, we had pheasant for luncheon.”

“Exactly.”

Her Majesty's Coroner for East Calleshire, Mr. David Locombe-Stapleford, was a solicitor in late middle-age to whom the epithet “crusty” might truly be applied.

He was almost archetypal in appearance and in manner, having inherited both the appointment to the office of Coroner and a long-established legal practice in the town of Berebury from his father. The archaic electrical fittings in his office in the town stemmed from Mr. Locombe-Stapleford's grandfather's time, but the roll-top desk and the chairs into which he waved Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby were from an earlier epoch still.

The Coroner was an autocrat of the old school and was afraid of nothing and nobody. Except, it presently transpired, of creating a precedent.

“If I understand you correctly, Inspector,” he said, adjusting his glasses, “you are asking me to enquire into some ashes.”

“That is so, sir.” Sloan hadn't sat on a black horse-hair chair for a long time and was surprised all over again at how uncomfortable he found it.

“It is a misdemeanour,” said the old solicitor sternly, “to prevent the holding of an inquest, which ought to be held, by disposing of the body.
Price,
Queen's Bench Division, 1884.”

“Yes, sir. Quite so.” Detective Inspector Sloan wasn't really concerned about simple misdemeanours. He had something quite different in mind. “It isn't exactly——”

“And, in any case, Inspector, a body is no longer a
sine qua non
for an inquest.”

“No,” agreed Sloan hastily, before the Coroner started rummaging about in his memory for when that had become the rule.

“A presumption,” he continued frostily, “that there has been a body is quite sufficient for the law to act.”

“Yes, sir, I am aware of——”

“There is, in any case, often evidence that a body has existed,” rumbled on the Coroner, “which may not now be present.”

Detective Constable Crosby, who didn't like flying, said unexpectedly, “A name on a passenger list.”

Sloan hadn't even realised that the Detective Constable had been listening: he didn't usually.

“After one of the atomic bombs had exploded, gentlemen, there was just a shadow of a man on the ground where he had been standing.” Mr. David Locombe-Stapleford had never entered an aircraft and had no intention of doing so, but he was accustomed to keeping ahead of detective constables.

“The Turin Shroud,” contributed Detective Inspector Sloan, whose mother was a great churchwoman.

“The Motorway Man.” Mr. Locombe-Stapleford could cap detective inspectors, too, with ease. “No doubt you remember the case, Inspector? My confrère over at Luston only had a hole to go on.”

“A man-shaped and a man-sized hole,” responded Sloan, a trifle stiffly. His own opposite number in the Luston Division had come in for a good deal of ribbing about the Motorway Man. It had taken a lot of valuable police time and energy to consign Luston's Motorway Man into the same generic category, so to speak, as the Piltdown one.

“A hoax, nevertheless,” said the Coroner severely, “perpetrated by those who ought to have known better.”

“They made a mould which disintegrated without trace after the concrete was set, didn't they?” said Detective Constable Crosby chattily, his wayward interest momentarily diverted by the sight of Mr. Locombe-Stapleford pulling down an antiquated electric light with a green glass shade. It worked from a white porcelain pulley and counterweight suspended from the ceiling. And it resembled nothing so much as an artifact in the office of a sheriff in a Spaghetti Western.

“So, Inspector,” said the Coroner, centering the lamp over his desk, “you are inviting me to enquire into some ashes, or, rather, the death to which they relate?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you wish to prevent their return to the deceased's relatives?”

“Not so much prevent,” said Sloan cautiously, “as delay.”

“Interfere with their disposition, then,” amended the solicitor. “I take it that what you want is to obstruct the crematorium authorities' normal procedure?”

“I have reason to believe, sir, that the death certification in this case might not have been totally accurate.”

“I am reliably informed, Inspector,” Mr. Locombe-Stapleford said with some acidity, “that the same thing might be said of approximately half of all cases where the cause of death is based on clinical information alone——”

Detective Constable Crosby leaned forward with interest. “How do they kn——”

“—where there has subsequently been a post-mortem examination,” finished the Coroner triumphantly.

“There wasn't an autopsy in this case,” said Detective Inspector Sloan with commendable restraint. “I understand that the certifying doctors were satisfied that the deceased died from heart failure.”

“At least,” sniffed Mr. Locombe-Stapleford, “they don't appear to have belonged to the ‘give it a long name and nobody will ask any questions' school of medicine, do they, Inspector?”

“I couldn't say, sir, I'm sure,” said Sloan austerely. “All I can say is that I am advised by the Regional Forensic Science Laboratory that a metal pellet said to have been found in the deceased's ashes at cremation was of recent manufacture and had not been in the body long enough for oxidisation to have taken place.”