A Dead Liberty (15 page)

“Well, there was one of those posters stuck on a wall there about giving up nuclear arms and advertising a protest march.”

“They were all over the place,” agreed Sloan.

“Lucy said that it was legs they should give up as well.”

“That's what I wanted to know, madam,” Sloan cleared his throat. It told him in a sentence that Lucy Durmast was no anti-nuclear zealot. “You wouldn't happen to know if the deceased—Kenneth Carline, I mean—held strong views on unilateral disarmament, would you?”

Cecelia Allsworthy shook her head again as she settled one of her young sons beside his brother in a play-pen. “No, although I can't honestly say that I really knew what Kenneth's own opinion was about anything. He didn't go around saying what he thought about things anyway.” She gave a quick shrug. “You don't, do you, in your first job? It's too important, isn't it, to begin with, for free speech.”

That aspect of employment hadn't occurred to Sloan. It was different in the police force anyway. You weren't there to have views. Just to uphold the right of everyone else to express theirs, which was different.

“Besides,” continued Mrs. Allsworthy, “Kenneth Carline didn't join the firm until after the tunnel was well under way. He took over from a man who was killed in a road accident in Yorkshire.”

“Did he?” said Sloan. Durmast's had been unlucky in their design engineers. To lose one parent, so to speak, might be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

“Anyway,” swept on Cecelia Allsworthy realistically, “Lucy knew far too well how much the Palshaw Tunnel meant to her father and to Durmast's for her to start getting caught up with the Marby nuclear protesters. And so, I should have thought, did Kenneth Carline.”

“I can see that it meant a good deal,” murmured Sloan. What he couldn't for the life of him see was what any of it had to do with one very junior civil engineer dying after a meal with the boss's daughter.

“I'll never forget the party they had when the pilot tunnels met halfway,” said Cecelia Allsworthy, picking off a stray piece of ball clay from her arm. “It was just after I married and came here and everyone was so excited. Do you know that when the two ends of the tunnel met in the middle they were only a few inches out?”

“Really?” Civil engineering was a closed book to the policeman but that opposite ends of tunnels and bridges should meet as planned was something that Sloan had always found impressive too.

“It is particularly important,” said Lucy Durmast's friend, “when it's a sub-aqueous excavation.”

“I can see that,” said Sloan gravely.

“Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink,” remarked Crosby insouciantly. “If they don't meet, that is.”

“Lucy said it was the equivalent of topping out in the building trade,” went on Cecelia, “and that there should be a celebration. They were ahead of schedule, too—Ronald Bolsover was still at his place in Provence when it happened. He wasn't even due back for another week, which shows how far on they were. They actually finished on time, too.”

That, thought Sloan, was pretty nearly as impressive these days as meeting in the middle without mishap. “Everyone must have been very pleased,” he murmured, wondering what it all had to do with the job in hand. His job, that is, as head of Berebury's Criminal Investigation Department.

“Anyway, as soon as the Edsway end had met the Palshaw end, Lucy's father started going off to Africa.” Cecelia Allsworthy leant over the play-pen and separated two little boys who might have been physical twins but who certainly weren't spiritual ones. “Bill said his part in the tunnel was as good as done and he could safely leave the rest to everyone else—and to the tunnel-boring machine, of course.”

Detective Inspector Sloan nodded his comprehension.

“Except”—she gave another of her quick smiles—“that Bill always called it the boring tunnel machine.”

Sloan knew other people like Bill Durmast who flourished only on challenge and constant change, and who fled routine as the Devil incarnate.

“He was off to Africa as soon as you could say ‘knife' after that,” said Cecelia.

That brought Sloan to something else. He asked her if she knew Prince Aturu of Dlasa.

“No, Inspector.” She shook her head. “None of the people to do with the Mgongwala contract have been to England at all. Lucy told me that. That's why her father had to be away so much.”

Sloan explained that Prince Aturu had been in England as a post-graduate student but that he had suddenly left the University of Calleshire without anyone knowing why.

“Perhaps he was homesick,” she suggested. “Hortense is suffering dreadfully from homesickness. She's simply living for the day when she can get back to St. Amand-sur-Nesque.”

“Prince Aturu was violently opposed to the building of Mgongwala,” Sloan informed her. To his mind and from what he had heard, the Prince was more likely to have been sick of home rather than the other way round.

“Perhaps the climate had something to do with it,” said Mrs. Allsworthy. “Poor Hortense just can't get used to Calleshire in the spring after being brought up in the South of France.” She grinned. “I've even asked Ronald Bolsover if she could go over and sit in his hot-house on her day off. Not like Bill Durmast. He loves the heat of Africa.”

“He was there though, wasn't he, for the official opening?” asked Sloan.

“Oh yes.” She nodded and added solemnly, “Lucy and I decided that that was a rite of passage.”

“Very good,” acknowledged Sloan. All policemen had some sociology thrust down their throats these days, whether they liked it or not.

“And Lucy and I went up to London to choose her outfit.” Cecelia Allsworthy, who had a casual elegance all her own, said earnestly, “The Lord Lieutenant's wife always dresses so well and the Minister's wife was coming too, you see. Lucy didn't want to let her father down.”

“You've got to keep your end up at an opening ceremony,” agreed Sloan. Keeping the flag flying in Court and in Her Majesty's Prison Cottingham Grange wouldn't be quite so easy but all the evidence pointed to Lucy Durmast doing her best then and now.

“Mrs. Othen—she's the County Surveyor's wife—was in mink,” recounted Cecelia Allsworthy. “That upset some of the nuclear protesters too. Lucy told me she heard one of them shout ‘Fur coats are beautiful on animals but ugly on people.'”

“Rites of passage are always a strain,” said Sloan solemnly. The sociologists had taught that, too. The fur lobby was something else …

“This one certainly was from all that I heard about it,” said Cecelia. “Mrs. Clopton—Clopton's were the contractors—had gone overboard a bit in pink.”

“Not an easy colour,” agreed Sloan. His wife, Margaret, had long ago averred that no woman over thirty could ever look really smart in pink.

“Especially in winter,” put in Detective Constable Crosby unexpectedly. “A cold day, wasn't it?”

“Very.”

“Sergeant Watkinson said it was cold enough to do some serious damage to a brass monkey,” said Crosby, “and that was before he broke his leg.”

“In the end,” said Mrs. Allsworthy regretfully, “it didn't matter all that much what anyone wore. All that anyone looked at was that great big banner.”

“I hear it came right down over the top of the tunnel entrance,” said Sloan.

“Portal,” said Cecelia. “You're not supposed to call it an entrance. Ah, here's Hortense … Is the kettle really boiling?”

The French girl said, “Really boiling, Cecelia, I promise,” and set down a tray with everything on it for tea save the teapot.

While Mrs. Allsworthy went off in the direction of the kitchen and the really boiling kettle, Detective Inspector Sloan took his first good look at Hortense. She was wearing a mottled green skirt and a burgundy-coloured blouse, and she was younger than he had thought at first. “And how do you like England, mademoiselle?” he asked kindly.

Detective Constable Crosby took his first good look at Hortense too—and then another.

Hortense answered Sloan but she looked at Crosby. “It is very cold in the spring,” she enunciated as carefully as Eliza Doolittle. “At home now it is warm and very beautiful.”

Crosby straightened his collar.

“I miss the … the smells so much.” She looked up anxiously. “Is that the wrong word?”

“Scents, miss,” said the detective constable huskily. “That's the word you're looking for.”

“Perfume,” said Hortense. “That is the word I seek. I come from Provence,
messieurs
, you see. From a jasmine farm.”

All the perfumes of Arabia
, thought Sloan inconsequentially. That was something that had cropped up in a famous murder.

“I miss the mimosa, too,” she said to Crosby, lowering her eyes just a trifle.

The detective constable looked at the petite French girl as if she were made of porcelain and might break at any moment.

“Especially in spring.” She lowered her voice a fraction too.

“The spring …” agreed Crosby in a strangled voice.

“Tea!” announced Mrs. Cecelia Allsworthy, coming back into the room with a teapot of a thoroughly satisfactory size.

ELEVEN

Vapores
—
Inhalations

Ronald Bolsover's secretary said, “He won't keep you waiting long, Inspector. He's got someone with him at the moment.”

Sloan could see this for himself. The firm of William Durmast, Ltd., was situated in a house with a very attractive Georgian front in the middle of the Rushmarket in Calleford. The back of the building was another matter. It was a higgledy-piggledy of periods and styles, and wherever possible, walls and sections of roof had been cut away and large windows inserted. In a design office natural light was at a premium and Sloan was aware that Ronald Bolsover needed it for his work as much as anyone. There were three architect's drawing stands in his room and two interior walls had been removed to hip height and glass substituted to borrow as much light as possible from the outside world.

As Inspector Porritt had faithfully reported, Ronald Bolsover's secretary would have been in a position to see her employer's every action but not hear what was being said in his room. Sloan stood by the deputy chairman's secretary's desk now and watched Bolsover through the glass partition as he was talking to another man.

The secretary misinterpreted his interest for impatience. “Mr. Bolsover's nearly finished with his other visitor.”

“Thank you, miss. There's no hurry at all.” He tapped his papers. “We're just checking up on the day Kenneth Carline died.”

“Poor Ken,” she said at once, adding defiantly, “and poor Lucy even if she did do it.”

“You knew them both?” He should have remembered that.

“Of course,” she said. “Ken had been working here for the best part of two years and I remember Lucy as a little girl.”

“Aaaarh,” said Sloan as encouragingly as a doctor. “You won't have forgotten that Monday morning, then.”

“Certainly not. He—Ken, that is—had arranged to see Mr. Bolsover at half-past eleven. Mr. Bolsover had told me so himself the previous Friday afternoon, and I put it in his diary. He was very busy that day what with Mr. Durmast being in Africa and having this appointment at Palshaw at two o'clock about the tunnel, to say nothing of its being a Monday, which is always a rush.”

“Quite so,” said Sloan. Work came in unexpected bursts down at the police station too, but not as a rule on Monday mornings. Crime tended to build up towards the end of the day and towards the end of the week. The crescendo usually came on Saturday evenings.

“And Ken came down from his own room upstairs just before the half hour.” She looked rueful. “I must say he looked a real sight what with his bruises and everything. He said ‘You should have seen the other fellow, though, Mary.' I said Rugby wasn't a very nice game if that's what happened to people playing it, but he only laughed. I could tell Mr. Bolsover didn't like to see him looking like that, though, because after Ken had gone in there I saw him open up his first-aid box and put a piece of sticking plaster on a graze behind Ken's ear that was still oozing.”

“Mr. Bolsover didn't give him anything to eat or drink though, did he?” murmured Sloan, one eye still on the deputy chairman of Durmast's. Ronald Bolsover was still talking animatedly to his visitor, using his hands in a Gallic way a good deal as he spoke.

“No, Inspector.” She was adamant about that. “There's a coffee machine in the front hall anyway. Everyone uses that when they want a drink.”

“How long was Kenneth Carline in with Mr. Bolsover?” asked Sloan, although he knew the answer already.

The secretary repeated what she had told Inspector Porritt. “About half an hour. They were looking at the Palshaw Tunnel plans for most of the time. Then Ken came out and asked if he could use my telephone to ring Lucy Durmast.”

“You actually heard him talking to her, then?” said Sloan. Mr. Bolsover's visitor was beginning to show signs of preparing to take his departure.

The secretary nodded. “Ken asked Lucy if he could call at the Old Rectory to collect some plans from her father's study before he met Mr. Bolsover at the tunnel at Palshaw. Then she must have asked him to stay to lunch because he said ‘Thank you, that would be very nice' and that he would try to be there by one o'clock.” She looked Sloan straight in the eye. “He was like that. Always polite.”

“I'm sure,” murmured Sloan.

“Lucy must have asked Mr. Bolsover to lunch too because I heard Ken say he was sure he wouldn't be able to come as well because he'd got something else to do before they met at Palshaw at two o'clock.”