A Dead Liberty (17 page)

“Who?”

“Henry Simmonds of Almstone.”

“The Chairman of the Berebury Bench, you mean?”

“Mr. Softie himself,” said Bolsover.

“We knock 'em off,” chorussed Crosby cheerfully, “the probation officer gets 'em off and the Bench lets 'em off.”

“They pushed an open door,” said Sloan with legal literalness.

“Exactly,” agreed Bolsover, adding with a touch of bitterness, “the Law apparently takes a different view of trespass when a door is open.”

“Question,” enquired Crosby of nobody in particular, “when is a door not a door? Answer: when it's a jar.”

“Who opened the door?” asked Sloan, rising above the interruption.

“Wish we knew,” said Bolsover, “but we don't. Nobody knows. The protesters must have had a sympathiser on site somewhere but we never found out who.”

“Kenneth Carline?” Sloan trawled the name in front of Bolsover without inflection.

“I didn't know him as anti-nuclear,” said Bolsover slowly, “but you can't always tell, can you? He played a lot of Rugby … oh, thank you, Mary. These are the photographs, Inspector …”

The remark about the Rugby was neither a non sequiteur nor evidence, but Detective Inspector Sloan, working policeman, knew what Bolsover meant. Caesar Lombroso might have been the first man after William Shakespeare to wonder about the link between physical make-up and crime but he certainly wasn't the last. Sloan was only too well aware that most of the criminals he apprehended were small, thin men. Perhaps there was a corollary: that even ways of thought were after all linked to physical make-up. That would inch the answer to crime nearer still to where he, Sloan, thought it belonged—not with the psychiatrists and sociologists but with the biochemists.

He turned to the press cuttings that Ronald Bolsover had handed to him. This was no time for theorising.

The Calleford newspaper had done the protesters well. Their main picture was of an enormous banner extending right across the width of the Palshaw Tunnel mouth like a gigantic tympanun. It proclaimed: “Nuclear Waste Damages Your Health.” Underneath that was a photograph of two large policemen apparently felling a defenceless young girl unprovoked. There were sundry other views of the protest crowd above the tunnel opening and a file portrait of the Lord Lieutenant of Calleshire, His Grace the Duke of Calleshire, taken on some other quite unrelated occasion. They also portrayed the unavailing attempt of Sergeant Watkinson to assail the group from below. A later photograph showed him being carried to an ambulance …

The text was as loaded as the photographs. The reporter managed a mention of the length of the tunnel in metres but that was about all. It was obvious that the press hand-out from Durmast's had been passed over in favour of suggestions that the tunnel itself might have a nuclear bunker concealed in its underwater workings. The chairman of William Durmast had stoutly denied this in an interview with a staff reporter but he got two column inches of newsprint compared with Melissa Wainwright's seven and a half column inches of implication and allegation.

Bill Durmast's attempt to expand on the technical difficulties of constructing a tunnel, let alone an extraneous nuclear shelter, in Lower Greensand under Gault were glossed over. So was his vigorous comment that he wasn't technically competent to do such work. Anyone whose first structural-engineering project, he had said to an inattentive newspaperman, had been doing the hand digging for an Anderson Shelter at the bottom of the garden at the outbreak of the Second World War at the age of eleven was too old to be thinking in terms of preparing for the next one.

“It was all very well for Bill to shrug off the opening,” said Bolsover, “but, dammit, we'd just built a tunnel that everyone had wanted for years and years.”

“I gather,” ventured Sloan, “that that is more than can be said about Durmast's current undertaking.”

“Mgongwala?” Bolsover looked up sharply. “What about Mgongwala?”

Sloan cleared his throat. “It doesn't appear to have unanimous support either.”

“What does?” Ronald Bolsover raised his eyebrows heavenwards. “I've never met anything that everyone was pleased about—let alone a civil-engineering project.”

“Prince Aturu is against, we understand.”

“So Carline told us,” growled Bolsover. “I advised him to watch his step with that young man. Too clever for his own good is Prince Aturu. Actually Bill and I both warned Kenneth Carline about having anything to do with Dlasian politics even on the sidelines.”

“And you don't think he did?”

The deputy chairman paused for thought. “I really don't know for certain. He said he couldn't very well stop seeing the Prince altogether, as they'd known each other quite well at university and nothing would stop Aturu from talking politics when they did meet …”

Politicians had a lot in common, thought Sloan to himself.

“So it wouldn't have been easy,” retailed Bolsover, “but he did promise to be especially careful about meeting Aturu until after Commenda. Only, of course, Kenneth was killed and so it didn't arise.”

“Commenda?” Sloan queried a word he didn't know.

“That's Dlasa's great festival of the year,” said Bolsover. “When they have the ceremony of dismissing unfriendly spirits. King Thabile comes out of his palace dressed in his ancestor's clothes and bids them go.”

“I see,” said Sloan. Many years ago an infant Christopher Dennis Sloan had been christened in a gown first used at his great grandmother's christening service but that, he supposed, was rather different.

“He's a hereditary monarch, of course,” said Bolsover.

“So the clothes should fit,” remarked Crosby irreverently.

At their wedding Sloan's wife, Margaret, had worn her mother's veil …

Ronald Bolsover's mind was working on quite a different tack. “I understand from Bill that Dlasian spirit gods are very nearly as unpredictable as our local planning committees.”

Sloan made sympathetic noises.

“And,” swept on Bolsover, “that the Dlasian system of waiting until the auguries are right is even more complicated than our Town and Country Planning Acts, which I must say some might find it difficult to believe …”

“Did you know the Prince?”

“Not really.” The deputy chairman shook his head. “He came into the office here once or twice to see Ken but we soon put a stop to that. There's too much riding on the Mgongwala contract for social niceties.”

“Of course,” responded Sloan aloud.

What he would dearly have liked to have known was whether there was enough riding on the Mgongwala contract for murder.

“But what did they come for?” asked John Allsworthy, settling down beside his own fireside in the Manor House at Brattle Episcopi as evening drew in. Here was an older building by far than the Queen Anne Old Rectory that belonged to Bill Durmast.

Cecelia Allsworthy wrinkled her brow. “I don't really know.”

“The same two who came before?”

“Oh yes. Inspector Sloan and Constable Crosby.”

“Curious,” said John Allsworthy, stretching out his long legs in front of the fire, “that they should come back a second time.”

“That's what I thought, too,” said his wife soberly.

“They didn't say why they came back, I suppose?”

“No.”

“Not even,” he enquired carefully, “that they had found out something new?”

She shook her head.

“They must have had a reason.”

“I know.”

“Funny, all the same,” he said after a pause.

“What could there have been new anyway?” she asked.

“I don't know.” He frowned. “You never can tell. Sherry?”

“Thank you, darling.” She sat down on the chair opposite him. There was no sign of the potter's smock or working jeans in the drawing room. Cecelia had on a fine wool dress in a soft pattern of subdued reds and blues with a contrasting plain white collar. “Dinner won't be long.”

“It must be Thursday,” said John Allsworthy suddenly. “No Hortense.”

“She's gone to a French film in Calleford,” replied Cecelia. “She was meeting her pal Clémence first and going with her. She won't be home until the last bus, so remember not to bolt the front door, darling, won't you?”

“An evening to ourselves,” he said luxuriously.

“At the rate they're growing,” said their mother, “the twins will be staying up for dinner any day now.”

“As long as you're here,” said her husband uxoriously, “I have no complaints at all.” He extended his arm round her shoulders. Presently he said, “It's been a long day.”

Cecelia Allsworthy immediately projected a proper wifely interest and listened with close attention while he told her about it. John Allsworthy never asked her about her work, and for this—artist that she was—she was grateful. When, on the rare occasions she did volunteer that it had gone well or ill, he confined himself to the two stock responses considered the ideal between partners at the bridge table: “Well done” and “Bad luck.”

John Allsworthy said, “Hawkins says that all the fences down at Birdler's Bottom are going to need renewing soon. That'll cost a pretty penny.”

“That reminds me,” said Cecelia, “the Parish Council want to Beat the Bounds next month.”

He grunted. “I must remember to check on that beer barrel in the cellar then.”

“I tried to explain to Hortense that it was a revival of the ancient custom of making sure that the next generation knew where the parish boundaries were before maps …”

“By banging their heads on a stone,” he added amiably. “I hope you didn't forget that bit. It's how we perfidious Albions give youngsters a bump of locality.”

“… But I don't think she really understood,” said Cecelia. “They must have a different system in France. She didn't even know what a bump of locality was until I explained.”

“At least we'd got going on parish boundaries before the Normans came over,” said the Squire of Braffle Episcopi.

“Not county ones, though,” she said mischievously. “They're Norman, aren't they?”

“They were,” he grumbled, “until we had all that local government reorganisation.” Mercifully the county of Calleshire had emerged intact, if not exactly unscathed, from the reforms of the Redcliffe-Maud Commission. John Allsworthy had a cousin in the West Riding of Yorkshire who was still inclined to wax eloquent on this.

“And,” continued Cecelia Allsworthy, “the rector called. He's having another crisis of conscience about Lucy. He's still worried in case he ought to be getting in touch with Bill Durmast.”

“She won't thank him for it, if he does,” said Allsworthy, “and I've told him so.”

“I tried to explain to him about the importance the Dlasians attach to this Festival of the Departure of the Unfriendly Spirits of theirs, and how we're so sure that Lucy wouldn't want Bill worried at least until it's safely over—but I don't think he took it really seriously.”

“Professional jealousy,” said her spouse unfeelingly.

“By the way, he also came to ask you to read the Lesson on Sunday.”

“First or Second?”

“Second.”

“That's a relief. Trying to say ‘Ahasuerus' before the assembled congregation always unnerves me and amuses everyone else. Remind me to check the Lectionary.”

“John!”

“Can't be too careful with the Church anti-militant,” said her husband unrepentantly. “I'm sure he once did me out of reading that nice piece on army recruitment by Gideon.”

“Don't be silly.”

“Moreover,” carried on Allsworthy, “I think he's afraid the congregation can't hear the difference between warmonger and whoremonger. I never get to read anything like that since he's been in office …”

It wasn't the pronouncing of the names of Old Testament Kings or ancient vices that was worrying Cecelia Allsworthy. “John, there was one rather odd thing that those policemen did want to know that did rather bother me.”

He looked up, quite serious now. “What was that?”

“Whether or not Lucy was interested in nuclear disarmament.”

“Lucy?”

“That's what they asked.”

“But why Lucy?” he said. “If it's anyone they should be asking, its …”

“Exactly.” Husband and wife exchanged one of those looks of total understanding that can pass only between married couples. Cecelia rose. “Finish your sherry slowly, darling, will you, and then come through.”

THIRTEEN

Conspersi
—
Dusting-powders

Detective Inspector Sloan also eventually reached his own home and waiting wife, although much too late for his son to lisp his sire's return or for Sloan himself to be even momentarily cheered by the sight of “this fair child of mine.” He had found “To be new-made when thou art old” one of the deepest feelings he had experienced in his own particular “forty winters” of Shakespeare's sonnet on parenthood.

A lesser domestic matter came to the forefront of his consciousness as he walked up the garden path to his own front door, determinedly trying to put the case of Lucy Durmast out of his mind as he did so. The problem was simple. He, Christopher Dennis Sloan, quondam gardener, would dearly have liked to plant an old-fashioned climbing rose—say Gloire de Dijon—at the far side of the sitting-room window to go with the Paul Léde that was doing so well round the porch. He was constrained from so doing though by the thought of the reaction of Peter Hamilton.

The Hamiltons were good neighbours—the proverbial cup of sugar was always available when urgently needed—and the Sloans were on the best of terms with them. Nevertheless of late Sloan had begun to detect a certain reserve in Peter Hamilton's admiration of his next-door neighbour's prize roses.