A Dead Liberty (18 page)

Sloan knew what had done it.

Last year he had grown to perfection for the very first time a really stunning Sandringham Centenary—a tall rose of rich burnt-copper colouring: had taken first prize with it too at the Berebury Horticultural Summer Show.

Unfortunately Peter Hamilton on his side of the fence had failed miserably to get his solitary bush of Whisky Mac to do at all well: had even let it get greenfly.

It was only a lifetime's training in the discipline of measured and orderly response to provocation that had enabled Sloan to refrain from commenting on the greenfly. He had even waited to give his own precious bushes a precautionary spray until his neighbour was at work, finding some hidden serendipity in the shift system as he did so.

Even Sloan was aware that Peter Hamilton was beginning to be resentful about all that was good about his garden. Peter hadn't even asked Sloan for advice on his failing Karl Druschki, which the policeman took to be a bad sign. Yet he couldn't possibly keep down a strong climbing tea rose like Gloire de Dijon—very free flowering the catalogue said—even if he did plant it by the sitting-room window, and the more attention he gave to the rather rarer Paul Léde over the porch the more splendid it became. He couldn't even put the Gloire de Dijon at the back of the house, because he'd got Vicomtesse Pierre de Fou there and doing very well round the kitchen door.

He—Sloan—had once even gone as far as mentioning the dilemma he felt himself to be in to his friend Happy Harry, Berebury Division's Traffic Inspector.

There had been no comfort to be had in that quarter.

“Policemen don't have friends,” Inspector Harpe had sniffed.

“I suppose not,” Sloan had responded with a certain melancholy.

“And,” the traffic man had added pertinently, “neither, come to that, do gardeners who grow for show. You ought to know that by now, Seedy.”

Detective Inspector Sloan braced his shoulders this evening and went indoors prepared to try to put the cares and burdens of the day and of his garden behind him.

He couldn't, of course.

By the time he was outside a good helping of beef stew and well into an excellent plum tart—nobody he knew had a lighter hand with pastry than Margaret—he was telling her about the strange message—if that was what it was—that Lucy Durmast had been sent at the prison.

“I thought,” said Margaret Sloan, “that Trevor Porritt had said that the murder was all about a love affair that had gone wrong. Not about Africa.”

“He did,” said Sloan, “and there's nothing to prove it wasn't.” He paused and thought awhile. “Nothing at all. That's the funny thing. Except that she's still not saying anything.”

“Perhaps she hasn't anything to say,” suggested Margaret Sloan placidly.

“She could at least say she isn't guilty,” said Sloan with the sort of irritability that can only be given free expression in the home, “if she isn't.”

“I don't see why she should,” responded his wife with feminine logic, “since she knows perfectly well that you're not going to believe her anyway.”

“She could still tell us why she …”

“And there's another thing to consider.” Margaret edged a dish of homemade custard in his direction. “If she knows she didn't do it, she might not care all that much whether anyone else knows or not.”

“She doesn't look a ‘damn your eyes' sort of girl.”

“It's what you think of yourself that matters, you know, in the long run.” She frowned. “That's why it's the things that injure your image of yourself—scars and that sort of thing—count so much.”

Sloan addressed himself to the plum tart and custard while he considered this.

“Moreover,” continued his wife, warming to her theme, “she also may know that anything she does say may only make matters worse.”

He nodded. He knew what she was thinking. Once, quite early in their married life, Sloan had taken her to the old Calleford Assizes to see a famous Queen's Counsel in action. Unfortunately the experience had only strengthened her convictions that the Law was an ass. The Q.C.'s interrogation of a hostile but perfectly truthful witness had only impressed her by its apparent total unfairness.

“This African message,” she said. “What is it exactly?”

“Nobody knows,” said her husband. “It's being copied and sent over from Cottingham Grange for me to see. It doesn't,” he added fairly, “mean that Lucy Durmast didn't kill Kenneth Carline. In fact, if Prince Aturu sent it, whatever it is, it could be because Lucy had killed his friend Kenneth. After all, for all I know they may think differently about justice and revenge in Dlasa.”

“I daresay they do,” rejoined his wife drily. “And who's to say who's right?”

“We don't even know what it means,” he said, ducking that issue. “Drawings like hieroglyphics the governor said, only she didn't have a Rosetta Stone handy at the prison.” The governor of Cottingham Grange was a woman with a finely attuned sense of humour, which was just as well, since it wasn't everyone's choice of career. “All we know is that Lucy Durmast fainted when she saw it.”

“I'm not surprised,” said Margaret Sloan warmly.

“Or pretended to faint,” added Sloan from a long habit of caution.

“The governor would know which,” said Margaret Sloan, undeterred. “At least Lucy Durmast was entitled to think she would be safe from that sort of thing in prison.”

“Well …” A place of safety was the term used for the building or institution where those in need of care and attention were taken by order of a benevolent government, but Detective Inspector Sloan wasn't so naïve as to think that prisons came into that category. The Act of Parliament in question was referring to hospitals. People were sent to prison on an order for the governor to have and to hold … That reminded him of something else. He looked his wife straight in the eye and said, “Would you have killed me if I'd got engaged to someone else?”

“No,” she said without hesitation.

“Well, then …”

“But I might have killed myself.” She held a dish out. “More tart?”

“We've come about the Kingdom of Dlasa,” said Detective Inspector Sloan the next morning to the smooth young man sitting behind his desk in his office on the fourth floor of the Ministry for Overseas Development.

It was quite a nice desk in its way but nothing like as elegant a one as that in the government department that the two policemen had just left. That had been the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The men from Calleshire had been treated there with great courtesy and attention and, with a skill born of long practice, immediately passed on to another department. It was not for nothing that the first Secretary of State at the Foreign Office had been the wily Charles James Fox. Sloan, who had noticed a bust of the famous politician in the entrance hall, knew gamekeepers living deep in the heart of rural Calleshire who still called foxes “Mister Charles” in tribute to the great cunning of both animals—Fox, the man, and fox—
Vulpes vulpes
—the creature of the wild.

“It's in Africa,” added Detective Constable Crosby helpfully.

Sloan didn't enjoy coming up to London but he had felt that his mission of enquiry about Dlasa could not be accomplished on his behalf by a friendly officer from the Metropolitan Police, however well briefed. For one thing, that officer might legitimately feel that the Calleshire Force was a little short of hard evidence on which to base their enquiries. There was another reason, too, for Berebury Division to make its own mistakes. Sloan didn't want any laughs by the Met at the expense of bucolic bumpkins up from the country with straws showing in their hair: the superintendent was very sensitive about that sort of thing.

Or, if it came to that, any amusement exhibited by high-flying young civil servants confronted by a constable of the calibre of Dogberry and Virges either.

“Indeed yes,” diplomatically responded James Jeavington, the civil servant, to Detective Constable Crosby. He was, in fact, the Ministry's Dlasian specialist. “In Africa. Precisely. The Dark Continent.”

“We need a little background to the present situation in Dlasa,” explained Sloan hastily, “and we understand that you would be the best people to help us.”

“Naturally,” said Jeavington fluently, “my Ministry would wish to be as constructive as possible.”

Sloan let that pass.

“In what way, though, can Overseas Development be of assistance to the Calleshire Constabulary?” asked the civil servant.

“We would like to know something about the contract for the building of Mgongwala.”

James Jeavington at once projected extreme caution. “What about it exactly, Inspector?”

“For instance,” said Sloan, “how it was awarded.”

“It went to Durmast's, the civil-engineering people from …” His voice changed suddenly and he added in quite a different tone “… from Calleford.” He paused. “I see.”

Detective Inspector Sloan hunched his shoulders. “A junior member of the firm of Durmast's was friendly with one of the sons of the King of Dlasa—Prince Aturu—who has been a dedicated opponent of the building of the new town at Mgongwala.”

Jeavington looked extremely alert but not surprised.

“The member of the firm,” said Sloan succinctly, “with whom Prince Aturu was friendly has been murdered and we understand that the Prince has been recalled to Dlasa. We need to know if there is any connection at all between these two events.”

“I see,” said Jeavington slowly.

“How did Durmast's get the contract in the first instance?” Sloan came back to his original question.

James Jeavington paused for so long before he answered him that Sloan began to wonder if the Ministry was a punishment station for failed Treasury men. “I think,” he said at last, “that it would be fair to say that they had won it.”

“In fair combat?”

“Everything is fair in international dealing, Inspector.”

“Like love and war,” said Crosby brightly.

“By sealed tender, for example?” persisted Sloan.

Jeavington shook his head. “Seals can be opened and resealed.” That much every administrator knew.

“By open tender, then?” suggested Sloan.

The civil servant avoided his gaze. “I think it would be—er—unwise of you to assume that that was the method by which Durmast's got the job.”

“And naïve?”

“Durmast's is a firm with a very good reputation.”

“There are a great many civil-engineering firms with good reputations,” rejoined Sloan.

“Her Majesty's Government was anxious that the work should be done by a firm from the United Kingdom.”

“I'll bet,” said Detective Constable Crosby inelegantly.

“Besides which, Inspector …” added Jeavington.

“Yes?”

“In some respects the African mind works rather differently from the occidental one.”

“Cricket,” said Sloan, “doesn't come into it, is that what you mean?”

“I do not think,” said Jeavington, “that Hamish Mgambo was ever a man to be influenced by breathless hushes in the close tonight or any night.”

“And King Thabile?”

“The only things,” pronounced Jeavington a little acidly, “that would appear to influence King Thabile III of Dlasa are the aforementioned Hamish Mgambo and a certain well-known provision store in Piccadilly.”

Sloan lifted an enquiring eyebrow.

“The King,” explained Jeavington, “has a great partiality for a special variety of chocolate biscuit.”

“It's like the Criminal Record Office, isn't it?” broke in Detective Constable Crosby chattily. “Your knowing everyone's weaknesses and writing it all down.”

“And strengths.” Jeavington didn't contest the point, only amplified it. “They're just as important.”

Detective Inspector Sloan had once been to a lecture on man management. All that he remembered about it now had been the aphorism “Build on strength: don't undermine weakness.” It would be difficult to apply to Crosby.

“We make a note of strengths too,” the constable was saying now quite eagerly to the civil servant. “Know your enemy and all that.”

“Dlasa's a friendly state,” said Jeavington mildly. “Queen Victoria sent the Prince of Wales there on a state visit and King Thabile's grandfather came over for King Edward's Coronation in 1902.”

“And what are Dlasa's strengths?” asked Sloan with genuine curiosity.

“A rather Edwardian attitude to Europe, a self-sufficient food supply …”

“Except for chocolate biscuits,” put in Crosby.

“Our envoy always takes a case of them when he presents his credentials.”

“Envoy?” Sloan picked up a word he wasn't absolutely sure about.

“A minister plenipotentiary,” explained Jeavington fluently.

“What's that?”

“A public minister sent by one sovereign to another for the transaction of diplomatic business.”

“Not an ambassador?” queried Sloan.

“Ranking below an ambassador …”

“I see.”

“… but above a chargé d'affaires.”

“Either way,” Sloan summed up neatly, an old saying coming back to him, “he's a man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.”

The civil servant bowed his head in agreement.

“There was something else we hoped you would be able to tell us about,” said Sloan.

“What's that, Inspector?”

Sloan produced a sketch of the missive that had been sent to Lucy Durmast in H. M. Prison Cottingham Grange. “It came under plain cover so to speak.” He didn't go into detail about the exhaustive examination of one ordinary envelope, postmarked Calleford, that had yielded no other clues at all about its source.

“That,” declared Jeavington without hesitation, “is a Dlasian revenge token.”