A Dead Liberty (24 page)

Of Prince Aturu of Dlasa there was not a single sign anywhere in the county of Calleshire.

William Shakespeare, decided Detective Inspector Sloan, had been quite wrong about sleep knitting up the ravelled sleeve of care. The Bard might, of course, have been talking about real sleep. Fitful dozes through the night had done nothing for Sloan.

Late late night thoughts had been succeeded by early early thoughts without a conscious distinction between the two and morning had broken without enlightenment.

Whoever it had been, he thought sourly, as he plastered his face with shaving cream, who had written about bright new day had never been faced with untangling three mysteries that might or might not have been connected but that were certainly plaited together: the murder of Kenneth Carline, the disruption of the tunnel-opening ceremony by anti-nuclear protesters, and the unlawful killing of Hortense Fablon.

It was an exceedingly unholy trinity.

The three balls of the Medici didn't have anything on it.

Perm any two, as the punters said.

Or three.

Or none.

The smell of bacon being fried drifted upstairs but did not cheer him.

Even the classic question in detection of “Who benefits?” didn't help.

Answer came there none to that.

A diligent Inspector Porritt had researched Kenneth Carline's background to establish beyond any doubt that no one benefited financially by his death.

It was highly unlikely that anyone gained from Hortense Fablon's death either.

But why two murders?

Unbidden, as philosophers have found is the way while shaving, Lady Bracknell's immortal lines came into his mind. “To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”

He frowned. He'd had that thought before recently but in a different connection.

The aroma of percolating coffee pursued the smell of fried bacon up the stairs while he tried to pin down in his mind when and why he'd thought it before.

Had it been yesterday or was it the day before when something else had struck him briefly in the same way?

He stared unseeingly into the mirror while he searched his memory. It had been something to do with something about Kenneth Durmast and Cecelia Allsworthy had said it … that much he did remember.

“Breakfast,” called out Margaret Sloan.

He didn't hear her.

It had come back to him what it was that Cecelia Allsworthy had said that had provoked the quotation the first time.

Had he been a fisherman, Sloan would have placed the moment as that when the float on the surface of the water first twitched.

As any really experienced angler could have told him he was still a long way from having his fish caught, landed and safely in the keep net.

Detective Constable Crosby was waiting for him at the Police Station when Sloan arrived.

“What I'm looking for,” said the Detective Inspector trenchantly, “is a hook …”

“Yes, sir.”

“A line.”

“Yes, sir.”

“… and a sinker,” finished Sloan. He had walked to work and not wasted the time.

“What about a car, sir?” enquired Crosby seriously. He understood about cars.

“Not just yet, Crosby, thank you. Presently, perhaps. We've got a lot to do first. Will you ask Inspector Harpe in Traffic Division if he could spare me a minute? And get someone to bring Mrs. Melissa Wainwright in to the station.” He paused. “Tell her that she will be helping the police with their enquiries. Literally.” He halted. “No, that won't do. We don't want a demonstration outside the police station. Tell her we should be most obliged for her help and see if that does the trick.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I'll have that report about the Rugby match that you had yesterday, too.”

Crosby reached for a file. “Anything else, sir?”

“A copy of the
Complete Works of William Shakespeare
would be a help. There's something in
Hamlet
I want to check.”

“Yes, sir,” said Crosby stolidly. “What about a warrant for John Allsworthy for murder?”

“Certainly not,” said Detective Inspector Sloan briskly. “He didn't do it.”

The telephone line between Berebury Police Station and the office of the Consultant Pathologist to the Berebury District General Hospital crackled as the switchboard connected Dr. Dabbe.

“That you, Sloan? Good. I've got my report all ready for you.”

“Thank you, Doctor.” There must be a saving grace, decided Sloan, to every murder. Like a professional conjuror, a murderer had to perform as in one of those stage acts that involved keeping an ever-increasing number of oranges in the air at the same time. Sooner or later he must make a mistake.

He—the murderer, that is—had only had the one orange to begin with: a dead engineer. To that had been added another orange—poison—and then a third: an accused girl who had stayed obdurately silent. They had to be kept in the air while the conjuror picked up another orange from his stage table. All the anomalies of a nuclear demonstration joined the other oranges in the air—an unlocked gate, an unguarded key and a mysterious telephone call said to have come from Durmast's.

And while the murderer's prestidigitatory skill was still dazzling the audience, the Dlasian oranges had to be worked in—a dissident, disappearing Prince, the new town at Mgongwala and an absent company chairman and father.

It was a dead French girl—the last orange—that had proved too much for a performer hoping that the quickness of the hand would deceive the eye, and the whole act had tumbled to the ground, coming to an ignominious end and scattering oranges everywhere …

“The murder of Hortense Fablon,” the doctor was saying, “was—er—quite straightforward.”

Detective Inspector Sloan pulled his notebook a little nearer. “No frills?”

“None,” said the doctor. “Beyond any doubt death was caused by manual strangulation.”

“The murderer wouldn't have had time to plan anything too elaborate,” said Sloan. He knew that now.

“Quite so,” rejoined the pathologist. “However, in view of what you have suggested to me in connection with an earlier death, I am having various organs analysed for traces of hyoscine.”

“You never know with defence counsel,” said Sloan.

“No more you do,” said Dabbe warmly.

“And it can't do any harm,” Sloan rationalised the matter to himself.

“Even gold has to go through the assayer's fire,” said the pathologist obliquely.

“True,” nodded Sloan.

“As you know, there is absolutely no clinical evidence to point to the presence of any noxious substance in the body of the deceased. Qualitative assay should confirm this.”

“I'm quite sure she wasn't poisoned,” said Sloan, “but it's as well to—er—leave no stone unturned.” He didn't really want to know to which of the poor girl's internal organs that cliché referred, and he quickly got back to a matter that he really did need to know. “Doctor, tell me something …”

“
À votre service
,” said the pathologist with macabre appositeness.

“There is, of course, nothing to suggest that Hortense Fablon had been poisoned, but equally there is no doubt at all that Kenneth Durmast was.”

“None,” said Dr. Dabbe promptly. “My colleague Dr. Bressingham demonstrated that Durmast died from an overdose of hyoscine.”

“What Inspector Porritt, my colleague, was not able to prove,” said Sloan neatly, “was how the murderer got the poison into the victim.”

“As I said before,” repeated the doctor gravely, “there are more ways than one of killing a canary.”

“What I want to know,” said Sloan, “if one particular way would do the trick.”

“I'm all ears,” said the pathologist.

“Just so,” said Sloan, embarking on a theory that might have held water for the murder of Gonzago too.

“Are you quite sure, Sloan?” growled Superintendent Leeyes.

“Not yet, sir, but I've asked Inspector Harpe to do some checking for me and we're trying to find a man called Hirst who lives in Luston.”

“And who's he?” Leeyes wanted to know.

“A member of the Luston Rugby Club.”

“I hope you know what you're doing, Sloan,” Leeyes said irritably.

“I think,” replied Detective Inspector Sloan, “that we're very near to uncovering the biggest fraud Calleshire has ever known.”

Leeyes grunted. He had always insisted that the chairman of the Watch Committee deserved that particular designation. “You haven't been putting two and two together and making five, have you?”

“I've just been looking at the facts, sir,” Sloan said. People used the word “kaleidoscope” so often and so loosely that its real meaning got forgotten. Sloan could still remember the wonder of first looking down the dark tube to the mirror at the other end with the fragments of coloured silver paper lying in one pattern—and giving the whole thing a jerk that produced a completely different pattern. The constituents were exactly the same—the tube was sealed, which proved it—but the total picture changed in an instant. The facts of the murder of Kenneth Carline had been there all the time. It had taken a tug at a mental kaleidoscope though to rearrange them in a formation that now made sense.

“It's evidence you'll need,” said Leeyes unhelpfully.

“It was something that Crosby said about the sort of evidence we needed that helped to put me on the right lines,” said Sloan.

“Crosby?” echoed Leeyes. “I don't believe it.”

“He said what we needed was concrete evidence, sir, and I think that's what we'll be getting.” Sloan tapped his notebook. “We're also turning up a report on a fatal road traffic accident in South Humberside something like eighteen months ago.”

“Why?” grunted Leeyes.

“Kenneth Carline's predecessor died there in one.” Sloan coughed. “We now have reason to believe that the death might not have been an accident.” Messrs. William Durmast had lost not one young structural engineer but two. And in spite of what Lady Bracknell had said it wasn't due to carelessness but murder.

“What about this fellow that you can't find?” asked Leeyes. “Prince Monalulu.”

“Aturu,” Sloan corrected him. He had never met Prince Aturu but he was quite sure that the son of King Thabile III would never don feathers and go round a race course shouting “I gotta horse.”

“Him,” said Leeyes.

“I don't think he comes into the picture,” said Sloan.

“What!”

“Oh, he was a friend of Kenneth Carline's all right and very caught up in Dlasian politics.”

“And so …”

“And so,” said Sloan, “he's gone to New York to see the United Nations.”

Leeyes rolled his eyes wordlessly. “And the revenge token?”

“An artifact copied from something in the Greatorex Museum. We've checked with the curator. Apparently William Durmast presented them with the original the last time he was home.”

“Do you mean to stand there and tell me that Dlasa doesn't come into this at all?”

Sloan frowned. “It's not as simple as that, sir. Perhaps I'd better explain.”

“I think you had,” said Superintendent Leeyes heavily. “Tell me …”

He sat back in his chair and listened with close attention to what Sloan said.

Presently he grunted “You're taking a warrant, aren't you, Sloan?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We don't want any slip-ups at this stage.”

“No, sir.” Sloan was cheered by the superintendent's use of the plural of majesty. It was always a good sign.

“At home?”

“No, sir, I don't think so.” Sloan coughed. “I had the scene of the crime in mind.”

EIGHTEEN

Solvellae
—
Solution-tablets

“How could Kenneth Carline possibly have been murdered at work, Inspector?” stammered Cecelia Allsworthy.

If by any stretch of the imagination the arrest of the murderer of Kenneth Carline and Hortense Fablon had been the subject of a stage play, the time of this, the Third Act so to speak, could have been accurately described as “Later the same day.” Only it seemed infinitely longer ago than this morning since Sloan had shaved, applying not only a simple blade but Occam's Razor as well.

“I just don't understand,” said Cecelia. She was still shaken and unsure of herself.

The action that had begun that morning with a train of thought in front of a bathroom mirror had reached its apotheosis in the hand-cuffing of Ronald Bolsover in the offices of William Durmast in the Rushmarket in Calleford. The tragedy wasn't going to be quite over within the Aristotelian unity of one revolution of the sun, although evening had found Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby sitting round the kitchen table at the Manor House at Braffle Episcopi talking to both Allsworthys.

“And why was Kenneth murdered?” Cecelia Allsworthy asked.

“It was when we started to wonder why that we found out how,” said Sloan enigmatically. He was keeping one eye on the kitchen range. Cecelia Allsworthy had stood a vast saucepan of home-made soup on the hottest part and in his view wasn't giving it the attention it needed. Both policemen were hungry and Sloan didn't want the soup to boil over.

“But you've already said that everyone could see everything that Ronald Bolsover did in his office.” John Allsworthy leaned forward, his eye bright with interest. “The walls are glass, aren't they?”

“That was the beauty of it,” said Sloan, “and that was what gave us the clue in the end.”

“What was?”

“The dumb show,” said Sloan. “Like in
Hamlet
.”

Cecelia Allsworthy raised a wan face, light dawning. “Ah, I think I know now … the play within the play.”