A Dead Liberty (6 page)

“How do you know when he got there?” demanded Leeyes. “I thought you said the girl was living in the house there alone. If there's only her word for it …”

“One of the men at the tunnel at Palshaw saw him go through just before one o'clock. Apparently Carline shouted to the chap that he would be back at two and carried on. The workman knew Carline quite well by sight, of course, from working on the tunnel.”

Leeyes grunted. “Braffle Episcopi's near enough to the Edsway end of the tunnel.”

“That's why the girl's father bought a house there in the first place.”

“What is why?” asked Leeyes grumpily.

“William Durmast is the civil engineer who was awarded the contract to design and build the Palshaw to Edsway Tunnel …” Sloan hesitated. He wasn't at all sure if “build” was the right word for putting in a tunnel. A better one was probably “construct.”

Or dig.

Or sink.

“And this Lucy is his daughter and she is supposed to have done for Kenneth Carline?”

“Yes, sir.” Sloan hesitated. “At least, that's what Trevor Porritt thought.”

“Beyond reasonable doubt?” enquired Leeyes, investing the phrase with all its legal significance.

“Inspector Porritt thought so,” said Sloan, “or he wouldn't have proceeded.”

Leeyes grunted. “I don't know what sort of standards they have in Calleford Division.”

Detective Inspector Sloan of Berebury Division carefully laid the file on the death of Kenneth Carline back on the desk, and said, “Good enough for a warrant.”

It was this very same point that Ronald Bolsover was making to his wife. They were going over the ground for the hundredth time.

“You can say what you like about Lucy,” Bolsover said, “but she's not silly. She knows as well as anyone what would happen if her father found out about … about … well, all this.”

“He'd come home,” said Mrs. Bolsover.

“Exactly.”

“At once.”

“On the next plane,” agreed her husband. “And what would happen at Mgongwala if he did?”

Phyllis Bolsover was renowned for her lack of interest in her husband's business affairs but even she could answer that question. “Nothing, I suppose.”

“Precisely,” said Ronald Bolsover. “Nothing at all. Not a single thing.” The building contract for the new capital city of the emergent African state of Dlasa had specified the number of Dlasa tribesmen to be employed in its construction, and the Dlasa were not renowned for either their industry or their technical competence. The same contract had required the number of foreign technicians to be kept to a minimum. (There had been no mention at all of the number of Thecats to be given work, since they were an oppressed minority in Dlasa.) “The cement would be unworkable in a week for a start,” added Bolsover, “and their ideas about preserving wood date back to the Ark. Actually Noah would have made a better all-round job anyway.”

“Bill's got help out there,” pointed out Phyllis Bolsover, who hadn't much of a sense of humour. “He's not the only one in Dlasa.”

“Only Bill has managed to get through to the Chancellor fellow who really runs the show.”

“But I thought that the King …”

“King Thabile III,” said Ronald Bolsover bitterly, “listens to his Chancellor and to practically no one else.” Politics came into building contracts as they did into everything else—especially building contracts for new capital cities.

“Surely,” said his wife, “they would understand if Bill explained about his daughter needing him.”

“Girls don't have the same standing in Dlasa as they do in our culture.” He paused and revised this. “Actually, when it comes to the point, they don't feel the same way about children anyway as we do in the West.” He had to choose his words with care. The Bolsovers had no family. Phyllis Bolsover did have a very fine collection of Bow china though; her husband's pride and joy was an elaborate greenhouse of exotic plants. “I'm sure I don't know why I'm saying the West. Dlasa's more south than east of here …”

“I don't see why …” she began to object.

“Moreover,” he said, “nobody could possibly describe the Dlasa as even remotely monogamous …”

“On the contrary,” she responded tartly, “if even half of what I've heard is true.” To Phyllis Bolsover, the idea of six children was seven too many.

“So they've all got—er—quiverfuls of sons,” said Ronald Bolsover, “which is what matters to them, and daughters only if they're unlucky.”

“Unlucky?” Even Phyllis Bolsover lifted her head at that.

“Dowry comes expensive in Dlasa.”

Her face cleared. “Dowry? These days? I didn't realise that they were as backward as that.” She didn't remember what she had brought to their marriage and in any case hadn't seen it as such.

“So,” he carried on, explaining, “a daughter in trouble wouldn't signify with the Dlasa.”

“But trouble with the law is rather different,” she protested.

“Actually,” he said, “they don't have a lot of that out there.”

“Of what?”

“Law,” said Bolsover neatly. “King Thabile is an absolute monarch.” The background reading for the Mgongwala contract had been very comprehensive. “That means his word is law.” The full significance of the phrase struck Ronald Bolsover for the first time.

“What he says goes, then?” said his wife, summing up the Divine Right of Kings in a single phrase.

“Thabile Rules O.K.,” assented Bolsover, relaxing suddenly. “Actually I understand from Bill that what Hamish Mgambo … that's the Chancellor …”

“Hamish?” She lifted a well-groomed eyebrow.

“They had missionaries.”

“There, too?”

“Scots ones.” He nodded and went on, “It's what this Mgambo fellow suggests to the King that is really what goes.” Reality and political theory seldom went hand-in-hand without complications.

“And you think that that is why Lucy's spinning all this out?” asked Phyllis.

“Lord knows, she understands how important the building of Mgongwala is to the firm. After all, she's a substantial shareholder in her own right because of what her mother left.” He frowned. “I know it's not a Canberra or a Brasília but as far as the fortunes of William Durmast of Calleford are concerned it's the setting seal.” Ronald Bolsover had never done other than identify with the company: he was as proud of it as its owner. “The Mgongwala contract couldn't have come at a better time after finishing the Palshaw Tunnel either. You know that.”

Phyllis Bolsover sniffed. “Well, I'm sure if I were Lucy just at this particular time I'd want someone around taking a proper interest.”

“She wouldn't see old Puckle, the solicitor, she wouldn't see Cecelia Allsworthy, who's her best friend, and she wouldn't see me,” he said again for the hundredth time. “And when she was asked if there was anyone else she did want to see she wouldn't answer. You can make what you like of that.”

“She knows what she's doing,” said Mrs. Bolsover consideringly. “I'm quite sure about that.”

“Yes,” agreed Bolsover. “And that's what I'm counting on, because one thing is quite certain and that is that one of the Durmasts—
père ou fille
—is going to hold me wrong. As I see it, I'm on a hiding to nothing for not cabling Bill and worse from Lucy if I do.”

“You'd have thought the newspapers …”

Her husband snorted gently. “A runner with a cleft stick would have his work cut out to get to Mgongwala.”

“Dlasa's got an airport—all right, all right—a landing strip, then.”

“I daresay that the British envoy there gets the English Top Newspaper by air in due course but Lucy's case hasn't hit the headlines yet, has it? Besides …” he hesitated.

“Besides?”

“Our envoy wants Mgongwala finished as quickly as possible, too.”

“Why?”

“There were a couple of Iron Curtain country tenders for building it. Bill only got the contract for Britain by the skin of his teeth.”

Phyllis Bolsover came back to Lucy Durmast. “She's of age,” she said, again not for the first time. “I suppose that means she can do as she wants.”

“What you really mean, my dear,” he said drily, “is that she's an Englishwoman born in wedlock with her feet on dry land and therefore has nothing to fear.”

It was no accident that Bill Durmast was representing the firm in Dlasa. Ronald Bolsover would never have been able to establish a rapport with King Thabile's Chancellor as Bill Durmast had done, let alone with King Thabile. His wasn't that sort of a personality. He was the firm's technical expert.

“And this isn't Africa.” His wife was incurably European. The epitome of English civilisation to Phyllis Bolsover was a fine piece of porcelain from Stratford-le-Bow.

“I know,” he said wearily. This ground, too, had been gone over time and again by the pair of them. “This is twentieth-century England.”

Phyllis Bolsover voiced the thought that had worried her most. “The police seem so very sure about everything.”

Bolsover shrugged his shoulders. “They've got a long stop, which makes it easier for them.”

“I know that the last analysis comes in Court,” she said almost crossly, “but all the same …”

“And that's where Lucy won't have any help.” His worry surfaced too.

Perversely Mrs. Bolsover said she could understand that. “Lawyers always make such a meal of the simplest little thing.”

“Murder,” he responded colourlessly, “may be simple but it's not little.”

She made a gesture of impatience. “You know what I mean, Ronald.”

Bolsover shifted the conversational ground slightly. “Why she had to give Kenneth Carline the sort of food she did beats me all the same,” he said. “Asking for trouble.”

“Oh, I don't know …”

“Hang it all, he only rang the girl at practically the last minute.”

“So she didn't have a lot of time,” said his wife.

“Time or not, I don't call chili con carne a scratch meal.”

“It is,” she said absently.

“Unfortunately,” he went on as if she hadn't spoken, “nobody can deny it has a flavour to cover a multitude of sins.”

“I don't suppose at the best of times the meat comes particularly fresh down Mexico way,” said Phyllis Bolsover. “The worst of times doesn't bear thinking about.” She shuddered. “The great thing about France is that they understand about food.” The Bolsovers had a holiday home in Provence.

“And why serve him that damn silly vegetable into the bargain?” he demanded. “You know, the one that sounds like a piece of jewellery.”

“Samphire.”

“I ask you! Samphire on a Monday morning in winter.”

“Lucy told you herself before she turned into a clam,” his wife reminded him patiently, “that she'd been experimenting with freezing it and thought she knew Kenneth well enough to try it out on him.”

“Poor man's asparagus,” he said scornfully. “What's that to give a man?”

“I believe it's quite nice,” said his wife calmly. “It would go well with a powerful flavour like chili con carne. So would the beer she gave him.”

“And so would hyoscine,” said Ronald Bolsover soberly. “At least, that's what the police say.”

FIVE

Applicationes
—
Applications

As it happened the police were saying something even more to the point.

At least, one member of the force was.

“What, sir?” echoed Detective Constable Crosby to Detective Inspector Sloan, to whose room he had been summoned. “Check out a murder case against the clock?”

“Lucy Durmast's got seven days,” said Sloan succinctly, “and so have we.”

“Somebody else's case, too.”

“Could happen to anyone.”

“And in somebody else's division,” said the constable, in whom the territorial imperative was as strong as in any man.

“Calleford,” said Sloan briskly, “is less than half the County away.” Constable Crosby was very nearly as insular in outlook as the superintendent.

“Mission impossible,” declared the detective constable to Sloan.

“It better hadn't be,” responded that worthy vigorously. “Or Superintendent Leeyes will want to know the reason why.”

“The trail's cold, for one thing,” complained the constable. “All this happened last January.”

“Time and crime,” said Sloan neatly, “can't always be separated.”

“But it's not like detecting something that has just happened,” insisted Crosby, aggrieved.

“More of a challenge, that's all.”

“And the accused's not giving us any help, is she?”

“She doesn't have to,” said Sloan. “It is a cardinal principle of English law that the accused doesn't have to defend him or herself against a charge.”

“All the same …”

“The burden of proof rests entirely on the Prosecution.”

“Well, then …”

“It just so happens,” said Sloan, “that Judge Eddington is treating her refusal to plead as putting her in contempt of Court.”

“If she won't play ball, then,” enquired Crosby more colloquially, “how do we know where to begin?”

“At the beginning,” snapped Sloan.

“If,” said Crosby mutinously, “Detective Inspector Porritt couldn't spot anything wrong how are we going to?”

“I'm not sure,” said Sloan with perfect truth. “Moreover,” he added hastily, “there may not be anything wrong with the police case anyway. It's quite on the cards that Lucy Durmast may have perfectly good reasons of her own for keeping silent.”

“Least said, soonest mended, sir,” said the constable sententiously.