A Dead Liberty (10 page)

Policing a stadium was an analogy dear to the heart of lecturers at the Cadet Training College. The perfect example, it was said, of the measured need for policemen, was a football stadium. Empty and one policeman could take care of it: full of spectators and four hundred couldn't.

“And he was so rotten on the Sunday morning after the match that he didn't go to the Kipper Club?” Sloan hoped he'd sorted this out at last.

Three men nodded.

“But all right by Monday morning, though?” persisted Sloan.

“Nearly all right,” said Gerry Porteous.

“He looked a bit of a mess,” said Marshall.

“Two lovely black eyes?” suggested Sloan crisply.

“More of a cauliflower ear,” said Marshall.

“He must have been on the ref's blind side all afternoon,” said Porteous.

Detective Constable Crosby's wayward interest was aroused at last. “Where was he in the scrum?”

“Middle row.”

“Dangerous place,” remarked Crosby.

“Not as dangerous,” said Marshall soberly, “as lunch with a lady.”

“True,” said Crosby.

In his mind Sloan likened middle row forward on the Rugby field to the second row in a police line of defence against a crowd. The front row, arms linked, took the brunt, but when the set scrum collapsed, so to speak, the greater danger fell to the second row. What came out of the maul when the contest was the Police Force versus the Mob was usually injuries.

Demonstrations reminded Sloan of something else.

“Was Carline,” he asked all the young men, “caught up at all with the nuclear waste disposal plant at Marby juxta Mare?”

Gerry Porteous frowned. “Did the noble firm of William Durmast build that? I don't think they did.”

“I'm pretty sure,” said Marshall, “that Ken once said that the atomic-energy authorities had some specialist construction people down for Marby.”

“Not everyone's cup of tea,” contributed Jervis, “atomic waste.”

“Horses for course,” said Crosby.

Sloan explained that he hadn't meant that. Had Carline been an activist in nuclear protesting? he asked.

Three young men shook their heads.

“Not his scene at all,” said Colin Jervis emphatically.

“He was against politics anyway,” said Gerry Porteous somewhat naïvely.

Detective Inspector Sloan was not sufficiently exalted in rank to attend meetings of the Berebury Watch Committee let alone those of the Calleshire Police Committee, but he knew that, like the poor, politics were always there.

“Especially African ones,” added Porteous.

Sloan lifted an eyebrow.

“Ken had had to do some of the groundwork calculations for this new town in Africa that his firm are building,” explained Porteous. “The preliminary brief for the quantity surveyors and so forth.”

“Well?”

“Politics came into that.”

Sloan could well believe it.

“It was the missionaries really,” said Alan Marshall. “Ken told us all about it.”

Sloan nodded. Politics and religion were hard forces to harness. Many a world leader had found that out for himself.

Colin Jervis said, “Blow me if some missionaries hadn't delivered a load of mattocks to Dlasa for ground clearance without so much as a by-your-leave.”

“Not a good thing?” hazarded Sloan.

“Completely upset the local economy,” pronounced Colin Jervis with all the authority of one who worked in a bank.

“How?” enquired Sloan warily. Economics were a closed book to him. They constituted a strange, illogical territory where two and two didn't always make four, where success in production was nearly as hazardous as failure.

“In Dlasa,” explained Jervis, “the bride-price was paid in mattocks.”

“I see,” said Sloan. He'd heard somewhere that the questions in economics examination papers stayed the same from year to year and it was the correct answers that changed. He could well believe it.

“With an excess of mattocks,” said Jervis, “the barter system broke down.”

“Mattocks,” chimed in Gerry Porteous, “being a sort of currency.”

“And it had been devalued?” asked Sloan. Devaluing the currency was a crime in a class of its own: one that Sloan did understand. He and his wife Margaret, had once been taken on a guided tour of a ruined Scottish castle. The curator had waxed eloquent on the iniquities of the wicked earl who had owned it in the sixteenth century and reeled off a positive Newgate Calendar list of his crimes. Murder, rapine, pillage, blackmail and abduction had been made to seem very run-of-the-mill by the curator, who had been working his way up to a dramatic climax. With lowered voice he had finished on a high note, “And he even fiddled the currency, too.”

“The brides,” said Porteous solemnly, “didn't know what to do, with mattocks being two a penny after that.”

“Very upsetting,” agreed Sloan.

“Ken didn't know what to do either,” said Marshall, “with the local economy all haywire. It upset all his calculations.”

Sloan nodded his sympathy. Politics, religion and economics were an even more heady trio to mix. Bride-prices, though, reminded him of something else. He said “Lucy Durmast …”

There was a perceptible stiffening all round.

“Nothing in it on Ken's side,” affirmed Porteous.

“All right,” conceded Marshall, “he took her out once or twice. And he went there quite a lot. His boss liked working at home and they did a lot of eating at the Old Rectory after work.”

“Just good friends?” suggested Crosby from the sidelines.

“Girls get funny ideas,” said the trainee accountant seriously. “You've got to be careful.”

“Perhaps Carline wasn't careful enough,” hazarded Sloan, wondering if accountancy and caution always went hand in hand.

“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” said Colin Jervis sagely.

“Did she come here?” asked Sloan.

Three young men shook their heads in unison.

“Never?”

“Never,” said Gerry Porteous.

“The landlady doesn't allow girls over the threshold,” explained Jervis.

That explained the male ménage. “Old-fashioned?” said Sloan.

“She's got two daughters she can't marry off,” said Marshall bitterly.

“And no wonder,” said Jervis.

“Did Carline have any visitors at all?” asked Sloan routinely.

There was a reaction to this of a different kind: it was more difficult to define, but the policeman was immediately aware of it.

“Occasionally,” said Gerry Porteous with noticeable wariness.

“Anyone in particular?” asked Sloan casually.

“A chap called Aturu came a few times,” said Porteous equally casually.

“Not an Englishman,” remarked Sloan.

“That's true,” agreed Porteous as if the thought were a new one.

“A fellow Ken was at college with,” explained Jervis.

“I see,” said Sloan evenly. “An old friend, you might say?”

“Sort of …” Jervis cleared his throat.

“This Mr. Aturu …” began Sloan.

“Actually, Inspector,” Porteous interrupted him awkwardly, “he's not Mr. Aturu.”

“Oh?”

It was Colin Jervis who plunged into the conversational lacuna that had been created. “He's Prince Aturu.”

“Is he?” said Sloan softly. “And who's he when he's at home?”

“One of the sons of King Thabile III of Dlasa,” said Jervis unhappily.

“I don't like it, Sloan,” declared Superintendent Leeyes predictably.

“No, sir.”

“One of the King's sons, you said.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But not—ah—one of the King's men?”

“No, sir.”

“Getting involved with a junior member of the construction firm that's building a palace for his father.”

“Capital city …”

“Same thing.”

Detective Inspector Sloan knew better than to argue. “They were at college together,” he said instead. “Kenneth Carline and Prince Aturu.”

“Perhaps that's how Durmast's got the contract,” suggested Leeyes, who was always deeply suspicious of the old school tie.

“No, sir, I don't think so.” Sloan took a deep breath. “You see, Prince Aturu is against the building of the new capital city at Mgongwala.”

“Sons,” pronounced Leeyes sagely, “have always opposed fathers.”

“Actively against …”

“Since Adam and Cain and Abel,” continued Leeyes. “It's in the nature of things.”

“Prince Aturu,” remarked Sloan with apparent inconsequence, “is in this country doing a post-graduate degree in economics.”

Superintendent Leeyes glared at him and said that that didn't alter the father-and-son relationship, or did it?

“The Prince,” observed Sloan neutrally, “feels that a new city is going to be bad for Dlasa.”

“Very probably,” said Leeyes.

“Very bad,” said Sloan.

“But good for William Durmast, Civil Engineers.”

“The Prince's argument,” reported Sloan, who had abstracted it from Gerry Porteous, who had heard it from Kenneth Carline, “was that conspicuous expenditure didn't do anything for the French royal family.”

“They had a revolution,” said Leeyes succinctly.

“Quite so,” said Sloan.

“A lot of
avoir la tête tranchée
,” said Leeyes in atrocious French. He had once attended an evening class course in French conversation: the lecturer had been heard to declare that he would have preferred to have had Winston Churchill in it: his accent had been better. “
À la lanterne
and all that, Sloan.”

Detective Inspector Sloan did not know if there were “To the barricades” touches in modern Dlasa. Or, if there were, if it was anything to do with the Calleshire Police Force.

“I don't like it,” repeated Leeyes.

“No, sir.”

“What,” he enquired, “did Inspector Porritt have to say about this dissident son?”

Sloan tightened his lips. “I'm afraid he wasn't told very much, sir. Only that an old college friend of the deceased had been trying to get in touch. That's all.”

“Not that he was Dlasian?”

“No, sir. Carline's flatmates didn't think it was important.”

“That's for us to judge,” said Leeyes magisterially.

Sloan nodded. Doctors took the same view about symptoms. Patients weren't the best judges of those. What mattered to the patient and what mattered to the doctor were two different things. Theirs to do and die … no, that was something else.

“When?” The superintendent's voice broke into this reverie.

“When what, sir?” Sloan asked, startled.

“When did this Prince Aturu try to get in touch?” snapped Leeyes impatiently. “In relation to the death.”

“He telephoned the flat the following Monday after Carline died. A week later, that is. Apparently he'd had a date with Carline at the weekend and, of course, the deceased had not appeared …” On second thought he could perhaps have put that more felicitously.

Leeyes grunted.

“According to Gerry Porteous—that's the man there he spoke to—Prince Aturu hadn't heard about the death …”

“Murder,” said Leeyes flatly.

“Murder,” amended Sloan, “and was very surprised and upset about it when Porteous told him.”

Leeyes sniffed. “He was, was he?”

“The deceased's friends,” said Sloan carefully, “were of the opinion that Kenneth was—er—having to dance pretty with the Prince.”

“Divided loyalties come difficult,” pronounced Leeyes.

“I should have thought,” said Detective Inspector Sloan, family man and mortgagee, “that he ought to have known which side his bread was buttered on.”

“Perhaps he did,” said Leeyes chillingly.

“Gerry Porteous knew,” said Detective Inspector Sloan. “He told me that he warned Carline to be careful about what he said to the Prince.” Economics might be a new science but accountancy was an old, old one. Even trainee accountants could add.

Leeyes frowned. “Did his employers know of his connection with the King of Dlasa's son?”

Sloan was guarded. “His flatmates thought not but they weren't sure.”

“You'd better find out, Sloan, to be on the safe side.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And see the Marby mob.”

“Yes, sir.” The superintendent could never bring himself to use their full title of the Marby juxta Mare Atomic Waste Disposal Plant Action Group.

“You'll have to talk to Melissa Wainwright, Sloan, you realise that, don't you?”

“Yes, sir,” said Sloan without enthusiasm. Melissa Wainwright was the leading light of all the nuclear protests in Calleshire. She was a skilled campaigner, veteran of many a confrontation with the law, and no lover of the police force. The feeling, as far as Sloan was concerned, was reciprocal.

“Sergeant Watkinson,” remarked Leeyes, “is out of hospital now.”

“Good,” said Sloan. The demonstration at the opening ceremony of the Palshaw Tunnel hadn't been peaceful.

“But still limping.”

Sloan cleared his throat. “The deceased's friends say that Carline had never talked to them about nuclear disarmament or anything like that.”

“But the protesters' leaflets were in his car?”

“Oh yes, sir.”

Leeyes grunted. “Funny, that. Better look into it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And, Sloan …”

“Sir?”

“When you see the pathologist over at Calleford—what did you say his name was?”

“Dr. Bressingham …”

“You'd better ask him if he checked for blowpipe dart marks.”

“Sir?”

“You can't be too careful in this game,” said Leeyes trenchantly.

EIGHT