A Dead Liberty (5 page)

And so had something else.

However long he spent in the Courts of Law he would never make the mistake of asking a woman how she had come to the life of the oldest profession. He had heard that answer too. “Luck, my lord. Pure luck.”

“I repeat,” he said now to Lucy Durmast, “that I have the power to commit you to prison for contempt of court and I shall not hesitate to do so if I find that you have no sound reason for not speaking.”

He hadn't meant to say “no sound reason,” thought Lucy. This was no time for legal puns though and not even the flicker of a smile crossed her face.

The best reason that Judge Eddington knew for sending a man to prison was seldom even acknowledged by the reformers. In his view it was to save other members of the tribe from having to have converse with the sinner. It was, in fact, the tribe that was being spared, not the sinner being punished. To his way of thinking, the avoidance of the newly bereaved came into the same category. It, too, was primitive, indeed instinctive, behaviour. So, too, was the shunning of the halt and the lame and the dying. That was what animals did. The feeble immediately became outcasts of the pack for reasons directly related to the survival of the pack.

Judge Eddington saw his sentencing of those who had offended against tribal customs or Society's code—call such ways by any name—as a late form of banishment. He was with William Shakespeare in this. The most condign punishment that the Bard had envisaged for his historical character had been the order to eschew the realm and become an outcast from the people of their own land. Sending someone to Coventry was the same thing in minuscule. There had been old laws, too, even earlier than those in Shakespeare's day, about those newly sentenced to exile sticking to the King's Highway until the coast was reached that still sent a shudder through the imagination.

“I am informed,” continued Cedric Eddington dispassionately, “that you are perfectly capable of hearing what I am saying …”

Lucy did not move.

He fixed her with a beady eye. “And I am warning you for the last time that if you continue to keep silence I shall have no hesitation in returning you to prison.”

Into Lucy Durmast's mind floated the memory of a book she had once read with the peerless title of
A Time to Keep Silence
. There was a time and a place for everything, of course. What the judge was saying so weightily was that silence when one had been charged in a Court of Law was more than a little inappropriate. A sort of not playing the game to their rules or something, thought Lucy vaguely. Men were such funny creatures.

“Is that quite clear?” he thundered towards the dock.

She said nothing.

“Lucy Durmast,” said Judge Eddington, lending each and every syllable as much weight as he could, “I must warn you that if you persist in being mute of malice that you stand not only in danger of going back to prison for contempt of court …”

She looked up but said nothing.

“… but also,” continued the judge severely, “of not receiving that justice to which you are entitled.”

She wanted to cry out that there had been no justice in her arrest but she didn't.

“And,” finished Judge Eddington impressively, “which it is my duty to see that you are afforded.”

Lucy Durmast's immediate thought was that he was going to have his work cut out to do that—but she kept her lips firmly together and did not voice it.

“Sentenced to seven days imprisonment for contempt of court,” pronounced Judge Eddington.

“Playing for time, I suppose,” sniffed Superintendent Leeyes, to whom this news was relayed by Detective Inspector Sloan.

“Who is?” asked Inspector Harpe of Traffic Division who had come back to the police station from the Court with Detective Inspector Sloan.

“The pair of them,” snarled Leeyes.

“The pair?” began Sloan. “But, sir …”

“The judge for one,” said the Superintendent. “You can bet your sweet life he's been trying to find out behind the scenes what it's all about. He's not silly.”

“He has been keeping in touch with the prison,” admitted Sloan slowly.

“There! What did I tell you?” Leeyes glared at his two subordinates. “I said he was playing for time.”

“They've told him,” said Sloan, “that she's played possum all the while there too.”

“Dumb crambo, more like,” said Leeyes.

“Some sort of funny game,” agreed Sloan, who wasn't too sure that he could remember the details of dumb crambo.

“And the girl as well,” insisted Leeyes. “In my opinion she's playing for time too.”

“Quite possibly, sir,” agreed Sloan.

“Though you can search me why she bothers.”

“Perhaps, sir, it isn't actually time she's playing for,” suggested Sloan.

“What other sort of stakes do you have in mind?” enquired Leeyes frostily.

“All the while you're actually in prison,” replied Sloan, “you are quite safe physically yourself.”

“Except from other prisoners,” put in Inspector Harpe with an accuracy based on realism. Inspector Harpe was in charge of Traffic Division at Berebury. He was universally known throughout the Calleshire Force as Happy Harry because he had never been known to smile. He on his part maintained that there had never been anything about which to be cheerful in Traffic Division.

“Other prisoners, Harry,” pointed out Sloan, “may sometimes be less of a risk than something or someone in the outside world.”

“Who and what?” demanded Leeyes upon the instant. “Tell me that, Sloan.”

“I don't know, sir.” Sloan turned back to the Superintendent. “Trevor Porritt must have thought he had a water-tight case or he wouldn't have proceeded with it.”

“They do say he was a cautious man,” conceded Leeyes.

“But,” said Sloan, “I, of course, only know what he wrote down. He can't remember anything now.”

Leeyes grunted.

“I suppose the accused can choose to keep quiet if they want to,” remarked Inspector Harpe with all the relaxation of one who is not directly involved with a case. “After all, it's a free country, isn't it?”

Since this last was one of Superintendent Leeyes's perennial hobby-horses, Sloan sought a swift diversion. “What were you doing in Court today, Harry?”

The Traffic Inspector lifted his head like a melancholy St. Bernard seeking a reassuring pat. “Couple of cowboy drivers got their lorries tangled up in the Palshaw Tunnel. Both exceeding the speed limit at the time, so it served 'em right.”

“Anything to say for themselves?” barked Leeyes. He disapproved of articulated vehicles on principle.

“Not a lot,” said Happy Harry. “One was French …”

“Ah …” breathed Leeyes vengefully. Heavy goods vehicles did little for the Entente Cordiale at any time: and after a Road Traffic Accident nothing at all.

“… and the other German,” finished Harpe.

Leeyes lost interest.

Sloan said, “Harry, you saw this girl Lucy Durmast, didn't you? What did you make of her?”

The verdict of Inspector Harold Harpe of Traffic Division came without hesitation or equivocation. “Nice legs,” he said.

FOUR

Auristillae
—
Ear-drops

Superintendent Leeyes glanced ominously at his watch. “If we've got to do Calleford's dirty work for them I suppose we'd better do it properly. You'll have to make do with Crosby, though. I can't spare anyone better. I take it, Sloan, that you've already been over Inspector Porritt's report in detail?”

Detective Inspector Sloan wondered for a moment if Lucy Durmast's silence had cost her as much effort in Court as his own restraint quite often did with Superintendent Leeyes. He contented himself now with saying after a pause, “I have, sir.”

“Let me get it quite straight, then,” said Leeyes, adding acidly, “now that Inspector Harpe has seen fit to go back to his proper duties.”

“There isn't a lot of problem about the evidence, sir,” said Sloan.

“Except,” supplied Leeyes, “that for some reason nobody can get round to presenting it.”

“Quite so, sir.”

“Well?”

“It's really quite simple, sir …”

Leeyes snorted.

Sloan reached for Trevor Porritt's file. “Kenneth Carline had lunch with Lucy Durmast on Monday, January 13, and died later that evening from poisoning by hyoscine hydrobromide.”

“If that's your nutshell, Sloan,” said Leeyes unkindly, “there isn't enough in it.”

“Carline didn't eat anything before he got to her father's house and he didn't eat anything after leaving it and before he died.”

Leeyes grunted. “That's been proved, has it, Sloan?”

“He had his breakfast as usual with the three other young men with whom he shared a flat …”

“And they were all all right?”

“Fit as fleas.” Sloan coughed. “They—these four—had a rota for the—er—domestic side.”

“That makes a change,” said Leeyes. “They usually have a girlfriend.”

Sloan forged on. “It wasn't Kenneth Carline's turn to do the cooking anyway that week. He ate what all the others ate and left for work as usual.”

“Where's work as usual?”

“Messrs. William Durmast, Civil Engineers, in Calleford. Their offices are in that big old house in the Rushmarket. Quite a nice place, really. Central and so forth.”

“Being central,” said Leeyes realistically, “usually means that there's nowhere to park.”

Sloan continued his narrative. “All that Kenneth Carline had there was coffee from a common source within the office shared by everyone. One of those help-yourself machines. To make things simpler still, he had it black and almost as soon as he got to the office.”

“Most young men need pulling together on Monday mornings.”

“He had had a bit of a trouncing anyway in a Rugby match on the Saturday afternoon,” contributed Sloan, consulting the file. “Trevor Porritt had established that because at the post-mortem the pathologist found a lot of … of … eccymoses.”

“If doctors mean bruises,” grumbled Leeyes, “I don't know why they don't say so. Got to prove they've had an expensive education or something.”

“The bruises were all at least forty-eight hours old though,” said Sloan, “and so didn't come into the picture.”

Leeyes grunted. “Go on.”

“After he'd had his coffee Carline went into the office of the deputy chairman. That's a man called Ronald Bolsover.”

“The man who tried to persuade Lucy Durmast to see a solicitor?”

“That's right, sir,” Sloan nodded. “He's in charge of the firm while William Durmast—he's the girl's father—is in Africa and Carline had an appointment with him for eleven o'clock that morning in his office.”

“Then he could have …”

“Ronald Bolsover's office is one of those old-fashioned ones where the walls are glass above waist level,” said Sloan.

“None of this open-plan nonsense, then,” grunted Leeyes, “with potted palms pretending to be walls.”

A memory from
A Midsummer Night's Dream
to do with Snout serving the office of a wall welled up in Sloan's mind, but he instantly suppressed it. There was a time and a place for everything. “No, sir,” he said. “Nothing like that. I understand it's something to do with needing all the light the rooms can get for technical drawings.”

“Artists need plenty of north light, too,” Leeyes informed him gratuitously. The superintendent was a great one for attending adult-education evening classes, and one winter there had been one on the life and art of Rubens. The lecturer had done his best but had not been able to prevent Superintendent Leeyes from taking a purely police view of the great Peter Paul.

“Anyway,” said Sloan, valiantly sticking to the point, “the deputy chairman's secretary was in the next office all the time that Kenneth Carline was with Ronald Bolsover.”

“And?”

“And although nobody could hear what they were saying, she is prepared to swear that neither Mr. Bolsover nor Kenneth Carline ate or drank anything while they were there together.”

“There are plenty of places to stop between Calleford and Braffle Episcopi,” said Leeyes. “It's right over on the coast, don't forget.”

“I know, sir. Between Marby and Edsway.”

“Well?”

“Time came into it, sir.”

“Swallowing something doesn't take long.”

“That would only be if it were suicide, sir,” said Sloan, “and he hadn't gone into a pub or cafe.” Superintendent Leeyes was given to picking holes in most arguments. The trouble was that he usually found them where no one else had thought to look.

“Time wouldn't have been of the essence then,” pointed out Leeyes.

“No, sir, it wouldn't,” Sloan agreed. Who had it been who had gone to the water's edge and decided that there was after all no hurry about drowning herself and had something to eat? A girl in a book Sloan had had to read for a school examination once a long time ago—could it have been Maggie Tulliver? He'd always meant one day to go back and read something else that the same author had written but somehow he just hadn't the time. Silly, really, when you thought about the years in between.

“But,” barked Leeyes, breaking into his reverie, “time mattered, did it?”

“Carline was working to a pretty tight schedule that morning.”

Leeyes grunted.

“As it is, sir, he must have covered the ground between Calleford and Braffle Episcopi well over the speed limit anyway.”

“Inspector Harpe's merry men had all gone to lunch, I suppose,” said Leeyes, “seeing as it was between twelve and three.”

“There certainly wasn't time for the deceased to have stopped at a pub or cafe that morning en route and still got where he did when he did,” said Sloan. “Anyway, Inspector Porritt checked them all out and they swear Carline hadn't been in.”