A Dead Liberty (14 page)

“Very suddenly,” said the Dean.

“Why?”

“He was recalled. His allowance was stopped by King Thabile.”

“For what reason?” asked Sloan.

“Kings don't give reasons.”

“You must have had some idea …”

“All fathers see their sons as rivals,” said Dr. Chelde.

“Psychology is nothing to be afraid of,” remarked Crosby.

“Oedipus,” said the Dean, adding rather neatly after a pause, “Rex. Dear me, yes,” he gave a positively old-fashioned chortle, “Oedipus Rex. I must remember that.”

“Prince Aturu of Dlasa,” said Sloan gamely.

“Absolute monarchs tend to dislike controversy politics,” said the dean. “That's another thing entirely.”

“I can understand that,” said Sloan. He didn't like them himself. It was when people got hurt.

“Whatever the reason, Inspector, I can assure you that Prince Aturu was on his way back to Dlasa within the day.”

“And nothing's been heard from him since?”

“Nothing at all.”

TEN

Vitrellae
—
Glass capsules

“Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” said Superintendent Leeyes grandly. “That's who you think you are, I suppose, Sloan?”

“No, sir.”

“And then”—the superintendent glared across his desk—“I expect we'd have to send Crosby out into the jungle afterwards to look for you.”

“Not at all, sir.”

“Like that other fellow—I forget his name.”

“H. M. Stanley, sir.”

“On second thoughts,” said Leeyes, “perhaps not Crosby. He'd be bound to tread on a crocodile or something.”

“It wasn't that sort of search that I had in mind,” said Sloan.

“He might even start a tribal war. If he upsets them like he upsets me …”

“Just a simple enquiry to Dlasa, sir, that's all.”

“If it's all so simple,” snapped Leeyes, “what's the problem?”

“They don't have a police force to ask.”

“What?” said Leeyes. “No men in blue?”

“None, sir.” He hesitated. “They don't have any law, you see.”

Leeyes grunted. “No point in having the one without the other, I suppose.”

“Not really, sir.” Now he came to think of it, Sloan could only agree.

The superintendent looked up keenly. “Does that mean, Sloan, that they don't have any lawyers in Dlasa either?”

“It does. The Dean of Cremond College explained to me that that was why Prince Aturu had read Economics even though he'd got a lawyer's mind …”

Superintendent Leeyes's expression was quite inscrutable.

“And a politician's ambition,” added Sloan.

“A nasty combination.” The superintendent shook his head.

Sloan nodded. It was easily as effective a recipe for difficulty as economics married to activism.

“Can't you talk to their high commissioner in London?” asked Leeyes briskly.

“They haven't got one, sir,” answered Sloan. “I had wondered about the Foreign and Commonwealth Office …”

“White man's burden and white man's grave,” pronounced Leeyes sourly.

“Pardon, sir?”

“The Foreign and Commonwealth Office,” said Leeyes. “Between the two they cover the lot.”

“Er—quite so, sir.” Sloan took a deep breath. “I propose to get in touch with them.”

“They'll be about as much good as the old Home and Colonial grocery store,” forecast Leeyes, “but there's no harm in trying, I suppose.” He hitched his shoulders. “This Kingdom of Dlasa, Sloan, is it a friendly nation or was it a former British Protectorate?”

“Neither, sir,” said Sloan carefully. He'd done his homework as well as he could. “It appears to be what is known as non-aligned.”

“I see,” said Leeyes. “
Rouge et noir
.”

“No, sir, not exactly. Not Red … just non-aligned.”

“What I mean,” said Leeyes with dignity, “was that the King was playing both sides of the roulette table.
Rouge et noir
. Not
noir
and therefore
rouge
.”

“Sorry, sir. I understand.” The only sort of roulette that Sloan knew anything about was the Russian variety much favoured by those who could not even make up their own minds about suicide.

“Hedging their bets,” sniffed Leeyes, abandoning Franglais. “Can't say I blame them.”

“No, sir.”

The superintendent lifted his head. “I take it, Sloan, that Dlasa is what it is fashionable these days to call underdeveloped?”

“Yes, sir,” replied Sloan. There were international standards that measured this. With or without laws and a police force Dlasa was underdeveloped.

“And are you trying to tell me, Sloan, that there's a connection between Kenneth Carline's death and Prince Aturu's being called back to Africa so suddenly?”

“It may only be a coincidence, sir.” Detective Inspector Sloan's reply was studied. The Superintendent did not allow coincidence in detection.

“Well?” Leeyes did not rise.

“The only people,” swept on Sloan, “who would seem able to tell for certain are either dead, dumb or departed.”

“There's that deputy chairman fellow …”

“Ronald Bolsover,” agreed Sloan. “I'm going to see him again. Not that he mentioned anything about any Dlasians being in Calleshire when I saw him before.”

“What about the accused?” asked Leeyes. “Did she know this Prince Aturu?”

“She's not saying, sir, is she?”

“Can't we find out?”

“Her friend at Braffle Episcopi might know,” said Sloan. “Mrs. Cecelia Allsworthy. She's very helpful.”

“In our work,” declared Leeyes didactically, “you learn that you always have to ask yourself why someone is being helpful.”

“Of course, sir. Naturally.” Sloan hadn't been born yesterday—which was one reason why he didn't say so. The other was that he had his pension to think of. “But even—er—suspect information is better than no information at all.” He paused and thought. Did he really mean that? “There is another point, sir. Even if there is a link between Prince Aturu and the murdered man neither Ronald Bolsover nor Cecelia Allsworthy might have known about it.”

“Or they might have done,” countered Leeyes promptly, “and not told us.”

“True, sir.”

“All we really know for certain,” pronounced the superintendent, “was that Kenneth Carline died from an overdose of hyoscine and that Lucy Durmast is speaking to neither man nor beast. Right?”

“Right,” said Sloan.

“And now we also know that Prince Aturu left Cremond College at the University of Calleshire in a great hurry the week after Kenneth Carline died? Right?”

“Right.”

“Doesn't amount to much, Sloan, does it?” he sniffed.

“Oh, there's one more thing, sir.” Sloan told the superintendent about the telephone call Melissa Wainwright had said she had had before the anti-nuclear demonstration.

“How did she know that the message had come from Durmast's?” challenged Leeyes with speed.

“She didn't,” said Sloan, “except that presumably only somebody at Durmast's would have had access to a key to the gate in the protective fencing.”

“Was Prince Aturu a nuclear campaigner seeing as he was up at the university?” A philosopher wouldn't have liked the superintendent's leap in logic—it smacked of the classic “When did you stop beating your wife?” but Sloan knew better than to argue.

“The dean,” he replied neutrally, “was going to make some enquiries about that for us, sir.”

Leeyes drummed his fingers on the table. “Are you suggesting, Sloan, that it was Kenneth Carline who let these protesters on to the tunnel site to disrupt the opening ceremony?”

“I'm only saying, sir, that the person who actually did so told Melissa Wainwright that he was from Durmast's, which was a funny thing to do in the circumstances.”

Leeyes grunted. “The deceased had some leaflets about the nuclear waste disposal plant at Marby juxta Mare in his car when it was found, didn't he? You haven't forgotten that, had you, Sloan?”

“No, sir.”

Leeyes looked thoughtful. “Does it follow that a young man capable for whatever reason of helping to ruin the official opening ceremony of a tunnel built by the firm for which he works is also capable of attempting to sabotage that same firm's next contract to build a capital city in Africa?”

“I don't know, sir.”

“In alliance with another young man who does not appear to know on which side his bread is buttered.”

“Kenneth Carline's friends,” ventured Sloan, “told me that the Prince thought he was saving his country.”

“I have a fair grasp of the politics of this country,” said Leeyes heavily, “to say nothing of those of the Calleshire County Council, but those of Africa are beyond me.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I do know, though,” mused Leeyes with apparent irrelevance, “that Dlasa is the sort of place where they used to have missionaries for dinner.”

“Did they, sir?”

“Moreover, they may not even now know that eating people is wrong.”

“No, sir.”

“I wonder exactly what's happened to Prince Aturu,” the superintendent mused.

Sloan was suddenly uneasy. “I must say I hadn't thought about that, sir.”

Leeyes waved an admonitory hand. “You should, Sloan, you should. Not that there's a lot we can do about it.”

“No, sir,” If anything, Sloan's uneasiness deepened. As a rule the superintendent's responses to almost all overseas situations were of the despatching of a gunboat nature. So far he hadn't mentioned action at all …

“Let us hope,” said Leeyes enigmatically, “that the only croaking Prince Aturu of Dlasa has done is as a frog.”

Detective Inspector Sloan could think of absolutely nothing to say.

“Lucy interested in nuclear warfare, Inspector?” Cecelia Allsworthy shook her head vigorously. “No, not as far as I know.”

“I see, madam.” The two policemen had patently interrupted Cecelia at her pottery wheel. It was not Mrs. John Allsworthy, wife of the Squire of Braffle Episcopi, who had welcomed them to the Manor House but Cecelia Allsworthy, sometime art student at the Slade, quondam artist and now asking no higher designation than that of simple potter. She had come through to see them a little flustered, her hands still bearing traces of clay, her face smudged.

“And I'm sure I would have known, Inspector.” She detached her mind with difficulty from considering the angle of the neck of the vase she was working on. She had been thinking how it was that the differences between the cultures of India and China could be somehow epitomised in the rake of a vase's neck and the concept had suddenly started to fascinate her. Where other people talked about national characteristics she had begun to think in terms of a curve. Did it go for Samian and Etruscan ware, too, she had been wondering when the front doorbell had rung. A vision of the Portland vase drifted into her mind and out again as she turned to her
au pair
girl. “Hortense, be an angel and go and put the kettle on for a pot of tea for these gentlemen.”

“
Mais oui
, Cecelia …”

Where other people talked about national characteristics she thought about vases. She supposed that Anglo-Saxon overlaid with Norman—rather like the parish church of Braffle Episcopi—influenced by everything she'd ever read and seen and been taught made the compound style that she was producing now, but she wasn't quite satisfied. What she was seeking was something even more cognate …

“Come along in, Inspector, and sit down.” She took one of the twins out of the young French girl's arms as she went towards the door and then, a moment later, took a few steps after her and called out “I'll infuse the tea myself, Hortense. Just see to everything else.”

“
Certainement
…”

“She's very good,” said Cecelia Allsworthy, coming back, “but she can't make tea properly. The French never can, you know.”

“Yes, madam,” said Sloan. Had Superintendent Leeyes been with Sloan and Crosby at the Manor House at Braffle Episcopi he would undoubtedly have agreed with Mrs. Allsworthy. Their superior officer's view on what the French were incapable of doing well had merely been exacerbated—not changed—by war and had much in common with those of the late Duke of Wellington.

Cecelia frowned. “I daresay Lucy didn't like the idea of a nuclear winter any more than anyone else does but that isn't the point, is it?”

“No, madam.”

“But from the way some people carry on you might think it is.”

“Some people get very worked up,” observed the policeman mildly.

“A great mistake,” said Mrs. Allsworthy at once. “I can think of a lot worse fates than dying at the same time as everyone I love. Save a lot of pain and grief.”

Sloan bowed his head to a higher realism than he had thought of. It was a view of atomic bombing that he hadn't encountered before: that didn't feature in any argument. “Is that what Lucy Durmast thought too?”

She wrinkled her face in an attempt at recollection. “All I know is that she agreed with me that the actual plant at Marby juxta Mare was impressive to look at—which it is—but she didn't wear a badge or anything like that.” Suddenly Cecelia Allsworthy's face lit up. “I do remember something though, Inspector.”

“Yes?”

“It was the day when we went over to Marby to see how the plant was getting on. It's really quite stylish, you know. They haven't skimped on the design side—one of the building is a perfect rhomboid.”

“And?”

“It sounds a bit silly really when it's repeated in cold blood.”

“Go on.” Cold blood had come into somebody's calculations already anyway.