A Dead Liberty (23 page)

What was in Lucy's mind at the moment and was engaging her full attention was the search for a word.

The longest one that she knew—antidisestablishmentarianism—had gone roiling about in her mind long after the chaplain's visit while she had sought another one: the word which all the vowels in the English language appeared in their right alphabetical order. She had known it well enough in the second form at school. Her cell-mates would have been surprised if they had known what it was she was cudgelling her brains trying to remember but they wouldn't have objected. Their attitude to her silence had interested Lucy by its very practicality.

“Quite right, dear,” the oldest one had said. “Say nothing. It's the only thing they can't hold against you.”

“Least said, soonest mended's what I always say,” nodded another. “Especially in Court.”

“Never had no time for canaries myself,” said a self-possessed girl called Rita. “You keep quiet if you want to. No skin off our noses, is it?”

At least, thought Lucy silently, she had one advantage over that prisoner of the Germans in the book. No one was going to drag her from her cell and say—and, alas, mean—“We have ways of making you talk.”

In England you went to prison as punishment, not
for
punishment. There was both a distinction and a difference. There was one thing, though, that did belong entirely to the prison ambience and of which Lucy was very aware. In a prison cell you were no longer mistress of your own front door. There was, she realised now, more than one way of looking at a key. It both opened a door and kept it locked. The difference there lay in whose hand it was held. Rather like the distinction between a master key and a skeleton one. It was the same key opening the same door but for different reasons and in different hands.

She was no longer mistress of her own front door.

She had no power to exclude the world.

When the door of her room was unceremoniously opened and she was told that Detective Inspector Sloan of the Berebury Criminal Investigation Department wanted to see her, she rose without demur. Detective Inspector Porritt had been persistent, polite and very much to the point and she had no cause to believe that Detective Inspector Sloan wouldn't be as well. After all, she wasn't an anchorite—or was it an eremite?—with her thoughts as her raison d'être. “I think, therefore I am …” No, that was something else.

Or was it?

Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby interviewed Lucy in one of the visiting rooms at the prison. Like Detective Inspector Porritt, Sloan was persistent, polite and pertinent but he was now a man with extra purpose.

“I must ask for your full cooperation,” he said. “Matters have taken a very tragic turn.”

She looked at him without comment, determined now not to be tricked into speech.

“There are several things I need to know, miss,” he said earnestly, “and rather quickly.”

She remained gravely attentive.

“Perhaps,” he said, “you would just give me a sign that you agree or disagree with what I am saying.”

She stiffened. This was a new ploy and she knew where it would lead to. The unguarded nod, the deliberate misunderstanding on the part of the interrogator causing inadvertent speech …

When his question came it merely puzzled her.

As far as she knew Kenneth Carline hadn't known Hortense Fablon, but she didn't say so. She remained rigid in her chair, her arms folded in her lap throughout the Detective Inspector's visit. At one point she detached her mind from them altogether and went back to considering which word in the English language it was that had all the vowels in it in the right alphabetical order …

“You see, miss,” a voice was saying as if from afar, “this is a very serious business indeed. Something has happened which may or may not have repercussions on the case against you. I can't say for sure, of course.”

She was aware of his persuasiveness. From where she sat the policemen appeared to be full of honest endeavour, but appearances were deceptive. There was no one better placed than Lucy herself to know this …

“Events,” he said, “have taken a very unhappy turn indeed.”

A word in the English language which used all five vowels in alphabetical order …

“I'm very much afraid that someone else has been killed,” the policeman said.

Five vowels, thought Lucy desperately.

“Someone you know, Miss Durmast.”

Fear clutched at her heart. They were wrong, those clinicians who insisted that that organ should be thought of as a pump. She distinctly felt her heart contract as he spoke. Pumps didn't change gear when alarmed. Her eyes asked the question that her tongue could not. Literally could not, now. It clove to her palate, too dry to move.

“Someone from Braffle Episcopi,” said Sloan.

Five vowels in the right order.

The answer suddenly welled up from her memory with the same apparent illogicality as a fact summoned up by computer from the depths of an impersonal machine. She suddenly thought how equally unlikely both storage and retrieval systems looked—brain and software. Human and mechanical. There wasn't much to choose between them as improbable sources of recorded information.

Five vowels in the right order occurred in the word “facetious.”

She had to make herself turn her head and focus on what Detective Inspector Sloan was saying.

“Hortense Fablon, Mrs. Allsworthy's
au pair
, was killed last night.”

There was, the policemen discovered, yet another variation on human communication. It fell awkwardly between the verbal and the non-verbal but whose meaning was as clear as any in either category.

Lucy Durmast burst into tears.

“Where to?” asked Crosby, as the gates of H. M. Prison Cottingham Grange clanged behind them and they were back in the outside uncloistered world.

“Headquarters,” said Detective Inspector Sloan, “to collect a warrant.”

“Right, sir.”

“Then out to Braffle Episcopi again.”

Crosby put his foot down on the accelerator.

“There's no hurry,” said Sloan. “Allsworthy won't run away. That sort doesn't. He'll face the music, all right. And his wife'll stand by him. That sort always does. Besides, I want to think …”

He shut his eyes.

That wasn't so much as an aid to thought as an attempt as determined as that of Lucy Durmast's to exclude the world. If he kept them open he would have to devote the journey to wishing he had led a better life and there wasn't time for that now. With Crosby at the wheel, self-preservation demanded muscles braced for whatever was to come. He had duties that shouldn't be subsumed by such mental and physical distraction …

He would read Dr. Dabbe's report, of course, before he went out to Braffle Episcopi.

He'd give John Allsworthy every chance to explain why he had been so long in Calleford looking for Hortense Fablon.

And so late in reporting her missing to the police.

And being so put out by the finding of her scarf in his car.

For all he knew,
droit de seigneur
was something the French girl understood very well. Perhaps Dr. Dabbe would be able to give him the answer to that too. The pathologist's phraseology would be different but his meaning undeniably clear.

He opened his eyes briefly and shut them again.

The words
droit de seigneur
came from the French. Hortense would have known what they mean all right. For all he knew there was a lord of the manor at St. Amand-sur-Nesque who, like John Allsworthy, owned the best house and most of the land and who was accustomed to having his way with young girls working in the house …

He opened his eyes again and this time he kept them open. “You might remember, Crosby, that overtaking leads to undertaking.”

“Well?” barked Leeyes as they walked into his office at Berebury Police Station.

“No joy from Lucy Durmast, sir.”

“She wouldn't tell you anything about this fellow Allsworthy and the French girl then?”

“She wouldn't tell me anything full stop, sir,” said Sloan.

“Not even,” said Leeyes richly, “that they were just good friends?”

“She cried,” reported Sloan in a constrained way, “but she didn't say anything.”

Leeyes was professionally proof against tears. He was strong on circumstantial evidence though. “This scarf, Sloan …”

“Hortense Fablon's,” said Sloan.

“In his car?”

“Indubitably,” affirmed Sloan. “The wife said the French girl had missed it the day before.”

“Wives,” said Leeyes darkly, “will say anything.”

“Yes, sir. He had given the girl a lift a few days earlier into Edsway. There's a chemist's there.”

“Two crimes of passion in one village,” mused Leeyes, “seem a bit much, all the same …” He was interrupted by the sudden shrill of the telephone on his desk. “Yes?” he said abruptly into the receiver. “I thought I said I wasn't to be disturbed. What's that?” His voice rose. “What did you say? Say it again!” he commanded, and then “Is he sure? What was he doing? Where? When?” There was a pause, then the Superintendent slammed the receiver down. “That was a report of a message from that man Bolsover from Calleford.”

“Yes?”

“He just went out to a Chinese takeaway …”

“And?”

“He's quite sure he saw Prince Aturu in the High Street there a few minutes ago.”

SEVENTEEN

Spiritus
—
Spirits

When he reviewed the case of Regina versus Lucy Mirabel Durmast afterwards, Detective Inspector Sloan was inclined to indicate among the sympathetic privacy of his peers that the search for Prince Aturu of Dlasa was almost the most anxiety-provoking part of the whole affair.

Looking for a man for whom no really accurate description had been available was bad enough: circumventing a humourous attempt to give the exercise the code name “Liquorice Allsorts” had been blood-chilling in its public relations implications. Before Superintendent Leeyes got to hear about it, Sloan settled with a neat sense of history for “Operation Black Prince” instead.

A hastily summoned Dr. Adam Chelde came up with some academic words about Prince Aturu such as “dolicocephalic” which were no doubt accurate but scarcely helpful.

“What's that?” was Detective Constable Crosby's immediate reaction. “Never heard of it.”

Dr. Chelde came from a background where it was perfectly proper to proclaim one's ignorance. “Not your field, of course, Officer,” he said generously. “It means long-headed.”

Ronald Bolsover, when consulted, had been vaguer. “Tall and black. Looked as if he would have made an athlete, I shouldn't wonder. Very African, anyway.”

Since the number of races in Africa was legion, this was not really very constructive.

James Jeavington, the civil servant at the Ministry for Overseas Development, had spoken about the man's hair. “Bound to have been crinkly,” he said. “All Dlasians have short crinkly hair.”

Asked about the shape of Dlasian heads, he was more graphic than the Dean of Cremond had been. “Pear-drop,” he said phytomorphologically.

Kenneth Durmast's three flat-mates had been the least observant of all.

“Marvellous teeth,” said Alan Marshall who had suffered young at the dentist's hands.

“A rich, plummy sort of voice,” said Colin Jervis, who was the one who worked in the bank. Sloan put the association between money and intonation (if there was one) to the back of his mind for future examination.

Gerry Porteous had been the most perceptive. “He sort of walked tall, if you know what I mean, Inspector. Like a king's son should.”

A general alert had accordingly gone out to all police divisions in Calleshire to seek and detain anyone answering to the composite description of Prince Aturu. The trawl netted a veritable anthropologist's dream.

Two West Indians who worked in Calleford Hospital were positively affronted at being mistaken for Dlasian, a country for which they had no reverence at all. A merchant seaman from Mhlamaland, whose people had been hereditary enemies of the Dlasians for generations, became very combative and showed every sign of becoming a hereditary enemy of the Calleshire County Constabulary as well.

A highly civilised merchant from Bengal with commercial business to execute in Luston, asked by a police sergeant where he was going, raised his hat and replied, “Almstone, sir,” adding with Olde Worlde courtesy to the officer, “and you?”

A newly arrived visiting professor of physics from Alabama, come to take up the Ornum Fellowships at the University of Calleshire, rather sadly recast his first letter home that evening, while the deepest forebodings of a South American tourist were confirmed by a simple enquiry about where he had come from made by a police constable in Berebury.

The greatest confusion of all arose during an interview with a strapping youth of the darkest of skins, seen running towards Calleford railway station. Asked from whence he had come, he said in the broadest of accents, “Lancashire.” Asked where he had been born, he gave the same reply. Asked his nationality he said “British.” He demanded rather pugnaciously to see the enquiring officer's credentials and started to talk about writs of habeas corpus, both of which the policeman concerned treated as evidence of long residence in the United Kingdom.

“British is best,” the young man grinned, offering to race the policeman to the railway station, “but Black British is better.”

When the nature of the enquiry was explained to him, he remarked ironically, “You have got trouble at t'mill, haven't you, man?” and sped on his way.

Detective Inspector Sloan, whose personal view was that what really divided mankind irrespective of everything else was a preference for thick or thin gravy, eviscerated all the reports with great speed and established one essential fact.