Death in the opening chapter

TWENTY-TWO

Before talking to Allgood again, Sir Simon had to phone the office. Harvey Contractor, his ambitious, talented, overqualified sidekick was manning the place in his boss’s absence, and it was to him that Bognor spoke. He was so immersed in the English countryside and the death of the vicar, that he had almost forgotten that Contractor existed.

‘Thick plot already,’ he said. ‘But getting thicker by the moment.’

Contractor had a degree, a good one, in semiotics from the University of Wessex in Casterbridge. His boss pretended not to know what this meant. Contractor humoured him in this, as in most respects. One day, Bognor’s job would be his. No competition. All he had to do was bide his time and keep his nose clean.

‘Anything you say, boss.’

‘This is supposed to be a holiday,’ said Bognor, trying not to whinge. ‘It’s anything but. I’m working flat out. Bloody hideous.’

Contractor yawned. The phone call had interrupted his ‘fiendishly difficult’ Sudoku. Contractor habitually finished it fast. He himself could be fiendishly difficult when he wanted, but he tried not to be with Bognor. He rather liked the old thing and saw through the veil of assumed stupidity which, on the whole, Sir Simon wore lightly. It did not fool Contractor, nor really was it meant to.

Contractor had read the whole of Proust in the original French, being averse to translation, and being able to read in a lot of languages. He was weaned on Simenon, also in French, and was an expert on crime literature from Bulgaria, Flanders and Finland. He was fluent on Thomas Merton and early Coetzee. He had fingered Henning Mankell as an emerging talent before anyone else in Britain was aware of him, and he had learned to despise Dan Brown similarly early on. He was, in short, literaturely perspicacious and he didn’t do festivals. He believed that writers should be read and not heard. Had he been at the Fludd, he might have heckled.

‘Problem?’ he asked.

‘Routine,’ said his boss. ‘Quick trip to Kew. Check out the army list in the National Archives. I want you to cast an eye over the Mobile 13th in the sixties. See if there are any familiar names there.’

‘That’s Blenkinsop’s old regiment, isn’t it?’

‘Could be.’ Contractor was right. He nearly always was. It was the main reason he was hired.

‘OK. Can you tell me what I’m looking for?’

‘I could, but I won’t.’ Bognor smiled and laughed inwardly. If the information he was seeking was there, Contractor would find it. He was damned, though, if he was going to give his subordinate the satisfaction of knowing this. Bad enough to have someone as cocky as Contractor working for him; worse still to encourage him.

Contractor laughed back. He understood the rules of the game only too well. ‘Your call, boss,’ he said. ‘I’ll get down to Kew and call you back. Remember me to Lady B.’ He laughed again. He and Monica had a good relationship; flirtatious, competitive, but mutually respectful as well. Quite right.

Actually, Bognor rather liked Harvey Contractor, which those who thought he was more conventional than he actually was might have found peculiar. Sir Branwell, who referred to Harvey, in a faux-jocular way, as ‘Your nig-nog’, affected to find the affection odd, but Bognor was completely without the usual prejudices of middle-class, middle-aged, white English males. He knew that a certain sort of person, usually female, usually shrill, much disliked him because of the way he looked and sounded. He rode with the punches and accepted his appearance, visual and verbal, as a sort of camouflage, which had the effect of concealing his true self from friend and foe alike. This was just as well, not least because Bognor, perversely, preferred the company of his natural enemies. His friends couldn’t begin to understand this, and Bognor reciprocated.

His was a small department. In the old days, Parkinson had been the crusty old boss and he the thrusting Young Turk. Well, up to a point. Even Bognor saw the humorousness of the idea of him as thrusting young anything. Parkinson was long since retired and dead into the bargain, though the ultimate demise had been quite recent. After the old boy had spent a decently long retirement, he finally died in the fullness of years at home in his slippers. Not a bad way to go: Scotch in hand, together with a half-complete Times crossword.

Now, it was he who had become the crusty old boss and Contractor the thrusting Young Turk. There was no one else of serious substance. SIDBOT had always been a girl of slender means; a lean outfit; a small streamlined organization which habitually punched above its weight. This irritated smarter, bigger departments, which often found themselves out-thought and outmanoeuvred.

He sighed and felt briefly smug. The sense of self-satisfaction did not persist, alas, for he felt too much like a good deed in a naughty world, and he firmly believed that, while his was a model department, this meant that there were many other departments which were pretty grim. Life itself was pretty grim, but maybe that was another matter. He took a Hobbesian view of human existence, even though he personally had rather enjoyed what he was increasingly aware had to be thought of in the past tense. He was often asked to accept that his meaningful life was over, and even though he contested this view robustly, he was forced to recognize that there was some truth in it. Retirement was looming; he had collected his bus pass; he was soon to be a pensioner. But that didn’t mean he had given up, even if he was forced to accept that he was now an old man in a hurry.

Plenty of time, though, for some final flourishes, and now that he had got his gong, now that he was running an office, he felt unshackled. He still had time for dishing out surprises and even producing some bloody noses. This he enjoyed, and in young Contractor, he believed he had a willing and able accomplice.

‘Anything else, boss?’ his subordinate asked.

Bognor said there wasn’t anything else. Contractor hadn’t finished though. ‘From where I sit, it looks as if the vicar killed himself,’ he said. ‘Anyway, you’ll never prove anything else. If I were you, I’d enjoy the show. They say Allgood talks a better book than he writes. Which wouldn’t be difficult.’

‘I’ve heard that too,’ said Bognor. ‘In fact, I’m seeing him again any minute. I missed his session this morning. Talking to the widow, instead. Heavy going.’

‘Tough shit,’ said Contractor with a definite note of irony. Talking to widows was part of the job. It went with the territory. If you didn’t like it, then you should shuffle papers around like most civil servants in Whitehall.

‘I’ll look forward to your call,’ said Bognor, more or less meaning it. He put the phone down. He supposed he should use his mobile more and master texting. However, he didn’t care for the contraption and had been brought up to believe that a man should always be master of his machines. He was afraid that mobiles were gaining the upper hand, which was why he stuck to old-fashioned landlines wherever possible. He believed, probably wrongly, that where they were concerned, he was in charge.

He hated mobiles almost as much as he hated laptops but needs must. He told very few people his mobile number and even pretended to various interested parties that he disbelieved in them so bitterly that he did not own one. He liked the sort of telephone you wound up. His idea of a proper number was single figures and an exchange with letters like Juniper or Flaxman. He had a natural aversion to numbers and was in many ways a Luddite. He hankered after ink and a fountain pen even if he drew the line at a quill.

Now that he was nearing retirement, he worried more and more about the verdict of others, and especially of the Almighty and his minions. Because of his new ‘K’ and his position as boss of SIDBOT, he would qualify for obituaries in papers of what used to be called ‘record’. The Times, for instance. He did not wish to be the victim of simpering damnation with faint press. However, he very much suspected that he knew the identity of the principle author in that organ and he feared the worst. Never mind. He would be gone, and he doubted very much whether Murdoch papers were delivered wherever he was going. Monica would be cross though. He wanted young Contractor to write the signed piece in the Independent, which was his sort of thing, but the way things were going there would be no Independent by the time he snuffed it. It was a race to the death, and were he a betting man, he would put money on his own chances of winning this particular race. There was no handicap that he was aware of.

He didn’t believe in God, nor heaven, hell or purgatory, but that didn’t stop him hedging his bets with a dose of agnosticism, nor from speculating about the quality of his reception at the pearly gates. He didn’t think he had much time for St Peter anyway, and definitely believed that you got a better class of person in hell. On the other hand, he had seen enough Hieronymus Bosch in Bruges to feel apprehensive about the underworld – too much toasting fork and boiling oil, and not enough reading the Sporting Life over a pink gin.

He had a nasty feeling that St Peter would be patronizing. ‘All those talents we gave you and you ended up with a measly “K” and an insignificant office in Whitehall,’ the old saint would say, shaking his head and making notes with his quill. Bognor hated being patronized, especially by those such as Saint Peter, whom he regarded as his inferiors in almost every important respect. I mean, how many GCEs did St Peter hold? Had he ever passed a driving test? Just because he was once Bishop of Rome and a martyr. No justice. Had he, Bognor, been St Peter, he’d have made a much better fist of things. Instead of which, he was going to rot in hell.

Oh, well. He wondered if the Reverend Sebastian was rotting in hell, or merely stewing gently in purgatory, before the pearly gates rolled back and he ascended some frothy white biliousness. On balance, he’d rather be down under with Groucho Marx than on cloud nine with the Reverend Sebastian. Did suicides qualify for heaven? Would the Almighty accept his findings? He doubted it.

It seemed highly probable that Allgood had been being hypothetical. Unless he had somehow been privy to a publisher’s slush pile, there was no way in which he could possibly have known that the priest was keen to be printed. The sudden, mildly mysterious, death was grist to the literary lecturer’s mill. A slight exaggeration, a reasonable scintilla of doubt, these were allowable ingredients if it helped him concoct a good story. There was a maxim about never letting the facts interfere with such a thing, and Bognor would lay heavy odds that Martin Allgood subscribed to it. He would, wouldn’t he?

He had to accept, reluctantly, that if he were able to prove that the late vicar was murdered, he would receive no thanks. He would obviously get no thanks from the guilty party; none from the deceased or his family; nothing but opprobrium from the Fludds and others. Not for the first time, he was out on his own; on a limb which was in imminent danger of breaking and rendering him at best ridiculous, and at worst a bit of a pest. Sir Branwell and Camilla would forgive him; Monica and little Contractor would be quietly pleased. It would cut no ice with St Peter, nor the Fellows of Apocrypha College, whom he was always seeking to please. He wondered why he had chosen such an unpopular path in life. Not vocation certainly. Just human error.

He sighed again. In a quiet way, he was afraid he believed in right and wrong. His idea of tidiness was not the same as other peoples. It was the rest of the world that was out of step. That was his core belief and it sustained him. The rest of the world disagreed, but it knew, too, that they marched to a different tune.

Which was why he had to go and have further talks with little Allgood, and sort out the new loose ends the writer had exposed. He would not be thanked for it; it would lead nowhere; but it still had to be done.