Death in the opening chapter

TWENTY-THREE

No one liked Martin Allgood. This mattered comparatively little, since you weren’t supposed to like Martin Allgood and he worked hard at making affection a matter of indifference to him. In this, he nearly always succeeded. Contractor obviously didn’t care for Allgood, but he was too professional to let this interfere with his report.

Allgood had always been unpopular. In fact, it was virtually his stock-in-trade. At school he had been the school swot, pimpled with acne. School, according to the file, was a grammar school somewhere in Essex. Bognor was very bad at the geography of that county, though he shared the popular prejudice against it. He thought of the county – wrongly of course – as an urban sprawl dominated by Epping Forest, Leyton Orient Football Club and boxers training in Tudorbethan pubs, watched by criminals of a certain age in vicuna overcoats, which they didn’t remove even in oppressive heat. Males from Essex did not remove their hats indoors, and once you had made a few million you smoked large Havanas, lived in a gated community and made champagne cocktails with Dom Perignon and good cognac. It did not matter that Essex was not like that, nor that Allgood was in any way typical. Essex was not Essex, and Allgood was a one-off.

After grammar school, Allgood had been to the local university where he read sociology and got a very good degree. At about this time, Allgood had his first and only book published. This was called, with a mock-genuflection in the direction of Charles Dickens and a rare modesty, Minimal Expectations. What about Rubbish? Fact or fiction? Or a mixture of both? Or a prose poem? Or a novella? No one seemed quite sure, but it had earned Allgood a place on the ‘Goodbooks’ list of ‘Twenty-Five Best Young British Novelists’, and the undying hatred of all good men and true. The comparatively few words of Minimal Expectations were arguably the last Allgood wrote, or at least, the last which were issued between hard covers.

He remained, to the world at large, a writer of almost infinite promise. The tabloids hung on his every word; his opinions sought; and his views earned golden opinions and fat fees. He had a view on everything and everyone, and many people despised him for obvious reasons.

Bognor was happy to be among those who disliked the idea of Allgood, but he was the first to acknowledge that this didn’t make him a murderer. He was unpleasant enough, certainly, but Bognor knew this wasn’t enough in itself. Opportunity? Well, yes. Motive? Motive would have to be mildly abstract, because there was no evidence that Allgood and Sebastian had ever met. On the other hand, Allgood was an atheist, a paid-up member of the Dawkins’ camp. However, he had none of Dawkins’ Balliol-bred tolerance and understanding, but was on the extreme wing of the atheist tendency. He made common ground with the sort of animal lover who hated humans, and was happy to trash laboratories and kill those who worked for him. In the case of Allgood, churches were fair game and so were vicars.

He found little Allgood in the garden of the Two by Two, aka the Fludd Arms. He was smoking what would once have been called a ‘gasper’, and which seemed the most apposite word for the thin, self-rolled cigarette which was stuck to his lower lip. He had on corduroy bags and an open-necked shirt with a sleeveless pullover, and in front of him was a glass of vivid pink liquid, which was bubbling away like a hookah. The on dit was that Allgood drank. Despite the sun, which was bright, it was chilly. The author looked as if he should have been wearing a floppy bow-tie, but a tie would have interfered with his overall appearance, which was deliberately dishevelled. Almost poetic; certainly raffish. The drink should have been absinthe.

‘I’m sorry I missed you,’ said Bognor. ‘I’m told you were very good, but duty called.’

‘Sorry about that. Quite understand though. Business before pleasure and all that rot, though I have to say that the older I get, the more I come to believe that nothing should ever get in the way of pleasure. Certainly, nothing as vulgar as business. Can I get you a tincture?’

Bognor wondered why everyone suddenly seemed to be talking funny. He felt as if he were in the Americas or Down Under. The natives spoke a form of English but it wasn’t quite the same. He guessed it was not Allgood’s first pink drink of the day. Nor would it be his last.

‘Thank you, but no,’ he said, aware that he sounded prim, as if he never touched the stuff himself. ‘I won’t keep you a moment.’

‘Take a pew though,’ said Allgood, patting the seat of the chair alongside him invitingly. It was stylish yet comfortable, made of some kind of thatch, probably worth a fortune. Bognor did as he was bade and sat.

‘A young black man came up to me in the supermarket the other day… I practically embraced him,’ said Allgood unexpectedly. Bognor did not know what to say, but looked nonplussed, which he was.

‘Sorry,’ said Allgood, ‘Joanna Trollope talking on TV. I caught it by mistake and have been knocking it around in case I can think of something.’

‘You writing something?’ asked Bognor. It seemed a sensible, pleasant conversational gambit.

‘Nah,’ said Allgood. ‘Not really. Not books. That’s a mug’s game.’

‘What, then?’ Bognor was genuinely curious. He had Allgood down as a writer of books. A novelist. ‘Fiction? Fact?’

‘Bit of both,’ said Allgood. ‘I remember years ago, a poet saying he couldn’t write anything for some literary magazine because he couldn’t afford to. Also, it would jeopardize his reputation as someone who had real trouble grappling with his daemons and fighting the dreaded block. If he published, he might lose his grant from the Arts Council and the local authority; might get fewer gigs. Might be regarded as, you know, commercial. He’d be thought popular. In the mainstream. Fatal. Should have realized at the time.’

‘Sorry,’ said Bognor, ‘you’ve lost me.’

‘I’m famous as a novelist,’ explained Allgood, talking as if to a small child, ‘but it’s much more lucrative to do things like this.’ He smiled and waved around in an expansive manner. ‘Not to mention fun.’

As if on cue, Vicenza Book entered left and sat down at their table. She looked as if she had just got out of bed, smiled and nodded at Bognor, and kissed the novelist proprietorially on the lips. ‘Hi, sweetie,’ she said, giving every impression of being the female half of an item.

Nothing much surprised Bognor any more, but he felt obliged to say, ‘I thought you had a publicist with you? Tracey or something?’

Allgood thought for a moment. ‘You’re right,’ he said, after a while. ‘She had to go back to London. Vicenza here has stepped into her breach, as it were.’ He laughed. ‘Haven’t you, darling?’

Vicenza simpered, and Bognor had vague thoughts of killing two birds with a single stone. He was impossibly old-fashioned. Time he retired. But even so.

‘You’re saying you’ve retired from writing books?’

‘You could say I’ve become more of a performance artist,’ he said. ‘Lot easier. Better paid. More kudos.’

‘So, the talk this morning… that sort of thing is now your bread and butter.’

Allgood seemed to give this too some thought. Eventually, he said, ‘Yah,’ and lapsed into silence. Vicenza ordered a glass of the pink drink from a passing waiter. It was Campari and orange. Bognor, on duty, asked for a double espresso.

‘But the Reverend Sebastian wanted to be a writer,’ ventured Bognor. ‘Ended up on the slush pile. Felt rejected. Became depressed. Took his own life as a result.’

‘Did he?’ asked Allgood. ‘Fancy.’

‘You’re the one who said it. This morning. In your talk.’

‘Did I?’ Allgood might have been considering a completely different third party. ‘How odd. Did I have any evidence?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Bognor, feeling as if he were getting out of his depth and had no water-wings. ‘Do you? Did you?’

‘Pass,’ he said, and then turned to Vicenza. ‘What do you think, darling?’

‘Dunno,’ she said, ‘I wasn’t there. Still sleeping it off.’

She simpered, leaving no one in any doubt what she meant by ‘it’. She was the ‘it’ girl of Mallborne, a bicycle soprano.

‘Natch,’ said Allgood. ‘Who said I said he wrote a book?’

‘Your audience,’ said Bognor. ‘They seemed to think you had inside knowledge.’

‘Not me,’ said the non-novelist. ‘If I seemed to suggest such a thing, I must have been talking hypothetically. Writers these days blur the edges between fact and fiction, in speech as well as on the page. I suppose it depends what you mean by truth.’

‘Yes,’ said Bognor, feeling as if he were nearing home turf. The nature of truth was the sort of concept with which he was familiar. Truth, justice, right and wrong – these were the tools of his trade. His stock.

‘I sometimes feel,’ said Allgood, ‘that if you believe something sufficiently strongly, it assumes its own truth. It may be false, but it’s not because that’s not what you believe. Maybe I believe the reverend wrote a book. For me, that becomes a truth, even if it’s not shared. You may not accept what I say, and the Reverend Sebastian may not actually have put pen to paper. But that doesn’t invalidate my belief, nor my constructing a theory around that belief, even though the theory is based on sand. It’s my belief that’s important, not the actuality. Do I make myself clear?’

‘Not really,’ said Bognor, who was groping.

‘Too deep for me,’ said Vicenza. ‘Not that I care much.’ And she laughed throatily, like one who smoked.

‘It’s quite simple,’ said Allgood. ‘All I’m saying is that truth is relative. Most people think it’s an absolute, but I don’t agree. Apart from anything, it’s fantastically restricting. Once you accept that it’s a question of degree, it opens up any number of possibilities.’

‘You can’t expect me to think that,’ protested Bognor. ‘My whole job is predicated on the basis that the world is black and white, and there is such a thing as right and wrong, guilty and innocent. I am charged with seeking out criminals and bringing them to what we call justice.’

‘I’m glad you entered the caveat,’ said Allgood. ‘At least you appear to be capable of understanding that in real life things aren’t quite as simple as they have to be in your career.’

‘I question which of us is living in “real life”,’ said Bognor. ‘Mine feels pretty real to me.’

‘Touche,’ said Allgood. ‘Mine, likewise. Which just goes to prove the point I’m making. I’m not disparaging your reality, which is real for you; but mine is real for me too. And you should respect it.’

‘Except,’ said Bognor, ‘when you try to proselytize. You’re entitled to a skewed view of what’s real, provided you keep it to yourself and don’t try to inflict it on other people. You know perfectly well that your view of what happened to the Reverend Sebastian is, in our terms, a pure fabrication, but you tried to pretend that it was real in terms that my friends, your audience, understood.’

‘Now you’re being duplicitous,’ said Allgood. ‘I was arguing hypothetically, in your terms. I never pretended otherwise.’

‘That’s not my understanding,’ said Bognor. ‘Did Sebastian write a book? Did he submit it to publishers? Was it rejected?’

Allgood appeared to give this some thought, but when he came up with an answer it was as infuriating as Bognor had feared. It also took little or no account of what he had said hitherto.

‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘maybe not.’

It was the sort of response an Apocrypha don would have produced in one of those infuriating tutorials which had nothing to do with the subject you were supposed to be studying, and everything to do with teaching you dialectic and the art of argument. Monica hated it, even though her own college had practised much the same.

‘Did the vicar write a book?’

A long silence. Eventually, Allgood said, ‘Not in the sense that would stand up in a court of law. I think he could perfectly well have written one, though. And if he had, he would have suffered serial rejections which would have undermined what was, by all accounts, a flimsy sense of self-confidence and self-worth. So, what I said makes perfect sense.’

‘But it’s a fiction,’ said Bognor, angrily.

‘That’s what I deal in,’ said Allgood evenly, ‘and there is a sense in which my fiction is truer than your fact, wouldn’t you agree?’

‘That’s not the point, as well you know.’

‘Oh, but I think it is,’ said Allgood. ‘Life is too literal. Actually, it’s a lot more interesting than plods like you make out.’

Bognor resented being described as a ‘plod’, but refused to rise and said nothing. He could do metaphysics but not professionally. Work was rooted in life and death, just as he believed that books should have beginnings and middles and ends, and anchovies helped out beef casseroles.

‘I don’t have a problem staying interested,’ he said, ‘and in the world I live in, a stiff is a stiff is a stiff, and it’s my job to see how and why a once breathing human can have reached that sorry state. As the meerkat says “simples”. It is too. And quite interesting enough, without injecting hypotheticals.’

‘You would say that, wouldn’t you?’ said Allgood. ‘It’s a point of view. Not one I happen to share, but a point of view nonetheless. I respect it. I just wish you’d do the same for mine.’

Bognor was exasperated.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but I have a job to do. I don’t have the luxury of being able to fantasize. Boring old black and white. Tiresome. Limiting. Not as good as writing a book, much less talking about it. But it’s what I do. So, can you just tell me. Did the late vicar write a book? Did he submit it to one or more publishers? Was it rejected?’

‘No,’ said Allgood. ‘Not in so many words. Not literally. Not as far as I know. It’s possible but I have no proof. As you’d describe it.’

‘So, you’ve been wasting my time?’

‘I wouldn’t put it like that,’ said Allgood, ‘but you said it.’

‘I could charge you with wasting official time,’ said Bognor pompously, ‘but I’ll let you off with a warning.’

‘Thank you, I’m sure’, said the novelist. ‘I’d prefer to think that we look at things in a different way. You see black and white and I see grey. I believe in murk, you believe in clarity. Different.’

Bognor reflected that Allgood could be right.

‘Anything I can do, just let me know,’ said Vicenza Book. She looked pert and tousled.

‘Likewise,’ said Allgood.

They raised their glasses.

Bognor wished life was so simple. He exited left.

Perhaps life and death were naturally murky, and his efforts to make them otherwise were necessarily doomed to failure.

Pity.