Death in the opening chapter

THREE

Brigadier Horace was a barking brigadier but he had little or no bite.

‘All fang but no finish!’ said Sir Branwell, with whom he had been at school, or thought he might have been. He was too polite to ask. Or indolent. Or, more likely, uninterested. He neither knew nor cared with whom he had been at school. In any event, people were at school with him, not him with them. The difference was crucial. ‘Never seen a shot fired in anger, let alone pulled a trigger.’

Contractor had done the work. He had done so at his master’s behest, his master being in the wrong place and, in a manner of speaking, on holiday. He had done so with flair, invention and assiduity. Contractor didn’t do competence. He obviously deployed sources, but he did not attribute his work in a conventional academic way, with footnotes and bibliography at the bottom of the page or the end of the book. Instead, he did so like a card sharp. Now you see me, now you don’t. He flickered magically with a sense of legerdemain, like a conjuror facing befuddled males on a drunken stag night. Here a rabbit, there a beauty in a bathing suit sawn in half, here a glass of water disappearing, only to re-emerge behind an ear or in a far corner of a room. Always the top hat, always the cane, always the fixed grin, but never anything conventional.

This was why Bognor had hired him. His first in semiotics from the University of Wessex was neither here nor there. Nor was his race, parentage or sexual orientation. Bognor liked him because he was bright and quirky. Other people found this intimidating. In the unlikely event that they appreciated intellect and industry and the qualifications which were the inevitable result, they liked them orthodox. In a super competent world, those who believed that two plus two always equalled four were appreciated; only a genius or a poltroon would think they added up to anything else. Contractor wasn’t sure they did and he certainly was not a poltroon. Bognor liked this; and Contractor knew that he liked it, and as he grew older he realized that this appreciation of his intellectual eccentricity was unusual. It was one of the things that made Bognor different. It infuriated some, particularly if they were bright and successful. A minority, however, found the quality appealing. One of these was Harvey Contractor and he was very, very bright. Formidably so.

Take Brigadier Blenkinsop. Eustace Basil Blenkinsop, aka ‘Basher’ Blenkinsop. Educated Wellington and RMA Sandhurst. The brigadier came from a long line of retired majors, though his father was a vicar in the Quantocks. Stogumber. St Mary’s. Red sandstone. The church was famous for its candlelit chandelier discovered by one of the brigadier’s father’s predecessors in 1907, languishing. It was now lit on high days and holy days and looked very beautiful.

Bognor shut his eyes and thought of the candles in the chandelier at Christmas in St Mary’s Stogumber. He imagined the vicar clambering up into the pulpit and saying words that none of his congregation understood. Stogumber wasn’t exactly the centre of the universe even when Basher was growing up. There was a sister who was married to a vet on Vancouver Island and another sister who was a spinster in Letchworth and did good works. That was all. Bognor imagined what it must have been like growing up as the only son of a vicar in rural Somerset. Was the vicar embittered? A fire and brimstone man? A pacifist? Had his religion influenced the brigadier?

After Sandhurst, Blenkinsop had gone into the gunners. Blenkinsop’s outfit was the 13th Mobile. Its proper name was the ‘13th Mobile Artillery’, because since Agincourt, and possibly earlier, they had been able to deploy lethal weaponry in the least expected places. There were no earlier twelve mobile artillery units, thus earning the 13th the unusual sobriquet of ‘the Lucky for some’ though they were usually known simply as the ‘13th Mobile’. Another nickname was the ‘Cautious Cauliflowers’, which derived from their habit of pinning a floret of the vegetable next to their cap badges every Dettingen Day. This was the anniversary of the battle of 1743, which was the last occasion on which an English – actually German – monarch had led his men into battle. This only happened because the CO of the 13th, Colonel ‘Biffer’ Lowe-Laugher, had stuck a prong of his tuning fork into the reluctant rump of the king’s horse. Hence the regimental custom of placing a gilt tuning fork on the Colonel’s right every night at the Dettingen dinner. The British army was full of such things.

At school and the academy, Blenkinsop had boxed and he went on fighting with some success after joining the army. He was battalion welterweight champion and knocked out some sergeant who was much fancied in the ring. As Second Lieutenant Blenkinsop he competed in the army championship, but was defeated by a mad captain in the Irish Guards. Bognor wondered what the Vicar of Stogumber made of his son’s pugilism.

The vicar of Stogumber had briefly taught at a public school – of which Bognor had not previously heard – in Warminster. He guessed it must have closed. The Queen’s School. Queen’s Warminster. Contractor had drawn a blank here because the school was long closed and all records lost or destroyed. Nevertheless, it seemed that the Reverend Blenkinsop had spent a relatively short time at the school before being translated to Stogumber. Again, there was no record. Why had Blenkinsop senior spent so short a time at Queen’s Warminster? Why had he been translated so swiftly to such a relative backwater? Bognor was suspicious. His wife, Muriel, was the daughter of a general, a friend and protege of Field Marshal Haig in World War One. That too aroused Bognor’s suspicion, though he was not sure precisely why. Muriel had a posthumous reputation in West Somerset for prodigious snobbery, whereas her husband was known throughout the area as a man of the people.

What was undoubtedly suspicious was the presence in the regiment of a young chaplain named Fludd.

Forget brigadiers, thought Bognor. Life was full of people who had risen to the surface of life like scum on stock, and Brigadier Horace was one such. Bognor regarded himself as a front-line soldier – the sort of man who, at the Battle of the Somme in the Great War, would have gone over the top in front of his platoon, been cut to pieces by enemy machine gun fire and won a posthumous Military Cross. Horace Blenkinsop, the barking brigadier, would meanwhile have been watching events, if at all, through binoculars in a requisitioned chateau, while stuffing his face with stolen champagne and plover’s eggs.

Bognor recalled his grandfather, a veteran of this very campaign, gassed and now gone to God, telling him that in his battalion, as in others, they had something called HQ company. No one knew what men in HQ company actually did, except issue more and more pieces of regulatory paper with which the rest of the battalion wiped their bottoms. During the war, more and more people gravitated to HQ company, where they performed more and more meaningless rituals, whose only apparent purpose was to make life difficult to impossible for those who actually did the work. Life, said Bognor’s grandfather, was much the same: far too many people in HQ company getting in the way of men on the ground trying to do a decent day’s work, like him and his grandson.

Thus Brigadier Blenkinsop. Yet, such was life that Brigadier Blenkinsop was widely regarded as a bit of a catch. He made programmes for television about battles in which he had not fought and of which he knew little. He opined in the Daily Telegraph and other public prints, telling his fellow man what to think about military warfare, but also everything else from greenhouse emissions (a fiction, fanned by leftist scaremongers) to railway trains (vanished due to that damned fellow Beeching) and gastronomy (days were when a celebrity chef was just a cook and garlic was something Johnny Foreigner used to flavour horse-meat).

Bognor did not care for the brigadier or for his sort. Whitehall was rife with brigadiers, barking orders, strutting about and getting in the way. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding, you had to hand it to him. Bognor was reminded of an elderly English rugby footballer, a cumbersome number eight, who, way past his prime, somehow survived, and indeed prospered, where younger, fitter, more agile and talented rivals came and usually went. This was achieved by stealth and what a dead journalist, much admired by Bognor, once described as ‘rat-like cunning’. This was possessed in spades by the ancient rumbling English rugby player. He read the game with deceptive ease and was able to anticipate its direction with unerring precision. So, without apparent effort or indeed movement, or endeavour of all but the most notional kind, he was always able to be at the centre of important play, where his strength and experience proved decisive. Others ran hither and yon, charging about like headless chickens, while the old bull elephant surged magnificently, and in an almost stately manner, through the wildest passages of the game.

So it was with the brigadier. Throughout his life, he seemed, uncannily, always to be in the right place at the right time. When dead men’s shoes needed to be filled, the brigadier was always close by, available to step into them at a moment’s notice. When a desk needed to be driven or an opinion expressed, Horace was available, amenable, willing and able. By his expert reading of the game of life, he had always been able to keep at least a pace or two ahead of his often more talented rivals, without exposing himself to needless risk, hazard or what they might have described as effort of any kind. His was a triumph of cunning over exertion, of wise inertia as compared with the charge of the light brigade. His was a staff officer’s life, the epitome of one who had spent his time in the cushioned security of HQ company. And it was he who was to be the keynote speaker at this year’s festival, and getting him was considered rather a coup.

Horace and his wife, Esther, had spent the previous night at what had, for many years, been called the Fludd Arms, but had recently been rechristened the Two by Two, after it had been sold off by Sir Branwell to a young man from the East End of London, who had reinvented himself as Gunther Battenburg and turned the ancient hostelry into a gastropub, to the consternation of the local community and to the interested attention of inspectors from the Michelin Guide and others. It had also begun to attract a significant and, to Sir Branwell and Lady Fludd, unwelcome sort of visitor. They took photographs of each other during meal times and came for the slug muesli, the squirrel pavlova and the oeufs ananas. They had more money than sense, lived off bonuses and were, in a word, trendy. Sir Branwell regarded them much as he did seagulls and would have treated them similarly, given half a chance. He longed to have them up before him when he, or Camilla, were sitting on the bench, but so far neither he nor his wife had had the pleasure.

If the Reverend Sebastian had indeed been done in by an alien hand, then Brigadier Horace, the brigadier’s wife, Esther, and Gunther Battenburg would have to join the long list of suspects. Battenburg was gay and had no known partner. That is to say, he had formed no regular attachment and was for the purposes of the impending enquiry, single. This ‘long list’, including most residents of Mallborne, would, presumably, be narrowed down before too long, rather in the manner of literary prizes such as the Booker, the Costa and, indeed, the newly inaugurated Flanagan Fludd for the best novel with a beginning, a middle and an end. Of this, Sir Branwell had high hopes. He very much hoped that this unfortunate incident would not cause them to be dashed, or even put on ice for the time being.

‘Poor timing,’ said Sir Branwell, later in the library. ‘But then timing was never one of Sebastian’s things. Not that Sebastian did “things” when you come to think about it. “Things” weren’t Sebastian’s kind of thing, if you see what I mean.’

‘No,’ agreed Bognor, who understood perfectly. He was sometimes accused of not understanding even quite obvious matters. In fact, he understood more than others suspected and quite often more than was good for him. ‘Not a popular man, Sebastian.’

‘No,’ Sir Branwell said, ‘not unduly.’

‘So, no real friends but no real enemies either?’

‘You could say that.’ His host frowned.

‘Have you noticed,’ said Bognor, ‘that popularity nowadays breeds popularity? It’s the reverse of what I think we were taught at Apocrypha.’

‘That the eclectic and unusual was preferable to received wisdom.’

‘Something like that,’ said Bognor. ‘Nowadays we are all more or less victims of herd instinct. If everybody likes something it is automatically good. A best-seller is better than something only a minority admires. Majority taste is good taste.’

‘That’s new?’

‘I think so, yes. In the old days someone like the Reverend Sebastian would have been accepted in a way that he wasn’t nowadays.’

‘Because he was odd?’

‘Maybe,’ said Bognor, ‘maybe not.’ He was thinking. It made him frown. ‘It’s to do with dumbing down. We distrust anything that’s out of the ordinary. We live in the age of the common man. If the common man thinks something’s good, then it is by definition good. If not, it’s unpopular. Ergo bad.’

‘Elitist?’ asked Sir Branwell who recognized the argument and sympathized with it.

‘Could be,’ said Bognor, ‘but not necessarily so. Manchester United are popular and excellent. Accrington Stanley less so. That doesn’t make Accrington Stanley bad.’

‘But they are bad. Man U would have them for breakfast any day of the week.’

They were getting into irrelevant waters, the land of the red herring. Bognor tried bringing them back to something approaching Earth.

‘Are we saying that the vicar was murdered because he was no good? A sort of ecclesiastical equivalent of a team that lurches between the lower divisions of the football league and something sponsored by a cement company.’

‘No,’ said Bognor, thoughtfully. ‘The Reverend Sebastian sounds like a man with few friends, but, by the same token, he probably had few enemies. He was too Laodicean to aspire to either. Difficult to be enthusiastic about someone lukewarm.’

‘I wouldn’t describe Sebastian as “lukewarm”,’ said Sir Branwell. ‘Useless, yes; lukewarm, no. He had some strong opinions. Women priests, Muslim fundamentalists. Strong, very.’

‘Pro or anti?’

‘Pro. Sebastian was teetering on the brink of being radical. Never over the edge, being one of life’s teeterers. He was always on, or near a brink, but never quite over.’

Bognor smiled. ‘You didn’t like him.’

His old chum smiled back. ‘I don’t think liking really came into it. That was the point about Sebby. You didn’t like him or dislike him. He just was, if you see what I mean.’

‘High church?’

‘High on the whole,’ said Sir Branwell. ‘Keen on smells and bells. Latin. But a soft spot for that American-Kiwi monk, Merton, which puts him on the left, I would think. Difficult to pigeonhole Sebastian, which was one of his few attractive features. You never knew what he was going to think about anything. Come to think of it, I don’t suppose he had much of a clue himself.’

‘Bit of a ditherer as well as a teeterer,’ said Bognor.

‘Uncertainty was his middle name,’ said the squire. ‘Except when he was certain of something. That’s one thing you can say for him. Well, could say for him, when he was, well, you know, alive. He was assailed by doubt. I rather approve of doubt.’

‘Up to a point,’ said Bognor, repeating an Apocrypha adage. They both recognized it and grinned.

‘So, in an age of certainty he was a prey to doubt,’ said Bognor, ‘and in an age when popularity was a mark of merit, he was prepared to be unpopular. Sounds rather a good thing.’

‘No, not at all,’ said Sir Branwell. ‘That’s far too positive. He was never that black and white.’

‘No,’ said Bognor. He could see that the vicar had been a tiresome priest, if seldom turbulent. Turbulence was obviously not in his nature, which was a pity as far as Sir Simon was concerned, as he had a definite weak spot for turbulence of almost every description. Perhaps the vicar had, as it were, kicked his own bucket; taken his own life; died by his own. Yet suicide, despite a popular view that it constituted cowardice – not a view to which Bognor ever ascribed – required a certainty, not to mention a moral courage, which was not part of the former padre’s make-up. Bognor was not at all sure what had happened in the night, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t suicide. Something had clearly gone bump but the drama had been inflicted by an outside agency. Of that he was already certain. He felt it in his water, which was, on the whole, and on the evidence of past history, as good an indicator as any.

He said so out loud, seeking confirmation, and was glad to receive it.

‘I don’t think he killed himself,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t sound in character.’

Sir Branwell shook his head sadly. ‘I think you’re right,’ he said. ‘For all kinds of reason. Nevertheless, I find it hard to believe that anyone would have done such a thing on purpose. It seems to me much more like a hideous mistake.’ Sir Branwell was a cock-up man rather than a conspiracy theorist. He held to the belief that when ‘Crusoe’, the great Somerset fast bowler and scribe killed himself, he overdosed by mistake. Chaps made mistakes. Name of the game. Fact of life. Could be awkward, but most real awkwardness was the product of confusion and inertia, not malice aforethought.

‘Hideous mistake, eh?’

Bognor laughed mirthlessly, having been taught, like his host, that cliches were full of dangerous assumptions and prejudices.

‘For once,’ he said, ‘the mistake really would have been hideous. Not often you can say that, eh?’