Death in the opening chapter

FOUR

The chief constable was, as usual, brisk and efficient.

Actually this was not true. The chief constable was the reason the boys were in the library, and it was into the library that the chief constable was ushered by Brandon the butler. Brandon did for the Fludds upstairs, while Mrs Brandon toiled away below stairs, behind the baize and below the salt. She was the invisible half, while her husband was all mouth and striped trouser. He buttled; she cooked; he was the outward sign that all was well; she the inner strength that ensured it really, almost, was. Time was when the manor would have supported a staff of several, if not of thousands. Now it was just the two of them: Harry and Peggoty.

‘Black, two sugars,’ said the chief constable. He shot with Sir Branwell; his wife played bridge with Sir Branwell’s wife. They were both ‘county’.

The chief constable, whose name was Jones, came from elsewhere but was ‘county’ by rank and assimilation. He was also living proof of the fact that in modern Britain, still, there were two sides to almost every question: the visible and the invisible. With the post-Murdoch decline in the concept of the Fourth Estate and of the press as a tribune of the people, the invisible side of British life had become more significant and the visible more perfunctory. Nevertheless, the distinction was maintained. There was a way in which things were seen to be done and there was a way in which things were actually done. This distinction was further complicated by the twin and, on the whole, contrary distinctions between ‘conspiracy’ and ‘cock-up’.

It was widely believed that these two theories stood for an ‘either or’; that you either had a conspiracy or you had a cock-up, and that this explained everything. However, Bognor’s life experience, contrary to that of Sir Branwell and others, suggested that the two ideas were not alternatives and that the British had an unusual, possibly unique, propensity for combining the two. This meant that life was either a conspiratorial cock-up or a cocked-up conspiracy – probably both. The British had an almost unerring gift for getting things hopelessly wrong. They also possessed an apparently limitless capacity for gossip and plotting, as in Gunpowder and Popish. The Gunpowder Plot was a brilliant example of a conspiratorial cock-up and a cocked-up conspiracy. As far as Bognor was concerned, Guy, or Guido Fawkes, was the ultimate Englishman. He wondered if he was an ancestor of Sebastian, the writer, but it was an idle and irrelevant wonder and not one worth worrying about. The Fawkes of gunpowder, treason and plot – the man for whom one still paid a penny before setting fire to him every November 5th – may not have been the greatest Englishman ever, but he was the most English.

Chief Constable Jones had arrived to explain the invisible solution to the questions posed by the death of the Reverend Sebastian Fludd. It was obviously suicide. He had assigned one of his most trusted lieutenants, a detective chief inspector, no less, to the case and this man was adept at going through the necessary motions with absolute conviction. He would examine the scene of crime and the body – or rather he would cause minions to do so, for even in make-believe DCIs did not get their hands dirty – and then he would report. He would issue dozens of reports, all beautifully typed. This would be done by other minions, for chief constables did not type. In this case, typing was a skill that the chief constable had not seen fit to acquire. He was a good shot though; a skill that he had acquired relatively late in life, through the offices of his ambitious wife who recognized that shooting was still, in the county, a skill essential for social advancement.

Sir Branwell had shot since he was so high. Bognor did not shoot, never having seen the point. He ate birds mowed down by others but deplored their turning it into sport. His disapproval was, however, mild and did not extend to the table.

Chief Constable Jones said the suicide was sad, that the balance of the poor man’s mind had obviously been disturbed, but that he would have wished life, and more particularly, the festival, to go on as near to normal as was decently possible. The chief constable had not yet won his knighthood. Bognor had, risibly, acquired his; Sir Branwell’s came as his natural inheritance.

‘I’m not at all sure he did kill himself,’ said Sir Simon.

‘Sir Simon thinks it was murder,’ said Sir Branwell. He laid emphasis on the word ‘sir’ and noticed that the chief constable noticed. This pleased him.

Mr Jones shrugged a man-of-the-world shrug and smiled what was meant to be a man-of-the-world smile but came out as more of a pained rictus.

‘Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t,’ he said, ‘but it will be much more convenient all round if it’s suicide. And seen to be so. I’m sure that can be arranged. The local press is very good. Editor has a decent handicap. We play eighteen holes every Thursday at Royal Mallborne. Suicide’s the ticket. Much the best for everyone.’

‘Not for the widow,’ said Bognor. ‘If it’s suicide, the insurance company won’t pay up.’

‘Oh,’ said the chief constable, ‘God will provide.’

‘Doubt it,’ said Sir Branwell. ‘His people are strapped for cash right now. The diocese made some ill-advised investments in Iceland. Besides, the Lord thy God is inclined to be a bit tight where lucre is concerned. His son came down to tell us it was filthy and diminished one’s chances of making it upstairs. Eyes of needles, camels, haystacks and all that.’ He paused, proud of his Biblical knowledge. Bognor was impressed; the policeman less so.

‘My professional opinion is that it was suicide,’ said the man Jones.

Neither Sir Branwell nor Bognor gave a fig for his professional opinion.

‘Sir Simon’s professional opinion is that it could perfectly well have been murder.’

The chief constable was on the brink of saying that he didn’t give much of a fig for Bognor’s professional opinion but evidently thought better of it, and before he made a fool of himself simply repeated two words.

‘Professional opinion?’ he said, inviting explanation.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Sir Branwell, not sorry at all, ‘I should have said that Sir Simon runs SIDBOT – The Special Investigations Department of the Board of Trade. There’s very little in the field of crime that he hasn’t solved in his day. The murder of Champion Whately Wonderful, Britain’s Prize Poodle; skulduggery in one of our best known monastic communities; Fleet Street; the Stately Home Industry; Canada; publishing; even the sudden and unexpected death of the Master of our own dear college. You name it and Sir Simon has been there. And he always gets his man.’

‘Well,’ Bognor had the decency to look mildly, if not wholly, embarrassed, pinkening a shade and shuffling his feet in a less than convincing suggestion that his host had been over-egging the pudding, ‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that.’

Chief Constable Jones was visibly shaken. He had taken Bognor for one of life’s failures, like so many of Sir Branwell’s friends. He seemed so understated, so frayed at the edges, so positively unremarkable. In the normal course of events the chief constable would probably not have noticed him. In this the chief constable would have been wrong as usual, but his would have been a common enough reaction. Bognor was not instantly noticeable and this was part of the reason for his success. He grew on one like ivy on a wall or moss on an unturned stone. Men like Jones often failed to notice and when they finally did, it was too late.

‘You don’t think it was suicide, Sir Simon.’ The chief constable was careful to remember the knighthood, to which he and, more keenly Mrs Jones, aspired.

‘Neither of us are attracted to the idea,’ said Bognor. ‘It seems too obvious. And not in character. Or not, at least, from what I know of the man. There was no note.’

‘No note.’

‘No note.’

Silence enwrapped them.

‘In my experience of suicide, which I may say is considerable, there is usually a note,’ said Jones. ‘Just because a note has not yet been found does not necessarily mean that there is no note. Or indeed notes. Sometimes the deceased sends several.’

‘The Reverend Sebastian was not,’ said the patron of his living, ‘a man of many words. Except when he took to the pulpit.’

‘Shy or just… er, laconic…?’ asked Bognor.

‘Economic with words,’ said his namesake. ‘Believed that actions spoke louder. Tended to leave matters unminced except at matins.’

‘In any event,’ said Jones, sounding like the man of the world he wanted to be, ‘suicide would, generally speaking, be a much more convenient verdict.’

The other two looked at him incredulously. Both, in their different ways, led sheltered lives. Here was the force of law and order expressing a preference for convenience over truth. Both Bognor and Fludd had a naive belief that the police believed in justice and the triumph of good over evil. Yet, here was a top police person suggesting, as far as they could see, that a man had not been murdered because the investigation and the concomitant apparatus would be too much bother.

‘But what if he were killed?’ asked Sir Branwell, as mildly as he could manage while still being polite.

‘So what?’ asked Mr Jones, meaning to sound rhetorical and wringing his hands. ‘A murder enquiry involves an inordinate amount of fuss. There will be officers, uniformed and uninformed all over the place. The press, possibly even national, will descend like vultures. There will be television cameras; statements to be taken; lines to be drawn. The whole thing will be excessively tedious.’

‘That’s the way with British justice,’ said Bognor. Had Jones known him better, he would have noticed that there was an edge to Bognor’s voice at this point and that this edge suggested danger. He should have been alerted and gone into back-pedalling mode. Instead, he blundered on.

‘We’re here to ensure a quiet, orderly life,’ he told them, in words that he had obviously uttered before. Often. ‘The job of the police is the same as that of all authority, namely to maintain an orderly society, prevent undue irregularity, alarms, excursions and things that bring other things into disrepute. There are necessarily times when in order to maintain a sense of order and common sense, corners have to be cut and a certain economy with regard to the truth has to be effected. That is why we employ public relations officers and other consultants. We seek to allay fears and to facilitate the order of the day. So, suicide, which is regrettable but rocks no boats, is preferable to murder, which upsets people.’

‘So, the police hoodwinks the public and turns a blind eye when it suits them,’ said Bognor with deceptive blandness.

‘In a manner of speaking,’ said the chief constable, ‘though I’d be unlikely to say so in public.’ He laughed mirthlessly. ‘My PR people wouldn’t allow it.’

Neither Bognor nor Sir Branwell joined in.

‘I was always taught,’ said Sir Branwell, ‘that justice not only had to be done, but had to be seen to be done.’

The chief constable, believing that he had won the day, was well into his stride, ‘That’s a very old-fashioned way of looking at things,’ he said. ‘Seeing is now believing. The vital thing is that justice must be seen to be done. Whether or not it really has is neither here nor there. Life is a game of smoke and mirrors. Providing these are convincing, nothing else matters.’

He smiled, evidently pleased with himself. He had only expressed the truth as he and his colleagues saw it. This nonsense about reality was as old-fashioned as the belief in truth and justice which one or two of his colleagues still banged on about. What actually happened was of no concern to the man in the street. The man in the street was fed a pabulum, a placebo, a lie if you insisted, which kept up his morale and him or her out of mischief. If the reality was different, what the hell. The fewer people knew the facts of life, the better for all concerned.

He was surprised therefore to discover that Sir Branwell was thanking him for his time and concern, and telling him that Brandon the butler would show him out.

He usually reckoned on a glass of sherry when visiting a Lord Lieutenant.

Bognor was sorry that he hadn’t asked Harvey Contractor to run a finger around the inside of the chief constable’s collar, but he hadn’t. Nor Mrs Jones, who sounded even worse. But chief constables didn’t do murders. Likewise the butler and Mrs Brandon. The butler never dunnit. Nor his wife. Even so…