Death in the opening chapter

NINE

The Bognors’ bedroom belonged to another era. It was enormous, and the bed was a four-poster, which needed the hot-water bottles scrupulously filled and inserted under the sheets every night by Peggoty Brandon. The walls were hung with pictures to do with hunting and the Fludds – caricatures of previous baronets in the manner of Spy, with Fludds in pink, dogs lolloping along with tongues hanging out, jovial looking men on horseback, and the occasional fox, glimpsed from afar. The central heating existed, but was ancient and perfunctory, the windows leaked and there was a damp patch on the ceiling and a bucket on the floor. The patch grew wetter in bad weather and the bucket filled. There were two high-backed Victorian armchairs on either side of the fire, which was always laid and sometimes lit. There was a bottle of Malvern water and two glasses, also, because the Bognors were the Bognors and the Fludds the Fludds, a decanter of Scotch. This was not normally provided for guests; the Malvern water was.

The Bognors enjoyed the room, which was the one in which they always stayed. They were used to it and it suited them. Very occasionally, when the Fludds opened the house and gardens for charity – usually the Red Cross or the Army Benevolent Fund – the four-poster was roped off behind a plush bell-pull of a barricade kept for such occasions, but more often it was a private sanctuary for the Bognors, penetrated only by the Brandons, apart from themselves.

This was where they retreated for the obligatory ‘forty winks’ which broke up the afternoon.

‘The bishop turned up,’ Bognor told his wife, who was already ten winks ahead of him.

‘What, old Ebb?’ Monica wanted to know.

‘Yes. He was quite interesting about the deceased.’

‘How so?’

Bognor told her about Fludd’s loss of faith and loss of Dorcas.

‘Reciprocated?’ she asked.

‘My sense is that the Lord still considered him one of his anointed, even if He felt a bit let down. Dorcas, on the other hand, was still fond of him. Not nutty or passionate, but that isn’t, wasn’t, in Dorcas’s nature.’

‘I’d feel a bit let down if one of my servants stopped believing in me. Imagine how Branwell and Camilla would feel if the Brandons suddenly said they didn’t believe in them any more.’

‘That’s silly,’ said Bognor.

‘Not really,’ said his wife. ‘If the Lord dunnit, then it was suicide. That’s one of His ways of doing people in. Otherwise it’s war, car crashes, tsunamis, earthquake, wind and fire.’

‘That’s silly too,’ said Bognor, ‘but probably not as silly as anything to do with Dorcas.’

They mused and agreed silently. Dorcas was not, on the face of it, the sort of woman you would kill for; nor did she strike one as a murderess.

Bognor told her about the hymn board. Her memory was more photographic than his and when he repeated the numbers he had written down, she frowned in recognition. They meant something to her even without the hymnal to refer to. And they didn’t stack up for her, any more than they had for him. She would need to think about it. The mind would be cudgelled and in due course, which could be at any moment, she’d provide an answer. On past form, it would probably be more or less right and more or less helpful. It was what made them such a formidable team, despite appearances.

‘I think I should start interviewing,’ he said. ‘Even if the interviews don’t add up to anything, I have to be seen to be going through the motions in the same way as if the police were involved. Most police procedure is just a question of form. In that sense, Branwell is right. They just get in the way and create mess and muddle. Branwell likes order. The police create disorder under the pretence of restoring order. Farcical. Very often they move into situations that are perfectly regulated and create chaos. Fact of life.’

Monica didn’t respond. She had heard this before. Many times. The fact that she agreed, didn’t make it any more original. The world was full of well-meaning people who wanted to improve life but made things worse. This is what made it go round, though the system was inevitably flawed and the difference between success and failure marginal. Many of Bognor’s most spectacular successes had been achieved by beating the system. Orthodoxy was almost by definition second-rate. He could not, sensibly, be accused of being unorthodox, even if it sometimes looked like it.

He would begin interviewing people. It was what one did. That, on the whole, was where the clues were. If he were a policeman and did things ‘according to the book’, whatever that was, he would have started with Dorcas Fludd. Dorcas was the next of kin; Dorcas had found the body when Sebastian didn’t turn up for supper (macaroni cheese, tinned peaches, Ovaltine); Dorcas was the one who grieved most and she was – if the book were to be believed, though the book didn’t actually exist, except as a symbol of the orthodoxy Bognor was anxious to repudiate – also the prime suspect. Cherchez la femme. For all sorts of reasons, she should have been first in his queue. ‘I’m sorry to intrude, Mrs Fludd, at such a sad time as this – but if you wouldn’t mind, there are just one or two questions I have to ask. Would you say, for example, that your husband was behaving in any way unnaturally in the moments before he… er… died?’

She would have answered his questions, sobbing quietly into a handkerchief and drinking a medicinal brandy in tearful gulps, because that was what one did when one’s husband, the vicar, had been found dead, swinging gently from a rope in his church one evening, when he should have been preparing his sermon. Had Bognor been a conventional Plod, he would have listened sympathetically, taken notes, expressed his condolences in a weary, undertaker’s manner, and gone on his way, none the wiser, but satisfied that he had, according to the book, behaved in the correct manner.

But Simon Bognor was not a conventional Plod and he did not believe in the book, any more than the Reverend Sebastian had, according to his bishop, believed in God. And Bognor knew the answers to all the questions that a conventional Plod would have put to the new widow. He knew that the deceased was troubled about matters matrimonial and professional; he knew that he had last been seen by Dorcas, Mrs Fludd, after he had drunk two cups of tea, eaten a slice of fruit cake, wiped his lips fastidiously and kissed his wife a last fond, but dutiful, farewell on both cheeks, but not the mouth, with lips puckered but pursed. He put the time of this last sighting at around five, and the discovery of the body at around seven. As near as dammit, though it hardly mattered.

The truth of the matter was that he knew much of what was easy and would be nailed down in a form which could be read out in court without fear of contradiction. That was the nature of conventional work. It existed mainly in order to cover the rear of the person carrying it out. ‘The police arrived and were, as usual, extremely efficient’ as one well-known British crime writer always insisted. This was true enough, but the concomitant truth was that they were always amazingly lacking in imagination. Luckily, most killers were similarly unhampered, so that the two were in a sense made for each other; the one discovered the other; and everyone was more or less happy. The taxpayer believed that he had received his due and the press connived at the deceit.

So for this, and other reasons, Bognor seceded to talk first to chef-patron Gunther Battenburg. The main excuse for doing so was that he was bored and did not want to be bored further, as well as possibly being embarrassed, by talking to Dorcas Fludd. She could come later, when he knew enough about her late husband and his demise to ask questions which did not come from some non-existent but constraining manual.

‘I think I’m going to have a word with Battenburg at the Fludd Arms,’ he said nonchalantly to Monica, adding equally nonchalantly, ‘Would you like to come?’ though this was not so much a question as a supplication, to which the anticipated answer was ‘yes’.

Thus, they set off through the picturesque little town to the pub which Gunther had put on the carte gastronomique.

Gunther Battenburg was almost certainly not his real name, but this didn’t matter much. It was a nom de cuisine. Had he used his real name, which was something along the lines of Ron or Fred or Bill, he would have been handicapped, just as he would have been if he had used his second name, which was Jones, Smith, Brown, White or something equally banal and British. Gunther Battenburg sounded German or Swiss, but more importantly ‘foreign’. Even the most British chefs sounded as if they came from somewhere else: Stein sounded Jewish, Ramsay Scottish and so on. There was always Delia and Elizabeth David, not to mention the Grigsons mere et fille, but Bognor always said they were exceptions that proved some rule or other, even if he wasn’t sure what it was, or whether it was significant, or intended to convey even the most cursory obedience. The point was that Gunther Battenburg was not his real name, that everyone knew this, but that it didn’t, in any important sense, make a blind bit of difference.

It was the same with the name of his establishment. To most of the world, his pub would always be the Fludd Arms, or The Fludd, but Gunther didn’t believe that you would win Michelin stars with a place called the Fludd Arms, so he called it the Two by Two, instead. No one knew where the name came from, nor why he had chosen it, but it was the sort of name that won Michelin stars, and that was precisely what Gunther had achieved within a couple of years: one Michelin star, going on three.

The food at The Fludd used to be execrable, in the same way that Mrs Brandon’s food at the manor used to be. Traditional English: meat and two veg, with the meat an indeterminate shade of grey and the veg boiled to within an inch of its life, if not beyond. Bread sauce with most things, especially sausage and birds. Puddings, mainly steamed for as long as possible, and served with Bird’s custard, Tate and Lyle’s Golden Syrup or jam. The jam was usually strawberry and commercially manufactured in a jar which used to have a label featuring golliwogs until they became outlawed under some legislation that said they would incite white people to hatred of black ones, possibly even make them murder them. The Bognors thought this unlikely, but shrugged and let it pass in an old-fashioned and ultimately rather dangerous British manner.

Bognor’s young minion, Harvey Contractor, had obviously enjoyed his researches into the background of Gunther Battenburg. As Bognor had surmised, this was not his real name, nor German his nationality. He had been born around the Elephant and Castle, christened Frederick Micklewhite, some sort of cousin of the actor Michael Caine, another who had changed his name. Apparently, he had been having tea in some pseudo-swagger London hotel with his ‘image consultant’, who had told him that no celebrity chef could make it while named Micklewhite. ‘Let me be cake,’ said our man, parodying Marie Antoinette, but getting the third syllable wrong.

Battenburg and the deceased cleric had enjoyed a spectacular argument just two evenings before the crucial death. It had taken place at Gunther’s restaurant when the vicar had come calling. The entire community, apart from the squire and his lady – the Bognors’ host and hostess – seemed to know exactly what had happened, sentence by sentence, and, it seemed (though Battenburg denied fisticuffs), blow by blow. Sir Branwell, incidentally, resembled one of those old-fashioned pedagogues who claimed to know everything, while actually knowing nothing at all. The squire claimed to be omniscient and to have his finger on the pulse of the village. The reality was that the only person on whose person the squire’s finger actually lay – and lightly at that – was his wife. And the same went for her. Maximum claim of intelligence, minimum basis in fact: the bane of bad security services everywhere.

The Reverend Sebastian Fludd had had a good idea. ‘Good ideas’ were frequently fatal in Bognor’s view. They invariably seemed wonderful at the point of genesis, which was often the bath, but they almost always seemed less so at the point of delivery. It was also a mistake to start a conversation, particularly when one was the supplicant, with the words ‘I have an idea’. It seemed to be acknowledged that this was how the vicar opened. It was not good. The equivalent of a feeble loosener or underarm lob. It cried out to be hit over a distant boundary or smashed for an immediate winner.

Battenburg, aka Micklewhite, duly obliged.

‘I deal in food, not ideas,’ he said. ‘Recipes, maybe. Ideas are for boffins and buffoons.’

‘My big idea is to have a foodless Christmas dinner, with all profits going to the starving millions around the world.’

‘Bugger the starving millions,’ said the chef pithily.

‘I beg your pardon,’ said the reverend.

‘Granted,’ said Gunther. ‘My punters are paying a lot of money for their Christmas gourmet break. They expect some bang for their buck. Edible bang; drinkable bang; bang they can stuff in their gobs.’

From there on, the conversation had deteriorated, though whether or not words gave way to something more physical was a moot point.

At some point, apparently, Battenburg had threatened the vicar with death, though this was in dispute and vehemently denied by Battenburg, though affirmed by Dorcas Fludd who, needless to say, had evidence only at second-hand.

‘I see,’ said Bognor, finishing Contractor’s report and staring into space. As usual, when he uttered these words, he saw nothing and, even if he did, he saw it through a glass, darkly.

There had obviously been a clash and it was inevitable. Battenburg relied on conspicuous consumption for his living; the reverend owed what little living he enjoyed to sackcloth and ashes. Battenburg owed his ease to rich people eating and drinking more than they should, without regard to any of the consequences. Fludd was the opposite. He would have been happier in a world without wealth, a world in which everyone starved, a world in which not only was Jack as good as his master, but all Jacks were sprats.

Bognor sighed. He could see the point of view of Mammon, aka Gluttony, and he could see the point of view of the ascetic who wanted everyone else to be in a state of similar self-denial. Fence-sitting was a hazard as far as he was concerned. This didn’t mean that he was slow to apportion real blame and to find people guilty. Nor did it involve a suspension of prejudice. He was always on the side of indulgence and against abstinence. That didn’t, however, make him unprofessional.

So, did he believe that the chef murdered the vicar? On balance, no. Chef Battenburg, in the heat of the moment, with a knife. Well, yes. Plausible. This, however, was a cold-blooded, premeditated crime and Battenberg did not seem that sort of person. Crime de passion in the heat of the kitchen, but not a murder in the still watches, in the presence of God. That was Bognor’s feeling and, on the whole, his feelings served him well. They were not, however, infallible and while he was always careful to take them into account, he never allowed them to overrule ratiocination. So Battenburg could have done it. Of course he could. And he had a thoroughly plausible motive. Instinct said no, and the heart was often as reliable as the head.

Sir Branwell and Lady Fludd had only eaten at the Two by Two once since Battenburg took the place over and changed its name, but Sir Branwell pronounced it poncey and Camilla did not disagree. Not that the Fludds were unadventurous. They went abroad and ate well; the food at Sir Branwell’s club was quietly ambitious and Sir Branwell quite enjoyed it. They particularly enjoyed Wilton’s in Jermyn Street whenever a rich friend or relation took them there, but that didn’t alter the fact that he found Gunther’s food ‘poncey’. It was a bit like changing one’s kit at the Hogarth Roundabout. There was some stuff that one simply didn’t eat on home turf, and Battenburg’s came into that category. Likewise, the decor; though the cellar, despite new world additions, remained passable.

The chef was preparing snail porridge, the idea for which had been cribbed from his friend Heston Blumenthal, when the Bognors came calling.

Snail porridge was an unusual starter for the literary festival’s inaugural supper, but it made a change from prawn cocktail, and it was, for many of the guests, acceptable and surprising.

Supper came after evensong and Sebastian’s sermon. Snail porridge followed his grace. This year, His Grace, the Rt Rev. Ebenezer, would fill the gap, but meanwhile Bognor had some questions to ask the chef.