Unbecoming Habits (The Simon Bognor Mysteries Book 1) Read online

  Unbecoming Habits

  A Simon Bognor Mystery

  Tim Heald

  In memory of my Father

  Contents

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  Preview: Blue Blood Will Out

  Prologue

  AUGUST 14 WAS A hot heavy day on which the sun appeared through a hazy sky, looking dull and irrelevant, as if it had opted out of its duty of providing light and heat. The warmth, which was oppressive, seemed almost to come from below the earth’s surface and from the top of Beaubridge Hill you had difficulty in distinguishing the individual houses of the village a couple of miles away on the other side of the valley. They were blurred shapes half hidden by the mist but a mile nearer, the neat barracks round the old farmhouse were quite distinct.

  All morning the sheep lay ruminatively under the gorse, scarcely bothering to chew at the short cropped grass which bore parched brown witness to a dry summer. The men in the valley were more energetic, hurrying about their work in the fields and gardens until shortly after twelve a sharp high-pitched bell started to peal a rapid summons from the farmhouse belfry. After five minutes the bell slowed to a strike of one every five seconds and the last of the Community’s thirty-four members walked as rapidly as his habit would allow into the low rectangular building where the office of Sext was to be celebrated.

  The friars sat in hierarchical order. Abbot on the left, Prior facing him across the flagstones. On the right of one and on the left of the other, brown-robed men huddled close in the pew, descending in seniority to the novices. Then a gap to tubular steel chairs at right angles to the pews. Today at Sext they were empty. They were for guests and visitors.

  There was one other empty place, the most junior of all, to the right of Brother Rollo. Brother Rollo glanced across at Brother Bede opposite and raised his eyebrows. Since he had arrived three weeks before, Brother Luke had been late for practically everything which he had not missed altogether.

  Brother Luke’s excuse for missing Sext was the best possible. As his brothers raised a low plain chant to the glory of their Maker, Brother Luke remained in the vegetable garden where, hours earlier, he had been sent to gather potatoes for the Community’s lunch. His rich brown habit merged with the rich brown soil; the white cord round his waist could easily have been confused with the bright white flowers of the plants. Only the livid purple of the back of his neck failed to blend.

  He had been lying face down among the potatoes for quite some time when Brother Bede found him, turned him over and noticed that the deep magenta marks around his neck corresponded rather accurately with the pattern of the crucifix chain which he always wore. He was, of course, extremely dead.

  1

  SIMON BOGNOR FINISHED THE Beaubridge Friary file for the third time and threw it viciously on to the seat opposite. A piece of paper fell out on to the floor of the carriage and he cursed. It was a bit much. After three years at a desk in the bowels of the Board of Trade and an amazingly tedious assignment at the High Commission in Canberra, he had suddenly been lumbered with this.

  He had arrived for work early that morning, looking forward to lunch at the club, mindful as ever of the idiocy of his job, when a flustered Parkinson had dropped the thin brown file on his desk. The words had been rather hurtful.

  ‘Right, Bognor,’ he had said. ‘Off your fat backside. Grab a voucher and sort this out sharpish. Collingdale’s dead. Don’t ask questions, it’s all in the file.’ Which was why he was sitting in a tatty first-class compartment bound for a religious community in the rural midlands. It was the story of his life.

  The file told him very little. The Society of the Sacred Brotherhood had been founded at Beaubridge in 1912. It was a respectable Anglican Order, approved by the Church of England and famous for its honey. It ranked below the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield or the Benedictines of Nashdom, the Cowley Fathers or the Dorset Franciscans, but above the more esoteric societies of hermits and probation officers manqués which sprang up continuously and usually died with their founders. There were seventeen and a half acres of land with it. Most of it was vegetable garden, though there was some timber and space for the celebrated bees. The farmhouse acquired by the founder, an ascetic and very wealthy eccentric who had died twenty years ago, was seventeenth century with Victorian additions. The rest of the buildings had been built after the order’s foundation, sometimes, as their rudimentary nature suggested, by the friars themselves. Woodstock was sixteen miles away by road, Great Tew about three.

  On the second page of the file was a bare list of the thirty-three genuine members of the order, with the name of Brother Luke pencilled in at the bottom. The friars also entertained a few permanent guests—a concession to the charitable principle. These men were not identified in the file though Bognor understood that most were alcoholics or derelicts rescued from the benches of London’s parks or main-line railway stations. On the final page was the single sentence which confirmed that each of the eleven Expo-Brit operations had included products from Beaubridge.

  Bognor sucked his teeth. He still didn’t quite see why it had been necessary for Collingdale to actually become a friar in order to discover what was going on at the place. He remembered Collingdale well. He was usually assigned to dangerous foreign missions and would pass through London once every two or three months, lean, leathery, tanned and taut. Not a bit like Bognor who was distinctly chubby, and slightly florid.

  Parkinson had said the police would meet him at Woodstock station. Bognor prayed they would be efficient and meticulous. He knew that he suffered from an inattention to detail. He was good at broad issues, but poor on minutiae. Also this was his first piece of real field work. He realised, of course, that it would have to happen, that he couldn’t spend the rest of his life drawing up briefs and unscrambling codes and ciphers. Ever since the man at the University Appointments board had leant across the table and whispered, ‘There is another branch of the Civil Service, Mr. Bognor… a rather special branch…’, ever since that moment and the series of curious encounters in pubs and country houses which had followed, Bognor had known that one day life would become dangerous. And this was it. He had been thrown in head first. He was to succeed where tough experienced Collingdale had failed.

  It was not yet mid-day when the train reached Woodstock, and Bognor was surprised to see the purple-visaged shape of Sir Erris Beg proceeding down the platform in his direction.

  ‘Cops,’ he said noisily, ‘are all busy.’ He extended a fleshy hand, the other clutched a shooting stick. His Old Etonian tie heaved under the impact of asthmatic, alcohol-assisted coughs. ‘Come and have a snifter at the Owl,’ he said, ‘before we dump you with the God-botherers.’

  Bognor said he’d be delighted. He’d first met old Beg a couple of years before when there had been some question of the Chinese trying to plant foot and mouth virus in Lord Sodbury’s dairy herd.

  Since then they had lunched together occasionally and Bognor liked him. His imbecilic appearance was misleading, besides which he commanded considerable respect within the department and from Parkinson in particular. A great deal more than any other Chief Constable.

  ‘Your boss rang,’ said Sir Erris when they were ensconced in the saloon bar of the Owl and had embarked on a brace of large pink gins. ‘He asked if I’d keep an eye on you. Thought you might need a bit of moral support.’

  ‘Oh.’ Bognor was pleased to have the support, but not happy at the thought of Parkinson breathing down his neck. ‘I don’t,
’ he said, coughing slightly on the gin, ‘anticipate any great problem. I’ve a fair idea of what happened already. But it’ll be nice having you around.’

  ‘You do understand the significance of this Expo-Brit connection, don’t you?’ asked Sir Erris.

  This, Bognor had to concede, was worrying him more than somewhat. He had understood from the file that the brothers always sent their honey abroad on Expo-Brit expeditions. These were export jollies in which a number of small independent manufacturers banded together to form a mini-export drive and, although most of them remained intoxicated throughout the journey, some succeeded in selling considerable quantities of such things as revolutionary bicycle pumps or pre-fabricated hen-houses.

  ‘Er… well,’ he said, ‘I do realise that the Sacred Brotherhood have been on every Expo-Brit so far, which in itself is, naturally, highly significant.’

  ‘More gin,’ said Sir Erris dogmatically and Bognor bought his round. ‘I’m willing to bet,’ continued the Chief Constable, ‘that every single agricultural secret that has gone behind the iron curtain in the last dozen or so years went out in a jar of Beaubridge honey.’

  ‘I go along with that,’ said Bognor, who had seen none of this on the file. It was typical of Whitehall. He began to suspect the whole thing was simply an initiative test dreamt up by Parkinson.

  ‘Collingdale is dead, is he?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh very,’ said Sir Erris, ‘which I would have thought was conclusive proof that our sacred brothers, or one or more of them, are engaged in a peculiarly unpleasant game of espionage.’

  ‘Possibly,’ said Bognor. ‘But it doesn’t help to have too many preconceived ideas.’

  ‘Indeed not. Now drink up and I’ll drive you out to the bloody brethren, and introduce you to our Inspector Pinney.’

  It was obviously distressing for Father Anselm. It seemed to the rest of the Community that he had taken it very badly. Particularly as their dead brother had been with them for only three weeks. They had hardly known him.

  ‘He’s aged overnight,’ said Brother Barnabas to Brother Vivian.

  ‘I’m not at all happy about the Abbot,’ said Father Xavier to Father John.

  True, Father Anselm was looking tired and drawn, but then he had looked tired and drawn since the days of his novitiate. Indeed he had been a tired drawn infant, a tired drawn schoolboy and a tired drawn undergraduate before he ever became a tired drawn friar.

  His naturally angular, even haggard, appearance gave him a slightly spurious air of asceticism which he cultivated, and led some to suppose, quite wrongly, that he was frail. He had played stand-off half in a particularly good Marlborough XV and would almost certainly have won a blue but for an untimely attack of hepatitis, or yellow jaundice as it was then called. At fifty-two he preserved his fitness by felling trees in a Gladstonian fashion and once a week in winter he would drive into Woodstock for a game of squash with the headmaster, a friend from Christ Church days.

  It was perhaps wrong of the Community to be surprised at Father Anselm’s distress. Ever since he had taken over fifteen years before he had ruled with an authority that was almost paternal. Some resented it and among the more sophisticated there was a feeling that his time with the Society’s mission in Papua had inculcated an attitude towards his fellow man which verged on the contemptuous.

  His actions on hearing of the death of Brother Luke were distinctly headmasterly, almost as if planned on the squash court in Woodstock. The friars—not the ‘guests’—had immediately been ordered to the refectory, on the grounds, presumably, that this was a secular matter. The rumour of sensation was spreading but only a handful of them knew what had actually happened and Father Anselm was evidently determined that they should learn from him.

  Two or three minutes of silent waiting at the long narrow tables and he entered hurriedly, black leather bible tightly clasped in his left hand. Eyes watched with unusually real interest as he climbed the three steps to the lectern under the room’s solitary stained-glass window (1930-ish, St. Francis with birds). He paused to polish spectacles on the billowing sleeve of his habit before glancing sharply at his audience.

  ‘I had never thought,’ he began, ‘that it would be necessary to remind you of Exodus XX, Verse 13. Indeed I had always believed that of all the commandments, the seventh was the nearest to the hearts of the followers of the life contemplative. Alas…’ He paused, both hands clasping the sides of the lectern. ‘Alas, for the first time in its life our brotherhood has been visited by death which is violent and unnatural. I cannot in conscience believe that the murder…’ Again he paused. ‘For make no mistake about it, murder it was… that the murder of our brother Luke… is the work of one of us. And yet the circumstances suggest that it was.

  ‘It has naturally been my unhappy duty to telephone the county police and they will arrive shortly.

  ‘I want each one of you to answer the police questions and to help them in their difficult work. But more important, much more important, I believe that someone here in this room knows what happened to Brother Luke. I earnestly pray that that person should come to me. I know that he will be deeply troubled and profoundly unhappy. I cannot pretend that it is not my duty to tell the secular authorities if any person should come forward, but our concern, our whole existence, is dominated by a greater reality. The perpetrator of this dreadful crime must answer to the State but he must answer also to God. And in the knowledge of Our Lord’s infinite compassion and mercy may that man come to me and confess.

  ‘And now’—he became brisk as he approached the peroration—‘when we move as we now shall to the chapel, we shall offer our prayers not only for the soul of our departed brother in Christ, but also for whoever did this deed that he may have the strength to acknowledge his guilt before God Almighty.’

  Even Father Xavier, the Community cynic and Father Anselm’s principal detractor, was impressed.

  Their prayers in chapel were almost anti-climactic.

  They prayed for the soul of Brother Luke:

  ‘O God, who alone are always merciful and full of pity we humbly implore Thee on behalf of the soul of Thy servant Luke which at Thy bidding has departed today from this life; that Thou mayest not abandon it to the hands of the enemy nor forget it for ever but that at Thy command the holy angels may bear it up and bring it to its home in Paradise; where because of its faith and hope in Thee, it will not suffer the pains of hell but will rather possess eternal joy.’

  And they prayed for the man who murdered Brother Luke: ‘Almighty and merciful God, who desirest the amendment rather than the destruction of every soul that repents and makes confession to Thee: look upon these servants of Thine; and turn aside from them Thy anger and indignation and forgive them all their sins.’

  Some were chanted and some were spoken in unison.

  When they trooped out into the courtyard there were two cars parked in it. One was a white Jaguar, the other an old Morris. Two red-faced men in policemen’s uniform and two less rubicund people in grey flannels and blazers were standing waiting.

  For the rest of the afternoon the police worked hard but without apparent direction. Fingerprints were taken and each member of the brotherhood was asked to say how he had spent the morning; but no one who endured the brisk five minutes of questioning in Father Anselm’s study seriously believed that the interrogation was more than the beginning of a very long haul indeed.

  Just before Evensong at 6.30 Father John met Father Xavier outside the tailor’s shop.

  ‘The locals evidently can’t cope,’ he said. ‘The Scotland Yard man’s going to be on the nine o’clock tomorrow. Father Anselm isn’t going to like that much. It’ll be in the papers before long.’

  Father Xavier dropped the stub of his cigarette on to the cobbles and ground it underfoot. ‘Sooner or later,’ he said, ‘Father Anselm and the rest of you are going to have to get used to the idea that one of us has committed a murder. And anyway, where were you this morning?’

/>   Sir Erris enjoyed driving. Particularly Land Rovers. After a few gins the deep whine of the engine and the pervading khaki took him back to North Africa. Five miles out of Woodstock he took the right fork, pushed the vehicle to seventy and started to whistle Lilli Marlene.

  They had just swerved past an unforeseen tractor when they saw the hitchhiker. He was sitting on a rucksack about fifty yards off. Sir Erris, who was by then singing The White Cliffs of Dover looked across at Bognor. ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘He won’t get another chance for half an hour.’

  They had passed him by this time and Sir Erris reversed back, erratically brushing the great stalks of cow parsley by the roadside.

  ‘Hop in the back,’ he said to the man. He was about twenty, with a round, optimistic face and sandy hair. He wore cavalry twills and a nylon roll neck; looked like a pre-war student.

  ‘Thanks awfully,’ he said, limping towards the back of the vehicle and climbing in with some difficulty. ‘I’m sorry. I hadn’t meant to cadge lifts. I’m afraid I just overestimated my powers of endurance. It’s quite a long walk from Sherton station.’

  ‘How far are you going?’ asked Bognor as Sir Erris accelerated.

  ‘To the Friary the other side of Great Ogridge. You can drop me off at the turning down to the village. It’s only a couple of miles from there.’

  ‘That’s all right, we’re going to the Friary too.’

  ‘Oh. Great. That’s terrific. I’m Brother Paul… I’ve been away on leave,’ he added, sensing accurately Bognor’s surprise.

  ‘By the way,’ he asked a few minutes later, ‘what takes you to the Friary? You don’t look a frightfully religious type if you don’t mind my saying so.’

  ‘You’re very perceptive. No. I’m a policeman.’

  ‘Oh.’ The young man thought for a moment. ‘Nothing’s happened, has it? Nothing wrong?’

  ‘I’m afraid one of your people has been found dead. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was murdered. Strangled, I’m led to believe.’