Business Unusual (The Simon Bognor Mysteries) Read online

  After a while Bognor gave up even the smallest pretence of trying to understand what was going on. Instead he allowed himself to be gently seduced by the mechanical clackety-clack of conveyor belts bumping bottles round the halls; by the great vats of embryonic lager and porter and Parsnip heaving and pulsating, suppurating and wafting yeasty, hoppish, barleymow smells and flavours around his nostrils; by the clackety-clack of Miss Mimms in her white coat and white hat, reciting facts and statistics and numbers in her flat Scarpington voice; by the sheer, unchanging, mesmerising rhythm of a process which had all the hypnotic qualities of a metronome with the rather awful rider that there were humans in the production line going clackety-clack just like the machines and Miss Mimms’s voice. Could you have an adequate life on a production line? At least he only had to watch and nod with simulated interest. Even so Bognor had a feeling that, as far as he was concerned, information itself had strong narcoleptic qualities. As delivered by Miss Minims, to the accompaniment of updated Japanesed Heath Robinson, it was lethal.

  After half an hour, and not a drop to drink, he was unfit to drive. Just about out on his feet.

  ‘You look as if you could do with a stiffener,’ said Moulton when Miss Mimms dumped Bognor back in his office.

  ‘Actually, I think I’d better not,’ said Bognor. ‘I had rather a heavy day yesterday.’

  ‘Didn’t we all! Didn’t we all!’ Moulton rolled his eyes and winked in such a lubricious fashion that Bognor was afraid word had got out about him and the Countess in the sauna. ‘What you need is a hair of the dog.’

  Bognor forced a laugh. ‘I honestly think a low cal lager would be better. Ein Alte Gnatspee, bitte.’

  Moulton guffawed back. Bognor could visualise him only too easily slapping his lederhosen with a thwack of the hand while yodelling some mädchen in a keller. Did one yodel mädchen’. Perhaps not.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ said Moulton, ‘we’re doing a very hot German trade with our Export Parsnip. Petersilien-wurtzel in krautspeak. Bit of a mouthful. But they seem to like it. Petersilienwurtzel aus England. Sehr … well sehr something or other. Tell you what, why don’t we crack a bottle of the Prince of Wales’s Parsnip?’

  Bognor was now well baffled.

  ‘You what?’ he said feebly.

  ‘Old brewing tradition,’ said Moulton. ‘Every so often we get Royalty to come and mash an ale. The Prince of Wales came and mashed a special Parsnip. It’s drinking awfully well.’

  Inwardly Bognor groaned, but he judged it impolite to refuse. On his way down to the brewery he had called in at the public library and carried out a quick consultation in the reference section. He was only working on a hunch but, looking at Moulton, he thought it might be worth a try.

  ‘Weak or strong?’ he asked.

  ‘Bloody strong!’ Moulton winked again. He was winking so much that Bognor wondered if it might be involuntary. He must be careful not to wink back, just in case. ‘Take the top of your head off,’ said Moulton.

  ‘Sorry, no, I meant cards.’ Being deliberately obtuse came easily to Bognor.

  ‘Cards?’

  ‘Weak or strong no trumps.’ Bognor hoped he had got it right. His understanding was that this was what a bridge player asked a new partner as they sat down at table for the first time together.

  Moulton’s appearance conveyed all the mystification that Bognor so often felt on his own account. ‘Um,’ he said. ‘Not with you, old fruit.’

  ‘Fishy one club,’ Bognor said. ‘Er … pre-emptive three …’ He hoped he’d read Hoyle’s Encyclopaedia of Card Games correctly. ‘Bridge,’ he went on quickly. ‘I’d heard you were into bridge. The Artisan Bridge club. Keen member. You.’

  ‘Ah.’ Moulton was pink already, but it seemed to Bognor that this was a pinker shade of pink.

  ‘My mistake. Understood you played in League B. You and Dorothy Brown.’

  Oh, aah, and plunge not the finger of enquiry into the pie of impertinence, O my uncle. Moulton was at a serious loss. He had turned into a flobster.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Not with you, my son.’

  And at that moment a butler — how ubiquitous was the ersatz butler in middle England — came in with a bottle of the Prince’s Parsnip.

  ‘Oh, terrif.,’ said Moulton, saved by a suave chap in Moulton and Bragg livery. The salver was silver, the bottle was glass, the label gilded and grand, the effect showstopping.

  Bognor had, in transatlantic idiom, ‘intuited’ enough to be able to bend and weave. He had, he reckoned, gleaned just enough. Whatever Moulton had been playing at with Mrs Brown, Mrs Festing and Mr Fothergill, it wasn’t bridge.

  ‘Gosh, I say,’ he said. ‘Is this the Prince’s Parsnip?’

  ‘Indeed it is.’ Moulton may have been aptly named ‘Mouldy’, but even so he was capable of incisive change of subject. ‘Strong, not weak,’ he said, meaning the beer, and then booting the unmentionable back into the closet, he added, ‘Not much of a one for bridge, to tell the truth. Social obligation, don’t you know. Chap has to keep up appearances if only for business’s sake. Now, try some of this. I think you’ll find it seriously remarkable. Seriously remarkable.’

  It was, it was. And, according to Freddie Grimaldi’s score card, Moulton had only scored two. But even a rotten bridge player would catch the reference to weak or strong. A rotten bridge player who belonged to a bridge club and played on mid-week afternoons. There was a little mystery here. Another modest Artisan secret. But was it significant? Did it mean anything? Or was it, like so much of the lore and legend of masonic societies, just plain silly?

  Moulton smacked his lips. ‘Nectar,’ he said. ‘Pure nectar.’

  Bognor smacked his. He felt the beer shoot down his throat and through the complicated apparatus of human plumbing which he could not understand. This beer really did reach parts other things couldn’t and it was reaching them at speed. In seconds the alcohol had penetrated the brain and he was half-way back to where he had been the day before. Not yet drunk but scarcely sober.

  ‘Mmmmm,’ he said, ‘and you’re right. Not in the least weak. Very far from gnatspee.’

  ‘About the same strength as sherry.’

  After lunch Bognor had to have a bit of a lie-down. Mouldy Moulton was an ass but he was, it seemed to Bognor, a perfectly agreeable ass and harmless. He was also a lavish host, so Bognor was badly in need of bed by three-fifteen when he finally stumbled away from the brewery clutching a souvenir bottle of the Princess’s Parsnip (Di had been down to ‘mash’ a couple of years earlier, though she seemed a less probable beer person than her sister-in-law).

  He was just nodding off when there was a knock on the door.

  ‘No, thank you,’ he shouted, and turned over, but the knocking persisted. ‘Not today, thank you,’ he shouted. ‘I’ll turn the bed down myself. I don’t want an After Eight.’ This last was a reference to the Jolly Trencherman custom of putting a single After Eight mint chocolate on one’s pillow at night. Two in a shared bed. Bognor, who had come across this before, often wondered if it had some sort of sexual connotation but was too embarrassed to ask anyone, even Monica. It was like bidets in the bathroom. He knew they were connected with some sort of deeply personal ablution but was not quite sure exactly what. He couldn’t believe the After Eights were just for eating in the conventional way. And was one supposed to do whatever one did with them before cleaning one’s teeth? He had been brought up to believe that there was a very precise drill to be followed before going to bed. One folded one’s clothes, one put on one’s pyjamas, one washed and brushed one’s teeth, and one said one’s prayers. Then one got into bed and there was no talking after lights out. Any deviation from this and one was beaten. Nothing in his hearty, muscular Christian fee-paying education had prepared him for the mysterious introduction of the After Eight into this ritual.

  It was thoughts such as these that kaleidoscoped through what passed for his brain that afternoon as he tried to sleep off the effects of steak,
chips and the Prince’s Parsnip.

  ‘Go away!’ he shouted as the knocking persisted. It was accompanied by a human voice, he now realised, female and familiar.

  ‘Don’t be such a bloody oaf,’ it was saying. ‘It’s Diana Scarpington.’

  Oh God, he thought, ‘unfinished business’. She had come to have her wicked way with him and he was not feeling up to it. Also he was feeling guilty and his wife had walked out on him. This woman was dangerous and must be asked to leave at once.

  ‘Do please go away!’ he called. ‘You’ve got me in enough trouble as it is. Go and find someone else.’

  ‘Don’t be idiotic. I just want to talk to you.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ he shouted. ‘This is very embarrassing. I’m extremely sorry for what happened. I’m afraid I must have had too much to drink.’

  ‘Oh, shut up and let me in. You really are a pompous ass.’

  That was the last straw. He was not going to be called pompous by some nymphomaniac jumped-up PR girl. He went to the door, which was chained, and opened it an inch or so.

  ‘You can call me many things,’ he said through clenched teeth, ‘but not pompous.’

  So she laughed at him. ‘If you could see yourself,’ she said. ‘Pomposity incarnate. Let me in.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. I need to talk to you.’

  ‘You are talking to me.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake don’t be so idiotic. If you go on like this I shall take all my clothes off and say you tried to rape me.’

  ‘You wouldn’t.’

  ‘I certainly would.’

  Bognor regarded her through the chained gap. She would, too.

  He unchained the door. She was wearing a fur, real fur, coat and a similar outfit to the day before, only this time the trousers were tight white and the roll-neck a vivid scarlet.

  ‘You look terrible,’ she said. ‘I must have been out of my mind.’

  ‘You were drunk.’

  ‘So were you. Anyway, I’ve always been attracted to unattractive men. Sprockett was pretty repulsive. Anyway, listen, I’ve found something out. At least I’ve half found something out. About the Artisans. I thought you might be interested. It’s to do with bridge.’

  ‘Uh, uh. Bridge.’

  ‘The Artisans’ Bridge Club. It’s not bridge they play. Not at all. I thought you ought to know. For your report.’

  Bognor raised an eyebrow and did his best to appear quizzical and superior.

  ‘Not bridge.’

  ‘It most certainly is not.’

  ‘Hadn’t you better start at the beginning?’ he suggested.

  She flopped into a Jolly Trencherman armchair mass-produced in some Third World sweat shop by yet another Puce subsidiary.

  ‘Piggy pretended to be cross after you’d gone.’

  ‘So did Monica. Only she wasn’t pretending. Thanks to you, she’s done a bunk. From now on I’m going to be utterly virtuous.’

  ‘That, you poor mutt, is called shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. Which in view of the identity of the bolter is rather a good metaphor.’

  ‘That’s not funny.’

  ‘No. Sorry. It’s not. Anyway, you don’t have to worry. I don’t fancy you today. Nor it.’

  ‘That’s a relief.’

  ‘You’ve been drinking again.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She clicked disapproval. ‘Naughty, naughty. Anyway Piggy pretended to be cross. He was a bit cross, but only because the butler had seen. He’s very old-fashioned about staff. Minds awfully what butlers see. So I asked what I was supposed to do when he swanned off playing golf. Not, I not because as we both knew he was quite incapable of performing the sexual act.’

  ‘Is he?’

  ‘Well, with me, he is. He can’t even … well there’s no need to go into the sordid details. So then he started to get very shirty and I said if he’d been playing golf why wasn’t he wet as it had been pouring with rain all afternoon. And then he said he’d been at the Artisans’ Bridge Club. And I asked him why, if he were playing cards, he was absolutely reeking of Miss Dior. At which I thought he was going to burst a blood vessel. But all he did was to say in his sniffy House of Lords voice, ‘There were ladies present, actually. There are some women who do know how to play cards.’

  ‘You don’t play cards?’

  ‘Life’s too bloody short.’ She snorted. ‘But, this is the good bit. Just as I thought he’d calmed down he said that if I must know he’d been having it off with Yvette Sinclair and she had expressed herself well satisfied. Then he went off to his study absolutely blotto and Perkins and I had to undress him and put him to bed.’

  ‘Which equalled the score as far as the butler’s concerned.’

  She shook her head. ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘Perkins often puts him to bed. But what was interesting was that when we got his shirt off his back was extremely nasty. Badly bruised and cut through the skin in some places. If it was Yvette she must have given him a ferocious going over with a cane or something.’

  ‘Is this Yvette woman something to do with the invalid carriage people?’

  The Countess nodded. ‘Married to that smarmy Eric. There’s something creepy about him. Though I’ve always thought the creepiest thing about him was his wife. She’s a French Canadian.’

  ‘So you think your husband was telling the truth?’

  ‘It explains all that gear he’s left in the dungeon. He’s always made out it was there “for old time’s sake”.

  ‘I noticed,’ said Bognor. ‘I thought some of it had been used more recently than sixteen hundred.’

  ‘Very observant of you.’

  Bognor smiled. ‘I’m paid to be observant, my lady.’

  ‘Don’t you “my lady” me or I’ll start calling you Bognor. You’re just like Sprockett in some ways. A massive conceit based on nothing whatever. It must be something they do to boys at Oxford.’

  ‘You never realised your husband was into SM?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘Now you mention it, I suppose not. I did once bite his ankle by mistake and he asked me to do it again.’

  ‘By mistake? His ankle?’

  ‘Forget it. I was experimenting at the time.’

  ‘So you’re telling me your husband spent the afternoon being flagellated at the Artisans’ Bridge Club by the French Canadian wife of Scarpington’s leading wheel chair manufacturer.’

  ‘Yup.’ She smirked and reached into her handbag. From it she produced an Ingersoll key. ‘And look what I nicked while he was asleep.’

  ‘Front door key of the Artisans’ Bridge Club.’

  ‘Right in one.’

  ‘Do you have the address?’

  ‘It was in his membership book.’

  ‘There’s a membership book?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Well, this is highly satisfactory. It sounds as if there is more to Artisan bridge than one might think.’ Bognor knew he was being pompous. ‘It does tend to confirm what I’d been suspecting for quite some time.’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, oh, yeah.’

  She obviously didn’t believe him but that didn’t matter. She had a key and an address. Bognor, could, he told himself, have found both for himself, given time, but here they were, presented to him on a plate, and an aristocratic one at that. Spode or Crown Derby, as it were.

  ‘Do you think we should check it out?’ he asked.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think, yes.’

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Car’s outside, illegal, but I’ve got a “Doctor” sign which comes in handy.’

  It was a white Volkswagen Golf which she drove with the pzazz and chutzpah he would have expected of her. Pedestrians scattered like surprised pheasants in her path.

  ‘Wedgwood Benn Gardens are out beyond the county cricket ground,’ she said. ‘I guess The Laurels must be one of those late-Victorian numbers bui
lt for the younger sons of the fat cats of the Industrial Rev. Know what I mean?’

  Bognor knew what she meant.

  This was the suburbia of the provincial city, middle England squared. Respectability and substance and not a non-pinko-grey face to be seen anywhere. A Victorian infrastructure with a few knobs on, including, most recently, fibre-glass, white-painted conservatories and satellite dishes. The inhabitants were the heirs of Pooter: ‘executives’; computer ‘analysts’ and ‘planners’; representatives; aspiring Artisans all. This was a comfortable world, more comfortable than ever in Thatcher’s Britain. Mouldy Moulton wouldn’t live here, but his children might and his executives certainly would. The name ‘Wedgwood Benn Gardens’ had been pasted over the old ‘Laburnum Road’ when in the Wilsonian sixties there had briefly been a Labour Council in Scarpington. Unlike ‘Mandela Road’ or ‘Brezhnev Place’, it had been allowed to stay. This was largely because, like the man himself, ‘Wedgwood Benn’ had a pleasing anachronistic euphony which fitted in well with the area’s bank-managerly Victorianism.

  ‘Here,’ Bognor half-remembered some Betjeman, ‘a monkey puzzle tree/And there a round geranium bed’, Oh yes, and better yet …

  He chanted aloud

  Each mansion, each new planted pine,

  Each short and ostentatious drive

  Meant Morning Prayer and beef and wine

  And Queen Victoria alive.

  ‘We’re here,’ said his friend the Countess. ‘Wedgwood Benn Gardens. Oh England, my England.’

  And there was a monkey puzzle on the front lawn. Not to mention stained glass over the front door and, let into it, the words ‘The Laurels’. It was a substantial two-storey pile with dormer windows in the roof and a modest amount of decoration of the curlecued, semi-heraldic, late-nineteenth-century variety. And, oh yes, a shrubbery with laurels.

  ‘Do the Artisans have the whole place?’ asked Bognor.

  The Countess could not answer. She parked the car a little way down the drive. ‘Only one way to find out,’ she said.