Masterstroke (The Simon Bognor Mysteries) Read online

  ‘That’s more like it.’ She tossed her head and glanced from one man to the other. All three were aware of the superiority of her sex, the two men uncomfortably so.

  ‘Right.’ She turned on an elegantly black-booted heel, buckles clattering as she did. ‘Vamos! Let’s see what’s on the files.’

  The men followed somewhat sheepishly. Mitten was in a hairy, donnish tweed suit of the style he had worn on his visit to the Board of Trade. Office seemed to have made him pompous, to have stopped off that geyser of irreverence which had so endeared him to his pupils by exploding just when it was least expected and most needed, punctuating long-winded orations at college feasts and the absurd pretensions of world leaders come to collect their honorary degrees. Mitten was, paradoxically, diminished by his elevation. He was the poorer for power.

  ‘Sold out,’ thought Bognor, as they followed the loping figure of Dr Frinton along the ill-lit cloisters surrounding Tobit Quad. And yet it wasn’t quite that; it was something more subtle and insidious, possibly even sinister. Bognor couldn’t put his finger on it.

  ‘I’m not happy about this, Simon,’ said Mitten sotto voce, as their leader increased her pace and outdistanced them by several yards. ‘She’s so deucedly headstrong. Can she know what she’s up to? And even if she does, is it right? I mean, I do think this sort of thing should be left to the professionals.’

  ‘She is a professional,’ snapped Bognor. ‘So am I,’ he added with less conviction.

  ‘In a manner of speaking,’ conceded Mitten. ‘But there are professionals and professionals. I would prefer to be doing this rather more conventionally. I feel as if I’m Gordon Liddy.’

  ‘Well, you’re not,’ said Bognor. ‘You’re not even remotely like Gordon Liddy. You’re acting on the side of law ’n’ order. And justice. And all that sort of thing.’

  ‘That’s what Nixon said,’ whispered Mitten miserably, as they passed out of the cloisters, through the Arch of the Maccabees and into the Garden Quad where they halted at the door of the lodgings.

  ‘OK, Waldy. Open up!’ commanded Dr Frinton.

  Mitten reached in his pocket and pulled out a piece of wood to which two large, old-fashioned keys were appended. The first did not fit, but the second did. Mitten turned it and the door creaked open. They were assailed by a smell of damp and decay. The place felt musty, as if its windows had been unopened for decades. Overlying this generalized aroma there were more specific scents. Bognor thought he detected very old fish, possibly stale milk, and perhaps cat droppings.

  He wrinkled his nose, and felt bilious again. ‘Gosh!’ he said. ‘Bit niffy, isn’t it?’

  Mitten took a polka dot handkerchief from his breast pocket and waved it under his nose. ‘Beckenham’s food,’ he said. ‘Scout hasn’t cleared it out.’

  ‘We’re not here to talk about the cat’s breakfast,’ said Hermione. ‘This way.’ She led them down the flagged hall, then left down a corridor to another locked door, which Mitten opened with the second key. He fumbled as he did so, irritating Dr Frinton, who remarked that both the keys and locks were so old and primitive as to be quite pointless. Any eight-year-old with a piece of stiff card and a modicum of ingenuity could have broken in without the slightest problem. Bognor was about to protest that he personally found lock-picking an extraordinarily difficult art to master when the door did finally open and Hermione let out an ungrammatical sentence composed entirely of expletives which Bognor found surprisingly strong, even for her.

  ‘Someone else had the same idea,’ said Bognor, following her into the room and eyeing the open filing cabinets and scattered papers. The burglar had been messy.

  ‘What makes you say that?’ asked Mitten, gaping at the papers. He looked both perplexed and outraged. This was more than an ordinary burglary, it was an affront to the college. That was what his manner suggested.

  ‘Simon’s right,’ said Hermione. She bent down and scooped up a sheaf. ‘Putney, Earl of,’ she intoned. ‘Unpromising material but enough means to compensate. Gamma minus academically. Moral behaviour ditto …’ She cast the sheet aside. ‘Finkelbaum, Ephraim. Outstanding intellect, but see involvement with french-Winifred, Hubert.’ She threw that down too. ‘Butley, Basil, recommended to G for special work with Force Q on account of brilliant performance in rugger cuppers, also forceful leadership during anti-Fascist riots. See Dean’s special report. …’

  ‘OK,’ said Bognor. ‘You’ve made your point.’ There was a cavernous, shiny leather armchair next to a large, drooping aspidistra and Bognor sat down in it heavily, sighed, and passed a hand over a surprisingly sweaty brow.

  ‘I presume he’s got what we wanted?’ he said.

  Hermione was on her hands and knees trying to sort through the former contents of the filing cabinets. ‘Difficult to be certain,’ she said. ‘Everything’s such a mess. He used to file by year with a complicated cross-reference system to moral tutors and coded indexes. He half explained it to me once, but it was so abstruse I think he’d forgotten it himself.’ She got to her feet and began to examine the cabinets themselves. ‘Looks like it,’ she said at last, forlornly. ‘No sign of your year at all, Simon. We can check it out more thoroughly in the morning, but I’m afraid our murderer’s got away with some nicely incriminating evidence.’

  ‘Pity,’ said Bognor. ‘I should like to have seen my entry.’

  ‘That I doubt,’ said Mitten. ‘It would have made salutary reading. But that’s by the way. I don’t understand how this could have happened. I mean, who could have got in without us knowing?’

  ‘Not exactly Fort Knox,’ Hermione snorted. ‘Any halfwit could have picked these locks.’

  ‘But,’ protested Mitten, ‘you have to get into the college in the first place. There’s only one way in.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ said Bognor. ‘There are a hundred and one climbable drainpipes to my certain knowledge. And even if he did come through the main gate, those porters are always asleep or half-cut. Or both.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s fair.’ Mitten pouted. ‘College security has always been very strict.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd.’ Hermione ran long fingers through her autumn gold hair. ‘Question is, who?’

  ‘Rook,’ said Bognor. ‘I’m almost positive Rook’s file was dynamite. My information is that he only got his first because he snitched a look at the political theory paper weeks before it happened.’

  ‘He what?’ Frinton and Mitten looked at him incredulously.

  ‘He got hold of the political theory paper in advance of the exam. Found it in this very room, no less. Was surprised by the Master, who kept mum. Accessory after the fact.’

  ‘Not possible,’ said Mitten.

  Hermione Frinton ignored him. ‘Why didn’t you tell us before?’

  ‘Before what?’ Bognor treated the question rhetorically and continued at once. ‘I couldn’t tell you before anything. I only found out this evening and you were so bloody anxious to get me on the back of that absurd velocipede of yours that there was no chance to provide you with new and exciting information. If only you hadn’t been so unforgivably impetuous.’

  ‘Good grief!’ she exclaimed. ‘You mean to say this is some drunken tittle-tattle you’ve picked up over dinner with that raddled old floosie you came weaving home with just now? Do me a favour.’

  Bognor glared.

  Hermione Frinton glared.

  Waldegrave Mitten blinked from one to the other.

  Finally Bognor said, in his most theatrical manner, ‘I’ve had a long day and I am going home to bed. No, thank you, I don’t want a lift. I would rather walk. I’ll see myself out.’

  And he did.

  5

  IT DID NOT TAKE Bognor long to walk back to the Randolph this time. Anger sped his steps, and evaporated his fatigue. He was extremely cross, not to say insulted. He objected to implications of incompetence, no matter where they came from. In the case of Parkinson they were to be expected. Parkinson’s disdainful misgiv
ings were a cross to bear, a running sore with which he had just about learned to live. Monica’s gentle teasing was founded on friendship, even love, or so he believed. But this was quite different – a brand-new colleague accusing him of unprofessional conduct in front of his old tutor. And not any old brand-new colleague, but one he rather fancied. It was a bit much.

  It was particularly thick because the more he thought about it the more suspicious Rook became. He had always been a flash Harry, too clever by half, always playing games with his friends’ emotions and loyalties, playing a game with life itself but not the sort of game Bognor wanted to join. Rook played like a professional, always calculating the next move, interested only in winning, not in taking part, happy to foul if it was necessary. Molly Mortimer’s allegations were shocking but, now that Bognor thought about them, entirely in character. Naturally Humphrey Rook would cheat. Who could have thought otherwise? The only real surprise was the Master’s complicity, but Bognor could see how that had happened. To have shopped Rook at the time would have meant blackening his character and ruining his career. Beckenham would not have enjoyed that. It would have made him seem callous, particularly as part of the blame was his for leaving the exam paper lying around in such a careless manner. And Rook was a favourite son. It would have seemed much the easiest way out. Successful men, in Bognor’s experience, always knew when to turn the blind eye. No reason to suppose that Beckenham was not perfectly Nelsonian in this respect.

  If it hadn’t been for his cheating Rook would probably have got a third-class degree, just like Bognor. Had Bognor cheated he would, given his luck, have been found out. This thought made him still angrier, so that as he came swinging into the Randolph’s lobby the fury was rising off him like steam. Even the most unobservant and casual bystander would have noticed that they were in the presence of a very angry man indeed.

  Nor did his rage abate as he ascended to his room. Had it not been for Molly Mortimer, he might have been heading bedwards with Hermione Frinton. Had it not been for Hermione Frinton, he might have been heading bedwards with Molly Mortimer. This was, of course, the purest fantasy, for despite his lascivious imaginings Bognor never went to bed with anyone but the faithful Monica. Nevertheless in matters of sex, as in practically everything else, Bognor was a fantasist, and as he moved towards a solitary bed in the cavernous hotel he found the prospect not so much depressing as enraging. In other bedrooms about the place there would, he knew full well, be endless energetic and adulterous couplings, regretted at breakfast perhaps, but not in the act. There, but for the grace of God, went he. Dammit!

  So cross was he and, of course, not yet sober, that he fumbled with his key in the door and was unable to open it for a full thirty seconds. He was also insufficiently himself to notice that the light was on. Even if he had noticed, he would merely have assumed that he had left it on before going out. He had no memory for such trivia at the best of times (which this, indubitably, was not) and would never have recalled his scrupulous switching off of lights immediately before meeting Molly in the bar. If he had, he would probably have assumed that the chambermaid had left it on while turning down his bed, and so he would have been just as unsuspecting as, in fact, he was. So that under no circumstances would he have avoided the blow which caught him sharply and adroitly on the back of the head as he finally effected an entry to his room.

  He slept soundly but dreamed vividly until shortly before five o’clock. The dreams were confused but exciting. In all of them he was being chased, though the identity of the pursuer was not always clear. Often the chase was processional. He would be racing across some windswept moor, with Professor Aveline bicycling behind him and gaining by the yard. Behind the professor came Molly Mortimer on horseback and behind her Hermione Frinton on Bolislav. Behind them the chief-inspector, Parkinson and Waldegrave Mitten in an open Mercedes of the type favoured by Goering. Behind them Monica, armed with a machine gun, flying through the air like Wonderwoman with some mechanized hang-gliding contrivance strapped to her torso. In other dreams he was hunted by Vole, Crutwell, Edgware and Rook, the four of them baying for him like hounds after a fox. He was always being pursued except for one particularly vivid dream, a replay of his oldest and least favourite, the nightmare in which he was once again forced to sit all thirteen papers of his final examinations at Oxford. Decked out in ‘sub fusc’ of gown and white bow tie, he faced the ordeal with a mind of complete blankness, an impenetrable fog of ignorance, which led to his handing in papers without a word written on them. It was a peculiarly dreadful dream and in this version it culminated in a horrific interview with Lord Beckenham, flanked by Mitten and Aveline, attended by Vole, Crutwell, Edgware and Rook. Lord Beckenham was wearing the full rig of a Lord Justice, complete with wig, and after delivering an interminable catalogue of various awfulnesses he finally donned a black cap and announced with due solemnity: ‘It is therefore the sentence of this court, that you be taken from this place and hanged by the neck. …’ At which point Bognor woke, bathed in sweat and shouting. He was lying on the carpet. For a moment he experienced that shock of complete disorientation which one always experiences on waking in a strange place.

  He was so confused that for a joyous instant he was even under the impression that he felt quite well. But when he tried to move he realized that he was not only damaged, but damaged fore and aft. Part of the pain was self-inflicted, the chemical consequence of excess alcohol ingestion. Bearable in isolation, but not when taken in tandem with the physical assault inflicted by whatever outside agency had hit him on the skull with a blunt object. It was one thing to have a hammering sensation inside the head; it was another thing to have a hammering sensation on the outside of the head; but it was something of an altogether different dimension when one was being hammered inside and out. He decided to lie very still and see if he could collect his thoughts, such as they were.

  ‘Hangover,’ he said to himself hoarsely and out loud. Dimly he remembered the cognac. And the wine. And the Scotch. But if this was a hangover, why was he lying in the middle of the carpet? He frowned and wished immediately that he had not. Frowning was agony. Hangovers were an occupational hazard of the Bognor life, and as such they were instantly recognizable. Nor was drink on its own enough to floor him. It was ages since he had passed out from boozing. Not for, oh, twenty years or more. In fact he couldn’t remember keeling over from alcohol since that time after the Arkwright and Blennerhasset dinner when he had drunk a bottle of port. He smiled at the memory and let out a shrill gasp of anguish. Consider the corpse on the carpet, he mused, he frowns not, neither shall he smile. Better dead than this. Very gingerly he moved his right hand to the top right-hand corner of his head and tried touching it. Not a good idea. The merest dab produced an appalling sensation as if a demon acupuncturist was playing darts with his scalp.

  It was then that the telephone sounded. It made him jerk violently, as if he had shocked himself on a faulty piece of electrical wiring. This induced a wracking spasm of pain, and each subsequent ring sent further slashing knifestrokes into his defenceless brain. It was no good just lying there on the floor, much as he wanted to. It would, he knew, be agonizing to get to his feet and blunder across to the telephone, but the searing rings of the instrument had a horribly insistent sound. They were not going to go away, and if he went on lying on the floor he would shortly expire. If he made a dash for it death might well ensue, but death would at least come swiftly.

  He inhaled deeply, braced himself for the effort and lunged across the room towards the offending shrill. He succeeded in lifting the receiver from its cradle and put it to his ear, expecting to hear the voice of his unloved boss. For once he was wrong. It was not Parkinson who spoke. Instead an inspector called.

  ‘Is that Simon Bognor?’ To Bognor’s tortured hearing Smith’s voice sounded alarmingly gloomy.

  ‘Yes,’ he croaked. ‘Simon Bognor speaking.’ Each syllable hurt.

  The policeman’s voice seemed to falter. ‘Are y
ou all right?’ he asked, a barely discernible note of sympathy twanging over the wires.

  ‘No.’ Bognor considered expanding on this, but decided against it. Words equalled effort equalled acute discomfort. He had been kneeling by the bed up to this moment, and now hauled himself to his feet and succeeded in sitting down on it. As he did he let out a moan of anguish.

  ‘Bognor? You there? You all right?’

  Bognor gritted his teeth and tried speaking through them. ‘No. Half-dead. Someone tried to kill me.’

  The inspector swore. ‘I’m sending a car round,’ he said.

  ‘What, now?’ Bognor wanted to sleep. Die, even. Mind and body screamed out for oblivion.

  ‘In ten minutes. They’ll be with you by four at the latest.’

  ‘Four!’ Bognor groaned. ‘A car at four in the morning?’

  Smith sounded relentless, no trace of compassion now. Perhaps he suspected a hangover, or some form of hallucination. ‘It’s necessary, I’m afraid. Can’t say too much over the phone. And stay out of trouble. Don’t answer the door to anyone except my men. I don’t want a third death on my hands. Not before breakfast.’

  ‘A third death?’

  ‘Ten minutes,’ said the inspector. ‘I’ll see you later.’ And he snapped down the receiver and cut off the call with a brutal finality which Bognor, eyes closed, could visualize all too easily. Trouble, trouble, trouble, he moaned to himself. He sat slumped on the bed and tried to work out who could be dead. It was a distressing tendency in Bognor’s cases for a second death to follow a first within hours or at least days of his beginning inquiries. His natural and strong inclination was to maintain that this was simply coincidence. Nevertheless he had read his Koestler and had enough natural scepticism to be worried by persistent coincidence. He had to confess, at least to Monica and himself, that coincidence was a facile explanation. This was something worse. It had, he was very much afraid, something to do with cause and effect.