Unbecoming Habits (The Simon Bognor Mysteries Book 1) Page 11

  ‘We won’t lose him,’ said Bognor, with ill-assumed authority, ‘though I admit it would have been easier if he were still here.’

  Lord Camberley gave him an admonitory stare.

  ‘Well then,’ said Anselm, pretending to ignore this friction. ‘What is the best way out of this distressing situation? ‘What do you propose, Simon?’

  Simon thought for a moment. ‘I can’t stay beyond the week-end,’ he said. ‘If I do our murderer or spy or whatever will realise that I’m not happy with the solution they’ve fed me. Therefore I have this afternoon and the whole of Saturday and Sunday.’

  ‘And how do you propose to use this time, Simon?’ Father Anselm smiled.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I really can’t…’

  ‘I think you should, Mr. Bognor,’ Lord Camberley frowned. ‘It would be unfortunate if I were to mention certain aspects of this case to certain people.’

  Father Anselm continued to smile as if he had not heard the threat at all. If it hadn’t been Camberley’s own son who was dead Bognor would almost have believed that the two men were organising the conspiracy themselves.

  ‘I should like to observe as much of the retreat as possible,’ he said. ‘I understand that people from all walks of life will be attending and do attend regularly. I believe that this is how the information is handed over.’

  Camberley nodded. ‘It’s plausible,’ he said.

  Anselm appeared shocked.

  ‘Dear me,’ he said. ‘To suggest that any one of us should use such an occasion as a cover—that is the word, isn’t it ?—for espionage…’

  ‘So I just want to see who comes and who talks to whom,’ continued Bognor. ‘I’m right in thinking this is the last retreat before the Expo-Brit?’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘And so,’ said Bognor, ‘it seems probable that this will be the last opportunity our courier will have of handing over detailed information.’

  The two others nodded agreement. Bognor began to feel almost important.

  ‘Who is going this year?’

  Anselm coloured and laughed artificially.

  ‘In view,’ he said ‘of your earlier suspicions it is rather embarrassing. Lord Wharfedale has been more than usually generous this year and he is allowing us to send two representatives. One is myself. The other is Father Simon.’

  ‘How unfortunate,’ said Bognor, his confidence suddenly getting too much for him. ‘If I don’t discover anything conclusive by Sunday night I have only one way left. We shall wait until you and Father Simon are sitting in the departure lounge at Heathrow, and we shall then detain you and search you until we find what we’re looking for. If necessary we shall empty every jar of honey in the process.’ He blushed. Perhaps he had overdone it.

  Lord Camberley finished his second sherry and puckered his mouth.

  ‘In the circumstances I should have thought there was a better than evens chance that our spy won’t be operating this year,’ he said. ‘He must realise that you’re on his tail. Even…’ he added softly, ‘if you’ve still got a long way to catch up.’

  ‘He hasn’t missed a year yet,’ said Bognor. ‘And my personal feeling is that he is an extremely confident operator.’

  ‘One other question,’ said Anselm. ‘I don’t understand how you think these secrets are getting through. You do realise that the same person is never sent on an Expo-Brit two years running?’

  ‘I must admit,’ he said slowly, ‘that when Father Simon became so anxious about the missing labels I wondered if that might not be the method.’

  ‘Ah. Ingenious.’ Father Anselm didn’t seem in the least alarmed.

  Lord Camberley moved to get up. Bognor turned the other way as he put an arm across Anselm’s shoulder. He only heard snatches.

  ‘Horrid business… very well done… not to worry.’ A sequence of platitudes. Then they turned back to him.

  ‘I must get back to London,’ said Camberley, extending a hand. ‘Glad to have met you. I hope I’ve been of some assistance.’

  The three went out to the yard where the Rolls had returned. The chauffeur, slightly flushed, jumped out and opened the back door. Camberley and Anselm exchanged muffled words, then Camberley turned to Bognor once again.

  ‘Just in case I think of anything else,’ he said, ‘could I have your home address? Just in case.’ Bognor scribbled on the back of an envelope and Camberley gave him a card with a terse ‘You’d better have mine as well. You never know’. Then he embarked. The chauffeur shut the door with an expensive thud, climbed in, started the engine first time, and the old machine purred away with its aristocratic cargo sprawled in the back, not bothering to wave or make any other gesture of farewell. Bognor delivered a mental ‘V’ sign at his departing rear bumper.

  ‘The most delightful man,’ said Anselm. ‘Such a tower of strength to us lesser breeds.’

  It would have been a perfect day for a swim. Only a very occasional breeze disturbed the stillness. Some of the friars and their guests had stripped down to an inelegant variety of shorts and bathing trunks which looked like a job lot from a jumble sale. They were lying, most of them, on the lawn. A couple were playing lazy and inefficient badminton without a net. Father Xavier sat in a canvas chair under an immense black ‘Cordobes’ hat, sketching. Even if a swim wasn’t possible Bognor would have enjoyed a quiet siesta.

  Instead he hurried to his room, took another handful of aspirin and ran back to the Land Rover. If he didn’t hurry he would be late for Brother Aldhelm’s afternoon walk. He hoped he wouldn’t pass him on the road, but if his instincts were correct Brother Aldhelm would walk across the fields and through the woods. Again, if he was right, he wouldn’t be stopping to pick daisies or wild garlic. Nevertheless it was always possible that yesterday had been a fluke, a coincidence, insignificant.

  As he forced the protesting machine up the hill he rehearsed the alternatives. If Aldhelm had been telling the truth he simply went for a walk and exhausted himself. It might not have been he who raced through Great Ogridge in the passenger seat of a red E-Type Jaguar. But if it was, why had he preferred that to the passenger seat of a perfectly adequate Land Rover? If, as seemed obvious, he had had an appointment, when had it been arranged? Why had he had to get away so soon after Thomas’s death? Was it Mrs. Strudwick’s car? Was it Mrs. Strudwick driving? Did Aldhelm have regular assignations on the hill-top? Or just the day Thomas died?

  He accelerated erratically to seventy on the straight at the top of the hill and was greatly relieved, after a couple of minutes, to arrive at the staddlestone under the chestnut tree and find it empty. Brother Aldhelm had not arrived. Or perhaps he wasn’t coming.

  He drove on for about a hundred yards and found a flaking five-bar gate which led into a hayfield. He backed the Land Rover into the entrance and got out. No one would give it a second thought because every local farmer would have one. He climbed the gate, paused astride it and gazed across the downland in the direction of the Friary. He stood like that for a full minute until suddenly he saw what he’d hoped for. With a little grunt of satisfaction he jumped down from the gate and using the hedgerow as cover slipped clumsily back in the direction of the staddlestone. Some ten yards short he stopped and crouched. From the other side of the stone came the noise of footsteps and heavy breathing. Bognor lay flat and elbowed himself virtually into the hedge, scratching his face on some brambles as he did. A few seconds of squirming and he was in position. From where he lay, securely if uncomfortably camouflaged, he could see a hundred-yard stretch of roadway and in the middle of that expanse was the staddlestone under the chestnut tree. Just as he had arranged himself, scraped a couple of burrs from his hair, and dug a sharp flint-like stone from under his right elbow, he saw Brother Aldhelm. He was not as puffed as the day before but he was still sweating.

  His breath came in staccato gulps and as he got to the stone he flung himself down on it and sank his head between his knees, a picture of exhaustion. Eventually he
regained some composure and raised his head to look down the road. Bognor smiled smugly at a couple of cabbage whites which flickered in some intricate sexual dance a few feet from where he lay. Everything so far was as suspected. They waited like this for a while until Aldhelm started to display signs of unease. He looked at his watch, stood up, sat down again, looked at his watch again, stood up and walked a few paces in Bognor’s direction. He stopped only a few feet short. If Bognor had had Father John’s blackthorn or even Camberley’s silver-headed stick he could have fetched him a blow across the shins without moving. He stood there thinking, put a hand inside his habit and massaged his chest for a second, then stopped to listen.

  Bognor heard it at the same time. He watched as all the tension left Aldhelm’s body, and heard the distant sound of a noisy gear change on the empty road, still some miles away to the west. He looked at Aldhelm remembering the pain in his head. The friar was quite big enough and quite strong enough to have inflicted it. He could have killed Collingdale but not Thomas and he could have spied. If Mrs. Strudwick was a crucial contact—if indeed this was her—could he have known her for the necessary eleven years? Not that that mattered. Contacts could, indeed should, be changed to avoid danger. Like codes.

  The car was being driven in the same distinctive fashion as on the road through Great Ogridge. It was Italian driving. Gear, brake, squeal, rev, gear, brake, squeal, rev. Everything being worked to excess.

  He edged nearer the road to get a better view and caught his head on a branch of May. He only half stifled his cry of pain. Aldhelm gave a little jump and turned round. He seemed to be staring straight at Bognor, but the car was almost on them. The friar turned back slowly and walked into the road. There was a final burst of acceleration, then a sudden rip down through the gears until the car slowed to walking pace alongside the staddlestone. The nearside door was flung open and Aldhelm leapt in. Without even stopping the E-Type jerked forward like a jet approaching take-off and shot down the road and out of Bognor’s vision. There was another virtuoso sequence of gear changing and the noise subsided into the distance. The whole episode was finished without Bognor being able to distinguish anything about the driver except for the long blonde hair.

  He would swear to that. Also that the car was red and almost certainly an E-Type, well, some sort of sports car.

  He would like to have given chase, but Sir Erris’s Land Rover shook horribly at speeds over eighty and was certainly no match for a fast car driven with that sort of élan. Instead he extricated himself in a series of almost stealthy movements, brushed himself down, and ambled back through the waist-high grass to the waiting Land Rover. He got in and sat staring down the high khaki bonnet across the road through the heat haze to the shimmering hills beyond.

  ‘Sing Heigh for the Old Manor at Melbury,’ he said idiotically. ‘And a nasty surprise for Brother Aldhelm.’ A nasty surprise too for that pillar of the 1922 Committee, the Rt. Hon. Basil Strudwick. He pictured the headlines: ‘Tory Member’s wife in Secrets Case.’ ‘L’affaire Strudwick.’ He steered the vehicle back on the road and pointed her in the direction of Great Ogridge.

  It was only ten miles to Melbury, but he was in no hurry. By the time he had taken two wrong turnings and ended up once in a farmyard and once in the middle of a field of cattle three-quarters of an hour had elapsed. The village itself was pretty and unspoilt by the demands of tourism; no antique shops, no cream teas, but a distinguished Norman church, a listed tithe barn and seventeenth-century cottages bowed under the weight of roses and clematis and honeysuckle. It was bisected by the River Cherwell, which ran under a narrow humpbacked bridge near the post office. The Old Manor itself was two miles downstream.

  An old man sitting on a bench staring blankly into the road gave him directions and said elliptically, ‘She’m there. He’m not.’ Bognor found the dialect as confusing as the directions. Eventually he came on it quite by chance: an open gateway and a tiny Cotswold stone lodge with a thatched roof. He drove slowly past and saw that the drive curved away up a gentle incline and through a copse of lime trees. The house was invisible. For a moment he pondered on whether to walk up or drive, then reversed and turned up the well-maintained gravel. After half a mile the drive swung sharply to the right and dropped away to a shallow hollow which contained the Old Manor. It was small as manors go—more like an Old Rectory—but exquisite. Bognor guessed William and Mary. Everything about it was immaculate. The red brick had been recently re-pointed, the heavy white front door shone with new paint and the lawn which sloped away towards an Indian file of weeping willows had been recently mown. There was a smell of new cuttings and instead of green parallel lines there were squares like Battenburg cake. It was an effect he had seen only in pictures.

  He had parked the Land Rover at the top of the incline so that he could take stock.

  Again he paused, wondering whether to leave it concealed or to adopt the overt full-frontal approach. He decided on the latter—he had nothing to hide—and nosed the Land Rover downhill, bringing it to an abrupt halt immediately behind the red E-Type, which sat, still steaming, on the wide turning area immediately in front of the door. He glanced casually in. That was curious. On the passenger seat was a heavy brown bundle, like sacking. He leant down and examined it briefly. It was coarse and damp to the touch and when he lifted the corner he saw the white dressing-gown cord. Bognor raised his eyebrows.

  He turned to the front door. There was a wrought-iron handle on the right-hand side and he pulled it firmly. From a long way away there came an answering clang. Rather old-fashioned. He turned back to the lawn and shaded his eyes to take in the view. The line of willows, he reasoned, must be the river bank. They needed pollarding, which was unusual, since everything else was so well maintained. It was a pity. Not only would the willows be lucky to survive if they were left like that many more years, it meant that the river itself and the bank beyond were obscured from the house. He rang the bell again and wandered to the first tall window on the left. Looking through, he saw panelling and chintz and portraits of ancestors. They looked unreal; even, though Bognor baulked at the thought, fake. Strudwick’s ancestors were small shopkeepers. Strudwick had pulled himself up by the boot-straps. Hence the affected mannerisms and fruity accents, and, of course, the reactionary politics.

  There was still no reply. Either they were not going to answer, which was unlikely, or they were somewhere in the grounds. If they were inside it would be a problem. He couldn’t very well break in. There would be questions; Camberley, for one, would have a fit.

  He tried the door. People rarely locked doors in the country, unless, he reflected sadly, they were keeping honey safe. It didn’t budge. He shrugged. There were two alternatives. He could sit in the Land Rover and wait for something to happen. If he did he might wait for ever. There were back doors, and almost certainly at least one other car in the garage. Better to be positive and make a search. He decided to leave the formal rose garden, and whatever lay behind the high brick wall (vegetables probably), till later and start with the river. His feet walking across the forecourt made a noise like a man eating toast. It was still very hot and the small of his back was wet.

  He had gone only half a dozen paces when he noticed something lying on the grass just in front of him. It was grey and brown and he judged, on closer inspection, a size nine. He picked it up and put it down hastily. Brother Aldhelm had very sweaty feet. He looked round for its mate and saw it five yards away.

  ‘One habit, brown, in seat of car. One pair sandals on lawn,’ he said out loud, and walked on. A few yards further on he found another pair of sandals. They had rope soles. He judged a size four: the grass was extraordinary, almost entirely devoid of divots or daisies, almost artificial it was so perfectly green. It was easy to pick out any alien object against its velvet surface. The next one was a man’s shirt about thirty yards further on. He squatted on his haunches and looked inside the collar.

  ‘Size fifteen and a half. Marks and Spenc
er.’ He wrinkled his nose and wondered which friar was in charge of laundering.

  The line of willows was quite close now and he noticed that the lawn merged into a rough shrubbery of azaleas and rhododendrons as it dipped away towards the river bank.

  About fifty yards beyond the Marks and Spencer shirt was another: a flimsy filmy cream one with an Yves St. Laurent label. The smell was just as strong as on the other and as familiar to Bognor, but it was some compound of jasmine rather than B.O. Could it be one of the Floris scents? he wondered, inhaling and trying to remember where he’d last smelt it. Somewhere expensive. Just short of the first of the rhododendrons he found a pair of fawn cotton slacks.

  ‘So that’s what they wear under their habits,’ he thought with a genuine sense of discovery.

  Now he was almost certain what he was going to see and he stopped, embarrassed. He had no wish to play the voyeur, but he could be wrong and he had to he sure. He brushed between a couple of Japanese shrubs and dropped hurriedly to the ground, hiding himself behind the trunk of the nearest willow. Farther down the bank and slightly to the right was a pile of clothing: something lilac which he judged to be women’s trousers, a grubby pair of aertex pants and something very small and black and frilly.

  His embarrassment, by now most acute, made him redden dramatically.

  The River Cherwell is not really a river at all, indeed at most points it is scarcely a stream, but a hundred yards downstream from Bognor’s hiding place there was a narrow weir which served as a dam. The area from the weir to Bognor’s willow was therefore almost an artificial lake, certainly a more than adequate swimming pool. His gaze moved across the river from the pile of clothes to a man standing in midstream. It was deep there and the water lapped round his shoulders occasionally coming close to the bottom of his jet black hair. As he watched, the man threw himself forward and started to crawl, powerfully and elegantly, to the far bank.