Business Unusual (The Simon Bognor Mysteries) Read online

  This was the year of the inflatables in football. Blow-up bananas in Manchester, balloonic haddocks in Grimsby, gaseous bees from Brentford and in Scarpington buns. After a particularly inept performance Radio Scarpington had described the team as having played ‘like a load of cream puffs’. Hence inflatable chocolate éclairs.

  There were already a few of them huddled together on the terraces of the North Stand when Bognor arrived. Some of their owners were even trying to beat the drizzle with a dirge-like version of Puff the Magic Dragon’. The combination of bedraggled provincial punk, jaunty sad song and bobbing brown and cream prophylactics was not encouraging.

  The part of the stadium in which Bognor found himself was quite different — expensive rubber plant, thick pile carpet and a poster saying that the guest artiste at the annual Directors’ Dinner Dance would be ‘Dr Mel Henry and the Consultants’. There was a photograph, presumably of the doctor, who appeared to be playing a trombone in the French Quarter of New Orleans.

  ‘Sir Seymour is expecting you,’ said the girl at the desk. She was blonde, pneumatic, marginally alluring, crisply turned out, but in a sense that Bognor was unable to define with real precision she was last year’s model. He supposed that was the difference between Scarpington and the Big Smoke. Even in the age of the fax, the modem, the dish and Sky TV the message took time to get through. The Tottenham Hotspur girl of today was the Scarpington Thursday girl of tomorrow. In metropolitan terms this was little Miss Yesterday.

  ‘Good of you to come, Mr Bognor. Or Simon, if I may.’

  Sir Seymour was standing on the ankle-high Wilton substitute (manufactured by Puce Industries of Taiwan) which covered the area immediately outside the lift at boardroom level. Immediately behind him was the famous picture of the Alf Hattersley goal which knocked Arsenal out of the Cup one dazzling January Saturday in the early nineteen-thirties.

  ‘Very good of you to ask me, Sir Seymour,’ said Bognor, wondering how it was possible for a man to exude quite such an air of prosperity. It was one thing to wear a tailored suit from Savile Row and hand-made shoes from Mr Lobb and a Hilditch and Key shirt and a Turnbull and Asser tie and to be waving a zeppelin of a Havana from Davidoff and to stink of Penhaligon’s Hamman after-shave, but for all these things to coalesce into a sort of second skin was quite another. The second you saw him you knew that Puce was prosperity made flesh, the very incarnation of wealth, a man for whom, in the beginning, the blank cheque was God.

  ‘Always glad to see a man from the Board of Trade,’ said Sir Seymour with about as much conviction as a damp squid. ‘“No nation was ever ruined by trade.” Benjamin Franklin said that, as I expect you know, Simon. I meet a lot of prejudice against trade and commerce. Meet it wherever I go, most of all in the Palace of Westminster. The Americans have a proper respect for trade. The British seem not to. We’re a workshy nation. Or were until Mrs Thatcher, God bless her. But to listen to some of those ginger-bearded, sandal-wearing, nut-cutlet-eating Guardian readers in the House of Commons you’d think an honest day’s work was an offence against nature. The university lecturers are the worst. Load of pinkoes. I’d close the lot, if I had my way. Including Oxford. Come and have a drink. What’s your poison?’

  Bognor blenched. Was it his imagination, or did they drink rather a lot in Scarpington? Mrs Currie, once Minister for Personal Hygiene and Eating Habits, had intimated that people from north of the Watford Gap drank too much, though Bognor had always put the remark down to prejudice. Maybe she was right.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Sir Seymour, ushering him through a door to their right, ‘if you’ve tried our famous Old Parsnip. It’s one of Scarpington’s many contributions to world civilisation.’

  Bognor quailed again.

  ‘I think—’ he said, but was not allowed to finish.

  ‘Freddie Grimaldi, the barman at the St Moritz who passed on so tragically the day before yesterday, used to mix something called a Scarpington Special,’ Puce sighed, ‘but the secret died with him. Now, allow me to effect some introductions.’

  There had obviously been a three-line whip of Artisans and Artisan hangers-on and supporters. Even Piggy, the Earl, was there. Bognor and he shook hands with an icy stiffness which Bognor felt everyone present must have sensed. Then he was passed to the Bishop who muttered something incomprehensible in what could well have been Latin. Then Harold Fothergill.

  A white-jacketed waiter loomed bearing a pint of beer on a tray.

  ‘Aha, Parsnip,’ said the MP. ‘I think you’ll be amused by Parsnip’s presumptions.’ And he laughed, chins a-tremble.

  ‘I thought you did poor Brackett proud,’ said Bognor. ‘Mrs Fothergill must have been pleased.’

  Why was he talking like this? It must be the alcohol, the lack of Monica, shyness, strange surroundings.

  ‘We try to speak well of the dead,’ said Fothergill. ‘Not like your so-called “national” newspapers.’

  Bognor had to say a silent touché to this. He had personally witnessed the cut-throat competition between the obituary staffs of the rival London dailies. Ambulance-chasing to the morgue and beyond. Character assassination of the corpse. For once, in the provinces, a gender, kinder, more agreeably hypocritical attitude prevailed toward the dead. ‘Bloody rude’ was still euphemised into ‘always spoke his mind’ or ‘no sufferer of fools’; ‘crashing bore’ became ‘noted for his keen sense of humour’ or ‘life and soul of the party’; even Alderman Festing was said, in the Scarpington Times, to have been ‘much loved’. London papers, in comparison, though nervous, for reasons of libel, about kicking a man when he was down were positively gleeful about kicking him when he was dead.

  ‘Speaking of Mrs Fothergill,’ said Bognor, with metropolitan malice, ‘she not here?’

  ‘She has a bridge evening,’ said Fothergill, and for a second their eyes engaged. ‘Edna’s never been much of a one for football, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Bognor. ‘I see. You not a bridge player?’

  ‘It’s a league foursome,’ he said. ‘We don’t play as husband and wife. In fact, between you and me that’s considered not befitting an Artisan. You’re allowed to play with one another’s partners but not one’s own.’

  ‘Sounds rather risqué.’ Bognor smiled over the froth of his Parsnip and had the satisfaction of drawing blood. Not a lot, for in truth Harold was an etiolated, bloodless being. In the old days editors had been different. Today it was computer skills, marketing and man-management that got them where they were, not booze and scoops.

  ‘Keen on soccer?’ asked Puce, who did not seem over-keen on too much talk of bridge. ‘Fundamental to the life blood of the city. With respect to his Grace, this club is more central to the community than the cathedral ever was or will be.’

  Puce never waited for an answer, Bognor observed. Sure sign of success. He looked out through the plate glass to the bobbing inflatable éclairs and wondered if Puce was right.

  ‘I was at a rugger school,’ said Bognor, ‘so …’

  ‘Ah, a rugger bugger, eh!’ Not only did Puce not let you answer his questions, he didn’t allow you to finish your own. ‘Well, Scarpington’s a soccer town. Ha!’ This last was not so much a laugh as a seal’s bark, a piece of verbal punctuation.

  ‘I …’ ventured Bognor, without real optimism. He was duly drowned in more Puce verbiage.

  ‘Simon here,’ and he smiled without warmth or affection at the Editor of the Times, ‘has come here to see what makes this town tick. So what better place could we bring him than to the Bog?’

  ‘You should understand by now,’ said Fothergill, toadying into the tiny gap left by Puce’s pause for a sip of his drink, ‘that what makes Scarpington tick above all else is Sir Seymour Puce and all his works.’ He simpered.

  Sir Seymour resurfaced, not looking too pleased. There was, his expression seemed to say, sycophancy and there was sycophancy. It could be overdone.

  ‘Tonight, Simon,’ he said, ‘is a fine example of wh
at can be achieved in a place like this, at a time like this, by people like us. Here we are in Scarpington playing games with our brothers from the East German Republic in a spirit of amity and friendship. It is thus that we foster fraternal relations and, not to put too fine a point on it, trade. Because of initiatives such as this the invalid carriages of Scarpington will be crossing the Elbe; the Old Parsnip of Scarpington will flow from West to East; even Harold will speak peace unto nations. We do have the top banana of the local Zeitung here, don’t we Harold?’

  ‘None of the krauts seem to have arrived yet. They’re supposed to be coming in a charabanc from the Talbot.’ Fothiergill sighed. ‘I’m not at all sure about my opposite number. Obviously a keen party member. Not much humour and his English isn’t up to much either.’

  ‘How’s your German?’ asked Bognor.

  Fothergill looked as if he might do Simon serious damage, but at that moment the door burst open and with a cry of ‘Achtung! Achtung!’ from Sir Seymour a bus-load of Lokomotiv hangers-on debouched into the board entertainment lounge.

  They looked, at first glance, disturbingly like their Scarpington oppos. Perhaps, thought Bognor, small-town success is the same under both systems. Maybe the Mayor and the Editor of the Paper and the Boss of the Factory and of the Brewery were the same in both places.

  And, lo, just to emphasise this point who should heave into view but his lunchtime host, the jovial bonhomous Mouldy Moulton, and who should he have in tow but a tubby chap with a paunch straining over his mass-produced people’s trousers. Mouldy introduced him as ‘Herr Doktor Gottlieb who brews the official state pilsner in his part of the world’. Puce sidled off to circulate and they were joined by a thin, pallid, intense man with wire-rimmed spectacles of a sort not much seen in the West since 1914. If ever. ‘And this,’ said Harold Fothergill, ‘is Herr Doktor Schubert, Editor of The Frankfurter. At least I think he said it was just called The Frankfurter. Ist das richtig, Doktor Schubert?’

  Doktor Schubert smiled, revealing an impressive quantity of gold tooth, and said, ‘How do you do. I am very pleased to be in your so beautiful country. I bring fraternal greetings from the People’s Democratic Public of Germany. Please.’ And he shook hands all round, inclining his head with a sharp snap every time he did so. Then he shut up. Bognor guessed that that was the end of his English and that he would not speak again.

  ‘Back on the beer, eh?’ said Moulton. He was drinking pink gin. Or rather he had just finished a pink gin and asked a waitress to fetch him ‘a double Gordon’s with a splash of Malvern Water, thanks ever so much, darling’.

  ‘No choice in the matter.’ Bognor swayed gently. ‘Sir Seymour insisted.’

  ‘Ah.’ Moulton turned to Doktor Gottlieb. ‘I was explaining to Franz here that Sir Seymour was the Führer of Scarpington. Or the Gauleiter. Perhaps that would be more appropriate. I’m not too hot on what they have in the iron curtain bit of Deutschland.’

  Franz was obviously a bit of a card. He also gave every indication of having had a few Parsnips. ‘In my country we are all sehr democratic being but I think we also are having our how do you say Sir Seymour Puce. Your British beer also is good but your Parsnip is best.’ He raised his glass. ‘Heil Parsnip!’ he said, and they all raised their glasses and said ‘Heil Parsnip’.

  ‘You are from the State Polizei. Gus is telling me,’ Doktor Gottlieb was all amiable curiosity, ‘you do not seem like our German policemen.’

  ‘Well,’ said Bognor, ‘I’m not really a policeman as such. I’m what’s called a Special Investigator of the Board of Trade.’

  ‘How do you say, “investigator”?’

  ‘Sort of detective,’ said Moulton. ‘Finds things out.’

  ‘Ach so’, said Franz. ‘I am correct. You are detective. Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, P. D. James, Ruth Rendell. Everyone in Germany now is reading the famous English detective stories. You are just like Lord Peter Wimsey.’

  ‘Well, no, I, er …Bognor had often thought of himself in very much the same terms as the cricket-playing, aristocratic, Balliol-educated sleuth who was so much more devilishly brilliant than he allowed himself to appear. But he had never dared articulate the idea even to Monica. Well, most of all to Monica. He must stop thinking of her. He was missing her. Damn.

  ‘So,’ Franz said. ‘You are looking for bodies, yes?’

  ‘We’ve got plenty of those, Franz, old fruit. Running at the rate of one a day practically.’

  The German’s brows furrowed. ‘One murder every day. Here?’

  ‘Well,’ — Mouldy Moulton’s gin appeared — ‘sudden deaths. One chap keeled over in the middle of a speech and another set fire to his flat. Pretty funny.’

  ‘Ach,’ said Franz. ‘Your English sense of humour.’

  ‘Funny peculiar,’ said Moulton. ‘Not funny ha-ha.’

  Poor Doktor Gottlieb frowned even harder. Moulton grinned and pulled a small pouch from his pocket out of which he took something that looked very like an eye dropper. He squeezed it over his glass and a dribble of angostura bitters hit the gin.

  ‘Barman’s friend,’ he said. ‘Present from Freddie Grimaldi.’

  Bognor experienced a lurching thrill of forensic intuition.

  ‘What is it, exactly?’ he asked, faux-naif.

  ‘Exactly that,’ said Mouldy. ‘Nobody in the world seems capable of mixing a pink gin the way I like it. In, not out, and not less than three drops of pink, not more than four. With this little hooshmy-bangmy I can control my input precisely.’

  ‘So you take it with you everywhere?’

  ‘Absolutely. Don’t leave home without it.’

  How often, thought Bognor, did advertising slogans become the everyday currency of cocktail party chatter? Not only that they passed for wit. In this instance American Express had a lot to answer for.

  ‘Was Freddie in the habit of dishing these things out?’

  Moulton appeared to think for a moment.

  ‘I suppose we were in the same line of business, so it was a natural prezzie from one booze-wallah to another. I know Seymour Puce has one because I’ve had one of his Scarpington Specials. He couldn’t do it like Freddie, alas. That particular secret died with him.’

  Bognor felt his brain clanking. It was as if the night shift of midgets that lurked in his cranium had been suddenly bundled out of bed to deal with a red alert. He had a vision of battalions of bleary-eyed termites shovelling the grey matter from one side of his head to the other while the two competing majors i/c brain cells barked contradictory instructions at their insubordinates.

  ‘Suppose Mouldy Moulton wanted to kill Reg Brackett.’

  ‘Why suppose?’

  ‘Let us suppose … he could have dosed his port with a lethal dose from his barman’s friend.’

  ‘A lethal dose of what?’

  ‘A lethal dose of a poisonous substance …’

  ‘Unknown to medical science, tasteless, odourless, quick-acting and undetectable by pathologist at post-mortem. Pull the other one, major.’

  ‘With respect, major, life is full of surprises but ne’er so full as death.’

  The brain activity was frenetic, tumultuous, unlikely to produce a solution for a while. Bognor tried to relegate it to his subconscious. Out loud he said to Moulton, ‘How interesting. May I see?’

  Moulton obliged.

  It was very like a nose or eye dropper. A bulbous rubber sachet at one end, then a glass tube about two and a half inches long. A gentle squeeze would discharge a single droplet of whatever the bulb contained. It was small enough to conceal in the palm of a hand, easy to use. A practised performer could have introduced any liquid he liked into almost anything whatever without being observed. Neat. Almost the perfect murder weapon.

  ‘What a good idea,’ he said, and then again because the clamouring in his brain was distracting him, he repeated the phrase, ‘what a good idea’.

  The message from the brain was beginning to assume a modicum of coherence. W
hat it said, roughly, up to a point and in a manner of speaking, was that if Reg Brackett had been murdered then it could have been done by a man — or woman — armed with a ‘barman’s friend’ who introduced a substance — as yet unknown — into his drink. It now emerged that Freddie himself possessed one of these said ‘barman’s friends’; likewise Sir Seymour Puce; and Augustus ‘Mouldy’ Moulton. Any one of the three could therefore, in theory, have committed the murder. Always provided they could have got close enough to Reg’s glass. But then, if Grimaldi the barman was in the habit of dishing out ‘barman’s friends’ to all and sundry the field of suspects was so enlarged as to become unmanageable.

  He was saved by Sir Seymour who reminded him of the old saw about the back-bench MP who dreamt that he was making a speech in the House of Commons and then woke up to find that he was. When two or more were gathered together in his presence Sir Seymour would make a speech at them. ‘If it moves,’ ran the military maxim, ‘salute it.’ There were other versions, some harmless such as ‘paint it’, some too sexual to bear repetition. In Sir Seymour’s case the reaction to other members of the human race was to clear his throat, raise his hand to his lapel, and harangue them. As far as he was concerned the only collective noun for ‘people’ was ‘audience’.

  Thus tonight at the Bog Sir Seymour’s response was Pavlovian and inevitable. It began, ‘Meine Damen und Herren, Ladies and Gentlemen, On behalf of Scarpington Thursday Football Club, Good Evening, Welcome, Thank you for joining us on such an auspicious occasion, and may you all have a very enjoyable and memorable evening, here together, tonight.’

  Bognor switched off at this point and fell to contemplating the company. Apart from Nigel Festing and Edna Fothergill, who, he supposed, were hard at it on the black waterbed in The Laurels (unless put off their stroke by the unexpected intervention of himself and the Countess) it looked like a near-total turnout of Artisan brass mixing with the Frankfurters. The only additions were one or two younger members of both sexes who might conceivably have been cadet Artisans, children of the middle-aged burghers, the next generation of the no longer silent majority. Several of them had the deep tan that Britain cannot offer without benefit of sunbed. The men looked as if they already drove BMWs and were ‘learning the business’ by shunting from one department of daddy’s firm to another in a ‘pretend’ menial capacity. The women veered towards pulchritude, expensive bangles and the first hints of a dangerous boredom. Well, thought Bognor, the Bridge Club should soon take care of that.