Death in the Opening Chapter Read online

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘just as it comes.’ He actually preferred artisan’s tea – strong and robust, with no messing around with milk or exotic fruit. He wasn’t in the least interested in the crucial debate, which meant so much to so many of his compatriots, about whether the milk went in first or last. He couldn’t be holding with effeminate additions when it came to tea.

  Dorcas poured from a capacious black teapot and he was relieved to discover that the liquid was Typhoo, scaldingly hot. He had feared he was in for tepid Earl Grey.

  ‘You found him,’ said Bognor, sipping. ‘That must have been a terrible shock.’

  She seemed to consider this for a while, and then said, ‘Not really. Sebastian said he’d be back for an early supper around six thirty. I’d made macaroni cheese. He was fond of my macaroni cheese. He used to say that it was what he had married me for.’

  She sniffled, and dabbed at her eyes and nose with a rather weedy handkerchief. Bognor felt that a true gentleman would have reached in his breast pocket and offered a sturdier one of his own. For all sorts of reasons, he failed to do this, but let her tell her story in her own way.

  ‘He hadn’t been himself recently,’ she said. ‘Not really. Not the old Sebastian. Not quite the man I knew and loved.’

  ‘In what way?’

  Once more, she seemed to be thinking about the question for the first time, even though it was obviously one which she had asked herself many times. Eventually, she said, ‘I’d never seen a dead body before. Sebastian was my first. I hope he’s my last. He seemed so, well, dead. Somehow, he wasn’t what I’d expected. It was the deadness that I found so unexpected. It was as if all the life had gone out of him. I can’t really describe it, except to say that he was deader than I had expected. Very dead, indeed.’

  ‘But you say he hadn’t seemed himself. What exactly do you mean by that?’

  He was beginning to become used to her habit of considering each question as if it was brand new. He found it reassuring.

  ‘He was having doubts,’ she said, eventually. ‘He’d almost seemed such a black and white person. It was one of the things that I found attractive. He knew what was what. You didn’t argue with Sebastian because he had all the answers. He didn’t always have the facts or the answers to back them up, but he always knew what he thought. It was true of trivial things too. He never dithered about what he was going to wear. He had very clear likes and dislikes when it came to food and drink.’

  Like the macaroni cheese, thought Bognor, saying nothing.

  ‘He didn’t like cats,’ she said, unexpectedly.

  ‘Didn’t like cats,’ repeated Bognor feeling foolish. ‘More of a dog person.’

  ‘More of a dog person. Definitely more of a dog person.’

  ‘But you didn’t have one? A dog.’

  ‘No,’ she paused, ‘he doesn’t . . . I’m sorry . . . didn’t really approve of pets.’

  ‘Ah.’ The slip into the present tense was quite usual, a typical problem in coming to terms with sudden loss. The couple had had no children and now it transpired that the reverend, though a dog-lover, had not approved of pets. Poor Dorcas was now completely on her own. Her husband’s death would have left a particularly large hole. She did not seem to be the sort of person who would have many friends, let alone influence people. Sadly, she seemed the sort of person who would pass through life relatively unnoticed.

  ‘Liked dogs but didn’t approve of pets,’ said Bognor, fatuously.

  ‘He thought they were free spirits. Didn’t like the idea of their being domesticated. He thought they were reduced in some way. I’m not sure I agree.’

  ‘So, you think you might buy a dog.’

  She smiled. ‘I might,’ she said, ‘I might.’ She sobbed quietly and then pulled herself together with a shake with an all too visible effort.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I have to ask these questions, even though I know they’re distressing. Can you tell me why you visited St Teath’s? And describe what you found when you got there and how you reacted.’

  At first she was silent, but then she spoke, very softly and in deliberate sentences with beginnings, middles and ends, very logical, almost as if rehearsed.

  ‘Sebastian said he wanted to compose his sermon in church. That was something he always did. He also said he would be back by six thirty. He was always very good about things like that. He knew that lateness upset me and I liked to be early for everything, even the bus.’

  She smiled a wan, drab smile and Bognor had a sudden vision of a long, lonely widowhood stretching out before her. The Reverend Sebastian was almost certainly the only man in her life, and he had been reeled in early, leaving her what might seem like an eternity of solitude. Probably. He couldn’t know for certain. One could never know the future for certain and maybe not the present, nor the past. It was his job to try to produce certainty about the past, to tell it how it really was. At the same time, he was forced to agree that even his most certain recommendations and findings were more to do with probability than certainty. Even confessions were partial. One person’s view was not every person’s view. If two or three gathered together and agreed on a certain version of events, that did not make them more real. Truth was necessarily elusive. It changed and shifted according to time, whim, perspective. If three years of Modern History at Apocrypha had taught him anything, it was the essential partiality of truth, the elusiveness of justice, the essential ‘wrongness’ of the ‘right’ verdict. There was always another perspective, another point of view, even when the ‘facts’ seemed cut and dried.

  ‘So your husband was punctual and thoughtful, liked dogs but hated pets?’

  She smiled. ‘That makes him sound, oh, you know . . .’ She broke off, trying to put her late husband into something approaching perspective. ‘Sebastian was a people person . . .’ she said, eventually, and then seemed to be aware that this was a cliché – possibly comforting, but not true. At least not necessarily, not everlastingly.

  ‘I think he liked people,’ she said, ‘no matter what the state of their beliefs. Or behaviour. He really liked sinners. In fact, I think he preferred sinners to the righteous. Give him a good murderer, any day. Virtuous people were a bit limp and Laodicean for him.’

  ‘He’d have spewed them out?’ he ventured.

  She caught the biblical allusion and smiled.

  ‘I thought I knew him,’ she said. ‘Now, I begin to wonder if I knew him any better than anyone else. I begin to wonder if anyone really knew him. But, I also begin to wonder if anyone really knows anyone else. Indeed, I wonder whether we know ourselves.’

  ‘Probably not,’ said Bognor. After all, he hardly knew himself, so why should anyone else, even Monica?

  He realized, dimly, that the interview was wandering out of control. Spiralling. On the other hand, the best interviews were like that. Only idiots used clipboards and were not prepared for apparent inconsequentialities, unexpected riders, things that went bump and interfered with arguments and prejudices. Even so . . .

  ‘It must have been distressing?’

  ‘Finding him?’ She considered the question. ‘I suppose so, though not in the way I expected.’

  ‘Expected?’

  She seemed surprised that he had picked up on the word.

  ‘I’d thought about it,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t everyone? Life can’t go on for ever. We have to be prepared for God doing something we hadn’t bargained for.’

  ‘So you think it was an act of God?’

  ‘I think I’m a Christian,’ she said, ‘and if that’s what I am, then everything is in some way an act of God. Isn’t that part of being a Christian? We have a bit of free will, but only a bit, and even that’s an illusion. God can always override it.’

  ‘You could put it like that,’ Bognor agreed. He saw her point of view from deep down, as well as professionally. In that sense, he had to agree with Sir Branwell. What difference, in the great scheme of things, did man’s verdict of innoc
ent or guilty mean? Were they absolute concepts? Valid concepts, even?

  ‘You do realize that you were either the last person to see your husband alive or the first person to see him dead.’

  ‘That presupposes that either he committed suicide or that I killed him. It doesn’t allow for murder by a third party. If that happened, then the murderer would have been the last person to see him alive and the first person to see him dead.’

  ‘Which was it?’

  He felt exasperated. At one moment she seemed almost precociously bright, the next unconscionably dim. There didn’t seem to be any half measures.

  ‘The last person to see him alive? Or the first person to see him dead?’

  She allowed herself a fleeting smile. ‘If I killed dear Sebastian, then the two aren’t exclusive. In fact, they’re the reverse. If I killed him, then I would be the last person to see him alive and the first to see him dead. If I wasn’t the murderer, I wouldn’t have seen him alive. Only the body.’

  ‘So which was it? First? Or both? Did you kill him? Did he kill himself? Or was it a third party?’

  ‘You’re the professional,’ she said sweetly. ‘It’s for you to decide.’

  TWENTY

  He was getting somewhere, even though he didn’t know where. Even the arrival was far from assured. He felt as if this meandering interrogation was going to end in a conclusion, but he still didn’t know what it was, nor even if it would be useful or germane.

  He shifted tack.

  ‘Do you think your husband’s death had anything to do with the literary festival? Or was it just a coincidence?’

  Again she smiled.

  ‘The timing is interesting,’ she said. ‘If he had died at any other time, it would have been unlikely to attract attention. As it . . . well . . . who can say? Part of your role is to avoid publicity, keep things tidy and orderly, to avoid fuss. On the other hand, I sense that you want to establish the truth. The two may coincide. Or not. Who knows?’

  ‘I don’t think that answers my question,’ he said. ‘One of my problems is to establish whether this tragedy could have occurred at any time, or whether it took place specifically because it was the eve of the festival. What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘But what do you think? Thinking and knowing aren’t the same. One is an opinion and the other is a statement of fact. If you can produce the latter, then that’s great, but I suspect you can’t. In which case, I’ll have to make do with something more speculative. Obviously, that’s not as helpful, but it’s better than nothing.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I really am, but I don’t have an opinion.’

  He shifted tack again.

  ‘When I talked to the bishop,’ he said, ‘I got the impression that Sebastian was going through some kind of crisis. He was suddenly doubting his belief. Personally, I don’t see that there is any relation between this crisis of confidence and the festival. I could be wrong, of course, but I don’t see any connection. What do you think, though? Was the bishop right? Was the crisis real? Was it significant? Did it have anything to do with the festival. With books? With literature? With being a Fludd?’

  Dorcas seemed anguished and confused.

  ‘Ebenezer shouldn’t have told you. He only knew about it because he was in a privileged position. It was as if it had been in the confessional. Not that I’m a papist, or anything so vulgar.’

  The word ‘papist’ sounded ludicrously pejorative and old-fashioned to his ecumenical ears. She made ‘vulgar’ sound vulgar too. He was moderately surprised to hear the bishop referred to with quite such easy familiarity. Three words in about the same number of sentences. He wondered if he was becoming lexicographically threatened.

  ‘Do you think your husband killed himself?’ he asked. ‘It’s a simple question, and you’re in the best position to answer. I have to tell you that there is a lot of pressure to decide that he did. It’s neater. May not be true, but it’s tidy, and why not? If he was murdered by someone else, it’s not going to help him. Nothing we do will bring him back.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I suppose not. He would have preferred it that way.’

  ‘Sorry?’ said Bognor, not understanding. ‘What would he have preferred and why?’

  ‘He never liked fuss. If he had to be dead, he’d rather just be buried and forgotten. That was his style, and nothing in that respect had changed.’

  ‘What other things had changed?’ This time Bognor knew – or thought he knew – what the answer should be. On the other hand, he didn’t know whether the widow would want to give it.

  There was a long pause, which seemed to confirm his suspicions. Dorcas knew. He knew too, because he had been told by his friend the Rt Rev. Ebenezer. On the other hand, the answer was likely to prove embarrassing and did not necessarily show her in the best light. It might help Bognor, but it could hardly help the Reverend Sebastian. He was beyond help.

  ‘What other things had changed?’ he repeated.

  ‘I heard you the first time,’ she said. He wondered if she had been similarly crisp with her husband, the vicar. She seemed so mild; a wet blanket of a woman; one of nature’s hearth rugs. Women, he thought to himself, were surprisingly deceptive. On the whole, he didn’t accept generalizations about the difference between the sexes, not least because Monica, aka Lady Bognor, was not a woman in the accepted sense. Maybe Dorcas Fludd came into a similar category. He doubted it, but all things were possible, especially, he thought ruefully, where women, and more particularly wives, were concerned.

  ‘I’m thinking about your question,’ she said, by way of explanation. This did little or nothing to soften the blow. It was probably true and certainly was, in the sense that she had heard the question first time round. His concern was whether she was concocting a plausible lie, or thinking of how best to tell the truth. He was beginning not to trust her.

  ‘Sebastian was having doubts,’ she said, confirming what he had already been told by the bishop.

  ‘He doesn’t sound the most certain person in the world,’ he said. ‘I’ve always found the ability to see several sides of any question appealing.’

  She took time to respond to these assertions.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ she said eventually, ‘and a certain doubtfulness may be attractive in a human being, in a general sense. It’s not helpful in a priest. Particularly when it concerns one’s vocation.’

  ‘And did it?’

  More time for thought. He found this profoundly irritating, but knew that interrupting the silence was playing into her hands. Much better to remain quiet and let her answer his question. She made him wait, but replied in the end. He had no idea whether it was worth the wait, but it was better than nothing and better than interrupting. Of that much he was reasonably sure.

  ‘You could say so,’ she said at last. ‘Sebastian was having serious misgivings about God.’ She smiled wistfully. ‘Not clever for a vicar. Sebastian had always shown a remarkably definite belief in the Father Almighty. You could say that this was a necessity. In any event, he used to be rocksteady about that. It was odd, because in almost every other respect, he was a dreadful ditherer. I was the one who took the important decisions. I always acted sensibly and quickly, and I hardly ever changed my mind. Sebastian simply couldn’t make his up, except where God was concerned. He always used to be absolutely steady about that, until he changed and religion became as much of a muddle for him as everything else.’

  ‘What exactly do you mean by “everything else”?’ he asked, and this time there was no hesitation about the answer.

  ‘Oh, income tax, VAT, church flowers, holy dusters.’ She laughed. ‘The literary festival. Everything. Life, nuts and bolts.’

  ‘You?’ This was daring, intrusive, OTT. He knew this, and saw her mood change immediately. She pinkened.

  ‘He used to be certain about me, much more so than I was about him. I loved him, but I could always see the flaws. The dit
hering, for instance. He never mentioned my flaws. He always said I was beautiful. He used to believe that I was the best thing that ever happened to him. He accepted the fact that we couldn’t have children. But then, at the same time he started to doubt his vocation, he began to doubt me, and to question the nature of love, the sanctity of marriage and,’ she became even pinker, ‘well, everything.’

  ‘And sex?’ Bognor really was pushing his luck now. He knew this, but in for a penny in for a pound, what the hell? The length of her silence and the almost impossible reddening of her cheeks made him think he had, indeed, gone too far, but, to his surprise, she answered, and even though the response was delayed, it was, as far as he could judge, honest. It was certainly explicit.

  ‘We used to have quite a lot of sex,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if we were any good, because we’d only ever known each other in a, well, in a carnal sense. But we suited each other and we enjoyed it. It was meaningful, of course, but fun too. We used to laugh quite a lot in bed. We had a lot of innocent fun. Nothing untoward, I don’t think, but tremendous fun.’ She grew wistful again. ‘Then that stopped. He said it was “wrong”, said it was a sin. So, we stopped. For the last few months, we even had separate bedrooms. We never even cuddled. I couldn’t help wondering if there was someone else, but I don’t think so. It was just him. Or rather not him. He wasn’t himself.’

  Bognor, inevitably perhaps, thought of himself and Monica. Childless. Faithful. Laughter in bed. Surprisingly sexy. No one else would have suspected. They would have thought it mildly perverse, but then sex was like that. He remembered the sex education talk from his headmaster when he was twelve, and how his best friend had whispered to him incredulously just after, ‘Do you realize that he and Mrs Fothergill have actually done that?’ It seemed grotesque, quite beyond imagining, but sex was like that. However enjoyable and entertaining it might be for you and your partner, it was unimaginable and mildly disgusting in others. The idea of the late Reverend Sebastian and Dorcas even in a missionary position was either laughable or nauseating, depending on one’s viewpoint. At any rate, it was beyond Bognor’s ken, just as was his own coupling with Monica.