Business Unusual (The Simon Bognor Mysteries) Read online

  Depressed by the company and the orotund drone of Puce’s welcome, his gaze was drawn to the terraces filling up below. The inflatable éclairs were quite impressive now and some enterprising huckster had produced some rubber hot-dogs to represent the German team.

  Suddenly a face in the crowd caught his attention. Unlike the others, it was turned up to the stand where the directors and their guests were gathered. It was on top of a Burberry-style trench coat of the type favoured by the police in black and white B movies — heavily buckled and belted. Clearly something about the directors’ box was fascinating the face but it was too far away to be able to recognise anyone with absolute certainty. Besides it was dark and although the directors’ area was well illuminated the stand areas were murky by comparison. Even so Bognor was fairly sure that he was right and that he had correctly identified the figure in the mac.

  Wartnaby.

  If so, the Detective Chief Inspector was taking a risk. He was supposed to be lying low, although on the other hand just because he had been taken off the Brackett case was no reason, surely, for not being allowed out to a football match. Odd, though. Wartnaby had not struck Bognor as your average Scarpington Thursday fan. Perhaps after all he was mistaken — bad light, distance, a surfeit of Parsnip. He doubted whether a jury would accept his sighting. He stared out at the crowd, straining for a second glimpse, but he was unable to locate the figure a second time.

  Blinking, he turned back for Puce’s peroration and a formal, lukewarm round of applause. Down below them the teams were running out onto the pitch — Lokomotiv in black and white stripes, Scarpington in their unique fuchsia and gold quartered shirts. The glass slid aside and the official party made their way to the directors’ box in the stand. Bognor found himself sitting between Moulton and Dr Gottlieb, the brewer, in the row immediately behind Puce and the most senior of the top brass. It was miserably chill but everyone was thoughtfully provided with vivid tartan rugs, made in Hong Kong by Puce Knitwear Plc. Moulton, thoughtfully, had not only brought his barman’s friend but also an ample hip flask of home-made sloe gin. Almost without thinking Bognor allowed himself a sip and settled down to be bored.

  In this he was not disappointed. Billed as a ‘friendly’, the game seemed to Bognor to be ill-tempered, petulant and characterised by what was universally accepted as the ‘professional foul’ but which he had always been brought up to regard as cheating. The Scarpington players seemed to be initially at fault but the Germans soon started to retaliate, though unlike the home team they displayed flashes of skill and what Bognor knew the football correspondents sometimes described as ‘artistry’.

  ‘Very physical team, Thursday,’ said Moulton, passing the flask.

  ‘Physical,’ repeated Bognor.

  ‘The continentals play a much less physical game.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Bognor.

  ‘Pretty-pretty. All very well to watch but it doesn’t get results.’ Moulton chewed on a slurp of sloe gin. ‘See what I mean?’ he asked, nodding towards the pitch. One of the Lokomotiv players had nutmegged his marker with considerable dexterity only to be scythed down by a Thursday defender who seemed to jump into the small of his back from behind.

  ‘Is that legal?’ asked Bognor.

  ‘Ref might blow up in a league match,’ said Moulton, ‘but as this is a friendly he lets it go.’

  Could this be a metaphor for life? Bognor was unclear. His own observations over a middle-aged lifetime led him to believe that, among the English, all was fair in love but not in war, that they, that is we, took pleasures seriously but business frivolously. In football, it appeared, one was allowed to cheat in a friendly match but not in an unfriendly one. This was Thatcherite laissez-faire gone mad. Oh God, he should never have drunk so much. Oh God, he missed his wife. Oh God, he wished he was in bed.

  In front of him Sir Seymour was video-ing the game with a neat Videopuce Camcorder manufactured in the Philippines. He was doing it with all the ostentatious effortlessness of the passionate and competitive amateur.

  At the same time he was lecturing the chief kraut, some sort of burgomeister figure, sitting on his right. ‘Now,’ Bognor heard, ‘you’ve selected your high speed shutter, so your depth of field is going to be reduced, especially at the higher speeds. OK. So you open the aperture right up to get the correct exposure. And for the same reason your focus has to be more accurate because when the objects get close the focal lengths get longer.’

  His German guest nodded vigorously and said ‘Ja, Ja.’ Boring Puce might be, but he was obviously an authentic video freak. Bognor might not know a SCART connector from a 51cm FST tube, but he could always tell an expert in his own subject. Sir Seymour was talking shop, but he was talking the shop of the shopkeeper.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘suppose I want to edit from a GR-C1 camcorder to an HR-D530 mains deck. Simple.’ But just as he was about to explain there was a groan from the crowd as the Lokomotiv striker was scythed down from behind by the Thursday left back. There was a shrill blast of the whistle and the referee pointed to the penalty spot.

  ‘Bloody ref,’ said Mouldy Moulton. ‘Doesn’t he know it’s just a friendly?’

  Sir Seymour was on his feet, still filming but also shouting at the referee to reconsider. Inflatable éclairs and hot dogs jostled each other on the terracing. A chorus of ‘off, off, off’ mingled with another of ‘ref, ref, ref.’ The ref showed the erring Thursday man a yellow card, the Lokomotiv striker placed the ball on the spot and struck it casually past the home goalkeeper to a chorus of whistles and polite applause from the German bigwigs in the directors’ box. In his excitement Puce had knocked over a box of tapes on the table-top immediately in front of his chair. Straining hard, Bognor tried to work out what the handwritten title said. When he did manage to read it he let out a little sigh which signified realisation and a sudden recognition that perhaps a trap was beginning to close. The handwritten legend on the side of the video-tape said: ‘Bridge, The Laurels, Nov 17th’.

  ‘Aha,’ said Bognor to himself. ‘Seymour Puce, the Russ Meyer of Wedgwood Benn Gardens.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ‘If you don’t go to other men’s funerals, they won’t go to yours’

  WARTNABY WAS DEAD ON time. Full fry-up, another cafetière of his exotic coffee from Kilimanjaro, and the papers which carried the news of last night’s unsatisfactory defeat under such headings as ‘Thursday run out of puff v Locos’, ‘Scarpington come off the rails’ and ‘End of the line at the Bog’.

  ‘Bring porridge, bring sausage, bring fish for a start,’ sang Wartnaby in a bath-baritone.

  Bring kidneys and mushrooms and partridges’ legs,

  But let the foundation be bacon and eggs.

  This early morning jollity left Bognor less than cold.

  ‘Did I see you out at the Bog last night?’ he asked.

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The Bog. The local football ground. I thought I saw you in the crowd.’

  Wartnaby looked incredulous in a civilised, non-censorious way.

  ‘Hardly my scene at the best of times,’ he said, ‘and frankly I’m keeping an exceedingly low profile. This is my first trip out of doors since yesterday’s breakfast. I have to be exceedingly careful. I don’t think you quite realise how insidiously powerful these wretched Artisans are.’

  ‘Oh, don’t bank on it.’ Bognor glanced at the black pudding and eggs and bacon and mushrooms and fried bread and sausage and tomato and decided that one could not be anything other than grateful to a man who could bring all this to your room, even if he did insist on singing the while. And flat. He tucked a napkin into the top of his Viyella pyjamas and began to eat.

  ‘So,’ said Wartnaby, leaning against the wall and gazing through the double glazing at the city below. ‘How was your day?’

  ‘You sound just like my wife,’ said Bognor through a mouthful of health hazard. ‘But I did learn a thing or two.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘
Like,’ Bognor chewed thoughtfully and chose his words with rather more care than he devoted to his diet, ‘Like what the Artisans are really up to.’

  ‘You went to Moulton and Bragg?’ Bognor’s subconscious told him that the DCI’s nonchalance was assumed, that he was not as languid and devil-may-care as he chose to seem.

  ‘I did indeed. But I also went to The Laurels in Wedgwood Benn Gardens.’

  Long pause.

  ‘Should that mean something?’ Wartnaby appeared genuinely perplexed. He seemed to be implying that Wedgwood Benn Gardens was not his neck of the woods.

  ‘It’s the Artisan Club. We discussed it yesterday.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Wartnaby was engrossed in his coffee. Or the view from the window. Or both. In either event he was abstracted. Not entirely of the world at this precise moment in time. Then, as if he was hearing it for the first time, he repeated, ‘You went to The Laurels in Wedgwood Benn Gardens.’

  ‘That’s what I said.’ Wartnaby might have provided one of the world’s great breakfasts, but Bognor was not going to be patronised and taken for granted by him. Bognor had gone out on a limb for him, infiltrating The Laurels like that. He wanted more than breakfast. He wanted gratitude.

  Wartnaby obviously realised.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t concentrating properly. That’s quite a coup. How did you manage it?’

  Bognor told him about the Countess and Piggy’s key. Then he described everything about the club up until he’d discovered the ‘Bridge’ section. As soon as he mentioned this Wartnaby began to perk up.

  ‘Is it bridge they play there?’ asked Wartnaby. ‘Or is that just a front? I thought that score card I found at Grimaldi’s extremely suspicious. The odd numbers. The hint of the arbitrary. The inverted commas round “bridge”. Did you discover the truth?’

  Oh, but Bognor loved black pudding. What was truth, even ultimate truth, beside black pudding? Bother cholesterol; knickers to calories. He chewed, he swallowed, and finally he spoke.

  ‘Sex,’ he said. ‘Not bridge, but sex.’

  ‘Sex.’ Wartnaby said it as if he had never heard the word before. The inflexion he gave it suggested mild distaste, but only mild. ‘Sex,’ he repeated. ‘You mean, as in intercourse.’

  ‘Wife-swapping,’ said Bognor. ‘On waterbeds.’

  ‘Waterbeds.’ Wartnaby sounded like a high court judge suddenly confronted, in very mature years, with the notion of a ‘G string’ or ‘sting’. He drew the word out very long, like Lady Bracknell saying ‘handbag’.

  Bognor explained about Nigel Festing and Edna Fothergill.

  ‘It’s just the way they do it in squash clubs,’ said Bognor, relying now on second-hand sources. ‘Only because you can’t have an out and out winner you have to have marks like figure skating or synchronised swimming. And, being the Scarpington Artisans’ Bridge Club, you get marks for manners.’

  ‘Please and thank you,’ said Wartnaby.

  ‘Just so,’ said Bognor.

  ‘And in order to award these marks,’ the Inspector scowled, ‘there have to be adjudicators. Unless it’s like the GCSE and you do a continual assessment?’

  Bognor told him about the two-way mirror and the ‘viewing room’. Then he told him about Sir Seymour Puce and his video camera at the Thursday-Lokomotiv clash.

  ‘QED,’ he said, when he’d finished. ‘In effect, Sir Seymour is running a do-it-yourself vice ring.’ He drank some of Wartnaby’s Kibo Chagga, savouring it like good claret.

  ‘Very interesting,’ said Wartnaby. ‘Very interesting indeed. But we still have no proof that Puce murdered Reg Brackett and Freddie Grimaldi.’

  ‘Is the result of Brackett’s post-mortem through?’ asked Bognor. ‘It’s his funeral this morning, I thought I’d drift along.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s through,’ said Wartnaby. ‘But I daren’t ask. More than my job’s worth. What’s left of it.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘The trouble is that, as I’ve said before, Puce has this town sewn up. Knowing that he’s a double murderer is one thing. Proving it is quite another.’

  ‘Mouldy Moulton has a barman’s friend,’ said Bognor, and when Wartnaby confessed that he did not know what a barman’s friend was he told him, adding, ‘So he could easily have Micky Finned a drink of Reg’s some time during the evening.’

  ‘But why,’ asked Wartnaby, ‘would Moulton want to do that? He and Brackett got on perfectly well. Their businesses didn’t overlap.’

  ‘You said Brackett called on the Scarpingtons? Presumably to try and get money out of him because of the ailing laundry. So my guess,’ said Bognor, ‘is that he tried blackmailing Piggy Scarpington.’

  ‘Piggy?’

  ‘That’s what the Countess calls him.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Wartnaby. ‘I’d forgotten you were so close to the Countess. But how could he have blackmailed the Earl?’

  ‘Because the Earl was into the Bridge Club.’

  ‘So was practically everybody else in town, by the look of it.’ Wartnaby stroked his chin. ‘Safety in numbers. That would be the theory. That and, no doubt, some mad pseudo-masonic curse involving tongue extraction for divulging the secrets of the third apron.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s it. Perhaps it’s a ritual murder.’ Bognor, fortified by the fry-up, and now chomping doorsteps of toast and marmalade, sensed his intuitive and deductive powers moving into a high imaginative gear. ‘Perhaps Brackett was so desperate about the finances of the laundry that he infringed Artisan law by threatening to break the secrets of the Bridge Club. So the only possible response, according to the Ancient Ritual and Lore of the Artisans, was for them to do him in. Just like the Ayatollah and Rushdie,’ he said, remembering the slogan on the railway bridge in the Muslim quarter of town. ‘Poor old Ayatollah had no alternative but to pass sentence on Rushdie because the penalty for blasphemy was written down in the Koran. Same with Brackett. I bet it’s all there in the sacred Artisan law book, so Puce had no choice but to declare a “fatwa”, and order Bracken’s ritual slaughter a.s.a.p. Big reward to the Artisan who actually accomplished it.’

  ‘If,’ Wartnaby was looking doubtful, ‘we accept the premise, then what about Freddie?’

  ‘Well,’ said Bognor, ‘without actually having access to the ancient Artisan rule book it’s difficult to be certain, but how about running this one up the flagpole? How about the Artisans appointing Freddie Grimaldi as the weapon of their wrath and then when he had done the deed he too has to die.’

  ‘Mmmm.’ Wartnaby looked at his watch. ‘Isn’t that a touch fanciful?’

  ‘The whole thing is fanciful,’ said Bognor. ‘I came down here to write an official government-sponsored paper on trade and industry in the most boring provincial city anyone could think of. It should have been a long, tedious document about hard work and computers and thrift and respectability. I had expected something terribly terribly English in a nice, genteel, cosy tradition. “Cosy”, in fact, is precisely the word I’m looking for. I thought it was all going to be wonderfully bland and cosy. Well no one can accuse the Scarpington Artisans of being cosy. It’s mayhem. Sex and violence and vice and corruption in every shape or form.’

  ‘And yet still cosy, despite everything.’ Wartnaby was being philosophical. ‘It’s the English way,’ he said, ‘toujours la politesse. Foreigners can’t understand it. They like their sex and violence underdone. Sanglant. Practically raw. We, on the other hand, conceal it behind net curtains and antimacassars. On the Continent a brothel is a brothel is a brothel. Here it’s a bridge club. Look at Cynthia Payne: Earl Grey and charades and middle-aged tarts in gymslips. Too too terribly polite and civilised. Even now when we’re contemplating crude lust of an almost totally animal kind we still bowdlerise it by talking about “going to bed with each other” or “hanky-panky” or even, God help us, about “making love”! Nigel Festing and Edna Fothergill were no more going to make love with one another than a couple of ferrets.’

  Bognor thought th
is unfair to ferrets even though he had to acknowledge the essential truth of what the Detective Chief Inspector was saying. Much of his life had been dedicated to proving the proposition that in Britain both sin and crime were so hedged about with convention, good manners, wearing the right clothes, having been at the correct school and above all never being common or vulgar that they became effectively unrecognisable as sin or crime. What was taking place here in the middle of England was yet another example. He sighed. ‘So, as a working hypothesis, let us assume that Brackett was killed according to the corporate will of the Artisans and that Freddie, the barman, was the instrument of that will, using his special nose dropper to introduce an alien substance into Bracken’s drink. Then a person unknown sets fire to Grimaldi. Who he?’

  ‘Puce,’ said Wartnaby.

  ‘How so?’ Bognor considered this second clipped interrogatory response evidence of further sharp thinking. He was feeling more on the ball than at any time since arriving. He would teach these villainous provincials to cosy up to him. No mere red-brick sex fiends and killer conspirators would get away from him.

  ‘That’s what we have to discover.’ Wartnaby paced in silence for a moment. ‘In the normal course of events,’ he said, ‘I would, of course, question Puce about his whereabouts at the time in question. And, Artisans apart, I would be particularly interested in the size of his shareholding in Mr Clean and Bleach’n’Starch.’

  ‘How big is it?’

  ‘I’m led to believe it’s “substantial”,’ said Wartnaby.