Unbecoming Habits (The Simon Bognor Mysteries Book 1) Read online

  ‘Retreat’, as far as Bognor was concerned, was exactly the right word. The retreat represented the high spot of the Friary’s life. For the brothers it meant a period of devotion, sacrifice and abstinence, a time in which one’s thoughts focussed exclusively on God. There was no room during a retreat for any but the most essential considerations. It was like school ‘ginger weeks’ when a normally severe military routine had been exaggerated to absurdity: cold baths were taken twice a day instead of once, one had to get dressed in three minutes, not seven, and dirty shoes were punished by a beating, not merely extra lines. The presence of the peppery and newly aggrieved Bishop of Woodstock introduced a further element—that of the annual inspection. Under his rigorous scrutiny everyone’s essential holiness would have to be impeccable and evident.

  He was musing drowsily at seven o’clock on Saturday morning when Brother Barnabas entered with a cup of tea and some sheets of foolscap.

  ‘Wakey Wakey, rise and shine,’ said Brother Barnabas in an unconvincing demonstration of joviality.

  Bognor regarded him beadily. ‘I should have thought you might have a hangover,’ he said.

  Brother Barnabas smiled wanly. ‘To tell you the truth,’ he said, ‘too much of that stuff leaves you a bit queasy the morning after.’ He drew out the ‘eee’ of queasy, giving it a sonorousness that made Bognor feel quite ill himself. He drank some tea.

  ‘Is that my list?’

  ‘Yes. Father Simon and I spent a lot of time working on that. Luckily a lot of the names are the same, so we’ve used abbreviations. Otherwise it would have taken all night.’ He handed Bognor the list. There was a lot of it.

  Once Barnabas, who was one of the most difficult men to get rid of he had ever encountered, had actually left him to his tea, he began to scrutinise the list properly. Much of it was a waste of time. Entries like ‘Party from Sherton School’ or ‘Delegation of African Bishops’ or ‘Archbishop’s Commission on Divorce Law Reform’ were surely irrelevant to murder and espionage, though in view of the story so far it would be cavalier to dismiss them too quickly. He blanched at the idea of African bishops becoming involved and took a pencil with which he swiftly crossed out all the seemingly impossibles. It still left a great many names. The community, it appeared, organised some half-dozen formal retreats a year, but that took no account of those visitors who came to stay on their own without benefit of organisation. He went through the list again and began to pick out some recurring names. Again a few, like the Bishop of Woodstock himself, seemed unlikely and he crossed them out too. He was reducing the list quite fast.

  There were some surprises in it and he began to see that a Friary was not such a bad place for espionage, after all. It reminded him of a call girl’s diary in which respectable M.P.s and industrialists, family men all, would recur with remarkable frequency. There were several such people in Brother Barnabas’s pages who had at various times visited the Friary in order to recharge their spiritual batteries. All of them could have passed on information of interest, but none of them had been with quite enough regularity to make them the professional agent for whom he was looking. He put the pages on one side and went to breakfast.

  It was a silent meal, like every meal on a retreat weekend, and he had ample opportunity to look round. As yet only about half the visitors had arrived. There were a couple of clergymen in shiny grey suits with fraying dog collars; one or two young men with intense faces and very short hair who looked as if they might be joining as postulants before the week-end was over; a Benedictine monk, presumably on an exchange visit; a mousey old man in a sports coat with leather patches who must have been a schoolmaster; and a very young man with straggly hair wearing a T-shirt which bore the legend ‘Michigan State University’. Bognor wondered if he was a friend of Brother Bede. It did not look very promising material.

  After breakfast he sought out Father Simon and got a list of all those who were on this week-end’s jaunt. They had unaccountably been left off.

  ‘Not a frightfully exciting collection,’ said Father Simon, twittering over his rimless spectacles. ‘Except, of course, for the Bishop. I confess the Bishop does rather frighten me. I suppose you could say he puts the fear of God into me… ha ha.’ He laughed very nervously and scratched the back of his head.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘And there’s one late addition. Our Mr. Jones. Apparently he didn’t think he’d be able to get away, but he changed his mind at the last minute. A very cultivated man Mr. Jones, though I wouldn’t have thought an exceptionally Godly one. But then there’s no telling, is there?’

  ‘No,’ said Bognor.

  Father Simon blushed and looked reproachful. ‘I do hope,’ he said, ‘that we are all going to be able to let bygones be bygones. Is your head better?’

  ‘Not much,’ said Bognor, and returned to his room and a further study of the lists. For a while he continued with his deletions and then when he had reduced the catalogue to more manageable proportions he switched over to a positive approach. It was possible that the contact would not be present this week-end. It depended very much on whether someone’s nerve had been lost. He suspected that it hadn’t and that a handover would be made, just as it had been every year for the past eleven. He took this week-end’s list and compared it with the lists of eleven years before. There were three of the same names: two clergymen and someone called Wilfred Mortimer. He checked through the years to see how often Mortimer cropped up. The total count came to seven. That made Mortimer a distinct possible. That is if there were more than one carrier involved: seven years Mortimer, four A.N. Other. He went back to the original list and decided he couldn’t bother with the clergymen. If they were the two he’d seen in breakfast they couldn’t be less likely. However, he circled them with pencil and put a query by their names. Mortimer he underlined with another query.

  He read the eleven-year-old names again and was about to move on to the following year when he checked himself. What had Father Simon said? Oh yes. Jones. And there on the original list was one Edward Jones. What an exceptionally ordinary name! Suspiciously so. He felt a twinge of excitement and checked himself. No, he would not allow his intuition to betray himself into any more cul-de-sacs. He underlined Edward Jones and turned over a page. Brother Barnabas had carefully given each year its own page. Halfway down page two he found E.J. He underlined it again and turned over. There, a little nearer the bottom this time, were the same initials. Again he drew a single sharp line underneath and moved on. With mounting eagerness he continued this methodical progress through all eleven pages until after the final neat crisp line had been drawn, when he put down the pencil, and looked up at the sepia picture.

  ‘Thank God!’ he exclaimed with blasphemous enthusiasm. ‘At last we’re getting somewhere.’

  It didn’t take him long to find out. For the next hour or so he busied himself making careful notes. Under each of his eight names he wrote a short character sketch with additional observations about alibis and motives. Under Brother Bede’s name he left a lot of space. That worried him. If Brother Bede was the guilty man—and he was the only one that he could see with the requisite triple opportunity—why had the man Jones come down for this week-end? If indeed Jones was the spy. Perhaps it was bluff. If Bede were guilty he must realise by now that Bognor had singled him out as the only man who could have passed on messages in the honey and killed twice. In which case what better way of throwing off pursuit than by getting oneself sacked and out of the way, and then making sure one’s contact arrived in the Friary, and appeared to hand over information to someone else?

  It was plausible and it would explain Mr. Jones’s last-minute decision to come. Bognor pursed his lips. If Jones turned out to be a red herring he would become suicidal. He put on a jacket and started off to attend Sext. The Office represented the formal beginning of the retreat and by the time it began everyone would have arrived. Brother Vivian was meeting the morning train at Woodstock, the Bishop was coming by car and so were a few ot
hers. He quickened his pace as the bell started to chime more insistently, nodded to Xavier, Simon and Anselm, who were standing in a silent group outside the chapel door, and found a seat in the second row of tubular-steel chairs.

  He knelt for a moment in stylised prayer and then sat up and looked round. The choir stalls in front of him were the same as usual. He ran his eye up and down both sides sitting facing each other with arms folded across their chests, eyes raised in apparent contemplation of the stations of the cross. He faltered briefly at John, Barnabas, Vivian and Aldhelm, the only four suspects in the chapel, and again at his first acquaintance, Brother Paul. Once more he was struck by the boy’s familiarity. He thought for a moment but couldn’t place it. Suspect Bede was in South London. Suspects Anselm, Simon and Xavier still waiting outside. He looked back up the left-hand line and then started as he noticed something unusual. Beyond the furthest friar, and almost on top of the altar, was a heavy wooden chair with arms and a high carved back which he hadn’t seen before. In it, under a panoply of golden crosses and shining vestments, sat a hunched purple-veined figure with massive grey eyebrows.

  Bognor recognised the Right Reverend Bishop of Woodstock. He shifted his gaze to his fellow guests in their metal and canvas chairs. They were, as Father Simon had suggested, an undistinguished lot. He wondered if the old man with the leather-patched jacket was Mortimer. If so, he could surely be dismissed. The two clergymen were also rabbits. The youth with the Michigan T-shirt was too young to be Jones, though he was the only one to look remotely possible.

  From the belfry above, the bell slowed to a final regular clang which meant that there was only a minute to kick-off. He opened his hymn-book, as advised, at Mr. E. H. Plumptre’s Hymn 604. It was a sturdy processional. He rather went for processionals. Just as the bell stopped its chiming the pianist struck up and everyone stood. Considering there weren’t above sixty people there, all told, the noise was formidable. His three remaining suspects, Anselm, Simon and Xavier—odd bedfellows if ever there were—entered in step as the congregation bellowed out ‘Thy hand O God has guided’ with the thunderous voice of the old bishop clearly audible above the marginally more restrained utterances of the rest of his flock. Bognor, for once, was participating with such abandon that he failed to notice the small elderly man in the pepper and salt suit until they reached the refrain.

  ‘One Church!’ sang Bognor lustily, oblivious to the tap on the arm. ‘One Faith! One Lord!’ It was only during the gap between verses that he looked up and saw the man smiling at him and mouthing ‘Excuse me’. He pressed back and allowed Mr. Jones to pass. Not, of course, that his real name was Jones.

  ‘Thy heralds brought glad tidings,’ he went on. ‘Glad tidings’ indeed. He had recognised Mr. Jones immediately. Mr. Jones was a very senior civil servant indeed. Permanent Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Technology, no less. Bognor was ecstatic. A triumph at last. Jones’s real name was Gaymer Burton. He was flashy, brilliant, and Simon was entirely right in suggesting that he was not the most obviously godly of men. None the less, he seemed to know the tune. He was singing as enthusiastically as Bognor himself.

  From now on Bognor would have to watch everything Burton did. It was too much to expect him to permit himself to be seen handing over a bulky envelope in full view. On the other hand, there were so few opportunities for speech during a retreat that he must give himself away simply by his conversation. The service moved on to the 119th Psalm, beginning, as was customary at Sext, at Verse 81 and continuing all the way to 128. Bognor joined in, pondering occasionally on the odd phrase.

  ‘I am become like a bottle in the smoke,’ he sang, and wondered what it meant. It wasn’t until he reached the curious words ‘thy commandment is exceeding broad’ that he glanced again at Burton and noticed with surprise that he was singing the words without recourse to his prayer-book. And by the look of him getting them right.

  ‘Show off,’ thought Bognor, his natural jealousy getting the better of his excitement.

  If he had thought the job of catching Burton out was going to be easy he couldn’t have been more wrong. For a start Burton had been given, as an old and evidently valued friend, a room in the farmhouse. During those many hours in which solitary meditation was required a number of people could have visited him. Ideally Bognor would like to have camped on his doorstep. It was not possible.

  At meals Burton seemed at pains always to sit next to someone different and the same thing happened at the seminars which were organised throughout the two days.

  At these Burton—or Jones, as he was studiously described—was brilliant. Where most of the friars were pedestrian and the visitors more so, Burton excelled. Only Anselm and the Bishop exceeded him in knowledge; only Xavier came near equalling him in wit and argument. Whether the subject under discussion was ‘Transubstantiation’, ‘The Efficacy of Prayer’, or in one memorably charged encounter ‘Christ in a Secular Society: the role of the Christian in a Changing World’, he was, to Bognor, insufferable. His erudition and overall mastery of the problems posed by Christianity in general and contemplative Christianity in particular were such that at times Bognor found himself thinking that here was another red herring. At times like this, in an admittedly heretical sense, he prayed for faith and at all times he watched and waited for a slip.

  The moment at which such a mistake might come, he decided, was at Confession. It was traditional during these week-ends for the more senior and respected friars (not just the ordained ones) to hear Confession. This was done not in the ritualistic fashion of the Roman Catholic Church in a curtained kiosk and whispers, but in broad daylight and, as it was summer, out of doors. At selected times of the day everyone would promenade in their courtyard and on the lawns, in pairs or alone. Each couple was given a wide berth so that a certain privacy could be preserved and nothing overheard. It was a perfect way to hand over verbal secrets, though Bognor was convinced that whatever was being passed on was written down, since detailed plans were almost certainly involved. However, he watched each confessional avidly and was again frustrated by Gaymer Burton’s brilliance. He treated the confessionals as an impartial belle of the ball who wishes to give no offence to any of her many suitors.

  At the first such session he spent a full half-hour engrossed with Father Anselm, and Bognor, eager for this particular scalp, began to make plans. But just as it seemed certain that was a special and suspicious relationship, Burton executed a graceful pirouette and shifted his attentions to the more abrasive preaching of Father Xavier. It was the same at subsequent performances. Whereas the doddering Mortimer and the two clergymen and the young man in the T-shirt tended to stick with one partner deep in intense searchings of the inner soul, Burton flitted about from one friar to another, gracefully and gently cutting in on other people’s conversations, spending enough time with each man to make it seem polite and not quite enough to indicate favouritism, before moving on once more.

  On Sunday morning, after a particularly virtuoso sequence of Burton’s, Bognor retired to the Boot in disgust. There unsurprisingly he found Father Xavier deep in his Scotch. He was, however, interested to find that he was not alone. There with him, being corrupted, as Xavier had said earlier, with a pint of shandy was young Brother Paul.

  ‘I would have thought,’ said Bognor, ‘that during a week-end of such significance you might have managed to stay away from the bottle.’

  ‘Can’t,’ said Xavier a shade irritably. ‘I’m surprised you’ve managed to find time to take your eyes off the devastating Mr. Jones.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Bognor found Xavier altogether too perceptive. It unnerved him.

  ‘You’ve been sniffing around him all week-end as if he were a bitch on heat.’ Father Xavier dragged on his Perfectos Finos. ‘You know Paul, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Paul. ‘You gave me a lift your first day here.’

  ‘That’s right. I’m sorry to see you in the fleshpots.’

  ‘It�
��s only shandy.’ Brother Paul seemed aggrieved.

  ‘I didn’t really mean the drink,’ said Bognor. ‘I meant him.’ He nodded at Xavier, who affected not to hear. Mr. Hey, who had been engrossed in farming talk, finally came across and asked Bognor if he wanted his usual. Bognor bought usuals for himself, Mr. Hey and Xavier, and offered Brother Paul another shandy. He turned it down.

  ‘So what do you suspect Brother Jones of having done?’ asked Xavier. ‘Do you think he’s from the News of the World?’

  ‘He didn’t manage much if he is,’ said Bognor. It was perfectly true that none of the Sunday papers had followed up the story of Brother Bede’s expulsion with more than a few lame paragraphs. Anselm had obviously been both ruthless and plausible.

  ‘Can’t stand these retreats,’ said Xavier.

  ‘They’re artificial,’ said Paul.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bognor. Conversation flagged. Xavier seemed distant, Paul taciturn. Bognor remarked on it and Xavier said he was having trouble with his sermon. It was important because it was for Evensong, and the Bishop would be there.

  ‘Theme?’

  ‘I have a text with which I begin and with which I end,’ said Xavier. ‘As is the manner with sermons. It’s a convention. Makes them tidier.’

  ‘And the text?’

  ‘It’s apocryphal, like a lot of the best sayings. “Forsake not an old friend; for the new is not comparable to him; a new friend is as new wine; when it is old, thou shalt drink it with pleasure.” Ecclesiasticus IX. Ten. Know it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh. Pity. I bet your friend Mr. Jones knows it.’ Xavier drained his glass. ‘I should think about it if I were you. You might find the odd clue in it. You never know. Right now I must go and polish it up.’ He got up to go. Paul left with him and Bognor ordered another drink.