Brought to Book (The Simon Bognor Mysteries) Page 15

  ‘Yes.’

  Bognor turned over, sat up, plumped his pillow, lay on his back.

  ‘The fact,’ he said, ‘that both Warrington and Capstick have defected to Strobe within forty-eight hours of Hemlock’s death certainly strengthens their motive.’

  ‘Warrington wouldn’t have defected if Audrey were still alive.’

  ‘True. But if he was going to become Mr Audrey in succession to Hemlock that surely makes the motive even stronger.’

  Monica giggled. ‘You think he killed for Audrey?’

  ‘That and the prospect of becoming boss of Big Books PLC.’

  ‘It’s a theory.’

  ‘I can’t see that the Midgelys are seriously in the murder stakes. They did very well out of Hemlock. Much better off having him alive. I’m ruling them out. The books are completely worthless. It’s only Hemlock’s hype that made them sell.’

  ‘Maybe Strobe could have hyped them better.’

  ‘Hmmmm. Up to a point.’

  They were silent for a while. Monica began to snore very lightly.

  ‘Of course,’ said Bognor, ‘Arthur Green and Romany Flange are the most suspicious of the lot. Do you imagine there’s anything sexual going on there?’

  ‘Oh, do put a sock in it, Simon, I’m trying to sleep. Romany Flange was already knocking off Hemlock and Glatt. Surely that’s enough in these days of the universal French letter?’

  ‘Romany Flange looks insatiable to me.’ He turned on his side. ‘And if Vernon Hemlock absolutely refused to publish The First Lady then killing him might have seemed the only way out.’

  ‘I don’t believe authors kill their publishers for refusing their books,’ said Monica. ‘They merely take them elsewhere. Now if you’re going to get back to the office in time for lunch you’d better get some sleep.

  ‘On the other hand,’ said Bognor, ‘isn’t it just as likely that Dr Belgrave would have killed him if he had decided he was going to publish The First Lady?’

  ‘But he didn’t, so she didn’t either, now please go to sleep.’

  ‘Could be bluff.’

  Monica put her head under one of her pillows and ground her teeth.

  ‘The trouble is: no dabs. Not a fingerprint anywhere on the wheel that controlled the “S” shelves. There just isn’t going to be any convincing forensic evidence. So we have to give the murderer…or the murderers…enough rope. It’s going to mean a stroke of luck or some devilish questioning. Maybe both.’

  He turned over onto his stomach again.

  ‘Perhaps it is all down to Strobe and the CIA,’ he said. ‘The logic is unassailable. Strobe and Megaword want control of Big Books. Hemlock won’t budge so they kill him. Then Audrey won’t budge either so they kill her too. Strobe wasn’t in the house and anyway he’d find it difficult managing the stairs even in that fancy wheelchair. So he’d infiltrated Marlene Glopff – or rather the CIA had – and she or someone else had suborned the butler. So one of them dunnit…’

  Monica began to weep softly so he talked more quietly to himself, tailing away into a whisper, then into an internal monologue and finally sleep. Not that he found respite there, for he dreamed extraordinary dreams of Bigger and Bigger Books, books in which even the words grew and grew until they became so enormous that they were too big to read, too big even to get on the page so that page after page was pure blank white with nothing on it but a terrible creeping red stain which spread and spread until every page of every book was damp and sticky with fresh spilt blood and then the microphone started to whine louder and louder and louder and louder with the voice of the fierce woman from the RIL mixing with the whinge of DCI Bumstead and the crisp telephonic retribution of Parkinson and the schmaltzy nothingness of Cynthia Midgely and the threatening Bronx of Marlene Glopff with her rippling pectorals and uncomfortable little gun and the waves beat against the jetty and the fairy lights rattled in the wind and…‘Oh my God wassamatta! Help. What time is it?’

  ‘God! You were snoring! I couldn’t do anything with you. Great mouth wide open and lying flat on your back and the whole room trembling. It’s after seven.’ Monica was standing at the foot of the bed frothing at the mouth. She had a toothbrush in one hand and most of the bedclothes in the other.

  ‘You’ve stripped the bed,’ said Bognor.

  ‘I couldn’t stand the noise,’ she said, dropping the blankets and fizzing the brush across her gums. ‘I shall be glad to get out of Byfleet. I don’t think it’s my sort of place.’

  ‘I was having a dream,’ he said, rubbing his eyes. ‘Gosh, I slept badly.’

  ‘Rubbish!’ Monica rinsed her mouth with water from a plastic mug. ‘I was the one who slept badly. Every time I nodded off I was woken by your snoring. I wonder who’s dead this morning.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘First it was Mr Hemlock. Then it was Mrs Hemlock. You know these things go in threes.’

  ‘I can’t bear it when you’re superstitious.’

  ‘I’m not being superstitious. It’s a well known fact.’

  ‘I think we’ve had enough corpses for one case. I hardly ever have more than two per case. You know that.’

  ‘You don’t usually have a trigger-happy Jane Fonda lookalike rampaging around the country in a helicopter, nor a double-agent major with a rifle, let alone an entire regional anti-terrorist squad. This case is bigger than your usual.’

  ‘It does seem to have escalated.’ Bognor swung his legs onto the floor. ‘Nevertheless I think this is where the killing has to stop. Too many authors behaving like the characters they create.’

  ‘The publishers are behaving worse than the authors.’

  ‘Up to a point.’ He yawned and pulled a palm across stubbly jowls. ‘The authors haven’t lost any of their people yet. The publishers have two dead already.’

  ‘You’re implying they were killed by the authors. Civil war in the book industry?’ She glanced at his feet. ‘Oh, Simon, you are revolting. Did you sleep in your socks?

  ‘I was cold.’ He ambled to the washbasin and squeezed toothpaste onto his brush. ‘Extraordinary dreams,’ he said, ‘all about blood and books.’

  ‘Don’t tell before breakfast,’ said Monica, pulling on tights, ‘otherwise they’ll come true.’

  Bognor spat. ‘Now that is superstitious. In the dream all the books I was looking at had completely blank pages which were covered in blood. And I defy you to demonstrate how that can possibly become true. I wonder if the Goose and Goblet does a proper cooked breakfast. I am absolutely not eating any muesli.’

  Monica sighed. It was part dismay and part agreement. So much about her husband was disastrous and yet, on the whole, it was the disastrous parts that she was so fond of. She knew that he ought to sleep with his socks off and that he shouldn’t have fried egg, bacon, sausage, tomatoes and bread for breakfast. And yet if he had been a muesli man she would never have married him.

  It was a fine crisp morning after the dank drizzle of the night. Bognor hummed a little as he crossed Anchor Street to the newsagent’s where he bought a Globe. In the dining room he sprinkled demerara on his cornflakes, smiled at Monica and only then turned to the paper. Molly Mortimer had made the front page:

  HEMLOCK WIDOW FOUND DEAD

  MYSTERY OF GREEN FACTOID

  PLOT THICKENS

  By Molly Mortimer, Literary Editor.

  Not often the Literary Editor strayed outside the Thursday books page or the sombre euphemisms of the obituary columns. Bognor read with mild amusement. Molly’s piece suggested more than it revealed – more smoke than fire. She had obviously got an inkling of the Flange-Green axis and she knew there was a Big Big Book in the wind. She had also guessed (or been told, but Bognor’s intuition suggested the former) that it was a break into non-fiction. To his horror he also read that ‘Britain’s book business, notorious for its long lunches and amateurism, has recently been attracting the attention of the Board of Trade. The BOT is keen to put more muscle into the export of
British words and one of the Board’s most senior civil servants is in Byfleet-next-the-Sea where he has been conducting lengthy investigations into Big Books PLC. The investigator, Mr Simon Bognor, 43, was unavailable for comment late last night, but Whitehall sources did not rule out the possibility of powerful American interest in the stricken British publishing house. Among British competitors waiting to pounce on the ailing giant, the name of Mr Andover Strobe, the 54-year-old crippled book broker is most often mentioned. It is believed that there would be stern resistance in Government circles to an American takeover. Former Tory Party Deputy Chairman Jeffrey…’ Bognor put the paper down and took a mouthful of cereal. He did not want political effusions at breakfast. He wondered what Molly had written originally. The article had all the hallmarks of what a certain sort of sub called ‘creative editing’. It meant that Bromley man (all sub-editors in his experience lived in semi-detached houses in Bromley) had taken Molly’s original and turned it into Globespeak, altering everything including ‘facts’ to accord with his own Bromley semi-detached view of life.

  The Goose and Goblet dining room was peopled by solitary commercial travellers all sitting at separate tables, all munching disconsolately and staring at anything they could find to stare at except for each other. Usually tablecloth or ceiling.

  Into this sad, silent mastication a moment later there erupted the lady of the press, cloaked though undaggered, striding in with the haggard yet superior expression of one who has been up all night.

  ‘Darlings!’ she said, seeing the Bognors, ‘thank heaven I’ve found you.’

  Commercial travellers’ eyes swivelled towards her like extraterrestrial antennae. She was not what one associated with Byfleet-next-the-Sea, even in high season, even at the end of the pier show.

  She came and sat down at their table, quelled the travellers with a raking stare, and demanded coffee from their clumping wide-eyed waitress.

  ‘Bloody good story!’ she said, in a husky whisper. She leaned towards Bognor and winked. ‘I don’t know how you do it.’ She turned to Monica. ‘I adore your husband,’ she said. ‘He’s such a dark horse. Wherever he goes people start dropping dead in the most delicious circumstances. I don’t know how he does it.’ She reverted to Bognor himself. ‘The News Desk rang in the middle of the night with some stuff about snooty-bangs at a writers’ retreat. And my sources say that the local constabulary have taken in Milton Capstick and Danvers Warrington for questioning. And a helicopter has been found abandoned at the old RAF base at Norton Fitzpriors and Hemlock’s butler has gone AWOL. Now what can you tell me?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Oh, sugar puff.’

  ‘Molly, it’s more than my life’s worth. Honestly.’

  ‘I’ll trade you.’

  ‘Trade me what?’

  ‘Information. Good stuff. Useful.’ The coffee arrived – the thin sour stuff you still get in English towns.

  ‘But Molly, even if I was interested in whatever it is that you’re offering I don’t think I have anything to give in exchange.’

  ‘A little bird told me you were involved in the shooty-bangs. Small village, name of Reckitt Magna.’ She drank some coffee, pulled a face and took a long, thin cheroot from her shoulder bag.

  ‘I could use a large brandy,’ she said; ‘bloody British licensing laws.’

  ‘Who told you I was at Reckitt Magna?’

  ‘Darling, I don’t reveal sources, but you ought to know by now that the Globe has informants everywhere. Distressed gentlefolk in reduced circumstances; retired military personnel on fixed pensions; the vast army of the unemployed; anyone with a score to settle. They all get on the blower to Aunty Molly and her friends the second anything stirs in the woodshed.’

  Bognor was well into his egg and bacon. He wondered if the Major’s breakfast would have been better. This was a touch greasy and the grease was a touch rancid.

  ‘You want to know what happened at Reckitt Magna.’

  ‘Please!’ Molly made a kissing face. She had smudged on some lurid lipstick which overlapped her lips.

  ‘I’ll see you,’ said Bognor, ‘but I’d like some circumspection. I didn’t much care for this morning’s stuff. I’m supposed to be incognito. And who told you I was forty-three?’

  ‘Isn’t he enchanting?’ Molly asked Monica. Monica was looking frosty and not disposed to enter into the discussion.

  ‘I met one of the local fisherfolk last night,’ said Molly, ‘in a dive by the harbour called the Mermaid’s Tail. We got talking.’ She swilled coffee and stifled the taste with smoke. ‘He was quite good on the local gossip, especially after a few shots of Pernod and black.’

  ‘You what?’ said Bognor, shocked.

  ‘Pernod and blackcurrant,’ said Molly. ‘It’s what the young drink. He was a juvenile fisherman. Quite dishy if you like tousled beefcake with tattoos.’

  ‘Not my style,’ said Bognor. ‘But do go on.’

  ‘He said someone had chartered his boat for a fishing trip.’

  Bognor waited. The bacon rind was hairy. He cut it off and chewed the meat.

  ‘Yes…’ he said.

  ‘Well, don’t you think that’s peculiar?’

  ‘He’s a fisherman,’ said Bognor. ‘Presumably he has a fishing boat. It’s presumably for hire. It all seems quite normal to me.’

  ‘In the dead of winter?’

  ‘No accounting for taste. This is England. Mad dogs and all that.’

  Bognor was irritated. Molly was trying to tell him something but for a journalist she was being maddeningly elliptical. Normally she would take a rumour and elevate it into the truth. Now she was doing the reverse.

  ‘Two people, as a matter of fact,’ she said, ‘booked in the name of Smith. Mr and Mrs.’

  ‘What are you trying to tell me?’

  ‘I’m not trying to tell you anything. Just telling you. My fisherman said that a rather sexy, well-turned-out woman who didn’t look in the least like a fishing person booked his boat for a couple of hours tomorrow morning. And given all the peculiar events taking place in the wake of the Big Books sales conference I think that’s a pretty suspicious fact.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Who do you think it is? – assuming it’s not a Mr and Mrs Smith.’

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine but my fisherman was quite smitten. And he emphasised the turn-out.’

  ‘American?’

  ‘No, it’s not the glamorous Glopff.’

  ‘Romany Flange.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’

  Bognor contemplated the marmalade. It was ersatz Oxford.

  ‘And she booked for two?’

  Molly breathed smoke through flared nostrils. She looked like a thoroughbred newly out to grass.

  ‘For two. Yes.’

  Bognor glanced at his wife. ‘Arthur Green equals Mr Smith?’

  ‘My hunch is the same as your hunch.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘He said half-past ten,’ said Molly through eyes half closed with fatigue and conspiracy.

  It was just after eight.

  ‘I’m supposed to be in the office before lunch.’ Crisis always made Bognor greedy. He succumbed to the temptation of the marmalade. If ever he won the pools he would take a week at a health farm.

  ‘What do you think, darling?’ he asked his wife.

  ‘I think you should get back to the office before lunch. If the connection at Bradleigh Parkway actually connects that means the nine-ten.’

  ‘You really think that?’

  ‘It’s your job. Your future. Your problem. You just asked me what I thought.’

  ‘I could always say I overslept. Or that British Rail screwed up. It wouldn’t be the first time.’

  No one spoke.

  At length Bognor said, ‘You said a helicopter had been found at the Norton Fitzpriors air base.’

  ‘Jawohl,’ said Molly.

&
nbsp; Monica scowled.

  ‘Anybody in it?’

  ‘My sources say no.’

  ‘Hmmm.’ Bognor swilled some of his coffee around his mouth and thought. Eventually he said, ‘This is absolutely off the record, unattributable, for your eyes only, top secret, confidential, cross your eyes and hope to die.’

  ‘Guide’s honour,’ said Molly.

  ‘If you’ll excuse me, I think I’d better go and pack,’ said Monica. She smiled one of her most notorious lemon sorbet smiles at Molly. ‘Lovely seeing you again,’ she said. The exit itself was also from the fast-freeze shelf. One or two of the solitary sales reps glanced up as she passed but immediately looked back at their tablecloths in shock.

  ‘Sorry, Simon,’ said Molly, putting a hand on his, ‘have I caused a little tiff?’

  Simon regarded her astonishingly long and amazingly crimson fingernails.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘not really.’

  Molly smiled the knowing smile of one who had spent much of her private and professional life summing up other people’s marriages. Prolonged observation had deterred her from trying the experience at first hand. It was not for want of opportunities.

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘You were saying…?’

  Bognor told her about their visit to the Haven. Not quite knowing why, he left out the bit about Glatt. He didn’t want Glatt in the Globe even off the record and unattributable.

  ‘Good story,’ she said. ‘So Andover Strobe has become a CIA stooge?’

  ‘It looks like it,’ said Bognor. ‘It reminds me of one of Arthur Green’s novels – everyone seems to have his or her price.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound as if Glopff or Hastings are in it for the money,’ said Molly. ‘Glopff is presumably a professional agent and Hastings appears to have unfulfilled literary ambitions. Ambitions Hemlock wasn’t able to indulge. Come to that Strobe gives the impression of being more interested in power than loot. So it’s not like a Green novel. I agree the Green oeuvre is concerned entirely with lust, money and airport lounges but I don’t think this is the same thing at all. But it’s still a good story. I wonder if they’ll run Strobe to earth?’

  ‘He’s not exactly unobtrusive,’ said Bognor, ‘but Bumstead is such an oaf I wouldn’t put it past him.’