Business Unusual (The Simon Bognor Mysteries) Page 15

  ‘In Mr Clean and Bleach’n’Starch?’

  ‘Puce doesn’t do things by halves.’

  ‘It certainly doesn’t look like it.’ Bognor was impressed by Wartnaby’s apparent mastery of the Puce dossier. Even so …

  ‘Are you certain that Puce is the villain of the piece?’

  ‘Villain of the piece’ had an oddly official ring to it. Almost as suggestive of pillar of society as Justice of the Peace, which, of course, Sir Seymour already was. Sir Seymour Puce, VP, PS, JP. The backbone of England as represented by the Artisans and men like Puce was obsessed by initials after surnames just as it was by gongs to wear round the neck at formal dinners. It was part, thought Bognor, of what made Britain so spineless.

  ‘I feel it,’ said Wartnaby. ‘There is the smell of corruption in him and its reek permeates the whole of this society.’

  Bognor had never, to the best of his knowledge, had to deal with a crusader policeman before. He found it disturbing, but better that than the bent copper. Or so he supposed.

  ‘I drink we had better beard Puce in his den,’ said Wartnaby.

  ‘You mean, see him at Puce International or the House of Commons?’ Bognor was not sure he saw the point of either.

  ‘No, no.’ Wartnaby shook his head. ‘Den of iniquity. The Laurels. Confront him with his turpitude and wring a confession from him.’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit risky?’ Bognor was getting fed up with risks.

  ‘Time’s not on my side,’ said Wartnaby, glancing at his watch. ‘And it’s a case of Puce or me. If I don’t take the initiative then he will. If I let him get the upper hand he’ll have me out of the force altogether.’

  ‘So what do you want me to do?’

  ‘Inveigle him into The Laurels. Get him to confess and I’ll be there to witness.’ Bognor looked dubious, which he was.

  ‘It has to be done.’ Wartnaby flashed a smile. ‘And done quickly. Otherwise we’ll both be undone. Once Puce and the Artisans decide that you’re trying to dish the dirt on them, they’ll have you out of a job too. Or worse. Look what happened to Brackett and Grimaldi.’

  Wartnaby picked up a Jolly Trencherman notepad from alongside the Gideons’ Bible on Bognor’s bedside table. ‘As soon as you’ve made an appointment with Puce,’ he said, ‘ring this number. I shan’t answer. Just let it ring for the number of hours you’ve fixed. I suggest six rings for six o’clock sharp for preference. If you don’t call I’ll be back here for breakfast, but I’d much prefer an interview today. The kitchens are beginning to get suspicious.’

  He seemed about to disappear but paused at the door. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘if you have time, I think you should have a look at Ron Brown. He’s succeeded Reg Brackett as President of Artisans, which is interesting in itself. He failed to be made President once before. Something to do with contaminated yoghurt, or so I’m led to believe. Also, like all the others he’s crazy for an honour, even if it’s only an MBE like poor little Reg. And, of course, Puce is the fount from which all such honours flow. I think a word with Ron might not come amiss. He has an office above Ye Milke and Yoghurte Bar in Dean’s Byre just next door to the Cope and Cripple.’

  ‘Right,’ said Bognor. ‘I’ll do what I can.’

  And this time Wartnaby did make his exit. It was funny, thought Bognor, about the Bog last night. Wartnaby’s macintosh was just like the belted and buckled Burberry he had noticed in the crowd. But then it was quite a common style. All he could honestly swear to have seen was a man in a mac. He gazed at the breakfast tray. There was still a slice of toast and some butter left on it. He was very tempted but he knew that he had had enough. So to prove that he was made of stern stuff he took the tray and put it outside on the carpet of the corridor. The gesture cheered him up a little.

  Still, he did feel lonely and neglected. Not even a phone call from Parkinson. It was a bit much. Here he stood, like a Roman centurion on Hadrian’s Wall, far from home, lashed by alien elements, contemplating the hostile hordes, and there was no support from home. Even Diana, the Countess, fickle jade, had retreated to the bright lights of London. Monica, he could, in fairness, hardly blame. But one’s own boss! He thought mutinously of putting in a call to Parkinson, reversing the charges, of course, but the thought of that martinet’s voice gimletting into him with its sharp, unsympathetic queries, its ‘Why in God’s name are you wasting my time and the Board’s money on your mindless whinges?’ and its ‘In pity’s name, use the talents the Good Lord provided you with and tell us all what goes on out there’ was more than he could bear. Scott must have felt like this in the Antarctic; or Hillary and Tenzing, Mallory and Irving as they battled toward the summit of Everest. This was Indian country; he was John Wayne and there was no sign of the cavalry. He experienced a sudden stab of indigestion and wondered for a terrible moment if some unknown enemy had nobbled the Kibo Chagga coffee with a dose from their barman’s friend.

  At times like this, adrift in a sea of doubt and deceptive tranquillity, it was his custom to make a list of suspects together with motive and opportunity, the better to concentrate his mind. He knew that this was probably what he should do and yet the effort was too much and the reasons less than compelling. All roads led to Puce and they all led via this extraordinary society, so drab and mundane and, yes, admit it, so cosy on the surface, yet so reptilian, corrupt and sinister within. How much more dangerous were these smiling, familiar breweries and factories and football grounds than the mean streets of Los Angeles and Detroit or the battlefields of Far East Asia. One knew if one consulted statistics that it was everyday life that threatened, not the exotics of foreign travel. Yet it was not until one experienced the chilling dangers of the commonplace face to face that one quite realised the truth of this self-evident fact. Risk lay in the day-to-day, not the once-in-a-lifetime. Death came changing the light bulb while standing on the bathroom floor or crossing the road to catch the last post. Here in Scarpington where everything seemed so damnably dull, this was where one learned to walk in mortal dread.

  Bognor shivered.

  It was ten-thirty. Brackett’s funeral was at noon. If he set off now he would have time to case Ye Olde Dairy and hope to find Ron Brown at home. No point in telephoning in advance. Much better to take him unawares and hope to catch him in the act of who knows what — having his way with a buxom milkmaid, fiddling his VAT return, adulterating his products — Bognor could believe anything.

  His Arkwright and Blennerhasset was loud for a funeral, especially here where they so respected convention and conformity. This was a black-tie job. He was already wearing the trousers, with braces, of an off-the-peg grey worsted two-piece, which would have passed unnoticed at a convention of bank managers. He was already wearing a white shirt so plain and unremarkable that it could have been worn to school by a new boy at King’s Scarpington. His shoes were scuffed but black by origin and design, and, like royalty, he always travelled with a plain black tie, ‘just in case’. This was not mere empty superstition. Too often in his life he had set off on a job which began as a jaunt only to find himself a few days later sitting dry-eyed in a funeral pew listening to the last post sound for a newly and unexpectedly deceased.

  He knotted the tie four times before getting it quite right, drained the dregs of the coffee, fluffed up the white handkerchief in his jacket pocket and preened himself in the mirror. What could be more funereal? Give him an opera hat and he could have done service as a professional mute. ‘It is better,’ he told himself, ‘to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting: for that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart.’ That was one of the things about an expensive old-fashioned education. You had an apt ‘mot’ for every moment — though if you believed that particular piece of Old Testament claptrap you’d believe anything. ‘Ho hum,’ he said to himself and left the room whistling. Funerals often made him feel cheery.

  It was not, he thought, market day and yet he was acutely aware of people shopping. He
personally detested shopping and Monica was not keen either. The Bognors shopped to live but Simon had a keen impression that Scarpingtonians this morning were living to shop. He had originally thought that his route to Dean’s Byre was unimpeded, but when it came to actually walking the ground and not just looking at a map, he discovered that his way was blocked by a vast concrete edifice called ‘The Sludgelode Centre’ sic. This was part multi-storey car park, part multi-storey shopping arcade, and it was absolutely jam-packed with shoppers.

  Yet these shoppers were not, on the evidence of what Bognor could see for himself, shopping for the staff of life. They were shopping for complete Scarpington Thursday football kits; electric pencil sharpeners; magazines with titles like The Complete Countrywoman, Royal Hats, Practical Rollerskating and Tablecloth; orange parakeets; designer jeans; pink tracksuit trousers; Slimeazee Paella Valenciana with brown rice; filofaxes; fairly naughty black knickers and suspender belts with red hearts on them; lopsided mugs which said ‘Holidays make me tipsy’; conventional mugs which said ‘I “heart” Scarpington’; cut-price excursions to Thailand; confetti; PVC aprons covered with advertisements for long-forgotten vinegar-based sauces; brushes for brushing mushrooms; machines for taking the pips out of papayas; individual cocktail-shaker-shaped helpings of Planter’s Punch; postcards of Marilyn Monroe; posters of James Dean; the ‘Complete Jeffrey Archer’; games of Trivial Pursuit.

  The only bread was ‘organically grown wholewheat nut-germ from SelfEmploy Farms of Wendover-on-the-Sludgelode’; the only wine was Peruvian Cabernet or Dandelion and Burdock from the same SelfEmploy Farmers that made the bread (and who appeared to be ‘By Appointment to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales’); the only milk seemed to come from goats.

  Perhaps Bognor was mistaken. Perhaps he only saw what he wanted to see. Perhaps his experiences of Scarpington so far had made him unnaturally jaundiced so that he saw this great demonstration of British affluence through bilious pale yellow spectacles. And wasn’t it, in any case, so much better than the bad old days of the antimacassar factory when the men wore clogs and the only show in town was Scarpington Thursday and ‘’ee son, you queued for a loaf of bread in them days’ and ate it, of course, with a scrape of dripping and no one in the town outside the Castle and the Bishop’s Palace had ever clapped eyes on a fresh grapefruit. Let alone teeth.

  And it was rather wonderful that you could have real waterfalls and fountains, indoors, in the very middle of Scarpington. And it was exciting to be able to look up and see a whole flock of Scarpington geese specially sculpted by a world-famous local sculptor suspended from the magnificent domed glass roof. And when you thought what life had been like only a decade or so ago when the nation had practically ground to a halt and the unions were too big for their boots (or clogs) and the teachers were on strike and the dead lay around unburied because there was no one to work the crematoria, and Britain was ‘the sick man of Europe’, well, it made you think, didn’t it?

  Bognor thought of the Artisans and the Bridge Club and Mouldy Moulton and Nigel Festing and Edna Fothergill and above all Sir Seymour Puce; and a nasty, pseudo-puritanical, self-righteous streak of moral indignation briefly asserted itself. For one reprehensible second he had an attack of the retired majors and found himself saying that maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to bring back national service and the rope and the birch and the cat and ration books and National Health orange juice and, yes, maybe even clogs. And then he shook himself and reminded himself that he had never known poverty, and he had no right, no right at all, and he turned up his coat and hurried on through to the other side.

  Ye Olde Dairy or Ye Olde Milke and Yoghurte Bar was, as he had suspected, a chip off the Sludgelode Centre block. It could equally well have been called ‘Ye Olde Ice Cream Parlour’. It was a riot of chrome and cream, mirrors and high bar stools, and potted ferns. There was a juke box and young men and women in black and white paying their way through Technical College. Bognor was reminded of an Edward Hopper painting, of an image of small-town or suburban America brought across the Atlantic, de-sleazed and given a contemporary Scarpington chic. A year or so ago it might have been as coronary-inducing as Bognor’s hotel breakfast, but in deference to another turn of the fashion dial this was, with a very few exceptions, determinedly healthy and designer lean. Thus ‘Kiwi Shake made with skim milk and low fat yoghurt’, ‘Carrot and Mango Sundae’, ‘Walnut, Carob and Quark Gateau’. In vain did Bognor look for Knickerbocker Glory or Banana Split or Hot Fudge Sundae, though one or two items did have an asterisk by them which turned out to indicate that this particular concoction was made with ‘full fat natural dairy ice cream’. These were not advised for those customers suffering from ‘obesity, high blood pressure or who are in any way allergic to conventional dairy produce.’ The note concluded, ‘If in doubt, consult a doctor’.

  Bognor asked a spotty youth with a shaven head and an earring if Mr Ronald Brown was in. The youth said he would see and who should he say it was. Bognor flashed his ID and thought of breakfast which was not a good idea. He didn’t suppose for a second that Brown had killed either Brackett or Grimaldi, but part of a detective’s job was to eliminate suspects and if he could help the grounded Wartnaby to eliminate the odd Artisan men that was a good thing. Besides which, Brown and his dairy were definitely high on his Board of Trade shopping list. He knew he could expect a serious grilling from Parkinson and Co. on the subject of ‘Trends in the British Dairy Industry: Whither Milk?’

  The youth returned.

  Mr Brown was in a meeting but would not be more than five minutes. If Mr Bognor would like to accept an ice cream or a drink with Mr Brown’s compliments he would be only too happy to assist when his meeting was concluded. Bognor said that he would be happy to wait but not to accept the boss’s hospitality. He never ate between meals. This was a lie but it seemed a polite excuse.

  After ten minutes of sitting on an uncomfortable stool contemplating the depressing menu with its depressing ersatz-enthusiastic way with the English language Bognor was told by the youth that Mr Brown would see him now.

  He was ushered through a mirrored door into an altogether less glitzy atmosphere where there was lino on the floor and no sound but the gentle click of fingers on computer keyboards and the hum and whirr of printers printing. Hi-tech dairy business — a computerised creamery.

  ‘Mr Bognor, welcome to the Cream of the Country’s Dairies.’ Ronald Brown, husband, Bognor could not help thinking, of Dorothy Brown who had scored three in the bridge evening whose card Wartnaby had shown him, rose and shook Bognor’s hand. Three points was only one more, thought Bognor, than poor old Mouldy Moulton and a good six less than Harold Fothergill. He wondered what division Ronald was in.

  ‘Would you care for a Fruitybrown?’ asked Ronald.

  ‘A Fruitybrown?’ said Bognor.

  ‘Nutmeg, cinnamon, molasses, fig or nut,’ said Ronald. ‘All preservative-free set yoghurts with real fruit, nuts, spices or what have you. Cartonned in our brand new plant at Sludgelode Fen. Fruitybrown is the brand leader in the UK short-shelf-life, high-health dairy products market north of the Trent.’

  ‘I see,’ said Bognor. This was grist to Parkinson’s mill, though not perhaps to Wartnaby’s. ‘Which do you recommend?’

  Mr Brown regarded him carefully. ‘You look a bit peaky, if I might say so. If I were you I’d have a Fig Fruitybrown. That’ll set you up.’

  The dairyman pressed a button on a box on his desk and said into it, ‘Maeve. Could you let us have a couple of Fig Fruitybrowns in my office.’ He spoke, Bognor noticed, with an air of confident, if limited, authority. Like Bognor he was funereally dressed, all in black, save for the white shirt front. Even his face, which was slablike and flabby, had a pallor which might have been donned specially for Reg Brackett’s obsequies. He was, Bognor supposed, just the wrong side of fifty. Unremarkable, but a pillar of the community. And of the Artisan Bridge Club.

  ‘Saw you at the game last nigh
t,’ said Ron. ‘Sorry I didn’t have an opportunity to communicate. I was having to entertain two of their big cheese makers. Sir Seymour has persuaded me to take a consignment, though I’m not at all sure it’ll catch on. It’s very high fat and full of caraway seed. Still they are taking a tanker of Fruitybrown in part exchange.’ He sighed. ‘Very poor game. I’ve been watching Thursday, man and boy, for almost half a century. They don’t make them like they used to. You going to poor Reg Brackett’s funeral?’

  Bognor said he was. Ron had presumably realised that Bognor was not normally given to wearing a black tie.

  ‘Poor Reginald.’ Ron looked genuinely distressed. ‘Known him all my life. Very nice man. Very decent, God-fearing, did a tremendous amount for local charities. I remember him dressing up as Father Christmas year after year for the annual Artisan children’s party. He was a surprisingly good Father Christmas for such a shy man. I think sheltering behind the beard did it. A sort of disguise. Gave him confidence. Perhaps if he’d been able to dress up as Father Christmas all the time he’d have enjoyed being President of the Artisans more.’

  ‘He didn’t like it?’ Bognor was surprised. ‘I thought it was the acme of Artisan ambition.’

  The dairy owner looked at him with suspicion. ‘Too shy,’ he said. ‘Every time he had to make a speech in public he had to go and sit in the loo and compose himself. Couldn’t eat his dinner. He didn’t touch his food the other night before he … passed away. Just pushed it round his plate. Muriel didn’t want him to take the presidency on. He’d had heart trouble. In fact there was talk of a by-pass, but they left it too late.’

  ‘Do we know it was a heart attack?’

  Bognor asked it mildly enough, but Ron seemed most disconcerted, though saved by the entrance of Maeve with two cartons of Fig Fruitybrown and a couple of teaspoons.

  Ron’s body language said ‘pas devant les enfants’. Or the staff. So they were silent until Maeve left again; both making a performance of removing the foil lid, plunging the spoon into the creamy brown sludge, and tasting. Bognor identified fig and yoghurt. The overall effect was medicinal but not inedible. There was something encouraging and unusual in eating food which felt as if it was doing you good, and the Fruitybrown had the unexpected effect of buoying him up.