Death in the Opening Chapter Read online

  ‘That’s Blenkinsop’s old regiment, isn’t it?’

  ‘Could be.’ Contractor was right. He nearly always was. It was the main reason he was hired.

  ‘OK. Can you tell me what I’m looking for?’

  ‘I could, but I won’t.’ Bognor smiled and laughed inwardly. If the information he was seeking was there, Contractor would find it. He was damned, though, if he was going to give his subordinate the satisfaction of knowing this. Bad enough to have someone as cocky as Contractor working for him; worse still to encourage him.

  Contractor laughed back. He understood the rules of the game only too well. ‘Your call, boss,’ he said. ‘I’ll get down to Kew and call you back. Remember me to Lady B.’ He laughed again. He and Monica had a good relationship; flirtatious, competitive, but mutually respectful as well. Quite right.

  Actually, Bognor rather liked Harvey Contractor, which those who thought he was more conventional than he actually was might have found peculiar. Sir Branwell, who referred to Harvey, in a faux-jocular way, as ‘Your nig-nog’, affected to find the affection odd, but Bognor was completely without the usual prejudices of middle-class, middle-aged, white English males. He knew that a certain sort of person, usually female, usually shrill, much disliked him because of the way he looked and sounded. He rode with the punches and accepted his appearance, visual and verbal, as a sort of camouflage, which had the effect of concealing his true self from friend and foe alike. This was just as well, not least because Bognor, perversely, preferred the company of his natural enemies. His friends couldn’t begin to understand this, and Bognor reciprocated.

  His was a small department. In the old days, Parkinson had been the crusty old boss and he the thrusting Young Turk. Well, up to a point. Even Bognor saw the humorousness of the idea of him as thrusting young anything. Parkinson was long since retired and dead into the bargain, though the ultimate demise had been quite recent. After the old boy had spent a decently long retirement, he finally died in the fullness of years at home in his slippers. Not a bad way to go: Scotch in hand, together with a half-complete Times crossword.

  Now, it was he who had become the crusty old boss and Contractor the thrusting Young Turk. There was no one else of serious substance. SIDBOT had always been a girl of slender means; a lean outfit; a small streamlined organization which habitually punched above its weight. This irritated smarter, bigger departments, which often found themselves out-thought and outmanoeuvred.

  He sighed and felt briefly smug. The sense of self-satisfaction did not persist, alas, for he felt too much like a good deed in a naughty world, and he firmly believed that, while his was a model department, this meant that there were many other departments which were pretty grim. Life itself was pretty grim, but maybe that was another matter. He took a Hobbesian view of human existence, even though he personally had rather enjoyed what he was increasingly aware had to be thought of in the past tense. He was often asked to accept that his meaningful life was over, and even though he contested this view robustly, he was forced to recognize that there was some truth in it. Retirement was looming; he had collected his bus pass; he was soon to be a pensioner. But that didn’t mean he had given up, even if he was forced to accept that he was now an old man in a hurry.

  Plenty of time, though, for some final flourishes, and now that he had got his gong, now that he was running an office, he felt unshackled. He still had time for dishing out surprises and even producing some bloody noses. This he enjoyed, and in young Contractor, he believed he had a willing and able accomplice.

  ‘Anything else, boss?’ his subordinate asked.

  Bognor said there wasn’t anything else. Contractor hadn’t finished though. ‘From where I sit, it looks as if the vicar killed himself,’ he said. ‘Anyway, you’ll never prove anything else. If I were you, I’d enjoy the show. They say Allgood talks a better book than he writes. Which wouldn’t be difficult.’

  ‘I’ve heard that too,’ said Bognor. ‘In fact, I’m seeing him again any minute. I missed his session this morning. Talking to the widow, instead. Heavy going.’

  ‘Tough shit,’ said Contractor with a definite note of irony. Talking to widows was part of the job. It went with the territory. If you didn’t like it, then you should shuffle papers around like most civil servants in Whitehall.

  ‘I’ll look forward to your call,’ said Bognor, more or less meaning it. He put the phone down. He supposed he should use his mobile more and master texting. However, he didn’t care for the contraption and had been brought up to believe that a man should always be master of his machines. He was afraid that mobiles were gaining the upper hand, which was why he stuck to old-fashioned landlines wherever possible. He believed, probably wrongly, that where they were concerned, he was in charge.

  He hated mobiles almost as much as he hated laptops but needs must. He told very few people his mobile number and even pretended to various interested parties that he disbelieved in them so bitterly that he did not own one. He liked the sort of telephone you wound up. His idea of a proper number was single figures and an exchange with letters like Juniper or Flaxman. He had a natural aversion to numbers and was in many ways a Luddite. He hankered after ink and a fountain pen even if he drew the line at a quill.

  Now that he was nearing retirement, he worried more and more about the verdict of others, and especially of the Almighty and his minions. Because of his new ‘K’ and his position as boss of SIDBOT, he would qualify for obituaries in papers of what used to be called ‘record’. The Times, for instance. He did not wish to be the victim of simpering damnation with faint press. However, he very much suspected that he knew the identity of the principle author in that organ and he feared the worst. Never mind. He would be gone, and he doubted very much whether Murdoch papers were delivered wherever he was going. Monica would be cross though. He wanted young Contractor to write the signed piece in the Independent, which was his sort of thing, but the way things were going there would be no Independent by the time he snuffed it. It was a race to the death, and were he a betting man, he would put money on his own chances of winning this particular race. There was no handicap that he was aware of.

  He didn’t believe in God, nor heaven, hell or purgatory, but that didn’t stop him hedging his bets with a dose of agnosticism, nor from speculating about the quality of his reception at the pearly gates. He didn’t think he had much time for St Peter anyway, and definitely believed that you got a better class of person in hell. On the other hand, he had seen enough Hieronymus Bosch in Bruges to feel apprehensive about the underworld – too much toasting fork and boiling oil, and not enough reading the Sporting Life over a pink gin.

  He had a nasty feeling that St Peter would be patronizing. ‘All those talents we gave you and you ended up with a measly “K” and an insignificant office in Whitehall,’ the old saint would say, shaking his head and making notes with his quill. Bognor hated being patronized, especially by those such as Saint Peter, whom he regarded as his inferiors in almost every important respect. I mean, how many GCEs did St Peter hold? Had he ever passed a driving test? Just because he was once Bishop of Rome and a martyr. No justice. Had he, Bognor, been St Peter, he’d have made a much better fist of things. Instead of which, he was going to rot in hell.

  Oh, well. He wondered if the Reverend Sebastian was rotting in hell, or merely stewing gently in purgatory, before the pearly gates rolled back and he ascended some frothy white biliousness. On balance, he’d rather be down under with Groucho Marx than on cloud nine with the Reverend Sebastian. Did suicides qualify for heaven? Would the Almighty accept his findings? He doubted it.

  It seemed highly probable that Allgood had been being hypothetical. Unless he had somehow been privy to a publisher’s slush pile, there was no way in which he could possibly have known that the priest was keen to be printed. The sudden, mildly mysterious, death was grist to the literary lecturer’s mill. A slight exaggeration, a reasonable scintilla of doubt, these were allowable ingredients if i
t helped him concoct a good story. There was a maxim about never letting the facts interfere with such a thing, and Bognor would lay heavy odds that Martin Allgood subscribed to it. He would, wouldn’t he?

  He had to accept, reluctantly, that if he were able to prove that the late vicar was murdered, he would receive no thanks. He would obviously get no thanks from the guilty party; none from the deceased or his family; nothing but opprobrium from the Fludds and others. Not for the first time, he was out on his own; on a limb which was in imminent danger of breaking and rendering him at best ridiculous, and at worst a bit of a pest. Sir Branwell and Camilla would forgive him; Monica and little Contractor would be quietly pleased. It would cut no ice with St Peter, nor the Fellows of Apocrypha College, whom he was always seeking to please. He wondered why he had chosen such an unpopular path in life. Not vocation certainly. Just human error.

  He sighed again. In a quiet way, he was afraid he believed in right and wrong. His idea of tidiness was not the same as other peoples. It was the rest of the world that was out of step. That was his core belief and it sustained him. The rest of the world disagreed, but it knew, too, that they marched to a different tune.

  Which was why he had to go and have further talks with little Allgood, and sort out the new loose ends the writer had exposed. He would not be thanked for it; it would lead nowhere; but it still had to be done.

  TWENTY-THREE

  No one liked Martin Allgood. This mattered comparatively little, since you weren’t supposed to like Martin Allgood and he worked hard at making affection a matter of indifference to him. In this, he nearly always succeeded. Contractor obviously didn’t care for Allgood, but he was too professional to let this interfere with his report.

  Allgood had always been unpopular. In fact, it was virtually his stock-in-trade. At school he had been the school swot, pimpled with acne. School, according to the file, was a grammar school somewhere in Essex. Bognor was very bad at the geography of that county, though he shared the popular prejudice against it. He thought of the county – wrongly of course – as an urban sprawl dominated by Epping Forest, Leyton Orient Football Club and boxers training in Tudorbethan pubs, watched by criminals of a certain age in vicuña overcoats, which they didn’t remove even in oppressive heat. Males from Essex did not remove their hats indoors, and once you had made a few million you smoked large Havanas, lived in a gated community and made champagne cocktails with Dom Perignon and good cognac. It did not matter that Essex was not like that, nor that Allgood was in any way typical. Essex was not Essex, and Allgood was a one-off.

  After grammar school, Allgood had been to the local university where he read sociology and got a very good degree. At about this time, Allgood had his first and only book published. This was called, with a mock-genuflection in the direction of Charles Dickens and a rare modesty, Minimal Expectations. What about Rubbish? Fact or fiction? Or a mixture of both? Or a prose poem? Or a novella? No one seemed quite sure, but it had earned Allgood a place on the ‘Goodbooks’ list of ‘Twenty-Five Best Young British Novelists’, and the undying hatred of all good men and true. The comparatively few words of Minimal Expectations were arguably the last Allgood wrote, or at least, the last which were issued between hard covers.

  He remained, to the world at large, a writer of almost infinite promise. The tabloids hung on his every word; his opinions sought; and his views earned golden opinions and fat fees. He had a view on everything and everyone, and many people despised him for obvious reasons.

  Bognor was happy to be among those who disliked the idea of Allgood, but he was the first to acknowledge that this didn’t make him a murderer. He was unpleasant enough, certainly, but Bognor knew this wasn’t enough in itself. Opportunity? Well, yes. Motive? Motive would have to be mildly abstract, because there was no evidence that Allgood and Sebastian had ever met. On the other hand, Allgood was an atheist, a paid-up member of the Dawkins’ camp. However, he had none of Dawkins’ Balliol-bred tolerance and understanding, but was on the extreme wing of the atheist tendency. He made common ground with the sort of animal lover who hated humans, and was happy to trash laboratories and kill those who worked for him. In the case of Allgood, churches were fair game and so were vicars.

  He found little Allgood in the garden of the Two by Two, aka the Fludd Arms. He was smoking what would once have been called a ‘gasper’, and which seemed the most apposite word for the thin, self-rolled cigarette which was stuck to his lower lip. He had on corduroy bags and an open-necked shirt with a sleeveless pullover, and in front of him was a glass of vivid pink liquid, which was bubbling away like a hookah. The on dit was that Allgood drank. Despite the sun, which was bright, it was chilly. The author looked as if he should have been wearing a floppy bow-tie, but a tie would have interfered with his overall appearance, which was deliberately dishevelled. Almost poetic; certainly raffish. The drink should have been absinthe.

  ‘I’m sorry I missed you,’ said Bognor. ‘I’m told you were very good, but duty called.’

  ‘Sorry about that. Quite understand though. Business before pleasure and all that rot, though I have to say that the older I get, the more I come to believe that nothing should ever get in the way of pleasure. Certainly, nothing as vulgar as business. Can I get you a tincture?’

  Bognor wondered why everyone suddenly seemed to be talking funny. He felt as if he were in the Americas or Down Under. The natives spoke a form of English but it wasn’t quite the same. He guessed it was not Allgood’s first pink drink of the day. Nor would it be his last.

  ‘Thank you, but no,’ he said, aware that he sounded prim, as if he never touched the stuff himself. ‘I won’t keep you a moment.’

  ‘Take a pew though,’ said Allgood, patting the seat of the chair alongside him invitingly. It was stylish yet comfortable, made of some kind of thatch, probably worth a fortune. Bognor did as he was bade and sat.

  ‘A young black man came up to me in the supermarket the other day . . . I practically embraced him,’ said Allgood unexpectedly. Bognor did not know what to say, but looked nonplussed, which he was.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Allgood, ‘Joanna Trollope talking on TV. I caught it by mistake and have been knocking it around in case I can think of something.’

  ‘You writing something?’ asked Bognor. It seemed a sensible, pleasant conversational gambit.

  ‘Nah,’ said Allgood. ‘Not really. Not books. That’s a mug’s game.’

  ‘What, then?’ Bognor was genuinely curious. He had Allgood down as a writer of books. A novelist. ‘Fiction? Fact?’

  ‘Bit of both,’ said Allgood. ‘I remember years ago, a poet saying he couldn’t write anything for some literary magazine because he couldn’t afford to. Also, it would jeopardize his reputation as someone who had real trouble grappling with his daemons and fighting the dreaded block. If he published, he might lose his grant from the Arts Council and the local authority; might get fewer gigs. Might be regarded as, you know, commercial. He’d be thought popular. In the mainstream. Fatal. Should have realized at the time.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Bognor, ‘you’ve lost me.’

  ‘I’m famous as a novelist,’ explained Allgood, talking as if to a small child, ‘but it’s much more lucrative to do things like this.’ He smiled and waved around in an expansive manner. ‘Not to mention fun.’

  As if on cue, Vicenza Book entered left and sat down at their table. She looked as if she had just got out of bed, smiled and nodded at Bognor, and kissed the novelist proprietorially on the lips. ‘Hi, sweetie,’ she said, giving every impression of being the female half of an item.

  Nothing much surprised Bognor any more, but he felt obliged to say, ‘I thought you had a publicist with you? Tracey or something?’

  Allgood thought for a moment. ‘You’re right,’ he said, after a while. ‘She had to go back to London. Vicenza here has stepped into her breach, as it were.’ He laughed. ‘Haven’t you, darling?’

  Vicenza simpered, and Bognor had vague thoughts of ki
lling two birds with a single stone. He was impossibly old-fashioned. Time he retired. But even so.

  ‘You’re saying you’ve retired from writing books?’

  ‘You could say I’ve become more of a performance artist,’ he said. ‘Lot easier. Better paid. More kudos.’

  ‘So, the talk this morning . . . that sort of thing is now your bread and butter.’

  Allgood seemed to give this too some thought. Eventually, he said, ‘Yah,’ and lapsed into silence. Vicenza ordered a glass of the pink drink from a passing waiter. It was Campari and orange. Bognor, on duty, asked for a double espresso.

  ‘But the Reverend Sebastian wanted to be a writer,’ ventured Bognor. ‘Ended up on the slush pile. Felt rejected. Became depressed. Took his own life as a result.’

  ‘Did he?’ asked Allgood. ‘Fancy.’

  ‘You’re the one who said it. This morning. In your talk.’

  ‘Did I?’ Allgood might have been considering a completely different third party. ‘How odd. Did I have any evidence?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Bognor, feeling as if he were getting out of his depth and had no water-wings. ‘Do you? Did you?’

  ‘Pass,’ he said, and then turned to Vicenza. ‘What do you think, darling?’

  ‘Dunno,’ she said, ‘I wasn’t there. Still sleeping it off.’

  She simpered, leaving no one in any doubt what she meant by ‘it’. She was the ‘it’ girl of Mallborne, a bicycle soprano.

  ‘Natch,’ said Allgood. ‘Who said I said he wrote a book?’

  ‘Your audience,’ said Bognor. ‘They seemed to think you had inside knowledge.’

  ‘Not me,’ said the non-novelist. ‘If I seemed to suggest such a thing, I must have been talking hypothetically. Writers these days blur the edges between fact and fiction, in speech as well as on the page. I suppose it depends what you mean by truth.’