Death in the Opening Chapter Read online

  ‘Yes,’ said Bognor, feeling as if he were nearing home turf. The nature of truth was the sort of concept with which he was familiar. Truth, justice, right and wrong – these were the tools of his trade. His stock.

  ‘I sometimes feel,’ said Allgood, ‘that if you believe something sufficiently strongly, it assumes its own truth. It may be false, but it’s not because that’s not what you believe. Maybe I believe the reverend wrote a book. For me, that becomes a truth, even if it’s not shared. You may not accept what I say, and the Reverend Sebastian may not actually have put pen to paper. But that doesn’t invalidate my belief, nor my constructing a theory around that belief, even though the theory is based on sand. It’s my belief that’s important, not the actuality. Do I make myself clear?’

  ‘Not really,’ said Bognor, who was groping.

  ‘Too deep for me,’ said Vicenza. ‘Not that I care much.’ And she laughed throatily, like one who smoked.

  ‘It’s quite simple,’ said Allgood. ‘All I’m saying is that truth is relative. Most people think it’s an absolute, but I don’t agree. Apart from anything, it’s fantastically restricting. Once you accept that it’s a question of degree, it opens up any number of possibilities.’

  ‘You can’t expect me to think that,’ protested Bognor. ‘My whole job is predicated on the basis that the world is black and white, and there is such a thing as right and wrong, guilty and innocent. I am charged with seeking out criminals and bringing them to what we call justice.’

  ‘I’m glad you entered the caveat,’ said Allgood. ‘At least you appear to be capable of understanding that in real life things aren’t quite as simple as they have to be in your career.’

  ‘I question which of us is living in “real life”,’ said Bognor. ‘Mine feels pretty real to me.’

  ‘Touché,’ said Allgood. ‘Mine, likewise. Which just goes to prove the point I’m making. I’m not disparaging your reality, which is real for you; but mine is real for me too. And you should respect it.’

  ‘Except,’ said Bognor, ‘when you try to proselytize. You’re entitled to a skewed view of what’s real, provided you keep it to yourself and don’t try to inflict it on other people. You know perfectly well that your view of what happened to the Reverend Sebastian is, in our terms, a pure fabrication, but you tried to pretend that it was real in terms that my friends, your audience, understood.’

  ‘Now you’re being duplicitous,’ said Allgood. ‘I was arguing hypothetically, in your terms. I never pretended otherwise.’

  ‘That’s not my understanding,’ said Bognor. ‘Did Sebastian write a book? Did he submit it to publishers? Was it rejected?’

  Allgood appeared to give this some thought, but when he came up with an answer it was as infuriating as Bognor had feared. It also took little or no account of what he had said hitherto.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘maybe not.’

  It was the sort of response an Apocrypha don would have produced in one of those infuriating tutorials which had nothing to do with the subject you were supposed to be studying, and everything to do with teaching you dialectic and the art of argument. Monica hated it, even though her own college had practised much the same.

  ‘Did the vicar write a book?’

  A long silence. Eventually, Allgood said, ‘Not in the sense that would stand up in a court of law. I think he could perfectly well have written one, though. And if he had, he would have suffered serial rejections which would have undermined what was, by all accounts, a flimsy sense of self-confidence and self-worth. So, what I said makes perfect sense.’

  ‘But it’s a fiction,’ said Bognor, angrily.

  ‘That’s what I deal in,’ said Allgood evenly, ‘and there is a sense in which my fiction is truer than your fact, wouldn’t you agree?’

  ‘That’s not the point, as well you know.’

  ‘Oh, but I think it is,’ said Allgood. ‘Life is too literal. Actually, it’s a lot more interesting than plods like you make out.’

  Bognor resented being described as a ‘plod’, but refused to rise and said nothing. He could do metaphysics but not professionally. Work was rooted in life and death, just as he believed that books should have beginnings and middles and ends, and anchovies helped out beef casseroles.

  ‘I don’t have a problem staying interested,’ he said, ‘and in the world I live in, a stiff is a stiff is a stiff, and it’s my job to see how and why a once breathing human can have reached that sorry state. As the meerkat says “simples”. It is too. And quite interesting enough, without injecting hypotheticals.’

  ‘You would say that, wouldn’t you?’ said Allgood. ‘It’s a point of view. Not one I happen to share, but a point of view nonetheless. I respect it. I just wish you’d do the same for mine.’

  Bognor was exasperated.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but I have a job to do. I don’t have the luxury of being able to fantasize. Boring old black and white. Tiresome. Limiting. Not as good as writing a book, much less talking about it. But it’s what I do. So, can you just tell me. Did the late vicar write a book? Did he submit it to one or more publishers? Was it rejected?’

  ‘No,’ said Allgood. ‘Not in so many words. Not literally. Not as far as I know. It’s possible but I have no proof. As you’d describe it.’

  ‘So, you’ve been wasting my time?’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it like that,’ said Allgood, ‘but you said it.’

  ‘I could charge you with wasting official time,’ said Bognor pompously, ‘but I’ll let you off with a warning.’

  ‘Thank you, I’m sure’, said the novelist. ‘I’d prefer to think that we look at things in a different way. You see black and white and I see grey. I believe in murk, you believe in clarity. Different.’

  Bognor reflected that Allgood could be right.

  ‘Anything I can do, just let me know,’ said Vicenza Book. She looked pert and tousled.

  ‘Likewise,’ said Allgood.

  They raised their glasses.

  Bognor wished life was so simple. He exited left.

  Perhaps life and death were naturally murky, and his efforts to make them otherwise were necessarily doomed to failure.

  Pity.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  There was a convention involving butlers, but Bognor was damned if he could remember what it was. This may have had something to do with the diminishing number of butlers, who were a dying breed, even if one included the ersatz butlers employed by a certain sort of celebrity hotel in such places as Dubai. Or it may have had to do with Bognor’s natural forgetfulness, or his belief that neither conventions nor butlers mattered much. Either the butler dunnit or he hadn’t. He was either the most suspicious character or the least. Whatever, he had to be interviewed, together with his wife, who in this case, did.

  These were their alibis for the time of death: Brandon was buttling and his wife doing. Sir Branwell, Lady Fludd and the Bognors themselves were there to corroborate. They may not have actually been present, but they were at the end of a bell-pull. To have nipped off to church and done the necessary would have involved a completely unacceptable risk. And the Brandons, as was the way Bognor suspected with butlers and doers, were not among the nation’s risk-takers.

  It was sometimes assumed that people such as the Brandons no longer existed.

  Not true.

  Within living memory, well almost within living memory, the Fludds of Mallborne would have employed large numbers of servants, of whom Mr and Mrs Brandon would have been the most important. Before the two socially levelling world wars, the manor would have boasted squads of lower orders, living as a sort of alternative household behind the green baize doors, much in the manner of the household made famous by the TV programme Upstairs, Downstairs in the 1970s. Even quite modest middle-class households would have had a couple of servants who cooked, served, drove and generally performed menial tasks for those upstairs.

  People like them were the staples of golden age crime fiction,
together with simpering clerics, blustering squires, long-winded lawyers, doctors who did regular ‘rounds’ (sometimes even on horseback) and all the other denizens of a society who knew their place and conformed to type. This world was often thought to have vanished, but it still clung on in places such as Mallborne. It was much diminished, unfashionable, unknown even to the journalists and others who sought to present a picture of contemporary life. But its fall from grace did not mean that this world had vanished. It still clung on.

  Perhaps it was a vanishing age, but it was not yet gone, and the Bognors were privy to it. Or, at least, to a part of it. They knew they were lucky and that their friends, Sir Branwell and Camilla, were immensely privileged. It was incorrect, wrong, feudal, but if you were on the right side, definite fun.

  The Brandons were on the wrong side of it – below the salt and on the distaff side of the green baize. This too was deceptive, for there was a real sense in which the Brandons ran the show. He was the regimental sergeant major while Sir Branwell was the ensign or second lieutenant. The baronet had breeding but was wet behind the ears; he carried a sword while RSM Brandon had only a pacing stick, silver-headed; the little officer dined in a smart mess; the sergeant-major presided over a rougher, less gilded institution. Yet, without the Brandons of this world, the army would cease to be. If Sir Branwell were abolished, no one would notice.

  There was a paradox here, and its dying did not make it any less of a paradox. In a classless society, where Jack was as good as his master, there were few nuances and complexities. The old society was unfair, sometimes criminally so, but it was satisfyingly full of contradictions. One, possibly the most obvious, was that those who seemed to be in charge, were actually little more than figureheads. Jack was better than his master, but the charade was the reverse. The truth was that the true bosses were those who seemed to be bossed, but the truth was not to be acknowledged. The Sir Branwells of this world were perceived to be the monarchs of all they surveyed, and yet the reality was that those such as Brandon and his wife, who bowed and curtsied, tugged at their forelocks and were kept ruthlessly in place, were actually the masters now, and always had been.

  ‘You can drop the “sir”, Brandon,’ said Bognor, who, by dint of his education, his association with Sir Branwell and, above all, his ‘K’, was ‘officer class’. He smiled, patronizingly. ‘There are no witnesses. And I don’t hold with that sort of thing. So just relax. Call me Simon.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Brandon. Then aware of Bognor’s incredulous reaction, he stammered something more egalitarian, along the lines of ‘Simon . . . er . . . Mr Bognor . . . er . . . Sir Simon.’

  Bognor, not particularly a stickler for modes of address and correct procedure, was embarrassed, and for almost the first time, thought that perhaps his new knighthood had merit if only when it came to ease of address. At least one knew where one was He had never had a problem with the head cheese at Apocrypha being constantly addressed as ‘master’. There was even, he supposed, something to be said for ‘sir’, if only on the grounds that it disguised ‘amnesia’. He had known people who called everyone ‘Sonny’ or ‘Darling’, or even ‘Fred’, when they were unable to remember someone’s real name. In that sense, maybe ‘sir’ was no worse. It carried unfortunate undertones of obsequiousness and deference, but it had its all-purpose uses.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Brandon, opting out of the problem altogether – as most people, in Bognor’s anecdotal observation, usually did. ‘It’s ingrained, I’m afraid. Also, I have to say that I have a better relationship with the boss than any number of the young, who wouldn’t dream of calling anyone by anything other than their Christian name.’

  ‘Unless it were “mate”!’ said Mrs Brandon-who-did, and who must have been born with a forename, but seemed to have acquired a status without one, just as governesses and housekeepers were accorded the mythical status of ‘Mrs’, whether married or not.

  Bognor was afraid he was becoming sidetracked and bogged down in stuff which had nothing to do with murder. Well, maybe it did. Lese padre. Maybe parishioners had become overfamiliar, or, on the other hand, not familiar enough. And before he could help himself, he found himself asking, ‘Did you call the Reverend Sebastian, “sir”?’

  This was obviously not a question either of the servants had been asked before, and it seemed to take them by surprise.

  ‘The thing about vicars,’ said Brandon eventually, and obviously speaking for both of them, ‘is that he has a title and one therefore usually called him “vicar”. If not, then I suppose, yes, we addressed him as “sir”, but remember he was a Fludd and that made a difference.’

  Bognor had forgotten that the reverend was not just a man of God, but also a Fludd, which in the local order of preference counted for rather more. He was reminded of the Cabots and their ilk in Boston, and could perfectly well understand that in the context of Mallborne and its environs, it was better to be a Fludd than a god. Presumably, a butler who worked for the senior living Fludd was superior to a mere vicar who worked for God. But he was not going down that peculiarly English path.

  ‘Would you say you knew the vicar well?’ he asked, and was rewarded once again by the appearance of original thought. This was gratifying, almost as if he had asked an original question.

  ‘Difficult to say, sir,’ answered Brandon after a silence. ‘You see he was our vicar.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Bognor. ‘I mean, absolutely.’

  There was a pause. Awkward.

  Bognor broke it.

  ‘Would you say you and Mrs Brandon were churchgoers? C of E? Know what I mean?’

  ‘The missus and I are Methodists,’ said Brandon, ‘born and bred. But, of course, there’s no Methodist Church in Mallborne, and once we entered service with Sir Branwell’s father, God bless the colonel, we sort of became C of E like everyone else.’

  ‘I quite understand,’ said Bognor. He did too. The Church of England was that sort of religion. A matter of social convenience, as much as a true church with one foundation. If it had a foundation, it had more to do with what sort of newspaper one read, how one voted, and whether one dressed up to attend, than with true religion. True religion in the C of E was in short supply, and many who adhered to it, believed it was better that way.

  ‘So, basically, you saw the Reverend Sebastian once a week in church?’

  ‘And when he and Mrs Fludd came for sherry.’

  This was Mrs Brandon. She had spoken. Bognor had the definite impression that while her husband did most of the talking, it was she who did most of the thinking.

  ‘Did they often come for sherry?’

  ‘Usually after matins. Mainly on high days and holy days.’ This was Brandon, back in his accustomed speaking role.

  ‘So, you really only saw the vicar in his official capacity?’

  ‘I suppose so. You could say that the sherry was semi-official. But it was duty sherry. Not a lot of fun.’

  The Brandons managed a wintry smile.

  ‘And Mrs Fludd? The rector’s wife.’

  ‘She sang in the choir,’ said Brandon. ‘Soprano. Not very good. We called her the red-faced warbler. Not as good as she thought she was. She thought she was quite special. Led to even more friction with the barmaid’s daughter. She’s here this year, calling herself Vicenza Book. Not what we called her when she lived here. But she can sing, I’ll give her that. Mrs Brandon and I know a bit about singing. Got all the Tenors on DVD, and Bryn Terfel. She was good. Mrs Fludd wasn’t. Not her fault.’

  He stopped suddenly. He had obviously said too much. Or thought he had.

  ‘So your relations with the deceased and his wife were formal, correct, but slightly distant.’

  The Brandons thought for a moment.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Brandon, speaking as usual, for both. ‘You could say that. Nothing against the gentleman. Nor Mrs Fludd. But we weren’t what you’d call, intimate.’

  ‘I see,’ said Bognor, thinking that people like the Bra
ndons were the wise monkeys of the situation. They saw loads; heard a great deal; talked among themselves. But they were not part of the action. Dispassionate observers. Well, uninvolved observers. Worth plugging into, but not themselves, of the party, and therefore above – or below – suspicion.

  ‘Any theories?’ he asked, with assumed casualness.

  Brandon seemed startled, as if he had been asked something improper, as indeed he had.

  ‘Certainly not,’ he said, seeming affronted and managing to convey the idea that it was a question that should never have been asked, much less answered.

  Bognor felt quelled.

  ‘I just wondered,’ he said, blustering, ‘if you had any theories about how the vicar met his end. I understand that you two know an awful lot about what goes on in Mallborne and I just wondered whether—’

  The butler cut in.

  ‘Will that be all, sir?’ he asked, just as generation upon generation of his ancestors must have asked people such as himself. It was not a question at all, being more of a rebuke. It was a reminder, above all, that while things might appear to change, they didn’t, in reality, change nearly as much as some people would have you believe. A certain sort of person knew as much, or more, as anyone; a certain sort of person knew his place, but his apparent place belied reality; a certain sort of person was in charge. Such a person now stood before him, and behind him stood the inevitable wife who, as always, in, what Bognor was increasingly inclined to accept was the battle of the sexes, wore the trousers.

  He felt suitably small and much reduced; but he knew his place. The Brandons knew theirs too, and, in this instance, they were, like it or not, above the fray. And they were keeping their counsel, no matter who asked them to say what they knew.

  It was ever thus.

  Difficult, unfashionable, but true.

  He had a call from Harvey Contractor in indecently quick time. Harvey was always in indecently quick time. He was also precise and accurate, and did as he was asked, plus some. Bognor was lucky to have him. The Board of Trade, even more so.