Blue Blood Will Out (The Simon Bognor Mysteries) Page 17

  ‘She’s not his mistress, he’s as queer as a coot.’

  ‘One of the many troubles with you, Bognor, is that you’re so bloody naive. What makes you so certain he’s queer?’

  Bognor told him and Parkinson dismissed it immediately as lascivious speculation. He banged the table. ‘I want facts,’ he said repeatedly. At last when he had recovered, he said, quite calmly, ‘I am afraid I’m now going to have to do something I should have done a long time ago. Take you off this assignment and suspend you pending a decision. I just can’t take much more.’

  Bognor sucked his teeth. He had been half expecting something like this and decided to take a risk. ‘Will you give me one more chance?’

  ‘No. You’ve had dozens of one more chances. No more.’

  ‘It will take less than five minutes.’

  ‘What is it?’

  Bognor told him and made as if to leave, but Parkinson pushed the telephone across the desk to him.

  ‘Do it here. I want to hear it direct from him. No cheating.’

  Bognor dialled Smith’s number. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Listen, don’t ask me any questions. This is vital, can you tell us exactly where Grithbrice and Lydeard are?’

  There was a pause before Smith replied. Then he said, ‘You’re on to something, aren’t you? I only heard this morning. Grithbrice is spending a couple of days with the Lydeards in Somerset.’

  ‘Aha,’ said Bognor triumphantly. ‘Would you mind repeating that to my superior who is sitting opposite.’ He passed the receiver across to Parkinson and silently congratulated Cosmo Green. Green had been right. That was the only explanation. There would be a third murder any time now. The only question remaining was who would murder whom. He was lost in this speculation when he realized that Parkinson was talking to him again.

  ‘You win, Bognor,’ he said, ‘but this really is the last time. You have until noon tomorrow.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked, and was rewarded with a flat resigned stare and a shrug.

  ‘Make the most of your last few hours,’ he said. ‘Do what you bloody like. Just stay away from me.’

  Bognor returned to his desk, elated. Adrenalin was beginning to flow and he felt a sense of challenge and of impending solution. The murderer was going to reveal himself at Lydeard within hours. Of that he was now certain, though he recognized, with a twinge of doubt, that his intuition was notoriously fickle. He hummed a few bars of Handel and went to the library for the Lydeard number, returned, dialled, and spoke to the Marquess.

  ‘Aha,’ said the Marquess. ‘Expect you want to come and have a bit of a jaw with the Grithbrice bounder and his floozie.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Bognor recognized that this was a useful passport to an invitation.

  ‘Sound thinking. Good place to get the truth out of him down here. We’re very quiet. You can use the library. Look forward to seeing you. Driving down? Good. I’ll tell Dot to have a bed made up.’

  Unlike Abney House and McCrum Castle there was nothing Victorian about Lydeard. The ‘New building’ was a cloistered courtyard to the rear, which was the work of James Wyatt at the end of the eighteenth century. Since then no Lydeard had had the cash or the inclination to add further. Bognor arrived in the watery sun of the afternoon, driving slowly through the park behind a coach from Shepton Mallet, which appeared to contain a Women’s Institute. The sky was cloudless, and so pale that it might have come from one of the Canalettos for which the place was famous. To the north, the red and green checks of the Quantock hills faded into woodland and then bare grass, gorse and heather at their summits. All around the winding drive there were vast oaks and elms sloping away to a reedy lake, built, not by Capability Brown as one might have expected, but by a Marquess of Lydeard who had been at landscape gardening while Brown was still a child.

  Bognor changed down a gear as the Women’s Institute slowed to 5 m.p.h., gazing west to the great maze of Lydeard, rivalled in Britain only by Hampton Court and, in modern times, perhaps, by Michael Ayrton’s creation for Mr. Armand G. Erpf in the Catskill mountains. Then a further bend in the drive, a rattle over a cattle grid which crossed the ha-ha, separating park from formal garden, and they could see the house. It was his first visit and he was entranced. It had, he conceded, none of the formal correctness of most of the French chateaux, but a rambling unity instead. Almost every century and every Lydeard had added a little, even if it was only a door or a window, and the resulting meld was a family history in brick, stone and mortar. Any cracks were papered over with jasmine and honeysuckle and climbing roses and a huge purple wistaria which, Bognor dimly recalled, was claimed as the oldest in England. Under this foliage the house showed a grey yellow for the stone, and a mellow red Somerset brick for the eighteenth- and seventeenth-century portions.

  It lacked ostentation, but three kings of England had visited here and Monmouth, on his way to the disaster of Sedgemoor, had slept in the great bedroom. Later Judge Jeffreys had returned and hanged one John Lydeard and forty of his men from gibbets at the lodge gates. Cromwell had taken it earlier and many, many years later it had been used in the Second World War for a purpose which even now was not disclosed. Peter Lydeard, the hero of the Elizabethan House of Commons; Raleigh’s friend, Sir Percy Lydeard; Aylmer Lydeard, the Romantic poet; Gertrude Lydeard, reputed mistress both of Palmerston and Prince Albert; and Arthur Lydeard, the penal reformer; all had been born and lived here, along with the innumerable Lydeards who had fought in England’s wars and administered England’s colonies or who, more often than not, had sat in Somerset and watched the cider apples grow.

  The coach from Shepton Mallet turned down a track to the coach park, which was in full view of the house and on lawn which previous parkers had turned red-brown with their slipping tyres. An ice-cream tent flapped gently in the breeze and effectively ruined the sublime view of the park and lake; and a new pine structure, which said ‘Drivers’ on the door, blocked off the view of the west front. A signpost, the only one Bognor could see, directed the public to bison, lavatories, house and picture gallery in four completely different typefaces and the gardens seemed to be totally covered with a thin film of litter. It seemed, to Bognor, a high price to pay for the privilege of living at Lydeard and with a little shiver he wondered if, in a similar position, he too might be driven to murder.

  There was a peeling board, signed ‘Private’, at the north corner of the house and he drove instinctively towards it and round until he came to a small yard in which were parked a rusty Ford Escort and the old Lagonda which he had read about in Lydeard’s file. It was a magnificent object in racing green with a running board wide enough for two abreast, headlamps the size of regimental soup tureens and two wide leather straps holding down the bonnet. He parked immediately behind it and went to the back door. There was no bell and he knocked. There was no answer, and he was just wondering whether he should walk round to the public part of the house and ask for directions when a female voice behind him said: ‘I am sorry. We weren’t expecting you so early. Albert and Ethel have taken the afternoon off to go to the cinema in Taunton.’

  He turned and saw a woman of about sixty, carrying a wooden trug, full of freshly cut roses. She was wearing earth-soiled leather gloves and had a pair of secateurs in her other hand. ‘Hello,’ she said, ‘I’m Dot Lydeard. I was just getting some flowers for your room. Smell that.’ She thrust the wooden basket at Bognor’s nose and smiled. ‘Gorgeous,’ she said, ‘I think we may be in for a bit of luck with them this year.’ She had, Bognor noticed, very soft grey eyes, and although her face was lined all the lines were in the right places, indicating laughter and sympathy. ‘Come on in,’ she said, elbowing the door open, and kicking off her gumboots immediately inside, in the vague direction of a pile of old shoes and tennis rackets. She took off the gloves and her shapeless felt hat and brushed herself down purposefully.

  ‘That’s better,’ she said. ‘Would you like a cup of tea or shall I show you your room? It�
�s all a bit makeshift at the moment, until the servants come back from the cinema. I told Basil to put you off till tomorrow but he said it was urgent. I’d have asked the staff to stay but they always have this afternoon off, so we’ll just have to rough it till they get back.’

  She led the way into a kitchen, which was enormous, dominated by a solid fuel Aga cooker and hung about with very old copper saucepans, strings of onions and garlic and a bunch of recently assassinated wood pigeons.

  ‘I suppose I shall have to do those,’ she said, pulling a face. ‘Such a mess.’ She walked briskly to a canister marked ‘Tea’, looked inside it and sniffed. ‘Do you mind servant’s tea?’ she asked. ‘In other words, Indian and rather black. I’m afraid we don’t seem to have any China.’

  ‘No, that would be very nice, Lady Lydeard.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ she said. ‘Even the grocer calls me Lady Dot. Everyone calls me Dot. You’re Simon, aren’t you? You don’t mind being called Simon, do you?’

  ‘Not in the least, I’d be very pleased.’

  She poured water into a heavy black kettle and put it on the stove.

  ‘Basil tells me that you have a fiancée called Monica,’ she said. ‘What a pity you haven’t brought her with you. I’d like to have met her.’

  ‘Well,’ Bognor was suddenly embarrassed, ‘that would have been nice. Only I know it sounds rather rude, but I am really here on business.’

  ‘Oh yes, of course. Silly of me,’ said Lady Lydeard, rattling away with some cups. Eventually she found two which satisfied her, though they were not a matching pair. ‘Kitchen cups, I’m afraid,’ she said, then frowned. ‘Business,’ she said. ‘Basil tells me you’re some sort of government investigator. You must forgive me, but I’m not awfully good at this sort of thing. I know it’s about the deaths last week, but I don’t honestly see what they have to do with the government.’

  ‘They may not,’ said Bognor, ‘but it’s possible that someone might have killed Lord Maidenhead because he was involved in secret negotiations with a regime in Africa.’

  ‘How very romantic, although I wouldn’t have thought Freddie Maidenhead knew much about politics. He’s always seemed rather shallow to me. And surely no one is suggesting that Canning Abney was killed for political reasons?’

  ‘No,’ said Bognor.

  Lady Lydeard rummaged among some tins on a shelf and produced a packet of digestive biscuits. The kettle boiled and she made the tea, then set biscuits and tea things on the long scrubbed refectory table in the middle of the room. ‘Help yourself to a biscuit,’ she said, ‘and I’ll be mother.’

  When she’d poured, she said: ‘It all seems very distant to me. I try to avoid having anything much to do outside the garden and the kitchen. It’s nearly all so depressing. But Basil has felt it terribly. In fact I’m bound to say he’s been acting very peculiarly recently. Not just since these latest things. He was very edgy and nervous before it happened. I think I’m going to ask him to have a proper rest. He’s not getting any younger and he tries to do too much.’

  ‘It must be hard running an estate like this and a business as well,’ said Bognor.

  ‘The estate’s no problem,’ she said, ‘Basil’s been doing that sort of thing all his life. You know we had a farm in Kenya before the trouble out there, and when we came back we had the most marvellous place in Rutland. Then Basil’s father died and there were all those wretched death duties. It sounds awful and I do love the house now we’re here, but quite honestly I think we’d have been better to have sold it lock, stock and barrel.’ She sipped her servant’s tea. ‘Still,’ she said, ‘Basil would never hear of that. I think he believes that having Lydeards at Lydeard is rather like having apes on the Rock of Gibraltar: the moment they leave the entire country goes to the dogs, the Empire finally vanishes and we’re taken over by Americans.’ She nibbled at her digestive biscuit. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I must be boring you and none of this has anything whatever to do with your business.’

  Bognor protested, all too genuinely, that he was not in the least bored, but Lady Lydeard insisted, instead, on subjecting him to a gentle inquisition of her own, starting with the inevitable question about his relationship with Humphrey Bognor. Tea over, she took Bognor and the roses up to his room and arranged the one in a vase while the other unpacked. Then she suggested they went in search of her husband and Grithbrice and Johnson who were apparently on a tour of the estate.

  ‘I suspect they’re with the bison,’ said Lady Lydeard. ‘Ever since our disaster with the foot-and-mouth, Basil’s been obsessed with the bison. I don’t know what he sees in them, myself. And I’m quite sure they make very little difference to our attendance figures. They were down again this year,’ she said wistfully. ‘I’m rather pleased when they go down, but Basil gets terribly excited and starts trying to think of a gimmick to attract the crowds.’

  Outside, such crowds as had been attracted were beginning to drift home. Bognor saw the ladies from Shepton Mallet returning to their transport and watched with amusement as a fierce lady in tweeds and brogues delivered a peroration to a small group by the front door. ‘And that, ladies and gentlemen,’ she boomed, ‘concludes our tour of Lydeard, truly one of the most magnificent of our English stately-homes. I hope, on behalf of myself and the Marquess and Marchioness, that you have enjoyed your visit and will kindly refrain from littering the grounds with ice-cream wrappers or waste paper. Souvenirs of Lydeard are available from the kiosk in the cloister.’ Bognor smiled.

  ‘That,’ said the Marchioness, ‘is our Miss Sims. She’s been our head guide for ten years now. She’s a tower of strength.’ She called across, ‘Good afternoon, Catherine. Had a good day?’

  Miss Sims strode across and was introduced. ‘Can’t complain, I suppose, Dot,’ she said. ‘But I should say we’re down on last year again. And we lost two more of the coffee spoons—the Georgian ones in the banqueting hall.’

  Afterwards, as they walked away towards the bison, Dot tutted and shook her head. ‘People are too dishonest nowadays. I’m sure it’s the television though Basil will insist it’s fluoride in the water. I don’t like those coffee spoons but they have been in the family more than two hundred years. Basil will be furious.’ Bognor wondered if the thief had been one of the ladies from Shepton Mallet.

  They had crossed the lawn with the three copper beeches on it and were skirting the maze when he saw Lydeard and his guests. They were leaning over a white fence staring across a field towards the Quantocks.

  ‘It’s such a big field,’ said Lady Lydeard. ‘Half the time you can never see them anyway. Are you a bison fan?’

  ‘All I know about bison,’ he said, ‘is biffalo, buffalo, bison, and I can’t even remember that properly.’

  ‘A. A. Milne, isn’t it?’ she asked approvingly. ‘And I fed buns to the elephant when I went down to the zoo.’

  The others had seen them now and they exchanged greetings. Grithbrice and Miss Johnson (devastating as usual in the tightest of trousers and the skimpiest of sweaters) seemed cross to see him. Lydeard on the other hand appeared affable.

  ‘Good to see you, Bognor. Wretched beasts are almost out of vision. Have to peer rather hard. I was just suggesting to Grithbrice that perhaps we’d better do a bit of stalking.’

  ‘Aren’t they rather dangerous for stalking?’

  ‘Good Lord, no. Perfectly docile. They’re big cows really. Just got more ribs than cows. Extraordinary thing that, did you know? Fourteen pairs of ribs in a bison. Most peculiar, but quite harmless. Eat out of your hand.’

  ‘What do they eat?’ asked Honeysuckle Johnson, looking apprehensive.

  ‘Not people, anyway,’ said Lydeard, laughing heartily. ‘Wouldn’t think they could keep going on what they eat. Damn sure I couldn’t. Twigs and grass mainly. And we give them some cattle cake and kale when the pasture’s poor.’

  Dot Lydeard said she had to arrange the evening meal and left them to peer at the bison. After an abor
tive minute the Marquess again suggested a stalk.

  ‘It does seem silly not to be able to see them properly,’ said Grithbrice, ‘but are you sure it’s safe? At Netherly we have a very firm rule about people entering the enclosures without arms.’

  ‘Don’t have bison at Netherly, do you?’ Lydeard sounded impatient. ‘Lots of carnivores. Lions and tigers and all that. Everyone knows they’re dangerous. Tell you what. I’ll take Bognor and we’ll go round the field and approach from the other side. Then when you see how easy it is and how close we can get, you and Miss Johnson can approach from here. And if, by any chance, anything goes wrong we’ll create a diversion.’

  ‘Sounds fair enough,’ said Grithbrice, ‘but we won’t move until you’re about twenty yards or so from them.’

  Bognor didn’t like it. All the same he could scarcely warn Grithbrice that he suspected murder was afoot. Nor, for the life of him, could he see what the snag in the scheme was. He and Lydeard would be exposed to danger at twenty yards before Grithbrice and Johnson even crossed the fence. Nevertheless he was nervous.

  ‘Come on, Simon,’ said Lydeard, who seemed suddenly to have become edgy. Simon turned and set off round the field. The wind had risen a little and was blowing towards the hills. Some clouds had appeared.

  ‘Wind’s got up,’ said Bognor. ‘I hope the weather’s not going to change.’

  Lydeard looked at him sharply. ‘Know anything about bison?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh,’ he seemed to relax. ‘Sad beasts. These are European ones. The American ones you probably know a bit about. Used to be all over North America. Then the railway came and they wiped out millions. Literally. Two and a half million a year between 1870 and 1875. Scandal.’

  He continued to chatter on about bison as they walked round the field. Bognor wondered why he’d looked at him like that. Something to do with his remark about the weather. Were bisons maddened by rain? What on earth could it be?