Masterstroke (The Simon Bognor Mysteries) Read online

  At the pond there was the usual gaggle of exceedingly rich infants in superannuated perambulators attended by nursemaids and nannies in starched uniforms. Older children and pensioners played with boats, many of them remote-controlled. And on one of the benches, reading a copy of Horse and Hound magazine, sat a small grey man in a pink and purple tie.

  ‘So that’s “Q”,’ thought Bognor. He was very small, rather neat, quite unrecognizable. The sort of man who merged. He would never be noticeable, never be out of place. As Bognor contemplated him from afar, he looked up and smiled. It was an oddly attractive smile. Bognor had not anticipated meeting a likeable man, and yet he felt an unexpected warmth from him. He could have been any age over sixty, white-haired, heavily lined, but amused in appearance and, Bognor thought, probably amusing too.

  He folded the magazine and placed it alongside him on the park bench, then looked up again and smiled. Bognor noticed for the first time that he had a little silvery goatee beard. He did not move. Bognor was obviously supposed to go to him. He did.

  ‘Morning, Simon,’ said the man, very nonchalantly, as if this meeting was a pleasant, unremarkable coincidence and Bognor an old friend. ‘Pray sit.’

  Bognor sat.

  ‘I was sorry,’ said ‘Q’, ‘to hear about your mother’s cat.’

  Bognor winced. His mother’s cat had been run over a fortnight before in Letchworth. Hardly anyone knew he had a mother, not even Parkinson. And scarcely one of those who knew he had a mother knew the mother had a cat.

  ‘It was quite an old cat,’ said Bognor. ‘Smelly, too. Can’t say I cared for it.’

  ‘Your application for transfer, by the way …’ The little man shook his head. ‘You’re far too valuable where you are, you know, I fear you’re there for life, whatever Parkinson may think.’

  ‘Look,’ said Bognor. ‘Who are you? And who … and why … and are you entitled to wear that tie?’ It was an odd question to ask, but there was something un-Apocryphal about him which was disturbing.

  ‘Just call me “Q”,’ he said. ‘Better that way. And since you ask, I suppose I ‘m not strictly speaking entitled to the tie. No. Does it matter?’

  Bognor said he supposed not. The man laughed at this. He had a cane which he picked up and used to beat the tarmac with. It was wooden, ash perhaps, with a silver handle. Could have been a swordstick. ‘Q’ could have been a fencer. He had an agile air.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I’ll be brief. Are you ready to believe?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Bognor. ‘I don’t care for this secrecy. I don’t like to believe what I hear from a man with no name. Do you have any proof of identity? A card? A letter? Can’t I know more? Whose side are you on? Ours or theirs?’

  ‘Q’ seemed to consider this very seriously for a minute or two, and then he said solemnly, ‘I don’t think I can answer that. You see, at my level of Intelligence work the question ceases to have meaning. I work to please myself. I have no other master. Contacts, friends, allegiances, alliances. … But sides? I prefer not to take sides.’

  ‘I see.’ Bognor was perplexed. At the same time he knew a cul-de-sac when he saw one. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘You have a message for me and I’m disposed to believe it. I have precious little alternative. Go ahead and tell me.’

  ‘You realize Aveline’s defection is a national scandal?’

  Bognor had read the Globe, seen the breakfast news and heard Peter Jay’s homily. ‘I suppose,’ he said.

  ‘I have no particular brief for Aveline,’ said ‘Q’, ‘though he’ll be much maligned, and he has an honesty of sorts. For myself, I like to see records as straight as possible, so I tell you this and leave you to decide what to do with the information. First, I do not believe that Aveline killed Lord Beckenham.’

  ‘No?’ Bognor watched a five-year-old in a sailor suit whirl an electric trimaran through a figure of eight.

  ‘No,’ said ‘Q’, and paused. ‘You’re too young to remember the Mitován affair?’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I say so,’ said ‘Q’. ‘Mitován was a Yugoslav. Wrong to call him Serb or Croat or anything else. He was before his time. Killed. Betrayed.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Oh, during the war. The British parachuted him in. He had come out in 1938 with his younger brother.’ ‘Q’ raised his stick and beat the ground three times hard. ‘Bad business,’ he said.

  ‘And who betrayed him?’

  ‘You can’t guess?’ Quizzical blue eyes peered into his, almost laughing, yet too compassionate for cheap laughter. ‘We didn’t know at the time, of course, and by the time we found out it was too late. In fact it was much neater to leave him in place.’

  ‘The complexity of Intelligence operations never ceases to baffle me,’ said Bognor sourly.

  ‘Never ceases to baffle us all,’ said ‘Q’. ‘Otherwise we’d all be a sight better at it, wouldn’t you say?’ He laughed again, an attractive punctuation mark. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s too serious to tease … Mitován was betrayed by the man who later became Lord Beckenham.’

  ‘I see,’ said Bognor.

  ‘Your old friend Vole had got hold of it, of course. He came to see me a couple of times. That book of his would have been remarkable, though I doubt now whether it will ever see the light of day.’ He paused and gazed ruminatively at the boats on the pond. ‘There are certain things, I’m afraid,’ and he spoke sadly now, ‘which are better left unsaid. Offends a few principles one may hold, but can’t be helped.’

  Bognor prompted him gently. ‘I have got the picture about Beckenham,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think I fully understand where this business about the Yugoslav gets us.’

  ‘Mitován,’ said ‘Q’. ‘He was an attractive man, very. He’d have given Tito something to think about, but … well … the Germans put him in one of the camps. Doesn’t bear thinking about, really. I don’t believe he ever talked, despite what they did to him. …’

  Bognor allowed the silence to drift for a moment and then said again, plaintively, ‘Yes, but …’

  ‘Mitován,’ repeated ‘Q’. ‘Doesn’t that mean anything? Ring no bells?’

  ‘No,’ said Bognor. ‘I don’t know any Yugoslavs.’

  ‘You do in a manner of speaking. Remember I said he had a young brother he brought out of the Balkans with him? All the rest of the family had been massacred.’

  ‘Yes, but I still don’t see …’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said ‘Q’, ‘my pronunciation is misleading. Jo was always keen to stress that last syllable, but when his brother changed the name he put all the emphasis up front.’

  ‘Mitován,’ said Bognor. ‘You don’t mean … ?’

  ‘That’s exactly who I mean,’ said ‘Q’. ‘I know what you’re thinking, but it often affects people like that. He is a little more English than the English, but that’s not uncommon. It takes foreigners like Daninos and Mikes to really caricature the English. We’re not nearly so extreme.’

  ‘And you think he avenged his brother?’

  ‘In fact I know,’ said ‘Q’, very seriously now. ‘But listen to me.’ He bent his head low and spoke very softly to the younger man. ‘The slate is clean. It was the only honourable course. It’s right that you should know. How right it is for others to know I’m not certain. That’s for you to decide. It’s your case. Yours and Dr Frinton’s. I’m sure you’ll make the right decision.’

  He stood. ‘Goodbye then,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose we shall meet again. And by the way, don’t be too hard on poor Parkinson. He does his best.’ And with a trace of a smile, more evident in the eyes than around the mouth, ‘Q’ waved his cane, turned and vanished among the nannies and their charges.

  Bognor sat on the bench for a moment, then ran to the park gates and hailed a taxi for Paddington Station.

  He reached Apocrypha Great Gate shortly after two, and hurried at once to Mitten’s rooms. They were empty. He then walked briskly across the quad to Dr Frinton’s roo
ms. There was no one there either. He had not banked on this. The revelations of ‘Q’ were too sensitive and explosive to be entrusted to the public telephone, and he had to make personal contact. Now the only two people to whom he needed to talk had disappeared. There was the chief-inspector chappie, but against much of his training and many of his inclinations he had decided that the inspector’s involvement was going to have to be prematurely curtailed. This was one time when town was going to be rigorously excluded by gown. It smacked of privilege, of the age-old arrogance of Apocrypha, and Bognor was deeply unhappy about it. On this sad occasion, however, he could think of no alternative.

  He walked back to the Lodge and asked the porter if Mr Mitten was in college.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘But he’s not in his rooms?’

  ‘No, sir. He’s in the Senior Common Room.’

  ‘And Dr Frinton.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘What? She’s in the SCR too? In that case I’ll pop along and dig them out.’

  ‘I wouldn’t do that, sir.’

  ‘Oh. Why not?’ The porter seemed surprisingly serious.

  Bognor frowned. He hoped there hadn’t been any more corpses since he left town.

  ‘It’s a college meeting.’

  ‘That’s all right. They’re probably only talking about drains. They’ll be glad to be hauled out.’

  ‘Not drains they’re talking about this time, sir.’ He bent down to the small hole in the glass between them. ‘It’s the mastership,’ he said sotto voce. ‘I believe they’re electing Lord Beckenham’s successor.’

  Bognor swore. This was indecent haste. Beckenham hardly cold, and already they were electing someone to take his place. On the other hand, the rumour and speculation and scandal were so rife that speed might seem essential to some Fellows. He tried to think straight. If they were carrying out an election this early, there would have been no time to wheel out the host of impressive outside candidates from Whitehall, Westminster and the BBC who usually jostled for jobs like this. They could only be meeting to elect an internal candidate, and the most obvious internal candidate by far was Mitten himself. In fact you might say it was the merest of formalities. ‘Oh, bloody hell!’ he said and swung round and ran off towards the Senior Common Room.

  The Apocrypha SCR was actually a complex of rooms, the first of which was a straightforward entrance hall. The door was locked and it was opened after repeated knocking by the formidable figure of Bell, the College butler, who allowed him into the hall but no further.

  ‘This is vital,’ snapped Bognor, who had never liked Bell even when he was a relatively junior scout during his own undergraduate days. ‘It is a matter of life and death, not to mention the good name of the College.’

  The good name of the College meant much more to Bell than life and death, but he was not to be swayed. He remembered Bognor as well as Bognor remembered him, and with no more enthusiasm. It was clear to both men that this was what contemporary jargon would call an irresistible force–immovable object situation. Bognor realized that he had no more chance of getting into the election meeting than he would have had of making it into the Sistine Chapel when the cardinals were choosing a pope. ‘If,’ he suggested, ‘I give you a note for Dr Frinton, will you deliver it?’

  Bell seemed to consider this for an age, but eventually he said he supposed there was no harm in it.

  Hastily Bognor ripped a page from his diary and scribbled the message: ‘Mitten dunnit. Total gen. Am outside. Corn-quick. Bognor, Board of Trade.’

  He supposed Bell would read it, but that was too bad. With any luck he wouldn’t understand it. The next few minutes passed excruciatingly slowly. Bognor paced and tried to collect his thoughts, but they were hopelessly and irretrievably confused. At last the note worked, and Bell came out with Hermione in tow. She was wearing haute couture jeans, her MA gown and an expression of extreme irritation. Bognor thought she had never looked lovelier.

  ‘Darling,’ she said, waving his note at him. ‘What is all this rot? It had better be good. We’re just about to vote.’

  Bognor closed his eyes. ‘You must not vote. You must absolutely not vote. It would be a disaster for the College.’

  ‘I can’t agree,’ she said. ‘Best to get it out of the way. Waldy will make a perfectly adequate Master and we can’t stand any more two-ring circuses at the moment.’

  ‘But you can’t elect a man who has just murdered his predecessor,’ hissed Bognor. ‘It’ll be like the Wars of the Roses.’

  ‘I think you had better explain,’ said Dr Frinton in a voice that would have doused the fires of hell.

  Bognor did, rapidly, skidding round corners, taking the facts at reckless speed, but wrapping the whole story up in not much more than five minutes flat.

  ‘You mean Waldegrave is a Yugoslav?’ she said. ‘But that’s preposterous. He’s no more Yugoslav than you or I. If he’s a Yugoslav then I’m a virgin.’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘You’re off your rocker, darling.’

  ‘You can be a very obstinate and silly woman,’ he said. ‘There is more to life than Beowulf and Bolislav.’ He tore another page from his diary. ‘If you won’t believe me, maybe he will.’ And he scribbled another note. ‘I know everything,’ it said. ‘Please come out now. Bognor.’ He folded it up and wrote on the outside, ‘Mr Mitován.’

  The next few minutes of pacing seemed even longer than the last, but at length the door to the electoral chamber was opened and Waldegrave Mitten came out on his own. He was looking, appropriately yet paradoxically, extraordinarily English in his shabby tweed jacket and canary-coloured cardigan. Bognor saw at once that his hands, at least metaphorically speaking, were up.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Bognor.

  ‘I can’t say I am,’ said Mitten. ‘It was too good for him, going like that.’

  ‘You can’t be Master, I’m afraid.’

  ‘To be honest, it’s rather a relief.’

  Mitten smiled and Bognor smiled back, one Apocrypha man to another.

  Epilogue

  ‘SO YOU SEE,’ SAID Bognor, squeezing lemon on to his smoked salmon, ‘I’ve connived in a cover-up.’

  His wife frowned. She had a stuffed leg of lamb en croûte in the oven, to go with the celebratory Château Cantemerle.

  ‘Isn’t it a bit of a risk?’ she said. ‘And well, without being puritanical about it, well, wrong?’

  ‘He only killed him,’ said Bognor.

  ‘That’s what I mean.’

  ‘Aveline and Beckenham killed lots of people. Or had them killed.’

  ‘And the poor chief-inspector chappie doesn’t suspect anything?’

  ‘I think he does suspect a little.’ Bognor’s eyes glazed as he contemplated the exquisite fish. ‘But he knows he’s outranked. National security is more important than common or garden justice.’

  ‘I don’t like the sound of that,’ said Monica.

  ‘No,’ said Bognor. ‘But there’s justice and justice. I think it’s been done, and if Aveline is credited with one extra piece of bloodiness, who cares except him? Besides, it’s useful propaganda if the world believes that Soviet moles are given to knocking each other off when the going gets rough.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Monica. She seemed dubious.

  ‘And I have also had a word with the right people about Edgware, Crutwell and Rook,’ said Bognor with satisfaction. ‘There’s a spanner in their works all right.’

  ‘And Mitten keeps his old job at Apocrypha?’

  ‘Absolutely. They’ll just have to find a new Master from somewhere else.’ Bognor chewed thoughtfully. ‘They need a sound, reliable, decent old Apocrypha man of integrity, ability …’ He drank a little Gewürztraminer and rolled it round his mouth. ‘Do you suppose,’ he asked, ‘that Parkinson would give me a decent reference?’

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Simon Bognor Mysteries

  ONE

  IT WAS NOT AS siniste
r as the Caistor Gad Whip nor as anthropomorphic as the Horn Dance of Abbots Bromley; not as business-like as the Lot Meadow Mowing nor as alarming as Punkie Night in South Somerset but the annual Popinjay Clout at Herring St George was nevertheless a very old English custom.

  No one knew the origins of the Popinjay Clout, not even old Sir Nimrod Herring whose ancestors had come with the Conqueror. Some said it went back further than the Herrings and that it was something to do with the old Saxon ‘fyrd’; others said it originated in the martyrdom of Saint Ethelreda, a virgin milkmaid of the sixth century who had been slain by some drunken villeins and cottars one Friday night; an American academic said that it was part of the Robin Hood legend, which was odd as Herring St George was not in Nottingham. It was all extremely confusing.

  The actual ceremony was, however, simplicity itself. At twelve noon all the men of the village, dressed entirely in green, marched to the Great Meadow by the banks of the River Nadder. There they fired arrows from their yew longbows quite indiscriminately into Gallows Wood. After an hour a halt was called and the village women, in smocks, went into the wood to retrieve whatever had been slaughtered in the bombardment. A kill in the Popinjay Clout was as rare as a score in the Eton Wall Game. Ten years earlier Sir Nimrod himself had bagged a rabbit. There had been nothing since.

  This year, the day of the Clout dawned brisk and blue and bracing. The TV team from Channel 4 and Mr Philip Howard of The Times arrived to record the event, as did busloads of tourists, many American. On the command of ‘fire’ from Sir Nimrod, arrows swooped away towards Gallows Wood, cameras clicked and rolled and Mr Howard’s pen raced purplish across the page of his reporter’s notebook. It was very quaint and everyone was looking forward to the ale and Bath chaps, the mead frappé and chitterlings which were a traditional part of the proceedings.

  ‘A capital Clout!’ exclaimed the Reverend Branwell Larch slapping Sir Nimrod boisterously on the shoulder. And indeed it was. The bowmen had shot nobly; the sun had shone; the grass was neatly mown; dog roses adorned the hedgerows and clambered about the immaculately whitewashed thatched cottages; even the smell of silage and chicken droppings which sometimes interfered with rustic charm was subdued for the day. Everything in the garden of England was lovely. Then, suddenly from the heart of Gallows Wood, there came a maiden’s shriek.