Death in the opening chapter sb-11 Read online

  ‘Well,’ said his wife, who was given to sudden bursts of energy which he generally discouraged, ‘what exactly do we propose that we do today?’

  ‘How do you mean “do”?’ asked Sir Branwell, not looking up from his newspaper. He was also engaged with toast, so his words sounded furry and coated in crumb.

  Sir Branwell, reflected Bognor, was one of him, and increasingly so. He was not much given to envy and wishing that he were other people, but in those rare moments when he played this game of make-believe, he found himself more and more wondering if it might be quite fun to be Sir Branwell. He drew the line at Lady Fludd however. Whereas Monica flirted dangerously with energy and enthusiasm, Lady Fludd appeared to subscribe to both with a passion. Bognor did not wish to be married to her. Life-swapping was one thing, and an idle hobby to be happily indulged. Wife-swapping, however, was something else altogether.

  ‘Actually,’ said Sir Branwell, looking around the table in a breakfastly, blurry sort of a way, ‘I don’t think there is an awful lot to do, if you see what I mean. Everything is more or less taken care of. And, in a manner of speaking, and up to a point, er… done.’

  He smiled affably and bit into his toast with more enthusiasm than he had spoken. If he had a consuming passion, which was not really his style, it was more for toast than for talk. This, reflected Bognor, was what life was about. A business efficiency expert, a visitor from Health and Safety or some similarly worthy quango, a government inspector, a jobsworth of whatever description, would have been appalled by this apparent inertia. Nothing was happening; nothing much seemed to matter. The females of the species displayed a slight sense of restlessnness, but this appeared to be easily quelled by their surroundings, if not by the somnolent, but presumably dominant, males. The males for their part resembled ancient lizards basking on warm stones in subtropical sunlight. They did not even spin. They did not even, like the lilies of the field, look good. They seemed completely devoid of purpose. There was no point to them.

  Bognor sighed with profound satisfaction. Pointlessness was something to which, in his few introspective moments, he aspired. As he grew old he was getting better at it. He wondered if he should have another slice of toast, or a cup of tea; he was pleased by his indecision and reflecting on how an entire weekend could be spent contemplating such decisions, when the bell rang and his dream was destroyed.

  They put up a fight against the intrusion.

  ‘Rats!’ said Sir Branwell, putting down his paper and his toast. ‘I’ve told Brandon to fix that bloody bell.’

  But Sir Branwell was wrong to blame it on the bell and it rang a second time, suggesting that the first ring was not haphazard and was caused, like the second, by a human agency. Someone had rung the front doorbell of the manor. On a Saturday morning. During breakfast. Unthinkable. But it had happened. It was a clear infringement of an unwritten rule. No one had rung the front doorbell on Saturday during breakfast during living memory. Yet it happened. Someone had.

  The four looked at each other in shock and incredulity. One was not expecting the unexpected. One never was.

  The bell rang a third time.

  ‘Well cut along, darling,’ said Lady Fludd. ‘See who it is.’

  Somewhere in the distance a dog barked. The staff, just the Brandons now, alas, always had most of the weekend off. Unless there was some sort of emergency. But when there was some sort of emergency, as now, they were never there. It was a rule of staff and there was nothing for it. Sir Branwell would have to open his front door himself.

  He rose clumsily to his feet, grumbling in an incoherent rebarbative way, consistent with the occasion and with the disruption of well-established ritual.

  Seconds later, he was back, energized, if such a thing were possible, and resembling the rural, aristocratic extramural equivalent of an action man. This was not particularly virile or particularly active, but it was a great deal more so than its virtually comatose predecessor.

  In his wake, the baronet towed a woman, middle-aged, and middling in every visible sense except for her distress, which was extreme.

  She seemed, for a moment, to be aware of the enormity of what she had done, but then, evidently, remembered why she was there and the reason for her distress.

  ‘It’s Sebastian,’ she said. ‘He’s dead. Extremely. I mean he really is. Dead. He was all right when I last saw him but now he’s dead. Gone. There was so much I wanted to say and so much I wanted to hear and now I can’t, shan’t. He’s gone.’

  Sir Branwell had produced brandy. His remedy for everything had been conjured up in a balloon on a silver salver that was originally presented to a great grandfather after some regimental triumph in the tug of war competition in Poona in the late nineteenth century. He always knew it would come in useful one-day. The present Sir Branwell that is, not the long-dead lieutenant with the electric whiskers and the faraway expression, who had been killed leading a charge against Boers in Africa.

  ‘Drink this,’ he said, as he had seen generations of stiff-lipped English actors order in innumerable not very good movies. He thought of adding that it would do her good but decided he was muddling the movies up with the ads.

  ‘Dorcas, how dreadful,’ said Lady Fludd, laying down her paper and rising to her feet. ‘You poor sausage. How dreadful.’

  She was thinking at the same time as she spoke, rather than planning ahead. This was a mistake. Her words did not convey what she really meant. She didn’t really think the event dreadful; nor had she really meant to call Dorcas a sausage. It just came out like that.

  Privately, she was thinking as she spoke, but the poor sausage was herself and even though she was commenting privately on the dreadfulness of the event, what she was actually saying was, ‘Bloody vicar. How incredibly inconvenient. And just before the festival. But then Sebastian always was a selfish little sod.’

  Out loud, however, she said, consolingly again, ‘You poor sausage! Sit down, sit down for heaven’s sake.’

  THREE

  Brigadier Horace was a barking brigadier but he had little or no bite.

  ‘All fang but no finish!’ said Sir Branwell, with whom he had been at school, or thought he might have been. He was too polite to ask. Or indolent. Or, more likely, uninterested. He neither knew nor cared with whom he had been at school. In any event, people were at school with him, not him with them. The difference was crucial. ‘Never seen a shot fired in anger, let alone pulled a trigger.’

  Contractor had done the work. He had done so at his master’s behest, his master being in the wrong place and, in a manner of speaking, on holiday. He had done so with flair, invention and assiduity. Contractor didn’t do competence. He obviously deployed sources, but he did not attribute his work in a conventional academic way, with footnotes and bibliography at the bottom of the page or the end of the book. Instead, he did so like a card sharp. Now you see me, now you don’t. He flickered magically with a sense of legerdemain, like a conjuror facing befuddled males on a drunken stag night. Here a rabbit, there a beauty in a bathing suit sawn in half, here a glass of water disappearing, only to re-emerge behind an ear or in a far corner of a room. Always the top hat, always the cane, always the fixed grin, but never anything conventional.

  This was why Bognor had hired him. His first in semiotics from the University of Wessex was neither here nor there. Nor was his race, parentage or sexual orientation. Bognor liked him because he was bright and quirky. Other people found this intimidating. In the unlikely event that they appreciated intellect and industry and the qualifications which were the inevitable result, they liked them orthodox. In a super competent world, those who believed that two plus two always equalled four were appreciated; only a genius or a poltroon would think they added up to anything else. Contractor wasn’t sure they did and he certainly was not a poltroon. Bognor liked this; and Contractor knew that he liked it, and as he grew older he realized that this appreciation of his intellectual eccentricity was unusual. It was one of the thing
s that made Bognor different. It infuriated some, particularly if they were bright and successful. A minority, however, found the quality appealing. One of these was Harvey Contractor and he was very, very bright. Formidably so.

  Take Brigadier Blenkinsop. Eustace Basil Blenkinsop, aka ‘Basher’ Blenkinsop. Educated Wellington and RMA Sandhurst. The brigadier came from a long line of retired majors, though his father was a vicar in the Quantocks. Stogumber. St Mary’s. Red sandstone. The church was famous for its candlelit chandelier discovered by one of the brigadier’s father’s predecessors in 1907, languishing. It was now lit on high days and holy days and looked very beautiful.

  Bognor shut his eyes and thought of the candles in the chandelier at Christmas in St Mary’s Stogumber. He imagined the vicar clambering up into the pulpit and saying words that none of his congregation understood. Stogumber wasn’t exactly the centre of the universe even when Basher was growing up. There was a sister who was married to a vet on Vancouver Island and another sister who was a spinster in Letchworth and did good works. That was all. Bognor imagined what it must have been like growing up as the only son of a vicar in rural Somerset. Was the vicar embittered? A fire and brimstone man? A pacifist? Had his religion influenced the brigadier?

  After Sandhurst, Blenkinsop had gone into the gunners. Blenkinsop’s outfit was the 13th Mobile. Its proper name was the ‘13th Mobile Artillery’, because since Agincourt, and possibly earlier, they had been able to deploy lethal weaponry in the least expected places. There were no earlier twelve mobile artillery units, thus earning the 13th the unusual sobriquet of ‘the Lucky for some’ though they were usually known simply as the ‘13th Mobile’. Another nickname was the ‘Cautious Cauliflowers’, which derived from their habit of pinning a floret of the vegetable next to their cap badges every Dettingen Day. This was the anniversary of the battle of 1743, which was the last occasion on which an English – actually German – monarch had led his men into battle. This only happened because the CO of the 13th, Colonel ‘Biffer’ Lowe-Laugher, had stuck a prong of his tuning fork into the reluctant rump of the king’s horse. Hence the regimental custom of placing a gilt tuning fork on the Colonel’s right every night at the Dettingen dinner. The British army was full of such things.

  At school and the academy, Blenkinsop had boxed and he went on fighting with some success after joining the army. He was battalion welterweight champion and knocked out some sergeant who was much fancied in the ring. As Second Lieutenant Blenkinsop he competed in the army championship, but was defeated by a mad captain in the Irish Guards. Bognor wondered what the Vicar of Stogumber made of his son’s pugilism.

  The vicar of Stogumber had briefly taught at a public school – of which Bognor had not previously heard – in Warminster. He guessed it must have closed. The Queen’s School. Queen’s Warminster. Contractor had drawn a blank here because the school was long closed and all records lost or destroyed. Nevertheless, it seemed that the Reverend Blenkinsop had spent a relatively short time at the school before being translated to Stogumber. Again, there was no record. Why had Blenkinsop senior spent so short a time at Queen’s Warminster? Why had he been translated so swiftly to such a relative backwater? Bognor was suspicious. His wife, Muriel, was the daughter of a general, a friend and protege of Field Marshal Haig in World War One. That too aroused Bognor’s suspicion, though he was not sure precisely why. Muriel had a posthumous reputation in West Somerset for prodigious snobbery, whereas her husband was known throughout the area as a man of the people.

  What was undoubtedly suspicious was the presence in the regiment of a young chaplain named Fludd.

  Forget brigadiers, thought Bognor. Life was full of people who had risen to the surface of life like scum on stock, and Brigadier Horace was one such. Bognor regarded himself as a front-line soldier – the sort of man who, at the Battle of the Somme in the Great War, would have gone over the top in front of his platoon, been cut to pieces by enemy machine gun fire and won a posthumous Military Cross. Horace Blenkinsop, the barking brigadier, would meanwhile have been watching events, if at all, through binoculars in a requisitioned chateau, while stuffing his face with stolen champagne and plover’s eggs.

  Bognor recalled his grandfather, a veteran of this very campaign, gassed and now gone to God, telling him that in his battalion, as in others, they had something called HQ company. No one knew what men in HQ company actually did, except issue more and more pieces of regulatory paper with which the rest of the battalion wiped their bottoms. During the war, more and more people gravitated to HQ company, where they performed more and more meaningless rituals, whose only apparent purpose was to make life difficult to impossible for those who actually did the work. Life, said Bognor’s grandfather, was much the same: far too many people in HQ company getting in the way of men on the ground trying to do a decent day’s work, like him and his grandson.

  Thus Brigadier Blenkinsop. Yet, such was life that Brigadier Blenkinsop was widely regarded as a bit of a catch. He made programmes for television about battles in which he had not fought and of which he knew little. He opined in the Daily Telegraph and other public prints, telling his fellow man what to think about military warfare, but also everything else from greenhouse emissions (a fiction, fanned by leftist scaremongers) to railway trains (vanished due to that damned fellow Beeching) and gastronomy (days were when a celebrity chef was just a cook and garlic was something Johnny Foreigner used to flavour horse-meat).

  Bognor did not care for the brigadier or for his sort. Whitehall was rife with brigadiers, barking orders, strutting about and getting in the way. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding, you had to hand it to him. Bognor was reminded of an elderly English rugby footballer, a cumbersome number eight, who, way past his prime, somehow survived, and indeed prospered, where younger, fitter, more agile and talented rivals came and usually went. This was achieved by stealth and what a dead journalist, much admired by Bognor, once described as ‘rat-like cunning’. This was possessed in spades by the ancient rumbling English rugby player. He read the game with deceptive ease and was able to anticipate its direction with unerring precision. So, without apparent effort or indeed movement, or endeavour of all but the most notional kind, he was always able to be at the centre of important play, where his strength and experience proved decisive. Others ran hither and yon, charging about like headless chickens, while the old bull elephant surged magnificently, and in an almost stately manner, through the wildest passages of the game.

  So it was with the brigadier. Throughout his life, he seemed, uncannily, always to be in the right place at the right time. When dead men’s shoes needed to be filled, the brigadier was always close by, available to step into them at a moment’s notice. When a desk needed to be driven or an opinion expressed, Horace was available, amenable, willing and able. By his expert reading of the game of life, he had always been able to keep at least a pace or two ahead of his often more talented rivals, without exposing himself to needless risk, hazard or what they might have described as effort of any kind. His was a triumph of cunning over exertion, of wise inertia as compared with the charge of the light brigade. His was a staff officer’s life, the epitome of one who had spent his time in the cushioned security of HQ company. And it was he who was to be the keynote speaker at this year’s festival, and getting him was considered rather a coup.

  Horace and his wife, Esther, had spent the previous night at what had, for many years, been called the Fludd Arms, but had recently been rechristened the Two by Two, after it had been sold off by Sir Branwell to a young man from the East End of London, who had reinvented himself as Gunther Battenburg and turned the ancient hostelry into a gastropub, to the consternation of the local community and to the interested attention of inspectors from the Michelin Guide and others. It had also begun to attract a significant and, to Sir Branwell and Lady Fludd, unwelcome sort of visitor. They took photographs of each other during meal times and came for the slug muesli, the squirrel pavlova and the oeufs ananas. They
had more money than sense, lived off bonuses and were, in a word, trendy. Sir Branwell regarded them much as he did seagulls and would have treated them similarly, given half a chance. He longed to have them up before him when he, or Camilla, were sitting on the bench, but so far neither he nor his wife had had the pleasure.

  If the Reverend Sebastian had indeed been done in by an alien hand, then Brigadier Horace, the brigadier’s wife, Esther, and Gunther Battenburg would have to join the long list of suspects. Battenburg was gay and had no known partner. That is to say, he had formed no regular attachment and was for the purposes of the impending enquiry, single. This ‘long list’, including most residents of Mallborne, would, presumably, be narrowed down before too long, rather in the manner of literary prizes such as the Booker, the Costa and, indeed, the newly inaugurated Flanagan Fludd for the best novel with a beginning, a middle and an end. Of this, Sir Branwell had high hopes. He very much hoped that this unfortunate incident would not cause them to be dashed, or even put on ice for the time being.