Business Unusual (The Simon Bognor Mysteries) Read online

  ‘He was very nice about you, actually,’ said Wartnaby, ‘though most of the time we discussed his lecture.’

  ‘Lecture?’ Bognor poured.

  ‘On Chelsea.’

  ‘Chelsea.’ Bognor repeated the word inanely. He was groping. The Board of Trade had no particular cases in Chelsea, not that he could remember. Oh, wait a minute, antiques. Bognor cudgelled the brain ferociously. Export licences, the ring, dodgy Hepplewhites, it was all coming back.

  ‘Porcelain,’ said Wartnaby. ‘I collect miniature scent bottles and your man Parkinson came to lecture to the Scarpington Antiquarian Society on Nicholas Sprimont. He’s supposed to be working on a biography, as you probably know.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ said Bognor, shocked. This called for a major revision of his opinion of Parkinson. In all their chequered history together — the best part of twenty years now — he had never heard Parkinson express any sentiment in any way suggestive of what one might term cultural ‘bottom’. Bognor had always thought of him, in aesthetic, cultural and intellectual terms, as little better than a policeman. And to make matters more difficult here was a detective chief inspector who collected scent bottles. What on earth was happening to the world of detection and forensics? There’d be policemen writing poetry and going to the opera before you knew where you were.

  ‘Well, there you are,’ said Wartnaby. ‘One never really knows the people one thinks one knows best. In any case, we had a little talk after the lecture and he said you’d be coming up to have a look at “middle England”.’

  Monica favoured him with a smile stiff with the superiority of the suburban south-east.

  Wartnaby smiled back with a relaxed flash of well-maintained, mildly irregular teeth which said in body language that he was going to have no problem remaining on at least equal terms with the Bognors or anybody else thrown up by Whitehall and all its works.

  ‘Parkinson didn’t say anything to me about a porcelain lecture. Or about you, come to that.’ Bognor was not trying to seem disobliging. It just came out like that.

  Wartnaby did not seem to think this required comment so he waited until Bognor, wishing to make up for having been abrupt said, ‘But it’s very nice to see you.’

  ‘I gather you were at last night’s dinner,’ said Wartnaby. He was not drinking his coffee.

  The Bognors nodded, a little apprehensive now.

  ‘And how was it?’ Wartnaby might have been enquiring about the weather or trying to determine whether someone would like one lump or two.

  Bognor countered. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Hardly one of the gastronomic treats of a lifetime.’

  Wartnaby smiled. ‘Great eaters of roast beef, the Artisans, though for my part I believe it does harm to their wit.’

  Bognor looked blank.

  ‘Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time, in you?’ asked Monica.

  Bognor realised he was caught up in what threatened to become a private mastermind contest on Shakespearean comedy. What on earth was the police force coming to?

  ‘Had you any previous experience of the Artisans, Mr Bognor?’

  Simon had already decided that this was one of those rare policemen with whom he probably ought to be on Christian-name terms.

  ‘Simon,’ he said.

  ‘Osbert,’ said Wartnaby.

  ‘Golly,’ said Monica.

  Wartnaby looked at her sharply. ‘Osbert Sitwell, Osbert Lancaster, not to mention Osbert Burdett who wrote a life of Carlyle and of Browning. It’s a perfectly sensible name, even if unusual. Besides which it’s really only one among the many Berts as in Al, Cuth or even Eg or Ethel. As it happens, practically everyone in the world calls me Bert. People are depressingly conventional about Christian names.’

  Now, at last, he did take a sip of coffee. His lip puckered. ‘Never drink coffee at the Talbot,’ he said. ‘Or any of the Jolly Trenchermen. You’d think Puce would do something about it. I’m a Kibo Chagga man myself, though I had a first-rate Costa Rican Tarrazu the other day. Anyway, “Bert” will do fine, but for God’s sake not “Oz”, much less “Ozzy”.’

  ‘I knew a Canadian once who called me “Si”,’ said Bognor. He winced to recall it.

  Osbert Wartnaby pushed his cup away and leaned forward.

  ‘I’m going to need your help,’ he said.

  This was the most surprising thing this surprising policeman had said thus far. The police rarely wanted Bognor’s support. They almost invariably resented his very presence. Any effort to become involved in actually solving a mystery was obstructed, often physically. Wartnaby’s initiative, therefore, was as unexpected as it was welcome.

  ‘Help,’ repeated Bognor, beginning to butter another slice of toast in celebration.

  ‘Yes.’ Wartnaby eyed the toast-buttering. He was much of an age with Bognor, but trim and spry. The glance carried an element of censorious superiority. ‘I need your help.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Bognor, avoiding his wife’s eye. ‘How can I assist you?’

  ‘How much do you know about the Artisans?’

  ‘Not much more than what Reg Bracket and Harold Fothergill told me.’

  ‘You’d already met Brackett?’

  ‘The day before yesterday. He was my second port of call. Fothergill said I ought to start with him if I wanted to know what made Scarpington tick.’

  ‘So what did they tell you about the Artisans?’ Wartnaby took a stainless steel Parker from an inside pocket. ‘You don’t mind if I take a note.’ He produced a leather pad about three inches by six. It was more of a statement than a question. Even if Bognor had objected, Wartnaby was going to make notes.

  ‘To paraphrase,’ said Bognor. ‘That it was an association of local trade, business and professional people given to good works and conviviality. Rather like Rotary only grander and with a history that went back to the seventeenth century.’

  ‘Correct up to a point,’ said Wartnaby. ‘You’ll discover that both Moulton and Bragg, the brewers, and Sinclair, the invalid carriage people, can trace their origins back to around the Restoration.’

  ‘Seventeenth-century invalid carriages?’ said Monica. ‘Surely not?’

  ‘There’s some dispute,’ said Wartnaby, ‘about whether Sinclair’s started out in sedan chairs or wooden legs. At all events they’ve always been in what one might loosely term transport for the disabled. And both of them were founder members of the Artisans. The earliest charters date from 1690-odd.’

  ‘So they’re Orange.’ This from Bognor, who still remembered the dates of the kings and queens of England despite the amnesia creeping up on his middle age. 1688. Glorious Revolution. William and Mary.

  ‘Very Orange.’ Wartnaby spoke with feeling.

  ‘You don’t sound over enthusiastic,’ said Bognor.

  ‘No. And it’s why I need your help.’ Wartnaby paused. ‘This is still a very Orange town,’ he said. ‘I know because I’ve lived here all my life. It’s not a very comfortable community for a Jewish Roman Catholic. Which is what I am. Lapsed on both sides of the family, but that doesn’t make any odds. Scarpington must be the most extreme Protestant town outside Ulster and the most extreme Protestantism is in the Artisans.’

  Neither Bognor said anything. There was nothing much to say. All around them was the comfortable evidence of the English middle class at breakfast on the hoof. Middling to posh hotel; middling to dull provincial city; bacon, eggs; Baxter’s and Cooper’s marmalades in the usual minipots; and the Daily Telegraph. The smarter sort of commercial traveller was dotted all over the dining-room, each one in solitary embarrassment, feigning assurance and man-of-the-worldliness. The odd woman out was a very odd woman out, except for the black-and-white waitresses in their pinnies. It could, apart from the muesli and the yoghurt laid out on a central buffet table, have been any business breakfast in Britain from around the turn of the century on. It was axiomatic that beneath the pastoral bucolic charm of the English countryside there lurked any number of hidden
menaces. But wasn’t it just as true of this outwardly prim prosperity? What hidden seedlings bubbled behind those morning papers? What lusts and envies disturbed the heartbeat under those clean white drip-dry shirts? Crime and the commercial traveller: discuss.

  ‘Wartnaby’s not a very Jewish name,’ said Bognor.

  ‘Osbert’s mother, dummy!’ Monica could be so gratuitously disparaging.

  ‘My mother was from Estonia. My father was merchant navy. He helped her escape. Very romantic. And then they ended up here.’ His eyes traversed the dining-room of the Talbot Hotel and moved upwards to the chandelier. They spoke volumes.

  ‘I went to the King’s School. That was my first brush with the Scarpington Establishment. It was stiff with Sinclairs and Bracketts and Moultons and Festings. All died-in-the-wool Proddies. There was a lot of bullying at the King’s School and a great deal of it was ritualised and institutionalised. It was an exceedingly dim place academically. Whenever anybody got into Oxford or Cambridge they lit a bonfire. It only happened twice the whole time I was there. Puce and Nigel Festing.’

  ‘Puce?’ said Bognor. ‘You mean Seymour Puce?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Wartnaby. ‘He was the school bully. Only, as I said, it was legal. He was head of school, captain of the Fifteen, RSM of the Corps. You name it. He beat like fury. We called him “Shagger” Puce. Something to do with sheep.’

  For a moment it looked as if he might be about to take a sip of the undrinkable coffee. Instead he asked a passing waitress if he might have a glass of water. She looked as if he had asked for a double Negroni, heavy on the gin, but she agreed to fetch it. Wartnaby was obviously, in his understated fashion, a man accustomed to having his way.

  ‘And you,’ said Monica. ‘You didn’t go to university.’

  ‘My father ran a milk bar called the Coconut Grove in the Ackroyd Road. Early one morning he was knocked down by a hit-and-run driver on his way to work. They never found the killer. My mother took an overdose a fortnight later. I was just sixteen. Only child.’

  Monica and her husband exchanged glances. They weren’t entirely sure where, if anywhere, this was all leading. It was an upsetting tale and intimate. They had only known Wartnaby a few minutes and now they had his life story.

  ‘So what did you do?’ Wartnaby was obviously going to tell them, but Bognor felt he needed a mild prompt. His glass of water arrived and was plonked down on the table with scant ceremony. He drank.

  ‘I ran away,’ he said. ‘Signed on as a cabin boy on a Dutch freighter at Avonmouth. Worked as a croupier in Macao for a year; in a logging camp at Gold River on Vancouver island for another; did a summer season on the ground staff at the Kensington Oval in Barbados and then got homesick and came back here. Married a local girl and joined the police. Been here ever since.’

  Very long pause. The Bognors were strapped for words.

  ‘The Artisans,’ said Bognor at last. ‘You were asking about the Artisans.’

  DCI Wartnaby smiled. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘but my life history is sort of relevant. I’m a Scarpington man through and through, but when it comes to the power base I’m an outsider. As I said, Jewish and Catholic. That rules me out on two counts. And there are others. At school I was what used to be called a “bolshie”. Questioned authority, no good at rugger, cheeky sod.’

  ‘Didn’t like Puce,’ ventured Bognor.

  ‘Didn’t like Puce,’ repeated Wartnaby thoughtfully. A cloud seemed to pass briefly across his face as if some unexpected memory had suddenly re-emerged. For a moment the Bognors sensed that he was going to share it with them, but he checked himself. Perhaps too painful, perhaps too intimate.

  ‘The point is,’ he said in a voice that was now more purposeful and brisk as if the earlier revelations were just a necessary overture to the main work, ‘the point is that as far as the Artisans are concerned I am distinctly persona non grata. Now I am reasonably sure that when the post-mortem comes through it is going to show that Reg Brackett had a heart attack. And I dare say his GP will come through with some corroborating evidence about a history of stress and high blood pressure and I’m sure Muriel Brackett will confirm that he had been under a lot of strain and that he was particularly hyped up about his big night and the after-dinner speech. And in the normal course of events the whole thing would be sloughed off as one of life’s little tragedies. Poor old Reg. Dreadful thing. Should have watched his diet, cut the fags, laid off the booze. Blah blah.’

  ‘But you don’t think that’s what happened?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Any reason?’

  Wartnaby thought for a moment.

  ‘King’s Scarpington,’ he said, ‘was not just a dim school with a bad academic record and a problem of violence. It was a deeply corrupt school. And the heart of the corruption was something called Upper Tucker. It was a sort of semi-secret society for the smart set — a pastiche of something called Pop at Eton. The whole place was a sort of parody of a proper public school. The headmaster and the rest of the staff counted for nothing. It was a boy-run school and it was run from Upper Tucker.

  ‘Now normally, as you know, success at school doesn’t necessarily mean success in after-life. It’s often the reverse. But in Scarpington the lines run directly out of the King’s School and on through adulthood to the grave. Modern Scarpington, Mr Bognor, is as deeply corrupt as the school was. And is. And the centre of it is the Artisans.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Bognor was beginning to think that Wartnaby was a bit of a nut-case. Whatever it was that Puce had done to him all those years ago could have turned his mind. Joining the local police was obviously done to get even. The awfulness had languished in a diseased mind for years and now he saw the chance of revenge. The vendetta had reached maturity; the kettle had come to the boil.

  ‘I promise you,’ said the Chief Inspector, slowly, ‘that the Artisans would make the most sinister Masonic Lodge in the world look like the Women’s Institute. They have the whole of Scarpington in their pocket one way and another. My own Chief Constable included.’

  ‘And,’ said Bognor, ‘not to put too fine a point on it, you think that they bumped off their own President in the middle of his after-dinner speech? That’s a pretty rum thing to do, isn’t it? I mean, they may be corrupt but there’s usually a logic to corruption.’

  ‘You’re right.’ Wartnaby frowned. ‘In logic. But my sense is that logic doesn’t necessarily enter into this. Or put it another way — there is a logic at work but it’s perverted. I don’t think, for instance, that it’s beyond the bounds of possibility that Brackett was killed as a warning.’

  ‘Pour encourager les autres.’ Bognor remembered Byng.

  ‘It’s only an idea.’ He looked morose. ‘To be absolutely frank, I can’t put my finger on anything, but I know it stinks and the more it stinks the more squeaky clean they make it look. Laundry’s appropriate. That’s just what they’ve been doing for years. Taking in each other’s dirty linen. Brackett did it literally and everyone else did it metaphorically. And they know I know. I’m sure of it. And it’s my belief that this time they’ve overstepped the mark.’

  ‘How long have you suspected them?’

  ‘In general terms, as long as I can remember.’ Wartnaby obviously sensed their scepticism. ‘I can see,’ he said, ‘you think I’m paranoid. Yes, if you like, I’ve had a bee in my bonnet about Puce and his friends since I was a child. Yes, I’m deeply suspicious about my father’s death. Yes, I joined the police because I saw myself as a crusader and I wanted to clean the town up. Guilty on all counts. I concede I could be wrong. But my point is that I’ll never have the chance of finding out unless I have help. The Artisans are a closed book as far as I’m concerned. No one will even begin to talk. My colleagues — most of them — are either involved with them or too frightened to take them on. You, on the other hand, are white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant, non-Artisan, non-Scarpington, and non-police. You’re no threat to them. To you they will talk. All I ask is tha
t you interview them all as soon as possible and let me know what they say.’

  ‘That sounds a bit one-sided,’ said Bognor. ‘What, if you’ll excuse the crudity, is in it for me?’

  ‘I’ll guide your feet into the way of peace.’ Wartnaby was doodling as he talked. Peacock feathers seemed to be the dominant refrain which would have meant something to a graphologist, Tarot-freak, end-of-pier gypsy lady or similar, but not a lot to Bognor, though Monica, being superstitious, would not have them in the house. Something to do with the evil eye. ‘I,’ continued Wartnaby, ‘can save you weeks of labour. My knowledge might not stand up in a court of law but it’s the real thing. Hearsay, gossip, intuition and a lifetime’s experience. All yours in return for up-to-the-minute, on-the-record, first-hand, viva-voce gen.’

  ‘You’re on,’ said Bognor, with a sudden exuberance which took them all, most of all himself, by surprise. ‘When do we start?’

  ‘In skating over thin ice,’ said Wartnaby, ‘our safety is in our speed. My Jewish grandmother always said it was best to start yesterday what one didn’t have to start tomorrow. Or words to that effect.’

  ‘I’m happy to be guided by your granny,’ said Bognor. ‘Who’s first on the list?’

  ‘I’d begin with Freddie.’

  ‘The barman.’

  ‘The same.’

  ‘But surely he’s not an “Artisan” except in a literal sense?’

  ‘He knows more about the Artisans than most Artisans,’ said Wartnaby, ‘and more about Scarpington than almost anyone in town. My hunch is that he’d quite enjoy talking to you. Particularly if the Board of Trade budget extends to a modest bribe. A tenner should do the trick.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  Face to Face with the Pilot

  BARTENDING IS PRIMARILY A nocturnal activity. Bognor had done his fair share of daytime drinking over the years and spent long hours in the company of dangerous daytime drunks. He could recall an afternoon of double g and ts with an elderly actor at the Wig and Pen and inordinate quantities of Scotch with a load of Fleet Street hacks in a very dark room in Soho run by a noisy woman, famed for her rudeness. But these, at least to his way of thinking, were aberrations. Despite changes in the licensing laws his reaction to being asked if he would take some alcohol was the same as most Englishmen’s. He looked at his watch. If it was after six and the sun was therefore ‘over the yard-arm’ it was acceptable to imbibe. If not, not. Some exception was permissible at lunchtime but not, these days, a lot.