Let Sleeping Dogs Die (The Simon Bognor Mysteries) Page 4

  They advanced on the cherry tree.

  ‘How long has the cemetery been here?’ he asked.

  ‘Nineteen-thirty,’ she said. ‘I inherited it from Mavis Briggs-Percival, the missionary. She kept Pekes. She’s buried there—over by the willow.’

  Bognor wandered over to the willow which wept lushly over a simple granite tombstone with Miss Briggs-Percival’s name chiselled on it and the three letters RIP underneath. All around it were much smaller stones inscribed to Wan-Tu, Mao, Ping, Wang and other similarly Pekinese names. Bognor wondered why he found it peculiar.

  Fred had not been buried very deeply and when he returned to the cherry he found that Andrews was already kneeling over a small hole and trying to extricate the coffin with his hands. After much grunting and sweat he emerged triumphant, clutching a battered cake tin decorated with a bundle of roses.

  ‘I thought …’ Bognor felt a mounting sensation of desperation. He concentrated very hard indeed and managed to conjure up a precise image of an orange box lying on the turf with the motto ‘Outspan Oranges—with care’ stencilled on it. There was no question of it. When Fred had been buried yesterday he had been in an orange box and now he was reduced to the size of a cake tin.

  ‘Yes, Mr Bognor, you thought what?’

  Bognor stared at her, trying to work out whether beneath the blubber there was a sinister Machiavellian mind or a silly frightened old woman. He was unable to decide.

  ‘I thought Whately Wonderful was buried in an orange box.’

  ‘What can have given you that idea?’

  ‘I saw it.’

  ‘You are mistaken.’

  ‘But I saw it. Yesterday. I was here. Remember?’

  ‘I’m afraid you are quite mistaken. Ask Andrews.’

  Andrews was dusting earth from the cake tin, and wiping its lid with the tail of his shirt, which protruded from his waist.

  ‘Excuse me, Mr Andrews,’ said Bognor, with the growing diffidence of the hopelessly conned, ‘but yesterday I quite definitely saw Whately Wonderful being laid to rest in an orange box.’

  The old man regarded him with blank brown eyes, then suddenly focused them and said, ‘’Fraid not, sir. We buried un in a cake tin. This cake tin here.’ And he tapped the top of the tin with his forefinger. Bognor turned back to the dog breeder.

  ‘How in God’s name do you fit a full-size poodle into a cake tin?’ he asked, his voice rising.

  ‘Mr Bognor, you are being indelicate. I hardly feel you would want to discuss the details of cremation if you were referring to one of your own loved ones.’

  ‘Cremation?’

  ‘Cremation.’

  ‘But when? How? Why?’

  ‘It is usual.’ Mrs Potts seemed to gain self-possession as Bognor lost his own. ‘It’s more hygienic and it takes up less space. There is a very useful local firm which is prepared to accommodate us when their incinerator is not otherwise occupied.’

  ‘But, Mrs Potts …’ Bognor made one final appeal. ‘You know perfectly well that when I was here yesterday you were burying your dog in a large orange box. So you must have had him cremated after I’d gone away. Now why did you do that?’

  For a moment he thought she was going to capitulate and tell him something, but it passed in an instant; however, it was enough to confirm that she was lying. He wasn’t insane after all.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Bognor, I’m very busy. Will you please take Fred and go.’

  Andrews held out the cake tin and Bognor took it ungraciously.

  ‘Goodbye,’ he said, ‘we’ll be in touch.’ Then he stamped tetchily back to his car, put the earthly remains of Champion Whately Wonderful into the boot and accelerated towards Dorset. He knew the Board’s analysts were clever but he doubted whether they would be able to detect rabies in a cake tin of dust. They would just have to try.

  Piddlehampton Manor was in the Piddle Valley, less humorously but no more correctly known as the Trent Valley, that pastoral area of central Dorset which gave birth to the Tolpuddle Martyrs. It took Bognor over three hours to drive to Blandford, modestly announced on its own signposts as ‘an interesting Georgian town’. Then he took the Dorchester road and saw signs to Bryantspuddle, Affpuddle, Puddletown, Piddlehinton and Piddletrenthide. Dorset, he reflected, had the finest place names in the world.

  Unhappily he had more on his mind than place names. Two miles beyond Blandford he finally succumbed to macabre curiosity and pulled in by a phone box. It was three o’clock and Parkinson would be back from lunch.

  When he’d eventually succeeded in reversing the charges—a process which took longer than it should because the operator persisted in thinking he wanted a number in Bognor and refused to believe that that was his name, he found Parkinson gloomy and censorious.

  ‘He died this morning,’ he said, ‘in great pain.’

  ‘Did he say anything?’

  ‘Nothing coherent. Anyway no one was allowed to see him except the staff. It’s not pretty, rabies. He was raving.’

  Bognor felt ill. He wondered if he should have had an injection against rabies as well as cholera and typhoid.

  ‘There was just one thing.’ Parkinson’s voice was very crackly. ‘The doctor says he kept on about being eager to do something. He couldn’t work out what it was but this word “eager” kept cropping up. The doctor couldn’t work it out. I don’t suppose it’s important but I pass it on in the slender hope that you might be able to make something of it.’

  Bognor caught sight of himself in the cracked glass of the phone booth’s mirror. He saw a face on the verge of decay. Perhaps it wasn’t too late to start a career as a schoolmaster.

  ‘Doesn’t make any sense to me,’ he said.

  ‘That’s doesn’t mean it isn’t important.’ Parkinson’s voice had taken on its usual note of irritation. Bognor derived comfort from it.

  ‘I’m afraid I had a rather abortive experience at Three Corners.’

  ‘Can’t hear. It’s a bad line. Three what?’

  ‘Three Corners. That dog. They’ve cremated it.’

  ‘Do you have the ashes?’

  ‘In a cake tin, in the boot.’

  ‘When are you coming back?’

  ‘Tonight, I hope.’

  ‘Bring them back with you then. They can manage ashes all right. Why did they cremate him?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  There was a long pause. When he did speak again Parkinson sounded almost solicitous. ‘For once in your life, Bognor, try to be careful. I have a nasty feeling this business is not as banal as it may seem.’

  ‘Thanks for the thought.’ Bognor hung up.

  He reached Piddlehampton after another half hour of dreamy driving. Two dead dogs and now a dead man, he kept repeating to himself. Each one could be quite accidental, and yet …

  The village was almost a parody. Its main, indeed its only, street wound gently up the hillside through two lines of thatched cottages set back behind well-mown grass verges. Roses burgeoned round tiny porches, climbed hungrily up to the roofs and clambered over garden walls. Half-way up the street a small Victorian almshouse stood opposite a neat Jacobean church which adjoined a perfect Georgian Rectory. All three periods blended happily in yellow stone. Only the twee anachronism of the Gothic script above Piddlehampton Post Office and General Stores jarred. The village seemed empty. The only sound was of pigeons cooing persistently and a hand-driven lawn mower clattering behind one of the cottages. Otherwise it might have been siesta time.

  He drove through the village drinking in the peace of it all and followed the road for another half mile through woodland until, just round a sharp left-handed bend, he came to a lodge gate. The lodge itself, a stone single-storey building, was dilapidated and unlived in. The drive, which had once been gravel, was now a mess of pebbles and weeds, and singing gently from a peeling white post was a sign which said, ‘Piddlehampton Pedigree Dandie Dinmonts—Manor Kennels’. He turned the little car over the cattle grid and down th
e drive. Certainly the place had known better days. The park which now lay on either side of him should have been exquisite. The timber alone was a picture of elms and oaks, though two lay where they had fallen, uprooted in the middle of the grass which grew high and unkempt. The drive ran along the side of the hill before turning slowly to the right and dropping away towards the Manor. From the beginning of this bend Bognor caught his first glimpse of it. It was large, solid and stone and very English. Not a Duke’s house. The ancestral home of the Dorsets was, typically, in Norfolk, and this had always been their third or even fourth residence, suitable for cadet branches, younger sons or, as now, eccentric, widowed mothers.

  As he drove on it became increasingly clear that the Dorsets had run low on funds. What had once been herbaceous borders were now a mess of weeds and plants gone badly to seed. The lawns were unmown and the house which from a distance had looked so dependable and sturdy was, on closer study, rackety and sad. The mullioned windows, the ugly gremlin gargoyles and the rusting, studded front door were all in need of repair. A line of washing fluttered on what might once, long ago, have been a croquet lawn, and outside the left corner of the house lay a rusting old Austin Seven with no wheels.

  Bognor stopped the Mini immediately outside the door and pulled the chain which hung by it. He heard no bell but the instant he rang there was a noise of barking from within. The barking approached and the door was pulled back six inches. A small woman like a wren looked from behind it and said, ‘Not today, thank you.’

  ‘I’m not selling anything,’ said Bognor, who had met this response before. ‘All I want is to ask a few questions.’

  ‘Ah. Hang on a jiffy then.’ She shut the door, rattled with the lock and chain, then reopened it releasing a throng of small mustard-coloured dogs which leapt at Bognor’s knees.

  ‘Aaagh,’ he cried, retreating aghast. One of them grabbed his turn-up in its jaws and started to wrestle with it; another pee-ed on his shoe while the rest jumped and sniffed and jostled him.

  ‘Guy … Talisman … Waverley … Mannering. … Down, the lot of you!’ shrieked the diminutive Duchess, laying into her dogs with her walking stick. The dogs subsided and the noise dwindled until the entire pack was behind the Duchess’s floor-length hearthrug of a skirt and only a single snivel emerged from them. Bognor had never seen a Dandie Dinmont before and they unnerved him. They seemed to him to combine the appearance of a dachshund with that of a poodle and their behaviour reminded him of a hunt terrier that had once belonged to a school friend.

  ‘I’m awfully sorry,’ he said, still shocked, ‘I’m afraid I’m not terribly good at dogs.’

  ‘So I observe,’ said the Duchess drily. ‘The absolute A1 cardinal rule is not to let them see that you’re afraid of them. They’ve rumbled you already. Get down, Mannering.’ This last remark was directed at a venturesome Dinmont which had surreptitiously launched itself at Bognor’s knees from behind. ‘Anyway, come along in. No point standing there being eaten alive. I think there may be some gin.’

  She ushered Bognor along a dark hallway, in which he was dimly aware of lugubrious country-house portraits by disciples of Lely and Reynolds, and through a door on the left.

  ‘Just a tick,’ she said, ‘I’ll see if we have alcohol.’

  Mercifully she took her marauding pack of Dinmonts with her, leaving Bognor to examine his new surroundings. The room reeked of dog. Whereas the Kennel Club and Three Corners had been markedly dogless the Duchess of Dorset’s drawing room was a veritable kennel. Dog hairs lay thick on the carpet and chairs, baskets and dog blankets littered the floor, and bowls of water and bowls of biscuit were more frequent than occasional tables. Like Mrs Potts, the Duchess evidently didn’t notice the squalor of her immediate surroundings. Everything from the portraits—similar to those in the hall—to the curtains looked filthy. In a corner by the fireplace there was even an old orange box, with ‘Outspan Oranges—with care’ stencilled on it. Bognor scarcely noticed it on his first glance round the room. Then he did a sudden double take. Could it be? No, this was absurd. Why on earth should Fred, alias Whately Wonderful, be exhumed from his grave in Buckinghamshire and transported to the Duchess of Dorset’s drawing room? He stared blankly at the portrait above the mantelpiece, rapt in thought, before suddenly realizing that it was a picture of a dog. It was competently done, if a shade chocolate-boxy. Bognor immediately recognized the distinctive and alarming features of a Dandie Dinmont like the ones that had just assaulted him. He looked down at his shoe and feared that dog’s urine would stain. Not that the suedes were new but even so. … The expression on the dog’s face was one of perky charm. It looked unbearably cute and Bognor, who reckoned he’d got the Dinmont’s measure now, found it indescribably flattering. He was about to turn back to the mysterious orange box when he noticed the initials at the bottom of the portrait: ‘C.C.’ Of course. This was an example of Miss Cordingley’s art. It confirmed his impression of dishonesty.

  He was about to return to the matter of the orange box when the Duchess came back with a bottle of Gordon’s gin. It was one of those very old bottles with a top with a hinge instead of the newer screw top. ‘Not many left now,’ she said, brandishing it. ‘Almost all the dear dead Duke left me. It killed him, of course, before he could finish it.’ She poured out two gins and tonic, handed him one and then stood looking at the picture with him.

  ‘It’s by Coriander Cordingley, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘It’s poor Piddlehampton Peter. She’s got him to a tee, don’t you think? Look at the eyes. You can almost feel the damp on his nose, poor old thing. She’s frightfully clever, Coriander. Do you know her?’

  ‘I’ve met her,’ said Bognor. It was on the tip of his tongue to say where he’d met her, but he thought better of it. ‘I wouldn’t say I really knew her.’

  ‘Not in the Biblical sense, eh?’ said the Duchess, kicking one of the dogs towards the sofa. ‘I’m most frightfully sorry but I don’t think I know your name.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Bognor. ‘No. I suppose not. How silly. Bognor. Simon Bognor.’

  ‘How nice,’ said the Duchess, shaking his hand energetically. ‘And I’m Dora Dorset. You don’t by any chance breed bassets, do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There’s a Bognor near Bournemouth who breeds bassets. I’ve only seen photographs of him but you are rather alike. Beautiful dogs, too. No relation, I suppose?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh well.’ The Duchess looked thoughtfully at her drink. ‘I think gin improves with age,’ she said. ‘Now come and sit down and tell me what I can do for you.’ She sat on the sofa and immediately vanished under a pile of dogs. When she’d removed most of them with another display of good-humoured shouting she patted an empty space on her left and motioned to Bognor to join her. He sat down reluctantly.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I work for a special department at the Board of Trade.’

  ‘How fearfully exciting,’ said the Duchess. ‘In all my years I don’t believe I have ever met an employee of the Board of Trade, least of all from one of their special departments. I’d no idea they had special departments. Do go on.’

  Bognor coughed. ‘The fact is that I am investigating a matter which could well affect you. Do you know Mervyn Sparks?’

  ‘Horrid little man. Mean mouth and foxy eyes. He was down here the other day on some pretext or other snooping about. I hope he’s not a friend of yours.’

  ‘He wasn’t,’ said Bognor. ‘As a matter of fact, he’s dead.’

  ‘Is he really?’ The Duchess did not seem greatly interested. ‘Have you come all the way from London to tell me this? I wouldn’t have thought the little man was worth the trouble.’

  ‘I don’t think you quite understand, your Grace. The point is, he died of rabies.’

  ‘The silly fellow. I’ve no doubt he picked it up on one of those damn fool foreign trips of his. You’re asking for trouble going to places like that. I haven’t been ab
road for fifteen years. It’s a very over-rated pastime. Do you travel much?’

  ‘Scarcely at all.’ Bognor’s forensic powers had been thrown into a state of more than usual disarray by the dogs. He was having trouble establishing whether the Duchess was as scatty as she seemed. ‘Your Piddlehampton Peter had to be put down because he had rabies, and …’

  ‘Ah, Mr Worthing …’ said the Duchess.

  ‘Bognor.’

  ‘Forgive me, Mr Bognor. Let’s not rush our fences. Suspected rabies. There has to be a post mortem. Then we shall know. I have my doubts.’

  ‘There is going to be a post mortem?’ His gaze strayed inevitably to the orange box, abandoned by the fireplace. The Duchess followed it.

  ‘Of course, Mr Bognor. The dog went quite mad and bit Louise. Naturally the authorities had to be informed. I fear they may have over-reacted, but we shall see.’

  ‘I don’t understand how your dog could have contracted rabies, your Grace, but before he died Mr Sparks told one of our people that he’d been down here and one of your dogs bit him.’

  ‘Did he indeed?’ The Duchess seemed for the first time to be disturbed. She took a deeper than usual draught of gin. ‘Perhaps. Yes. I do recall the incident. He tried to pick someone up. Ridiculous. The man has … had … no sense whatever. Lunacy to allow him out in a show ring. Naturally the dog bit him, but it was no more than a nip. A tiny bite. Hardly worth talking about.’

  ‘In this case,’ said Bognor, profoundly, ‘a nip is as good as a feast.’

  She looked at him sharply. ‘What a very odd thing to say,’ she said. ‘Are you suggesting that Mr Sparks died because he was bitten by one of my dogs?’

  ‘Um.’ Bognor thought for a moment. ‘Yes,’ he said eventually, ‘I think I am.’

  ‘Oh.’ They sat in silence only punctuated by the playful snorts and whimpers of the dogs.

  ‘Is Miss Cordingley staying with you?’ he asked abruptly.

  The Duchess seemed taken aback. ‘Coriander? Good heavens, no. She usually stays at the Dorset Arms in the village.’

  ‘Usually?’