Death in the Opening Chapter Read online

  SIX

  Sir Simon and Lady Bognor went for a walk later that morning, before the sherry which always preceded Sunday lunch.

  The two had walked together since before they were married and it had become a ritual, even though their walking had an imbalance which handicapped the process from the very beginning. This lay in the fact that Monica had two speeds and her husband only one. Never the twain did meet. Monica moved fast or slow. The former was designed for getting from A to B with maximum expedition and was used in airports, railway stations and other places of no passing interest, where the arriving was all that mattered and the travelling merely a tiresome necessity. The other, slower, speed was for window shopping. Bognor referred to it as dawdling.

  He himself walked at a speed which suited him but, essentially, belonged to no one else. Because of this, he was often an anthropomorphism of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘cat that walked by himself’. He was at one and the same time gregarious and solitary, and his walking speed suited him. When it was appropriate he adjusted his speed to that of other people, but he was basically only happy at his own idiosyncratic medium pace. It left him alone with his own thoughts, untroubled by interruption.

  So Simon and Monica walked at different speeds, but they sang from the same, or at least similar, hymn sheets and talked the same game. Since they had first met, they had been each other’s greatest, usually only, confidants. They talked together often and in different situations, many stationary, but they had always talked together en plein air, walking. This involved compromise and usually meant that Simon walked faster or slower than he would have liked. If he maintained his own pace, he usually fell behind his wife or pulled ahead. In either case, conversation became impossible. Sometimes this worked.

  Today, however, was a talking occasion taken at a slow speed, which meant that Bognor took his foot off the gas pedal and sauntered alongside his wife, concentrating on her but also appreciating the wild garlic.

  ‘I don’t believe the vicar killed himself,’ he began, as they left the ha-ha behind them and turned right into the woodland garden.

  ‘Why not?’ Monica wanted to know. ‘Are you quite sure it’s not because that unpleasant chief constable thinks otherwise?’

  Bognor wondered whether the cowpat he had rather adroitly avoided was actually cow dung or belonged to some other animal; wilder and more obviously suited to woodland rather than open pasture or meadow. She could be right. He had a knee-jerk objection to authoritarianism, particularly when it was based on convenience rather than true authority. If men like Jones took a view then Bognor’s immediate response was to take another, preferably contrary. He had learned to disguise this with a fog of bureaucratic prevarication which made him seem more amenable and reasonable than he actually was. He never fooled himself, and seldom Monica, but he was surprisingly good at pulling the wool over the eyes. Better still, he was a past master at making people think that if wool had been pulled, it was they and not Bognor who had done the pulling.

  ‘You’re quite right,’ he conceded. ‘I don’t like the chief constable and I’m inclined to disagree with whatever he says. On the other hand, I really don’t think the Reverend Sebastian Fludd dunnit.’

  ‘Why not?’ his wife wanted to know.

  Bognor did some more thinking and then said, ‘Because it’s simply not in character. He wasn’t a natural suicide.’

  ‘No such thing,’ said Monica. She spoke with certainty laced with a touch of asperity. ‘The oddest and least likely people kill themselves, often for the most absurd and least predictable reasons. You know that. You’ve seen it often enough.’

  This was true. They both knew it. They had both experienced examples.

  ‘Even so,’ said Bognor, in what to anyone else might have seemed a lame remark.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ said Monica. ‘You feel it. Deep down.’ She acknowledged this sixth sense of his and recognized that it was what distinguished the great from the mundane. Methodology got you so far but proceeding by the book was, in her eyes, the mark of the second-rate. Anyone could read a book, assimilate the essential message it contained and then proceed accordingly. It took something akin to genius to break rules, ignore convention and not to pay too much attention to what the book said.

  Both of them believed this with a consuming and unifying passion. Moulds were made to be thrown out; rules and laws led to repetition and rote. Gut instinct was what marked men out. Mozart and Shakespeare and Leonardo da Vinci were great because they dared to do things differently; those who followed were second-rate because they did the same.

  ‘If he didn’t do it, then who did?’ Monica asked, pertinently enough.

  ‘The wife found him,’ said Bognor. ‘She was the nearest.’

  ‘But was she the dearest?’ she asked.

  ‘Aha,’ said Bognor, stepping over more dung. The countryside was full of excrement. This looked like some sort of deer muck. Not domestic dung, despite its neat identical rows of brown pellets. Orderly ordure. ‘Good point. It sounds like a basically antiseptic union.’

  ‘Not like some,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe not,’ he said, refusing to rise to such obvious bait, even on a Sunday morning in the country.

  ‘Leaving motive on one side for the time being,’ said Monica, ‘she had the opportunity.’

  ‘So we’re saying that she followed her husband into his church, interrupted his sermon-prep, made him tie a rope round his neck, attached it to a beam, stood him on a suitable chair and then kicked it away, causing him to suffocate, or whatever.’

  ‘We’re not saying that,’ said Monica.

  ‘No,’ conceded her husband, ‘but if we’re suggesting that Mrs Fludd murdered her husband, then something along those lines must have happened. Why be so melodramatic? Why not just put something lethal in his Ovaltine one night at the rectory?’

  ‘Because if she did that, dummy, she would have been the only suspect. By topping the unfortunate Sebastian in church, she created a whole raft of other possibilities and other suspects. She deflected attention, made herself just one among many, rather than the only possibility. It’s obvious.’

  This was unanswerable. Bognor remained silent. Finally, he said, ‘So if she did it, she was being cold-blooded enough to finger other suspects.’

  ‘If it was her,’ said Monica, ‘it was cold-blooded. No getting away from that.’

  ‘If it was her,’ said Bognor, ‘it would have to be a persuasion job. She wouldn’t have had the strength to do all the preliminary business, even if she could have kicked the chair away from under him. If it were her, then it would be amazingly cold-blooded and preconceived in every possible way. I’m not sure anyone is that calculating.’

  ‘Oh yes, they are,’ said Monica. ‘You know the old saw: divorce no, murder yes. Catholics say it mostly. Maybe Mrs Fludd was like that.’

  ‘So, Mrs Fludd would rather have killed her husband than divorce him. If she wanted to end the relationship then she had no option. Death or nothing. She might offend the law of the land but not of God.’

  ‘You’re twisting what I said,’ Monica protested. ‘Besides killing people is wrong. There’s a commandment about it. God sent the word down from the mountain on a tablet. Via Moses. It was a serious old testament prophet job.’

  ‘A bitter pill for some to swallow.’ Bognor grinned. There were moments when he loved his wife very much. This was one of them. They had learned to tolerate each other’s feeble jokes. He inhaled the smells of the countryside and reflected that there were worse things for a man to be doing before Sunday lunch than going for a walk in rural parkland. Even when death loomed so large in the immediate background. After all, death was part of his job, and if they couldn’t both accept that, then they could accept nothing. In the long run, they were all dead and death provided interesting and crucial conundra. He was glad that his job involved basics and not peripherals.

  ‘For what it’s worth, I don’t think the reverend was the victim o
f a nuptial murder, but at this stage I don’t want to rule anyone out. Not even Mrs Fludd.’

  ‘But if it wasn’t Mrs Fludd . . . mind your feet . . . it was someone who knew the vicar’s movements. They knew he’d be in church preparing his sermon.’

  ‘Unless they had an appointment. Sebastian might have arranged a meeting with his killer.’

  ‘That sounds unduly defeatist,’ complained Monica. ‘We’re not talking euthanasia here. I don’t see any evidence for the reverend wanting himself dead.’

  ‘I don’t mean that he knew the killer was his killer,’ said Bognor, not adding the word ‘stupid’, though his tone implied it. ‘But if he was murdered by someone he thought he could trust, someone he believed was a friend, then there’s no reason why he shouldn’t have made an appointment with him.’

  ‘Or her.’ His wife was a stickler for feminine equality, even when it was a question of murder suspects. He admired her for it.

  ‘You think it might have been a woman?’

  She thought for a moment, as if the idea had only just occurred to her.

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ she said. ‘The only possible reason for supposing it was a man that did it is if it’s a question of brute strength. I’m prepared to concede that the average man is stronger than the average woman. But we aren’t talking brute strength here.’

  ‘Big of you.’ His wife’s feminism was a matter of edgy humour between them. Deep down, Bognor reckoned he was more of a feminist than she was; Monica, on the other hand, tended to the Marilyn French view that all men were rapists no matter what. Unsurprisingly, they both took considerable exception to such opposing views in the battle of the sexes, so that they went unexpressed, even though they were at the root of all arguments on matters of gender. Part of the problem was that husband and wife both regarded themselves as liberal and progressive on matters of sex, whereas in fact they were as susceptible to ingrained prejudice as the next man or woman. In professional matters this signified little, but they suffered from the popular belief that they were both in their quite different ways superior to the normal conventions that applied to the essential differences between men and women. In fact, they suffered from the usual old-fashioned failings that had afflicted men and women for ever. Bognor, for example, did not really see the point in soap and water; Monica, however, could not have too much of either. There were other differences involving everything from map reading, through punctuality, to shopping for shoes. Both would hotly deny that they ever succumbed to sexual stereotyping. Neither, however, would be entirely correct.

  Privately, Bognor thought women made rotten detectives and, if forced to admit it, he would have included his wife in that generalization. Monica, more or less, up to a point, thought precisely the opposite.

  But neither of them would ever admit it.

  ‘I feel like a dry sherry,’ he said, looking, like all Englishman, at his watch whenever the question of alcoholic drink was mentioned.

  ‘G and T for me,’ she said, ‘and an olive from Fortnums. One thing I’ll say for your old friend, he does Bombay Sapphire and a mean olive.’

  And they turned for the ha-ha and home, with nothing resolved and the mysterious death of the vicar still hovering uneasily on what was otherwise a perfect country Sunday. They both enjoyed habit, particularly when it blurred into tradition. There was something comforting about the sort of library drinks, decent but unfussy meat and two veg with a claret to match and a couple of Labradors under the table. It may not have made Britain Great but it certainly made England English.

  Even a murdered vicar had an agreeably timeless feel to it. One felt the English had been murdering vicars and drinking warm sherry since time immemorial. Rooks cawed as they negotiated the cattle grid on to the gravel and lawn, which led up to an Englishman’s cockeyed version of what Palladio had built for the nobility of the Veneto. It was like so many things English – a friendly, agreeable, slightly tumbledown misunderstanding of the real thing. England was meant to be frayed at the edges, well worn and a not quite perfect fit.

  Even sudden death had an old banger, rust-bucket feel to it. That was the British way of murder that was.

  SEVEN

  One of the forensic pleasures of weekends chez Fludd was working out the antecedents of the principle component of the main course at Sunday lunch. Sometimes, it was so difficult to be sure, that there was argument about whether this was fish, fowl or something furry. In fairness to the kitchen, it had to be admitted that it was usually possible to eliminate chicken and fish which seldom featured on Sundays anyway. (There had been a memorable occasion when they had been completely foxed by some pheasant masquerading as something completely different.)

  The Bognors couldn’t agree on whether the blame was Mrs Brandon’s or Lady Fludd’s. The problem lay in the habit of roasting the meat the night before serving, carving it into servable slices, and then dousing it in gravy and reheating in time for Sunday lunch. It was invariably double-over-cooked and grey in colour, blotting paper in taste. This was a well-established custom in a certain sort of traditional country house. It had everything to do with convenience and nothing whatever to do with gastronomy.

  From a Julia Child, Elizabeth David, or celebrity chef point of view, Sunday lunch at the Fludds had nothing to recommend it, but for a semi-professional nostalgic, such as Sir Simon, it had a lot going for it. This was how life used to be when he was growing up. It didn’t taste of much but it was the same for everyone; equality of nothing very much. It was a bit like the former East Germany, for which he had a sneaking regard. Nobody had anything much better than a lawnmower masquerading as a motor car; you all lived off a hundred and one ways with wurst and dumplings; but on the other hand everyone had beer and jobs. Also, in a curious way, each other. The older and grander Bognor became, the more he believed in society, in pulling together and being kind to one’s neighbours. Consumerism, conspicuous consumption and celebrity seemed to involve competition of a sort he could not relish. He liked the quiet contemplative life and did not much care for kicking sand in the face of the people who lived next door.

  Thus Sunday lunch with the Fludds. It was an oddly relaxing meal, familiar, unflashy and sound in an old-fashioned way that had gone out of favour, along with tweed, leather and shaving brushes made from badger bristle. There were more efficient, and indeed more enjoyable, ways of eating but he took pleasure in Sunday lunch at the Fludds not because of the food and drink, but despite them.

  ‘Tiresome,’ said Sir Branwell, carving something which had probably once been a bird. There was evidence of wings. ‘If one is going to be murdered there is a time and place. Immediately before the festival is not one of them. And who in his right mind would want to kill the Reverend Sebastian? Sebby would never hurt a fly.’

  ‘Who said anything about their right mind?’ enquired Lady Bognor, watching the dissection with apprehension.

  ‘The point I am making is that Sebby’s death is “tiresome”. I simply don’t believe any other word will do.’

  The point Sir Branwell was actually making was that any event which interfered with the world as he knew it was inappropriate. Although he would deny that he had actually created that world, it was the one which he had inherited and with which he felt comfortable. He was not the fourteenth baronet for nothing, but even if he was he enjoyed the tidy, predictable society in which he found himself, and did not like it being compromised by murder or even accidental death. Life for Sir Branwell and his ilk was convenient or it was nothing. Murder was inconvenient.

  This was the whole point of sudden death. For a certain sort of Englishman, it lacked drama and excitement, and definitely such emotions as grief or upset of an essentially trivial nature. Grief, unless one’s dogs or horses were involved, was alien to Sir Branwell and men like him, of whom there were a surprisingly large number. Maybe that was why the majority of British crime fiction was so anodyne and bloodless. Perhaps it was the fault of all those middle-class Dames �
� from Agatha Christie to Phyllis James. Not that Bognor had anything but admiration for these formidable ladies, but he wasn’t altogether sure that they had done a lot for murder most foul. In their hands, it wasn’t as foul as it was in real life.

  Except that for Sir Branwell, it wasn’t.

  ‘Inconvenient, very,’ he said. ‘If he wanted to top himself, he could surely have waited until after the festival, not to mention his sermon.’

  ‘If he did kill himself – which seems improbable – then the balance of his mind would have been disturbed, which in turn would have meant that he didn’t give a flying whatsit for the festival or his sermon. Hard to believe but true nonetheless.’ This from Lady Bognor. As always, he thought to himself, the still shrill voice of reason, and yet reason and common sense were strangely inapplicable at times like this. This was what was so often wrong with the English murder. It had become a middle-class affair: sanitized; rendered prim. Even the traditional English funeral – of the sort the Reverend Sebastian would soon enjoy – took place with a closed wooden box. There was no public burning of the body, no eating by vultures, no sense of the catastrophe of death. It was all neat, tidy, orderly, and part of the warp and weft Agatha Christie and the other women had a lot to answer for.

  ‘What Monica means is that it’s all a bit of a shambles,’ he found himself saying. ‘Of course it’s inconvenient. Dashed inconvenient, you could say, but murder’s like that. Messy.’

  Monica gave him one of her looks, in which affection and exasperation were mixed in equal measure, but she said nothing.

  ‘All I can say,’ said Sir Branwell, handing round plates of charred bird, ‘is that mess is for other people. I don’t do mess. As you should well know, Simon.’

  This was perfectly true. Even at Apocrypha, Fludd had been remarkable for his fastidiousness. In an untidy world, he was almost impossibly neat. Even when vomiting after drink, he always managed to make an excuse and find the loo, causing as little trouble as possible. He was like that. ‘Noblesse,’ he said, rather too often, ‘oblige.’