Yet Another Death in Venice (The Simon Bognor Mysteries) Read online

  “No,” said Bognor, “but that doesn’t prevent it being the truth. We don’t like the Pontis. We rather hope that they are the murderers, but we look unlikely to be able to prove it. What about Father Carlo?”

  “Ah, Father Carlo.” Silence.

  “I rather like the idea of Father Carlo,” said Bognor. “He is so repulsive, I end up being quite fond of him. He comes out the other side if you know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean,” said Dibdini, “and I have the beginnings of a case against him. His hobby was medieval weaponry and, in particular, the crossbow.”

  Bognor laughed. “Good start,” he said, “but a bit circumstantial. Just because Father Carlo was interested in the weapon that killed Irving G. doesn’t make him a murderer.”

  “No,” said his friend, “but it’s a strange coincidence.”

  “Okay,” said Bognor. “Was Silverburger really a Catholic?”

  “If he was anything,” said Dibdini. “Catholics believe in forgiveness. It’s central. Silverburger believed in forgiveness. He believed in confession. Father Carlo can’t tell us anything that passed between them in the Frari, but we know that Silverburger went to see him after he had slept with Sophia, the Russian prostitute, and after he had also had sex with Benito, the gondolier.”

  “So he was feeling guilty about them?”

  “No,” said Michael, “but he knew he had to confess. It is not the same. Father Carlo would have listened to what Silverburger had to say, and then he would have pursed his lips and made Silverburger say he was truly sorry, and he would have made him say some Hail Marys or something similar, and that would be it. Silverburger would leave the Frari with a clean sheet.”

  This didn’t happen in the Church of England, even when one had lapsed.

  “I don’t understand Catholicism,” he said.

  “That’s the point,” said Dibdini. “You’re not supposed to understand. It is literally beyond belief. Their rules are not our rules. The servant of the Lord preaches perpetual forgiveness because ultimately his master is the one who decides. He is the one who has power; he is the one who decides what is right and what is wrong.”

  “I see,” said Bognor. Which is what he always said when he didn’t.

  6

  The flat was comfortable, expensive—though it had been cheap when they first acquired it—and above shops in Marylebone High Street that had become quite a fashionable part of London by the early years of the twenty-first century. In a sense, it had caught up with them for when they had first bought it, many years earlier, it was what they could afford—no more and no less. It had always seemed a friendlier part of London than most of the city. There were fewer transients and it felt comfortable, a place full of the sort of shop and eating place where they remembered your name after just one or two visits.

  London, meanwhile, had become arguably more glamorous, more vibrant and buzzy, but it had unquestionably become more dangerous. The homeless were everywhere. One felt hassled and threatened at every juncture. Smiling at strangers was a provocation; footsteps were almost certainly hostile, and there were muscle-bound bouncers in ever doorway. The higher the gloss, the greater the threat.

  Marylebone had changed but less than other parts of town. It felt lived in, comfortable in the way that old clothes feel comfortable. There was a shabbiness, a down-at-heel gentility with which the Bognors felt at home. They recognized; they were recognized. When London was described as a set of interconnecting villages, they nodded in agreement. Elsewhere, they might have been, rightly, bewildered. Here, they felt, just as correctly, at home.

  Monica was wearing a caftan. She always wore a similar garment when they were at home, relaxing and not expecting company. The shapeless bell-tent was as comfortable, homely, and frayed about the edges as the surroundings. She felt relaxed. Her husband in gray flannel bags, a shapeless cardigan, and slippers likewise. In their sort of England, it was bad form to drop in unannounced and the only probable phone calls would be from the subcontinent and have to do with debt or double-glazing. They would therefore ignore the telephone bell just as they would ignore any ring from the front door. Either would be an unwelcome intrusion.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “How do you mean?” It was a boiled-egg-and-toast sort of an evening and none the worse for that. “Did you talk to Michael? About Mr. Silverburger?”

  “Oh, that,” he replied. “Yes. He sent his love.”

  “But what did he say?

  The Bognors shared everything. Including secrets. Especially secrets.

  “The Pontis have a place in Northamptonshire. Correction: They rent a place in Northamptonshire. Pass themselves off as local gentry.”

  “With any success?”

  “Not a lot.” He thought of the unchanging snobbery of the English countryside. “Eyeties don’t go down a bomb with the Northants’s smart set.”

  “I didn’t think Northants had a smart set.”

  His wife had a good ear, nose, and throat for social pretension, being as near as dammit the real thing and close enough anyway to be able to tell the difference. If she wasn’t related to the Northants’s smart set, she had been to school with it. Or played tennis. Whatever, she looked down on it just as she looked down on practically everything and everyone.

  “What about our suspects?” They were both drinking their evening whiskey, which was sort of medicinal and went with boiled eggs and toast. “Surely, we have a list as good as Dibdini’s. I’d hate to think we were being beaten by the Italians at anything more serious than the Eurovision song contest.”

  “Not dissimilar.” They always had a scotch if they were alone in the evening. Bell’s, Teacher’s, or the Famous Grouse, depending on what was on offer at Tesco. Regular as clockwork at about six thirty. He wondered vaguely if that made him an alcoholic or merely a creature of habit. Also if it mattered. Probably not. “One starlet who can’t act; one servant figure from Latvia or thereabouts; and an accountant who was originally some sort of Kraut. Motives are: ambition crossed with sex, that’s Ingrid, aka Inge; money and sex, that’s Trevor the Balt, servitor; and money, that’s Eric, who’s the money man from Deutschland. I don’t think sex comes into the game with Eric, so if he’s the guilty party, it will be to do with expenses or VAT or petty cash fiddling. I somehow doubt it’s huge amounts, but I could be wrong.”

  “And Silverburger wasn’t a Member of Parliament,” said Monica, “or a Tory benefactor who took advantage of non-dom status. A Labour Party donor who was double-crossing Unite. A Liberal who danced too vigorous a two-step with that nice Mr. Cable.”

  “I imagine Eric always votes Conservative because it’s a mark of respectability,” said Bognor, “but I’d be surprised if he were political enough to kill for his beliefs.”

  “Or courageous,” said Monica. “Eric sounds quintessentially cowardly.”

  “Maybe,” said her husband, “but I wouldn’t be too certain. Money does odd things to the most ordinary-seeming people. Greed is a great motivator. Poverty is an excuse for all manners of excess. Swanley saw a lot of the stuff but never had very much himself. That transforms some people.”

  “I’d still prefer your Romanian starlet. Or even the poofter from Riga.”

  “We know nothing about his sexual proclivities,” Bognor said pompously. And was rewarded with a pout of skepticism. She didn’t believe him, couldn’t believe he could be so naive. “A Balt who calls himself Trevor. Come on.” She smiled.

  “No straight Balt would call himself Trevor.”

  “And how many accountants do you know who would solemnly go to Venice to murder a client with a crossbow?”

  Monica felt she had known one or two exotic accountants in her time, and yet the profession had a dull reputation. Good cover, she always felt. No one would ever expect the accountant of having done it.

  “Well,” she said, “just because they’re accountants doesn’t mean …”

  “I’ll see the Swanleys,” s
aid Bognor. “And I’ll do so with an entirely open mind. I just don’t happen to think he’s our man.”

  “Whereas Trevor could be.”

  “Trevor,” said Sir Simon, with all the authority of one who had never met him, “is single, foreign, and no better than he should be. He might easily hop over to Venice, mingle with the crowd, shoot the boss, and go home again. Jolly cheap on easyJet and perfectly convenient. Now you see me; now you don’t.”

  “It’s no easier for a single Latvian than for a married accountant,” she protested.

  “There,” he said triumphantly. “Just the words suggest everything. The one is a plausible killer, and the other isn’t. It’s as simple as that.”

  “You’ve been exposed to too much Agatha Christie. You believe in Hercule Poirot and his little gray cells.”

  Bognor flushed. There was a smidgen of truth in this. He enjoyed the novels of the dame, but he was also scrupulous in distinguishing between fact and fiction, real life and the world according to Christie.

  “I enjoy the Belgian and his little gray cells, but that isn’t the same as believing in them.”

  “Not entirely from where I stand,” she said. This was unfair and she knew it. “What I’m saying,” she said, stepping back in an effort to seem slightly less partisan herself, “is that you’re biased in favor of accountants against Latvians.”

  Simon decided to ignore this. She was being silly. He could not afford bias. Not in his job. It was essential to begin with a clean slate, and even if he had prejudices, it was important to distinguish between his personal views and his professional behavior. He tended to believe, along with P. D. James, that murder was essentially a working-class business, even if it became more interesting in middle-class hands. In this sense, he was classist. Yet he never allowed such beliefs to interfere with the way in which he conducted a case. Life had a way of surprising even him.

  “Everyone gets questioned,” he said. “You know that. And in exactly the same way. And everyone in my investigations is guilty until proved innocent. That’s the way with investigators. We’re the exact opposite of judges and juries. We have nasty suspicious minds. We believe the worst of everybody.”

  “Oh,” said Monica. “Nothing nastier than a High Court judge. Prurient cross-dressers, the lot of them.”

  She was winding him up. This was something she often did when she was losing an argument.

  “I know,” he conceded. “There’s a routine. It doesn’t change a lot. What makes life interesting is the people we investigate, not the way we do it. That doesn’t change. The people are always different though. That’s what makes the job so fascinating.”

  “So you’re a dull stick and all around you is ever-changing interest. Some of your best friends are murderers.”

  There was some truth in this, although privately Bognor thought he was quite interesting and rather unorthodox, preferring not to plod along with the rulebook but to extemporize, sometimes with some brilliance and panache. Colleagues seemed not, on the whole, to notice and to be disparaging when they did. He cared about this, but tried to keep quiet about it. “I’m always telling you that the essence of successful detective work is a constancy when faced with ingenuity and originality. That’s almost the only fixed point in our line of work. Everything else is always different; that’s why it is vital that I remain the same.”

  “Says you.” She was smiling.

  “I’m sorry if you think that’s boring,” he said, pretending to be affronted.

  “I didn’t say you were boring. Far from it. I only hinted that your approach to the job might be, well, shall we just say, blinkered.”

  He did not respond to this but said instead, “The only possible source of DNA was the bolt. No traces of anything. Whoever fired it was obviously wearing gloves. They knew what they were doing.”

  “Hired assassin?”

  “Possible,” he said. “It was Italy, after all. My gut tells me that it wasn’t. I’m not used to it. It’s not the way we do things here.”

  “But as you said this was abroad.”

  “And I said it was possible. I just believe that the killer was the person who wanted Silverburger dead. Don’t ask me why. I just believe it.”

  “Difficult shot?”

  “Not really. Silverburger was standing with his back to the bowman. To judge from the way the bolt penetrated, it was fired at close range. I assume whoever pulled the trigger had been practicing, so they knew what they were doing.”

  “So it could have been one of ours?” Sir Simon thought for a moment.

  “In theory, yes,” he said. “If they happened to be in Venice.

  That’s the main stumbling block.”

  “But easily ascertained.”

  “Easily ascertained, yes.”

  They both stared moodily into their emptying glasses. “He was a ghastly man, Silverburger,” he said eventually. “So they say,” agreed his wife. “He certainly made dreadful films.”

  Bognor was being reflective. “I seem to spend a lot of my life apprehending people who have done much-needed work,” he said. “Getting rid of Silverburger was a service. He was a waste of space. And yet I am the instrument of a law that says that getting rid of him was wrong.”

  “We think he was a waste of space,” said Monica, “but his mother must have loved him. And others. Not everyone thought of him as lowly as we do. Did. Besides killing people is wrong.”

  “I’m not so sure,” said Bognor, recognizing that this was dangerous ground for an investigator. His role in life was defined and precise. The minute one started questioning it, one entered realms of philosophy and danger. His was not to reason why but simply to, well, get on with the job, and not ask too many questions. And he believed that what he was doing was right. He was the hammer of the righteous, the instrument of the law that ruled, and necessarily, the earth. Killing people was wrong. He knew and believed this as an article of absolute faith.

  “Are you sure?” he asked, expecting an answer.

  “What?” she said. “Sure about what? I don’t deal in certainties. You know that. Or you jolly well ought to by now.”

  “Killing people,” he said. “You said that killing people was wrong. Do you believe that?”

  It was her turn to think for a while.

  Eventually, she said quietly, “Like I said, I don’t deal in certainties. But since you ask, most of the time, yes. And I think we have to live by that belief. But I’m not sure it’s always right. Sorry… .”

  “Killing people is wrong,” he said, “but sometimes killing people is better than not killing them. If people are a waste of space, we’re better off without them.”

  “But”—she now seemed on surer ground—“that’s not for us to decide, darling.”

  7

  Eric Swanley’s office was in London’s Covent Garden. The garden itself was an unusual mixture of ancient and modern. Originally, it had been dedicated to vegetables, Covent being the old English for convent and the place being a sort of monks’ garden for London during the reign of King John and for the following few hundred years. During Bognor’s youth, it had been a glorified greengrocer, famous as much for its eccentric licensing laws as for its fruit and vegetables. Now it was a sort of theme park full of jugglers and cardsharps. The old buildings remained but had been transformed into trendy bars and cafés. Somehow, against most of the odds, it retained a bohemian, raffish atmosphere that Bognor liked.

  Swanley’s office was unreformed and gave the impression of having been well established when the first monkish gardeners originally arrived in the thirteenth century. There was no lift or elevator, and one ascended to the fifth floor by way of stone stairs. The walls were painted a pea green that Bognor associated with very old-fashioned public wards in run-down hospitals. Maybe urinals.

  It was a suite of offices though that gave too extravagant and affluent an idea of them. Basically, there was an office in which Swanley worked and an outer area with a spinster
of uncertain age hunched over a computer (one of the few concessions to modernity and an indicator that all was not entirely as it seemed). The chairs on which those waiting to be ushered into his presence were old-fashioned ladder-back dining room seats that gave the impression, like most of the fixtures and fittings, of having been there since the beginning.

  Inside the main office, which Bognor was able to penetrate after an only marginal wait—just enough to convey business and importance but not enough to suggest indifference—the impression was one of paper. Paper was everywhere, mostly bundled and tied with ribbon, mostly pink. The paper, too, looked as if it came with the office as did Mr. Swanley himself.

  “I’ve come about Mr. Silverburger,” said Bognor.

  “Of course. A tragic business. Alas, poor Irving.” Swanley rubbed his hands together, which produced a strange rasping noise, as if they were made from some kind of sandpaper. He offered Bognor a drink, suggesting a choice between tea and coffee, which his guest guessed was more apparent than real. Whatever he asked for would be warm, khaki-colored, and tasteless. He was surprised, therefore, when a serviceable large espresso arrived in a state-of-the-art Illy cup. That was, reflected Bognor, the new Covent Garden. He must remember that. All was not what it seemed. It never was, but looks, as so often, could be deceptive.

  “He was a client of yours?”

  “Indeed,” said Swanley. “This is confidential, I take it.”

  Bognor agreed wondering as he did why Swanley was bothering to record it on a small, modern device. It probably did pictures as well. He was impressed.

  Swanley wore an old-fashioned pinstriped suit. He looked and was behaving a little like the family undertaker. Only with twenty-first century trimmings like the recorder and the coffee. Bognor told himself to stay awake and not to think in terms of tape recorders and camp coffee.

  “Had you known Mr. Silverburger long?” Bognor asked. “Irving and I were like brothers,” said Mr. Swanley, not answering the question nor appearing in the least German.

  True Brit and smarmy with it, thought Bognor.