Death in the Opening Chapter Read online

  ‘We’ll try to reduce the mess,’ said Bognor, sounding pompous, aware of the fact, but unable to see a way of seeming otherwise, ‘that’s our job. Or part of it. Lucky that we were here. On the other hand, a very important part of my job is to see that justice is done. And seen to be done.’

  The pomposity was on overload. He knew this but could think of no way of diminishing it.

  ‘Bugger justice!’ said his host, doing it for him.

  The roast bird was barely edible and defied identification. Down under it would probably have been roadkill, but in England it was more likely to be Fluddkill, brought down by the squire’s ancient Purdey twelve-bore. The pudding was equally themeless, though it was steamed and came with custard. You didn’t dine at Casa Fludd on account of what the baronet insisted on calling ‘scoff’, although he kept a decent cellar and served perfectly acceptable claret to accompany the execrable food.

  Conversation continued to focus on the death of the Reverend Sebastian, but was procedural rather than forensic. The wives did not have particularly strong opinions for once and were, on the whole, content to take their husbands’ side. This was unusual, as was the men’s diametrically opposed opinion. They usually agreed, if only to differ, but, faced with the death of the vicar, they took up very decided positions on either side of the fence.

  Sir Branwell was all for tidiness, Bognor for solving the puzzle. Time was when Simon might have agreed with the need for order, but age had not wearied him, nor the years condemned. Instead, he had become zealous in the pursuit of truth. Sir Branwell, on the other hand, was all for truth, provided it didn’t get in the way.

  Their disagreement was profound but polite. They had been friends for ever and differences of opinion could not change that. Neither of them wished it. When the apology of a pudding had been cleared away, coffee – weak and tepid – appeared in a pot, along with minute cups, and a carafe of acceptable port began to circulate steadily among the four of them.

  It was ever thus.

  ‘No question of cancelling the festival?’ asked Bognor.

  ‘Good grief, no,’ said his host, slurping port like the late Keith Floyd, whom in some respects he resembled.

  ‘Sebastian wouldn’t have wished it,’ said his hostess with enviable certainty. ‘He would have wanted the show to go on.’

  ‘Then why kill himself?’ asked Lady Bognor, going to the heart of the matter with predictable shrewdness.

  ‘That’s why I think someone else did him in,’ said Bognor. ‘The late Reverend was not a boat-rocker. He wouldn’t have thrown the entire event into jeopardy, even if he were depressed.’

  ‘I don’t want bloody journalists sniffing around,’ said Sir Branwell. He pronounced the offending word ‘jawnalists’, as in ‘jaw-jaw, not war-war’. He didn’t like the press, referring with contempt to ‘that little creep Evans’ and ‘that foreign republican Murdoch’. The Bognors agreed in the particular, but not the general. They were for a free press, which, in general terms, they felt the British no longer had. Discuss.

  ‘You and I are always going to see things differently. If someone killed the reverend, then that’s wrong, and they should be made to pay for it.’

  ‘Won’t bring him back though,’ said Fludd, not unreasonably, ‘and trying to find the murderer is going to break a whole nest of eggs without, as it were, making an edible omelette.’

  ‘Brannie’s right,’ said Lady Fludd. ‘A whole lot of journalists crawling all over the place, smuggling themselves into the house in laundry baskets, lives exposed to ridicule or worse, coals raked over, and to no avail whatever. Absolutely no avail whatever.’

  ‘Quite,’ said her husband.

  The port circulated.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ said Bognor.

  ‘Not necessarily what?’ countered Fludd, in the manner of an Apocrypha tutor picking up a woolly argument and exposing it for the moth-eaten cardigan it really was.

  ‘Avail,’ said Bognor. ‘Not necessarily to no avail. The truth availeth and all that. I’m not saying the process will be easy, or even pleasant. These things seldom are. But at the end of the day, we will have a result. Nothing will have been swept under the carpet.’

  ‘I rather resent the idea that I am sweeping Sebastian under the carpet. I am letting him rest in peace, as he so plainly wished.’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s what the vicar would have wished. If someone else killed him, then he certainly didn’t. If you really want to know, I think that’s as good a proof as anything that he was murdered. If it were suicide, he’d have chosen almost any other day of the year. He certainly wouldn’t have created a vacuum at the beginning of the festival.’

  ‘I still think we should avoid undue fuss,’ said Sir Branwell.

  ‘We don’t do fuss,’ said his wife. They didn’t, either. It was something that Hitler and other would-be invaders didn’t understand about a certain sort of Briton. You didn’t mess with people like the Fludds. They did team teas for the cricket, commanded the Home Guard and didn’t do fuss. Period. Not to be roused. Slow to be so, but dangerous when done. An ancient cliché, but true nonetheless.

  ‘I think,’ said Bognor, glaring at his port, ‘that I should visit the scene of the crime. You never know what the conventional people may have missed.’

  ‘We’d all feel happier,’ said Lady Fludd, ‘if we thought everything was in your hands and could be handled by someone like you. Without, you know, fuss.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Sir Simon. ‘Safe pair of hands.’

  His wife would have rolled her eyes under some circumstances, but obviously felt such a gesture was inappropriate in this time and in this company.

  ‘Church,’ she said. ‘Simon and I had better have a sniff round St Teath’s or whatever. A smell and a bell. Who knows?’

  ‘It’s locked,’ said Sir Branwell, ‘but I have a key.’

  EIGHT

  Church was a church was a church. Also a scene of crime. Parts of it had been sectioned off with fluorescent tape. Two police officers were on guard. They too were dressed fluorescently. Fluorescence was all the rage these days, thought Bognor whimsically. It was the new luminous orange. It conveyed authority. Confronted with fluorescence, people became orderly. They formed queues, deferred, asked no questions, told no lies. Better a fluorescent jacket than a knighthood. He should know.

  ‘Cold in here,’ said Monica, shivering. It wasn’t really, but it felt like it. Scenes of crime, which meant places where murder had been committed, often felt colder than they actually were. Association of ideas, fact of life. Or death.

  Bognor didn’t know what he was looking for. He seldom did. This mattered very little. In fact, knowing exactly what one was looking for was often a drawback, because it indicated a closed mind incapable of assimilating the unexpected and dealing with surprise. And murder was nearly always a tale of the unexpected, a guilty thing surprised.

  He gazed about him, looking for anything that was out of place and not as it should be. Above the pulpit, the board advertised hymns. There were four of them numbered, all to be found in Hymns Ancient and Modern. Nothing out of order there, but, even so, he felt he should see what the choir and congregation had been scheduled to sing.

  The result was surprising. Christmas carols, harvest thanksgivings, wedding celebrations and deferential thanks for the graciousness of the royal family were all very well in their way, but not at this time of year, and not all together at once. It probably didn’t signify, but it was still unexpected. He was reminded of the biblical clues in the Stieg Larsson whodunnit about the girl with the tattoo and of the clues in Dan Brown’s best-seller. Both had been read by millions, and there was no reason to suppose that an avid reader had not taken the idea and played with it when killing the Rector of Mallborne.

  On the other hand, it could be that Sir Teath’s was a more than usually catholic church, and the selection of hymns was more than usually wide. After all, the bishop was Ebenezer Lariat, aka Bishop Ebb,
an old friend of Simon’s ever since they had worked together on the great communion wine scandal of 1983. He was now Bishop of Lymington, and was standing in at short notice for the Reverend Sebastian on the grounds that he was the late Rev.’s superior and could also deliver fifteen or so plausible sermonic minutes at the drop of a mitre. Alas, no room for debutants, even ones as keen as Simon.

  Bishop Ebb was due in an hour or so.

  The bishop was an Oxford man too. Keble, and muscular with it. He was a rowing blue, and Bognor could picture him in a pink Leander cap, much too small for him, on a foggy, damp boat-race day. He took a third class honours degree in Geography, and was into broken glass and hearty pursuits rather than religion. That came later.

  Cuddesdon, curacy in the industrial north, a living in the south, and a doubtful sexuality, coupled with an understated interest in choir boys and wolf cubs, added up to a more or less conventional path to episcopacy. That, at least, was what Contractor thought, and Bognor was inclined to agree.

  Ebenezer was not stupid, but he was, on the whole, lazy and had risen, if not exactly without trace, without apparently troubling the scorers. For a relatively public figure, he maintained a low, virtually private, profile. He had published a non-controversial treatise on prayer, aimed, characteristically, at a wide and relatively unspecific audience. This had sold solidly rather than spectacularly, and was eclipsed by his reworking of Hymns Ancient and Modern with a fashionable and predictable emphasis on the Modern.

  Bognor forgot where he had first met him, but he seemed to have been part of his emotional scenery for as long as he could remember. From time to time, he consulted Ebenezer on church matters, and he always asked him to their annual Christmas party, if only as a token cleric. Monica didn’t care for him – a usual lack of liking for her sex, though this was by no means universal. The bishop had a very loyal cook and housekeeper called Mrs Grimes. There may have been a Mr Grimes, but, even if he had once existed, he was long departed.

  As far as religiosity was concerned, Lariat-Lymington was all things to most men. He was generally considered ‘sound’, but no one knew (or, to be truthful, much cared) where exactly he stood on the ordination of women, whether he was a closet Catholic, or if he thought that the Church of England at prayer, flower-arranging, or even holy dusting, was in any way significant. The bishop just ‘was’.

  It was not like Contractor to fail in a task, and he would argue persuasively that, as far as Ebenezer was concerned, he had done the job. Nevertheless, there was a phrase that Bognor had learned from a friend who had become some sort of journalist. This was ‘We do not feel the character quite comes alive’. This was normally the prelude to a rejection in the politest possible sense. Everything was there: education, sporting achievements, size of hat and shoes, colour of eyes, maiden name of maiden aunt, but somehow the Rt Rev. Ebenezer remained strangely skeletal. For all his assiduity and perspicacity, Contractor had failed to put blood and flesh on the bare bones. The bishop remained elusively skeletal. He remained so to all inquisitors, leading some sceptics to maintain that, when you stripped away the flummery and the frocks, the cope and cape, the crook and mitre, there was nothing there at all.

  Perhaps so, perhaps not. Despite the sonorous public performance (the bishop had a deep baritone voice, with a matching delivery, of which he was inordinately proud), Ebenezer was a bit of a footnote. Maybe not even that. Which did not mean that he did not possess hidden depths or lacked the capacity to kill.

  Meanwhile, Bognor cogitated. He noted the numbers on the hymn board and the words which matched them in Hymns Ancient and Modern. He had no Bible with him, but would borrow one later and cudgel the grey matter yet further in the hope of elucidation. He stared long and hard at the spot above which the cleric’s limp body had recently hung, but, try as he might, his staring produced no answers.

  Conceding surrender, if only temporarily, he shifted to seek the woman. However, the only woman who seemed to fit any bill at all was Dorcas Fludd, wife of the Reverend Sebastian, and even he was compelled to admit that Dorcas was a very dark horse indeed. Cherchez Dorcas was an unproductive idea, and yet she and the reverend had been man and wife. They must once, unappealing though the idea might seem, have fancied each other and even, despite the lack of children, had carnal knowledge of each other. And Dorcas was a decent enough sort. Just not what you might call sexy.

  You couldn’t, on reflection, rule Dorcas out of the equation. Just because you didn’t fancy her, just because most of the world didn’t fancy her, didn’t mean that she couldn’t kindle fierce passions in the odd, and he meant odd, breast.

  He would have to have a word with her, in the hope of finding out what made her and Sebastian tick. It was she who had discovered him, she who had come straight to his cousins, she who had seemed so distraught. Alas, poor sausage!

  Bognor was not a particularly religious man. Lapsed C of E, like most of those brought up in the faith. Nevertheless, he had a vestigial respect for the noise it made and for matins and evensong, for the creed, for psalms, hymns and that curious wheedling, sonorous vicar’s voice, which seemed such an essential adjunct to that conventional middle-of-the-road, essentially bloodless faith. It was like English murder, like, in fact, so much of English life: ordered, tidy, neat, devoid of passion. The Church of England queued. The Church of England did not step out of line. The Church of England knew its place. Like so many English things, it was oddly lapsed and in an apparent state of abeyance, and yet there was a sense in which it was slumbering, not dead, and, to men like Bognor, still commanded respect, even at times a certain dread.

  He found himself reflecting thus, as he stood in St Teath’s that day. He was in the presence of death, and he felt it. The sense of doom and finality was visceral, and was enhanced by his surroundings. It didn’t matter that the Church, which used to be so central, had grown peripheral and unimportant. It had, for years, been a vital part of being a person. One was christened in church, one was married in church, one’s funeral was held in church. It marked one’s beginning and one’s end, and also, more importantly, it was part of one’s routine. Even in Bognor’s childhood, it had been a regular Sunday ritual, and in childhood the day had begun and ended with prayers. In the morning, it was school chapels, and in the evening, it tended to be smaller house dining rooms. But it was a part of life, as essential a part as anything, and even though he, like so many, had lapsed, it remained with him for ever and he respected, sometimes loved, the noise it made.

  The fact that the dead man was ordained and had died in his own church, gave the whole event a majesty that would otherwise have been lacking, even though Sir Branwell found the mystery an affront to his sense of order and ­tidiness, rather than something apocalyptic. One would have thought that Bognor, much of whose business was death and who dealt with it most days of his life, would have become inured to the whole idea. Instead of that, however, it was he who was still in awe of the end of life, and men like Sir Branwell who regarded it essentially as a tiresome disruption of routine. Sir Branwell and Lady Fludd had never even seen a dead body. The same was true of most English people of their generation. It was lack of familiarity which bred contempt. Familiarity induced awe, respect and fear. It made Bognor fanatical about truth and justice, and led him to do his best to eradicate murder from the vocabulary. For most people, death was little more than an inconvenience. Bognor was a traditionalist in such matters.

  He was reflecting on conservatism, mortality and meaning, when he sensed movement behind him and realized that Bishop Ebb had arrived early. He was wearing grey flannel bags, a tweed jacket along with a purple vest, and an enormous and showily bling pectoral cross.

  ‘Well,’ said the bishop, ‘he moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform. I hadn’t intended to be here until I got Branwell’s SOS, but now our paths cross once more. You’re the silver lining to a deep black cloud. Welcome to St Teath’s.’

  And he shook Bognor by the hand. Warmly. Bognor h
ad experienced enough cool handshakes in his life to recognize the difference. The bishop smiled with his eyes too, and he exuded warmth. Some, possibly even most, episcopal personages were cold to the point of cadaverousness, but not Ebenezer Lymington. You wanted to snuggle up to him and bask.

  ‘Nice to see you, Bishop,’ said Bognor. ‘Sorry about the circumstances, but still good to see you around.’

  It was indeed good to have a senior man of God around, and one who could not possibly be a suspect. No Reverend Green, no lead piping in the library, no spanner in the conservatory. Colonel Mustard, Miss Scarlet, Professor Plum: all possible. But not Bishop Ebb. His alibi was perfect, quite apart from the fact that he was far too saintly. Loren Estelman or Sarah Paretsky might have had a killer prelate in the mean streets of Detroit or Chicago, but no such person would disfigure the pages of a mystery set in rural England. The bishop didn’t do it. And in England, couldn’t. Not so elsewhere.

  ‘So, penny for your thoughts,’ said the Rt Rev. Ebenezer. ‘Our friend the Lord Lieutenant would have us believe that Sebastian killed himself. He could be right, even if his reasons are wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened. Sir Branwell doesn’t like anything to interfere with the status quo, but, in my experience, life and death aren’t like that. They say that God’s joke is men making plans for the future. There’s a lot in that. I have predicated my life on the notion that tomorrow is an illusion and that one is constantly taken by surprise. It’s the only way to retain a semblance of control. Branwell believes that if you talk slowly and loudly enough, everything will pan out according to his wishes.’

  ‘And sometimes that happens,’ said Bognor.

  ‘That’s what I mean about being right for the wrong reasons,’ said the bishop. ‘It all comes down to God moving in mysterious ways his wonders to perform. They are wonders, He is mysterious. That’s part of the point. If it was all clear-cut and logical, we’d all be like Dawkins, which would be very boring.’