Business Unusual (The Simon Bognor Mysteries) Read online

  ‘Brill!’ The Countess sounded pleased. ‘Come to tea. Mrs Perkins will have baked a cake, I dare say. Do you play backgammon? Or bridge?’

  ‘Neither, I’m afraid,’ said Bognor.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ she said. ‘I can see we’re going to have lots in common. I shall see you shortly, Mr er …’

  ‘Bognor,’ said Bognor.

  ‘Of course. Come right on over, just as soon as you like.’

  ‘I’ll get a cab.’

  ‘Just do that little thing.’ And she gave a peal of laughter and hung up.

  ‘Dear God!’ said Bognor out loud. He went next door to the bathroom and splashed cold water all over his face, while trying hard not to catch more than a glimpse of himself in the mirror. He knew he wouldn’t care for what he saw. All mottled jowl. ‘Oh ye wattles and dewlaps,’ he said to himself, ‘praise him and magnify him for ever. I look like a bloody turkey. The Countess will throw me out as soon as look at me.’

  Then he went back into the bedroom and wrote, in a rather unsteady hand, under his wife’s message: ‘Gone Castle see Mr and Mrs Scarps. Hope film good and you unbored. Back soon. Luv S.’

  There was always a line of taxicabs outside the Talbot because it was the nearest approximation to a ‘business’ and ‘conference’ hotel in town. This meant that it had a fax machine and rooms with baize-covered boardroom tables and what were now called ‘audio-visual aids’ but which Bognor still thought of as ‘magic lanterns’ and associated with an agreeable old cove who used to come once a year to his preparatory school in order to lecture on hedgehogs. It would be unreasonable to describe trade as brisk, but apart from Scarpington Lower Level which was the main-line Inter-City station and not to be confused with Scarpington Upper Level where the branch line to Stoke-on-Trent terminated, there was nowhere else for a taxi-driver to sensibly park.

  His taxi-driver was not communicative. A thick-set, middle-aged man in a pseudo-leather jacket, he appeared to speak only in grunts. The back of his neck spilled over his collar and was pitted with scars which looked like the relics of a very serious and unpleasant childhood disease. Unless it was shrapnel. But he was too young for the last war and there seemed no good reason to suppose he had been involved in any sort of bombing. He was neither Irish nor Arabic and spoke — or rather grunted — in the unmistakable flat Scarpington accent. Bognor was unaware that there had ever been any incident in the town which could possibly account for shrapnel in the neck.

  The drive out of town was as educational as anything he had yet accomplished on Parkinson’s behalf. First the town centre — a mess of architectural styles ranging in antiquity from the 15th-century monastic conduit in front of the Victorian ‘cathedral’ which Monica had so disparaged to the rain-stained breezeblock of Marks and Spencer, Tesco, Next, Benetton, Laura Ashley and all the other chains which had so unified, homogenised, anaesthetised and generally screwed up the High Streets of England. In this matter Bognor was something of a fogey, an admirer, though with qualifications, of Prince Charles, Gavin Stamp and the late Sir John Betjeman.

  In between these two extremes there were a few undistinguished Victorian relics, including the old Post Office, lovingly buffed up and scrubbed and floodlit. The Post Office was now a wine bar called ‘Thingummys’. Some of the other refurbishments were inhabited by the twee-er, more Ashleyite chains. The Scarpington Society (patron Sir Seymour Puce) had been responsible for some new street signs with a William Morris lettering out of keeping with everything in sight and for some ‘genuine antique’ fibre-glass Edwardian lamp standards widely believed (though this had not been proved) to be manufactured by a dubious Puce subsidiary in Hong Kong.

  Beyond the centre the themery swiftly disintegrated into ever crummier terraces of back-to-backs punctuated by Asian-run corner stores and video shops with latticed grilles over the windows. This was poor-white country, a land of fear and carpet slippers, the twitch of net curtain, the threat of hypothermia in the night, the exploding water heater, the toxic foam sofa, and all this punctuated by a government descant admonishing the natives to eat more greens and wear long johns.

  It seemed much more than a mile from room service, however flawed, at the Talbot Hotel. Bognor thought of Frantisek and the steak tartare, gazed out at dull red brick, mortared by grime, and felt guilt. It was the guilt of the liberal privileged, an out of kilter, passé, sixties sentiment virtually unthinkable in the thrusting, hard-nosed self-support of Thatcher’s Britain. But he felt it all the same.

  Then suddenly it was Bangladesh. The same mean terraces became Dacca-sub-Sludgelode. Everywhere man was bearded and berobed and woman was swathed in sex-diminishing shapeless swaddle. Bognor was all in favour of the brotherhood of man, hail-fellow-well-met, same-again-thank-you-squire, don’t-mind-if-I-do, say-what-you-like, and never a care if the drinker or speaker was a Hindu or a Jew or a Pole or a Turk speaking Urdu, Pushtu, Hindi, Hebrew, Burgess, Steiner or even plain old Middle English. Yet he was disconcerted by this clash of culture and architecture, this fervid contrast of faith and background and preconception. As they neared a railway bridge he glanced up and saw through the murk that someone had sprayed a slogan alongside the advertisement for Ferodo brake linings.

  ‘Death to Rushdie!’

  He shivered.

  And then, seconds later, they were out of the city and on a short strip of dual carriageway. Ahead, silhouetted against a pale peep of wintry afternoon sun, was the gaunt granite of one of the oldest inhabited homes in England, the domicile of d’eath-Stranglefields since the Conqueror had granted the land in 1068. Scarpington Castle.

  Bognor sighed.

  Behind that Gothic — Tennysonian Gothick, mind you — drawbridge and beneath that satellite dish gleaming pristine in the thin light of a December day was the Countess of Scarpington, pining while her husband the Earl was at the hunt. Well, shooting duck with the bank manager and Moulton the brewer or Sinclair the invalid carriage manufacturer. But who cared? The Earls of Scarpington had taken pleasure in the chase since time immemorial, while their ladies had taken their pleasures as they found them. Or something like that. Bognor, like the rest of the country, was becoming Disneyfied in old age. Other countries revised their history to suit present politics; the British were re-writing theirs as a series of pop-up books.

  The castle was built on a curious excrescence not unlike a diminutive version of Glastonbury Tor. It was known officially as. ‘Old Knob’, and unofficially as ‘The Stranglefield Wart’. It was an obvious place to build a Norman castle because the Knob or Wart was the only protuberance in the otherwise pan-flat Vale of Sludgelode. The original castle had been little more than a bleak, simple, four-square tower pocked with slits for firing arrows at anyone foolish enough to come galloping across the plain with hostile intent. Over the centuries it had been often besieged but never successfully. The worst moment had been during the Civil War. Scarpington itself had been for the parliamentarians, but Sir Blake d’eath-Stranglefield was a staunch monarchist. He and a small band of family and retainers held out against everything, including a severe biffing from cannon under the personal command of Cromwell himself.

  In the domestically more docile eighteenth century, the family, elevated to the peerage by George III, attempted to soften the hawkish angularities of their ancestral abode. Classical windows and wings and stable blocks were tacked on wherever possible and some estate workers’ cottages at the foot of the Knob were demolished to make way for a water garden, a rose garden, an arboretum, a private zoo, a maze, and a deer park landscaped by a man said by some to be the ancestor of Stanley Green, the Artisan builder’s merchant and known, inevitably, as Incapability Green. Actually Green had done a perfectly decent job, but no one could change the essential character of the Castle itself. The proper thing to have done — others, like the Digbys at Sherborne or the Cavendishes at Haddon managed it — would have been to abandon the old barrack fortress and build an entirely new mansion in a less commanding but more com
fortable location. This was not the d’eath-Stranglefield way, which was why their modern successors were condemned to such damp and draughty grandeur.

  The Castle was notionally open to the public, but at this time of year they had almost given up the pretence. The gates were closed and the taxi-driver had to conduct a grunted altercation with the lodge-keeper before gaining access. Bognor noticed a sign claiming that the zoo now boasted the world’s largest collection of gerbils. Yet another sign of the decline in some aristocratic fortunes.

  The drive up to the top of the Knob was narrow and steep; a north wind gusted in a flurry of sleet; high above the tallest turret the ancient banner of the Earls of Scarpington fluttered defiantly. ‘Gormenghast,’ muttered Bognor, as he grudgingly paid over twelve pounds to his driver who just as grudgingly gave him a receipt. Then he ran across the gravel to the porte-cochère where he yanked at a bellrope and waited, shivering.

  Eventually a thin, elderly man in butler’s gear opened the door and let him in, though without enthusiasm.

  ‘Her ladyship is in the library,’ he said. ‘If you’ll come this way.’

  Bognor felt that he had been here before. Of course. McCrum Castle, home of Sir Archibald McCrum of that Ilk. He had had to go there when his investigations of the stately home industry, as it was then called — now they had become ‘Historic Houses’ — had turned nasty. Scarpington Castle had the same sense of being hewn from living granite, of outsize antlers above smoke-billowing fireplaces, of half-baked commercialism, of a desperate attempt to keep up appearances. Appearances of what, though, wondered Bognor, as he and the butler tip-tapped along echoing stone-flagged passages, past rusty armour, and family portraits so walnut with lacquer you could hardly make out the characteristic d’eath-Stranglefield noses in them. At last the butler paused before a closed oak door and knocked. Rather a bossy knock for a butler, thought Bognor.

  From within a voice which managed to be simultaneously tinkling and husky said ‘Come!’ Just as on the phone, the single syllable was elongated into a protracted drawl. It was the drawing-room equivalent of the parade-ground trick of turning simple commands into a foghorn blast full seconds long.

  ‘The gentleman from the Board of Trade,’ said the butler to the back of a high, draught-excluding chair in front of the fire. From the size of the logs the fire was clearly meant to roar, but it only spat and fumed.

  ‘Thank you, Perkins. That will be all. We don’t want to be disturbed.’

  ‘No, my lady.’ Perkins withdrew gracelessly, giving Bognor a farewell glance which definitely said, ‘Watch your step, sunshine.’

  The voice from the chair now became flesh. The Countess of Scarpington was wearing skin-tight blue jeans, a black polo-neck sweater and brown cowboy boots. Her blonde hair which last night had been piled high under what must have been one of the few remaining family heirlooms now hung loose over her shoulders. As she stood to welcome her guest, she steadied herself against the chairback. Even as Bognor told himself that she really was incredibly sexy he also noticed that she was (a) not sober and (b) not as young as she had looked at dinner. Terrific paintwork and a remarkable figure could not, close to, disguise the fact that she was unlikely to see forty again. But then, thought Bognor, be reasonable. Nor will I.

  ‘I say,’ she said, ‘isn’t that an Arkwright and Blennerhasset?’

  For a second he was confused, then he glanced down at his vivid tie. ‘Yes, actually.’

  ‘I say,’ she said, clapping her hands in a gesture which was just a little too girlish. ‘Did you know Bomber?’

  ‘What?’ said Bognor, raking through the embers of college life a quarter of a century before. ‘You mean Jimmy Sprockett?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘God!’ Bognor staggered slightly, and the Countess, by the merest flicker of attention, made him realise that she had noticed. ‘Bomber Sprockett. Whatever happened to him?’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘first he married me. Then he took me off to Australia where we not only had a ball but made a fortune in computers. And finally he went and got himself killed in the sea.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Bognor. He couldn’t think of anything better.

  ‘They never found him. He was out on the reef snorkelling. It could have been a shark, I suppose. Silly old Sprockett. So anyway I came home with the loot and married an earl.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I think this calls for a celebration,’ she said. ‘In fact I was thinking it would probably call for a celebration anyway so rather than have boring tea and boring cake made by boring Mrs Perkins I thought we’d have some of Piggy’s seriously interesting champagne. Luckily for us he just happens to keep two or three bottles in the fridge up here for just such emergencies so we don’t have to disturb Perkins and get him to go and rummage in the cellar.’

  She sashayed over to the panelling under a picture of the fourth Earl, ‘Black Jack Stranglefield’, and did something nifty which caused a door to swing open and reveal a small fridge full of bottles. Out came a bottle of Veuve Clicquot ’82.

  ‘Piggy’s something called “A Friend of the Widow” which means he gets a bottle of bubbly every birthday.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Non-vintage, though, which I think is rather vulgar.’ She pointed to a cabinet in the corner. ‘Glasses over there. Will you do it or shall I?’

  Bognor did it, managing to screw the cork off with the merest of dull pops and not spilling a drop.

  ‘Take a pew,’ she said, settling back into her chair.

  Bognor sagged into an enormous sofa opposite.

  ‘Cheers,’ she said. ‘Isn’t this fun?’

  ‘Cheers,’ said Bognor. ‘Tremendous fun.’

  ‘And fancy you knowing Sprockett!’

  ‘Yes, fancy.’

  She smiled at him. Her own teeth, gap in the middle. Crow’s feet at the corners of the eye.

  ‘But you don’t know Piggy?’

  ‘No, not yet.’

  She drank a little champagne and looked up at him from under a mane of blonde. ‘I hope you don’t mind my asking,’ she said, removing a wayward hair which momentarily blurred her vision, ‘but have you been drinking?’

  ‘Yes, actually.’

  She giggled. ‘Well, that’s rather a relief. So have I. So that makes two of us.’

  She stared at him.

  Bognor stared back.

  After a longer than comfortable mutual stare, she said, as if consciously flipping back into conventional gear, ‘You said you were writing some sort of report about Scarpington.’

  ‘Yes.’ Bognor sketched in the essential details and she listened, wide-eyed.

  ‘What an assignment!’ she said, when he’d finished. ‘Poor you. This place is the absolute pits.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Bognor. ‘It surely isn’t as bad as all that.’

  ‘I can assure you,’ she said, ‘it is every bit as bad as all that. Thank Christ I kept on the flat in Eaton Square.’

  ‘My boss seems to think Scarpington is rather like everywhere else except London,’ said Bognor. ‘That’s why he chose it.’

  ‘If he really thought that then he could have chosen anywhere else instead, couldn’t he?’ She tossed her head to get rid of more hair in the eyes. ‘And I can assure you anywhere else would have been an infinitely more amusing place.’

  ‘Unfortunately my boss doesn’t pay for me to be amused.’ Bognor spoke with all the resentment of a man whose career has passed lunch and settled into early afternoon.

  ‘Funny thing,’ she said, glancing towards the window which was taking a terrible lashing from the storm. ‘Most people here seem to think Piggy married me for my looks.’

  ‘And he didn’t?’ This was meant as a compliment, albeit heavy-handed. She acknowledged it with another sideways grin. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Piggy married me for the lolly and I married him for the title. Bloody silly thing to do but I think I’ll hang in. Would you hang in if it were you? I mean, I’m hardly ever here, and he’s hardly eve
r in town.’

  ‘Is there enough money?’

  She laughed. ‘There’s enough money,’ she said, ‘even with this great millstone to subsidise. In fact once I’d got my accountants on to the estate it’s surprising how little money it need actually lose. And we think we’ve struck oil on one of the farms. Literally, I mean. So in the end I may even make money out of the deal. Which would be ironic, don’t you think?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘You were at the dinner last night,’ she said suddenly.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘With a woman who looked like a horse.’

  ‘My wife.’

  ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude. She looked like a very nice horse. Some people are very attracted to horses. Wasn’t it Joyce Grenfell who said that the world was divided into horses and buttons?’

  ‘Sounds like her,’ said Bognor, and then, wishing to change the subject because talk of Monica was making him feel guilty even though, of course, he was only here out of duty, he said, ‘Quite dramatic, that chap Brackett keeling over like that. I’d only just met him. He was one of the first Scarpingtonians I’d been to see.’

  ‘Grubby little man,’ she said. ‘Oddly enough, he’d been to visit Piggy only yesterday morning.’

  ‘Really.’ Even through the fuzz of booze Bognor’s antennae twitched. ‘Were they mates?’

  ‘God knows,’ said the Countess, ‘but they were fellow Artisans, and in Scarpington terms that means more than family, more than the Old Boy Network, more than, oh, I don’t know …’ She poured more champagne. The champagne was disappearing fast but there was more in the fridge. Whether it was that or the thought of the Artisans was difficult to tell but her voice had suddenly taken on a note of hysteria and for a moment Bognor was appalled to realise that she was on the verge of tears.

  ‘I was beginning to form that impression already,’ he said. ‘I had a session this morning with Freddie, the barman at the St Moritz bar …’

  ‘Him!’ Lady Scarpington’s control again teetered on the brink. ‘Now there really is something quite unbelievably creepy about him. The way he looks at women. Ugh! And he knows too much. He reeks of other people’s sad, sad secrets.’