Business Unusual (The Simon Bognor Mysteries) Page 7
‘You were saying about Brackett …’
‘Was I?’
‘About his visit. Coming to see your husband.’
She visibly made an effort to take a grip. ‘Do you mind if I take my boots off,’ she asked. ‘In fact, would you awfully mind pulling them off for me? They’re rather tight.’ And she lifted one of her skinny, shapely legs in his direction. Bognor swallowed hard, got to his feet, and performed this delicate task while trying to pretend that he derived no physical satisfaction from it whatsoever. Afterwards he went back to his sofa while she curled up and tucked her feet under her bottom. He couldn’t help noticing that she had painted toenails and a gold chain round her left ankle. Monica was always intensely disparaging about women who wore chains round their ankles. But he must, he told himself severely, banish all thought of Monica and concentrate on his professional investigations.
‘You say,’ he said, trying to sound brisk and under control, ‘you say that your husband and Reg Brackett had a meeting.’
‘Not a very amicable meeting,’ she said. ‘In fact, something very close to a row. I’ve seldom seen Piggy so agitated. Not like him. He’s normally so wet you could shoot snipe off him.’
‘What was the row about?’
‘God knows.’ She said it as if she not only did not know but was past caring.
‘Your husband didn’t have anything to do with Bracketts Laundry and Dry Cleaning Services?’
‘Good grief, no! He wasn’t even a customer. We do all that sort of stuff in-house.’ She rearranged her feet. ‘I do know he wanted money.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Because Piggy asked me for money.’
Bognor thought for a moment and poured them both another glass. Almost without noticing they had killed the bottle.
‘If you don’t mind me asking, what are your, er, financial arrangements?’
‘We don’t have a joint account,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t share an account with my dear husband any more than I’d share a bed, frankly. I give him a regular allowance. Anything over and above that he has to ask. Sometimes I give, sometimes I don’t.’
‘So if he needs to acquire a new and exotic gerbil the Earl would have to borrow from you?’
She grinned. ‘I’ve told him the gerbils must go. Some smart alec has latched on to the idea that there are one or two peers of the realm who are a bit lacking in the brain department, so he’s cleaned up selling bogus tourist attractions to half the stately home owners in Britain. Piggy got the gerbils. It could have been worse. The McCrum of that Ilk has got sporrans.’
‘Wouldn’t you know it?’ Bognor grinned back. ‘The world’s biggest collection of sporrans. I used to know the McCrum. He’s mad.’
‘So’s Piggy. In a negative sort of way. Anyway, Brackett was after my money and I said “no”. I don’t think Piggy had expected anything else. The only thing I would say is that I think Brackett was doing more than just ask.’
‘Beg, you mean? A bended knee job?’
‘No, more than that.’ She frowned. ‘I think he threatened. I think it was money with menaces. He must have been desperate, if so. One Artisan threatening another. Unthinkable.’ She arched her eyebrows.
‘Breaking the Artisan oath.’
‘Absolutely.’ She ran a finger along the gold chain at her ankle and flexed her painted toes, then looked at her watch which was a chunky and very expensive one-off Cartier. Poor dead Sprockett’s computer business must, thought Bognor, have been extraordinarily successful. Funny, he had always thought of Sprockett as rather dim. Certainly dimmer than himself. It only went to show.
The Countess leaned back and half yawned, half purred.
‘Piggy won’t be back for an age,’ she said. ‘Do you think we ought to have the other half?’ She nodded towards the empty Widow’s cruse.
‘I don’t know that I could.’ Bognor knew that he had had more than enough, but he was always easily tempted, particularly when, as now, his defences were down.
‘I’ll tell you what,’ she said. ‘One of the little luxuries I have allowed is a sauna and the tiniest little indoor pool you’ve ever seen in your life. What would you say to that? It would help us sober up.’
‘Not,’ said Bognor, with a perceptiveness which surprised him, ‘if we have the other half.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘at least they’ll cancel each other out.’
‘Do you reckon?’
‘Well,’ her smile was almost absurdly arch this time, ‘it’s a theory. We won’t know until we put it to the test, will we?’
‘I don’t have any swimming trunks.’
Her smile this time quite plainly said that to talk of swimming trunks in a developing situation such as this was mere prudery. But sensing, correctly, that prudery, though mixed with prurience, was an essential part of Bognor’s nature, she said, ‘I’m sure I can find you a pair of Piggy’s.’
‘Are you sure it’s safe?’ Bognor knew perfectly well it wasn’t in the least safe, but it was amazing what excess alcohol could do for a chap, even one as safety-conscious as he was.
‘Safe?’ This time there was no mistaking the sexual inflection. She was thinking about AIDS and herpes and condoms and other hitherto unmentionables which now, to Bognor’s consternation, seemed to have become a regular part of chit-chat in even the most polite society.
‘Heart,’ said Bognor, deliberately misunderstanding. ‘I mean, I haven’t checked but I have a nasty feeling my blood pressure isn’t what it should be. And I am a pound or two overweight.’ (For ‘pound’, he thought, read ‘stone’.) ‘And don’t they say it’s particularly dangerous if you’ve been drinking?’
‘Do they?’ She purred again. ‘I always think it’s even more fun after drinking. And if the worst came to the worst, what a way to go! Better than being eaten by sharks like poor Sprockett. And I’m rather fabulous at mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Or so I’m told.’
Oh God, oh Monica, thought Bognor to himself, what’s going on? I’m out of control. I’m not in charge. Help and yet not help!
As if in answer to this silent, if confused supplication, the phone sitting on an ancient chest which looked as if it might have accompanied Sir Ralph d’eath-Stranglefield on the Crusades began to ring. The Countess looked at it, then looked at him. Bognor looked at it, and then at the Countess.
‘I think,’ she said, ‘we should just let it ring.’
Then Bognor knew that he was lost.
It rang for quite some time and they both could almost feel its exasperation before eventually with a petulant final yelp it cut off.
‘I’ll find you some trunks,’ she said. ‘Won’t be a jiffy. Just wait here and don’t go away.’
Bognor wondered where on earth she expected him to go.
She was away for about five minutes and such was Bognor’s state that it seemed on the one hand much longer and on the other shorter. Perhaps, he thought, that was what was meant by the left and right side of the brain. A different perception of time. The rain drummed against the leaded window pane. He thought of Reg Brackett and his last unfinished joke. He thought of Scarpington Specials and the barman’s friend. He thought of Monica and tried not to. He thought of the Countess’s painted toenails. He wondered what Parkinson would say. And smiled.
‘Here,’ she said, shimmying up behind him unheard in bare feet and a white towelling robe. ‘Try these for size.’
Piggy Scarpington, whom Bognor had only ever seen sitting down, evidently had a lot of bottom. The trunks, scarlet with a gold S and coronet on the right buttock, looked as if they would have fitted the hind legs of a pantomime rhinoceros.
Diana Scarpington marginally misinterpreted Bognor’s embarrassment. ‘I won’t look,’ she said, and strode to the windows where she lit a cigarette and stared with exaggerated disinterest at the weather.
‘What a bloody awful day,’ she said, blowing smoke at the glass. ‘Until you turned up, that is. Fancy your knowing poor Sprockett.
’
‘You can turn round now,’ said Bognor. He felt more than usually silly in Lord Scarpington’s scarlet trunks, particularly as he was still wearing his tweed jacket and the purple and pink A and B tie.
‘Oh, you look absolutely adorable,’ said his hostess, turning and laughing. ‘I’ll bring the glasses if you bring the bottle. Follow me.’ And she led the way, still laughing in between humming what sounded, sort of, like the famous tenor aria from Don Giovanni.
More flagstoned corridor. There seemed no end to them. Bognor, carrying his shoes, trousers and an unopened bottle of vintage champagne, was glad there was no one there to see him. Was it merely imagination which made him think that whole generations of d’eath-Stranglefield ancestors were looking down the collective family nose as they passed? On balance he thought not.
‘It’s a long way down,’ she said, stopping at the end of one of the interminable, dripping corridors, ‘so we installed a lift.’ She pressed a button and the wall slid to one side. It was a very small lift with the result that they were cabin’d, cribb’d, and confined to such an extent that they were compelled to touch. Bognor’s hands were full. The Countess had two glasses in one and with the other first pressed the ‘Down’ button, and then found the back of Bognor’s neck and pulled his mouth down on to hers. It was obvious to Bognor, drunk though he was, that she had done this sort of thing before.
‘Mmmmm,’ she said, as the lift touched bottom with a bump. ‘You taste as if you’ve been drinking.’
Bognor was feeling rather sick. He hoped he was going to be all right. It had been a bumpy ride. Somewhere nearby a phone began to ring. Diana Scarpington picked up a receiver on the wall just outside the lift, said snappily, ‘Wrong number’ and replaced it.
‘Here we are, then,’ she said, unnecessarily. ‘What do you think?’
It was certainly a contrast with the rest of the leaky old Schloss, though he was surprised to see that one or two relics of the dungeon’s former use remained. There were manacles attached to a wall; a sort of stocks; and something that looked like a thumbscrew.
‘Piggy has such a sense of history,’ said the Countess, ‘so I gave in. They’re inclined to give me the creeps, but what the hell!’ To Bognor’s inebriated gaze they had a suspiciously glossy, oiled look, almost as if they had been put to use quite recently.
The rest of the dungeon was quite different. There was a pine-finished area to the right which already gave off the throat-burning aroma of sauna heat; to the left a placid round pool which looked icy cool; and between the two a foaming sauna. Sprinkled about the place were leather-covered cushions, sofas and bean bags. On one wall there was a screen. Opposite, a hole in the wall.
‘Projector?’ he enquired. ‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘You can sit in the jacuzzi and watch whatever you want. Bliss.’
She removed the robe in slow, seductive movements. Underneath she was wearing the skimpiest conceivable bikini, little more than a purple G-string with two tiny purple half-moons barely concealing her nipples.
‘Don’t you think,’ she said, ‘you ought to take off your jacket and tie? It’s terribly hot in there.’
Again she moved in close. This time she slipped off his tweed coat with an almost professional dexterity, then unknotted his tie, unbuttoned his shirt buttons and slid both hands under the shirt.
‘I bet you don’t get this at home,’ she said, pressing her mouth to his. ‘Mmmm!’
An eternity later she released him. ‘I don’t think you’re in training,’ she said, with just a hint of peevishness. ‘Come on, bring the bottle.’ And she grabbed him by the hand and led him into the broilerhouse. Once inside she closed the door and scooped water on to a bucket of what Bognor took to be white-hot coals. As the steam caught him full in the mouth he found himself gagging and gasping for breath.
‘Christ!’ he said eventually.
She laughed and opened the champagne as easily as she had removed his jacket and tie. ‘Have a drink,’ she said, and poured. ‘Lie down, take it easy.’ She herself eased on to one of the wooden slatted bunks and wriggled off her miniscule bikini-top. ‘Mmmm,’ she said. ‘Isn’t this just heaven?’
Bognor was still finding breath hard to come by. He didn’t know how much of this heat torture he could stand. Cardiac arrest under these circumstances would be embarrassing. Perhaps he should have stayed upstairs. He lay back and tried breathing very slowly and regularly. It seemed to work because the next thing he knew the Countess was shaking him, with a look half-way between irritation and anxiety.
‘Come on,’ she said, evidently relieved to find him still alive. ‘You need a plunge.’ So saying, she yanked him upright with surprising force and pulled him out of the sauna across the floor and into the cold pool.
It was very deep and they seemed to go down for ever. Bognor decided that he was dead. He had never, well hardly ever, experienced such a shock to the system. He had no wind left in his body at all. From the oven into the refrigerator. He felt like a Christmas turkey shoved still frozen into the Aga. No, that was the wrong way round. Like a Baked Alaska thrust under the grill.
And then they were going up and up and then they broke through the surface and they were back in the torture chamber dungeon and he wasn’t dead after all, just suffering terribly and beyond breath, and quite unable to appreciate the sleek, almost naked albeit middle-aged charms of the fiendish woman who was doing all these things to him. He was going to freeze.
‘Help!’ he whispered. ‘Help!’ Whereupon she pulled him up and out and propelled him into the jacuzzi. Oh, that was better! He found himself almost smiling. She had positioned him on a submerged seat so that only his head and shoulders stuck out of the comfortable warm water. A throbbing jet of water massaged the small of his back from behind. Diana Scarpington had vanished, but a second later she was back with the bottle and the two glasses and she too subsided languorously into the jacuzzi.
‘Golly,’ said Bognor, ‘that was a mauvais quart d’heure.’
‘Don’t be so feeble,’ she said. ‘You sound as wet as Piggy.’
She poured two glasses. ‘Chin-chin,’ she said, and, sitting gently on his lap, put both arms round him, pulled their bodies close together and started to kiss him with an animal urgency he was almost certain he had never before experienced.
‘Sssh!’ he said, just as he feared he would choke on her tongue or bleed to death from the sharp clamp of her teeth on his lips. ‘Shhh! I can hear something. It’s the lift. Listen. Someone’s using the lift.’
But she was beyond listening. He could feel her heart pounding against his; her fingernails grinding into his shoulder blades and kidneys; her tongue … and then, just as he thought everything had to be a dream, he saw the door from the lift shaft open, and people enter the dungeon. The people were familiar. Some more so than others. He only just recognised the butler and would probably not have done so but for his pinstripe trousers and black jacket and the expression which said ‘Gotcha, sunshine!’ He recognised the Earl of Scarpington from the night before and he recognised Detective Inspector Wartnaby from breakfast.
As for Monica …
‘Oh God!’ he said.
CHAPTER FIVE
Not a Tremendously Good Show
MONICA BOGNOR DROPPED ANOTHER brace of Alka-Seltzer into a plastic mug and regarded her husband with a gaze that would have sunk the Bismarck.
‘It’s no use, Simon,’ she said. ‘In flagrante is in flagrante. I saw you. Her husband saw you. Detective Chief Inspector Wartnaby saw you. And, worst of all, the butler saw you.’
Bognor, sitting on the bed, moaned softly.
‘And you will get absolutely no sympathy by making ridiculous noises. You merely diminish yourself still further. If such a thing were possible. Now drink this.’
Bognor stretched out a hand and took the plastic mug. He knew it would only make him sick again but he deserved it. He would never touch alcohol again. Never. Nor let another woman past his lips.
Bognor drank the Alka-Seltzer.
‘I—’ he began, but was unable to get any further, partly because he felt too ill and partly because his wife interrupted him too quickly.
‘Don’t even think about speaking. The woman is notorious. You must have known that before you went there. And her poor unfortunate husband. I thought I knew you, Simon Bognor, but I was wrong. I knew you were weak; I knew you were easily led; I knew you were stupid; but I did not realise that you were vicious and venal.’
It was no use. Bognor had to be sick. He rushed to the bathroom and crumpled in a kneeling position in front of the lavatory bowl. He had not felt so awful for years. It must have been the room service steak tartare. Unfortunately he had vomited up that in a ditch half-way between the castle and the hotel. Thank heaven they had stopped Wartnaby’s car in time. It would have been even worse if he had been sick over that.
A few minutes later he felt able to return to the bedroom.
‘Seriously, darling, I really do think Freddie could have stuck me with a Micky Finn. He had this thing, a cross between a nose dropper and a water pistol. It was given to him by a friend on the Queen Mary.’
‘Don’t you “darling” me, Simon. I am not in the mood for forgiveness.’ She was tapping her finger on the table. Metronomically. It was a very bad sign indeed. ‘And I think it is cheap, cheap even by your shoddy standards, to blame your disgrace on a dead man who is unable to speak for himself.’
There was some truth in this.
Freddie was dead. It was the reason for the unexpected arrival of Monica and Wartnaby. That afternoon, not more than an hour after Bognor had left him, the neighbours had reported a fire in Freddie’s grotty little flat in the ‘poor white’ section of town through which Bognor had been driven in his taxi.