Red Herrings Read online

  Bognor was not entirely clear what was happening at the other end of the line but he could hear muffled voices. Presumably Felix was talking to his partner, Norman. They presumably shared a bed since they appeared to share everything else.

  ‘Mr Bognor, are you still there?’

  Bognor said ‘yes’, impatiently. He was anxious to get back to his wife even if he could do nothing more useful than hold her hand and wipe her brow and say ‘there, there’. He suddenly realised that if anything were to happen to her he’d be quite upset. ‘Please God, don’t let her die,’ he said to himself and then heard Felix say, ‘Don’t try to move her whatever you do. Just let her stay exactly where she is until Doctor Macpherson gets to you. He should be there in a jiffy.’

  And, amazingly, even as these words were uttered, he heard heavy hurrying footsteps, two pairs, followed by a knocking on the door. He cast aside the telephone, feverishly adjusted his ageing Viyella pyjamas to make himself as presentable as possible, and rushed over to the door. It took him a moment to release the chain and unlock it (you couldn’t be too careful even in Herring St George, especially after what had happened to Wilmslow) and fling it open. There, breathing heavily in the corridor, was Norman Bone in a shantung bathrobe, black, embroidered with crimson poppies. Beside him was a thin, etiolated figure in striped trousers and a black jacket. He carried a worn black grip with the initials ‘E.St. G. MacP.’ embossed on one side. Bognor recognised it as a doctor’s bag of pre or immediately post war vintage, not from personal experience but from watching black and white films of that era on late-night television. Such bags were invariably carried by Miles Malleson and other character actors. They were often cinematic code for imminent birth.

  ‘Doctor!’ said Bognor, slipping unconsciously into vintage celluloid argot. ‘Thank heavens you’ve come!’

  For a giddy moment he thought Macpherson was going to say ‘I just happened to be passing’ but instead he just pushed past rather roughly, opening his bag as he did. He passed through into the bathroom and closed the door behind him, leaving Bognor and Norman Bone, standing there looking at each other sheepishly.

  ‘That was quick!’ said Bognor, a shade fatuously.

  ‘Pure luck,’ said Bone. ‘He just happened … that is he was here already. I woke half an hour ago with this perfectly fearful migraine. Doctor Macpherson says I must call him out whenever I get one in case it turns out to be some form of haemorrhage. He says I’m rhesus something or other. Not negative or positive. More exotic than that. Anyway I’m a very high risk so he always comes straight out at once in case it’s a real emergency and I have to be rushed into Whelk General. He’s a tower of strength, Doc Macpherson, and so imaginative. He gave me acupuncture for my sinuses and the most amazing homeopathic remedy for piles. I do hope your wife’s all right. I blame myself I really do. I should never have let her eat the steak. Well I shouldn’t have let either of you eat the steak. I said to Felix, the second I smelt the rest of it, I should never have done it. Never. Listen I brought a bottle of the Hine VSOP with me.’ He removed a bottle from the pocket of his dressing gown and passed it to his guest. ‘Have a taste of that. I’m sure she’ll be all right. He’s wonderful in emergencies.’

  Bognor took a swig. ‘You’d better come in,’ he said. From the bathroom there was a sound of moaning coupled with the unmistakable drone of bedside manner of an old school; a reassuring litany of placebo and panacea designed to shut the patient up and make him or her submit unquestioningly to whatever indignities were being inflicted. Seconds later the bedroom door was opened by the good doctor, now in braces and shirtsleeves, and with his thick silvery mane dishevelled though in an attractively bouffant style which might have been pre-arranged.

  ‘Bognor, old chap, I wonder if you’d be good enough to give me a hand getting your wife back into bed. She’s a bit of a handful if you’ll pardon the expression.’

  Bognor handed the Hine back to Norman and stepped through into the bathroom. Monica was no longer moaning. Her eyes were shut and she was breathing deeply.

  ‘You take her left and I’ll take the right. You’ll find she’s a dead weight.’

  Bognor had never manhandled an unconscious wife before; it was invariably the other way about. He was surprised to find quite how heavy she was. Or perhaps it was a decline in his own muscle power. Together however they half dragged half carried her to the four poster and heaved her up. Bognor tucked her in, while Macpherson produced a stethoscope and checked her breathing. Then he felt her pulse, frowning at an old fob watch as he did.

  ‘Is she going to be all right?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said the doctor, allowing Monica’s hand to fall to her side – a little roughly in her husband’s opinion.

  ‘Is she asleep?’ Bognor accepted the proffered brandy from Norman and passed it on to Macpherson. The doctor drank deeply. And Bognor realised that he had caught a distinct whiff of booze on his breath the second he came in the door.

  ‘Asleep?’ Macpherson put his head on one side, and regarded the patient with a quizzical smile. ‘In a manner of speaking. You’d probably call it a trance. Hypnotic. It’s surprising how quickly you can put someone under if you know how to do it, and, naturally, if they’re a good subject. Your wife’s a remarkably good subject, Mr Bognor. In fact I would guess she’s blessed with considerable psycho-kinetic powers. Does she have premonitions ever?’

  ‘Well.’ Bognor frowned. ‘Not in the sense that she’ll tell you there’s going to be an air crash or an earthquake the day before it happens. She’s very prescient but I put that down to intelligence and a certain amount of intuition.’

  The doctor eyed him sceptically. ‘You would, would you?’ he said, suddenly sounding unexpectedly Aberdonian. It had all been Home Counties up until now.

  ‘Is she going to be all right?’ Bognor asked again, ignoring the pointedness of the remark and not in any case seeing exactly what point Macpherson was attempting to make.

  ‘She’ll be right as rain in the morning,’ he said. ‘And she won’t remember a thing about it. She’ll be weak naturally so let her spend the morning in bed. Toast and tea for breakfast. No alcohol till after the sun’s over the yard arm. Call me if you’re at all concerned about anything.’

  ‘What else did you give her?’ Bognor was aware of sounding shrill. He felt he was not in control of events. ‘You didn’t just hypnotise her?’ The brandy was back with Norman Bone. Bognor thought he caught a flicker of conspiratorial concern between the two men. It was the slightest suggestion, a mere hint of a hint. Given the stress of the moment he might well have imagined it. But he thought not.

  ‘A wee jab,’ said the doctor. ‘A little cocktail. Nothing very strong. Homeopathic if you understand what that means. It doesn’t always apply but in a case like this it’s the best and surest remedy.’

  ‘A case like what?’

  This time Bognor was certain that a silent message passed between Bone and Macpherson.

  ‘Let’s just say that she would appear to have consumed something that did not agree with her. It’s easily done. And if everything turns out well then the least said about it the better. Isn’t that so, Mr Bone?’

  ‘That’s my view, Doctor.’

  Macpherson beamed down at his hypnotised patient. She was breathing very deeply but quite regularly. The fever seemed to have diminished.

  ‘Don’t try to wake her before morning.’ The doctor smiled at Bognor. An expression not entirely devoid of menace. Bognor looked into the eyes to see if they matched the expression of the lips. There were many people who claimed to be able to sniff out hypocrisy by studying men’s eyes. Parkinson for one. Bognor, however, did not subscribe to the theory. If a con man was half good at his job he could get his eyes to participate in the con just as effectively as any other part of his body. The notion that a man’s eyes were some sort of gateway into his soul was the purest gobbledygook. No better than mediaeval superstition. You might as well judge someone by
the stripes on his tie. The doctor’s eyes seemed, to Bognor, to be totally noncommittal. He could not conceivably say whether they were for him or against him. Only that they were disturbingly bloodshot. Fleetingly Bognor remembered that they were the eyes of a man who, forty years before, had been cuckolded by Squire Herring.

  ‘I’ll be going then,’ said Macpherson. ‘Absolutely no cause for alarm. Good night to you.’

  And they saw themselves out, both smiling thinly, as they left Bognor alone with his unconscious wife and some half formed but disturbed and disturbing thoughts. For the first time on this case he was alarmed and fearful because he had the strongest possible suspicion that what had happened was no accident.

  He re-chained and locked the door, turned off the light and swung himself into bed alongside his heavy breathing wife.

  It must have been the steak. He retraced the sequence of events. He and Monica had both ordered the guinea fowl which was one of the day’s specials in an extremely under-crowded restaurant. The odds against their having genuinely run out were incalculably high. Felix had manoeuvred him into having the steak because the steak was the easiest dish to doctor. They had probably infiltrated some poison into the sauce. Inedible fungus perhaps. Monica had complained that the sauce was unnaturally bitter That could explain it.

  Lying in bed he experienced a sudden chill of fright and put out a hand to grasp his sleeping wife’s. They had meant to kill him. It was the only explanation. That was why they had tried so hard to make him eat the poisoned fillet and why they had been so anxious not to let Monica eat it. Why they had almost panicked. And that story about Norman’s migraine. Poppycock. They had alerted the doctor so that at the first sign of symptoms he could come beetling upstairs and administer an instant antidote. Which meant that Doc Macpherson was part of the conspiracy as well.

  Why had they baulked at killing Monica? They had no qualms about killing him. Was it a panic measure by the two hoteliers – one which would have been reinforced by the doctor no matter who the victim? And if it was a panic measure what prompted the panic? They would have realised that he was conferring with Chief Inspector the Earl of Rotherhithe. But that was no reason for murder.

  They could well have known that Sir Nimrod had come to call even though he had gone straight to ‘Myrtle’. They thought Sir Nimrod had blown the gaffe. But what gaffe? How could Felix and Norman possibly be concerned with the true parentage of Naomi Herring. Both, Bognor guessed, were no more than late thirties which made them younger than Naomi. It didn’t make sense. Alongside him Monica breathed deeply in her hypnotic trance. But Bognor could not sleep. Try as he might he could not unravel the mysteries of the night nor ease the sudden realisation that this thatched and rose clad pocket of forever England was as personally threatening as any jungle – concrete or tropical.

  He must have drowsed off because he never heard the maid with the morning tea and The Times and Telegraph, not even when Monica dragged herself out of bed and swore at him for having locked the door and put it on the chain. It was the drop of Earl Grey spilt (deliberately it has to be said) on his chest by his loving spouse which brought him round.

  ‘Jesus Christ, what on earth did you do that for? I’ll have to have a skin graft.’ He felt fighting fit for a moment but the mood swiftly passed as he remembered what had happened during the night. ‘Are you all right?’ he added solicitously, reaching out to touch Monica’s forehead. It felt very cool.

  ‘Yes.’ Monica had bagged The Times and was fishing in her handbag for the Portfolio card. They had never yet won at Dingo but as they frequently reminded each other there was a first time for everything.

  ‘Not sick?’

  ‘Not in the least.’ Monica removed the pencil from the spine of her Liberal-SDP Alliance diary (a facetious present from Bognor) and started filling in the Portfolio entry. Quite a jolly joke playing bingo with share prices in the once-upon-a-time top people’s newspaper.

  ‘Doc Macpherson said you’d probably feel rather weak.’

  ‘I always feel weak in the mornings. You ought to know that by now.’ She scribbled in some numbers, frowning as she did.

  ‘We agreed you should spend the morning in bed.’

  ‘I should love to spend the morning in bed,’ she said, ‘but not if you’re going to be here pestering me. I’m afraid if that was rhinoceros horn in the sauce last night it had no effect whatever. I feel about as randy as a blancmange.’

  ‘Don’t you remember anything about last night?’ asked Bognor.

  ‘Only that I slept extraordinarily well.’ She put down the newspaper and stared at him, plainly perplexed. ‘It’s a very comfortable bed.’ She continued to stare. ‘What did you say about Doctor Macpherson?’

  ‘He said you’d feel weak.’

  ‘What in God’s name does Doctor Macpherson know about it?’

  Bognor scratched his baldish patch. Then he said: ‘Don’t scream for a minute. I want to get through this without interruption. O.K.?’

  Monica examined him sceptically for a moment. ‘I promise not to scream until you’ve finished talking,’ she said. ‘After that I feel free to do as I please.’

  Bognor nodded. ‘O.K.,’ he said. ‘Now you remember the steak?’

  ‘Don’t say too much about the steak.’ Monica sipped tea. ‘Or I shall consider myself discharged from all promises.’

  ‘The steak is crucial. You’ll have to bear with me. I’ll make it as quick as I can. Let us suppose, as Guy Rotherhithe’s old boss Lejeune of the Yard would say, that Felix and Norman want to murder me.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Monica, not unreasonably.

  ‘Shh,’ said Bognor. ‘We’re playing this by Lejeune’s law. When proceeding in a westerly direction from A to B always plod. A is our first supposition, viz that Felix and Norman want to kill me. The obvious way to do so is to slip something in the meal they’re preparing for me. This, however, is difficult if either (a) I order something that is already prepared or (b) we order the same thing.’

  Monica nodded patiently.

  ‘The first part of their plan went flawlessly. In other words they succeeded in persuading me to have a steak. God knows what they put in it. It probably was a lethal fungus of some description. Or maybe they keep some paraquat derivative floating around. I don’t know. Anyway, their plans go hopelessly askew when Felix comes back with the killer fillet and finds that you, that is to say we, have changed our minds.’

  ‘Careful,’ said Monica, ‘I shall scream if you’re rude.’

  ‘Whereupon they go through that ludicrous charade of trying to change our minds back again.’

  ‘That only works if they really wanted to kill you.’

  ‘They do. That’s “A” in this application of Lejeune’s law. It’s called a working hypothesis. When they fail to change our mind, they call up Doc Macpherson. Doc MacP chunters round fastest so that the second we send out a May Day from Myrtle he can be up here with his hypodermic, administering a homeopathic antidote before you can say Nimrod Herring.’

  Monica put down her tea cup and raised her hand. From the world beyond the casement window the church clock could be heard striking the half hour. A cock crew and in the distance a motorbike farted unpleasantly up a bucolic hillside.

  ‘Permission to speak,’ said Monica.

  ‘Granted,’ said Bognor, ‘but not for long.’

  ‘It’s all fun as theory,’ she said, ‘but as none of it ever happened I don’t see what it’s got to do with … well, what it’s got to do with anything much actually.’

  ‘Aha!’ said Bognor, triumphantly. ‘But that is where you’re wrong. I woke at two-twenty this morning to find you face down in the loo vomiting your guts out while in the last stages of salmonella poisoning. Or something very much like it. You were barely conscious.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘I am not being silly. Please hear me out. I immediately phone zero and there is Felix obviously waiting breathlessly by the phone. Then, hey
presto, there’s a tramping of elephantine feet and enter Norman Bone and the doctor himself. The doctor charges off into the bathroom while Norman waylays me with a bottle of brandy, and doesn’t re-emerge until he’s hypnotised you into a deep sleep and jabbed you full of some homeopathic gunge.’

  ‘But Simon I don’t remember any of this. You must have been dreaming.’

  ‘Exactly as he said.’ Bognor spoke exultantly, but he was beginning to be nervous. If Monica really couldn’t remember any of what had happened and if she was feeling weak but otherwise well, then what proof could he produce? He was beginning to have an uneasy feeling that les deux patrons and the doctor would deny that any of them had been near the room. He took hold of Monica’s hands and stared a little frantically into her eyes. She recoiled in alarm. ‘He said you wouldn’t remember anything. The cunning bastard. But you do, don’t you?’

  Monica shook her head. ‘I’m sorry Simon, but no, I don’t remember any of this. Are you sure you’re not having me on?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Bognor. ‘It’s as true as I’m sitting here, dammit.’

  ‘Well prove it.’ She did not say it unpleasantly but rather with an air of sweet reason.

  Bognor thought for a moment. Monica had managed things with her customary efficiency. Nothing would be soiled. All would have been flushed away or (he guessed) removed by the doctor. ‘The injection!’ he said, suddenly. ‘He injected you. The question is where?’

  ‘I thought you said this all happened in the bathroom.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he snapped. ‘I mean where on your body. There’ll be a mark. Bruising perhaps if he’s less than a dab hand with a syringe and he seemed a bit cut to me. Question is, did he inject you in the arm or the bottom?’

  ‘You may be my husband but you are not inspecting my bottom for hypodermic needle scars. I am going to scream, Simon, really. I think you’re going round the bend.’