Death in the Opening Chapter Read online

  The chef was preparing snail porridge, the idea for which had been cribbed from his friend Heston Blumenthal, when the Bognors came calling.

  Snail porridge was an unusual starter for the literary festival’s inaugural supper, but it made a change from prawn cocktail, and it was, for many of the guests, acceptable and surprising.

  Supper came after evensong and Sebastian’s sermon. Snail porridge followed his grace. This year, His Grace, the Rt Rev. Ebenezer, would fill the gap, but meanwhile Bognor had some questions to ask the chef.

  TEN

  ‘Tell me, chef,’ began Bognor, enjoying the cliché and wondering why Gunther was wearing a toque and check trousers, ‘where were you yesterday, between the hours of five and seven?’

  Gunther took off his toque, rubbed his eyes, and beamed at Lady Bognor.

  ‘Would you care for a cup of something? Camomile tea? Herbal infusions? Or something a little stronger? A glass of prosecco, perhaps? I have a particularly fine one from a small estate in a village a few miles outside Verona. I have been buying from Guiseppe for several years.’

  Monica said she’d like a glass of prosecco. She had learned recently that it was a sparkling wine in its own right, and not simply a cheaper Italian substitute for champagne. This was true, generally. Other people’s sparkling whites were not just imitations of the French elixir, but wines with their own character. This was a lesson for life. People were not just inferior imitations of other people, but individuals in their own image. Same with chefs; same with Gunther. He wasn’t just the next Heston Blumenthal – or a poor man’s version of Heston – he was Gunther Battenburg. Or maybe not. But whoever he was, he existed in his own skin and he was his own man. There was no one quite like him.

  Same with the Bognors. They were sui generis.

  This was probably just as well, and it did not always seem thus to others. To Bognor, however, an element of nonconformity raised his best game.

  ‘I always associate Battenberg with cake,’ said Monica, puckering over her fizz. ‘From a small town in Germany. Marzipan. Brightly coloured squares. Mildly embarrassing name for our own dear House of Windsor.’

  ‘The cake is spelt with an “e” not a “u”,’ said Gunther. ‘My name has little or nothing to do with the cake. Hoffentlich. I do not like cake in general, and I abhor this one in particular.’

  ‘Like Vyvyans with a “y” in Cornwall, as opposed to an “i”,’ said Monica, ignoring her husband’s fond but forbidding stare. He was warning her off, an admonition which the chef noticed and evidently respected.

  ‘Prosit,’ he said, raising his glass. ‘I was here yesterday between the hours of five and seven, in answer to your question, Maestro. I was supervising prep for dinner. It is my custom.’

  ‘We only have your word for that,’ said Bognor beadily. Such scepticism was a stock-in-trade. He liked being thought of as a Maestro, though. He must use it in future. The flattery softened his response.

  ‘I had my batterie here. You can ask them. They will vouch for my presence.’

  ‘OK,’ said Bognor, ‘I have to ask questions such as this. Form’s sake, you understand. Nothing sinister about them. They have to be asked, that’s all. Busy night?’

  Gunther looked thoughtful. ‘Comme ci, comme ça,’ he said eventually. ‘The first guests for the festival have arrived already. Brigadier Blenkinsop and his wife. Mademoiselle Book, the singer, and her friend. Maestro Allgood, the writer. They were all here.’

  Bognor disliked Martin Allgood being referred to as ‘maestro’. He had always thought of little Martin as a bit of a pipsqueak, and much disliked what little he had read of his. It didn’t help that Monica seemed to a bit of a fan.

  ‘All here already, so soon?’

  Gunther nodded. There didn’t seem to be anything to add, so a silence hung in the air, until it was broken by Bognor asking, ‘The dead man. Did you know him?’

  ‘The vicar? Of course. In a small community such as ours the vicar is a known person. Just like the squire, the person who runs the pub. And so on. There are not, I am told, as many vicars as once upon a time, and the Reverend Sebastian had other congregations and churches. He was busy. In former times, the vicar would perhaps not have been quite so busy but, alas, times have changed and the vicar today is a busy person.’

  ‘You, however, are not a member of the Church of England?’

  The chef seemed to think about this, but finally shook his head a little sadly.

  ‘I was brought up as a Lutheran,’ he said, ‘but I am, as you say, “lapsed”.’ He laughed, as if pleased at having mastered such a difficult and essentially English concept. ‘Lapsed,’ he repeated. ‘It is like your tea. It is weak, with much water.’

  ‘Lapsang souchong,’ said Monica, not helpfully.

  The chef looked blank.

  ‘So you knew the reverend as a pillar of the Establishment, rather than as a man of God?’

  Gunther looked blanker yet. Maybe, thought Bognor, he really was foreign, and not a cookery school graduate from the East End of London.

  ‘How well did you know the Reverend Sebastian?’

  This time Gunther understood the question perfectly.

  ‘He always said the grace at my festival dinner. Always the same words. “For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful.” Quite dull. Always the same. Sir Branwell said that at school they had a joke toast which said “For baked beans and buttered toast, thank Father, Son and Holy Ghost”, but I am not understanding the joke. Nor the reverend. He was very conservative. He liked to be thought, as you would say, “progressive”, but he did not enjoy change. He enjoyed the same always: food, hymns, words, grace, women.’

  ‘Women,’ said Bognor, latching on to the oddity with speed. ‘What makes you say women?’

  Gunther Battenburg went pink.

  ‘It is, as you say, a figure of speech.’

  ‘But you thought the vicar was conservative when it came to sex?’

  ‘Perhaps, but also, perhaps not.’

  The chef was discomfited and Bognor pressed home his advantage.

  ‘Sex,’ he said. ‘Would you describe yourself as conservative when it came to sex?’

  Part of the fun of being a special investigator, even if only from the Board of Trade, was that it gave one a licence to ask questions from which one would normally have flinched. Thus sex.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Gunther, ‘I am not understanding.’

  Bognor was not sure where this was heading, but he asked the question that had been at the back of his mind long before he had actually met the chef.

  ‘Gay are we, Gunther?’

  Monica was obviously outraged at such an irrelevant intrusion.

  ‘I hardly think . . .’ she began, but her husband shushed her.

  ‘Her Majesty’s government doesn’t pay for thought,’ he said, ‘especially from spouses. I just want to know whether Gunther here is homosexual.’

  Gunther was no longer looking particularly pink.

  ‘I don’t understand what my sexual inclinations have to do with the death of the Reverend Sebastian,’ he said, giving the impression of understanding perfectly. ‘But, given a chance, I’ll fuck anything that moves. Sex seldom comes into it.’

  It wasn’t clear whether the Bognors found the admission, or the use of the Anglo-Saxon word, the more upsetting. They belonged to a generation and a class which tended to believe that homosexuality was an unpleasant disease best not mentioned, and in which only out-and-out bounders, such as Peregrine Worsthorne, used four-letter words in public. Nevertheless, Bognor had asked the question. He should have been expecting an answer he didn’t like and to hear words he only used, if at all, in private.

  ‘You asked,’ said the chef, after a longish pause. ‘But I don’t see how it is going to help poor Sebastian or nail his killer.’

  ‘So you don’t think it was suicide?’

  ‘I didn’t say that, but, on balance, I think it’s unli
kely. Sebastian was almost certainly gay, but I’d guess his sexuality was probably repressed.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘I recognize the signs. Above all, only a certain sort of man would marry a woman like Dorcas, just as only a woman such as Dorcas would marry a gay cleric.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘That Dorcas is a typical dyke. Repressed, non-practising, but still a dyke.’

  Another silence.

  ‘You feel it in your gut?’

  ‘I feel it in my gut. More prosecco?’

  The Bognors accepted and drank. In the old days, they would just have drunk with no questions asked. Nowadays, they had a problem. In today’s world, everyone preferred it if one didn’t drink alcohol at all. In any event, one was not allowed very much. The Bognors, however, belonged to a world and a generation which enjoyed a drink and did not regard this as a problem. Change of life. Bit like gaiety. What had once been a guilty secret was now an open affirmation.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Gunther, ‘I didn’t kill him. I don’t know who did. I have a watertight alibi and no motive. May I go now and make porridge?’

  Bognor glanced at his wife. She agreed, but no third party would have known. They took their glasses into what was, in former days, the snug, and was now all beige furniture and black and white photographs.

  ‘There was a time,’ said Bognor, ‘when cooks were just cooks, and chefs worked at a handful of great hotels.’

  ‘Or were French.’

  ‘Quite.’ Bognor watched the bead in his glass, saw the bubbles ascend and vanish as they broke the surface.

  ‘Don’t like him,’ said Bognor.

  ‘Doesn’t make him a murderer.’

  ‘Don’t like his food either.’

  ‘Nor does that.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  They stared morosely at the dead flat-screen.

  ‘So, you eliminate him from your enquiries?’

  ‘I’ll talk to a sous-chef or two just to firm up his alibi, but basically he’s eliminated, yes. Strange interviewing him. I felt like that greengrocer on Celebrity Masterchef. Nothing but meaningless superlatives and droolings about how he’s getting a sense of well-rounded peach fragrance. I’ve never had snail porridge, but I’m more interested in discussing that, than I am in establishing his alibi. If you know what I mean.’

  ‘Up to a point,’ agreed Monica, ‘though if he didn’t have an alibi and was a murderer, that would make him interesting, wouldn’t you say?’

  Bognor considered this.

  ‘You mean,’ he said, ‘that haute cuisine is more interesting than murder.’

  ‘The other way round, actually. But the one against the other.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Bognor, ‘we live in a world which rates them both pretty high. After all, cooks and murderers make flawless celebrities, along with models and failed spin bowlers.’

  ‘Especially if they can dance.’

  They both laughed. Their world seemed real enough to them and yet, to dancing cooks and models, it would have carried just the whiff of make-believe that they ascribed to television, soundbites and the meretricious in general. You paid your money and you took your choice, and the future would deliver a verdict which would change according to the times, and whether or not the world survived. In the meantime, Bognor reckoned that all you could do was the best possible according to one’s own lights, and not to be seduced by bright lights, instant success and a certain sort of suit.

  Talking of which, he supposed that he really ought to interview Sir Branwell and Lady Fludd. In the event of things going wrong and of publicity ensuing, a failure to interview the Fludds would be held against him. Apocrypha College would be called in evidence to prove some sort of old school tie, and the fact that he and Monica were staying as guests up at the Manor would not look good. The headlines would scream, pseudo-egalitarians would snigger, and there would be a general consensus that it served him right, that he had fallen down on the job, and what could one expect from old-fashioned, fuddy-duddy, grumpy, long-lunching plutocrats anyway.

  Bognor felt none of these things, and regarded himself as being, in practically every important aspect, at the well-honed cutting edge of life in general. Even so, he had seen enough of real life to know that he should appear to play by the book, if only to avoid having it thrown at him if things went wrong.

  Which meant interviewing Branwell and Camilla, if only for form’s sake.

  It would yield nothing, but it would look good on paper and better still in the paper, if it ever got that far. The Fludds would dislike the interview, but the possible alternative was almost too dire to contemplate.

  ELEVEN

  Sir Branwell had never, well hardly ever, heard of anything so ludicrous in his life. It took the absolute chocolate digestive. It was the Bath Oliver to end all Bath Olivers. A real Huntley and Palmer. I mean he had never been so . . . well if the suggestion had come from anyone but Simon he would . . . on the other hand . . . was he absolutely certain . . . even in this day and age . . . I mean really.

  And so on.

  Bognor explained that the conversation was an essential formality. A formality, but essential nonetheless. It was simply a matter of insuring against criticism, of demonstrating efficiency, even-handedness and, above all, justifying the apparently high-handed decision to bypass the usual channels and allow Bognor to conduct the investigation instead of the local police force.

  Simon began, naturally, by asking the same question with which he had opened his interview with the cook. Where had the Fludds been between roughly five and seven the previous day, that being the time, as near as could be ascertained, at which the Reverend Sebastian had passed by on to the other side?

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, you know perfectly well where we both were,’ exploded Sir Branwell. ‘We were here, with you. All the time, until Dorcas came in and told us that she had found her husband dead in church. You know that perfectly well.’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ explained his interlocutor patiently. ‘I know perfectly well, but the coroner won’t, the court won’t, the press won’t. I need to have your alibi on the record so everyone can see it.’

  ‘Bugger the record,’ said the baronet. ‘I have absolutely not the slightest interest in everyone, as you put it, seeing the record. I am entirely free to come and go as I please, without the world and his wife having to be told. It’s completely outrageous. Where Camilla and I are, at any time of the day or night, is nobody’s business but our own.’

  ‘A man is dead,’ said Bognor. ‘Put yourself in everyone else’s position.’

  ‘On a point of fact,’ Sir Branwell was being dangerously cool, ‘a man is not dead. The Reverend Sebastian Fludd is dead. He was not a man in the accepted sense. He was the vicar of St Teath’s and my cousin. I will not have his memory blasphemed in this fashion. “A man”, indeed. That gives entirely the wrong impression. And I see absolutely no reason at all why I should put myself in everyone else’s position. That is not where I want to be, and it is, to use your own word, completely “inappropriate”. My position is my position, and I have no desire to be anywhere else. Nor is any useful purpose being served by pretending otherwise.’

  ‘For my sake,’ pleaded Monica. ‘It’ll make life easier for all of us. Help to beat off jawnalists. Allay criticism. Please.’

  ‘I don’t see it, Monica,’ said Camilla, ‘I really don’t. We know where we were. You know where we were. Why should anyone else know?’

  ‘That’s the way it is,’ said Bognor.

  ‘Well, it shouldn’t be,’ said Sir Branwell snippily. ‘Just because you say that’s the way it is, doesn’t mean that it’s right and, or, proper. If people such as us don’t stand up and allow ourselves to be counted, then what the hell’s the point.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m asking,’ said Bognor, trying to keep the triumph out of his voice. ‘I just want you to stand up and be counted.’

  ‘Don’t be so c
hildish,’ said Sir Branwell, sounding childish. ‘I decide whether or not we’re going to stand up and be counted. Not any old Tom, Dick or Harry.’

  ‘But,’ said Monica, ‘it’s not any old Tom, Dick or Harry. It’s Simon. Your old friend. Simon.’

  ‘Simon,’ said Sir Branwell, with an element of truth, ‘is acting on behalf of Tom, Dick and Harry. He doesn’t fool me.’

  ‘I’m going to write down that you and Camilla were with us in the Manor all through the time concerned,’ said Bognor, ‘and Monica and I will, if asked, swear to it.’

  ‘Write what you like,’ said Sir Branwell, adding surprisingly, ‘Next question.’

  ‘I wanted to ask about Sebastian. How well you knew him? What you thought made him tick. That sort of thing. Nothing specific. I just want to build up a picture.’

  ‘That’s more like it,’ said the squire. ‘Wouldn’t want poor little Sebastian to become a cipher. Just because he’s dead, doesn’t make him a stiff. Rum bloke, very, but not without his points. And he was a Fludd. Never forget that. Quite a distant Fludd. Not part of the mainstream, but a Fludd all the same.’

  ‘More like a puddle,’ ventured Monica. ‘I always thought of him as pretty wet but small scale.’

  Sir Branwell ignored her. He regarded the sally as in poor taste and, in any case, Monica was a girl, a woman. All right for certain things: sex, flower arranging, cooking maybe, but not for opinions or thought or anything practical. For that, you needed a chap. Women were all very well in their way, indeed, you could say they helped make the world go round, but they were definitely only second fiddles. The orchestra was conducted and led by chaps, and the music was composed by one. God was a man, probably elderly, white-bearded, Anglo-Saxon. Almost certainly wore an Apocrypha tie and liked a drink on a cold day. He digressed. One did. And you couldn’t quite say that the Reverend Sebastian was one of us, despite being a Fludd.