Brought to Book (The Simon Bognor Mysteries) Page 8

  For the rest of the journey they talked shop and it gradually dawned on the Bognors that the apparently ludicrous idea of the poet as intelligence agent was entirely logical. There were literary precedents of course, especially in wartime. Graham Greene was the most obvious example. Latterly, Anthony Blunt had been the most obvious example of aesthete as agent: life outdoing literature. What self-respecting Deighton or Le Carre could have invented a master spy and double agent who was one of the world’s greatest experts on Poussin (of all people) and latterly looked after the Queen’s personal picture collection. Indeed was knighted by her for doing the job.

  By contrast Glatt’s double life seemed an example of unusually good casting by the British Intelligence Establishment. The poetic renaissance meant that Glatt was asked to give readings at universities and polytechnics all over Britain. There were few more effective ways of infiltrating student society than as one of our most charismatic younger poets. He had read for South African miners and for Californian grape pickers and for Turkish Kurds – for dissidents the world over, not excluding Britain’s own gays, blacks, unmarried mothers and primary school head teachers. And everywhere he went he kept his eyes and ears open. At international literary conferences and festivals he was a perpetual presence, seeming always to be in earnest confabulation with the likes of Gunter Grass or Norman Mailer. He was an honoured guest in Belgrade and Budapest. He was invited to Soweto, though banned at the border. He delivered the Canaan Banana Inaugural Lecture in Harare and gave a memorable reading of ‘The Dartington Rhymes’ in Tashkent. He had been embraced by Fidel Castro.

  Monica was keener on poetry than her husband and knew Glatt’s work well. Bognor had never even read ‘Box’.

  On the outskirts of Byfleet-next-the-Sea he said he’d better drop the Bognors off by the railway station so that they could pretend to have come all the way by train. It wouldn’t do to let anyone know that they had travelled down together or even that they knew each other at all. He was staying at the Goose and Goblet. He accepted that Borage, the Managing Director, would almost certainly recognise him but that was no great problem. His relationship with Romany Flange was an open secret. He had a reading at the Byfleet and District Poetry Society the day after tomorrow. (‘Yes, it was arranged to coincide with the Big Books Sales Conference, and I agree that was mischievous but it was a chance to stay on with Romany for a day or two by the seaside. Besides, I am writing an epic called “Invasion 1940” so the sea is relevant right now.’) There was, he thought, no need for anyone to be suspicious. He would watch from afar and in his own way. But he would like Simon to keep in touch. If anything drastic came up Bognor should simply call the Goose and Goblet and leave a message.

  ‘What sort of message?’

  ‘It depends what you want to say,’ said Glatt.

  ‘Oh, come on!’ protested Bognor. ‘I can’t just ask the girl at the Goose and Goblet to say that Green and Flange have eloped to Moscow and I’m giving chase. Be reasonable.’

  They were driving along the front, the waves crashing into the beach to their left sent spray across the windscreen so that he had to turn on the wipers.

  ‘Just say something cryptic like “Tell Merlin Glatt there’s a grating roar of pebbles on the beach”.’

  Monica purred.

  ‘And if you can’t get through to the Goose or you feel uneasy just call your man Parkinson and tell him to get Special to send out a Mayday for “Wizard” to RV with you.’

  All this seemed a bit melodramatic to Bognor, but then everything about Merlin Glatt had been melodramatic ever since he’d bopped him one in Notting Hill Gate last night. Poetic licence, he supposed. Compared with the Board of Trade Special Investigations Department, Military Intelligence and Special Branch were still absurdly romantic and cloak and daggerish. But then compared with someone like Bumstead he supposed he cut a pretty Balkan figure. Well, perhaps that would be exaggerating. He’d always aspired to play an Anthony Hope hero but such hopes had gone the way of the century before lunch in the Lord’s Test and the Nobel Peace Prize. Realism had, perforce, come early in Bognor’s life.

  ‘Shall we make a rendezvous anyway?’ Monica had obviously taken a shine to the poet. ‘You’ll want to know what poor Audrey has to tell us.’

  They were by the railway station now. Not much sign of life, but, according to Glatt, a train due in two minutes and likely to be on time. They could get a cab to Hemlocks once it was in.

  ‘We could happen to bump into one another in the snug at the Goose around six-thirty,’ Monica continued.

  ‘What if Chris Yardley or Borage are there?’

  ‘We can make it look…oh, you know, as if we hadn’t met before…’

  ‘OK,’ said Glatt. ‘Train’s coming. I can hear it. I’ll be in the bar of the Goose at six-thirty, but if I’m reading the new Gavin Ewart keep away. If I’m reading an evening paper you can ask if I’ve got the cricket score from Sydney.’

  The train was approaching. Monica started to open the door.

  ‘What shall I ask Audrey Hemlock?’ asked Bognor. Something about Glatt was making him very edgy.

  ‘Anything and everything,’ said the poet. ‘She can’t tell us too much. Go on. We don’t want anyone to see you leaving the car. See you later.’

  ‘What an absolutely fascinating person!’ said Monica, adjusting her headscarf and hoping that her back view didn’t look too broad. The Burberry wasn’t terribly flattering from behind. But then maybe Glatt wasn’t looking.

  Bognor growled. The back of his head was good reason for not thinking as highly of their new colleague as Monica.

  ‘Bit of a poseur if you ask me,’ he said.

  A handful of bedraggled travellers were on the train. The Bognors mingled with them and hailed a cab from the rank.

  ‘Hemlocks, please,’ said Bognor, stowing the case in the boot, and then climbing in the back of the Ford Cortina alongside his wife.

  ‘Hemlocks, you say?’ The driver had the looks and demeanour of a bad-tempered potato.

  ‘Yes, Hemlocks.’

  ‘You don’t mean the Winter Gardens?’

  ‘No, I mean Hemlocks.’

  ‘The Hemlocks meetings are at the Winter Gardens,’ said the driver, who had still not even started the engine.

  ‘I know that,’ said Bognor, ‘but my wife and I are staying at Hemlocks which is the private residence of the late Vernon and Mrs Hemlock. We are or rather were the personal guests of Mr Hemlock.’

  The driver started his car with a noticeably bad grace and an air of some truculence. He had a large boil on the back of his neck, just below the greasy black hair line and just above the greasy black collar.

  ‘Late Mrs Hemlock from what I hear,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ said Monica, ‘it was poor Mr Hemlock who died. In the fire.’

  The driver turned on to the promenade and laughed. ‘That were last night, missus,’ he said. ‘Seems poor Mrs Hemlock were so upset she killed herself this morning. Ambulance left with the body not half an hour ago.’

  Their first inclination was disbelief but the taxi driver persisted.

  ‘They were ever so close,’ he said. ‘Ever since they first came to Byfleet, well, must be nigh on twelve year or more, they were so close they were like two halves of a mussel. Folk remarked on it they did. Well ’tis no wonder she done ’erself in. Terrible thing for the town. Terrible.’

  Bloody mutterer, Bognor thought, and prayed it was just gossip. As they pulled up under the porte-cochere, however, he had an uneasy sense that it was true. As he paid the driver Hastings came to the door. It was not the cheeky chappie of the day before yesterday, nor even the more subdued but still truculent one of yesterday.

  ‘You’ll have heard the news,’ he said. ‘Inspector says she killed herself, though God knows why. I’d have thought she’d be glad to be shot of him. Inspector’s in the library. Expect he’d like a word. Expect you’d like a word yourself.’

  ‘What’s happenin
g with the sales conference?’

  ‘They’re all down at the Winter Gardens,’ said Hastings ‘That creature Borage was saying “the show must go on”, but I don’t see how it can now. He’s a busted flush.’

  He really was chastened. He had even taken their case. ‘I’ll put this in your room,’ he said, ‘but we’ll have to close the house up soon as we can.’

  ‘Who succeeds?’ asked Monica, trying to sound sympathetic. ‘Were there children?’

  ‘None,’ said Hastings, ‘that’s just it. No one knows what’s happening.’

  ‘And Miss Flange?’

  Hastings seemed torn between distress and anger.

  ‘She’s in the study now. Going through papers.’

  Bognor was shocked. ‘She mustn’t do that. There could be evidence. Does DCI Bumstead know?’

  Hastings looked truly miserable. ‘No idea,’ he said, ‘but I’ve said more than enough. You’d better talk to him. He’d kill me if he knew I’d said this much. Will you both be in for dinner?’

  ‘What’s everyone else doing?’

  ‘All dining in. Dinner as per usual. Miss Flange’s instructions.’

  ‘I see,’ said Bognor.

  Monica took off her Burberry and handed it to Hastings with her most ravishing and sympathetic smile. A combination of Nurse Bognor and Mata Bognor.

  ‘Miss Flange is in charge?’ she asked.

  Hastings did not reply. ‘Inspector’s in the library,’ he said. ‘Dinner’s eight for eight-thirty.’

  ‘Dearie me,’ said Bognor as they moved out of earshot. ‘Below stairs is taking it very hard.’

  ‘Don’t be so insensitive. I’m upset too. Poor duck. She’d had a rotten life.’

  They paused below what looked remarkably like a Bonington seascape: ‘Schooner in Byfleet Bay’. It was noticeable that outside work and outside sex, Hemlock’s taste had been subdued, discreet and on the whole surprisingly good. Audrey’s influence, perhaps.

  ‘Do you think she did it, though?’ The schooner’s bows were invisible in the swell. The artist, Bonington or not, had managed to capture just such conditions as still prevailed out of season in ‘Breezy Byfleet’. Man against nature. You got a very strong sense of God’s essential bloody-mindedness at the English seaside in November.

  For once Monica had been credulous. ‘I hadn’t thought,’ she said, ‘I mean if they all say she killed herself, then…but no, I’d have thought she had more reason to kill herself before he was dead than after. But women are odd people, as you ought to know. She was very fond of him in a loony way. You think she was murdered too?’

  ‘I’m keeping an open mind on the subject.’ Bognor knocked on the library door.

  ‘Yes? Come in.’

  The Inspector sounded testy and on seeing the Bognors he looked testy, too.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said, gracelessly, ‘I was hoping you’d have stayed in London. We can manage perfectly well on our own down here, you know. You London people are all the same. Think anyone east of Limehouse and north of Watford has straw in their hair and paints themselves with woad. I don’t suppose you know that when the Saskatchewan Police came over on their fact-finding mission last year they said that this was the most impressive force in the country.’

  ‘Impressive?’

  ‘Impressive.’

  The DCI had turned the library into a working headquarters. Bognor wondered if it was described as an ‘incident room’. He was not much good at police jargon. Jargon in general irritated him. DCI Bumstead had installed a computer, a coffee percolator and an attractive WPC who sat in one corner with an old manual Remington, looking busy, doing nothing. Pegboard had been stuck over most of the bookshelves, and maps, diagrams, photographs and computer printouts were stuck all over the pegboard. It was impressive in an irrelevant, bureaucratic and to Bognor very irritating fashion. It was rather like the British Rail sandwiches at Bradleigh Parkway. More attention had been paid to the packaging than the content. Symptom of the age.

  ‘I gather’, said Bognor, ‘you’ve suffered another casualty.’

  ‘Mrs Hemlock’s passed on, if that’s what you mean.’ Bumstead fingered the moustache. His hatred of Bognor and all he stood for flickered across the room.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Overdose, if you must know.’

  ‘I must.’

  ‘My boss has had formal notification of the Q4,’ he said, venomously, ‘so if you must, you must. The doctor had prescribed sleeping pills. The packet was on the bedside table. Empty.’

  ‘Suicide note?’

  ‘Not that we’ve located at this moment in time.’

  ‘Who found her?’

  ‘Romany Flange.’

  ‘Flange? But what time? Romany Flange was in London last night. I wouldn’t have thought…’

  ‘Evidently she and Arthur Green drove down here very early,’ said DCI Bumstead, pleased to be able to surprise his unwanted team-mate with unexpected information. ‘They got in before breakfast. Mrs Hemlock didn’t put in an appearance at the meal. Ms’ – he pronounced the unsatisfactory abbreviation as if it were simply an elision of ’em’s and ’zed’s – ‘Mmmmmzzz’ Flange went to her room to see if she was all right. She had business to discuss. I understand the business affairs of the company are complicated. Mr Hemlock tended to confide only in himself. There’s a great deal that’s not been written down.’

  ‘So when Romany Flange went to Mrs Hemlock’s bedroom she found her dead?’

  ‘Affirmative.’

  ‘Not comatose, but dead.’

  ‘She couldn’t find a pulse and when she held a mirror to her mouth there was no sign of any breathing.’

  ‘So they rang for a doctor.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘And you believe it was suicide?’

  The Inspector was irritated.

  ‘I see no reason not to.’

  ‘She phoned my wife last night. She had something she wanted to tell me. We arranged to meet this morning.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So it seems odd to make an urgent appointment for a few hours away and kill yourself before keeping it.’

  ‘Suicide takes precedence over etiquette in my experience,’ said the policeman. ‘It’s not something that’s covered by Emily Post.’

  Bognor had not thought Bumstead would be aware of Emily Post. ‘You know what I mean,’ he said testily. ‘The only possible reason for her taking an overdose is that she was distressed by the death of her husband, yet we all know, don’t we, that her husband was in the habit of sleeping with anything that moved? He treated her atrociously. She had every reason for wanting him dead.’

  ‘There’s no accounting for women, Mr Bognor.’ He nodded in the direction of Monica. ‘Present company excepted. Now if you’ll excuse me I have work to do.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Bognor. ‘I don’t suppose your boys have found the papers she was talking about on the phone last night?’

  ‘The scene-of-crime officers are making a thorough examination, Mr Bognor, and I’ve no doubt we shall have their findings in due course. But at this moment in time I’m not aware of any such papers. What exactly were they supposed to contain?’

  ‘That’s what I was hoping to find out when I talked to her.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, sounding for all the world like a cut-price Parkinson. ‘Well, I don’t suppose you’ll ever know, will you? It’ll be one of life’s unsolved mysteries.’ And he stroked his moustache with the index finger of his right hand and he smiled.

  The Winter Gardens were wintry but hardly botanical. The signs of summer were frayed and damp: ‘A Viennese Whirl’ with Edmund Gathorne and the Wellbeloveds; Arturo Grimaldi and his Italian Strings; Singalong with Verity Smith, star of My Fair Lady and Cabaret; Wee Georgie Jarrett and the Spangle Sisters. A dying palm tree bent before the prevailing wind and a string of coloured bulbs jangled above the foyer. The building itself was by Brighton Pavilion out of Jack Straw’s Castle on Hampstea
d Heath – an Edwardian folly with a lot of what had once been white clapboard; a brace of minarets; a cupola surmounted by a weathervane of Old Father Time in a sou’wester; a profusion of stained glass. Nellie Melba had sung here once and – it was alleged – the Beatles in the days before their fame.

  ‘Ye Gods!’ said Bognor. ‘Quel dump!’

  Monica gave the taxi driver one pound fifty.

  They showed their passes to the Big Books lackey on the door and passed through the foyer into the auditorium. The back rows of the stalls had been curtained off so that only a hundred or so seats were in use. These were occupied almost exclusively by men in dark, rather anonymous suits. The few women were better but still discreetly turned out.

  There was a table on stage. Behind it sat the Midgelys and Romany Flange, looking more sultry and witch-like than ever. Mrs Midgely – Cynthia – was dressed to kill. (Though quite what was difficult to imagine.) Her hair, heavily lacquered, was done up in what Bognor vaguely thought used to be called a ‘beehive’, and every time she moved her head enormous gold earrings crashed about like birdscarers. When she waved her hands, which was often, gold bangles jangled on her wrists. You couldn’t see below her top but her top seemed to be composed almost entirely of gold spangles which caught the light from every angle and sent it lancing out into the far corners of the Winter Gardens, warming the cockles of the hearts of the representatives of Big Books PLC and spurring them on to sell just that final thousand copies of the ‘87 Royal Bedside Book which would send it into the top ten best-selling non-fiction titles of the year. By her side Wilfred looked merely dapper, in the same kind of suit as that worn by the reps, only expensive.

  Behind them was an enormous screen onto which had been projected a stylised golden crown against a purple background. Under the crown, also in gold, were the words: ‘Miranda Howard – World’s Number One Royal Author.’

  Bognor and his wife slipped into what must once have been the ‘three and nines’, picked up the Big Books Spring and Summer List of Forthcoming Titles, also decked out in ‘prestigious’ gold and purple. Cynthia was approaching the end of her spiel. She was telling an interminable and rather muddled story involving a television appearance with Terry Wogan and ‘JR’. Someone had said that she and Wilfred were ‘Princess Michael of Kent’s Boswell’. Someone else had not known who Boswell was. Lurking in the undergrowth of this confusion was something Mrs Midgely had once found riotously funny but now neither she nor anyone else could think what it was.