Just Desserts (The Simon Bognor Mysteries) Page 9

  It was five to. He dialled 499 9000 and was soon greeted with a breezy ‘Hi, Simon.’

  ‘Hello,’ said Bognor, britishly.

  ‘Simon, I have some good news for you. I called Delphine Bitschwiller this morning, and it turns out she’s taking a party of Europeans over to Acapulco for the Feast of the Five Continents. She wants me to come along, and when I told her about you she fairly jumped at the idea. I told her to contact you at the Board of Trade, London. Was that right?’

  Bognor’s mind raced or came as near to it as that essentially pedestrian organ was able to. The process unfortunately interfered with speech. Two proxy invitations to Acapulco in the space of a few hours seemed a little silly. Who had got in first? Blight-Purley or Ebertson? And why were they and the Veuve so keen for him to go to Mexico? ‘Simon, are you there?’

  ‘Yes, I’m here. Tell me did you get the impression that la Veuve knew anything about me?’

  ‘Not a thing till I told her. Oh, except for one thing, she seemed to think she knew some relation of yours. Someone called Bognor who was killed in the raid at Dieppe. That make sense?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bognor, drily, ‘that makes sense.’

  5

  THE INVITATION WAS SIMPLE in that deceptive way which only the very grand can achieve: an enormous white card with ‘M. Simon Bognor’ written on it in copperplate plus the information in black type, heavily embossed, that Madame Bitschwiller requested the company of the said Bognor at dinner at Las Brisas, Acapulco, Mexico on 2nd June. The reply was to be directed to Champagne Bitschwiller, Reims, France. That was all. In a separate envelope came the nuts and bolts: a ticket to Charles de Gaulle airport, Roissy, where the Bitschwiller chartered Boeing would be waiting for the English party to join it; an itinerary; brochures; postcards; a history of Bitschwiller; and so on. Bognor sucked his teeth and flicked at the corner of the invitation with his fingertips. Why should la Veuve ask him to dine in Acapulco? Was the British Board of Trade really so prestigious an organization that Maison Bitschwiller should give him an expenses-paid holiday in Acapulco? It was most mysterious. And if the prospect had not been so mouth-watering, it would have seemed more than a little sinister. Parkinson, when confronted with the invitation, was as angry as before but finally succumbed.

  ‘One proviso,’ he had said. ‘If there are no results I dock your holiday double.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘You’re to spend five days in this ghetto of the international jet set?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If it’s a success, then well and good. If it’s a failure you lose ten days’ holiday.’

  ‘Ten?’

  ‘That’s what I said. And now before you go larking off there, for Christ’s sake get off your arse and get down to some logical thinking. I want to know why Scoff Smith was killed, but …’

  ‘I know,’ said Bognor wearily. ‘You want me to keep a lower profile than ever because no one must suspect that we suspect.’

  ‘Something like that,’ he said. ‘Don’t let them think you’re any cleverer than you look.’

  For a day he made lists and diagrams, his usual substitute for logic. What he wrote down and what he drew was no more logical than what he thought, but it looked more logical and it made him feel better.

  ‘Scoff Smith was a small-time spymaster with a network of restaurateurs and hoteliers who reported on their clients and guests,’

  he wrote. That was supposition, first suggested by the report in the files and amplified by Blight-Purley. He could not prove it. When he’d asked Parkinson what sort of information Scoff supplied, he had said that it was fairly small beans, and that most of it was gleaned from Scoff’s own restaurant or from his travels and attendance at international meals like that in Acapulco. He was dismissive about the idea of any network and told Bognor not to be melodramatic. Nevertheless the idea made a certain sense, and he could think of no more plausible starting point. He continued to write.

  ‘Scoff gave/sold information to Parkinson and, possibly to other British government agencies. He also gave/sold it to Ebertson and Petrov as well as others as yet unknown.’

  So far so good. He threw the pencil on to his blotter and paced.

  ‘Scoff committed suicide, but was pressured into it artificially with high oestrogen contraceptives. He wasn’t a natural depressive but he got migraines. The contraceptives didn’t do the migraines any good and they destroyed his sex-drive as well as messing up his liver. Hardly surprising he knocked himself off.’

  He was talking to himself now, walking slowly up and down the room, frowning, hands sunk deep in the pockets of his tweed jacket, the brown one with the leather patches on the elbows. ‘Anyone who worked at the Dragoon could have done it but obviously only the women would have had the pills. On the other hand if this was a high-powered international espionage job the pills could have come from anywhere. They would have been tools of the trade; part of the kit. OK. So anyone working for a half-competent organization could have got hold of them.’ He had wanted Gabrielle to become the principal suspect, but he was beginning to realize that there was no reason why she should be. She might be the only person at the Dragoon who would know that the network existed, which meant that she was the only person who could have done it on her own initiative. That didn’t rule out the chance of any one of the other people on the staff being cogs in some enemy wheel. ‘Oh, shit,’ he said, returning to his desk and picking up the pencil once more. Someone had once said that his deductive processes were slightly slower than Dr Watson’s while another critic had opined, in a semi-official complaint, that he was ‘an amiable twit’ whose ‘efforts at sleuthing are always good for a laugh’. At times like this he was compelled to acknowledge the germs of truth in these assessments. All the same he could not, for the life of him, see what Holmes or Bond would have done in similar circumstances. His life was not characterized by the cast-iron simplicities which so marked theirs. His was full of confusion and bafflement. Recognizing this he turned to his usual remedy. He made a list.

  ‘Opportunity,’ he wrote. ‘Entire staff of Dour Dragoon.’ That took care of that. Or did it? Regular guests and friends who wandered backstage to congratulate the chef or inspect the kitchen might contrive an opportunity. If so that would widen it to include, say, Aubrey, Blight-Purley, Ebertson, probably not Petrov who was not on terms of intimacy, Aubergine Bristol, perhaps Amanda Bullingdon, though he had the impression that whereas Lady Aubergine’s fleeting affair had passed into friendship, Amanda Bullingdon’s had ended in a certain coldness. ‘Oh, shit!’ he said again, recognizing the futility of his list-making. The more he thought about murder the longer the list became until he convinced himself that both motive and opportunity were universally available. But then there was Petrov. ‘Petrov,’ he wrote firmly in block capitals, stabbing at the paper in frustration and fury.

  He had been with Petrov that morning. He had seemed shifty. He had gained admittance to the Dragoon, as far as he could see on the authority of Massimo, the head waiter. Bognor had himself managed to get in, what, five minutes afterwards? By which time the Russian had disappeared and no one would admit to having seen him. Then the wretched man turns up in the Thames and is spirited back to his country of origin with scarcely as much as a ‘by-your-leave’. Bognor sighed. Under normal circumstances the matter might have been easily solved by asking the question direct, if necessary in court or at least in a police station. Political sophistries made this impossible. Even the indirect question was difficult. He was hamstrung. First he was asked to discover the ‘murderer’ of a man who was universally accepted as a suicide. Second he was charged with finding the assassin of a person the existence of whose very corpse was now a matter of conjecture. ‘Habeas Corpus,’ muttered Bognor. ‘What bloody Corpus?’

  His frustration continued for several days. It would be untrue to say that during that time the Smith-Petrov affair was relegated to the pending file, but it would be quite as false to sugges
t there was anything approaching a development. Bognor returned to the Dragoon but learnt little more from Gabrielle than how to make a mayonnaise with thirty-two egg yolks. He attended a number of wine tastings and visited Smithfield and Billingsgate where the sight of so much meat and fish in the raw provoked a sudden and uncharacteristic attack of vegetarianism. He discovered that waiters and managers were generally contemptuous of their public (far more so than most entertainers), and that fifty per cent of a chef’s wage came in a variety of cleverly contrived percentages designed to maximize profits. He assessed the export potential of Mendip snails, the plausibility of reintroducing the lamprey to the waters of the Severn, and the chances of marketing some essentially British comestible to rival the hamburger, now that the Icelanders had interfered with the price and availability of cod while the weather had interfered with the price and availability of the potato. As a disguise of his real intentions his behaviour was masterly, but it had the disadvantage of masking those intentions even from himself. He became, in a word, immersed. His weight increased; his complexion worsened; but he had no further inkling of what had caused the deaths of Scoff Smith and Dmitri Petrov until one morning when fate intervened once more in the person of Colonel Erskine Blight-Purley.

  ‘Got your flannels creased for tomorrow?’ enquired the Colonel grimacing at him over a glass of Eitelsbacher Karthäuserhofberg Kronenberg Kabinett in a cellar somewhere off Pall Mall.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Bognor sniffed and swirled in what had now become a passable imitation of genuine winemanship.

  ‘Cricket,’ said Blight-Purley. ‘I’ve marked you down as number seven. You never said whether you bowled.’

  ‘I don’t play cricket,’ said Bognor. ‘At least I haven’t played since school.’

  ‘Oh well, never mind. Number seven doesn’t have to produce anything unduly remarkable.’

  ‘I’m still not quite with you.’

  ‘I told you.’ Blight-Purley quaffed, well satisfied with the contents of his glass. ‘Wine buffs and bibbers against winegrowers, shippers and so on. Pendennis and I are non-playing captains. We play alternately in town and country. Honourable Artillery Company ground in London and Petheram village pitch in the country. Petheram again this year, and I just hope Freddie Pendennis doesn’t try to inflict his Petheram Rouge on us at lunch. He’s got more chance of taking wickets with that than the ball, but still. I can give you a lift if you’d like. My flat. About nine.’

  Bognor was beyond speech. At that moment Aubrey Pring joined them. ‘This Graacher Himmelreich is most interesting,’ he said. ‘Just that balance of mellow fruitfulness and flint which you get from really decent Krautwein. Don’t you agree, Purley?’

  Blight-Purley’s eyes yellowed. He was, Bognor sensed, a man who was unduly sensitive about the double-barrel to his name. ‘I was just briefing young Bognor about tomorrow,’ he said. ‘We rely on your inimitable leg-tweakers, as usual, Pring.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Aubrey. ‘I’m delighted you can play, Simon. I don’t remember you playing at Oxford.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you perform for the Erratics?’

  ‘Actually, no.’

  ‘Oh. You bat? Or bowl?’

  ‘Neither.’

  ‘I’ve put him down at seven,’ said Blight-Purley, ‘and I’ve no doubt he’ll turn an arm over in extremis.’

  ‘That shouldn’t be necessary.’ Aubrey reached across and picked up the bottle of Moselle to replenish their glasses. ‘We’ve got Basil Luton playing for us this year remember. He’s distinctly quick. Played a couple of games for Dorset last year. He has that extraordinary ability to make the ball fizz in the air. It sounds like a doodle bug. Petrifying.’

  ‘Especially after lunch.’

  ‘Quite.’

  Conversation turned away from cricket and Bognor turned away from them. He found himself staring into the faintly lopsided eyes of Amanda Bullingdon.

  ‘You look rather green,’ she said. ‘Is all this food and drink getting you down?’

  ‘It’s not that. That bastard Blight-Purley’s trying to get me into cricket gear tomorrow.’

  ‘Better than trying to get you into bed.’

  ‘Has he been giving you trouble?’

  She shrugged. ‘Nothing I can’t manage, but he has been trying. Ghastly old goat. His breath is disastrous. I hope you are playing.’

  ‘I don’t seem to have been given much choice.’

  ‘You can always say “no”. That’s what I do.’

  ‘It’s hardly the same.’

  ‘Maybe not. By the way …’

  ‘Yes.’ The girl was suddenly conspiratorial.

  She led him away from the throng of drinkers. ‘What’s happened to Petrov? I rang his office to get him to this “do”, and they said he’d gone home. Has he? It was very sudden. Nobody seems to know anything, or if they do they’re not saying.’

  Bognor was not going to take any additional risks. ‘I hadn’t heard, but if they say he’s gone home suddenly then home, I imagine, he has gone.’

  The girl seemed concerned. ‘He was an awfully vulnerable sort of person,’ she said. ‘I always felt sorry for him. He didn’t quite fit, and he seemed to be under pressure. Much more recently, too. I remember when I was with Scoff he was always trying to curry favour with him but in a way which was … oh, I don’t know … odd. And the last time I saw him he said something very peculiar.’

  Bognor was still concentrating on the awful ordeal ahead of him on the cricket field at Petheram. ‘Said something peculiar?’

  ‘Yes. He said: “I think if the devil doesn’t exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness”.’

  ‘That sounds like a quote,’ said Bognor.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ she said, nodding eagerly, ‘so I asked him. He said it was from Dostoevsky—The Brothers Karamazov. He’d been reading it. He said Dostoevsky could afford to be optimistic because he’d never had to endure life under a communist dictatorship.’

  ‘I thought Dostoevsky was a pessimist.’

  ‘I think he was being ironic.’ She grinned teasingly.

  ‘Very Russian,’ said Bognor, put out. ‘But what does it mean?’

  ‘I’m not really sure,’ she said, ‘except that someone was getting him down.’

  ‘Someone or something?’

  ‘I think someone,’ she said. ‘But that’s an impression more than anything else.’ Bognor filed the impression at the back of his mind. Someone had been getting at Petrov. He guessed it was his masters in Moscow, exerting pressure.

  ‘I wish Blight-Purley hadn’t put me down for his bloody cricket,’ he said, fingering his ever-expanding paunch.

  She frowned at him. ‘You haven’t been listening to a word I’ve said,’ she complained. ‘I shall enjoy watching your attempts.’

  ‘Are you going to be there?’

  She looked superior. ‘Every year,’ she said, ‘I help Gabrielle with the catering, which I admit can be a little fraught. Scoff used to keep wicket. He was surprisingly good.’

  The cricket provoked a grumbling row that evening at the flat. Monica was compelled to sort through cupboards, ring a couple of ex-boyfriends and generally put herself out in an attempt to provide her lover with appropriate kit for the match. Not until eleven was this accumulated: a very tight pair of cream trousers with grass-stained knees, very off-white pads which barely covered the grass-stains, a very old Viyella shirt; a similarly antique padded protector for his genitals (liable to be struck unexpectedly by the ridiculously hard leather ball); and a lurid, purple and green striped cap which Bognor feared signified some distinction he did not, in fact, enjoy.

  ‘Happy now?’ asked Monica, surveying the clothing, laid out on the bed.

  ‘Not in the least,’ he said. ‘I am going to be humiliated. I know it.’

  She began to pack the clothing into a canvas Gladstone bag-style suitcase which had belonged to her father and had old P an
d O labels to prove it. ‘I’ve half a mind to come,’ she said. ‘The idea of witnessing your ritual humiliation is rather appealing.’

  He swore at her, half humorously, but in the end—which was nine o’clock the following morning—he arrived at Blight-Purley’s flat alone. He found Aubrey Pring and Aubergine Bristol already ensconced in the drawing room drinking black coffee and Fernet Branca. Both had long canvas cases not unlike Bognor’s.

  ‘You’re not playing surely?’ he asked Aubergine when they had all exchanged bleary greetings.

  ‘She’s a very useful middle-order bat,’ said Pring, stiffly, ‘and a considerable first-change bowler.’

  ‘Not to mention her ability as a slip fielder,’ added Blight-Purley, who was wearing flannel trousers with a blazer of many colours. It was too early in the morning for such a jacket but Bognor forbore to say so. Instead he exclaimed, ‘Goodness. I remember a girlfriend of mine who once bowled the Master of Balliol for nothing, but I thought she was an exception.’

  ‘I’m not much good really,’ said Miss Bristol with the typical mock modesty of her class, ‘but I do rather enjoy it, and men get frightfully cross playing against a bird.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ said Bognor, declining the offer of coffee and Fernet Branca.

  ‘Drink up,’ said the Colonel to the others, ‘we must be on the road. Play begins at eleven.’

  The drive was deplorable. Blight-Purley’s car was an old grey Jaguar, and he drove it in a remarkably eccentric way, appearing to dawdle whenever the road was fast and open, and speed up at corners. He would sit for hours behind such slow-moving vehicles as tractors and milk-floats when it was clear that overtaking was quite safe, and then just as his visibility was obscured by a hill or a bend he would pull out, jerking the car into a higher gear, and career past, pulling in sometimes with only a coat of paint to spare.