Death in the Opening Chapter (22 page)

‘Sorry,' said Bognor, ‘you've lost me.'

‘I'm famous as a novelist,' explained Allgood, talking as if to a small child, ‘but it's much more lucrative to do things like this.' He smiled and waved around in an expansive manner. ‘Not to mention fun.'

As if on cue, Vicenza Book entered left and sat down at their table. She looked as if she had just got out of bed, smiled and nodded at Bognor, and kissed the novelist proprietorially on the lips. ‘Hi, sweetie,' she said, giving every impression of being the female half of an item.

Nothing much surprised Bognor any more, but he felt obliged to say, ‘I thought you had a publicist with you? Tracey or something?'

Allgood thought for a moment. ‘You're right,' he said, after a while. ‘She had to go back to London. Vicenza here has stepped into her breach, as it were.' He laughed. ‘Haven't you, darling?'

Vicenza simpered, and Bognor had vague thoughts of killing two birds with a single stone. He was impossibly old-fashioned. Time he retired. But even so.

‘You're saying you've retired from writing books?'

‘You could say I've become more of a performance artist,' he said. ‘Lot easier. Better paid. More kudos.'

‘So, the talk this morning . . . that sort of thing is now your bread and butter.'

Allgood seemed to give this too some thought. Eventually, he said, ‘Yah,' and lapsed into silence. Vicenza ordered a glass of the pink drink from a passing waiter. It was Campari and orange. Bognor, on duty, asked for a double espresso.

‘But the Reverend Sebastian wanted to be a writer,' ventured Bognor. ‘Ended up on the slush pile. Felt rejected. Became depressed. Took his own life as a result.'

‘Did he?' asked Allgood. ‘Fancy.'

‘You're the one who said it. This morning. In your talk.'

‘Did I?' Allgood might have been considering a completely different third party. ‘How odd. Did I have any evidence?'

‘I don't know,' said Bognor, feeling as if he were getting out of his depth and had no water-wings. ‘Do you? Did you?'

‘Pass,' he said, and then turned to Vicenza. ‘What do you think, darling?'

‘Dunno,' she said, ‘I wasn't there. Still sleeping it off.'

She simpered, leaving no one in any doubt what she meant by ‘it'. She was the ‘it' girl of Mallborne, a bicycle soprano.

‘Natch,' said Allgood. ‘Who said I said he wrote a book?'

‘Your audience,' said Bognor. ‘They seemed to think you had inside knowledge.'

‘Not me,' said the non-novelist. ‘If I seemed to suggest such a thing, I must have been talking hypothetically. Writers these days blur the edges between fact and fiction, in speech as well as on the page. I suppose it depends what you mean by truth.'

‘Yes,' said Bognor, feeling as if he were nearing home turf. The nature of truth was the sort of concept with which he was familiar. Truth, justice, right and wrong – these were the tools of his trade. His stock.

‘I sometimes feel,' said Allgood, ‘that if you believe something sufficiently strongly, it assumes its own truth. It may be false, but it's not because that's not what you believe. Maybe I believe the reverend wrote a book. For me, that becomes a truth, even if it's not shared. You may not accept what I say, and the Reverend Sebastian may not actually have put pen to paper. But that doesn't invalidate my belief, nor my constructing a theory around that belief, even though the theory is based on sand. It's my belief that's important, not the actuality. Do I make myself clear?'

‘Not really,' said Bognor, who was groping.

‘Too deep for me,' said Vicenza. ‘Not that I care much.' And she laughed throatily, like one who smoked.

‘It's quite simple,' said Allgood. ‘All I'm saying is that truth is relative. Most people think it's an absolute, but I don't agree. Apart from anything, it's fantastically restricting. Once you accept that it's a question of degree, it opens up any number of possibilities.'

‘You can't expect me to think that,' protested Bognor. ‘My whole job is predicated on the basis that the world is black and white, and there is such a thing as right and wrong, guilty and innocent. I am charged with seeking out criminals and bringing them to what we call justice.'

‘I'm glad you entered the caveat,' said Allgood. ‘At least you appear to be capable of understanding that in real life things aren't quite as simple as they have to be in your career.'

‘I question which of us is living in “real life”,' said Bognor. ‘Mine feels pretty real to me.'

‘Touché,' said Allgood. ‘Mine, likewise. Which just goes to prove the point I'm making. I'm not disparaging your reality, which is real for you; but mine is real for me too. And you should respect it.'

‘Except,' said Bognor, ‘when you try to proselytize. You're entitled to a skewed view of what's real, provided you keep it to yourself and don't try to inflict it on other people. You know perfectly well that your view of what happened to the Reverend Sebastian is, in our terms, a pure fabrication, but you tried to pretend that it was real in terms that my friends, your audience, understood.'

‘Now you're being duplicitous,' said Allgood. ‘I was arguing hypothetically, in your terms. I never pretended otherwise.'

‘That's not my understanding,' said Bognor. ‘Did Sebastian write a book? Did he submit it to publishers? Was it rejected?'

Allgood appeared to give this some thought, but when he came up with an answer it was as infuriating as Bognor had feared. It also took little or no account of what he had said hitherto.

‘Maybe,' he said, ‘maybe not.'

It was the sort of response an Apocrypha don would have produced in one of those infuriating tutorials which had nothing to do with the subject you were supposed to be studying, and everything to do with teaching you dialectic and the art of argument. Monica hated it, even though her own college had practised much the same.

‘Did the vicar write a book?'

A long silence. Eventually, Allgood said, ‘Not in the sense that would stand up in a court of law. I think he could perfectly well have written one, though. And if he had, he would have suffered serial rejections which would have undermined what was, by all accounts, a flimsy sense of self-confidence and self-worth. So, what I said makes perfect sense.'

‘But it's a fiction,' said Bognor, angrily.

‘That's what I deal in,' said Allgood evenly, ‘and there is a sense in which
my
fiction is truer than
your
fact, wouldn't you agree?'

‘That's not the point, as well you know.'

‘Oh, but I think it is,' said Allgood. ‘Life is too literal. Actually, it's a lot more interesting than plods like you make out.'

Bognor resented being described as a ‘plod', but refused to rise and said nothing. He could do metaphysics but not professionally. Work was rooted in life and death, just as he believed that books should have beginnings and middles and ends, and anchovies helped out beef casseroles.

‘I don't have a problem staying interested,' he said, ‘and in the world I live in, a stiff is a stiff is a stiff, and it's my job to see how and why a once breathing human can have reached that sorry state. As the meerkat says “simples”. It is too. And quite interesting enough, without injecting hypotheticals.'

‘You would say that, wouldn't you?' said Allgood. ‘It's a point of view. Not one I happen to share, but a point of view nonetheless. I respect it. I just wish you'd do the same for mine.'

Bognor was exasperated.

‘I'm sorry,' he said, ‘but I have a job to do. I don't have the luxury of being able to fantasize. Boring old black and white. Tiresome. Limiting. Not as good as writing a book, much less talking about it. But it's what I do. So, can you just tell me. Did the late vicar write a book? Did he submit it to one or more publishers? Was it rejected?'

‘No,' said Allgood. ‘Not in so many words. Not literally. Not as far as I know. It's possible but I have no proof. As you'd describe it.'

‘So, you've been wasting my time?'

‘I wouldn't put it like that,' said Allgood, ‘but you said it.'

‘I could charge you with wasting official time,' said Bognor pompously, ‘but I'll let you off with a warning.'

‘Thank you, I'm sure', said the novelist. ‘I'd prefer to think that we look at things in a different way. You see black and white and I see grey. I believe in murk, you believe in clarity. Different.'

Bognor reflected that Allgood could be right.

‘Anything I can do, just let me know,' said Vicenza Book. She looked pert and tousled.

‘Likewise,' said Allgood.

They raised their glasses.

Bognor wished life was so simple. He exited left.

Perhaps life and death were naturally murky, and his efforts to make them otherwise were necessarily doomed to failure.

Pity.

TWENTY-FOUR

T
here was a convention involving butlers, but Bognor was damned if he could remember what it was. This may have had something to do with the diminishing number of butlers, who were a dying breed, even if one included the ersatz butlers employed by a certain sort of celebrity hotel in such places as Dubai. Or it may have had to do with Bognor's natural forgetfulness, or his belief that neither conventions nor butlers mattered much. Either the butler dunnit or he hadn't. He was either the most suspicious character or the least. Whatever, he had to be interviewed, together with his wife, who in this case, did.

These were their alibis for the time of death: Brandon was buttling and his wife doing. Sir Branwell, Lady Fludd and the Bognors themselves were there to corroborate. They may not have actually been present, but they were at the end of a bell-pull. To have nipped off to church and done the necessary would have involved a completely unacceptable risk. And the Brandons, as was the way Bognor suspected with butlers and doers, were not among the nation's risk-takers.

It was sometimes assumed that people such as the Brandons no longer existed.

Not true.

Within living memory, well almost within living memory, the Fludds of Mallborne would have employed large numbers of servants, of whom Mr and Mrs Brandon would have been the most important. Before the two socially levelling world wars, the manor would have boasted squads of lower orders, living as a sort of alternative household behind the green baize doors, much in the manner of the household made famous by the TV programme
Upstairs, Downstairs
in the 1970s. Even quite modest middle-class households would have had a couple of servants who cooked, served, drove and generally performed menial tasks for those upstairs.

People like them were the staples of golden age crime fiction, together with simpering clerics, blustering squires, long-winded lawyers, doctors who did regular ‘rounds' (sometimes even on horseback) and all the other denizens of a society who knew their place and conformed to type. This world was often thought to have vanished, but it still clung on in places such as Mallborne. It was much diminished, unfashionable, unknown even to the journalists and others who sought to present a picture of contemporary life. But its fall from grace did not mean that this world had vanished. It still clung on.

Perhaps it was a vanishing age, but it was not yet gone, and the Bognors were privy to it. Or, at least, to a part of it. They knew they were lucky and that their friends, Sir Branwell and Camilla, were immensely privileged. It was incorrect, wrong, feudal, but if you were on the right side, definite fun.

The Brandons were on the wrong side of it – below the salt and on the distaff side of the green baize. This too was deceptive, for there was a real sense in which the Brandons ran the show. He was the regimental sergeant major while Sir Branwell was the ensign or second lieutenant. The baronet had breeding but was wet behind the ears; he carried a sword while RSM Brandon had only a pacing stick, silver-headed; the little officer dined in a smart mess; the sergeant-major presided over a rougher, less gilded institution. Yet, without the Brandons of this world, the army would cease to be. If Sir Branwell were abolished, no one would notice.

There was a paradox here, and its dying did not make it any less of a paradox. In a classless society, where Jack was as good as his master, there were few nuances and complexities. The old society was unfair, sometimes criminally so, but it was satisfyingly full of contradictions. One, possibly the most obvious, was that those who seemed to be in charge, were actually little more than figureheads. Jack was better than his master, but the charade was the reverse. The truth was that the true bosses were those who seemed to be bossed, but the truth was not to be acknowledged. The Sir Branwells of this world were perceived to be the monarchs of all they surveyed, and yet the reality was that those such as Brandon and his wife, who bowed and curtsied, tugged at their forelocks and were kept ruthlessly in place, were actually the masters now, and always had been.

‘You can drop the “sir”, Brandon,' said Bognor, who, by dint of his education, his association with Sir Branwell and, above all, his ‘K', was ‘officer class'. He smiled, patronizingly. ‘There are no witnesses. And I don't hold with that sort of thing. So just relax. Call me Simon.'

‘Yes, sir,' said Brandon. Then aware of Bognor's incredulous reaction, he stammered something more egalitarian, along the lines of ‘Simon . . . er . . . Mr Bognor . . . er . . . Sir Simon.'

Bognor, not particularly a stickler for modes of address and correct procedure, was embarrassed, and for almost the first time, thought that perhaps his new knighthood had merit if only when it came to ease of address. At least one knew where one was He had never had a problem with the head cheese at Apocrypha being constantly addressed as ‘master'. There was even, he supposed, something to be said for ‘sir', if only on the grounds that it disguised ‘amnesia'. He had known people who called everyone ‘Sonny' or ‘Darling', or even ‘Fred', when they were unable to remember someone's real name. In that sense, maybe ‘sir' was no worse. It carried unfortunate undertones of obsequiousness and deference, but it had its all-purpose uses.