Death in the Opening Chapter (6 page)

‘So, the Reverend Sebastian wasn't the victim of a crime
passionelle
? At least not in a conventional sense.' Bognor seemed thoughtful. He had seen enough of life, and more particularly of death, to rule out crimes of passion even in unlikely candidates. Perhaps, most of all, in unlikely candidates. Still waters could run exceedingly deep. Springs sprung in unexpected places. He was disinclined to rule out something to do with sex where the vicar was concerned.

‘How many festival performers were in town already?' he asked, changing tack unexpectedly, though sex and the festival performer could not be ruled out at this stage either.

Sir Branwell thought.

‘Not many, as far as I know,' he said. ‘The Brigadier and Mrs Brigadier. Vicenza Book.'

‘Not
the
Vicenza Book?'

‘Why? Do you know her?'

‘She's famous,' said Bognor, irritably. ‘Even I have heard of Vicenza Book. She's probably the most famous soprano in world opera.'

‘I wouldn't know,' said Sir Branwell, who didn't.

‘Monica will be incredibly overexcited,' said Bognor. ‘
The Nightingale of Padella
in Brodo. Italy's Stoke on Trent. We heard her do an obscure Handel with the ENO.'

‘Yes. Well,' said Branwell, ‘her father used to work behind the bar in the pub when it was still a recognizable pub. Her mother's Italian. Hence Padella in whatsit. She was, as it were, passing. She and Bert didn't last long and she took the girl back to Italy. Bert died. Drank himself to death. Sad story. Vicenza wrote out of the blue saying she'd like to come and sing at the festival, had such happy memories of Mallborne, blah, blah. Sebastian was all for it. All for her. So we signed her up. She should be here. She's taken a house with her camp followers.'

‘And she's already in town?'

‘Stretch limo sighted shortly before lunch yesterday. Not many of those in Mallborne. Tinted glass. White. Personalized number plate.'

‘Sounds authentic,' Bognor conceded.

‘Anyone else?'

‘Martin Allgood.'

‘The novelist?' Bognor had read an Allgood once and didn't like it.

‘He's this year's writer-in-residence. Here for the duration. Does lots of readings, interviews, judging of things. We put him in Thatch Cottage on the estate and call it the Writer's House for the week. Rather a good publicity stunt. Always attracts masses of publicity, and Allgood can be relied on to say something suitably foul and controversial. We had him once before, about ten years ago. Seemed surprisingly nice actually. Pretty girlfriend but I think she's done a bunk. I read an interview with him a year or so ago which seemed to suggest he batted and bowled. AC/DC.'

‘Probably another publicity stunt.' Bognor had a low opinion of Allgood based mainly on the one reading of the single book – something to do with expectations. Not great in Allgood's case. He knew this to be unfair, but was convinced that the author was an untalented showman. He had a beard and was very short. Bognor had an aversion to small, hairy writers, which was based entirely on prejudice but was more or less unshakeable, probably for that very reason.

‘Was Sebastian the vicar during Allgood's previous residency?' asked Bognor, quick as the proverbial flash. He liked not to be seen missing tricks, especially when so clumsily flaunted.

‘As a matter of fact, Sebastian was newly arrived. They didn't get on. Allgood criticized Sebby's sermon, which was ill-advised. He was sensitive about his sermons, Sebastian.'

‘Don't blame him,' said Bognor. ‘What was the point of Allgood's criticism?'

‘Oh, Allgood was going through a Dawkins' atheist phase as usual and Sebastian was sympathetic to the creationist johnnies. Not hook-line-and-sinkered, but sympathetic. Sebastian had a fatal tendency to see all sides to an argument; Allgood only ever saw one.'

‘Seldom the same,' smiled Bognor.

‘No one ever accused Martin of consistency,' said Sir Branwell. ‘Not even Martin, and a lot of the time he is his own worst enemy. As he freely admits.'

‘Did he dislike the vicar enough to kill him?'

The squire thought for a moment. ‘At the time, maybe. But Allgood never harboured anything for very long. Least of all grudges. And these days he's something of a creationist himself. If you believe what you read in the papers.'

‘No.' Bognor grinned. ‘I don't.'

He didn't either.

Bognor reflected that he had included his old friends in Contractor's brief. The office genius had duly obliged. But.

Neither Branwell nor Camilla had escaped Contractor's forensic attentions. They couldn't. What's more, they would both have been mortified if they had been left out. There was nothing in the reports of his two old friends that caused Bognor to so much as raise an eyebrow. Nevertheless, he felt as if he we were reading an obituary by a professional who hadn't known the deceased, or a eulogy by a friend of a friend at one of those impersonal memorial services. Too often, the preacher hadn't known the centrally departed any more than the obituarist. It was just so with Harvey Contractor. The reports had professional finesse but lacked true knowledge. Bognor knew both rather better than the back of his hand. Which was why he eliminated them from his enquiries.

SIX

S
ir Simon and Lady Bognor went for a walk later that morning, before the sherry which always preceded Sunday lunch.

The two had walked together since before they were married and it had become a ritual, even though their walking had an imbalance which handicapped the process from the very beginning. This lay in the fact that Monica had two speeds and her husband only one. Never the twain did meet. Monica moved fast or slow. The former was designed for getting from A to B with maximum expedition and was used in airports, railway stations and other places of no passing interest, where the arriving was all that mattered and the travelling merely a tiresome necessity. The other, slower, speed was for window shopping. Bognor referred to it as dawdling.

He himself walked at a speed which suited him but, essentially, belonged to no one else. Because of this, he was often an anthropomorphism of Rudyard Kipling's ‘cat that walked by himself'. He was at one and the same time gregarious and solitary, and his walking speed suited him. When it was appropriate he adjusted his speed to that of other people, but he was basically only happy at his own idiosyncratic medium pace. It left him alone with his own thoughts, untroubled by interruption.

So Simon and Monica walked at different speeds, but they sang from the same, or at least similar, hymn sheets and talked the same game. Since they had first met, they had been each other's greatest, usually only, confidants. They talked together often and in different situations, many stationary, but they had always talked together
en plein air
, walking. This involved compromise and usually meant that Simon walked faster or slower than he would have liked. If he maintained his own pace, he usually fell behind his wife or pulled ahead. In either case, conversation became impossible. Sometimes this worked.

Today, however, was a talking occasion taken at a slow speed, which meant that Bognor took his foot off the gas pedal and sauntered alongside his wife, concentrating on her but also appreciating the wild garlic.

‘I don't believe the vicar killed himself,' he began, as they left the ha-ha behind them and turned right into the woodland garden.

‘Why not?' Monica wanted to know. ‘Are you quite sure it's not because that unpleasant chief constable thinks otherwise?'

Bognor wondered whether the cowpat he had rather adroitly avoided was actually cow dung or belonged to some other animal; wilder and more obviously suited to woodland rather than open pasture or meadow. She could be right. He had a knee-jerk objection to authoritarianism, particularly when it was based on convenience rather than true authority. If men like Jones took a view then Bognor's immediate response was to take another, preferably contrary. He had learned to disguise this with a fog of bureaucratic prevarication which made him seem more amenable and reasonable than he actually was. He never fooled himself, and seldom Monica, but he was surprisingly good at pulling the wool over the eyes. Better still, he was a past master at making people think that if wool had been pulled, it was they and not Bognor who had done the pulling.

‘You're quite right,' he conceded. ‘I don't like the chief constable and I'm inclined to disagree with whatever he says. On the other hand, I really don't think the Reverend Sebastian Fludd dunnit.'

‘Why not?' his wife wanted to know.

Bognor did some more thinking and then said, ‘Because it's simply not in character. He wasn't a natural suicide.'

‘No such thing,' said Monica. She spoke with certainty laced with a touch of asperity. ‘The oddest and least likely people kill themselves, often for the most absurd and least predictable reasons. You know that. You've seen it often enough.'

This was true. They both knew it. They had both experienced examples.

‘Even so,' said Bognor, in what to anyone else might have seemed a lame remark.

‘Don't tell me,' said Monica. ‘You feel it. Deep down.' She acknowledged this sixth sense of his and recognized that it was what distinguished the great from the mundane. Methodology got you so far but proceeding by the book was, in her eyes, the mark of the second-rate. Anyone could read a book, assimilate the essential message it contained and then proceed accordingly. It took something akin to genius to break rules, ignore convention and not to pay too much attention to what the book said.

Both of them believed this with a consuming and unifying passion. Moulds were made to be thrown out; rules and laws led to repetition and rote. Gut instinct was what marked men out. Mozart and Shakespeare and Leonardo da Vinci were great because they dared to do things differently; those who followed were second-rate because they did the same.

‘If he didn't do it, then who did?' Monica asked, pertinently enough.

‘The wife found him,' said Bognor. ‘She was the nearest.'

‘But was she the dearest?' she asked.

‘Aha,' said Bognor, stepping over more dung. The countryside was full of excrement. This looked like some sort of deer muck. Not domestic dung, despite its neat identical rows of brown pellets. Orderly ordure. ‘Good point. It sounds like a basically antiseptic union.'

‘Not like some,' she said.

‘Maybe not,' he said, refusing to rise to such obvious bait, even on a Sunday morning in the country.

‘Leaving motive on one side for the time being,' said Monica, ‘she had the opportunity.'

‘So we're saying that she followed her husband into his church, interrupted his sermon-prep, made him tie a rope round his neck, attached it to a beam, stood him on a suitable chair and then kicked it away, causing him to suffocate, or whatever.'

‘We're not saying that,' said Monica.

‘No,' conceded her husband, ‘but if we're suggesting that Mrs Fludd murdered her husband, then something along those lines must have happened. Why be so melodramatic? Why not just put something lethal in his Ovaltine one night at the rectory?'

‘Because if she did that, dummy, she would have been the only suspect. By topping the unfortunate Sebastian in church, she created a whole raft of other possibilities and other suspects. She deflected attention, made herself just one among many, rather than the only possibility. It's obvious.'

This was unanswerable. Bognor remained silent. Finally, he said, ‘So if she did it, she was being cold-blooded enough to finger other suspects.'

‘If it was her,' said Monica, ‘it was cold-blooded. No getting away from that.'

‘If it was her,' said Bognor, ‘it would have to be a persuasion job. She wouldn't have had the strength to do all the preliminary business, even if she could have kicked the chair away from under him. If it were her, then it would be amazingly cold-blooded and preconceived in every possible way. I'm not sure anyone is that calculating.'

‘Oh yes, they are,' said Monica. ‘You know the old saw: divorce no, murder yes. Catholics say it mostly. Maybe Mrs Fludd was like that.'

‘So, Mrs Fludd would rather have killed her husband than divorce him. If she wanted to end the relationship then she had no option. Death or nothing. She might offend the law of the land but not of God.'

‘You're twisting what I said,' Monica protested. ‘Besides killing people is wrong. There's a commandment about it. God sent the word down from the mountain on a tablet. Via Moses. It was a serious old testament prophet job.'

‘A bitter pill for some to swallow.' Bognor grinned. There were moments when he loved his wife very much. This was one of them. They had learned to tolerate each other's feeble jokes. He inhaled the smells of the countryside and reflected that there were worse things for a man to be doing before Sunday lunch than going for a walk in rural parkland. Even when death loomed so large in the immediate background. After all, death was part of his job, and if they couldn't both accept that, then they could accept nothing. In the long run, they were all dead and death provided interesting and crucial conundra. He was glad that his job involved basics and not peripherals.

‘For what it's worth, I don't think the reverend was the victim of a nuptial murder, but at this stage I don't want to rule anyone out. Not even Mrs Fludd.'

‘But if it wasn't Mrs Fludd . . . mind your feet . . . it was someone who knew the vicar's movements. They knew he'd be in church preparing his sermon.'