Brought to Book E-Book

Tim Heald

• Herausgeber: Dean Street Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Bognor tries to understand how a publishing magnate could have been crushed by smut. Before retiring for the night, Vernon Hemlock pours a brandy, lights a cigar, and takes a look at his cache of pornography. Far more than a wad of dirty magazines stashed under a mattress, this is a collection of some of the world's finest erotica, dating back as far as a dirty doodle drawn by da Vinci. The millionaire publisher is perusing the Swedish section when the shelves begin to move. By the time he notices the walls closing in on him, it is too late. Vernon Hemlock has been flattened by filth. This would not normally bother Simon Bognor, but he fears it will be bad news for his book deal. A stridently lazy Board of Trade investigator, Bognor stumbled his way into a handshake deal with Hemlock to write a kind of memoir. With his publisher dead, Bognor has no choice but to find the man who squashed the king of porn and confront his own greatest fear: hard work. 'Dazzling and star-spangled [prose].' - Dorothy B. Hughes, author of In a Lonely Place'Crime with a P.G. Wodehouse flair.' - Chicago Tribune 'A constant pleasure.' - The Daily Telegraph

Leseprobe

Tim HealdBrought to BookA SIMON BOGNOR MYSTERY

Bognor tries to understand how a publishing magnate could have been crushed by smut.

Before retiring for the night, Vernon Hemlock pours a brandy, lights a cigar, and takes a look at his cache of pornography. Far more than a wad of dirty magazines stashed under a mattress, this is a collection of some of the world’s finest erotica, dating back as far as a dirty doodle drawn by da Vinci. The millionaire publisher is perusing the Swedish section when the shelves begin to move. By the time he notices the walls closing in on him, it is too late. Vernon Hemlock has been flattened by filth.

This would not normally bother Simon Bognor, but he fears it will be bad news for his book deal. A stridently lazy Board of Trade investigator, Bognor stumbled his way into a handshake deal with Hemlock to write a kind of memoir. With his publisher dead, Bognor has no choice but to find the man who squashed the king of porn and confront his own greatest fear: hard work.

‘Dazzling and star-spangled [prose].’DOROTHY B. HUGHES

‘Crime with a P.G. Wodehouse flair.’CHICAGO TRIBUNE

‘A constant pleasure.’DAILY TELEGRAPH

For Alan, Anthony, Anthony, Brian Chester, Colin, David, Don, Eden, Harold, Hilary, Ion, Michelle, Nigel, Pat, Paul, Steve, Simon, Terence and all my other publishers past and present.

One

Vernon Hemlock caressed the bulbous base of his brandy balloon with almost as much lascivious pleasure as he devoted to the sublimely erotic bottom of his mistress, Romany Flange. The grey-blue coil of smoke from his enormous Romeo y Julieta eddied towards the deliciously rude ceiling painted for the house’s original owner in 1864. Hemlock gazed wistfully at the sportive nymphs, shepherds and satyrs frolicking about a Tuscan countryside in which every piece of topography seemed to be a phallic symbol of one kind or another.

Vernon Hemlock smiled. It had been a good day at the office. The six-monthly sales conference of Big Books PLC, the publishing giant he had created with a ten thousand pound loan from his old chum Barrington-Fingest, was an occasion of ever-increasing self-satisfaction. Big Books grew bigger and bigger. As the books got bigger the cheques got bigger and so did the American sales and the film options and the enormous co-produced TV series. Hemlock published fewer and fewer titles every year, but such titles! Today had seen the announcement of The Royal Family Cookbook, a certain bestseller for Christmas with the astonishing innovation of edible pages. Biochemists in Taiwan had come up with a revolutionary form of rice paper which could be impregnated with whatever flavour you wanted. An edible Royal Family! Hemlock purred.

Tonight as so often he decided to take a last look downstairs in the library basement where he kept his magnificent collection of erotica and pornography. He was not certain whether he would be bedding Romany tonight or whether he would have to make do with his wife but whatever was in store it always helped to have a last salivating linger over the goodies in the basement. He rather fancied a look at the Scandinavian section.

He took the lift to the basement, inserted the plastic card which was the only way to get through the computer-controlled security doors and swayed over to the stack marked ‘S’. ‘S’ was for ‘Sade’, and for ‘Sweden’ and ‘Swiss Army Knife’; for ‘Sachertorte’ and ‘Syphilis’ and ‘Scrotum’ and ‘Sarcophagus’ and, indeed, for ‘Sex’ itself. There was more in ‘S’ even than in ‘F.’

The entire collection was willed to the Getty Museum in California. Perhaps it should have gone to the nation, but if the nation had it it would be kept on locked shelves whereas in California it would be available to all. Besides, Hemlock relished the thought of the nation’s predicament in having to decide whether or not an export licence would be granted. It might be filth but it was unique filth and priceless, too. There was a Leonardo cartoon of mind-boggling ingenuity; a Picasso of geometric perfection and physical impossibility; a Laughing Cavalier who saw a joke unsuspected by anyone who knew only the original; a Constable in which the beasts of the field were as bestial as Henry VIII in Holbein’s extraordinarily irreverent portrayal The Monarch at Rest in the Dedans.

Hemlock exhaled and licked his lips, then turned the wheel to prise the shelves apart. He had always had a weakness for this sort of thing ever since his first glimpse of Health and Efficiency on Platform 3 at Bristol Temple Meads so many years before. He was one of nature’s voyeurs. It was what made him such a successful publisher.

The floor was shiny tiled and his slippered feet made a sibilant lounge lizard sound as they greased along the newly opened aisle. At Stradivarius he paused. There was something extraordinarily titillating about erotic stringed instruments of the seventeen hundreds. He removed the bulky vellum volume and licked his lips again.

He was so engrossed that he never heard the turn of the screw, or noticed that the shelving was starting to move together again. It was only when his brandy glass toppled, spilling VSOP over a naked nun playing the cello, that he realised something was wrong. The shelving was power-assisted so that within seconds he was trapped. For a moment there was a pause, and from what seemed a long way off he heard laughter, muffled by volume upon volume of priceless erotica. The tip of his cigar caught the edge of the page, which started to smoulder, but his arms were now trapped at his side and he could not move to put out the fire. Coughing now he began to call out but the shelves ground on, tightening their grip remorselessly to the accompaniment of the distant laughter.

The fire triggered the smoke detectors about half an hour later, by which time it had gained a strong enough hold to effectively destroy the entire collection. Luckily it was well insured. Oddly enough it was not until morning that a thoughtful police constable opened up the shelves marked ‘S’ and discovered Vernon Hemlock of Big Books PLC.

He was, of course, extremely dead.

Two

Simon bognor and his wife Monica were guests at Hemlocks that night. Not that Bognor was what you might call ‘bookish’. Not in the modern sense. Apart from one or two whodunits and other ‘genre’ novels he eschewed contemporary fiction, leaving it to his wife Monica, a devotee of the East Anglian school of writing which drove Bognor into terrible rages. Bognor believed that the novel had died at around the outbreak of the Great War.

Occasionally Monica would encourage him to read something safe and old fashioned like the latest Amis but after a few pages Bognor would give up, muttering, and return to Dickens or Mrs Gaskell. He was none too keen on non-fiction, either. ‘If it’s true it’s boring; if it’s not boring it’s bound to be lies.’ He was becoming curmudgeonly in middle-age, only saved from being a tiresome fogey himself by his contempt and distaste for those who really were members of that peculiar brotherhood. ‘Teenage pensioners’, Bognor called them with all the middle’s hatred of extremes.

It was this hostile attitude towards modern literature which had led Parkinson to propose that Bognor should prepare the Board of Trade’s preliminary working (mauve) paper on ‘The Publishing Industry’.

‘This should force you into the twentieth century, laddie,’ Parkinson had said, announcing the project. ‘I want no leaf unturned. A Good Book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit and nowadays Good Books are Big Bucks. I want none of your mimsy Oxford college nonsense about aesthetic values. This is a commercial business. No claptrap about starving novelists in Bloomsbury attics. No Times Literary Supplement arty-fartiness. We need to know about the sort of books people read, Bognor. Not pseudo-intellectual sociology lecturers. Real people.’

‘I see,’ Bognor had said, biting his lip dolefully. ‘I see’ had been his standard response to Parkinson ever since he had first joined the Board of Trade so many years before.

And there was another project not known to Parkinson. Now that Bognor was in his forties, contemporaries of his seemed to have risen to positions of eminence and even power. One, a porcine economist called Weinstube, was a junior minister in the new Socialist Coalition Government. His curious task was concerned with propaganda and the rewriting of history. After only a few weeks in office Weinstube had come up with a long list of utterly uncommercial titles such as The People’s Friend—The Role of the Job Centre in Post-Industrial Society and a two-volume life of Patrick Gordon Walker. One such project was a history of the Board of Trade. Meeting Bognor at an Apocrypha College Society Dinner he had, after port, asked Bognor if he would take on the volume dealing with the Special Investigations Department, where, God help him, Bognor had worked all his adult life.

Weinstube might have been a silly man but he wasn’t stupid. His silver tongue had secured considerable sums of government money for his department and its publications. He had also negotiated a number of deals with Vernon Hemlock. These were unorthodox and the only certainty about them was that they reflected personal financial credit on the two principals. This was arranged through carefully selected third parties acting through a discreet bank in Liechtenstein and was reckoned by both Weinstube and Hemlock to be foolproof. Thus it was – up to a point and in a manner of speaking – that Bognor became a Big Book author. Not that Hemlock would be publishing under his Big Book imprint. That would be wholly inappropriate. The almost certainly unsalable Weinstube books would be published by Aspen and Larch, the small subsidiary house Hemlock had acquired for just such contingencies. Aspen and Larch dealt in rubbish of various kinds and operated mainly as a tax loss. The publishing industry was full of Aspens and Larches.

‘I suppose they’ll have to call off the sales conference,’ said Bognor, peering morosely out to sea. He and Monica were taking a modest constitutional along the front after breakfast. It was noticeable that Hemlock’s demise had had very little effect on their appetites. Nor on anyone else’s.

‘I doubt it.’ Monica yawned. ‘Whatever time did those perfectly bloody fire alarms go off?’

‘About half an hour after I nodded off,’ said Bognor. ‘Worst possible time. Just when you’re into deep sleep. It could be quite dangerous.’ Bognor had been reading an article about sleep patterns in the ‘specialists’ page in the Daily Telegraph – the page which was always illustrated with pictures of building blocks and arrows. It looked like the instruction manual for a build-it-yourself Finnish picnic table which still lay half-constructed in the Bognors’ garden shed back home.

‘You were snoring. I was still asleep.’

‘Lucky you!’ Bognor spoke feelingly. ‘That means you’ve had more rest than I’ve had. I’ve actually had a minus quantity of sleep, being woken up like that.’ He flexed his paunch and turned inland, breathing deeply. ‘I must say I do like the seaside,’ he said.

‘You can’t like Byfleet-next-the-Sea.’ Monica spoke with the asperity of an insulted and quite exhausted wife but her husband seemed not to notice.

‘Oh, but I do,’ he said, ‘I think it’s enchanting.’ He gazed along the promenade, absorbing the shuttered soft-drink stalls. the bolted bathing huts, the upturned dinghies, the tarpaulin over the stacked deckchairs which flapped in the winter wind ‘Where else in the world would you get this sense of desolation’ “Listen! you hear the grating roar of pebbles which the wave … er … te-tum … and fling … until …”’

‘“Draw back, and fling at their return, up the high strand” you illiterate oaf!’ Monica snorted her exasperation. ‘Come on she said, ‘we’d better get back to Hemlocks and see what’ going on.’ She started to stride back, taking long sensible stride in her flat, sensible shoes.

Bognor had to run to catch up, then fell into step. ‘The there’s something about “eternal sadness”, isn’t there?’

‘Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.’

‘That’s right.’ He spoke with approval and also the bogus knowledgeable manner of someone who knows he is a bit of a ninny but does not need or wish to be reminded of it. ‘Poor old Hemlock!’ he said, after a pause. ‘The eternal note of sadness certainly sounded for him.’

‘He was a rapacious slug,’ said Monica, ‘a nasty, greedy, mercenary brute.’

‘Steady on!’ said Bognor. ‘He was my publisher.’

‘You hadn’t signed anything.’

‘No, but we had an understanding.’

‘Understanding be jiggered.’

‘I don’t think you’re being entirely fair, Monica. And anyway he’s dead now.’

‘Good riddance!’ Mrs Bognor lengthened her stride, leaving her husband bobbing in her wake.

Bognor leant against an Edwardian street-lamp lovingly preserved by the Byfleet and District Townswomen’s Guild and panted. A tattered poster advertising August’s end-of-the-pier show leered down at him from the pebbledashed wall of a gentleman’s lavatory and a couple of seagulls mewed overhead. They could have been fighting or mating, he wasn’t sure, being no ornithologist. Came to the same thing in the end. In the distance he watched his wife buffeting against the wind, closing in on the grey sub-Lutyens bulk of Hemlocks. It had been built for Norbiton, the margarine magnate, who had perished in a flying-boat accident off Salerno before he could take up residence. A cross between the Cenotaph and Anne Hathaway’s cottage – a gross pillbox, half-timbered and bloated, barnacled with turrets and conservatories and roof gardens. Hemlock had bought it from nuns in the sixties for a song.

Bognor sighed. Monica was little more than a matchstick person now. Maddening woman, though he was fond of the old bag in his way. And she of him, he thought, ruefully. He sighed again and began to rumble after her, flatfooted, hung-over and a little depressed. He wondered if he would see the year out or would end up dead like Hemlock, lightly toasted between two library shelves. A wave broke close by, sending a shower of spray over his rising forehead. He turned up the collar of his coat and paced purposefully back towards the great house. He was afraid his troubles were only just beginning.

‘They’re all in the library,’ said Hastings. Hastings was the butler. He had been with Hemlock since the beginning – first as office, errand and tea boy, later as a rep. He claimed never to have read a book in his life and nothing about him suggested this to be untrue. He had sussed Bognor as a Right Wally the moment he saw him. Most of the other guests got a ‘sir’ or ‘madam’ from Hastings, mainly in the hope of a tip when they left. Not Bognor.

‘Right,’ said Bognor, with an air of purpose. He handed over his Burberry and straightened his tie.

‘Am I to join them?’ he asked.

‘The Chief Inspector said he gave instructions for no one to leave the house.’ Hastings accepted the coat with ill grace. ‘And that included you. If I were you I’d cut along sharpish and say sorry like a good boy.’

Bognor said nothing, just pulled at his cuff and gave Hastings one of his famous but unconvincing withering looks.

‘Git!’ mouthed Hastings in a stage whisper.

Bognor ignored him. He had long since learned never to bandy words with a butler.

The library door was stiff and squeaky so that he entered the room with a fanfare of protesting hinge. The room was uncarpeted so that even if he went on tiptoe, which he did, every step was noisy. He hated making this sort of entrance. It always reminded him of that terrible morning so many years before when he had arrived late for morning chapel and walked down the aisle under the sniggering gaze of five hundred boys. The headmaster, gowned and mortar-boarded on his wooden throne, had looked on with no amusement at all. Beatable offence.

Now that he was a grown-up, indeed middle-aged, person, Bognor knew that he should not be embarrassed at being the centre of attention. He certainly shouldn’t be fazed by the censure of some two-bit Detective Chief Inspector and a roomful of Vernon Hemlock’s bestselling-author houseguests.

But he was.

‘You must be Bognor.’ The Chief Inspector was the sort of pedestrian oaf Bognor abominated. He wore the suit one associated with professional footballers and his hair was cut short with the suspicion of a Derek Hatton bob at the back. His was the sharp, fashionable, scented appearance which Bognor mistrusted very much indeed. He used to think he disliked the old-fashioned detectives in trench coats and chunky black shoes, but he preferred them to the new breed.

‘Simon Bognor, Board of Trade,’ he said, trying to sound polite.

‘I gave instructions that no one was to leave the house.’ The DCI dabbed at his ducky little moustache.

‘I’m sorry. The instructions didn’t reach me.’

Bognor sat down heavily on a set of library steps next to Arthur Green, author of The Billion Lire Breakfast, The Million Dollar Martini, The Lunch that ended the World and Last Supper. Mr Green, mousey as ever, gave him an encouraging glance and a quarter-smile. Like so many authors he was as near the opposite of his hero, Lance Remington, as it was possible to imagine.

‘Honey, I had no instructions!’ This was Marlene Glopff, the sinuous raven-haired superstar of the American soap Homer. The series was not, as Bognor had supposed, a Greek epic but something to do with baseball. Miss Glopff was a fitness freak who lifted weights and lived almost exclusively on wheatgerm and carrot-juice. She had just produced (‘written’ was not the word) her first book, Working Out with Glopff.

‘I gave instructions that no one was to leave the house, Miss Glopff,’ said the Chief Inspector. ‘Those instructions were perfectly explicit and I expect them to be carried out. I don’t wish to have to charge anyone with obstructing the course of justice.’

Marlene Glopff pouted but said nothing.

Milton Capstick, characteristically, took exception to the policeman’s words. Capstick had ‘authored’ (a favourite Hemlock word) a hugely successful series of self-help and improvement volumes. As the onlie begetter of The True Self, Looking After Number One and The First Billion, Capstick believed in permanent self-advertisement. He was never put down.

‘There’s clearly been a breakdown in communications, Officer,’ he said. As he spoke, his bow tie bobbed up and down in time to his Adam’s apple. His blazer was very clean and his grey flannels beautifully creased. He was almost suave, but, like most of Hemlock’s authors, there was – to Bognor’s practised and jaundiced, if bleary, eye – a built-in phoniness. People who wrote Big Books were almost always unreal.

This certainly applied to Danvers Warrington who spoke next. ‘Dashed if I knew anything about being confined to barracks, old fruit,’ he said, waving the stem of an ornate curlicued meerschaum at the Chief Inspector. ‘I’d have been out for the old crack of dawn constitutional if it wasn’t for a twinge of the old malaria. Never leaves you, malaria. Like sandfly fever. Once bitten, twice…well, I certainly never heard anything about being put in jankers.’ Warrington was Hemlock’s famous wine writer: Warrington on Wine, More Wine with Warrington, Another Glass with Warrington, Pass the Plonk with Warrington. On the television show that he hosted for Wessex TV he invariably appeared in loud-check plus-fours with knee-length canary stockings. Also a monocle. He was in just such an outfit now.

‘That will do, thank you,’ said the DCI. He put his hand in his jacket pocket like Prince Philip and surveyed the little group in silence, moving his head from left to right, pausing for meaningful eyeball-to-eyeball contact with each person in turn. Bognor guessed the idea was to get everyone to look away before he did. It must have been something from the latest Scotland Yard manual on how to interrogate terrorists. Bognor was not going to become involved in eyeball wrestling at this stage of the proceedings so he stared resolutely at Hemlock’s Encyclopaedia Britannica which was handily situated a few yards behind Inspector Bumstead’s left elbow.

‘We believe’, said the Inspector when he had finished this lingering tour d’horizon, ‘that we are dealing with a murder.’

No one spoke until Monica Bognor, a woman given to speaking her mind and much less susceptible to intimidation than her husband or indeed anybody else present.

‘Are you implying that one of us killed Vernon Hemlock?’ she asked.

‘That’s not what I said.’

‘I didn’t say you did. I merely wanted to know if that’s what you were implying. There’s a difference.’

‘I have reason to believe that the deceased did not die due to natural causes.’

‘Goodness, how exciting!’ It was Cynthia Midgely, the distaff side of the Midgely writing team which performed under the joint by-line of Miranda Howard. She and her husband Wilfred used to work on the same local paper until hitting on a royal book formula which had made them both millionaires. Theirs was the newly announced Royal Family Cookbook. Its predecessors included The Royal Family Bedside Book, Royal Party Games, The Queen Mum, Good Queen Bess, Charlie’s Aunt, More Royal Party Games and The Royal Family Bedside Book 1979 – and an annual sequel in each of the following years. Cynthia was easily excited – an attribute which contributed to the notorious but commercially successful purple gush of the books. Wilfred supplied the research, though neither of them had ever actually seen a member of the Royal Family in the flesh. When confronted with this, both Cynthia and Wilfred used to reply archly that Lady Antonia Fraser had never met Mary Queen of Scots and look at her. This always went down very well on the Wogan show.

This time Cynthia had not meant to speak so loudly. She coloured and said in a coy simper, ‘I mean, how perfectly dreadful!’

‘Perfectly dreadful indeed,’ said Bumstead. ‘There are no signs of a forcible entry having been effected into the house and I am therefore driven to the conclusion that whoever killed Mr Hemlock was staying in the house. Not to put too fine a point on it this was an inside job.’

Looking round, Bognor saw that the company was, if not struck dumb, at least extremely subdued by this news. The most affected were, predictably enough, the two women known to be in Hemlock’s life: his wife Audrey, the foreign rights director, and his mistress Romany Flange, brightest of the Big Books editors whose eye for the main chance was unerring. Miss Flange was supposed to be enamoured of Merlin Glatt who was on the verge of becoming an absolutely enormous poet. Hemlock had not allowed him over the threshold – not just because of his place in the affections of Romany Flange but also because he had signed a contract for an erotic bestiary with Andover Strobe, Hemlock’s biggest rival in the world of books.

The Inspector smiled a thin, professional smile designed to freeze bone marrow.

‘Everybody who slept in the house is in this room now,’ he said. He stared at Bognor.

‘You’re forgetting the staff,’ said Bognor. ‘This may have been an inside job but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t have been a downstairs one. Consider the butler.’

‘Bugger the butler,’ said the Inspector. Bognor seemed to be getting on the policeman’s nerves. This was exactly where he wanted to be.

‘I’m sorry.’ Bognor felt a sudden access of confidence. Reaching into his inside pocket he found his impressive laminated ID and waved it at the policeman. ‘I do have a certain professional standing in cases like this,’ he said, ‘and my view is that you would be unwise to bugger the butler, whatever your inclination. As a member of the Special Investigations Department of the Board of Trade I do have some experience of crime, and…’ he paused here for dramatic effect ‘…murder.’

The DCI now looked quite angry. ‘Is that so?’

‘That is so,’ said Bognor, confidence flowing into him along with the irritation.

‘I do hope, Mr Bognor, that you are not going to be a nuisance.’

Bognor spread his hands to indicate that he personally had no intention of doing anything at all which might in any way interfere with whatever it was the DCI was up to. He also managed to convey, with surprising skill, that in his opinion the Detective Inspector might be making a big mistake.

At this point Monica decided to intervene. Hostile she might be in private, but in public she could be loyal as a lion. She did not like to see her husband patronised or bullied. Still less did she like to see him make a fool of himself.

‘Chief Inspector,’ she said, smiling, ‘I wonder if I might have a word with you in private?’

‘I shall be having words with everyone in private,’ said the Inspector, ‘and in the meantime I must ask all of you to go to your rooms and under no circumstances to discuss anything at all with each other – least of all the deceased and the manner of his demise.’

He paused again. ‘One of these officers will call you when I need you.’ He nodded curtly at the impossibly young constables who stood at either side of the library door. ‘Now if you’d all make your way upstairs in silence I’d just like Dr Belgrave to stay behind, please.’

Dr Belgrave was an iron-grey spinster in a maroon trilby. She wore gloves, smoked a cigarette through a holder, sported steel rimmed specs and was the author of The British Approach to Sex, Sex and the United States, La Vie Sexuelle – an Analysis of the French Way of Love and Behind the Net Curtain – a Study in Suburban Sin. In Bognor’s view she was almost certainly a man, bearing, as she did, a remarkable resemblance to one of the greatest of all Welsh scrum-halves. She was alleged to have been Hemlock’s adviser concerning the erotic dungeon below-stairs where he had met his end. As far as sex was concerned, her interest was said to be entirely theoretical and intellectual – though even there Bognor had his doubts.

Monica was not so easily fobbed off.

‘Ann,’ she said, grasping Dr Belgrave by the elbow and propelling her towards the door as everyone began to leave, ‘I won’t be more than a second. But I do feel someone has to save this silly little man from himself.’

Three

Five minutes later Bognor stood at the bedroom window watching the waves lash the sea wall. Pondering the arbitrary way in which the grim reaper gathered in the harvest, he was roused from his reverie by his wife bursting in with as much ferocity as the sea outside.

‘What a perfectly bloody little man!’ she said, chest heaving. She was a formidable sight when roused and she was plainly roused now. ‘He more or less told me to mind my own business.’

Bognor gazed out at the troubled waters and wished he was on the other side, abroad, away from tiresome, unexpected murders which threatened to upset the equilibrium of his ways.

‘He as good as told me that we were suspects ourselves.’

‘I suppose, in the circumstances, that’s not unreasonable.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. What can you mean?’

‘If Hemlock was murdered last night then presumably he was murdered by someone who was staying in the house overnight. That includes us.’

‘No intelligent investigator could seriously include us among a list of murder suspects. It’s preposterous.’

‘He’s not an intelligent investigator, he’s a spivvy little halfwit.’

Monica sat down on the bed. ‘I’d no idea you’d taken against him quite so strongly. His name’s Bumstead, by the way, Arthur Bumstead.’

‘There’s a footballer called Bumstead,’ said Bognor. ‘Plays for Chelsea.’

‘So?’

‘So nothing. But it’s not a fortunate name. He’d have done a sight better if he’d changed it. There’s a lot in a name.’

‘It doesn’t seem to have done the Chief Inspector much harm.’

‘He’s done well in spite of it.’ A gust of wind caught an abandoned deckchair and tossed it against the railings where it stuck flapping. It reminded Bognor of a dying bird, a dying bird in the garish stripes of some impossibly minor public school or designed by a state-of-the-art advertising agency. It was the sort of thing Vernon Hemlock would have enjoyed as a publicity stunt – spraying a whole lot of birds in fluorescent paint and releasing them at his sales conference. He would have worked in some naked ladies as well, being such a one for naked ladies. Real and imaginary. If it hadn’t been for his obsession with naked ladies he might still be alive and well and…

‘Simon! You’re not listening.’

He shook his head. He had noticed that his attention span had been diminishing recently, his boredom threshold getting lower.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I was thinking.’

‘We’re going to need to do a lot of that.’

‘Yes.’ Bognor was not looking forward to the prospect. He wished people wouldn’t get themselves killed while he was visiting. It had happened before.

The telephone rang. Both Bognors knew instinctively who it was. Only one person they could think of knew where they were. Only one person invariably got in touch after a corpse had appeared in Bognor’s life. He was Bognor’s vulture, an office undertaker. Where Bognor was so often and so unwittingly the harbinger of death, Parkinson was its confirmation.

Monica picked up the receiver and handed it to her spouse with a ‘Guess who?’ expression and a ritual ‘I think it’s for you-hoo!’

‘Bognor,’ said Bognor.

‘Done it again, eh, Bognor?’ Parkinson sounded almost pleased, as if glad to have his suspicions confirmed even though they were rather terrible. Like a weather forecaster walking into a blizzard of his own predicting.

‘You’ve heard, then?’

‘One gets to hear things before they happen in this job, as you should know by now, Bognor. I’m told your friend Mr Hemlock was squashed to death between two sliding shelves in his library.’

‘That’s about the size of it.’

‘Rather less than the size he used to be,’ said Parkinson without mirth. ‘I take it you’re assisting the police with their enquiries.’

‘No chance. The DCI seems to take a dim view of me at the moment. It’s mutual.’

‘That won’t do, Bognor. Won’t do at all. You know the rules. Maximum co-operation with the law at all times. At least on the face of it. You must put yourself entirely at the Chief Inspector’s disposal while reporting back to me at all times.’

‘I’ve tried,’ said Bognor. ‘He doesn’t want me at his disposal.’

There was a long pause. Bognor sensed irritation pulsing down the line like an electric charge. He could picture the Parkinson brow, sweaty, empurpled. The old man was more crotchety than ever as retirement loomed, especially as the coveted ‘K’ still eluded him.

‘You must try harder,’ he said eventually. ‘Meanwhile I’ll have a word with the Chief Constable, though frankly he’s a bit of a bugger himself. Downright obstructive in the drugged banana boat business in ‘eighty-two. Some of these people don’t seem to understand the jurisdiction of SIDBOT. Think they’re God Almighty and can do as they please. I may have to go over some heads and apply for a Q4 but meanwhile you butter your man up. And call me back this afternoon. I want this cleared up sharpish and with no embarrassment to the Department or the Board.’

‘Righty-ho!’ Bognor did not feel as jaunty as he tried to sound.

Monica had broken a nail. Worrying at it with an emery board she said, ‘How long can he keep us here?’

‘He can’t,’ said Bognor. ‘At least not in theory. We’re perfectly free to come and go as we please. But in practice I’d say we’re stuck here till about lunch. Then I should guess one or other of our little company is going to plead an urgent business appointment and cut and run.’

‘Guess who’ll be first?’

‘Milton Capstick,’ said Bognor. ‘His self-esteem demands it.’

‘I was going to say Capstick. He’s awful.’

‘They’re all awful,’ Bognor sighed. ‘Only some are more awful than others. I think I’m getting a cold. I shouldn’t have gone for that walk. Ruined my relationship with the gentleman of the police and my constitution all in one go.’ He blew his nose into a blue-and-white spotted handkerchief. It was rather grubby.

‘Who do you think did it?’ Monica sounded as if her own mind was made up already.

‘They’re all unpleasant enough. And everyone had the opportunity.’

‘I thought you needed a special card to get into the basement?’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Audrey Hemlock. We had a tête-à-tête in the loo yesterday. She was having a bit of a weep.’

‘You never told me.’

‘You never asked. Anyway, it didn’t seem particularly interesting at the time.’

‘What was she blubbing about?’

‘What do you think? Her bloody husband. Whenever you see women crying their eyes out in the loo it’s because of some ghastly man.’

Bognor frowned. ‘What in particular?’

‘Honestly, Simon, you can be an awful oaf sometimes. No one enjoys constant public humiliation.’

‘You mean Romany Flange?’

‘Yes. Everyone knew she was Hemlock’s mistress. Everyone knew about the dirty books in the basement. Audrey thought we were all sniggering. Or pitying her. She couldn’t make up her mind which was worse.’

‘Poor old Audrey. Gives her a motive, though.’ Bognor chewed his lip and wondered if he might smoke a cheroot. He decided against. They made him wheeze and Monica would complain that they made the sheets smell.

‘I don’t think you’ll find any shortage of motive,’ said Monica, ‘but Audrey certainly didn’t have one of those open-sesame plastic cards for the basement.’

‘Did anyone except Hemlock?’

‘That ridiculous butler, I think. And there would have been a spare somewhere.’