Red Herrings E-Book

Tim Heald

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

Beschreibung

An ancient country custom goes awry, killing a man and spoiling Bognor's holiday. At the annual Clout, the men of Herring do as they have done for centuries, firing arrows blindly into the woods and allowing their women to retrieve what they have shot. Nobody ever kills anything, but it's a jolly time nonetheless - until the day when a few of the arrows find their mark, pinning a wayward customs inspector to a tree in a bloody parody of Saint Sebastian. It's rotten luck for the dead man, and not much better for Simon Bognor. Bognor huffs when he hears of the killing, knowing that he is going to be sucked into investigating the death. A special inspector for the Board of Trade, Bognor is always getting invited to crime scenes, despite knowing almost nothing about crime. His bad lungs, sour attitude, and fleshy physique are out of place in the countryside, but Bognor is in for the duration. He will find the person who caused the accident - or the next arrow's target could be his heart. '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 HealdRed HerringsA SIMON BOGNOR MYSTERY

An ancient country custom goes awry, killing a man and spoiling Bognor’s holiday.

At the annual Clout, the men of Herring do as they have done for centuries, firing arrows blindly into the woods and allowing their women to retrieve what they have shot. Nobody ever kills anything, but it’s a jolly time nonetheless – until the day when a few of the arrows find their mark, pinning a wayward customs inspector to a tree in a bloody parody of Saint Sebastian. It’s rotten luck for the dead man, and not much better for Simon Bognor.

Bognor huffs when he hears of the killing, knowing that he is going to be sucked into investigating the death. A special inspector for the Board of Trade, Bognor is always getting invited to crime scenes, despite knowing almost nothing about crime. His bad lungs, sour attitude, and fleshy physique are out of place in the countryside, but Bognor is in for the duration. He will find the person who caused the accident – or the next arrow’s target could be his heart...

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

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

‘A constant pleasure.’DAILY TELEGRAPH

For Dorothy and Calla

Chapter 1

It was not as sinister as the Caistor Gad Whip nor as anthropomorphic as the Horn Dance of Abbots Bromley; not as business-like as the Lot Meadow Mowing nor as alarming as Punkie Night in South Somerset but the annual Popinjay Clout at Herring St George was nevertheless a very old English custom.

No one knew the origins of the Popinjay Clout, not even old Sir Nimrod Herring whose ancestors had come with the Conqueror. Some said it went back further than the Herrings and that it was something to do with the old Saxon ‘fyrd’; others said it originated in the martyrdom of Saint Ethelreda, a virgin milkmaid of the sixth century who had been slain by some drunken villeins and cottars one Friday night; an American academic said that it was part of the Robin Hood legend, which was odd as Herring St George was not in Nottingham. It was all extremely confusing.

The actual ceremony was, however, simplicity itself. At twelve noon all the men of the village, dressed entirely in green, marched to the Great Meadow by the banks of the River Nadder. There they fired arrows from their yew longbows quite indiscriminately into Gallows Wood. After an hour a halt was called and the village women, in smocks, went into the wood to retrieve whatever had been slaughtered in the bombardment. A kill in the Popinjay Clout was as rare as a score in the Eton Wall Game. Ten years earlier Sir Nimrod himself had bagged a rabbit. There had been nothing since.

This year, the day of the Clout dawned brisk and blue and bracing. The TV team from Channel 4 and Mr Philip Howard of The Times arrived to record the event, as did busloads of tourists, many American. On the command of ‘fire’ from Sir Nimrod, arrows swooped away towards Gallows Wood, cameras clicked and rolled and Mr Howard’s pen raced purplish across the page of his reporter’s notebook. It was very quaint and everyone was looking forward to the ale and Bath chaps, the mead frappé and chitterlings which were a traditional part of the proceedings.

‘A capital Clout!’ exclaimed the Reverend Branwell Larch slapping Sir Nimrod boisterously on the shoulder. And indeed it was. The bowmen had shot nobly; the sun had shone; the grass was neatly mown; dog roses adorned the hedgerows and clambered about the immaculately whitewashed thatched cottages; even the smell of silage and chicken droppings which sometimes interfered with rustic charm was subdued for the day. Everything in the garden of England was lovely. Then, suddenly from the heart of Gallows Wood, there came a maiden’s shriek.

It would have been a chilling sound wherever and whenever it was uttered but on a midsummer day in rural England in the middle of An Old English Custom it was beyond description. And as the shrill keening was taken up by a chorus of other women, even the purplest face (and Herring St George was usually a sea of purple faces) turned quite white. The stiffest knees trembled and the juttingest jaw sagged. Even Simon Bognor, that apotheosis of phlegm, froze momentarily as his teeth clenched around his first sausage roll of the day.

Seconds later the reason for the feminine distress was made clear. For the first time in a decade there had been a kill in the Popinjay Clout. They had found a Mr Brian Wilmslow leaning against a blasted oak, looking a little as if he were posing for a portrait of Saint Sebastian.

He was, of course, extremely dead.

Chapter 2

Simon Bognor and his wife Monica were not natives of Herring St George but they were staying in the village for Clout weekend with their friends Peregrine and Samantha Contractor. Peregrine was a very grand Anglo-Indian Old Etonian whose father had made a fortune in railways. Peregrine had used this fortune to make another one out of mail order lingerie. This was where he had met Samantha. Samantha was the leading model of mail order lingerie in Britain.

It was also lingerie that had brought Simon and Peregrine together. There was something a touch shady about the mail order lingerie enterprise and, as a special investigator of the Board of Trade, Bognor had been charged with finding out what it was.

‘Something fishy about this business,’ said his boss, Parkinson, in characteristically dour fashion, as he picked his teeth under the smiling portrait of Her Majesty the Queen.

‘You mean fishnet,’ said Bognor grinning facetiously. ‘Fishnet stockings. Those sort of silky black mesh things women wear with top hats.’ He had had a more than usually good lunch and was feeling over-confident.

Parkinson glowered, and Bognor sighed. He knew it was a feeble joke but something about Parkinson’s glum, behind-the-times prissiness invited feeble jokes.

‘We both know perfectly well what I mean, Bognor,’ said Parkinson, and this was true, as it usually was, so that Bognor had shuffled out still grinning, though now a little ruefully, and gone off to investigate frilly knickers and flimsy bras. He had been able, as he put it to Parkinson, in another ill advised attempt at humour, to uncover nothing at all. He sensed that all was not quite what it should be at Fashions Sous-tous, as Peregrine Contractor called his business, but he was unable to put his finger on it. He also found Contractor highly engaging, especially when he attempted to bribe him with a job lot of frillies and flimsies for Monica (Monica was much too big for them).

Since then the two men had remained acquaintances if not exactly friends. The Bognors had been to the Contractors’ box at Ascot and Covent Garden; the Contractors had been to brunch chez Bognor. Bognor was careful not to mention the relationship to Parkinson; but if his flinty superior had found out, then Bognor would have explained that he was keeping an eye on him ‘just in case’. ‘Just in case’ had become one of Bognor’s favourite phrases. Enigmatic ambiguities, he had discovered, kept people guessing. Which was essential when one was still only guessing oneself.

Much of Bognor’s work at the Board of Trade was based on guesswork. There was, he knew (or rather had been told, which was not the same), a different, more logical way of doing things. Ever since he had first entered the Board of Trade due to that dreadful misunderstanding with the University Appointments Board, he had endured advice from men like Parkinson.

‘A more forensic approach on your part, Bognor,’ his boss would growl from time to time, ‘would do us all the world of good.’

A fearful squirt called Lingard had briefly come to share his office before moving on to higher things. ‘I see absolutely no method in your brand of madness,’ he would complain, morosely, as Bognor lurched from hunch to hunch. Even the long suffering Monica, Mrs Bognor, would occasionally lecture him on the need for what she called ‘ratiocination’. Bognor, despite his honours degree in modern history, had had to go to the dictionary where he found that the word meant you used syllogisms. On looking up ‘syllogism’ he discovered that it was a ‘form of reasoning in which from two given or assumed propositions called the premises and having a common or middle term a third is deduced called the conclusion from which the middle term is absent’.

‘Oh, really!’ he protested when he digested this. ‘Life’s not like that. Life’s much more complicated.’

‘Au contraire,’ riposted Monica, ‘it’s only complicated because you make it complicated. If you were logical you’d be better at everything.’

‘I’d end up like Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple.’

‘You could do worse,’ said Monica.

Bognor sulked.

They had been greatly looking forward to the weekend of the Popinjay Clout. There would, the Contractors promised, be excellent food and drink, scintillating company, terribly House and Garden surroundings and the engaging diversion of the Clout itself. Now, on top of all that, there was death.

‘Oh, bloody hell,’ said Bognor, when the news came through on the Herring St George grapevine. ‘This is supposed to be a weekend off.’

‘Don’t be so insensitive,’ said Monica. ‘Someone’s dead. That’s a tragedy not an inconvenience.’

‘It may be a tragedy for the corpse and their nearest and dearest but as far as I’m concerned it’s thoroughly inconvenient. I was hoping to do a lot of lolling about and eating and drinking. Now I shall have to dust down the syllogisms and ratiocinate.’

‘I don’t see why,’ said Monica with characteristic asperity.

‘You wouldn’t,’ replied Bognor, equally tartly.

‘I say.’ Peregrine Contractor was wearing very tight Lincoln green drainpipes and a well tailored matching jerkin which almost concealed his natty little paunch. A self designed forage cap with rakish feather over one ear was supposed to create an illusion of Errol Flynn. Not quite successfully. ‘Have you heard?’ he enquired. He was breathless from excitement and unwonted exercise.

‘No,’ said Mr and Mrs Bognor. ‘What?’

‘He’s one of yours,’ said Mr Contractor. ‘The stiff. He’s a spook from your neck of the woods. A government inspector no less. Awkward, I should say. Name of Wilmslow. Friend of yours?’

Bognor shrugged. ‘The Board of Trade’s a huge government department,’ he said. ‘There may well be a hundred and one Wilmslows lurking in its woodwork. But not one that I know. What’s he do?’

‘Value Added Tax. He’s a VAT inspector.’

‘The dreaded VAT men aren’t from the Board of Trade, Perry.’ Bognor was affronted. ‘They’re Customs and Excise. Not at all the same thing.’

‘Oh.’ Peregrine Contractor flapped a hand in limp dismissal of such nitpicking, ‘I always imagine all you Whitehall wallahs are in cahoots with each other. What does bring it rather home to one is that he was coming in tomorrow to look at the books. Well he won’t be able to do that now.’ He laughed. ‘I suppose they’ll send someone else.’

‘What exactly happened?’ asked Monica.

‘Well, darling, no one knows exactly what happened.’ Contractor patronised Monica just as he patronised most women.

‘His problem was that he wandered into the woods at the wrong moment. No teddy bears’ picnic for him.’ And he sang in a disagreeably off-key falsetto. ‘If you go down to the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise.’

Bognor brushed sausage roll crumbs from the lapel of his blazer. He was not a blazer person but Monica had insisted he invest in one. Something to do with her parents or her brother-in-law. ‘This is a pretty serious business, Perry,’ he said. He remembered Monica’s criticism of him. ‘Someone’s dead,’ he said. ‘Which may seem like a mere inconvenience for many of us. For some people, though, it’s a real tragedy and it’s my job to get to the bottom of it. If there’s a bottom to get to. Accidental death is one thing. Murder is another. What was this?’

‘Search me,’ said Peregrine. He gesticulated theatrically in the direction of Gallows Wood. ‘You could hide an army in there let alone a dashed Value Added Tax inspector. You can’t possibly suggest he was shot on purpose. None of the archers could have known he was there.’

‘Couldn’t they?’ Bognor spoke sharply. He was irritated. Contractor seemed to be treating the incident almost as if it was part of the pageantry. Indeed, now that the news had sunk in to the collective consciousness of Herring St George and the audience of tourists, this seemed quite a common reaction. No one showed any sign of going home. There was a pervasive, speculative and frankly excited buzz. Bognor who had seen enough death to regard it as almost routine was, not for the first time, mildly revolted. Still, he had accepted, long ago, that murder was, at least in part, the world’s most popular spectator sport.

‘Not with you, old shoe,’ said Contractor. Contractor habitually referred to Bognor as ‘old shoe’, an expression he claimed to have picked up at Yale Law School, though Bognor was fairly sure Contractor had never been within miles of Yale. His formal education had ended prematurely when Eton had asked him to leave after an incident involving maids.

‘Just because they couldn’t see the man,’ said Bognor testily, ‘doesn’t mean that they didn’t know he was there.’

Samantha Contractor, who had been scouring the field in search of gossip, now rejoined them. You could tell she was some sort of model on account of her smock which she had designed herself and which was an exceedingly brief piece of linen only just held together by quantities of black leather thong. She did have an extraordinary body and depending on how she bent and moved it was practically all on public display.

‘Isn’t it all too just perfectly ghastly?’ she asked no one in particular, lisping through shiny purple lips, ‘What’s going to happen?’

‘The Clout must go on,’ said Peregrine gravely. He had recently been elected to the Clout committee, a sure sign that he had been accepted into the community. The ten thousand he had, not quite secretly, donated to the church belfry appeal fund, had helped quite a bit. It was a gratifying compensation for being blackballed by White’s.

‘I’ve been talking to the man from the fuzz,’ said Samantha. ‘He’s rather dishy. I told him about you Simon, dear, and naturally he’s dying to meet you. He’s going to come over and have a glass of bubbly when he’s done whatever you have to do with the corpse. He seemed to have heard of you.’

‘Heard of me?’ Bognor bristled.

‘I said we had this tremendously super detective staying for the weekend and when I told him your name, he said, “Not the Simon Bognor?” So naturally I said “yes”.’

Monica snorted. ‘I expect they’re using your past cases at the police training college,’ she said. ‘What was his name?’

‘Guy,’ said Samantha fluttering vast stuck-on eyelashes at an unimpressed Monica. Monica wore virtually no makeup and nothing false. ‘Take me as I am’ was her attitude, ‘Like it or lump it.’ She found Samantha preposterous.

‘Guy?’ she said.’ Is that a surname or a christian name?’ Samantha said she didn’t know. She said that she had introduced herself as ‘Sammy from the manor’ and that when she had asked him who he was he had held out a very virile hand, looked her straight in the eyes and said, simply, ‘Call me Guy.’ Samantha grinned. ‘He really is ever so dishy,’ she said.

‘I do rather wish you hadn’t brought me into it.’ Bognor, though understandably susceptible to Samantha’s body, was less than impressed by what passed for her mind. He spoke huffily. ‘Sudden death really isn’t my pigeon. Codes and ciphers are about as exotic as I get. Mostly it’s petty irregularities regarding South African oranges or smuggled mink.’

Samantha pouted. ‘But Simon darling,’ she said, ‘we met you because you were showing a sudden interest in ladies’ underwear. You can’t say that isn’t exotic.’

‘It really isn’t a joking matter,’ said Bognor. ‘As you know perfectly well, I am merely a common or garden investigator with the Board of Trade. It is not a job that has any particular glamour. In fact frankly it’s not even interesting most of the time. I would much rather do practically anything else in the world, but like most people who are stuck in god awful jobs they don’t enjoy, I need the money and I’m too old to change. I’m stuck. Just like most people are stuck. And the last thing I need is to have bloody policemen lumbering me with a lot of silliness just because some damn fool VAT inspector has got himself riddled with arrows while walking in the woods. This is supposed to be a weekend off.’

‘Well I’m very sorry I’m sure,’ said Samantha.’ I was only trying to help.’

The situation was partially restored by Peregrine. In the smouldering silence that followed this little exchange there sounded the discreet gasp of a champagne bottle blowing its top. Seconds later Samantha’s husband emerged from behind the Rolls Royce carrying a tray with an open bottle of Veuve Clicquot and glasses. ‘Time for drinkies, boys and girls,’ he said.

The champagne not only cooled tempers it also acted as a magnet for those villagers who were not averse to a glass but who would normally have had to stick to something less elegant and less pricey. Home brew even. The first free-loader was the Reverend Branwell Larch. ‘The padre’s a fearful piss artist,’ confided Peregrine to Simon and Monica, the night before. He had predicted that he would be the first to show, so there was no surprise when he arrived looking doleful.

‘“That which the palmerworm hath left hath the locust eaten,”’ he said in a sort of conversational plainsong, nasal and thin. He wore a cassock with the air of a man who enjoyed dressing up and had a thin, pink veined face with thin, slicked, black hair. Late forties, Bognor judged.

‘And,’ said Peregrine Contractor, rather surprisingly, ‘“that which the locust hath left hath the cankerworm eaten.”’

Monica compounded the surprise. ‘“And that which the cankerworm hath left hath the caterpillar eaten,”’ she said, ‘“Joel, chapter one, verse four.”’ She raised her glass and stared at it thoughtfully. ‘There’s a wonderful verse just after which starts off, “Awake, ye drunkards and weep”. Very good stuff, Joel.’

‘Monica has “A” level scripture,’ said Bognor by way of explanation. ‘Her convent insisted. She’s still very hot on the Bible.’

‘It’s an extremely good book,’ said Monica defensively. ‘Full of good things, don’t you agree, Vicar?’

The Reverend Larch, gaping somewhat, agreed, and accepted a proffered glass.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And as relevant to our modern times as it ever was. The eternal verities remain, ah, how should one say, eternally, well, veritable.’ He smiled and then realised rightly that something more was expected of him. ‘Very salutary to have death visited on us in such a violent fashion. And on such a lovely day. “In the midst of life we are in death” as the prayer book says. We could have hardly had a more dramatic demonstration of that. So at least some good has come from the wretched fellow’s passing. Though one has to concede that God really does move in the most mysterious ways.’ The vicar was groping desperately for the thread of his argument. Any thread, any argument. He sipped champagne as a delaying tactic and then said: ‘And death in whatever shape or form is uniquely mysterious, don’t you agree, Mr Bognor?’

Bognor and Mr Larch had been introduced earlier in the morning. The vicar, who fancied himself as a judge of character, had decided that Bognor was a sympathetic and intelligent person even if not of the faith. Bognor had said something disparaging about monasticism. The line was prompted by the vicar’s dress. Bognor had had an aversion to that sort of thing ever since some unnerving experiences in an Anglican friary early in his career, but the vicar knew nothing of this and was in any case not keen on monasticism himself. He believed in getting in among his flock, and was fond of describing himself as ‘a people’s parson’.

‘I’ve always found death disturbingly straightforward once it happens,’ said Bognor. ‘It’s the events leading up to death which are mysterious.’

‘That may be your experience,’ said Mr Larch. ‘But in my line of work life after death is the ultimate mystery.’

‘My husband takes a rather prosaic view of this sort of thing,’ said Monica slipping a protective arm through Simon’s. ‘In fact he takes a prosaic view of almost everything. Don’t you, darling? But so would you if you worked for the Board of Trade.’

‘In any event,’ said Peregrine Contractor, pouring more champagne, ‘I’m sure we all agree that it’s absolutely tragic. A tragedy for the village, too.’ Everyone looked suitably solemn but they were disturbed in this moment of reverent contemplation by the advent of Sir Nimrod Herring and his daughter Naomi. Sir Nimrod, last of the Herrings who had come to the village on the coat tails of the Conqueror, had once lived in the manor, now occupied by the Contractors. New money had, as it always did, driven out old; ancient lineage and immaculate breeding had proved no match for ladies’ lingerie. Despite having fallen on hard times, however, the old squire had not moved from the village which had borne his family’s name these nine hundred years and more. Forced to trim his cloth and turn an honest penny he had taken over the village post office and there he now presided with Naomi under the legend ‘Herring and Daughter’.

He was an amiable seeming person with a white tonsure and a tuft of hair in the middle of his chin. This, unaccountably, was rust coloured with only a few flecks of grey. His daughter, Naomi, was a round faced woman in her early forties, figure concealed in a smock which was as discreet as Samantha’s was not.

‘What a perfectly bloody business!’ he exclaimed, helping himself to champagne. ‘Thank God for something decent to drink after that bloody mead. It doesn’t matter how much ice you put in the damned stuff it still tastes of bees’ wax.’

‘Oh, Daddy!’ said Naomi. Naomi was permanently embarrassed by her father and none too bright. After Lady Herring, her mother, died in faintly mysterious circumstances (drowned in the moat) Naomi had gone through a prolonged ‘difficult’ spell. She had been a hippy among the flower people of Haight Ashbury in the sixties; then returned to ride pillion with a chapter of Hell’s Angels from Ruislip before setting off on the road to Katmandu and spending a saucy two years in an ashram in Poona. Latterly she was alleged to have settled down though no one was entirely convinced. She was rumoured to have had a child by one of the Rolling Stones but, if so, no one knew what had happened to it. It was also said that she was devoted to Sir Nimrod and it was certainly true that she put in extremely long hours behind the counter. And she was very decent at coming out late at night to drive the old squire home when he was too tight to do it himself.

‘What a silly fellow, wandering into the field of fire during Clout,’ said Sir Nimrod, ‘asking for trouble. Could have been killed.’

‘But he was, Daddy,’ said Naomi, eyes very round, face very pale.

‘Just as I said, child.’ He glanced at Bognor to whom he had not previously been introduced. ‘I don’t think we’ve met,’ he said, sticking out a hand which Bognor shook, ‘Herring.’

‘Bognor,’ said Bognor, ‘and this is my wife Monica.’

‘Bognor!’ Sir Nimrod’s eyes flashed. ‘Any relation of old Theo Bognor?’

‘Not that I know of,’ said Bognor truthfully.

‘Old Theo was in my company at Arnhem,’ said Sir Nimrod. ‘Any friend of his is a friend of mine. So you’re no relation. Ah well. Naomi and I were talking about this deuced corpse. He was from the Customs don’t you know. A bumfwallah. Come down to sort out everyone’s Value Added Tax. Damned waste of taxpayers’ money if you ask me. They should be out catching criminals. You should see the pieces of paper we have to deal with in the post office. Licence to breathe is what you’ll have to have before you can say knife. I say, Vicar, I thought you’d be over in the woods saying the last rites. Not quaffing the Widow with the nobs.’

Mr Larch, already on his second glass, stretched his mouth in a rheumy approximation of a smile and said, ‘“The Lord God giveth and the Lord God taketh away.”’

‘Rum lot, you sky pilots,’ said Sir Nimrod. ‘The old Canon wouldn’t have let the stiff out of his sight until it was safely packed in ice down at the morgue. But then the old Canon was a stickler for protocol.’

He glowered. In the old days before the final collapse of the Herring fortunes the living of Herring St George had been in the gift of the Herrings. Sir Nimrod, being High Church and conservative as well as Conservative, had always appointed Anglo-Catholics who spoke the Queen’s English. Larch was a break with the tradition. He had been foisted on them by the progressive bishop of the diocese and Sir Nimrod regarded him as a closet Methodist. He had introduced a regular Family Mass, guitar music and a perfectly disgusting ritual called ‘making the sign of peace with your neighbour’. This, Sir Nimrod, fuming in the family pew (a feudal vestige he still resolutely refused to relinquish), would have nothing to do with. He had not kissed another human being since Lady Hillary had passed on twenty years and more ago.

Parson and Squire, Bognor thought to himself. Or, in a manner of speaking, Squire Mark One (Sir Nimrod) and Squire Mark Two (Perry Contractor). Even now all English villages were supposed to have one of each, although in practice the parson was called something like a team ministry and was a handful of curates based on the nearest town and cruising round the surrounding villages when it suited them. Even Larch, he had learned from Peregrine, was nominally responsible for the smaller villages of Herring St Andrew and Herring All Saints, but All Saints was effectively delegated to the district nurse who doubled up as a deaconess and St Andrew was practically derelict. What passed for the St Andrew’s congregation worshipped at St George except for twice a month when Larch took his guitar over for a People’s Choral Evensong.

Bognor was a city person who had lived nearly all his adult life in London. He had all the townee’s wariness about the country, suspecting that rural prettiness was merely a cover for incest, bestiality and possibly even witchcraft. Most of what he knew about village life was gleaned from reading the newspapers and a certain sort of novel.

‘If this were fiction,’ he muttered to his wife as they both helped themselves to another sausage roll from the hamper (Mrs Gotobed, the Contractors’ cook had excelled herself) ‘then we’d have the local doctor here as well, wouldn’t we?’

‘Him or the local bobby,’ she agreed. ‘I imagine we’re about to get a visitation from Samantha’s scrumptious policeman. Or do you think he’s something she dreamed up?’

‘Who knows?’ asked Bognor more or less rhetorically. He really meant ‘Who cares?’ but was nervous of being overheard by his host or hostess. ‘Frankly,’ he went on, ‘I’m beginning to wish I’d stayed in bed. These people all seem a bit peculiar.’

‘Country air,’ said Monica knowingly. ‘Turns the head and ruins the complexion. Country folk always have addled brain cells and terminal skin cancer.’

‘I’d forgotten how exhausting life was in the country.’ Bognor sighed.

‘It’s not your surroundings that exhaust you, it’s your time of life.’

There was some truth in this. Bognor would not see forty again. Come to that he felt he was unlikely to see fifty. In the days when the Clout first started a man of over forty was considered pretty antique, accorded much veneration and respect and not expected to live much longer. Bognor felt that he had been born into the wrong century. He felt like mediaeval man – course spent, sands of time run out – but was always being told that this was ridiculous. His contemporaries jogged, worked out with weights and ate nothing but nuts and sunflower seeds. Many of them persuaded themselves that they were in their prime of life. Worse still, many of them convinced very sexy women of half their age that they were in their prime of life. Bognor knew that, in his early forties, he had the body of a not very well preserved man in his late sixties. He just wished he lived at a time when this was regarded as normal. He did not particularly regret feeling so old; but he did object to being told he was peculiar. Never mind, the intellect was as sharp as ever.

There was a Tannoy system at the Clout; not a very sophisticated one, it crackled and whined through loud speakers placed on the corner of the mead tent and another by the St John’s Ambulance post. The voice behind it belonged to Damian Macpherson, only son of ‘Doc’ and Mrs Macpherson. Damian was the village teddy boy. Although he was over thirty he seemed to be permanently unemployed and hung around in drainpipes, winklepickers and an old tail coat outside the pub. When anyone feminine passed by he would leer horribly and make various suggestions varying from a drink to a quick How’s Your Father behind the cricket pavilion. But there was no malice in the man and no one had objected to his being appointed to the loud-speaker system. It was accepted that he would stick to the script and say nothing unless authorised by a member of the committee.

So far he had recited admirably, even injecting a note of sombre unflappability into the rather anodyne announcement about the body in the wood. Now, once more, he spoke:

‘Would Mr Simon Bognor of East Sheen please report to Doctor Macpherson in the refreshment tent. Mr Simon Bognor to the refreshment tent.’

Bognor swore. ‘I don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘That can only mean one thing.’

Monica nodded, grim-faced. ‘Parkinson,’ she said.

‘’Fraid so.’

Just as she said it, Peregrine Contractor emerged from behind his Roller clutching a cordless telephone.

‘Simon, old shoe,’ he said, ‘Dandiprat’s on the blower. Your boss has been on in a state of excitement. Says he’s been phoning everyone in sight. Wants you to check in p.d.q.’

Dandiprat was the Contractors’ butler – very short, very obsequious and extremely sinister. He always gave Bognor the impression that he was in the possession of everyone’s guilty secret.

‘Unless I’m much mistaken he’s been on to Damian Macpherson as well.’ He sighed. ‘Can I ring from the Rolls?’

‘You’ll reverse the charges?’

‘Naturally.’ Bognor knew perfectly well that a large part of Perry’s success was due to an obsessive though selective parsimony. At the same time as he dispensed magnums of champagne he grudged you the price of a phone call. Entirely in character.

The phone was a push button cordless. Bognor, sitting in the back of the Rolls, punched 100 for the operator and waited. Not a lot of point, he reflected glumly, in a marvel of modern science like this car phone without visible means of support, when communications were fouled up by some incompetent human in the telephone exchange. When the operator did come on the line she sounded frumpish and surly, peeved at being disturbed. Bognor snapped at her and she snapped back, taking an age to put the call through and doing it gracelessly. ‘I have a Mr Bognor calling from a Rolls Royce in Herring St George. Will you accept the charge?’ he heard her say and was depressed to hear Parkinson saying, ‘Yes, yes,’ just as testily. He did dislike low spirits, particularly when they reflected his own. He liked other people to cheer him up. What was the point in people who simply depressed you?

Like Parkinson. Bognor’s relationship with his boss was long standing and long suffering. There were those outsiders who regarded his marriage with incredulity, but this was unfair; despite a robust reluctance to be hen-pecked and a permanently wandering eye he was fond of old Monica. He was not fond of old Parkinson. Not a bit. And yet he had suffered under him for so long that life without him was unthinkable.

‘Bognor?’ That staccato almost derisive enquiry. He had endured it for so many years that now he accepted it and would have been uncomfortable if his superior began a telephone conversation in any other way.

‘Speaking,’ he said, just as tartly. It was not a one-sided affair. He gave as good as he got. Well, almost. At least he answered back. And if he did not answer back he was never servile. He had a good line in lip chewing, dumb insolence, an entirely justifiable attitude in view of Parkinson’s permanent truculence and condescension. The trouble was that Parkinson while undeniably good at his job was in every other respect a comparatively low form of life. Bognor, although professionally miscast, was in every other way a person of the utmost distinction. It was a difficult situation to live with, though not uncommon. Bognor’s experience of life was that it was not the cream which floated to the top but the scum. He and Parkinson were a case in point.