by Tim Heald
The lamp-post, he realized suddenly, was not getting any closer. He must have stopped. He retched slightly and began to place one foot in front of the other counting the steps as he went. At twenty the lamp-post was almost in touching distance and he was just debating whether or not to make a lunge for it when a figure emerged from the alley. The face was hidden under a wide brimmed hat but there was no mistaking the menace in the heavily hunched shoulders.
‘You pig,’ said the figure. ‘Just piss off and stay clear, and let this be a warning.’ And as he uttered these peculiar words he swung his fist in a great arc. Bognor watched fascinated and quite unable to move as the fist advanced towards him, gathering pace inexorably, before it landed firmly in the middle of his face. As it did so he felt another blow on the back of his head, and then everything stopped and he had a dim distant sensation of falling that he associated vaguely with being given gas at the dentist’s. ‘Help’, he tried to say. ‘Stop’, he tried to say. But through the blackness and the pain he was aware that he was producing no more coherent sound than an obscene gurgle.
‘My God,’ said Monica. ‘My God.’
‘It’s all right, miss,’ said the taxi-driver. ‘He’s not as bad as he looks. Least ways if he is it’s the booze more than the blood. Is he yours then?’
Bognor who was unable to remain upright without leaning heavily on the public-spirited driver tried to say something, but it hurt too much. Besides he could think of nothing sensible to say. Another gurle emerged from his mouth accompanied by a dribble of blood.
‘It’s one pound fifty,’ said the driver. ‘If he’s yours that is.’
‘Yes,’ said Monica, eyes starting from her head, ‘I’m afraid he is mine. Could you bring him in and put him somewhere … somewhere safe. Oh my God.’
The taxi-driver helped Bognor into the flat and put him almost gently into an armchair before accepting two pounds from Monica.
‘He just turned up at the rank in Sloane Square,’ he said, in response to her question, ‘staggering around something terrible and spitting blood all over the auction. Couple of other blokes wouldn’t take him ’cos he’d make a mess of their cabs but I’d got some old newspapers so I put him on those. It’s not as bad as it looks like I say. Nothing broke. Still got all his teeth. It’s his liver I’m worried about.’
‘You’ve been very kind,’ said Monica, taking another, pound from her purse. ‘I don’t know what he’d have done without you.’
‘Got home in the morning,’ said the driver, pocketing the extra pound. ‘Don’t you worry, miss. He’ll be OK tomorrow. Bruise and a headache that’s all he’ll have.’ He let himself out and Monica turned back to the bloody Bognor.
‘What ever happened?’ she asked.
Through the messy pain of blood and brandy and champagne Bognor thought she looked rather plain. She had already taken off her make-up ready for bed and was wearing an old quilted dressing gown and felt bedroom slippers. For a moment he toyed with the idea of telling her she didn’t look so hot herself, then thought better of it. Instead, with an effort he pointed at his nose and mimed a right hook.
‘Surely you can say something,’ said Monica. ‘Oh I wish you did something sensible for a living. I wish you worked in an office.’
‘I’ve been in a bloody office,’ shouted Bognor, and then let out another grunt of pain. It had been a very hurtful sentence.
‘It’s no use,’ said Monica, ‘I can’t understand. And you stink of alcohol. I’ll fetch some cotton wool. Try to get undressed.’
When she came back with a bowl full of boiling water and cotton wool swabs Bognor had managed to take of his overcoat and his tie. She looked at him crossly for a second and then smiled. ‘Oh, Simon,’ she said, her eyes misting with tears, ‘I do wish you’d look after yourself.’ Bognor nodded. ‘Would you like a brandy or something?’ Bognor retched and then shook his head.
‘You sounded as if you were plastered when I rang earlier,’ she said, kneeling down and starting to dab at the blood which had clotted round his nose and mouth. ‘But I didn’t imagine you’d come back like this. I think I’d better use some witch hazel.’
Bognor shook his head violently. It would sting.
‘Darling,’ she said, ‘there’s nothing else. I haven’t any steak.’
He shrugged and she went on dabbing.
‘Open wide.’ He opened wide and she smiled.
‘The taxi-driver was right,’ she said, kissing him lightly on the nose.
It reminded Bognor of the kiss from Molly earlier on. He remembered it nostalgically then checked himself. Hell, he thought, they’re just two completely different sorts of woman.
‘All teeth present and correct,’ said Monica. ‘Now listen. I know you can’t talk but while I’m cleaning you up I’m afraid I’ve got bad news. You’re not the only person who’s been in the wars. Only I’m afraid,’ she stopped for a second, ‘I’m afraid the other person wasn’t quite so lucky. Parkinson rang half an hour ago.’
‘Ow!’ Bognor yelped. She had pressed too hard just below his nose, which he judged from the way he was feeling was the point of maximum impact. He was suddenly filled with a sense of impending disaster.
‘Pencil and paper,’ he managed to say, every syllable excruciating. Monica looked disapproving but brought it nonetheless.
‘Not Anthea Morrison?’ he wrote in block capitals. Monica looked at him in astonishment. ‘How on earth did you know?’
He shrugged. He hadn’t known. It was that flicker of premonition. Molly Mortimer had been the second person that day to suggest that the Pepys secretary might be able to help him more than anyone else, and yet she was, apart from the monosyllabic Peckwater, the only member of the column’s staff he hadn’t had any words with at all. Not about murders anyway. Only about amateur theatrical companies in Gloucestershire and regiments marching about with their bayonets fixed and where the paper clips were kept and whether he preferred Indian or China tea in the afternoons. He swore and winced.
‘She fell under a tube train at Blackfriars,’ said Monica, ‘during the rush hour. No one seems quite sure how it happened. Apparently it was terribly crowded. There are so few trains at the moment with the go-slow. She was right at the front of the platform and the crowd had piled up behind her and she fell off just as the train was coming into the station.’
‘Fell?’ wrote Bognor.
‘In the circumstances,’ said Monica straightening up, and looking distastefully at the stained swabs and the muddy water, ‘I should say she was pushed. Parkinson didn’t offer an opinion. All he said was that you were on secondment and that if it wasn’t for civil servants having to obey politicians who are prepared to toady to newspaper proprietors you wouldn’t be in this mess. Instead he said, if I remember rightly, that you would be tucked up safely in the basement at the Board of Trade with your code book.’
She took the bowl away and came back with his pyjamas, the Viyella ones with the frayed cord. ‘I agree with Parkinson,’ she said, ‘but since you are in this mess we’d better get you tucked up in bed here.’ She unbuttoned him, untied him, unzipped him, allowed him the faint dignity of removing his own underpants and made him a mug of hot chocolate. He was sitting up in bed drinking it when he remembered something else. He mouthed for pen and paper.
‘No. You’ve done yourself enough damage for one day.’
He shaped his hands into a gesture of prayer and tried to blow her a kiss. It hurt too much and he gave up but she smiled and relented.
‘One final message,’ she said. ‘And then you will finish your cocoa and I will turn out the light.’
He took the pad and tried to remember. It was too much effort. He signed to her to bring him his jacket and he felt in the pocket for a little before extricating a crumpled scrap from a notebook.
In the city set upon slime and loam
They cry in their parliament ‘Who goes home?’
He read it through and then pencilled in three dots and a
question mark after the last word before handing it to Monica. She looked at it briefly.
‘Chesterton,’ she said after a few seconds of brow furrowing. ‘The Flying Inn, I think. Do you want me to check?’
He nodded and she went out. Bognor found himself warming to her once again. She had her faults and she wasn’t all that much to look at but she was reliable. A good person to have at one’s back, when the chips were down and all that. Nothing flash. But sound. A good egg.
She returned holding open a faded scarlet volume entitled A G. K. Chesterton Omnibus.
‘I was right,’ she said, ‘The Flying Inn it is. Do you want me to read it?’
Bognor nodded.
‘First four lines only,’ she said, ‘then lights out.’
In the city set upon slime and loam
They cry in their parliament ‘Who goes home?’
And there comes no answer in arch or dome
For none in the city of graves goes home.
She made a face. ‘Rather horrid,’ she said. ‘I prefer it when he’s being rude about Grocers or funny about rolling English roads. Now before you pass out I am going to make you sleep.’ She confiscated his chocolate and turned the lights out but it was more than an hour before Bognor slept. Despite the pain and the knock-out punch he couldn’t sleep. Instead he kept repeating in a lilting whisper:
And there comes no answer in arch or dome
For none in the city of graves goes home.
He was too fuddled to know what it could mean but the general tone was evident enough. Even if it was only an idle doodle St John Derby’s thoughts had been singularly gloomy on the night of his death. ‘For none in the city of graves goes home.’ Had he been waiting for someone? For someone he feared might kill him. He tried to remember what that tiny man with the improbable name had said, Dmitri Pugh, that was it. ‘He said he had to meet someone … he seemed out of sorts.’ So Derby had been sitting in his office drunk and out of sorts and waiting for someone, and while he was waiting he wrote about graves and people not going home. But he’d ordered a taxi. Perhaps his nerve had failed him. Or maybe he was being optimistic.
‘For none in the city of graves goes home.’ Bognor shuddered.
5
TO SAY THAT HE felt better next morning was accurate, but to say that he felt well hyperbole. His head ached with hangover and his face ached from the stranger’s punch. At the back of his head there was another area of intense discomfort where he must have hit the lamp-post on the way down to the pavement. His stomach was like jelly and his hands shook. Speech now seemed to hurt him less but his lips were so swollen that he sounded like an apprentice ventriloquist. The first time he stood to go to the lavatory he had to sit down abruptly to stop the room revolving. Nevertheless he was still short of breath and as the moments of waking ticked by and he sipped at strong black tea and ate toast and home made marmalade he began to feel that conceivably the day could be faced. Not, he decided, with optimism. Not even with equanimity. But faced all the same.
Five minutes later he was not so sure. First he saw that Anthea Morrison’s death was on the front page of his second paper, the Daily Express. Some bright executive there had noticed the connection. ‘Secretary in death fall’ was the headline and the story which followed was a perfectly straightforward account of the tragedy even if it was written in odd English. The final paragraph was the real reason for the story being so prominently displayed. ‘Miss Morrison’s death,’ it ran, ‘came less than twenty-four hours after the sudden death of the distinguished journalist St John Derby (Obituary, page 9). Mr Derby was editor of the Samuel Pepys column of the Daily Globe where Miss Morrison worked as a secretary.’
Bognor had just finished reading it when the phone rang. It was, inevitably, Parkinson. After several futile attempts to explain to Parkinson first that he had got the right number, secondly that he was Simon Bognor and thirdly that he was not drunk, he handed the phone to Monica, who did her best to explain for him.
‘He’d like you to drop in on your way to work,’ she said, when she’d done so. ‘He wasn’t sympathetic about your wounds.’
Bognor grunted. It was bad enough trying to eat toast with your mouth fixed in a permanent grin. Parkinson and the Daily Express were making life worse.
As he dressed he fastened paper to a clip board and began to make the notes to which he always resorted in times of crisis. In this case it was almost as important to put the garbled events of the previous day into some order as it was to establish motives and methods and opportunities for murder. ‘Interviews,’ he wrote, ‘with Wharfedale, Gringe, Mortimer, Port, Wimbledon, Harris and Mortimer again.’ He rubbed his lip and thought of gossamer wings. ‘And Father of Chapel and Imperial Father,’ he added by way of afterthought. Then he wrote underneath: ‘Unresolved two murders, one assault …’ He chewed at the pencil. There were plenty of other unresolved questions. Had Lord Wharfedale really been trying to sack Derby and had he been prevented from doing so by the Union? It seemed improbable. ‘Ask Imperial Father,’ he wrote. Then there was St John Derby’s unexplained wealth and the suggestion of blackmail. Molly Mortimer had come right out with it. Bertie Harris’s insinuation had been oblique but it was obvious that he was implying blackmail. That said something about their respective characters. And Parkinson had mentioned something about a file on Milborn Port. A file on Milborn Port? Oh really. He kissed Monica on the cheek.
‘Thank you for the city of graves,’ he said, ‘and everything.’
She smiled. ‘Please be more careful today,’ she said, ‘Don’t drink so much, stay away from dark alleyways and keep a stiff upper lip.’
‘I don’t have any option,’ he said with feeling. He walked to the bus stop, determined today to behave more like a staid Board of Trade investigator and less like a cub reporter. It was bitterly cold again. He thrust his hands deep in his overcoat pocket and tried unsuccessfully to whistle a happy tune.
Parkinson was sitting stiffly in his upright chair stirring tea in a thick china cup with a chip. He looked, as usual, grim, but the spectre of a smile crossed his face when he saw Bognor’s battered visage.
‘I have never,’ he said, with malicious satisfaction, ‘known a man who was able to get to the centre of a problem as quickly as you, Bognor. It could even be said that within a matter of hours you invariably become the centre of the problem yourself. I do appreciate that you like to become involved in your job. I do really. But a certain detachment. A certain detachment.’ He was stirring his tea with such venom that a spoonful slopped on to his blotter where it was slowly absorbed leaving a light brown stain. ‘It is not necessary or desirable to cast yourself in the role of victim, Bognor,’ he said.
Bognor stared unhappily at the portrait of the Queen which he could see just behind Parkinson’s left ear and said nothing.
Parkinson consulted his notes. ‘First,’ he said, ‘I have had a personal call from the Minister. The Minister has changed his mind. It’s his prerogative and one which he exercises mercilessly. He wants you off this case. He admits he made a mistake. Unfortunately it’s a bit late for that.’
‘Oh?’ For a moment Bognor had seen a glimmer of hope. A suggestion that he could return to a safe boring life in the basement.
‘For a start,’ said Parkinson, ‘you’re too closely involved already. Not that by itself that would normally worry me. I don’t like bowing to the self-seeking whims of careerist politicians and it’s not my business to curry favour with Lord Wharfedale even if it’s the Minister’s. But there is the file on Milborn Port.’
‘What does the file say?’
Again Parkinson consulted his papers. ‘Age fifty-three, married, two sons, educated Sherborne and Trinity College, Dublin. Moscow Correspondent of Daily Globe 1958. Gossip writer.’
‘Just because he was once in Moscow that doesn’t make him …’
Parkinson glowered at him. ‘Are you really not able to speak more distinctly than that?’ he asked. ‘I am h
aving the greatest difficulty in comprehending whatever it is that you have to say.’
‘Sorry … sir.’
‘It’s not a very big file,’ said Parkinson drily, ‘because your friend Mr Port is not a very big fish. As even you can appreciate he would have problems of access to anything of strategic importance or economic importance. On the other hand he is peculiarly well placed to provide information of what you would doubtless describe as social significance.’
‘I don’t quite follow.’
Parkinson twitched with exasperation. ‘Have you ever heard of a filth man?’
‘No.’
‘A filth man, as the name suggests, is someone who gets the dirt on people. The idea’s American but nowadays we’re all interested in a little filth. Who’s sleeping with whom, who’s losing a fortune at the gaming tables, who’s so consistently drunk that he is unable to do his job, whose daughter has freaked out, whose wife has left him. People pay money for that sort of information. They’re interested in it. It can be useful.’
‘And Milborn Port was passing on that sort of thing to the Russian Embassy.’
‘I’m delighted you’re able to follow me so swiftly. It’s not in the legal sense treason. He doesn’t, as far as I know, possess state secrets but he makes mischief and we’d like to know a little more about him.’
Bognor was intrigued. ‘Would they pay much?’
‘Enough.’
‘Enough to buy Chateau Lafite and pay the rent of a flashy flat in South Kensington?’
‘Your Mr Port has a house in Stoke Poges.’
‘I know.’
For once it was Parkinson’s turn to look puzzled. ‘It wouldn’t be a lot of money. Not under the circumstances. Perhaps a few hundred a year. Why?’