Deadline (The Simon Bognor Mysteries)

by Tim Heald

  The Terrapins clearly realized that something had happened to their star. In the next move he was conspicuously avoided and the ball was fed straight to the sprinter Bagley, who was tackled only yards short of the line. The seconds ticked away and it seemed that the Terrapins must hang on, however precariously, to their slim lead. The Scotsmen, however, sensed the new Terrapin weakness. The referee was looking at his watch, whistle poised ready to blow for the end of the game when the Scottish scrum-half kicked the ball as high as he could and straight towards where Willy Wimbledon stood in splendid isolation, yards from any protecting team-mate. The crowd hushed as the ball hung in the air and then began to drop slowly towards the lonely Viscount. The only sound was the thunder of seven pairs of Scottish boots pounding towards him. The ball, Willy and the Scots all met at the same instant. It was hardly Willy’s fault this time though a tougher braver man might have clung on desperately. Instead he made a frantic grab at it, seemed for a moment to have caught it and was then brushed aside as the ball ran loose and was successfully seized by a triumphant Scot. The rest was a formality. The latest score made it level pegging at sixteen all but the conversion was as easy as the one with which Willy had failed. The crowd held its breath as the Scottish kicker ran up and clipped the ball neatly and precisely between the uprights. Eighteen—sixteen to the Scots.

  The second the ball arc-ed through the posts, the touch judges waved their flags aloft signalling triumph, the referee blew a prolonged final blast on the whistle and the onlookers erupted into cheers, boos and indeterminate rhubarb noises. Some of the little girls, who minutes earlier had been so ecstatically euphoric, were now sobbing with distress and lost illusions, while two of the drunken Scots, roared on by their fellows, were attempting to climb the goal-posts.

  Bognor allowed himself the luxury of a thin smile.

  ‘I don’t somehow think,’ he said, smugly, ‘that that will be remembered as Viscount Wimbledon’s finest hour,’ he said.

  ‘Pig,’ said Molly. ‘He was upset.’

  ‘I know,’ said Bognor, ‘and all because Eric Gringe called him a Fairy. Tut tut. Poor little fellow.’

  Molly gave him a beady look. ‘If you go on gloating,’ she said, ‘I shan’t make anything up to you. Come on. Let’s find Bertie.’

  They tracked Bertie down by the Wharfedale dormobile/grandstand where he was putting on his dutiful heir apparent act, drinking Dimple Haig whisky and being nice to the editors. The two teams of finalists were there too, drinking non-vintage champagne, some of it from the absurd Wharfedale trophy, which had just been presented. It had been a muted presentation because Lord Wharfedale thought anything else would be too like the Cup Final of which he disapproved. He considered it common. The only player conspicuously absent was Viscount Wimbledon. ‘Collar-bone,’ said the Terrapin captain tersely, on being questioned, ‘someone kicked it in that last maul.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Bognor. He privately thought it unlikely to be worse than a bruise. Probably inflicted by one of his own side too. He had decided that Willy was too wet to have murdered anyone. Unless … It didn’t require much courage to push someone on a crowded platform, or smash a fist into the face of a very drunken Board of Trade investigator. The paper knife stabbing was different. And why had his game gone so totally to pieces when Gringe shouted Fairy?

  ‘Bad luck,’ said Bognor to the Terrapin captain. ‘Not winning. I thought you had it sewn up.’

  ‘So we did.’ The Terrapin grimaced. He had blood on his left knee cap. ‘Until Willy went to bits. I don’t understand it. The second that fellow shouted out “Fairy” he cracked up.’

  Bognor shrugged. He noticed that Molly was in deep and earnest talk with Bertie Harris who was wearing an expression of ritual concern, rather like a doctor trying out a new bedside manner.

  After a few minutes of sage nodding and shaking Bertie knocked back his Scotch with a flourish, waved at Bognor to follow and marched off with Molly in the direction of the press tent.

  The next hour and half was devoted to constructing a column. Gringe was nowhere to be seen, nor Wimbledon, and Milborn Port was quietly gibbering. However Gringe’s insistence on as much copy as possible by lunch, had paid dividends. Bognor himself had already written notes on the Earl of Surrey, the Plynlimmon Goat, Freddie ffrench-Patrick, and the Seven Sisters’ Stompers. These and other similar offerings about rugger players with withered legs, rugger players who had won VCs, rugger players who had gone off with other rugger players’ wives, rugger players who had become Bishops of the Church of England and an improbable anecdote from Milborn Port about the popularity of rugger at the Vatican had all been telephoned to the Globe during the afternoon by the temporary secretary. There Horace Peckwater had perused them and amended them and checked them and placed them in order and constructed suitable headlines for each one.

  Nevertheless there was more to do, and the three members of the Pepys staff who remained sober and intact addressed themselves to the difficult task of writing more items about the day’s entertainment. It was slow work. However, well before the deadline time of approximately six o’clock Bertie expressed reasonable satisfaction. Just as they were finishing and preparing to retire to the next door tent for a final drink before going home Viscount Wimbledon appeared. He looked wan and sheepish and held his heavily bandaged arm in a sling made from the silk scarf he had earlier worn round his neck.

  A chorus of ‘Oh, I say, bad luck, old boy’, ‘Hard cheese’, and similarly hypocritical condolences greeted his arrival. Secretly everyone was as amused as Bognor by his discomfiture but no one quite had the gall to show it.

  ‘Where’s Gringe?’ he asked. No one knew and there was a general embarrassed shuffling. No answer. Finally he looked at Bognor and said with a show of bravado, ‘I owe you a drink, if you’d still like it?’

  ‘Fine,’ he said.

  The beer tent was now distinctly seedy. The few drinkers left were in poor shape and the staff, grown surly after the day’s work, showed signs of restiveness. Had the Pepys people not arrived when they did the tent would have been struck and the remaining clients tidied away with the rubbish. Conversation was strained. Bognor was ill at ease himself and also keen to see Gringe. He wondered what it was that the wretched man had wanted to tell him and also what explanation he would offer for his effective cry of ‘Fairy’.

  ‘I did enjoy some of your earlier stuff,’ he said tentatively to Wimbledon. ‘Pity about the final. I almost got the impression that …’

  ‘I’d rather not talk about it if you don’t mind,’ said the Viscount. He was still obviously upset but, Bognor reckoned, more by the ‘Fairy’ remark than the loss of face or final.

  ‘Did you manage to get a good column together?’

  ‘All right. I had a chat with your father.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The silences became longer until they almost obliterated speech. In the middle of a particularly long one there was the scrunch of feet on empty beer cans and a bemacintoshed figure appeared in the door of the tent. Mr Gringe steadied himself briefly with one hand on a conveniently placed guy rope.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. His face was in the shadow but it was clear from the way he was standing that he was very unsure of himself.

  ‘My round,’ said Bognor with a brightness he didn’t feel. ‘What’s yours?’

  ‘I’d like a brandy if I may, please.’

  Bognor ordered the brandy and beers for everyone else. The brandy was presumably medicinal but it was also twice as expensive as beer and its ordering irritated Bognor, and, he guessed, everyone else. The hostility was almost tangible. Most of it was directed at Gringe but he sensed much more. Some was aimed at himself too, but almost everyone now seemed to have at least one acknowledged enemy among his colleagues. Almost facetiously he wondered when the next murder would be done.

  It almost happened immediately, and might have done if the two protagonists weren’t so emotionally and physically unwell. Wimbledon, coping clumsil
y with a cigarette, a pint tankard and his sling, sidled across to Granny Gringe and said with all the menace of Humphrey Bogart: ‘Would you mind stepping outside a minute. I have something I want to say.’ There was no mistaking the threat in his tones and since, despite the stage whisper, everyone else was listening and watching, it was clear to all of them.

  Gringe drank brandy, his hand shaking as he raised the glass so that a tiny trickle missed his mouth and ran down his chin and on to the collar of his raincoat.

  ‘I’m not going outside with you,’ he said. The words were innocuous enough but he managed to imply that if he had gone outside he would have been instantly subjected to a sexual assault. Wimbledon didn’t miss the innuendo.

  ‘In that case I’ll have to say it here, where everyone can hear.’

  ‘Go ahead.’ It was too dark to see Gringe’s eyebrows but Bognor would not have been surprised to discover that they were both performing acrobatics.

  ‘I say, you two.’ It was Bertie Harris falling into the role of elder statesman and heir to the Empire again. ‘Don’t you think all this ought to wait till tomorrow? We have had a very long day and it’s been pretty bloody difficult. Now why don’t you just pack it in and talk about it in the morning when we’ve had a chance to sleep on it?’

  ‘Bugger that,’ said Wimbledon, his voice rising. His beer was spilling and he put it down on a table so that he could use his hand for the cigarette. It glowed in the shadows as he jabbed it towards Gringe’s nose. Then he seemed to subside again.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, ‘I’ll just say one thing and that is that I’m resigning. I’m not working under you, you sneaky little voyeur. You can have it in writing tomorrow. Goodnight.’

  And he was gone. The cigarette end lay where he’d thrown it in a pile of litter, still glowing for a few moments while everyone gazed blankly and speechlessly at the darkened entrance out of which he had vanished.

  ‘He’ll be all right in the morning,’ said Bertie with a humourless laugh. ‘Nothing like a good night’s sleep to restore some perspective. I think it really is time we went.’

  It was, too. The staff had been banging empty crates about for five minutes and now stood staring at them with undisguised resentment. They left, chorusing good-nights to each other as they did and making their way independently towards the car park.

  Bognor caught Granny Gringe about fifty yards out of the tent.

  ‘You wanted to talk to me,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Gringe, ‘but I think I’ve changed my mind.’

  ‘It’s too late,’ said Bognor. ‘You’re involved now. You know something and I want to be in on the secret. Do you have a car?’

  ‘I came by train to Barnes.’

  ‘Where are you going now?’

  ‘Bromley.’

  ‘From Blackfriars?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll give you a lift. We can talk in the car.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk. I’ve changed my mind.’ His voice was beginning to go out of control again.

  ‘You don’t have any option. This is a murder enquiry. And you know something. You can’t withhold evidence.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘It’s true.’

  They had arrived at the pavilion now. The lights were on inside and through the windows they could see the merry throng of rugger hearties gathered round the bar elbows bent as they drank their pints. A vigorous chorus of ‘Eskimo Nell’ came wafting out on the chill night air.

  ‘It’ll take you hours to get home on public transport,’ said Bognor, ‘and it’s a bloody night.’

  He took a minute to make up his mind, then he said, sadly and softly, ‘All right. It’ll have to come out in the end.’

  They turned and walked away from the raucous singing to the car park. Neither said anything until Bognor had negotiated the busy crossroads near the Red Rover pub and was heading east towards Putney.

  ‘Well,’ he said eventually, settling into fourth gear behind an articulated lorry from Belgium, ‘I’ve seldom seen a more effective piece of heckling. Tell me more.’

  For a minute he didn’t think Gringe was going to respond, and they were beyond Putney Swimming Pool before he spoke. Then without further prompting he was in full spate. It was irrelevant to murder, at least irrelevant to the mechanics of murder although it provided a sort of motive. ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ he began, and Bognor knew then that he would be forced to understand willy-nilly. For ten minutes Gringe kept up a ceaseless diatribe. He catalogued his own parentage, childhood, adolescence: The sacrifices to send him to grammar school, to red brick university; the hours of extra study, the newspaper round, the vacation jobs, labouring; his army service, fighting for a commission in the Pay Corps; then journalism; the court reporting on the local paper; the promotion to a big regional paper in Newcastle; the big break which sent him across country to join the Globe’s Manchester staff as a news reporter, the years of drudgery and then another break when he scooped the rest of the country’s papers with his exclusive revelations of embezzlement and perjury in one of the country’s largest trade unions; the implausible reward of a job in London on the Samuel Pepys column and the humiliating discovery there of the privileged. He had sweated blood and ink to get there and when he arrived what did he find? He found men who had been born to it, men who had inherited it, men who were doing it because they could think of nothing else to do with their rotten worthless lives, men with titles, men who squandered and frittered such meagre talents as they possessed on women and horses and above all alcohol, reducing themselves to privileged parasites, a perpetual affront to the honest, the poor, the industrious, to people like himself who by their own toil and guts and talent had pulled themselves up and made something of themselves.

  They were at Battersea Dogs’ Home before he paused for breath. Bognor seized the opportunity mercilessly.

  ‘But Viscount Wimbledon,’ he said. ‘You called him a fairy.’

  It was an advantage, he realized, that he had Gringe to himself in the car and that it was dark. He couldn’t see his face except occasionally when they paused near a brighter than usual street lamp and this gave Gringe confidence and anonymity. He was almost talking to himself.

  ‘Worthless, worthless Willy,’ he said, sounding more than a little hysterical and giving a shrill demented laugh. ‘You’ve seen him, with his little kiss curl and his bloody blues and his title and his privilege. But I found out. I found out.’

  ‘How?’

  Gringe stopped short, suddenly embarrassed again. He asked for a cigarette though Bognor had never seen him smoke before, and when Bognor had lit it for him, sucked inexpertly on it, coughing and not inhaling. When he spoke again it was with his usual diffidence but it quickly evaporated.

  ‘It was one evening a few months ago. St John said he was ill. I thought he was hung over. He said in the morning that he wouldn’t be coming to work but he’d like to see the column in the evening if I’d care to drop it in on my way home. He knew perfectly well that his flat wasn’t on my way home. It was in the other direction. But he didn’t care about me. He thought I was common, insignificant, nothing. He’d made something of himself all right. He’d sold out. All that nonsense about the cane and the cloak and the plummy voice and the smart friends. He was a toad, a common toad.’

  He coughed and rolled down the window, then threw the half finished cigarette out and rolled it up again.

  ‘But Wimbledon,’ prompted Bognor. ‘You said he was a fairy?’

  ‘I took the copy round,’ he said. ‘All of it. All eleven stories. And he’d forgotten I was coming. I could tell by the time it took him to answer. I rang twice and then when he came he looked upset and anxious and surprised. He looked as if he’d been caught red-handed. “Come in, dear boy,” he said, like he always did, only he didn’t mean it, you could tell by his eyes. But I went in, just to spite him, even though he didn’t want it. He was wearing a dressing gown. Silk wi
th golden dragons on it and nothing underneath. I could tell something was wrong, so I went in.’

  Bognor narrowly missed a parked car. He was enjoying the story.

  ‘And …’ he said.

  ‘Nothing for a minute or two. He gave me a glass of sherry. Dry sherry, so dry it was almost like vinegar. He knew I liked it sweet but it was his way of upstaging me, making me feel small and stupid. And he read the column but I could tell he was nervous by the way he kept fidgeting, and then he came in.’

  ‘Who?’ Bognor knew perfectly well, but he wanted to savour it.

  ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy, Worthless Willy Wimbledon.’

  ‘And that was the first time you saw him, before he got the job on the column.’

  ‘That’s why he got the job on the column, isn’t it? For services rendered.’

  ‘And you never told anyone?’

  They were at Lambeth now, just passing the Archbishop’s palace, with the Houses of Parliament silhouetted across the river on their left. He felt Gringe hesitate.

  ‘No,’ he said finally. ‘Well, that is I told one person, only that was different. It’s what I wanted to talk to you about earlier.’

  ‘Ah.’ It was what Bognor had been half expecting. Another bit of jigsaw was fitting into place, though there were still a lot of pieces to go. He tried to make it easier.

  ‘You told Anthea Morrison?’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I guessed. You forget I’m a professional.’ Bognor didn’t feel like it, and to be honest he had only really guessed a few minutes earlier. It was the signal for another outpouring of frustration and disillusion and hatred and pent-up emotion. Through the torrent of words Bognor managed to single out the salient facts. Gringe disliked his wife who was prissy and pushy, and wanted him to be, God knows what, Editor, King, Prime Minister. Or more precisely she wanted to be Queen. And as Bognor had observed, and as Gringe knew all too clearly, Eric Gringe was one of life’s losers. In the office which he so clearly loathed there was only one person who was similarly patronized and ignored and who suffered the ignominy of being thought lower class. That was Anthea Morrison. Their affair had blossomed slowly, if only because Gringe was a man of chronically nervous disposition and little initiative. Anthea was a Catholic and that hardly helped. Nevertheless they had begun to see each other. At first it was totally harmless. When the others were off drinking at El Vino or the American Bar at the Savoy or Jules in Jermyn Street, then Eric and Anthea would snatch a quick coffee in one of the small shops off Ludgate Circus. The relationship remained platonic though inevitably Derby, who missed nothing, realized that something was going on and used Gringe’s pathological nervousness and fear of his wife to indulge his tiresome habit of blackmail. There was little money involved but it seemed that Derby was like the little boy who enjoys pulling wings off insects. He couldn’t resist tormenting the guilty.