Yet Another Death in Venice (The Simon Bognor Mysteries)

by Tim Heald

  “Until the Pontis. They were foreigners as well.”

  “This is true,” she said. “But is it, as you would say, ‘relevant’?” She rolled the word around her Romanian tongue, accentuating the opening R and making the word sound surprisingly sexy.

  “And you hadn’t made a movie since The Coffee Grinders?”

  “This is also true,” she said. “But I have been very busy. With this, with that, as you say in England. Also, as you say, I have been ‘resting.’ Resting is very important in your country.

  Everyone in England must rest.”

  “Not any longer,” said Bognor. “That went out with Mrs. Thatcher. Before her, we used to rest a lot. It was considered rather fashionable. But not anymore. We don’t rest the way we used to. The only people in the West who understand the idea are the Irish and the Spaniards. Maybe the Italians.”

  “The Pontis,” Ingrid said with feeling, “do not rest. They never rest. They are always working. Even when they seem to be at rest.”

  Bognor thought of his long liquid lunches with Dibdini at La Locanda Montin and decided it would be best to include at least some Italians in the category of accomplished resters. At least Dibdini got the hang of it. His lunches might not have been free, but at least they were long.

  “Maybe Signor Ponti is, as we say ‘the exception that proves the rule.’ He has money and he works very long hours.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “Bernardo works and earns the money.

  Gina does no work and buys many shoes.”

  Bognor smiled. He had not previously thought of Gina Ponti as Venice’s answer to Imelda Marcos.

  “Surely, there would have been room for the two of you in a film?” he asked. It seemed a reasonable question, but it led to an angry outburst from Ingrid involving more discordant poufs, accompanied by a sort of descant of whimpering from the dog.

  “I see,” said Bognor. “So you had hostile feelings toward Gina that were both professional and personal.”

  She nodded vigorously.

  “I didn’t like her,” she said. And Bognor suddenly realized what it must be like to have a rival who was twenty years younger and had a rich husband and as many shoes as she wanted. Ingrid had perfectly good reasons for wanting Gina dead but none, as far as he could see, for wishing the same fate for Irving Silverburger.

  He let himself out and saw as he left that the little poodle was baring her yellow teeth at no one in particular while her mistress was helping herself to another hefty Gordon’s.

  10

  “So,” said Bognor, “all our people were in Venice at the time of his death; all paid for by him. But none had much of a motive.”

  Contractor looked thoughtful.

  “Motives aren’t wet fish,” he said. “They don’t always slap you in the face. They’re not always obvious.”

  “No, but …” said Bognor, knowing that fundamentally he and Contractor agreed. It was deeply mysterious, but there was no reason for the Swanleys, Trevor, or Ingrid Vincent wanting Silverburger dead. Rather the reverse. They all benefited or stood to benefit from his life and increased prosperity. Just the Venetian trip itself. None of them would have had the funds or the inclination to visit La Serenissima without him. Let alone have lunch at Harry’s Dolci. On the other hand, you had to ask why exactly Silverburger had asked them there in the first place. Surely, he didn’t have a foreboding. He can’t have intended the Venetian adventure as a last farewell. Or could he? It was quite odd.

  He and his acolyte were having a desultory brainstorming when Minnie came in and said that there was a persistent caller with a funny foreign voice for Sir Simon. She didn’t think he was selling double-glazing or tax relief; he sounded as if he was closer than New Delhi and she couldn’t get rid of him. Would Sir Simon mind awfully if she put him through? Otherwise, he would be on forever, and she would never get anything done.

  It was Bernardo Ponti. He and Gina were just passing through on their way to the country, and they had been talking to Michael Dibdini, who was an old friend and said to give him a call some time and have a chat. He and Gina were at the RAC, but only for a moment as they were off to Kettering on the train any minute, and they’d have a car waiting, but why didn’t he come on down for lunch one day. It would be awfully nice to see him and bring his wife, if he felt so inclined. Michael had told them so much about her, but now he must dash or they’d never get to the station in time for the train. So toodle pip, but give us a buzz sometime. We’re in the book in Newton under Ponti, and it’s not far to Kettering, and we’ll make sure you’re met, and we’ll have you back in two shakes of a duck’s whatsit. And Ponti hung up, leaving Bognor dazed and as speechless as he had been throughout this breathless monologue, which had been delivered in a style Bognor associated with the younger sons of Indian princes doing geography at Christ Church. No one in real life actually spoke like that. Nor had a place in Northants or dropped the initials of the Royal Automobile Club, which is where Nigel Dempster used to play squash with Jeffrey Archer and is really just a glorified hotel albeit on Pall Mall. Anyone can join.

  Contractor looked quizzically, cocking a well-groomed eyebrow but not asking the question outright.

  “Ponti,” said Bognor, “wanting to say ‘hello.’ Claimed to be an old mate of Michael’s. Which I doubt. And Minnie’s right. He talked funny. Not predictable funny, but funny, funny.” He liked Minnie. He had rescued her from the typing pool, which was a fate worse than death. He valued her shrewdness, which was quirky but real.

  “What do you mean, ‘talked funny’?”

  “Last person I heard talking like that was someone who called himself the Uvaraj of Thangardrur. Claimed to be studying at Oxford, which I doubt. He sounded like a character out of a P. G. Wodehouse book, only on speed and about to be drowned. Half-drowned perhaps. Not real anyway. Something he’d made up without recourse to the genuine article.”

  “So he’s not the genuine article?”

  “He’s trying to pass himself off as a British country gent. He’s not genuine at that, but then who is nowadays? In fact, he seems to be an Italian financier with a much younger wife. I don’t see any reason to doubt that.”

  “So you’ll see him here?”

  “Wants to give me lunch at his pad in rural Northants.”

  “And you’re going?”

  “Why not? I like the idea of Venice cum Pseudley.”

  “Whereabouts in Northampton?”

  “Newton,” he said.

  “The Rose of the English Shires.”

  “The what?”

  Contractor repeated the phrase. It suggested knowledge but not real knowledge. Contractor had the first in spades; the second came with experience, which was what Bognor liked to believe he had.

  “Sounds suspiciously like something dreamed up by the marketing department somewhere,” he said. “Anything with rose in it has an unreal, adman’s tinge to it. Real people don’t do roses.”

  “Oh,” protested Contractor, “that’s unfair.”

  “Who said anything about real life being fair?” said Bognor.

  “No, but,” said Contractor.

  “I know your ‘no, buts,’” said Bognor. “I don’t trust them. They mean you disagree which elsewhere would be insubordination. And elsewhere has a point. I’m too lenient.”

  “So you’re seeing Mr. and Mrs. Ponti in the country here.

  Then what?”

  “We need to establish why Trevor was in The Coffee Grinders when he said he was back in Riga with an unpronounceable name with an S on the end. You’d better do that. I will see the Pontis, and then it’s probably time I saw Father Carlo and the gondolier and the Russian girl, neither of whom sound any better than they should be, which doesn’t necessarily make them murderers but definitely makes them plausible suspects.”

  “But that means going to Venice?”

  “Yes.”

  “Immediately after a day out in the country.”

  “Very observan
t.”

  “So you spend your time on days out in this country and jolly jaunts to foreign parts. All at the taxpayers’ expense.”

  It was on the tip of his tongue for Bognor to say that it was all in the line of duty, but he thought better of it. It was true up to a point, but only up to a point and his subordinate knew it. He remembered resenting Parkinson’s perks. They had been relatively few, for Parkinson was a parsimonious soul not given to pleasure or excess but even so, if there was anything that seemed even mildly exotic, he snaffled it leaving Bognor to grizzle. At least he would have grizzled if he felt that he would not, one day, step into Parkinson’s shoes and enjoy what he had. It was a compensation for growing old and no longer being sound in wind and limb. Age and experience and wisdom meant chauffeurs and long lunches and foreign travel. At least it had done so before the forces of correctness stirred themselves and moved abroad. Nowadays, the Puritans were in charge. Fun was a forgotten concept and meritocracy ruled. The compensation was that these things went in cycles as anyone trained, like Bognor, in history knew perfectly well. The tragedy for Simon was that he was in the wrong part of the cycle. When he was junior, the boss had all the enjoyment and when he was senior all pretense of enjoyment had vanished. Contractor, by contrast, was in the right place at the right time and would, in time, enjoy respect, leisure, and perks—all of which Bognor felt he was denied. It was ever thus.

  “I thought Dibdini was handling the Italian end,” said Contractor.

  “Up to a point,” said Bognor, using the phrase in its Scoop Waugh sense to mean a resounding negative expressed with argument-avoiding ambiguity.

  “You mean he’s not?” Contractor was not dumb.

  “I mean what I mean,” said Bognor. “I like Michael. He’s very good at his job. But at the end of the day, he’s foreign.” This xenophobia, expressed with all the natural certainty of the British National Party was not intended patronizingly or cynically. Bognor simply believed that the British belief in justice and their system of achieving it was unique and superior. He took little pleasure in this but believed it to be a fact, incapable of serious dispute.

  “So he is in charge and yet he’s not in charge,” said Contractor who, not being of exclusively British descent, was able to see such equivocation for the facile obfuscation that it really was. Bognor, being British, thought it rather sophisticated. “So you have to go and give him a hand and then endorse his findings for home consumption. Bear in mind, that Silverburger was a US citizen murdered on Italian soil, which means that he’s none of our business.”

  “Technically perhaps,” Bognor agreed loftily, “but Silverburger was a citizen of the world, so his death is everybody’s business, especially SIDBOT’s. Besides, he spent a lot of time here, and he could have been knocked off by a British passport holder. More important, I make the rules around here and if I say his murder comes within my jurisdiction, come within my jurisdiction it most certainly does.”

  “That’s making the rules up as you go along,” said Contractor.

  “Yes.”

  Contractor sighed. “Just so long as we agree about something,” he said.

  Bognor said nothing, which could be construed as a response to this, but asked Contractor, not for the first time in this or other investigations, whether he had any solutions to offer.

  “On balance, Boss,” he said, “I agree with you.”

  Bognor said that was just as well, but he wondered if Contractor had any bright ideas. He usually did at this stage of the proceedings, particularly when Bognor was unsure of himself as he so often was.

  “I don’t believe the murderer was any of the people to whom you’ve talked so far,” he ventured. He was evidently thinking out loud, which was one of his more attractive attributes.

  “Does that include the Pontis?”

  “Not really,” said Contractor, “because you haven’t spoken to them properly. Just on the phone. I don’t think that counts. You have to be there in person. It has to be a proper interview.”

  “So the telephone doesn’t count. In fact, electronics are so susceptible to security risk and to tampering that nothing really counts if it’s done on the Internet, even if it’s hedged around with the most abstruse security precautions.”

  “Security precautions can’t compete with any known electronics,” said Contractor.

  Bognor smiled and nodded. “Which is why we rely on such apparently old-fashioned methods,” he said. “The tried and tested are invaluable simply because they are tried and tested. If it ain’t broke, it don’t need fixing. Or words to that effect. It’s another way of saying that old-fashioned interrogation remains the best way of getting at the truth.”

  “Does that include torture?”

  Bognor scowled. “You know perfectly well it doesn’t include torture,” he said. “Only villainous idiots such as George Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld believe in torture. Torture is morally indefensible, contrary to the Geneva Convention and practically useless.”

  “But if it were practically useful, you’d ignore the first two considerations?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You implied it.”

  “No,” said Bognor. “You inferred it. That’s not the same.”

  “Now we’re dealing in semantics,” said Contractor. “Nit-picking. I don’t believe you think any of the people to whom you have spoken face to face in connection with the Silverburger murder actually killed him. That isn’t the same as saying they didn’t; much less that no one on either the English or the Italian list were responsible. But I sense that is what you’re beginning to believe. It’s not clear-cut, and you’re wondering if the killing wasn’t random.”

  “Speculation,” said Bognor.

  “Did you know that there are people in the counterespionage world who believe you can explain things in terms of multiple choice?”

  “You mean Professor Plum did it with (a) the spanner, (b) the dagger, (c) the revolver, or (d) the lead piping in (a) the conservatory, (b) the library, (c) the pantry, or (d) the bathroom?”

  “I’m a great believer in the lead piping in the library when all else fails,” said Contractor. “But I can believe it. Death reduced to board game. But then you could say that life is just an animated board game, a sort of Snakes and Ladders with knobs on.”

  “You could say that,” agreed Bognor, “and there are those who do. For me, however, lunch in the Rose of the English Shires beckons. Could you see about the times of the trains to Kettering and back and let me know ASAP?”

  The Kettering train was fast, and he was in the Northampton countryside well before lunch. Chauffeured car and prepaid first-class tickets meant that it cost him nothing, and he traveled with only the morning’s paper and his thoughts for company. The paper was full of nothing as usual, and he was far better informed than any of its reporters or editors thanks to his own research and to a careful study of the Internet. Time was when this would not have been the case and a studious perusal of the morning’s press would have been essential for both professional and social reasons. Sadly, this was no longer the case. He was constantly being told both in public and private that the days of the old-fashioned newspapers were numbered and that print was doomed. If this were true, he believed that the papers and their greedy proprietors had only themselves to blame. Newsgathering was a sophisticated, time-consuming, and costly business. The minute you lost sight of that and tried to make money from “news,” you and traditional papers were in ruins. QED; fact of life; sad but true.

  England slipped by like speeded up film; a blur of images, celluloid in their unreality. He sat in first class, insulated from the polloi back in steerage, insulated from the world outside, insulated from everything. This was life in the fast lane; the life of a successful man, one who had made something of his life in the western world far removed from smelly socks, from toil, from horny-handed anything at all. This was how the other half lived, except that it wasn’t the half of it. This was how a min
iscule proportion of haves lived, at the expense of the have-nots. The great unwashed were condemned to a life in steerage; the very few were in the Queen’s Grill eating caviar, drinking Krug, and waiting for icebergs.

  He was reflecting on this when the train pulled into Kettering, once the capital of a thriving boot-and-shoe industry; now the main town in nothing very much. Kettering was the hub of various Roses of the Shires, once significant and thriving, now depressed if not quite as derelict as Detroit.

  The car was waiting by the main exit: standard issue cab with driver in sheepskin coat, driving gloves, and standard patter about those he had had in the back of his vehicle. Bognor sat in the front, a democratic habit he and Monica had acquired in the Antipodes, and asked the driver if he was busy. The cabbie, mildly irked at having to remove a half-eaten KIT KAT and a half-perused girlie magazine from the front seat, said not very on account of the depression, but he supposed he shouldn’t grumble, and the two lapsed into silence as more of picture postcard passed in a synthetic glaze before Bognor’s eyes. More slowly than on the train, but otherwise much the same.

  Newton may or may not have been the Rose of the Shires, but it was pretty in a pretty way. Some villages boasted the sort of inhabitants who would and could join together to secure an increased speed of broadband. Newton was such a village. The houses were beautifully kept, lovely to look at, and did not look as if they were much lived in. They certainly weren’t frayed at the edges.

  Ponti obviously heard the cab on the gravel of his drive for he opened the door just before Bognor got out. He was wearing tweed, naturally. It was obviously his idea of what the English gentleman wore in the country, but it was not only, like his house, insufficiently frayed around the edges to be a real gentleman’s suit, it also had a red thread in its pattern, which was, Bognor thought, a dead giveaway.

  “Welcome to Newton in the Willows,” said his host, giving the village its tourist board name. He smelled of aftershave, another telltale factor. An Englishman would have reeked of BO. A black Labrador came out and sniffed at Bognor’s fly. Like its master, it was too well groomed. It answered to the name Dog, which Bognor thought surprisingly good. “Next time, you must leave time for a walk. There’s a good one from the Eleanor Cross in Geddington. J. L. Carr was keen on Eleanor Crosses. He saved Saint Faith’s, the church. He has passed away, sadly, but his biographer lives somewhere close by. He is a butcher, I believe.”