Brought to Book (The Simon Bognor Mysteries)

by Tim Heald

  ‘You’re not seriously suggesting that Bumstead is going to suspect me of being the murderer?’

  ‘It’s perfectly possible. He more or less said we were all under suspicion. Once he finds you have no alibi I should think he’s bound to think you did it. Worse than no alibi. You were actually prowling around.’

  ‘I was not prowling around. I was looking for milk.’

  ‘Yes, darling.’

  Bognor glowered. Not for the first time he had a sinking feeling that his wife might be right.

  ‘Look at it another way,’ he said, a shade desperately; ‘if I didn’t do it, who did?’

  ‘Haven’t the foggiest,’ said Monica, ‘but in everyone’s interests I think we should do our level best to find out. Whatever the DCI thinks.’

  ‘You mean start questioning people on our own?’

  ‘On your own. You have the authority: impressive ID, plausible manner. And Parkinson will have that Q4 before long.’

  ‘He may not get a Q4. And that little tick was very specific about not discussing Hemlock.’

  ‘Don’t be so wet. Let’s start with Warrington. He’s the most obvious poseur.’

  Bognor was not enthusiastic but he was beginning to see that in the absence of a bona fide culprit he might well find himself in serious trouble.

  He picked up the phone. ‘Mr Warrington, please,’ he said, sensing the butler’s contempt which communicated itself down the telephone as magically as Parkinson’s annoyance.

  After a pause a voice said ‘Warrington’. The voice was the product of two decades of wine tastings in city livery halls and cellars. At least that was what it was obviously intended to convey. Unmistakable. And extremely bankable.

  Bognor had no trouble persuading Warrington that they should meet. Bognor had guessed from television that, apart from a drop of ‘an interesting little Cru Bourgeois I picked up on my way back from a weekend with Sidney Rothschild’, there was nothing Warrington liked more than the sound of his own voice. Especially when listened to with deference. Bognor had managed to imply that his deference would be extreme, that he would be the perfect audience. Bognor had not implied in any way that he regarded Warrington as a suspect. Had he done so Warrington would not have played ball. Instead he had told the nation’s greatest wine bore that he wanted to pick his brain and ask his opinions since he was bound to have one or two that Bognor might like to be entitled to. Reflecting on this, Danvers Warrington polished his monocle with a red-and-white spotted handkerchief rusty with snuff stains and positively purred.

  They met in Warrington’s room. Warrington had evidently conceived a dislike for ‘our friend from the constabulary’, but he wasn’t prepared to run the risk of being caught in the corridors. ‘Mister Wine in cells for contempt’ was not something he relished. Like many very conceited men he was also a fearful coward.

  ‘Aha!’ he said, opening the door and peering theatrically in both directions before bundling them in with much fluster, ‘Aha!’

  Mr and Mrs Bognor sat down on the bed which, they both noticed, had been very well and freshly made, unlike their own which had not been touched. Warrington sat in a hall porter’s chair in blue leather. He crossed his legs and pulled at one of the canary yellow stockings.

  ‘Before we begin,’ he said, ‘I wonder if I might see some formal identification? I don’t like to seem unduly fussy but in the circumstances I think you’ll agree one can’t be too careful.’

  Bognor handed him his shiny laminated Board of Trade card with the new regulation colour photograph which made him look less like a man with a price on his head than the old black and white one. It showed a pudgy face of an alarming, luminous red. Warrington looked at it through his monocle.

  ‘Mrs Bognor is not, I take it, with the Board?’ he said.

  ‘I’m just with Simon,’ said Monica.

  ‘Quite.’ Danvers Warrington pursed his lips in the familiar, pained expression which always preceded one of his famous profundities.

  ‘The dog barks but the caravan moves on,’ he said.

  It was Bognor’s turn to say ‘Quite’.

  ‘We writers’, he continued, ‘are what you might call a rum kettle of fish. Not a lot of love lost, if you see what I mean.’

  Bognor nodded.

  ‘I expect I mentioned that I get a twinge of the old sandfly fever now and again?’

  The Bognors nodded again.

  ‘You’d think, wouldn’t you, that in a houseful of guests, and colleagues at that, that someone would venture a word of sympathy. But no, not a dickie bird. It’s perfectly plain that every last one of my fellow scribes thinks it’s just another of Danvers’ dashed affectations. It leaves a man very low, I can tell you, especially when it strikes in the still small watches. Picked it up in the Malayan show. Suppose you were too young for that.’ He jabbed his meerschaum in the general direction of the bed.

  ‘I missed national service,’ said Bognor.

  ‘Pity,’ said Warrington. ‘Makes a man of you. Where was I?’

  ‘You were saying there was no love lost between writers.’

  ‘You’re not a writer chappie?’

  ‘Not really.’ Bognor did not feel obliged to expound on his projected history of the Special Investigations Department.

  ‘Difficult to understand for someone who’s not been touched by the muse.’ He gazed at the bowl of his meerschaum as if embarrassed at being touched by the muse. He reminded Bognor of a born-again Christian bearing witness at Wembley or on the TV God-slot.

  ‘The grape and the muse,’ he went on; ‘it’s a rare privilege to have been visited by both.’

  ‘Are you saying that this particular collection of writers did not get on with each other?’ Monica, as always, was keen to get to the point. Warrington was irritated at having his stately digressions interrupted.

  ‘As you will certainly have noticed, Mrs Bognor, very few of our company could be described as writers in the true meaning of the word. Self-help manuals and royal scrapbooks are scarcely what one might describe as “literature” in the sense that a gentleman would use the term.’

  ‘I understood some of Dr Belgrave’s stuff was considered rather…I mean, didn’t Germaine Greer do a piece in the Literary…?’

  ‘Oh, pish tush, Bognor, pish tush. Let us not beat about the bush. You and I are hommes du monde. You know as well as I that Miss Belgrave’s emanations are pornography simple if not pure.’ He gave a short laugh. This slid into a pipe-smoker’s hack which he had some difficulty in curtailing.

  When he had stopped coughing he said, ‘The fact is that practically every person in this house hates the guts of practically every other person. But I’ll tell you something else: almost the only thing which stopped us hating each other was Hemlock. We may have hated each other but we loathed him.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Bognor. ‘No shortage of motive, then. Why was that?’

  Warrington laughed again. ‘I can see you really aren’t an auteur,’ he said. ‘No man is a hero to his valet, least of all his publisher.’

  Bognor did not question this curious sentence. The sentiment behind it was clear enough.

  ‘Would you believe, Mr Bognor,’ Warrington lowered his voice, ‘that the standard Big Book contract stipulates a five per cent royalty, rising only to ten? Pass the Plonk with Warrington was the first British wine book to sell in Japan. Its American advance was a million dollars. It took me months to get a single penny out of them. And then it was only because Audrey Hemlock’s a decent woman au fond.’

  ‘So you weren’t crazy about Hemlock?’

  ‘I should bloody well think not.’

  ‘What exactly happened after I went up to bed last night?’

  ‘I didn’t kill him if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘It’s not, actually, but as far as I can see you and Capstick were the last people to see him alive. Did you all go to bed at the same time?’

  ‘No.’

  Was it Bognor’s imagination or
did Warrington’s negative come a shade too sharp?

  ‘We finished our drinks, then Hemlock gave Capstick a dig in the ribs, a literal dig in the ribs, and asked if he’d like one last one downstairs.’

  ‘He didn’t ask you?’

  ‘Not exactly. I mean he didn’t positively not ask me but he didn’t make me feel wanted either. If he did ask the question he phrased it so that I was obviously expected to say no. Anyway, I wanted bed. I was worn out. Bored, too.’

  ‘Why stay so long?’

  ‘Part of the function of a sales conference’, said Warrington wearily, ‘is to ingratiate yourself with the boss. Big Books sales conferences are just an opportunity for Hemlock to arouse a wholesale display of absolutely sickening sycophancy.’

  ‘Did you know about “downstairs”?’

  ‘Everyone knows about “downstairs”. It’s been in Private Eye every fortnight for the last ten years.’

  ‘But you’d never seen it for yourself?’

  ‘Not my cup of tea. I prefer my pleasures to be in the flesh, if you’ll pardon the expression. I’ve never seen the attraction of voyeurism.’

  ‘Not’, said Bognor, ‘that Mr Hemlock was averse to a bit of real-life nooky?’

  ‘It’s amazing what power and money can do. Romany Flange, Marlene Glopff. They wouldn’t have looked twice at that odious little toad if he hadn’t been loaded with cash and influence.’

  ‘I knew about Romany Flange,’ said Bognor, ‘but not Glopff.’

  ‘Working Out with Glopff,’ said Warrington. ‘He always liked an element of double entendre. It’s Audrey I feel sorry for.’

  There was a silence while Warrington fed tobacco into his pipe. The tobacco was in a pouch that looked like moleskin. It smelt of cellar.

  ‘So the last you saw of Hemlock was him and Capstick heading towards the basement?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I went to bed, slept soundly and woke to find all this brouhaha.’

  ‘And that’s it?’

  ‘That’s it.’ A cloud of smoke wafted towards the ceiling. It smelt of more than three nuns. Warrington recrossed his legs, flaunting canary calves.

  ‘Odds on Capstick,’ he said. ‘Three to one the butler. Bar the field.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Opportunity,’ said Warrington. ‘We all had motive because one way or another we were all being ripped off.’

  ‘It’s quite rare for an author to murder his publisher,’ said Bognor. ‘In fact I’ve never heard of it before.’

  ‘Lack of real opportunity,’ said Warrington. ‘The motivation is nearly always there but if you think about it your average publisher seldom allows himself to be exposed to the author in what our transatlantic cousins call a “one-on-one situation”. I don’t mean editors. I mean your average “grand frontage”. The nearest they ever get to an à deux situation with a writer is lunch at the Savoy Grill when one of us has the temerity to complain about the latest ghastly book jacket the art department have stuck on. Or when one of their rivals tries to poach us. The last time I had lunch on my own with Hemlock was at the Savoy Grill after he’d seen me lunching with Andover Strobe at the Neal Street Restaurant.

  ‘Strobe was trying to poach you?’

  ‘Going through the motions. He knows that it’s almost impossible to escape from a Hemlock contract. Houdini himself couldn’t have got out of one. Hemlock has option clauses so binding Baden Powell himself couldn’t untie them. But Strobe still likes to lunch Big Book authors. It irritates Hemlock. Besides, he has to have names to put on his expense forms.’

  ‘I see.’ Bognor was beginning to develop a new understanding of the world of books. ‘Why Capstick in particular?’ he asked.

  ‘As I said, mon vieux, we all had motives.’ Warrington waved the pipe in a semi-circle. It trailed smoke like an ancient anarchist’s bomb about to explode. ‘In his case I suspect it was something to do with the film rights to Looking After Number One. The story I heard was that Hemlock wanted Marlene Glopff to star and Arthur Green to do the script. I could be wrong. But if it wasn’t that it would be something else. I wouldn’t concern yourself unduly with motive. As I said, we’ve all got plenty of those.’

  ‘Shhh!’ Monica’s hearing was uncannily keen. At railway stations she was always the first one to pick up the vibrations from the approaching train. Now she had obviously detected an ominous hum from the corridor carpet. ‘Someone coming,’ she said.

  They froze.

  She was right. The footsteps were brisk, purposeful and almost certainly official.

  ‘Shouldn’t you make a dash for it?’ Warrington was agitated.

  ‘Too late,’ said Bognor.

  ‘No reason to,’ said Monica. ‘We have a perfect right to be here. Duty even. You invited us, Mr Warrington.’

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t say that, Mrs Bognor. I don’t want to run foul of the law. They can be very troublesome, les flics. I had a little difficulty with them over a breathalyser business. For sheer malice they were beyond belief. Not overly scrupulous when it came to the truth, either. And because of who I am they seemed to find the whole thing screamingly funny. The ribaldry! You wouldn’t believe it.’

  They had all hoped that the footsteps were not coming their way but, just as they thought they had passed and were heading away into the distance, they stopped and there was a knock on the door. The knock had the same perfunctory, official sound as the footsteps.

  ‘Entrez!’ said Warrington, an assumed breeziness fooling neither Mr nor Mrs Bognor.

  The door opened and a very young, spotty man with lightly spiked blond hair and a sharp but cheap off-the-peg suit, stood there. He seemed nervous but also hostile.

  ‘Mr Warrington?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Warrington, saying the word slowly through both nostrils just as he did in his famous TV blind tastings.

  ‘Chief Inspector would like a word if you please, sir.’

  The ‘sir’ was not altogether satisfactory. Not enunciated with the proper degree of obeisance.

  ‘Naturally, Officer,’ said Warrington, pique overcoming nerves. The word ‘Officer’ was spoken with the same sort of subtext that had characterised the earlier ‘sir’. Bognor made a mental note of ‘fifteen all’.

  ‘Before you go, sir,’ (thirty-fifteen observed Bognor) ‘I wonder if you’d be so kind as to explain what Mr and Mrs Bognor are doing here.’

  Warrington was plainly not up to this. He had the conventional lay terror of authority, especially of the police.

  ‘Perfectly all right, Officer,’ Bognor decided that this was an opportunity to pull rank, ‘I was just asking Mr Warrington one or two questions, in my official capacity.’ He flashed his ID in the direction of the young policeman who seemed lamentably unimpressed.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said, ‘but the Chief Inspector’s instructions were quite specific. I must ask you to return to your room immediately. You’ll understand that I shall have to make a report to the Chief Inspector seeing as how he was so specific about going to your rooms and under no circumstances discussing the matter with anyone else in the house.’

  ‘You have your job to do,’ said Bognor, sorely tempted to slip in a quick ‘sonny’ to push the score on to forty-thirty. He resisted, not wishing to seem petty. He hoped Parkinson had managed to get the Q4, otherwise he might be in trouble. Normally he worked perfectly well with the investigating officers in cases like this. There had been problems, of course. Bognor’s highly intuitive and unorthodox approach to crime was not always appreciated by a police force which was becoming increasingly scientific and logical in its approach. Bognor’s view was that the two styles could work together quite satisfactorily with a little give and take. There were moments when all the forensic logic in the world could not conjure up the right solution. He acknowledged that an element of plod and science was sometimes necessary. So why couldn’t that sort of investigator recognise that ‘f
lair’ and the ability to leap boldly across the hurdles erected in the name of plausibility were also valuable. He supposed that a certain sort of person was always chippy when confronted with real class. Bumstead was obviously just such a person. Classic second-rater.

  The expected reaction materialised almost at once. They had scarcely returned to their room when more footsteps sounded, more official, more menacing, more bumptious than before. The knock at the door was barely even a formality.

  ‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re playing at, Bognor?’ Bumstead was cross. The vein at his temple was throbbing like the cha-cha and there were gobbets of perspiration shining on the dinky little moustache.

  ‘Problem, Inspector?’ asked Bognor, pleasantly enough. It took two to have a major row and he had decided not to give the little man that satisfaction.

  Bumstead advanced very close so that his head was only a foot or so from Bognor’s. They would have been eyeball to eyeball but for the fact – very satisfying to Bognor – that the policeman was a clear six inches shorter. Bognor had only seen this sort of stance adopted by baseball team managers who came on the field of play to complain to officials. They were usually chewing tobacco rather like the stuff Warrington smoked. Bumstead was not chewing tobacco but Bognor noticed with satisfaction that he had some alien object stuck between his two front teeth. A reminder of breakfast, he presumed. Probably a bit of muesli. The DCI looked like a muesli man.

  ‘You’re not half as funny as you seem to think, my friend,’ said Bumstead. His breath was surprisingly rancid under an overlay of minty toothpaste.

  ‘I don’t think I’m in the least bit funny,’ said Bognor, equably. ‘My wife will tell you that one of my faults is taking myself a great deal too seriously. And as for being your friend, I think not.’

  ‘I could do you, Bognor.’

  ‘I doubt it. How?’

  ‘Obstructing the course of justice.’

  ‘I hardly think so. I’m only trying to help.’