Brought to Book (The Simon Bognor Mysteries)

by Tim Heald

  It was a spy story and like all British spy stories since the war it began in Cambridge in the shadowy, elitist bisexual world inhabited by Blunt, Burgess and Maclean. Green sketched in the familiar background – arrogant cloistered youth shaken rigid by the Fascist threat of Hitler’s Germany and ill-disposed to the sort of narrow patriotism that had made it possible. It was a generation that did not believe in country right or wrong, would not fight for King and country and agreed passionately with E. M. Forster that personal friendship was more important than anything else.

  Although it was old stuff Bognor had to concede that Green told it quite beautifully. He had that elusive gift which often makes stylistically second-rate authors into bestsellers. It was not so much the ability to tell a story as the ability to hold an audience, to keep a reader turning the page because he was anxious to know what happened on the other side.

  From Cambridge and the Apostles, Green continued with the well known traitors’ tale. He followed them into Foreign Office, Intelligence, the Queen’s Picture Gallery, the very heart of the British Establishment and, ultimately, in the case of Burgess, Maclean and Philby, to Moscow itself. He discussed Blunt, speculated on Sir Roger Hollis who, on balance, he considered too stupid to have been a double agent and ran through the famous Australian case when the Government tried to ban the publication of a kiss-and-tell volume by one of its former ‘spy catchers’. Looking round the hall Bognor was fascinated to see that the reps were utterly engrossed. It was almost as if they had been hypnotised. They sat with their mouths ajar nodding slightly in time to the words. Bognor had never before seen such a powerful visual demonstration of the word ‘agog’.

  Nevertheless there was no novelty in it for the first quarter of an hour. It was a brilliant piece of precis but it was still a plagiarised precis, a fact which, just at the right moment, Green himself acknowledged. There was, he said, a school of thought that a line had been written under the story of the Cambridge traitors, that we knew all we ever would know. Some experts still drivelled on about fifth, sixth, seventh men. Lord Rothschild had had to write to the Daily Telegraph to clear his name. Just because so many of the principals were homosexually inclined everyone went searching for more men. Nobody uttered those famous words: ‘Cherchez la femme.’

  The rest of the Green story was brand new and so red-hot that even now he wasn’t giving away every last detail. Ever since Burgess and Maclean had done their celebrated cross-Channel bunk in 1951 a whole host of official and unofficial investigators had been ferreting around the story to see how far the conspiracy extended and if possible to determine whether there had been a mastermind behind it. Now, as the result of many years of research, he, Arthur Green, was in a position to reveal that the whole plot was the work of one of the most famous of all Cambridge philosophers, a pioneer feminist whose name he was not prepared, even here among friends and colleagues, to reveal, until publication day itself.

  The reps might not have been able to work it out from the clues that followed but Monica could and did.

  ‘Daisy Butskell-Godunov,’ she scribbled on the fly-leaf of her Good Housekeeping Diary.

  Bognor nodded as if he had guessed as much all along.

  Daisy’s origins had always been mysterious – rather like those of her friend and contemporary Brendan Bracken. Somehow or other Green seemed to have got hold of some of her confidential papers, including diaries. He was fudging the story, trying to whet the reps’ appetites without running too many risks, so he was being vaguer than he would presumably be when it came to cold print. According to him Daisy had been born a Russian Princess in 1901 and sent to English boarding school in 1914. She was there when her family were wiped out three years later by the Bolsheviks.

  After that she had been passed around, like a parcel, among friends and distant relations but by the time she arrived in Cambridge just after the war she was quite independent. Formidably intelligent, stunningly beautiful, she knew everyone from Keynes and Wittgenstein to Noel Coward and Ivor Novello. Naturally her background gave her the reputation of being passionately anti-Communist. Indeed her name was linked – and not just intellectually – with that of Oswald Mosley but Green’s new discoveries among her papers revealed that this was a pose. She appeared to have contacts with exiled members of the revolutionary left from her earliest teens. In the twenties and thirties she made at least three clandestine trips to Soviet Russia where she almost certainly had a brief romantic liaison with Stalin himself. (Green was prepared to claim that she was the only woman who had had carnal knowledge of both Stalin and Churchill.)

  Although barred by sex from membership of the Apostles she was the nearest thing to an Honorary Female Member that that preposterous society admitted. She apparently got to know Philby through his father, St John Philby, the celebrated Arabist. From then on she was away. She recruited them; she ran them; and she recruited and ran literally hundreds of other bright young Cambridge traitors throughout her life. She was still Moscow’s most significant British subject when she died in 1967, victim of a never-explained hit-and-run motor accident outside her London flat in Dilke Street, Chelsea. She was laden with honours – an honorary fellowship of her college, a governorship of the BBC, a life peerage. There had never been a whisper of public suspicion; precious few in private.

  Green ended by saying that many of Daisy’s stooges were still in place. They were often in positions of importance and sensitivity. Cabinet. The Synod. The Committee of MCC. In the book he would be naming names.

  ‘Hmmm,’ said Bognor, as Green sat down to a silence which slowly turned into a thoughtful rather than rapturous applause. ‘Interesting.’

  ‘Very.’ Monica, if not quite agog, still looked distinctly thoughtful. ‘Do you believe it?’

  Bognor sighed. ‘It sounds a bit like a case of the factoids,’ he said.

  ‘But he’s treating it as real history,’ said Monica. ‘It’s not one of those “This-is-a-true-story-but-I-have-changed-one-or-two-details-and-called-it-a-novel-so-none-of-the-bastards-can-sue” books.’

  ‘What the BBC calls a “docu-drama”,’ said Bognor. ‘No, it sounds as if Arthur’s breaking new ground.’

  ‘And he’s got these papers. I wonder if they can prove they’re genuine.’

  Bognor laughed without a lot of humour. ‘They’ll wheel out some “expert” like poor Hugh Trevor-Roper,’ he said.

  ‘And then Daisy’s friends will roll out another expert who’ll say the opposite.’

  ‘All good for sales,’ said Bognor. ‘Nothing like “fake, says expert” to create interest in a new book.’

  ‘And what’s it all got to do with last night?’

  Bognor frowned. ‘Are we to assume the two of them had a rendezvous at eighteen Kensington Park Gardens?’

  ‘The Soviet Embassy?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘That’s obviously where Glatt saw them go in.’

  ‘My guess too. Now why would Green and Flange beat it straight to the Soviet Embassy as soon as Hemlock kicks the bucket?’

  ‘And why’, mused Monica, ‘should poor Audrey pass on the next morning?’

  ‘Coincidence has to be the most likely answer,’ said Bognor, ‘statistically speaking. I wonder if Green got his information from the Soviets?’

  The Winter Gardens were emptying now. Green had explained with a sorrowful smile that in view of the sensitive nature of his material he couldn’t entertain questions. The reps were scurrying off. It wasn’t opening time yet so any alcohol would have to be in the privacy of hotel rooms. Bognor guessed the score. Scotch from plastic toothmugs; wine from the box.

  ‘What’s The First Lady got to do with the murder? With the murders?’ Monica flipped her scarf over her shoulder.

  ‘Plural?’

  ‘I think so.’ Bognor stood. ‘I wish I was at home,’ he said. ‘I feel assailed – deaths, motives, opportunities, they do so pile in on one.’

  ‘Nature of the beast,’ said his wife. ‘It
’s ever thus. You know that. Call Everyman and say “Flee – all is discovered” and there wouldn’t be a man left in the country. They’d all be on the night mail with Burgess and Maclean. Mankind is a guilty secret waiting to be found out.’

  ‘What cynicism and profundity!’

  ‘Pouf!’ Monica darted an unexpected kiss on Bognor’s pink and stubbly cheek. ‘True, though,’ she said.

  They left the darkling Winter Gardens arms linked. A pink fairy light about to fuse winked from the string above the portico. The wind had dropped and a sea mist burgeoned.

  ‘I’d like a candy floss or a stick of Byfleet rock,’ said Bognor.

  ‘You’ve only just had a chocolate bun.’

  ‘I want to take away the taste.’

  They walked along the front.

  ‘Look!’ Bognor waved a hand into the damp grey yonder. A single illuminated shop-front shone out from an otherwise dark parade. ‘Marine Ice Cream Parlour. Prop. F. Mozzarella.’

  ‘It’s open,’ he said.

  ‘Must be a CIA front,’ said Monica. ‘No sane man would open an ice cream parlour at the seaside on a day like this.’

  ‘I wonder if they’d do a knickerbocker glory.’

  ‘You’re not serious.’

  ‘Never more so.’

  They paused for a moment in front of the window. There was a marvellously lurid display of sundaes in fussy glass dishes and bowls and flutes. They were like something from a Victorian doll’s house only life size. Peering over this and into the cafe Bognor saw gingham check tables at which no one sat, also a stout man in an apron. He was standing at the counter watching a small television. Presumably Prop. F. Mozzarella watching an Australian soap opera.

  As they entered, a bell over the door jangled, causing Mr Mozzarella to look up. He did not look very pleased to see them.

  ‘You are open?’ Monica spoke tentatively.

  Mr Mozzarella nodded, and indicated a table by the window.

  ‘I’d just like a cup of tea,’ said Monica. ‘My husband wants a knickerbocker glory.’

  Mr Mozzarella looked at Bognor. Monica looked at Simon. Simon grinned, shifted his weight from one foot to the other and rubbed the back of his neck. ‘Or a banana split if knickerbocker glory’s off,’ he said helpfully.

  ‘Knickerbocker glory is on if you want it.’

  ‘Terrific’

  They sat.

  ‘He was a bad man, Hemlock,’ said Monica, pushing the pepper shaker against the plastic tomato which contained ketchup. ‘Could he have been killed because of Green’s book?’

  Bognor picked at congealed ketchup with the prongs of his fork. ‘It seems to me that he wasn’t going to publish it.’

  ‘Why not? It’s a good story.’

  ‘If true.’

  ‘That never bothered him in the past. He never let the truth interfere with a good story.’

  ‘Maybe the Government had asked him not to,’ said Bognor. ‘Maybe they’d bribed him. An honour. He’d have liked a “K”. Sir Vernon would have appealed to him.’

  ‘Don’t spill the beans and you get a knighthood.’

  ‘Stranger things have happened.’

  ‘But Green could just have taken the book elsewhere.’

  Bognor smiled a superior smile. ‘Not if I know anything about the way Hemlock drafted his contracts. You’re thinking he might have offered it to Andover Strobe.’

  ‘It had crossed my mind,’ conceded Monica.

  ‘What I want to know’, said Bognor, ‘is why the Russian Embassy? If it was the Russian Embassy.’

  ‘Maybe it’s a Russian propaganda ploy.’

  ‘It would follow. The whole saga from Blunt onwards has always looked like a well orchestrated plot by Comrade General Philby if you ask me.’

  Mr Mozzarella had disappeared from view behind a curtain of beads. He now emerged bearing a tray with a black teapot, white cup and saucer and a dazzling multicoloured kaleidoscope of fruit and ice cream set in a sundae glass and topped with a miniature parasol. The shaft of this speared two maraschino cherries to a sphere of Cornish Dairy Cream sprinkled with chocolate chips and hundreds and thousands.

  ‘Oh, Simon,’ said Monica, ‘you’re disgusting.’

  As she said it the door jangled again and a small figure in a rakish sou’wester and Barbour half fell into the café together with a blast of damp Arctic air. The wind had freshened.

  ‘Thank God you’re here,’ said Dr Belgrave, wiping her eyes and starting to remove the coat. ‘I thought I must have lost you.’

  She stared at Bognor’s ice cream. ‘That bloody Flange wants a Condom Cook Book in aid of AIDSAID,’ she said. ‘That looks like the front cover. I’ll have a tea, please.’

  She blew on her hands, rubbing them together.

  ‘This Green book’s a bugger,’ she said, ‘no getting away from it. And I’m afraid it’s the key to the whole sordid business.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Bognor, delving into his knickerbocker glory with the long spoon provided by Mr Mozzarella. The length of the spoon made him think of supping with the devil and he gave Dr Belgrave a sharp, uncomfortable look. How sinister was she? She was bad looking certainly, but you couldn’t convict on appearance and some of the nicest people Bognor had ever known were perfectly hideous. Male mainly, it was true. Come to think of it he was no oil painting himself. The knickerbocker glory was what a certain class of gastronomic journalist called a ‘revelation’. ‘Sinful’, too, though that was a different school of gastro-journalism.

  ‘How do you mean?’ he asked. He had forgotten how much he liked maraschino cherries.

  ‘It must be why poor Vernon was murdered. Audrey, too.’

  Mr Mozzarella arrived with another cup and saucer.

  ‘When you want another pot just give us a shout, darling,’ he said to Dr Belgrave. He did not have an Italian accent.

  ‘Why should the Hemlocks be murdered on account of Green’s new book?’ Bognor decided, not for the first time, that obtuseness was the best tactic to employ. it’s a long story,’ said Dr Belgrave. She took her tea black and unsugared. ‘And one I hoped I’d never have to tell.’

  ‘I’m going to have to hear it, though,’ thought Bognor. Out loud he said, ‘Perhaps you’d better start at the beginning.’ ‘I first met Daisy at Girton,’ she said. ‘She really was rather wonderful. I think all my year were a little bit in love with her. It wasn’t just her looks or her brains, there was something you very seldom encounter in my experience – a vitality, an exuberance, an optimism. You felt when you were with Daisy that anything was possible. And with Daisy it damn near always was.’

  Dr Belgrave paused. She seemed distressed, on the verge of a self-revelation she knew that she would regret. Both Bognors smiled, seeking to encourage. ‘I was a star pupil,’ she said. ‘Teacher’s pet. She took me up. There was a villa in Fiesole one summer vac. A reading party. The year after, a lodge in the Highlands. Bloody rain. And Daisy liked to golf. It would have been purgatory if I hadn’t worshipped her.’

  Dr Belgrave sipped tea and snuffled.

  ‘Not to put too fine a point on it, I was Daisy’s consolation for the last ten years of her life. She supervised my PhD. She talked me into Harvard. “Whatever I had she gave me again.”’

  There was no doubting the tears in Dr Belgrave’s steely eyes.

  ‘I remember her doing Founder’s Day at school one year,’ said Monica. ‘She was amazingly thrilling.’

  Dr Belgrave smiled gratitude.

  ‘As you must have guessed by now,’ she went on, ‘Daisy left me her papers.’

  Bognor was nearing a glorious end. He scraped chilly syrup off the sides of his glass as sleet slid down the window pane.

  ‘With what object in view?’

  Dr Belgrave chose to ignore this.

  ‘I wanted to be a novelist,’ she said, ‘more than anything else. Daisy encouraged me, though I see now that she was misguided. I’ve burned them. You can’t cross Barbara Pym wit
h Henry Miller. At least I couldn’t. They were embarrassing. It was Daisy who introduced me to Vernon. He was just starting out as a publisher. It seems a bloody long time ago.’

  She rummaged in her satchel and pulled out a cigarette holder into which she screwed a Players Navy Cut sans filtre.

  ‘Vernon said they were promising and that I was a “born writer”. “Born bloody writer.” The novels would come in good time, he said. Creativity couldn’t be hurried. All that sort of crap. Meanwhile, he said, The British Approach to Sex would be a winner. I was broke, of course, and…oh, it was thirty years ago and the world was young and it seemed a good idea at the time and of course it made a small fortune. Made me a small fortune and Vernon, as ever, a rather larger one.’

  She laughed and the smoke streamed from both nostrils, mingling with the steam from her black tea.

  ‘You know how you get stuck in a relationship without ever quite realising that it’s happened. It was true of me and Daisy and it was true of me and Vernon. Don’t ask me to explain about me and bloody Vernon because it defies logic. A marriage of warped minds, perhaps. Maybe I’m unnaturally susceptible to Svengalis. I don’t know. It was a peculiar relationship but it was still a relationship.’

  ‘Binding?’ asked Monica.

  ‘Oh, binding, yes, very.’

  ‘What happened exactly?’ Bognor tried to sound gently probing.

  ‘After Daisy died I showed Vernon the papers. The diaries in particular.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I was distraught. I had to show them to someone. I know it may seem ridiculous but I trusted Vernon. He was my publisher. My friend.’

  ‘Did you show them to him as a publisher or a friend?’ Monica sounded ratty.

  ‘I didn’t discriminate in those days. It never occurred to me that he wasn’t both.’

  ‘And it was all there – Blunt, Philby, Burgess, Maclean? All the secrets spilled onto the pages of the diary?’