Brought to Book (The Simon Bognor Mysteries)

by Tim Heald

  It was impossible to hear voices. Impossible to hear anything above the sea and the engine. Borrowing Molly’s Chinon glasses again, he saw that they were definitely closing on the Dolores Ibarruri. The East German ship was indeed festooned with all manner of strange devices. As he watched, Bognor saw an officer on the bridge scanning the sea with binoculars. He had obviously seen them but something else seemed to be engaging his attention. Bognor followed his gaze and focused as hard as he could. No use. He could see nothing. The German, however, could.

  Then, as he watched, desperately straining to see through the weather and to remain more or less upright, there was a small eruption from the stern of the Dolores Ibarruri, a cotton wool pompom hung in the air, a thin trail of smoke sped upwards and then burst in a bright red star above the boat. Seconds later there was a muffled explosion from above and green smoke came eddying down to sea.

  ‘Very lights,’ said Bognor.

  Molly smiled and scribbled. ‘Named after an American naval officer called Edward Very who died just before the Great War,’ she said. ‘Ask me another.’

  ‘I’m going to have to stop them,’ said Bognor, feeling sicker than ever. ‘The bastards are defecting.’

  Monica was not sure about the Strobe gang.

  That Andover Strobe himself was one of the most successful of the new breed of British publishers was incontestable. No four-flusher he. His attitude to the product was robust, commercial and populist. He understood the business; he had no trace of sentiment; no hint of literary aspiration. He was ambitious – his enemies would say greedy – and he was a capitalist. If he kept on the right side of the law it was because he regarded this as only sensible, not because any moral issues were involved. At the Haven Monica had been impressed by his control. He cut an absurd figure in his spacey wheelchair and his garish outfit but he had authentic menace based on evident self-discipline. Now, however, he seemed to be losing touch with reality.

  ‘Rambo, crambo!’ he cried, as the firm’s Harrod-green Range Rover creamed towards Byfleet Pier, gears expertly crashed by Hastings. The wheelchair was fastened into the back by a custom-built magnetic locking device which still enabled Strobe to turn it hither and thither in order to get the best possible view. Monica sat on the floor while he kept the gold machine-gun trained on her navel. ‘Metal screeches against metal, Mrs Bognor,’ he said as Hastings double declutched, ‘as if each strip, each panel was fighting to survive the successive impacts of…I quote, I paraphrase…have you ever noticed how life so often imitates art but so rarely approximates to the prosody of the Megabuster? Do you read me, Mrs Bognor?’

  ‘I think,’ said Monica, struggling to maintain her grip on the side of the Range Rover and of reality, ‘that prosody means something else.’

  ‘Meaning, schmeaning, Mrs Bognor,’ said Strobe. ‘What is meaning compared with life?’

  The Range Rover took briefly to the pavement, narrowly missed a parked three-wheeler and a slow-moving pram, rose off a couple of wheels, clumped back to four-wheel contact. The tyres squawked. Monica would have done the same but was concerned to keep face. Strobe’s chair was obviously equipped with keen stabilisers.

  ‘The Japanese have a word for it,’ continued Strobe, ignoring the captive’s silence.

  If so he was unable to think of it, for he lapsed into introspective quiet.

  ‘Where the hell’s the boat?’ Hastings skidded the vehicle to a halt.

  ‘Hugh said end of pierr’ Glopff had obviously been told to economise with speech during moments of crisis.

  ‘Do we have a key?’

  The pier was bleak and shuttered. Rusting metal gates barred the entrance. They were padlocked.

  ‘Shit, no,’ said Glopff. She swung down from the front seat, paced over to the barrier, rattled it, kicked it, returned. ‘You’ll have to drive through it,’ she said.

  Monica had noted the Range Rover’s reinforced fenders. Now, turning her head she saw peeling paint, last year’s fairy lights, a decayed advertisement for afternoon tea dances at the end of the pier and another for Hot Buttered Toast and the Coffee Pots. She just had time to take in that it was orange and yellow with a photograph of a tall Caucasian male and a chorus line of scantily clad Filipino girls when the gears crashed again, Hastings engaged the most powerful he could find, slipped the clutch and charged. Seconds later there was a tearing splinter, a hardly perceptible jolt and the four of them were bowling along Byfleet Pier at around forty.

  Andover Strobe, cradling his little gun, began to croon Cole Porter: ‘Are you fond of swimming, dear? Kindly tell me, if so. Yes, I’m fond of swimming, dear, But in the morning, no.’

  A wave broke beneath the pier and spray dusted the windshield.

  Monica shivered.

  On the bridge of HMS Snapdragon Merlin Glatt and Lieutenant Tregarron both saw the red and green of the two flares. Tregarron made a terse signal to the engine room and ordered his number two to alter course to port. The Snapdragon’s head turned into the wind and she dipped into the waves like a prop forward barging in the line-out.

  Glatt raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Contact,’ he said, ‘earlier than I anticipated.’

  Tregarron grimaced.

  ‘We’re faster than we look, Mr Glatt,’ he said.

  ‘We’d better be, Tregarron,’ Glatt scowled. ‘If those Krauts are away and out of territorial waters before we get there I and my friends are going to be most unhappy.’

  Below decks on the Saucy Sue, Bognor and Molly Mortimer held a council of war, taking Dutch comfort from the remains of the rum.

  ‘They’ll be armed,’ said Molly, eyes wide.

  ‘I doubt it. Green is a wimp.’

  ‘But he thinks he’s Lance Remington. In which case he’s bound to be armed. And we know they have a Very pistol.’

  ‘Even if they’re armed they’d never shoot. Not at a person.’

  ‘Romany Flange might, she looks totally ruthless to me. And you think she killed Audrey Hemlock.’

  ‘I do?’

  ‘You do.’ Molly flung back rum. ‘I read you like a book, Simon. As you well know.’

  ‘Well, you read right this time.’

  Bognor wished the boat would stop moving. He looked out of the porthole with the Chinon glasses. The Dolores Ibarruri and the Saucy Sue were closing fast now. Only about a hundred yards separated them. Bognor could make out the stitching on the cable-knit sweaters of the crew. There were some decidedly thuggish-looking people on board. If he and Molly Mortimer were to make a move they would have to make it fast. As soon as they were in touch with the East Germans they would be outnumbered and outgunned. He wondered if Trevor kept a gun down here swilling around among the sea-water and slops and fishing tackle and string.

  ‘You’ll have to bluff,’ said Molly.

  ‘Bluff?’

  ‘If you don’t have a proper gun you’ll just have to pretend.’

  ‘They’ll never believe it.’

  ‘You’ve no alternative. It’s either that or they defect, taking the book with them.’

  Bognor watched the approaching Germans and pondered. Pondering time was limited. He lifted the glasses and stared at the taffrail. A stocky, rather familiar figure was leaning over the stern being sick over the ship’s name. Bognor turned away partly from disgust, partly because he did not wish to intrude into private suffering. His own stomach was registering disturbing symptoms as if in sympathy.

  Presently, however, he turned back, not knowing quite why. He was still wrestling with his plans. Was he about to go on deck and indulge in dangerous heroics? Or was he going to stay here and play safe? Left to his own devices he would have kept quiet but the presence of a woman, particularly a woman such as Molly Mortimer, did have a certain galvanising quality. He retrained his glasses on the sick person in the stern of the Rostock fishing boat. As he did he let out a little yelp of recognition.

  ‘Good grief!’ he exclaimed. ‘Dr Belgrave!’

  Parkinson wa
s too late to see the Very lights which were, in any case, too far out to sea to be visible to the naked eye.

  A quick courtesy call on the car radio to Bumstead told Bognor’s boss what he suspected. Bumstead was interrogating Milton Capstick and Danvers Warrington and showed every sign of charging one or other or possibly both with the murder of Vernon and Audrey Hemlock. Warrington had admitted being Audrey’s lover and the DCI seemed to regard this as conclusive evidence of the wine buffs unreliability. Capstick was clearly being bothersome and it sounded ominously as if Bumstead was going to charge him with obstructing the course of justice, pending something more serious.

  When Parkinson asked him if he had any clue about where the Bognors were Bumstead replied that they were ‘off his patch’ and that he had given Bognor ‘a flea in his ear’. Parkinson swore under his breath and remarked out loud that he supposed Bognor would therefore be ‘sick as a parrot’. Bumstead concurred, having, evidently, no ear for irony.

  ‘What about Strobe, Glopff and the butler?’ asked the Board of Trade mandarin.

  ‘Hot on their trail,’ replied the policeman. ‘I anticipate an arrest in the nearest possible future but at this moment in time I am not at liberty to divulge their precise whereabouts.’

  This time Parkinson could not forbear to swear out loud. He did so noisily and very profanely, causing Krichefski and Horowitz to exchange amused and irreverent glances.

  A quick visit to the Goose and Goblet however led them immediately to the harbour where in the snug of the Mermaid’s Tail the Board of Trade men swiftly established from a hirsute, peg-legged regular that the Saucy Sue had put to sea with a highly irregular human cargo. Parkinson briefly considered going in hot pursuit but thought better of it when he contemplated the choppy waters and even more so when the disabled salt vouchsafed the further information that a Harrod-green Range Rover had recently passed by at a rate of knots. Parkinson remembered that his wife’s collection of Great Romances of the Universe, published by the firm of Andover Strobe, was uniformly wrapped in what was described in the firm’s advertising literature as ‘the distinctive and prestigious olive livery of the world’s greatest publishing house’. Jamming his Homburg back on his head he made for the door. Moments later, at the pier, Krichefski let out a shout and pointed to the broken gates jangling in the gale. Horowitz swung the car into a screeching ninety-degree turn, grazed the jagged edges of metalwork and bombed towards the pierhead.

  The Battle of Byfleet was about to begin.

  Bognor had intended to approach with cat-like tread, taking his quarry unawares. The rising storm confounded this intention. One minute he was standing at the top of the companion way, clasping the little Chinon binoculars in the right-hand pocket of his Barbour where he and Molly Mortimer had convinced themselves that its snubby double barrel could do duty as a disguised Board of Trade special issue firearm – the next he was catapulted by a heavy wave, through the doors onto the deck, issuing forth with all the menace of a newly landed monster from the deep. As he crashed, he screamed.

  The sound was inarticulate but – even above the weather – audible. It was also alarming.

  Trevor was in the wheelhouse but Arthur Green and Romany Flange were both on deck holding on to the side of the vessel and staring across at the approaching Dolores Ibarruri. Hurtling through the door Bognor came to a stop some six feet from the pair of them. His right hand still clasped the gun-like shape in his macintosh pocket and despite a stagger and gasp he stayed upright. The spectacle of a stoutish, fortyish, middle-aged man, green of face and green of coat, pretending to be on the verge of serious shooty-bangs on the high seas might under normal circumstances have seemed preposterous or even laughable. But to Arthur and Romany, steeped in the fantasy world of Big Books, the sudden menace was authentic, even predictable. Others less professionally suggestible might have wondered why if Bognor had a gun, he was hiding it in his pocket. It was what one did in the street, certainly, but here, on the ocean wave?

  They froze.

  Bognor also had a spasm of silent indecision but was rescued by Molly Mortimer. She had been right behind him as he crashed through the doors and now she went swiftly to his side clutching a dirty crowbar she had picked up downstairs.

  ‘Do exactly as Mr Bognor says,’ she said. The gun is loaded and if I know him he won’t hesitate to use it.’

  She turned to the wheelhouse. ‘Trevor,’ she called, ‘our time is up! Back to port!’

  The German ship was closing fast.

  Bognor collected his thoughts. ‘Frankly,’ he said, ‘Her Majesty’s Board of Trade doesn’t care very much what happens to you two, but we’re not keen on the papers you’re carrying getting to Moscow – or even Rostock.’ He pointed at the expandable lightweight sac at Green’s feet. ‘Hand that over now. And no silly stuff.’

  Green bent down to pick it up. But even as he did so there was a sharp report from the Dolores Ibarruri, a coil of rope snaked across the water and a vicious barbed harpoon embedded itself firmly in the decking a couple of feet to their starboard.

  ‘Breeches-buoy,’ shouted Trevor. ‘Boarding party!’

  Bognor looked across at the enemy and saw that a group of men in woolly hats and white polo necks were doing intricate things with the rope at their end. One of them pointed his arms in their direction, there was a stab of fire, a staccato crackle and a flight of lead whined high above them through the rigging of the Saucy Sue. Another figure on the bridge of the ‘fishing boat’ addressed them through a sophisticated-looking megaphone. He did so in heavily accented language-school English and the sentiments were very similar to those expressed by the Literary Editor of the Globe to the publisher and her author.

  ‘Hello, Herr Bognor! We know you are on board. You are please advised not to trouble making be. We are aboard coming and we would like not to shooting with the weapons.’

  ‘Krautspeaking schweinhund!’ snapped Bognor, wondering if Captain W. E. Johns would have been a Big Book author or a Strobe man, ‘Trevor, can you cut that rope?’

  ‘Not bloody likely, mate,’ shouted Trevor. ‘No way I’m going to be aerated by a Commie goon with a high-speed shooter, know what I mean?’

  There was shooting on the pier as well.

  Halfway down, between Terry’s Jellied Eels and Frankie’s Fries, there was a double burst from either side of the Mozzarella Marine Ices kiosk. One took the offside front tyre and the other accounted for most of the windscreen, neatly bisecting the passengers and doing nothing worse than shower them with glass.

  Horowitz braked hard, skidded left and ended up sideways on to Gypsy Romano’s Fortune Telling Booth, Est. 1873, ‘The Future is Yours to Sea, to Sea’. The three of them piled out and hit the deck in the prescribed Board of Trade Special Investigations Department Training Manual style.

  ‘Armed publishers,’ said Parkinson, bitterly, ‘in this day and age, in Great Britain. It makes a mockery of everything I’ve tried to do in my career. Pen mightier than sword, rational civilised debate, intelligent communications between consenting adults, liberal consensus, tea and sandwiches at Number Ten, good God – is this what the world’s come to?’

  He raised his head and shouted towards the pierhead. ‘Strobe, we know you’re there, now for God’s sake come out like a rational human being and stop these ludicrous games. I’ll count to ten then I want you to wheel yourself out with your hands above your head. One…two…three…’

  On the count of five there was a shout which sounded like ‘Banzai!’, an object the size of a cricket ball sailed high to their left, bounced on some railings, ricocheted on the scaffolding below and behind them and exploded with a dull crump. A hole appeared in the surface of the pier and the firework smell of cordite hung in the air.

  ‘Ah well,’ said Parkinson, ‘at least that may attract some sort of attention.’

  It was nothing as elaborate as a breeches-buoy, just a sort of hook to keep the invaders from falling into the sea. As Bognor watched, a burly
bloke pushed off from the Dolores Ibarruri and started to make his way towards them. He had a rifle strapped to his back and a knife in his teeth. The knife was a dramatic gesture but not helpful since it presumably deprived him of the power of speech. Perhaps he did not speak English.

  Bognor had an idea.

  He passed Green’s case to Molly Mortimer. ‘See if you can find the Butskell-Godunov stuff,’ he said. She took the case and started to rummage. Looking across to the enemy ship Bognor saw that despite the choppiness and the heaving of the two boats Fritz was making surprisingly fast progress. Worse still, a couple of other Fritzes had swung out onto the rope behind him. Bognor called across to the leader of the advancing assault group.

  ‘Achtung! Achtung!’ he shouted. ‘Ich bin Simon Bognor von der Britisher Board of Trade. Halt!’

  To his considerable satisfaction he observed a definite pause in their progress. It was a brief pause, true, but they obviously recognised the voice of authority.

  ‘Ich have “Halt” er…gesagen,’ he bawled, Halt!’

  This time the pause was briefer.

  ‘Got it,’ said Molly, with an air of triumph. She produced what looked like a barrister’s brief – a great stack of foolscap tied together with pink ribbon. Also two five-and-a-half-inch floppy disks. ‘The disks say “First Lady”,’ she said.

  ‘Great,’ said Bognor. ‘Just hold them up so these chaps can see them and then if anyone makes a false move throw them overboard.’ He now turned his attentions to the interlopers. ‘Now listen to me, you men!’ he bawled. ‘These papers which my colleague has in her possession, these are the papers which your masters are after. If you allow these papers to fall into the sea your masters will be displeased. If I know anything about your part of the world they will have you taken out and shot. Bang bang, you’re dead!’