by Tim Heald
He paused, pleased to note that they too had paused again. But the pause was his undoing. By facing out to sea he had removed his attention from Green and Flange. By holding up the Butskell-Godunov papers Molly had been forced to lay down her crowbar. Thus they were vulnerable. Also the sight of his Biggest Book and its source material about to go overboard and be lost to himself and to posterity aroused all the dormant Lance Remington in the wimpish author.
Arthur Green launched himself on Simon Bognor.
Romany Flange thrust herself at Molly Mortimer.
The four of them went down in a heap.
The melee lasted only a moment and was predictably inconclusive. Bognor had copped out of the last Board of Trade Refresher Course in Unarmed Combat run by ex-Sergeant-Major McKillop of the Scots Guards. Unarmed Combat had never been one of his skills, anyway. Nor Arthur Green’s. The women were more formidable but their long dangerous nails and their long clutchable hair cancelled themselves out. Oddly, the only casualty was Captain Trevor who decided he had better join in, tripped over an ill-coiled rope by the door of the wheelhouse, slipped and fell, hitting his head on the corner of a lobster pot which knocked him out cold.
This shocked the other four but not as much as the fate of the papers. The two disks got swept into a gutter of bilgewater which must have rendered them useless, though someone as efficient as Green would, Bognor presumed, have made backup disks. But the papers, the precious papers, lost their pink binding and started to flutter hither and yon. As soon as this happened all four protagonists forgot their enmity and started trying to gather them up, but the harder they tried the more they fell about and bumped into each other, and the more scattered and bedraggled and lost the papers became.
In the few seconds that this fracas lasted, the men from the Dolores Ibarruri made no further progress but stayed swaying on their ropes watching for the outcome, hypnotised by the oddity of the encounter. Then, just when they might have been on the move again, there was a sound of further gunfire. This was a different gunfire – not the ratatatat of kettle-drum machine-gun fire but the more sonorous boom of something heavier. An old three- or four-inch gun, Bognor guessed. And then a shell splashed into the water ahead of the Dolores Ibarruri and there was an underwater explosion. It was all oddly like an old black-and-white war movie except that the monochrome sea and spray made it real and frightening. There was another boom and another splash and this time the shell fell astern so that the Dolores Ibarruri was bracketed and the men swaying on their ropes hesitated for a moment, and then a figure appeared on the bridge in a cap with gold braid and he shouted out words in German of which Bognor could just catch ‘Achtung.’ and ‘Schnell!’ and the men started to positively scamper back to their ship, hand over hand.
‘The cavalry!’ said Bognor. He took the binoculars out of his pocket, ignored the furious expressions on the faces of Flange and Green, scanned the horizon, and found the squat, grey features of HMS Snapdragon bearing down on them from the south-east.
‘Royal Navy,’ he said, with an air of authority, as the German boat cast off the harpoon line and let it splash into the sea. Bognor switched his gaze back to the Dolores Ibarruri. There was much activity. The captain, if captain it was, was looking thunderous on the bridge. Astern, Bognor saw Dr Belgrave, seemingly recovered from her sea-sickness. She too had a pair of field-glasses and was studying the Saucy Sue as intently as Bognor was studying the fishing boat from Rostock. Bognor screwed his eyes up to the lens and concentrated extra hard. There was no mistaking her. She was the same person that had poured out her life story only yesterday in the Marine Ice Cream Parlour on the front at Byfleet-next-the-Sea.
Seeing him watch her, the Doctor lowered her glasses and waved, twice slowly. Then as the Dolores Ibarruri turned away and gathered pace, she blew a kiss. Bognor, mystified, blew one back.
Molly Mortimer looked at him oddly. ‘What on earth are you doing?’ she asked.
Bognor thought for a moment and decided that she had quite enough of a story for her paper already.
‘Just waving and smiling,’ he said. ‘It’s what one does when one’s feeling a bit smug and superior but not quite sure why. Read the latest Royal Family Bedside Book and you’ll see what I mean.’
The Saucy Sue lurched and shipped a cold douche of wave. The skipper stirred on the deck but did not wake.
‘OK, superman,’ said Molly Mortimer, ‘now perhaps you’ll take us all back to port.’
Bognor, who couldn’t tell a sheepshank from a round turn and two half-hitches, had no idea how to scandalise the yards, and thought a binnacle was another name for a barnacle, was not the man to take the Saucy Sue and her passengers home through the storms and currents of Byfleet Bay. Such a man, however, was near at hand and such a man, of course, was Glatt. Glatt, starved of real action, longing to have boarded the Dolores Ibarruri and to have performed some man-to-man heroics possibly involving the use or at least the threat of his Navajo knife, was delighted to be able to climb aboard the Saucy Sue using the same Tarzan technique as the East Germans.
If he was discomfited by Bognor’s presence on board he did not admit it, indeed took mild satisfaction from Simon’s obvious lack of real mannishness. He was more put out to find Molly Mortimer, not because she was ‘press’ but because she had apparently been patronising about last year’s Collected Glatt. ‘A fearful case of de haul en bas,’ he said, ‘and God knows what in the world you have to be patronising about.’
Molly, knowing that she had the most tremendous scoop, was in no mood for such gripes. ‘You were very lucky to be reviewed at all,’ she said, as Glatt spun the wheel with one hand, ‘and if you’re not careful I shall be perfectly beastly about The Bestiary.’
‘I never read reviews anyway,’ said Glatt, ‘but one’s relations become easily upset. I have aunts who read the Globe.’
As they neared the shore all six – including the reviving Trevor – were aware of a commotion around the pier Puffs of smoke, crackles and bangs, a highly amplified voice hectoring…
‘Aha!’ said Glatt. ‘Could this be the rest of the American contingent? The Strobe faction? Our people apprehended a Jetfoil earlier which was on its way to an RV somewhere or other we couldn’t quite make out.’
Bognor seldom thought of himself as psychic but suddenly he felt a stomach churning which had nothing to do with wind or weather.
‘My God!’ he said. ‘I have a hideous feeling my wife may have missed her train.’
It had been a bad few hours for Monica, Mrs Bognor.
Ugly moment the first was when no transport materialised at the pierhead.
Ugly moment the second was when Parkinson’s car came steaming towards them blocking the only exit.
The only way out was by sea.
Strobe’s eyes were like dairy delight Catherine wheels; Hastings seemed dangerously taut; only Marlene Glopff retained the high-gloss cool of the true professional.
‘Six thirty-three in Langley,’ she said, glancing at her watch. ‘Bad time. It’s when they change shifts. Any case, my guess is that they’ve written us off. Deny all knowledge, dammit.’
‘They can’t do that,’ said Strobe.
‘Sure can,’ said Marlene, flexing a pectoral.
‘You mean the boat’s not coming?’ said Hastings.
‘I mean just that.’
Glopff and Hastings took up positions either side of the ice cream kiosk and exchanged occasional desultory fire with the police sharpshooters who had arrived soon after the grenade went off. Bumstead had taken control of the operation, immediately banishing Parkinson and his team to the front and maintaining a bombastic harangue through his loudspeaker. Strobe and Monica remained in the kiosk. They had run out of conversation.
After a while Glopff came in. ‘Our hostage is the only chance,’ she said, glancing malice at Monica. ‘She has to work for us. Otherwise we might as well kill her right now.’
‘How?’ asked Strobe, fingering the trigger of
his gun.
Glopff bent low over the wheelchair and whispered.
Presently Strobe began to smile.
Not a pretty sight.
Both Glatt and Bognor scanned the pier with their binoculars. Trevor, miraculously restored, was at the wheel.
‘Good heavens,’ said Merlin Glatt, presently, ‘I do believe I see your wife.’
‘You what?’ Bognor felt worse than ever. Glatt’s glasses were more powerful than his.
‘Do you see that sleeping-bag shape hanging from the boom? About six feet above sea level.’
Bognor saw what he meant. The little Chinon glasses showed no more than a canvas body bag, blurred at this range, swinging to and fro above the waves that broke against the extremity of the pier.
Glatt handed Bognor his Zeiss glasses without a word.
It was true. The Strobe gang had hung what did indeed look like an army surplus sleeping bag from a boom which protruded from the pier. The draw string was pulled quite tight at the top. It did not, for the most part, look like a body except that at the top there was a human head, white, drawn, still alive and, magnified through the glasses, unmistakably his Monica’s.
‘Jesus!’ said Bognor.
‘Swine!’ said Glatt, nostrils flared, the fine line of high cheekbone tight against the skin. His mouth was set in a thin line. ‘She’s their only hope. One false move by that oaf Bumstead and they’ll cut that rope and let her drown.’
It was true. A dud grenade with a paper stuck to it had announced the fact to the besieging policemen not five minutes before. If safe passage was not arranged within the hour Monica would be cut from her gibbet and sent to a watery grave. Any attempt to storm the ice cream kiosk and then, too, Marlene or Hastings would cut the rope which was all that now bound Mrs Bognor to this earth.
There was a strange glint in the poet’s eye.
‘War, war is still the cry,’ he murmured, ‘war even to the knife.’ He looked back to the skipper. ‘Full steam ahead, Trevor, and swing round as close as you dare.’ Saying which he pulled the Navajo knife from his boot and pressed the razor-sharp metal to his thumb so that a little trickle of blood oozed out. ‘Faith with the blade,’ he said, in Gurkhali.
It did not go entirely according to plan. The Saucy Sue was a cumbersome tub; Trevor was exhausted and not entirely competent at the best of times; it was still rough, even in these relatively sheltered waters. As they neared the end of the pier Trevor brought the bows round so that Glatt standing at the very edge of the deck was almost directly under the body bag. An amazing leap, worthy of the line-out jumper he had once been, a flash of the snickersnee and the rope was severed.
With terrifying speed Bognor’s wife fell through the air and into the waiting arms of her husband and the author Green.
She was alive.
‘Darling!’ she said.
‘Hello!’ he said.
And then, as Trevor went about, the side of the Saucy Sue was caught by a strong wave. The Saucy Sue though old and ugly was strong and serviceable. Byfleet Pier was old and ugly too, but not as strong.
There was a splintering crash. The old timbers cracked, buckled, started to collapse. Trevor revved and revved. The little boat tugged away from the ailing pier. And slowly, slowly, that pride of the Edwardian seaside began to give way and slide with a heartstopping inexorability into the angry waters of the bay. The Saucy Sue was not twenty yards away but moving as fast as wind and current would allow when there was a massive explosion. And another. And another.
When the smoke cleared, Mr Mozzarella’s ice cream kiosk was no more. Nor the end of the pier. Nor Andover Strobe. Nor Marlene Glopff. Nor even the butler.
The only sign that they had been there was a state-of-the-art wheelchair, bobbing in the briny, borne up on its self-inflating, supposedly life-saving buoyancy tanks.
But empty.
EIGHT
‘I DON’T FANCY A long post-mortem,’ said Monica, sipping vintage Clicquot at Boris, their new favourite restaurant, very very much later. They had both undergone hours of exceedingly tiresome debrief from Five, Six, BOT (SID), the Cabinet Office, Parkinson, Bumstead, Glatt and others too numerous to mention.
‘You know, of course, that poor Audrey wans’t murdered, after all.’ Bognor sipped too and signalled to the waiter for another half. ‘People like Bumstead and even Glatt are so ready to jump to obvious conclusions. Their imaginations get over-heated. They can’t admit the possibility of accidental death, coincidence, the everyday currency of everyday life. Everything has to be murder and conspiracy and things that go bump in the night. If only they’d bothered to wait for the postmortem and ask a few intelligent questions.’
‘What happened?’
‘Heart attack. She’d obviously had a steamy night with old Warrington – as suggested by the strand of yellow stocking. Must have been, let’s say, excited, by Hemlock’s death. Then Romany came in and started creating hell and the whole thing was too much for the ticker. Hardly surprising. How are you feeling, by the way?’
‘Tired.’ Monica put out a hand and stroked her husband’s frayed cuff. ‘And Hemlock himself?’
‘Ah,’ said Bognor, ‘there you have me. And them. Motives everywhere and not a bit of proof. But that’s publishing, I suppose. Let’s go and eat.’
A week later a letter with a Cyrillic script postmark arrived chez Bognor.
‘Dear Simon (if I may),
A word of apology. It was smart of Glatt to insert my obit, in The Times, Telegraph, etc. – though I could tell that clever Massingberd boy smelt a rat. I was sorry to see “Daisy’s Diary” scattered on the ocean deep. All my own work as you must have guessed by now and I’m sorry I pretended otherwise. Dear Daisy was far too scatterbrained to keep a proper diary so it seemed reasonable to invent one. And I’m glad your friend Miss Mortimer was able to spin such a yarn from the whole saga. On the other hand I was sorry to have to deceive you. You have such a nice trusting face. Far too nice to be doing the job you do!
‘You presumably realise that I was responsible for squashing poor Vernon in the basement. Nothing particularly personal but my control here in Moscow had decided it was time for me to get things moving and killing Vernon seemed an agreeably dramatic way to set about it. My masters thought that you, Glatt and possibly A. N. Other had rumbled me and it was time to pull me in. Now I’m not so sure.
‘I was amused too to read the Literary Editor’s exclusive in the Globe. “D” Notices and Official Secrets Act invoked, I assume? It made tremendously funny reading but I don’t imagine many of her readers could have made head or tail of it. “Publisher perishes in end of pier show!” Honestly! My regular British press reading is now confined to the Guardian Weekly and I can’t say I miss the tabloids. On the other hand it must be said that Pravda lacks a certain dash!
‘Quite apart from not getting Daisy’s diary out I was sorry about the other side of the swap. Presumably your interrogators have done a proper job on Flange and Green. Such a greedy girl! She fell for the Gorbachev File hook, line and sinker. Him being Anastasia’s illegitimate grandson, Andropov alive and rather unwell in a Siberian psychiatric ward, the wife’s little dalliance with George Schultz…the lot. If you’re interested in trading something else do let me know. The Bishop of Durham perhaps?
‘If you’re ever this way do spend a weekend at the dacha. Kim will give you directions. Or young Martin W. Such a bright boy!
‘You must admit the people on this side of the curtain have a much more vivid imagination than the West credits them with. Mama always said so and even if she was scatty she was blessed with insights not vouchsafed to the rest of us.
‘In a Big Book I suppose I’d have been called a sleeper but I always felt so wide awake. Enjoyed every moment of it. Making trouble is so agreeable, don’t you think, and with the Bumsteads of this world ever with us, so terribly easy. Don’t you think?
‘Take care. And if you ever feel like a change of scenery you know what
to do. ‘Yours ever, Ann Belgrave (nee Butskell-Godunov)’
Six months later Parkinson passed over a trade paper clipping:
‘The Trustees of the Flange Institution have announced the most valuable Literary Prize yet. The £50,000 annual Hemlock-Strobe Award in memory of Britain’s biggest publishers is to go to the Biggest Book of the Year. The judges are Miss Romany Flange; the poet Mr Merlin Glatt; the novelist Mr Arthur Green; and the biographer Miss Miranda Howard.’
Underneath, Parkinson had scrawled, ‘Am prepared to nominate your history of the Board’s Special Investigations Department. Should I live so long. Yrs P.’
Bognor barged straight in through his chiefs famous open door.
‘Dammit,’ he said, tight-lipped. ‘It’s not a joking matter. Flange and Green are as traitorous as Burgess and Maclean They should be put on trial. If they’re not I shall reveal all to Chapman Pincher. I’ll go to Australia and find a publisher.’
Parkinson shook his head sadly.
‘We don’t hang, draw and quarter any more, dear boy,’ he said. ‘Traitor’s Gate’s a tourist attraction – or hadn’t you noticed? We’ve got a lot more sophisticated now. The minute we discover a traitor in our midst we load them with honours and laud them with praise. It’s policy. Ever since that old queen who looked after the Queen’s pictures.’
Bognor shook his head, disbelief battling with rage. ‘You people,’ he said, ‘would have given Judas a life peerage and made Lord Haw-Haw President of the MCC
Parkinson nodded. ‘Probably,’ he said. ‘It’s called Blunt’s Law.’
Turn the page to continue reading from the Simon Bognor Mysteries
PROLOGUE
‘FELLOW MEMBERS OF THE Scarpington Artisans’ Lodge, Your Graces, My Lord, ladies and gentlemen …’ Reg Brackett, MBE (for community services), picked nervously at his chain of office and flashed his dentures at the assembled company. One hundred and seventy-three souls were crammed into the King Alfred the Great Banqueting Room at the three-star Talbot Hotel, flagship of the Jolly Trencherman chain, owned by Scarpington’s most successful son, Sir Seymour Puce, MP for the city, who was seated on the left of the Countess of Scarpington herself. Black-tied Artisans and their wives were augmented by the great and good of Scarpington and District. The Earl of Scarpington, Grand Patron of the Lodge, was guest of honour and would speak next. The Bishop of Scarpington had said the traditional Artisans’ Grace (‘For these thy gifts, the fruits of thy mercy and of our dutiful toil and labour, we thank thee, Lord’) and they had all scoffed their way through the Fruit Cocktail Artisan, the Baron of Beef Scarpington and the Coupe Talbot.