by Tim Heald
Murder at Moose Jaw
A Simon Bognor Mystery
Tim Heald
Contents
Prologue
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
Epilogue
Preview: Masterstroke
Prologue
THE PERSONAL RAILROAD CAR of Sir Roderick Farquhar was a glorious anachronism in a country otherwise short on such eccentricity. It had been rescued from the breaker’s yard by Sir Roderick himself and restored to its former luxury under his own scrupulous supervision. That night as it rattled out of Moose Jaw station en route for Swift Current, Medicine Hat and the Pacific coast it was the only antique in the train, a single memory of the old Canadian Pacific lingering on among the shiny new blue-and-gold coaches of VIA, the Canadian answer to Amtrak and British Rail. Along its varnished purple side the gilded legend ‘Spirit of Saskatoon’ glittered in the moonlight. Inside in the refurbished galley, jars of plovers’ eggs and pots of Oxford marmalade jostled the Gentleman’s Relish and bottles of lychees in kirsch. The wine cellar was stocked with port from the House of Warre and claret from Château Lafite, and in the dining saloon, in a drawer of the Georgian sideboard, there were two boxes of Cuban cigars, nine inches long, a present from the President.
Outside in the vast emptiness of the northern night, the silence was broken only by the steady thump and clatter of the train and the lonely cry of a loon. Inside the ticker-tape chattered spasmodically but did nothing to disturb its owner who had dined well. Being head of the Mammon Corporation had its compensations. Sir Roderick had been operated on for ulcers and had long ago discarded the last of his four wives, but he was rich and he was powerful. Mammoncorp was the largest conglomerate in the Dominion, the fifth-richest in North America and the tenth in the world. The Farquhar family fortunes, while below the billion mark, were, nonetheless, adequate and his annual income was at a level appropriate to his needs.
Tonight he had dined with his private secretary, Prideaux, who had then retired to his modest quarters in another part of the coach. Sir Roderick had made two telephone calls, one to Caracas and the other to Zurich, before putting down his Havana, replenishing his cognac and retiring for the night. As always he drew his own bath. This had become a ritual and no one else in the world, not wives, not mistresses, not manservants, had ever adequately managed it. He liked the water to be warm but not hot and he liked it to be of such a height that when his frame was immersed the surface came to a level no more than a centimetre below the auxiliary drain hole. The bath was an eighteenth-century Florentine tub rescued from a decaying palazzo five years before, not only commodious but a sound investment too. It was his habit to pour the water, place the latest copy of the Wall Street Journal, the Toronto Financial Post, the London Financial Times and the city pages of Die Welt and Asahi Shimbun on the walnut reading tray, add not more than three drops of his Balenciaga bath oil and stir it judiciously with the three remaining fingers of his left hand. Only then did he divest himself of his silk, monogrammed robe and enter the waters gingerly but with the keen anticipation of the genuine sybarite. He took his pleasures with the true seriousness of the convert, for he was a son of the manse and had been brought up strictly on porridge and corporal punishment.
This night between Moose Jaw and Medicine Hat his pervading sense of loneliness and failure was numbed as usual by the external warmth of the bath water and the internal warmth of the alcohol. The steam rising from the surface of the ocean between chin and toes was so fragrant that he breathed it in deeply, savouring the scent of pine needle and jasmine and feeling so contentedly sleepy in so peaceful a manner that no one would have believed that he was inhaling the odour of death.
Next morning at six, Amos Littlejohn, the burly Louisiana-born ex-heavyweight boxer who had been senior steward to the president of Mammoncorp for the past ten years, knocked on the door of his master’s bedroom. The silver tray which he carried so cleverly immobile in his left hand supported a goblet of fresh grapefruit juice and a pot of newly-brewed coffee made with a half-and-half mixture of Jamaican and Brazilian beans. There being no answer Littlejohn gently opened the door and raised the blind. When he had done so he turned to the bed and was sufficiently surprised by its pristine emptiness to spill two or three drops of grapefruit juice. The aroma of lavender bags reproached him and he hurried away in search of Prideaux.
The personal secretary was not amused at being woken so early but on hearing the reason he hurried from his closet and followed the steward to Sir Roderick’s boudoir. Once there he turned pale and dabbed limply at his brow.
‘The bathroom,’ he said. ‘We must try the bathroom.’
The bathroom door was not locked since Sir Roderick’s position guaranteed a privacy born of extreme fear. The two men entered apprehensively, to find Sir Roderick Farquhar reclining placidly in his ancient bathtub. The grubby water lapped the peak of his paunch in time to the motion of the wagon’s progress. The newspapers lay across the bath as neat and unsullied as the bedroom sheets. The face of Mammoncorp’s president wore a benign expression of happy repose that neither observer had ever previously witnessed.
He was, of course, extremely dead.
1
SIMON BOGNOR GAZED WANLY at the lake. It looked cold. Across its bleak, grey surface a tall unwieldy ferryboat was churning towards the ring of islands which shielded the harbour from the worst of the storm. On a clear summer’s day, Bognor knew, you could see the spray from Niagara Falls, simply by peering hard from the twenty-fifth floor of any hotel in town. In winter you were lucky to see beyond the end of your nose. He rubbed his stomach reflectively and put a piece of croissant in his mouth. The room was warm. Hot indeed. Despite the arctic outside, it was possible for a man to stand stripped to the waist wearing only a pair of striped cotton pyjama trousers knotted nonchalantly below the navel with a bow. Bognor knew a shop near Jermyn Street in London where they had not yet discovered the elastic waistband. He sighed. He had no overcoat. It never snowed in November. He had rung the High Commission in London before leaving, spoken to the Minister for Public Affairs no less.
‘Never snows in Toronto before December,’ he had said. ‘Besides, Canada’s centrally heated. And you don’t have to walk anywhere.’
Bognor in early middle age was not a pretty sight. His hair was going fast and his waist, never a dominant feature, had finally disappeared. His complexion was unclear and he had more than one chin. He buttered another piece of croissant. The trouble with this sort of place, he thought to himself, was that they never gave you enough bloody butter. It came in a plastic capsule designed to appeal only to those whose life was dominated by their cholesterol count. He thought of ringing room service for more but decided against. He would have a yoghurt shake for lunch. There was a place in the depths of the Sheraton Center where they did an apple-blossom yoghurt shake unlike anything he had ever tasted.
He had been here before. Not many months earlier there had been an untidy business involving a colleague in the Toronto consulate whose body had been discovered deep-frozen by a cross-country skier in a conservation area a few miles to the north of the city. For reasons too eccentric to be accurately described as reasons, Bognor had suspected Sir Roderick Farquhar of smuggling a new and powerful form of LSD across the Atlantic in jars of Gentleman’s Relish. In this he had been mistaken. It had been the work of Farquhar’s personal assistant and neithe
r the Canadian nor the British Government had been amused by Bognor’s aspersions. Farquhar was too significant to be messed around by a middle-rank investigator from the British Board of Trade. The RCMP, however, had belatedly come round to his point of view. Bognor’s intervention had thrown up a lot of dust and some of it had been gathering on the Mounties’ files. Farquhar, it transpired, had a past. The files pointed to pre-war Latvia and a sinister accommodation with pro-Nazi elements. Later there had been an undoubted involvement in the Viennese black market, prostitution in Batista’s Cuba and regular Paraguayan business trips which had continued until the year of his death. Before he arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, one autumn morning in 1951, Farquhar had had at least five names. Not one of them was Farquhar.
Bognor yawned. As a result of all this he was held in a certain awe by the men of the Mounties, besides which he was the Board of Trade’s expert on Canadian affairs. He had only been in Canada for six weeks on the Gentleman’s Relish case but that was at least five weeks longer than anyone else in the board’s offices in Whitehall and it gave him a reputation. He did not discourage this. He was not good at his job and he was therefore forced to grab at anything which could convince his colleagues to the contrary. Accordingly he made a point of studying the hockey results in the small print of his Daily Telegraph. He would then irritate everyone by remarking from time to time, ‘Leafs shut out the Sabres yesterday’ or ‘Lafleur scored three Wednesday’ or ‘Seems Orr’s knee broke down again’. All of which meant nothing at all at the Board of Trade, and precious little to Bognor. It did, on the other hand, impress them, however marginally. Like most Englishmen, they knew very little about Canada and were not eager to know more.
Bognor finished the croissants and put on yesterday’s shirt and a clean tie. He resented laundry bills, regarding them as needlessly expensive. At home his washing was done by his new bride, Monica. New bride, old girlfriend. She had been part of his furniture for as long as he could remember. They had finally married for reasons of which neither was entirely sure. It was something to do with feeling too old to live in sin. Also they both, though neither had admitted it, felt a vague desire to be unfaithful and this was easier, and safer, within wedlock than without. Negative reasons, Bognor conceded, but then he had seldom done anything for positive ones. They had married at Chelsea Registry Office on a sodden morning six weeks ago. Parkinson, his boss, had been best man, held the ring, brought along a brace of red carnations and taken them to lunch at Santa Croce in Cheyne Walk by the Thames. They had become euphoric on champagne and lasagne verde.
‘O tempora! O mores!’ he muttered, fumbling with a knot of his tie. Any semblance of control over his life seemed to have gone long ago. Ever since that terrible moment at Oxford when he had fatuously been deflected from his decent, ordinary, humble ambition to become a bureaucrat. He would have been an admirable civil servant. He was designed for indecision, for referring matters to colleagues and committees, initialling reports without comment. He could in time have become a master of the art of office filibuster, of saying nothing, importantly. He might have achieved a minor medal. Or more. Become Sir Simon. Something vital but unspecified in the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, or Employment. Instead he had listened to the man at the Appointments Bureau and ended up in a branch of what was laughingly called ‘Intelligence’, a department cloaked in the half-baked pseudo-secrecy of a basement office in the Board of Trade. All cloak and no dagger. Codes, ciphers and, over the years, a half dozen or so bizarre assignments that had started tamely and ended … distressingly.
He put on his jacket and glanced at the front page of the Globe and Mail. The main story appeared to be about a committee appointed by the Ontario government to investigate traffic pollution. They had immediately gone to investigate traffic pollution in the Bahamas. The Globe smelt corruption. Alongside the piece there was an account of a boat trip up the Yangtse by the Peking correspondent. Bognor had noticed on his previous visit that the Globe had little time for abroad in general but made up for it by keeping a man in China. He supposed that this was because China was the only place on earth where there was never any news—or if there was, no one was allowed to report it.
The phone rang—a soft, cat-like sound.
‘Bognor,’ he said, briskly.
‘Hi, Si. Good to have you back. It’s Pete Smith. RCMP. We met on the last Mammon case. Do you have a moment?’
‘Yes. Of course.’ Bognor swore to himself. Of course he had a bloody moment. More like several moments. All the time in the world.
‘Shall I come round?’
‘Up to you. I could meet you somewhere. I ought to buy some boots, and a hat. I was caught unawares.’
‘Canada’s kinda cold in winter, Simon.’
‘I heard. Your men in London didn’t seem to think it was winter, yet. If I go and buy something woolly I can meet you afterwards.’
‘OK, Simon. You can buy your gear at Simpsons, then we can meet on the roof.’
‘The roof?’
‘Sure. There’s a coffee shop up there. Haven’t been for years, but I guess they’ll fix coffee.’
‘Right,’ said Bognor. ‘Shall we say an hour, then? I’ll go up to the coffee shop and ask for you. And if you don’t recognize me I’ll be the one in the new boots.’
He could charge the boots to expenses. There would be a row with Parkinson but he would get away with it in the end. Now that Parkinson had moved up a rung or two he was magnanimous. He had a bigger office and more pay and sometimes the exasperation with which he regarded his subordinate was tinged with affection. Or so it seemed.
Outside in the street the force of the wind took him by surprise. It was snowing in what was locally known as ‘a flurry’ and it ripped into his face on gusts of urban gale frozen by its long passage east across the prairies. Or south across the frozen north. He wasn’t sure. Geography had never been one of his strong points. Wherever it came from, this was not the sort of snow he was used to. His snow was a thin British drizzle that turned to slush the second it hit the ground or, just occasionally, left a film of white dust redolent of Dickensian Christmas cards. This snow was not at all the same. It stung. It came at you from all sides and even when it should have been lying serenely in your path it leaped up and hit you amidships. Looking about him he realized that everyone else was dressed for it. Their lower legs were encased in galoshes and ‘fun-fur’ boots that looked as if they had been cut from a living Yorkshire terrier. Their hands were mittened and their heads protected by long scarves and fur hats, tea-cosey-shaped woollen things and balaclavas, their bodies by melodramatic parkas and eiderdown-filled great-coats guaranteed to keep you warm in a temperature of hundreds of degrees below zero. By the time he reached the main railway station he was beginning to lose feeling in the tip of his nose and fingers. Somewhere he had read that a man’s lungs could freeze in this sort of weather and then explode like burst water pipes when they thawed out. It was with enormous relief that he stumbled into the womb-like welcome of a high brass and glass structure belonging to one of the many banks that lined Bay Street.
‘By god!’ he gasped, breathing heavily and rubbing his hands between his knees to get the circulation going, ‘Bloody Arctic!’ It had now become incredibly hot. With a fine disregard for the energy crisis the bank appeared to be blowing hot air around its building, as if it were trying to cultivate cacti. It was a tactic calculated to bring on pneumonia in any normal man and Bognor knew it. He feared he was suffering from terminal hypochondria and that this was likely to precipitate a fatal attack. He was so preoccupied with the tingling in his fingers that he didn’t notice the girl at first. His eyes were watering, blurring the passers-by as they hurried down the escalators into the bowels of the building.
‘Mr Bognor.’ The girl seemed solicitous. She was very small, not more than about five foot two, swathed in a light brown fur which Bognor judged to be synthetic. Her boots were shiny brown and she had on a dark blue beret, pulled
down over the ears. Though none of her hair was showing she looked dark, almost olive-skinned. Her eyes were a light translucent blue and she wore very little make-up.
‘Mr Bognor,’ she repeated. ‘Are you all right?’ She spoke with the distinctive accent of the Quebecois, a sound which was to French as American is to English. He felt flattered by this unexpected attention. He had always found Canadians unforthcoming, as anxious about social intercourse as the English were supposed to be. Torontonians most of all. Even they admitted to being in the crude vernacular of the place ‘tight-arsed’.
‘How did you know who I was?’ asked Bognor, who rather prided himself on his chameleon-like anonymity, his effortless ability to blend into the surroundings. He had thought he was looking rather Canadian today.
‘It’s not important,’ she said. ‘Let’s just say I was given a description, also a photograph.’
‘But you’re not a Mountie?’
‘No, of course not. Quite different. But we too have ways of finding things out. The description was very accurate. But it’s not important, we’re wasting time.’
‘Oh,’ said Bognor.
‘You must buy a coat,’ said the girl, ‘or you will freeze. You English are crazy.’
‘Not at all,’ said Bognor. ‘Pas du tout. I was on my way to buy a coat. I left mine behind. Silly of me. I simply hadn’t realized …’
She cut him short impatiently. ‘We must talk,’ she said. ‘It’s very important.’
‘We are talking,’ he said, pinching his nose, to clear the brain. ‘But how did you know who I was?’
‘That doesn’t matter.’
‘Oh, but it does.’ Bognor’s lucidity was returning. ‘You knew my name. We haven’t met.’ He peered hard into the face, pert and gamine, tried to fathom the piercing eyes. ‘Have we?’
‘We have friends in the RCMP. Your photo is in our files after the affair of the Gentleman’s Relish,’ she said, glancing about her. ‘We must hurry. They may be watching. I must go now. We will see you tonight. Take this, and au revoir.’