Murder at Moose Jaw (The Simon Bognor Mysteries)

by Tim Heald

  ‘I still think this is silly,’ said Monica for the tenth time that morning. Bognor sat in the passenger seat of the cumbersome hired Ford, his crutches stowed in the back. ‘Shouldn’t we have said we were coming?’

  ‘He’d have refused to see us.’

  ‘Quite right. Then we couldn’t have gone.’

  ‘Oh, Monica,’ said Bognor, ‘I love you dearly, but I do wish you’d see my point of view.’

  ‘It’s not a point of view,’ she replied with asperity. ‘It’s a feeling in your bones. Or,’ she stabbed at the accelerator pedal, ‘more likely in your gut. What are you going to say when we get there?’

  ‘That we just happened to be passing by.’

  ‘On our way from Toronto to the Arctic Circle. Just a little routine jaunt. Ha bloody ha! Do be your age. You don’t expect him to believe it, do you?’

  ‘No, but one has to say something. It’s merely a convention.’

  The snow had melted several days ago and the world was dull grey as they turned off the highway and took the lanes to Farquhar Farms Inc. The country was gently undulating, thinly populated, the only buildings being huge Ontario barns, neat wooden farmhouses and the occasional white clapboard church with a tiny tower and belfry. ‘This should be it,’ said Bognor as they came on newly painted white fencing enclosing fields of lawnlike grass. One or two shining horses grazed gently. In the field nearest them a stallion was charging at the rails, halting just short of them, pawing the ground then turning to gallop to the other end of the field, flicking its heels and tossing its head as it went. Half a mile farther on they came to a tarmac drive which led between an avenue of conifers to a large colonial mansion with high columns supporting a central arch. The Canadian flag drooped from a pole above the front door. Monica slowed the car to walking pace.

  ‘Yes?’ she enquired.

  ‘Yes, please,’ he said.

  ‘On your head then,’ and she turned and drove slowly over the ‘sleeping policemen’, the tarmac bumps in the road designed to slow the reckless driver. Halfway along the drive Bognor called to her to stop for a second. On a short stretch of railway line stood a highly polished purple wagon-lit with a golden legend inscribed on its side: ‘Spirit of Saskatoon’.

  ‘Touch morbid,’ said Bognor. ‘He met his end in that thing.’

  ‘Not still in there, is he?’ asked his wife, regarding the sleeping car dubiously.

  ‘What, stuffed, I suppose?’

  ‘Well. It would make an imposing mausoleum,’ she said. ‘Not quite Castle Howard but with a touch of the requisite eccentricity.’

  ‘OK.’ Bognor nodded towards the house. ‘Let’s see if His Nibs is in. We can always ask for a guided tour. I must say, I wasn’t expecting it here.’

  They parked by the front door, which opened as they stopped to reveal a butler in short black coat, striped trousers and a grey silk tie. He appeared to be the genuine article since he spoke in the scrupulously well modulated tones of the upper echelons of the servants’ hall. He wanted, he said, to know if he could be of any assistance. Bognor, still not used to his crutches, hovered uncertainly in the driveway while Monica fished a visiting card from her husband’s inside breast pocket.

  The butler took it, examined it with a butler’s patronizing air, and disappeared to see if his newly elevated master was at home. A few minutes later he reemerged to say that Mr Littlejohn would see them now. They were ushered in, Bognor swinging along like Long John Silver, and taken along a high passage lined with family portraits of doubtful authenticity until they arrived in a conservatory where a fat black man in blue canvas shorts, a Harvard University tee-shirt and sneakers lay in a hammock eating a banana. As they entered he rolled out of the hammock and walked towards them, tossing the banana skin in the direction of a potted palm.

  ‘Mr Bognor,’ he said, extending a welcoming hand. ‘What a pleasant surprise. You were involved in the Gentleman’s Relish Affair, I recall. We never met. But Sir Roderick spoke most warmly of you.’

  ‘Oh god,’ thought Bognor, ‘a character.’

  ‘I just happened to be passing by,’ he said, out loud, ‘and I thought I’d take the liberty of dropping in. Allow me to introduce my wife, Monica.’

  Mr Littlejohn beamed and said he was charmed. He offered them a drink. The butler was sent off for champagne, an old habit of Sir Roderick’s and one which Mr Littlejohn was keeping on.

  ‘I’m sorry to see you’ve been in the wars, Mr Bognor,’ he said, indicating the crutches and Bognor’s plastered foot.

  ‘Skiing accident,’ said Bognor.

  ‘So you are here on holiday?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Aha.’ Mr Littlejohn pressed pink palms together and contemplated them. ‘A pity. I had thought for a moment that this might be a business visit. I would have enjoyed the opportunity of discussing my late master’s unhappy death.’

  ‘Well,’ Bognor was slightly nonplussed by this. He had dreamed up a long, convoluted conversational gambit which would have led to the raising of the subject of the murder in about twenty minutes’ time. This was not what he had expected. ‘Um, just because I’m off duty doesn’t mean to say I can’t … Well, as it happens there are one or two loose ends that have been puzzling me.’

  Mr Littlejohn demurred. ‘I would not think of intruding on your holiday by raising matters of professional interest. Besides, the whole question is still sub judice and it would therefore be improper of us to as much as mention it. Is my interpretation of the law correct?’

  ‘There’s the letter of the law and the spirit of the law,’ said Bognor, tentatively. ‘Not always the same thing.’

  Monica gave him a daggerish look.

  ‘You could say,’ he continued, ‘that although I’m not officially dealing with the case, my presence in Canada is not entirely coincidental.’

  Mr Littlejohn rubbed his hands and beamed. ‘Aha,’ he said again, ‘I understand perfectly. You can rely on my total discretion. Mum is the word, eh?’ And he laughed immoderately and invited them to lunch, an invitation which Bognor accepted with alacrity although Monica, making a mouth like a prune, was obviously going to have fierce words to say later.

  It would be wrong to describe Mr Littlejohn as a perfect witness since his orotund manner of speaking meant that it took him longer than most people to say what he wanted. His use of vocabulary was uncertain and tended towards malapropism so that Bognor was not always entirely sure that he understood exactly what he was telling him. But the gist was plain enough.

  First of all it seemed that the deceased was not a well man. Every morning and every evening Littlejohn had put out piles of pills for his master to consume. Liver pills, heart pills, vitamins, pills for lowering and raising blood pressure—Mr Littlejohn had little or no idea what the pills were supposed to do. Without them, however, Sir Roderick was convinced that he was a goner. Nor was this just hypochondria. At least twice within the last five years he had been to hospital to have bits removed. Mr Littlejohn thought a lung had gone in one visit and a piece of intestine in the other. He was unable to be more precise. Sir Roderick’s doctor was in Harley Street. He had a Canadian doctor, a quite competent physician, but not trusted. Sir Roderick’s advice to Littlejohn had been much the same as that given on behalf of Sir Winston Churchill in relation to his doctor, Lord Moran.

  ‘If Sir Winston is taken ill, call Lord Moran and get him to send for a doctor.’ Littlejohn was happy to furnish Bognor with the English doctor’s name.

  Secondly Littlejohn could not explain how or when the lethal bath oil was substituted for the innocent bottle. The bath oil was kept in crates of twenty bottles in Farquhar’s personal stores. Whenever necessary Littlejohn got out a new case. This accompanied him wherever he went, though it was not guarded. Anyone knowing about it could have worked a switch if they could have got into the railway car, the private plane, any one of Sir Roderick’s apartments or houses or offices. Littlejohn was also adamant that the only person who e
ver broke the seal of a bottle was Farquhar himself. A broken-sealed bottle would have to be put into Farquhar’s medicine cabinet, not Littlejohn’s crate, a much more difficult procedure since the only people who might have gone near it were personal staff, which meant, in practice, Littlejohn and Prideaux. He affected not to know that Sir Roderick had dished out bottles of the exclusive liquid as Christmas presents. Hitherto he had supposed that the murderer was Prideaux because he said only Prideaux would have had the necessary access. Also he did not trust him.

  ‘Ah never did care for Frenchies,’ he said, ‘and in my esteem Mr Prideaux was not a gennelman.’

  Finally, although he himself claimed absolute loyalty to his late employer, he confessed that he could be difficult. Sir Roderick, he agreed, had possessed more enemies than friends. Indeed it would be stretching a point to say that he had any friends at all.

  ‘What about Mrs Baker?’ asked Bognor. ‘Wasn’t she a friend?’

  ‘No, sir,’ replied Mr Littlejohn, tipsy on champagne of which he had produced a second bottle. ‘Mrs Baker was a girlfriend.’ He winked prodigiously. ‘Saving your presence, Mrs Bognor, my former master and benefactor was some swordsman. I remember days when we was smuggling girls out the back door almost as soon as they came in the front. Don’t ask me how he did it. Even when he was ill and old, he just could not get enough.’

  ‘Didn’t anyone refuse him?’ asked Monica.

  ‘Not so’s I remember, ma’am,’ said Littlejohn. ‘Course he wasn’t always too choosy about who he had. And he had the money to make it worth their while.’

  ‘I gather Mrs Baker refused to marry him.’ This from Bognor.

  ‘He was mad as hell at her for something she did but I never did figure out what it was. Not my place to ask either.’

  ‘I understood it was because she wouldn’t give up Mr Baker and marry him instead.’

  ‘Sir Roderick, he wanted just everything. His mouth was bigger than his stomach.’ Mr Littlejohn scratched an ear thoughtfully. ‘And he just hated that Baker boy. He just hated him.’

  ‘Then why did he send him bath oil at Christmas? Some kind of a joke?’

  ‘That I just wouldn’t know.’

  ‘And did he send Baker all Mrs Baker’s love letters?’

  Littlejohn frowned. ‘That what you heard?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bognor.

  ‘Well, if that’s what you heard, then that’s what you heard.’ He laughed. ‘For a gennelman who just happened to be passing by my vestibule you sure have an awful lot of questions to ask.’

  Bognor smiled nervously, Monica kicked him under the table, and they spent the rest of the meal discussing Blenheim Palace, where, years before, Littlejohn had started life as a very junior footman. He told an outrageous story concerning the Prince of Wales.

  Afterwards, the men both smoking six-inch Davidoffs (another little legacy of Sir Roderick’s), they went outside to look at the horses and the ‘Spirit of Saskatoon’. This last had been preserved inside as well as out. The plovers’ eggs, the Oxford marmalade and the notorious Gentleman’s Relish were still in the galley. The ticker tape still held the last message Sir Roderick would ever have read, timed the night of his death, the closing price on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. In the wardrobe there were still half a dozen of Farquhar’s suits and a brace of his distinctive canary yellow waistcoats. In the bathroom the eighteenth-century Florentine tub in which the head of Mammoncorp had breathed his last, remained elegant as ever, a bottle of the murderous bath oil resting alongside the loofah on the soap tray alongside the walnut reading tray.

  9

  ‘I DIDN’T CARE FOR the “Spirit of Saskatoon” much,’ said Bognor, exhausted by the day. He had found smoking on crutches a considerable imposition.

  ‘Like something from Madame Tussaud’s,’ agreed Monica. ‘I’m not clear why he does it. He’s not quite real either. Spooky.’

  ‘Worthwhile though.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘I’m certainly going to have a word with that Harley Street quack.’

  ‘That’s not going to help much. We know he didn’t die of natural causes.’

  ‘Supposing he did though?’ Bognor rubbed his chin.

  ‘But he didn’t.’

  ‘No.’

  Even so the idea haunted him.

  That evening they had dined at the Courtyard, where Toronto’s trendies gathered at lunch to drink Perrier water. Bognor had enjoyed it on his earlier visit to the city. It was one of the few places where he didn’t find the profusion of indoor greenery unduly botanical. And the food was straightforward.

  ‘It’s almost as if the old buzzard was setting everyone up,’ he said. ‘He sends out murder weapons to a whole gang of people, most of whom apparently hate him, and he as good as says, “Go ahead shoot me.”’ He stuffed his mouth full of spinach and bacon salad, and sipped Inniskillin. ‘This is the only decent wine in the whole of Ontario,’ he said. ‘It’s really not bad. Not for the likes of Farquhar though.’

  They both finished their first course in silence, then inspected the room for further topics of conversation. It had that peculiarly Toronto quality of first-generation chic which Bognor found rather charming and Monica found rather absurd. They both felt as if the entire city and its inhabitants had been designed by a firm of interior designers in the late sixties and early seventies.

  ‘It’s so self-conscious,’ opined Monica, gazing critically at a leggy negress in cavalry twill trousers and a tweed hacking jacket who was talking to an intense balding man in a white suit and tinted spectacles. ‘Is this one of Farquhar’s haunts?’

  ‘No. There’s a place called Winston’s which is about the only restaurant he was ever seen in. Instant stuffiness. Ties and jackets and a hint of yesterday’s cigar smoke,’ said Bognor. ‘They spray it on, I’m sure. Baker goes there too. I don’t think what they call “old money” dines out in restaurants. They prefer each other’s houses.’

  ‘What about that lot then?’ asked Monica, swivelling her eyes in the direction of a chef who was slicing mushrooms like a human Magimix. ‘No, not there, stupid. Just behind the oasis. By the fig trees and the pampas grass. The woman in the emerald feathers. That has to be old money, surely.’

  Bognor turned awkwardly. His injuries made neck movement uncomfortable so that he had to turn his trunk as well. Since that was also uncomfortable he spent most of his time staring straight ahead.

  ‘God, yes!’ he exclaimed, turning back with injudicious alacrity and pretending to be engrossed in the entrecôte with poivres verts which had just been put in front of him. ‘That’s Harrison Bentley and his wife Muriel. And friends. Don’t know who the feathers belong to. Or who the chap is. Same sort of people by the look of it.’ He grinned. ‘Nouveau old money if you follow me. Total phoney.’

  ‘And another murder suspect?’ Monica was having some sort of chicken with cream and brandy and truffles. She was accompanying it with a gratin dauphinoise. Bognor reflected that if she went on like this she was going to get fat. Not that he could talk. On the other hand it was different for a man and in any case he wasn’t able to take exercise at the moment. If he could have gone skiing every day his paunch would be more manageable.

  ‘He had bath oil,’ agreed Bognor, ‘and he obviously disliked Farquhar. If he did him in it would have been for quasi-business reasons.’ He cut into his steak, another manoeuvre made painful by injury. ‘One thing about Canada,’ he said. ‘They certainly know how to make steak.’

  ‘Do people murder each other for business reasons?’ asked Monica. ‘I thought the stab in the back in the boardroom was just a figure of speech.’

  ‘It’s possible,’ said Bognor. ‘Bentley is so snobbish and besotted with “the mother country” that he could have done it. I suspect what really rankled was Farquhar’s knighthood. Parkinson won’t like it though. I’m supposed to make sure that Bentley and his cronies win out in the boardroom battle against the Cerniks. That will be
a victory for Britain.’

  ‘Don’t look now,’ said Monica, ‘but I think they’re coming over.’

  Bognor, whose immediate reaction to ‘don’t look now’ was to look at once, began to turn but decided he had experienced enough pain for one meal and took another stab at the beef. He had just got a forkful into his mouth when he heard the unmistakeably laundered old money, Rosedale, Mother Country voice of Mr Bentley. ‘Canglish,’ thought Bognor, that’s what it was, not a real language at all but an invention like Esperanto or Franglais.

  ‘Good evening to you, Mr Bognor,’ intoned Bentley, the greeting seeming to emanate from his nostrils.

  ‘Oh,’ said Bognor. ‘Ah.’ He swallowed hard, not having chewed for the requisite twenty-five chews nannies insist on, grabbed for a glass of water, half rose in his chair, remembered his game leg, subsided, coughed, spluttered, was, in short, discomfited.

  ‘Please don’t get up, Mr Bognor. I’m exceedingly sorry to see that you’ve been in the wars.’

  ‘Skiing accident,’ said Bognor, clearing the blocked tubes. ‘Silly of me.’

  ‘You know my wife, Muriel, Mr Bognor.’ Muriel, at her husband’s elbow, simpered and said something unintelligible but affably intentioned.

  ‘I don’t think you know my wife, Monica, Mr Bentley,’ said Bognor, entering into the courtly spirit of the proceedings. He was certainly not going to destroy Bentley’s view of the English by being boorish. Monica smiled, inclined her head and held out a hand in a passable imitation of the Queen Mother at a Variety Club Gala. Bognor was proud of her.

  ‘Permit me to introduce Miss Dolores Crump,’ said Bentley, indicating the woman in the green feathers who had first attracted Monica’s attention. Bognor made a token attempt to stand and Miss Crump acknowledged it with a mute gesture which said ‘please not on my account’ though Bognor gained the impression that she would have enjoyed seeing him inflict grievous bodily harm on himself in order to pay her proper respect. She looked hard as tin tacks, of a certain age, outrageously painted and feathered, and slim to the point of being bony. Like an ageing parakeet. So this was Farquhar’s last mistress. Or last publicly acknowledged ‘live-in girlfriend’. Her eyelids matched her feathers and since she appeared to spend a lot of time with her eyes closed one saw a lot of them. Bognor wondered if they shone in the dark. They looked luminous. As she moved across to exchange handshakes with Monica (hers exaggeratedly limp, Monica’s correspondingly beefy), a trim dapper gentleman, the fourth member of the party, said to Bognor, ‘I’m Crombie, Mr Bognor, pleased to meet you.’