by Tim Heald
‘Goodnight, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard enough. I’ll make no formal complaint this time since you’re obviously as embarrassed by this lunacy as I am.’
With which he spun on his heel and exited, leaving the servant to usher them out, much discomfitted.
‘You sure blew that one, Si,’ said Smith, when they were out in the winter again.
‘He’s a good liar, I’ll grant you that,’ said Bognor. ‘But what a liar. God!’
‘So now what do we do?’ asked Gary. ‘Feller Prideaux is still missing and we know he was taken out by three guys against his inclinations. We gotta find him, eh, chief?’
‘Sure,’ concurred Smith. But he said no more. The three men got into the car where they remained, brooding.
‘Hey!’ Bognor felt a sudden tingling down his back. ‘Where did you say they found me after those gorillas roughed me up?’
‘On the Don Valley,’ said Smith, ‘under one of the bridges. Do you remember, Gary? The Danforth, or was it higher? St Clair maybe?’
‘Don’t remember,’ said Gary, ‘but it was on the Parkway. The suicide place.’
‘’Sright,’ said Smith.
‘Let’s go there,’ said Bognor. ‘Now.’
Smith exhaled. He seemed to sag in the middle as if punctured. ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘We’ve been halfway round the city already. Then we’ll call back at Prideaux’s apartment. The bastard’s tucked up in bed by now, I guess.’
Gary laughed dutifully.
‘Don Valley Parkway first,’ said Bognor. He had a nasty feeling in the pit of his stomach. They were such morons. The odds were that they would use the same dumping ground a second time. He was certain Prideaux was in their hands and he was equally certain that Prideaux was not going to be let off with a warning. Bognor’s sin had been denied and unproven. Not Prideaux’s. He had an idea that Baker’s men had done the state’s duty before the state could do it for itself.
The car sped along Bayview before looping round on to the parkway which ran north-south along the valley. Traffic was heavy. Endless automobiles speeding along with no thought for the slippery, frostbitten surface.
‘Slower,’ said Bognor, ‘please.’
The driver pulled into the inside lane and reduced speed. Bognor stared hard out of the window. They passed under one high viaduct.
‘Nothing there,’ said Smith. He too was gazing out, looking for a corpse. He did not expect to find one. Bognor did.
They passed under another bridge, very slowly this time, not more than twenty miles an hour. Behind them a car flashed its lights and sounded its horn. They were beginning to cause a jam.
‘Nope,’ said Smith.
They drove on. There was no bridge for a mile or more. The tension in the car began to relax. Bognor felt in his pocket for a cigar. Smith coughed. A heavy articulated truck with Quebec number plates screamed past, obliterating the windscreen with a spray of slush. The driver flicked the windscreen wipers into top gear and swore quietly.
‘There!’ shouted Bognor, pointing. ‘The lights. Pull over.’
‘Been a shunt,’ said Smith. The flashing lights were from a police car. Or an ambulance. In fact, both, as they realized when they got close.
‘Just a shunt,’ said Smith again, but there was a tightness in his voice which warned Bognor that he did not believe it.
They pulled up just short of the flashing lights. The door of the ambulance was open. On the ground just behind it there was a stretcher. On the stretcher was a shape. The shape was covered in blankets or rugs. Even as they walked towards the scene one of the ambulance men pulled a blanket towards the head of the stretcher and let it fall so that it—him—whatever it was, lay totally obscured beneath.
Smith showed his ID card to the city policeman in charge, a young lieutenant with sandy hair and a Scots accent.
‘Suicide,’ said the lieutenant. ‘Chucked himself off the bridge.’ He glanced up at the parapet several hundred feet above. ‘He wouldn’t have known much about it.’
‘Any identification?’
‘Name of Prideaux. Jean-Claude Prideaux.’
There was a silence. The only sound was the constant swoosh of the traffic as it hurried past, the living mocking the dead.
‘Did he fall, officer?’ asked Bognor. ‘Or was he pushed?’
The policeman glanced at him suspiciously.
‘I’d assume suicide, sir,’ he said. ‘It’s a favourite spot. And with respect it would be impossible to tell one way or another. He’s a hell of a mess. I’d guess a dozen or so automobiles … Well, I don’t need to spell it out for you.’
‘No.’ Bognor coughed. He went back to the car and sat in the back, his face between his knees. There but for the grace of god in whom I don’t believe … he kept thinking. A moment or so later Gary and Pete Smith returned. The car started up, and slid away into the traffic. Bognor remembered that earlier nocturnal excursion on the city’s highways in the little green Pinto after the dreadful rendition of The Mousetrap. He swallowed hard. Prideaux had not been likeable, but even so …
In the front Pete Smith turned to face Bognor.
‘Guess I owe you an apology, Si,’ he said, and when Bognor failed to answer, he added, very softly, ‘poor French bastard, eh?’
Epilogue
THERE WAS NO PROSECUTION. There was no proof. Bognor knew and Baker knew Bognor knew, but Baker was beyond reach. He was too strong and the evidence was too weak. Bognor filed a report. A copy for Parkinson. A copy for the RCMP. It was the least he could do. It would only gather dust but at least it was in the archives. Someone might exhume it one day. It might just put the skids under Baker’s headier political aspirations.
He himself broke the news to Maggie Baker. She appeared quite distressed but by now Bognor was past caring about her distress, real or imaginary. Emotion, he realized, was not her forte. Louise was at the flat. It was, after all, her flat. Afterwards she showed him out. If anything she was more shattered than Maggie, though she made no display of her shock and sadness. She looked wan and vulnerable and disturbingly attractive. So much so that standing by her front door Bognor was moved to say, ‘That dinner. I suppose you wouldn’t revive your acceptance?’
She managed a weak smile. She had had no idea about Jean-Claude, had not suspected about him and Maggie, let alone the murder. She was an innocent.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘It’s kind of you, but I think you should go home to your wife, don’t you?’
But she kissed him all the same, to show no hard feelings. Bognor found it upsetting, but he did as he was told.
Pete and Gary came to the airport to see him off. He was touched by this too.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t much use really, was I?’
Smith pumped his hand up and down with enthusiasm. ‘Lookit, Si,’ he said. ‘We had a ball. Eh?’
Gary said, ‘Have a good flight, sir.’
After the plane took off it circled over the city. Bognor looked down at the sparkling lights, tried to work out which road was which, located Yonge and then realized he was mistaken. Only the dark line of the lake gave him a certain reference, and there, poised as always for blast-off, was the winking light of the CN Tower. Bognor gazed back at it wistfully, remembering Monica and himself hurtling down its side in that deadly yellow capsule. He smiled at the light and winked back.
‘O, Canada!’ he said.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Simon Bognor Mysteries
Prologue
IT WAS FIRST LIGHT in the garden quad of Apocrypha. Because this was an English summer no rosy fingers gave earnest of the dawn, which arrived instead grey and misty, creeping up on night like a mugger after an old lady’s handbag. Water dripped from the mulberries and splashed plangently from a broken drainpipe over the west door of Hawksmoor’s incomparable college chapel. At the foot of the steps leading up to Great Hall a puddle had formed. Through it walked the Master. He was oblivious to the wet for he wa
s drunk, so drunk that he scarcely noticed the dampness which seeped through the splits in his patent leather shoes and ran in tiny rivulets down his neck and under the stiff white collar of his boiled white shirt.
He staggered slightly as he walked across his quad: Lord Beckenham of Penge, master of all he surveyed, a self-made man made good. He had come a long way from the council estate in Skelmersdale. If, at seventy-one, that mane of white hair, so envied by his older colleagues, was finally thinning, and if those once so regular teeth were now a little chipped and yellow, he could still claim them as his own. Own teeth, own hair, own everything. He was his own man. Always had been.
Thus he reflected as he slowly crossed the quad, and so immersed was he in these thoughts (and so fuddled with claret and liqueurs) that he did not notice another figure, similarly clad, similarly uncertain in its gait, emerge from the shadows at the bottom of staircase twelve. Halfway across the quad the two almost collided.
‘Ah, Aveline,’ exclaimed Lord Beckenham, recovering first and recognizing the gaunt features of the Regius Professor of Sociology, ‘agreeable gaudy.’
‘Very,’ said Aveline. ‘I’ve been up drinking with Badman and Scrimgeour-Harris.’
‘And I with Mitten’s men,’ said the Master. ‘Edgware, Vole, Rook, Crutwell and Bognor.’
‘Ah … Bognor,’ murmured Aveline, dreamily. ‘But otherwise a good year.’
‘A very good year,’ agreed Lord Beckenham, then paused. ‘Can I offer you a nightcap?’
‘That’s very kind, but no. I’ve a bicycle to catch.’ The professor laughed harshly, like a corncrake, the noise echoing over the grass. He moved on. ‘Cheerio, then,’ he called, unexpectedly.
The Master continued on his way, though without enthusiasm. The lodgings had been gloomy since Mabel’s death three years ago, and despite the hour he was not particularly keen to get to bed. There were three flights of stairs to negotiate, too, and they were steep. Recently he had found that they left him distressed and breathless and he was obliged to pause from time to time to gather strength. Time was when he would have taken them three at a time. More than fifty years ago he had come to Apocrypha as a soft-faced freshman on an open scholarship, the first boy from his school ever to win a place at Oxford. The three photographs were still on the wall of the drawing-room. In the last of them he sat in the middle of the team, holding the ball, hair parted in the middle, slicked down like Hitler’s. He had scored the winning goal the last time Apocrypha won cuppers. He unlocked the front door at the third attempt and began to climb. One more gaudy to go, he thought to himself … a farewell gaudy with his own contemporaries, those few who survived … he fumbled with his tie … it was too tight … it was empty vanity to persist with the old collar he had worn so long … far too tight … he stopped to rest and swayed slightly, then clung to the rail for support. …
The scout found him when he came with morning tea. He was, of course, extremely dead.
1
BOGNOR WAS AWOKEN BY bells. He had forgotten what a bell-ridden city Oxford was. He had similar trouble with Venice. ‘Bloody bells,’ he muttered and, raising his head slightly, he removed the pillow and buried his head underneath it. The bells were now muffled but they were still disturbing. Bognor cursed them again and put out an arm, seeking the consolation of his wife Monica. She was not there. He sighed, sat up, letting the pillow fall to the floor, and, very tentatively, opened an eye, shutting it again immediately. He was not ready to have light thrown upon his situation which was, he was beginning to realize, hung-over in the extreme. The furry sensation in his mouth and throat told him that he had been over-indulging in drink and tobacco. This was confirmed by the ache behind the eyes. He scratched his scalp and attempted to coax the memory into some form of action. It stalled a couple of times but at the third try he was able to recall a little of the night before. Of course. The gaudy. He had adjourned with his old colleagues from Mitten’s tutorial group. The port had run out. They had gone to Mitten’s rooms in the Pantry Quad. The Master had been there too. And that extraordinarily attractive new English don. Hermione something. Clacton? Southend? Margate? No, none of that was right, but it was a place somewhere down there. Frinton, that was it. He remembered Mitten introducing them. ‘Bognor and Frinton,’ he had said in that affected aristocratic drawl of his. ‘Well, you two ought to have lots in common, eh? Ha! Ha!’ He was the only person Bognor had ever met who, when intending to convey the idea of laughter, actually said, ‘Ha! Ha!’ – two separate words, clearly articulated, rather as if he had been taught to laugh by some do-it-yourself manual for foreign students.
‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!’ With a supreme effort Bognor forced both eyes open and let them slowly traverse the room. It was a newish bed-sitter, on the site of what had once been a damp, draughty, Victorian tower full of Bognor’s memories. There was the obligatory poster of Che in his beret and of Monroe with fluorescent lips and, he was depressed to see, even of ‘girl in tennis dress scratching bottom’. An Apocrypha undergraduate ought to be able to manage a little more originality than that. It was a bit like having flying ducks or that green woman painted by the Russian whose name he could never remember. The one you saw in Woolies. He looked at his watch: nine-fifteen. Better put in an appearance at breakfast. That insufferable Crutwell would have been out for his ghastly jog by now. Edgware too, in all probability. They’d both be looking pink and scrubbed and young for their age and generally disgusting. The trouble with this reunion was that it was making him feel a failure. He was a failure – he knew that – but this reminded him of the fact all too forcibly. Not only was he a failure, he looked like one alongside all these budding success stories.
He swung his legs out, touched the floor with his toes and tried standing. Not a good idea. He sat down again and passed a palm over his jowls. All his problems stemmed from university. It was that absurd interview with the Appointments Board which had got him into the Board of Trade in the first place, since when he had been stuck. Codes, ciphers, red tape and occasional excursions into what was euphemistically described as ‘the field’.
He had had his moments, he supposed. Parkinson had even mentioned the possibility of an MBE recently, though he had resisted all Bognor’s requests for a transfer to some other branch of Whitehall. Monica was urging him with increasing fervour to ‘get out while there’s still time’, but nothing happened. He made a few half-hearted inquiries and even went to one (very depressing) job interview at some multi-national. It came, of course, to nothing. Secretly Bognor knew that he had left it too late and that he was doomed to the Board of Trade for life. He could eventually take early retirement and live on his index-linked pension. A depressing future stretched ahead, a depressing past lay behind, and a depressing present enveloped him. It was all made much worse by the Apocrypha gaudy and renewed acquaintance with his contemporaries.
Outside, the bells ceased. He stood again and staggered over to the washbasin where he recoiled sharply from the reflection which leered back at him from the mirror. Thank the Lord it wasn’t a full-length one. He scratched his stomach and realized that it was sagging flabbily over the cord of his pyjamas. They were the same pyjamas he had had when he was at Oxford twenty years ago. They didn’t make them like that any more – stout, striped flannel pyjamas designed to last a lifetime. The manufacturers had not, however, bargained on Bognor’s increasing girth. It was rather sad to find oneself growing out of one’s pyjamas. He frowned into the mirror and told himself brusquely not to be so wet. Life was just beginning. Couple of aspirin, a shave and a brisk clean of the teeth and he’d be a new man. He remembered Crutwell and Edgware and their fitness mania. For a second he even contemplated the idea of a press-up, but the thought passed quickly. Too late to start that sort of thing now.
When he reached Hall he found that, as he had feared, his friends were already heavily involved with a hearty breakfast. Even Sebastian Vole, Associate Professor of Modern History at Prendergast in Vermont, was chompi
ng cornflakes and he was reputed to come alive only at noon. There was a chorus of ‘Morning’, ‘Hello, Simon’ and ‘Sleep well, old boy?’ Bognor replied with an all-embracing grin and poured himself a cup of coffee. A scout offered him cereal and he declined.
‘Bacon and egg, sir?’
Bognor suppressed a keen desire to retch. ‘Thanks, no,’ he said. ‘I’m not really much of a one for breakfast.’
‘You never showed up for your run,’ called Ian Edgware. ‘It was fabulous out on Port Meadow. All river mist and lemon-coloured sun.’ Edgware had always had a penchant for second-rate imagery. Bognor recalled his excruciating verses in some long-defunct literary magazine of their generation.
‘Run?’ he asked. ‘What run?’
‘You said you were coming for a run, you lazy sod,’ said Peter Crutwell through a mouthful of toast and marmalade. ‘Quite definite about it, you were. Said you never missed your morning mile.’
‘I never.’ Bognor flushed.
‘You did, you know,’ insisted Crutwell. He was a schoolmaster these days. Highly successful. A ‘housebeak’, as he insisted on calling himself, at Ampleside but not expected to stay much longer. He had been short-listed for the headmastership of Sherborne and Cranlingham and was said to be a virtual certainty for Fraffleigh. Five years there and he would walk into the top job at Eton, Harrow or Winchester and from there to an Oxbridge mastership, director-generalship of the IBA or some other glamorous, high-profile public office. Bognor could see it all.
‘I’m afraid you did, actually,’ agreed Vole, glancing up from his cornflakes. ‘Port talking, but you did say you’d go running with them.’
‘Oh.’ Bognor frowned. He had not the slightest recollection of saying any such thing. He turned to Humphrey Rook for confirmation. Humphrey was at least losing his hair, which was some consolation. What remained was black and greasy and brushed straight back off the forehead. He also had a bit of a paunch, though his expensive banker’s suiting made a passable fist of disguising it.