Deadline (The Simon Bognor Mysteries)

by Tim Heald

‘I have a theory.’

  Parkinson put a hand to his forehead. ‘I’d rather you didn’t,’ he said.

  ‘What do you want me to do then?’

  ‘Carry on. Not as before. Keep a low profile: Liaise with the police but for Christ’s sake steer clear of trouble. I’m not interested in your solving the case. I would like information. And don’t let on that you know about Milborn Port. Apart from anything else I don’t want any confusion with Special Branch. They can be jealous.’

  Bognor left, deflated. At the Globe he made two stops before reaching the Pepys office. First he called on Bert Watson, the Imperial Father. He’d never heard any mention of Lord Wharfedale trying to sack St John Derby and he doubted whether the chapel would have opposed the move. He had a shrewd notion that Derby wasn’t a member of the Union anyway. Bognor expressed no surprise and in answer to Mr Watson’s sympathetic enquiries about his swollen features, said that he’d fallen down stairs in the flat when the lights fused.

  He was more honest with the policeman.

  ‘Did you see his face?’ asked Sanders when he’d finished.

  ‘Too dark, I’m afraid, and he had a hat pulled down over his eyes.’

  ‘Scarf?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Why?’

  Sanders lit another of the Embassy cigarettes whose fumes had already severely reduced the visibility in his office. ‘You saw the papers?’ he said.

  ‘About Anthea Morrison.’

  ‘Yes. Was it an accident?’

  Sanders shrugged. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think she was pushed.’

  The policeman stood up, came round the desk and bent down to examine the bruising. ‘Must hurt,’ he said laconically, ‘and he wasn’t wearing a scarf?’

  ‘As I said I don’t think so, but why?’

  ‘Anthea Morrison was killed at about ten to seven. It appears that work stopped on your column at about half past six and she went straight to Blackfriars underground station to catch a train home. Normally it would have been after the rush hour but because of the go-slow there were still a lot of commuters around. Some of them stop off for a couple of pints and hope everyone else will have vanished by the time they get to the station … anyway, she was standing at the far end of the west-bound platform which is badly lit and she was standing in the front next to the line and she fell under the Richmond train. Nobody honestly knows what really happened but several of the people waiting near her say that there was a man in a dark overcoat standing just behind her. He had a hat pulled over his eyes and a scarf over the lower part of his face, which was normal enough as it was so perishing cold. The second she’d fallen he was off like a startled rabbit, muttering something about fetching an ambulance.’

  ‘And did he?’

  ‘Someone did. Could have been him. It was too late for her. She was a very nasty mess but she wouldn’t have known much about it.’

  Bognor visualized that terrible moment of falling, the fraction of a second between the time she was pushed to the time she hit the electric rail. He wondered if she’d been killed by that or by the impact of the train. He decided he didn’t want to ask. Whichever it had been there was still time for her to realize what was happening.

  ‘And no one stopped him?’

  Sanders shook his head. ‘No reason to. There was complete pandemonium for the first couple of minutes, especially near where she’d been. Further up the platform it was different. Anyway he got right away, guilty or not.’ He paused and lit a new cigarette with the stub of the old one. ‘What time did you say you were attacked?’

  ‘I’m not sure. About half past eight I should say. I can check.’

  Sanders pursed his lips. ‘Dark overcoat, hat pulled down, and no scarf.’

  ‘I’m not sure about the scarf.’

  ‘And Sloane Square can’t take more than half an hour from Blackfriars by any form of transport. Even the underground in a work-to-rule.’

  ‘You mean that the man who killed Anthea Morrison was the same person who bashed me?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s stretching coincidence too far.’

  Bognor thought, something his various pains made unpleasant. Nor were the thoughts very happy.

  ‘It has to be someone on the column,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Why so?’

  ‘Because only my colleagues on the column knew that I was going off with Molly Mortimer.’

  ‘Or the private viewers at the Western Fine Arts?’

  ‘But they couldn’t have got to the gallery from Blackfriars in time.’

  Sanders agreed. ‘Could be a conspiracy,’ he ventured. ‘Miss Mortimer might have telephoned to say you were with her.’

  ‘Hardly.’

  Sanders looked almost as miserable as Bognor. ‘There’s something implausibly whimsical about this crime,’ he said. ‘Last week we did a stolen car racket and the week before there was the Ludgate Circus drug ring. You knew where you were with that class of crime. Villains are villains. This is too middle class.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ said Bognor, ‘only for me it’s almost slumming. I seem to specialize in upper class murders. I’ve got the last two lines of that verse you gave me.’

  He recited them and Sanders laughed sardonically.

  ‘Doesn’t get me any further,’ he said. ‘I’m foxed.’

  ‘I have a hunch,’ said Bognor after some deliberation. He told the policeman about the blackmailing and then, contrary to caution, about the file on Milborn Port.

  ‘So,’ he concluded, ‘if Milborn Port was passing on scurrilous gossip to Russian intelligence and if St John Derby knew about it then you have a classic blackmail situation.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And finally,’ said Bognor, ‘the worm turned. Milborn decided he’d had enough. Arranged to meet Derby late at night in the office ostensibly to hand over more cash but actually to have a show-down. Then he realizes that Anthea Morrison knew more than she should so he takes the only way out and pushes her under the tube train. Finally he decides that I’m on to him and warns me off.’

  ‘Super,’ said Sanders. ‘Now try proving it.’

  That’s your job.’

  ‘Ha.’ Yet again he lit a new cigarette from the final flames of the old one. ‘I wonder if you have any idea how many medium built men in dark overcoats and hats and scarves there were at Blackfriars station last night. And how amazingly unobservant the British public is. Particularly when it has a train to catch.’ He shrugged. ‘Never mind. You keep a good eye on your colleagues. We’ll smoke them out before long.’

  ‘If they don’t kill me first,’ said Bognor.

  He never made it to the Pepys office. When the lift reached the fifth floor he was the only passenger left in. As he started blearily to emerge on to terra firma a ladylike hand pressed him decisively on the chest and pushed him back into the lift. At the same time Molly Mortimer said cheerily, ‘Time for the hair of the dog.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Bognor, but he was too late. The antique doors clanged behind them and the Heath Robinson inspired contraption descended. Molly was immaculate. This morning’s coat was suede and belted, she carried a leather shoulder bag and was smoking a Black Russian in a holder. She wore tinted glasses and a costermonger’s cap in black velvet.

  ‘You look like the thinking man’s Mata Hari,’ he said. ‘I’m off drink.’

  ‘Christ,’ she said, peering at his wounds. ‘He must have put a lot into it.’ The lift came to a jangling halt at the ground floor and they had to fight their way past an incoming throng of Globe employees.

  ‘It’s eleven,’ she said. ‘A Bloody Mary will set you up.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Coffee then.’

  ‘Oh all right.’ She took his elbow and propelled him gently but decisively across the busy street whose traffic parted like the waters of the Dead Sea except for a Number Eleven bus which shaved their bottoms.

  ‘Immigrant!’ shouted Miss Mortimer, gaily.


  Bognor swore under his breath. He was unhappy.

  Inside the café, which was long and low, smoky and noisy, he ordered two coffees while Molly unbuttoned her coat revealing a cashmere roll neck which accentuated her breasts. They looked, Bognor thought, larger than yesterday. ‘I thought your story on the Prince of Wales Own Midland Light Infantry was a very good read,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t so happy with the Gloster Thespians. A bit flat. You look appalling.’

  ‘I feel bloody appalling,’ he hissed. ‘What the hell do you mean, “he must have put a lot into it”? What do you know about it?’

  She blew at the froth on her coffee. ‘I do wish they wouldn’t put candy floss on perfectly good coffee,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid I have some explaining to do.’

  ‘It had better be good.’

  ‘Not particularly. Does it hurt?’

  ‘Yes, of course it bloody hurts.’

  ‘Poor lamb.’ She made a little moue and smiled. Bognor forgave her instantly. ‘I’m afraid it was Willy.’

  ‘Willy?’

  ‘Willy Wimbledon. You met him yesterday. He’s very young.’

  ‘And you and he …’

  She nodded. ‘Not for long. But he’s terribly pretty and very good at it. Anyway he hit you and I’m apologizing for him. I really am dreadfully sorry.’

  ‘Why can’t he apologize for himself?’

  ‘He’s trying to see Liberace or he would. But Granny insisted he went.’

  ‘Liberace?’

  ‘We missed him yesterday and Lord Wharfedale’s peeved.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, passing a hand over his forehead and sucking his teeth, ‘but I simply do not understand.’

  ‘Willy thinks he’s in love with me,’ she said, lowering her voice as a large thug-faced man in a sheepskin coat turned to look at them, ‘and he was on his way to the flat when he saw you leaving. You may not remember but you weren’t very steady on your feet and I was having to do quite a lot of propping up. Then, which again you won’t remember, I rather foolishly kissed you goodnight. Not a real kiss, just a little kiss, Board of Trade officials for the use of, but enough, I’m afraid, to make poor Willy upset. Besides he’d been drinking too. He’d been to the opening of the Hilton in Oxford Street. So he waited in the alley until you came up and then he “thumped” you, as he put it.’

  ‘Bloody hard.’

  ‘It could have been worse. He boxed for Cambridge.’

  ‘So bloody childish.’

  ‘But, darling, Willy is bloody childish. Eton and Cambridge and straight on to a national newspaper column and a title and two blues and stacks of money, how on earth could he be anything but bloody childish?’ She drank coffee and looked embarrassed. Fleetingly Bognor thought she looked almost vulnerable but he let the idea pass. She was, he remembered, as hard as old boots.

  ‘You do realize how serious this could be?’

  ‘What? How?’

  ‘Thumping someone in my position. An official investigating a murder.’

  ‘Don’t be pompous.’

  ‘I’m not being pompous.’ He noticed that several people were trying to eavesdrop, an inevitable hazard he supposed of having an interesting conversation in Fleet Street. ‘All I’m saying is that it happened only an hour or so after a man wearing the same outfit pushed Anthea Morrison under the Richmond train at Blackfriars.’

  ‘The same outfit?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘You forget,’ he said, ‘this is my job. I’m being paid to investigate murder.’

  She smiled. ‘Forgive me saying so but it is easy to forget.’

  ‘All I’m saying is that we the police and I have our suspicions. And one of them is that the man who pushed Anthea Morrison under the underground train is the same man who punched me in the face. And if as you say the man who punched me is Viscount bloody Wimbledon then he’s going to have to do more than apologize to me. He’ll end up answering to a judge and jury.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘But why should Willy push Anthea Morrison under a tube train? You’ll be saying next that he stabbed St John with the paper knife.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘That’s what I aim to find out.’

  Most of this exchange had been carried on in a whisper but their manner and gesticulations, coupled with Bognor’s strange, mutilated appearance, had provoked much interest among their fellow coffee drinkers. Bognor paid the bill and they left amid the scrutiny of all the two dozen in the café.

  ‘What’s on today?’ he asked as they made a second foolhardy crossing of the street.

  ‘Nothing much. It’s always chaos without Anthea and Granny’s in a panic about the Sevens on Sunday. I think you’re down for the P.M. at the philatelists’ convention at the Albert Hall.’

  They were in the bizarre entrance hall now and once more Bognor was struck by the Wharfedale motto. ‘The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,’ he murmured to himself, ‘but someone, so help me God, is not telling it.’ Aloud he said to Molly, ‘The Sevens? What Sevens?’

  ‘The Daily Globe Rugby Union Seven-a-side Tournament?’ said Molly, putting on a fruity hurrah harry voice. ‘Darling where have you been? Apart from the Expo-Brit scheme it’s practically the only thing we do sponsor, and it’s bloody awful. Beer and sweat and gale force winds and we all have to go.’

  ‘All? Why?’

  ‘Because the entire column is devoted to it. We do it with Expo-Brit too but that’s easy because the firms taking part are sometimes moderately interesting but I can tell you it’s murder trying to find enough stories about a day’s rugby.’

  ‘Murder’s the word.’

  She glanced at him. They were in the passage now, lino floored, cream painted with stout wooden doors leading off. They were alone.

  ‘Honestly,’ she said, ‘I am sorry. We came looking for you when he’d told me but you’d vanished. I promise I’ll make it up to you somehow.’

  ‘You can’t have looked far,’ he said, disbelievingly.

  ‘We didn’t come straight away because he didn’t tell me straight away. When we did all we found was a little bit of blood. We walked down to the square and one of the drivers at the rank said a man spitting blood and alcohol had just gone off in a cab. So I realized you were safe. Honestly. Mind you I’m surprised you were able to walk that far.’

  ‘I think I crawled,’ said Bognor, theatrically. ‘I feel like it. Come on, we’re late.’

  The office was in despair. The depression had an almost physical presence like a fog. A temporary secretary, an acned plump girl in a tiny grey skirt and remedial sandals sat at Anthea Morrison’s desk. Everyone else was silent, slouched over some largely imaginary chore. Empty champagne bottles, usually an apt symbol of merriment and high life, were like gate crashers at a wake, and last night’s waste paper, usually conscientiously cleared first thing by Miss Morrison, still lay where it had fallen or been thrown. The mail was still unopened and secured by the thick elastic band which the messengers had put round it.

  ‘You’re late,’ said Mr Gringe without looking up. ‘I will not tolerate tardiness.’

  Bognor looked at the thinning grey hair on top of his head, at the worry lines on his forehead and the thin anxious mouth. He wore a stiff collar something Bognor had scarcely seen since school and a maroon cardigan under the shapeless grey jacket. It was not an appropriate costume for the job and he wasn’t an appropriate person. Bognor felt sorry for him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I got held up.’

  ‘Well please don’t let it happen again. These are quite exceptionally distressing times and it’s important that we all pull together.’ He shook his head, releasing a little flurry of dandruff and his voice trembled slightly. ‘We’re all very upset about what has happened,’ he went on. ‘I’ve put you down for the Prime Minister’s speech at the philatelists’ conv
ention. He’s speaking at twelve-thirty but I should make a point of getting there early. I’ll give you some more stories to do when we’ve dealt with the mail.’

  ‘Right,’ said Bognor, wondering how much longer Mr Gringe would stand the strain. No wonder they called him Granny. He picked a copy of the Globe from the table in the centre of the office and took it to his desk.

  ‘Good grief,’ said Milborn Port, suddenly noticing Bognor’s face. ‘What have you done to yourself?’

  ‘I fell downstairs,’ he said thickly. Milborn was smoking a cheroot. He took it out of his mouth and raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Looks more as if someone gave you a thump,’ he said. ‘Hey, Bertie, have a look at Bognor’s face. You been laying into him?’

  The Honourable Bertie Harris went on reading the Financial Times. ‘Pilton’s are down again,’ he said. ‘I think there might be a paragraph in that somewhere. What did you say, Milborn?’

  ‘I asked if you’d seen Bognor’s face?’

  ‘No,’ he drawled. ‘I saw it yesterday. Has it changed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He put down the Financial Times with a sigh and examined Bognor cursorily.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘For a moment I thought Milborn meant you’d put on a false nose or a moustache to cheer us all up. What was it? Fisticuffs?’

  ‘I fell downstairs.’

  ‘Oh well,’ he said, resuming his paper, ‘if you don’t want to tell us, don’t. I wouldn’t dream of prying myself. All the same I should suggest a large piece of fillet steak applied to the bruising might well assist. If you can’t afford fillet rump should do.’

  Bognor turned to the Samuel Pepys column and saw that Lord Wharfedale’s tribute to the deceased St John Derby on their behalf was the lead item. He was glad that his typing had been so useful. Alongside it there was a photograph of the dead man and he realized that he had never before seen a picture of him. It was an interesting face now that he had the opportunity to study it, even in the hazy grey half tones of the tiny Samuel Pepys reproduction. There was a caption under it, penned presumably by Peckwater, ‘St J. Derby,’ it said. ‘Unequalled flair.’ It was a photograph which must have been taken a little while ago, judging by the darkness of the hair and the clarity of the eye. Bognor peered at it and wondered if it was a blackmailer’s face. There was something about the way the nostrils flared and the mouth curved sardonically which suggested humorous dishonesty, he thought. Or was he simply being fanciful? He appeared to have a scar on his cheek below the left eye.