by Tim Heald
Blue Blood Will Out
A Simon Bognor Mystery
Tim Heald
Contents
Prologue
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
Preview: Deadline
Prologue
THE MORNING MIST HUNG low over the Thames, veiling, but not wholly obscuring, the stumps of newly pollarded willow and the white bushes of hawthorn which lined the opposite bank. Two moorhens stalked each other across the impeccably manicured lawn, their heads jerking in twitchy unison, and from the house itself there sounded the howl of a discontented dog.
It was just seven. Too early for most of Sir Canning’s guests to be doing much more than tossing restlessly as the sun filtered through gaps in the curtains. Stately-home owners—even the most emancipated and extrovert—are not generally the earliest of risers and the select few who were attending the first annual conference of Abney Enterprises were more likely to burn midnight oil than catch worms.
The exception was Frederick, third Earl of Maidenhead. There was nothing out of the ordinary in this because the Earl prided himself on being perverse. At six-thirty he had woken, drunk one cup of Twining’s Russian Caravan Tea from the Teasmade machine at his bedside and put on a pair of individually styled bathing trunks with the legend FM embroidered on the left leg. He had then made his way downstairs, across the gravel, round the fountain and the floodlights, and over the grass to the cord-covered springboard. At six-fifty he patted his putty-coloured paunch twice, took three deep breaths of invigorating Thames Valley air and smoothed his abundant grey locks with the palm of his right hand. He then extended both arms in front of him, bounced lightly on the board and dived. A few yards out he rose to the surface and started to crawl slowly towards Berkshire.
Now at seven he was drifting downstream and was indeed leaving the Abney land on his port side. He was almost exactly in midstream and he appeared to be making no effort to swim further. His arms and legs were perfectly limp. He was, of course, extremely dead.
1
LORD MAIDENHEAD’S DEMISE was not allowed to interfere with breakfast for the very good reason that it was not discovered until after the meal was over. Even if it had been, the house guests would almost certainly still have breakfasted well. They were not a noticeably sentimental collection and they had not been particularly fond of the dead man. Besides, they had paid for their breakfast.
The first to arrive in the dining-room, at half past eight, was the host and owner—or more properly the proprietor of Abney House, Sir Canning Abney himself. Sir Canning was remarkable if only because he had turned the business of opening a stately-home to the public from a flamboyant improvisation into an exact science. When he had inherited the Abney estate from his father fifteen years before he had been advised to sell out. The income from the farms was negligible and the whole estate had been deplorably managed for a quarter of a century. There were death duties of several hundred thousand and the house was falling down. Three property developers had approached him within hours of his father’s death, which had decided him. If the estate was going to make money it was going to make it for him. He had sacked the agent; sold off a minute proportion of the land for an exorbitant price; modernized the farms, evicting tenants where possible and installing managers; and most important of all opened the house to the general public and founded the Small Ships Museum. At eight-thirty that morning, as he helped himself to kidneys, Sir Canning was a happy man. The weekend conference established him as undisputed leader of the stately-home industry. By an unfortunate quirk of fate, last year’s attendance figures had suggested that the outrageously eccentric and inefficient Earl of Maidenhead had become leader of the league and Sir Canning had been forced to console himself with the thought that he undoubtedly made less money. Now, with the conference, he was back on top.
He bisected a kidney, looked at his watch (gold from Garrards) and frowned. The first seminar—on catering—was scheduled for ten. He very much hoped there would be no backsliding.
Lady Abney breakfasted, as usual, in bed where she spent a great deal of her time, not always alone and not always with her husband; and the next arrival in the dining-room was another of Sir Canning’s paying guests. He was a small, leather-skinned man with a clipped military moustache and quick ferrety movements. Late forties. He walked purposefully to the sideboard where he lifted each of the silver covers in turn before finally helping himself to two rashers of crisp back bacon and some scrambled egg.
‘Morning,’ said Sir Canning.
‘Morning,’ said the McCrum.
‘Sleep well?’
‘Very. Overslept I’m afraid.’ The McCrum picked up a copy of The Daily Telegraph and turned to the sports page.
‘It’s the air,’ said Abney. ‘Very soporific. Takes you two days to get used to it.’
The McCrum grunted. He had not wished to come south on this gimmick-ridden jaunt, much less spend a hundred guineas for the privilege, but as the owner of Scotland’s most flamboyant castle he had felt it proper. Or, more accurately, Lady Mabel had thought it proper. She was upstairs titivating.
‘Anybody else about?’ asked Sir Canning.
‘Passed old Lydeard in the corridor. Fellow was muttering about Alka Seltzer.’
Conversation now ceased. Sir Canning had toast with home-made marmalade. He had banned Frank Cooper’s on the grounds that the quantity of orange peel in it had diminished. The McCrum turned to the Peterborough column.
Gradually the room filled until everyone was there with the exception of Lady Abney, the Earl and Countess of Maidenhead and Peter Williams, the agent and managing director of Abney Enterprises. Sir Canning drank coffee from a vast, elaborately patterned cup and looked round with pleasure. There were, he conceded, absentees. No Marquess of Bath, no Montagu of Beaulieu, no Bedford, but by and large the gathering was impressive.
‘No sign of the Maidenheads?’ asked Sir Canning, addressing the company at large.
The Marquess of Lydeard, mouth full of sausage, shook his head briefly and Mr. Cosmo Green, the new owner of Hook, shrugged expressively. He was there to advise about money, which he was good at. Sir Canning looked at the far end of the table and raised his eyebrows. ‘Tony?’ he enquired. The Hon. Anstruther Grithbrice said, ‘No,’ and turned to his neighbour, a voluptuous black girl, whom he had introduced the night before as Honeysuckle Johnson. ‘Have you, honey?’ he asked.
‘Not a sign,’ she said in a husky Eartha Kitt voice.
‘Oh,’ Sir Canning grimaced and got up. ‘If,’ he said, ‘any of you should bump into them you might remind them that we have catering at ten. In the boardroom.’ He put The Times under his arm and walked out.
Outside in the dark corridor he almost ran into his butler. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said Mercer. ‘I was just coming for you. Mr. Williams is on the phone.’
‘The phone?’ Sir Canning’s satisfaction was jolted. Peter Williams had a flat in the house, over the old stables. It had its own entrance but it wouldn’t have taken him more than thirty seconds to walk round. Besides, he invariably had breakfast in the main dining-room.
‘I’ll take it in the office,’ he said irritably. ‘Did he sound all right? Not ill?’
‘No, sir. Not at all.’
‘Good. He’d better not be.’ He opened the green baize-covered door which separated the private sector of his home from the public, stepped lightly over a purple rope barrier, across the great hall with its seascape
s and engraved oars, coats of arms and photographs of admirals and rowing eights, and opened another door, in a far corner, marked ‘Private’. This was the office block, much of it a recent addition built out into a courtyard where no one could see it.
‘Morning, Miss Adams,’ he said to his private secretary, a thin-faced spinster in her late thirties. ‘I’ll deal with this and then we’ll do the mail straight away. We have a full day today.’
‘Good morning, Sir Canning. Yes, of course.’
He went past her and into his office beyond, where he sat down heavily in the high-backed revolving leather arm-chair and flicked a switch on the long slim silver and black device on the desk. ‘Peter?’ he said, leaning back in the chair.
‘Hello, yes, it’s me.’ The voice sounded oddly real even after the amplification. It was an expensive system—Danish. ‘I’m afraid we’ve had a slight accident.’
‘Oh Christ.’ Sir Canning was peeved. ‘Not now of all times,’ he said. ‘What is it?’
‘Not serious,’ said Williams. ‘It’s just that I took Lady Maidenhead out for a spin in the Charlotte last night and we broke down.’
‘Broke down?’
‘It’s all right. She’s fixed now. It’s just that we’ll both be a bit late. Lady Maidenhead’s rather distressed. Could you explain to her husband?’
‘He’s not down yet. Anyway it’s your problem not mine. You’ll have to explain for yourselves. When will we see you?’
‘About a quarter of an hour. I’m at a phone box in Marlow.’
‘O.K. Quarter of an hour.’
Sir Canning flicked the switch back and pursed his lips. Miss Adams came in with a bundle of letters and he smiled at her, wryly. ‘I do hope,’ he said, ‘we’re not going to have trouble.’
2
LADY MAIDENHEAD, IT WAS generally agreed, received the news of her husband’s death with disquieting equanimity. The announcement was made by a policeman who arrived on a motor bike ten minutes before the seminar on catering was due to begin. The body, he told Sir Canning, had been washed up at Cookham Weir and spotted by a man out walking his dog. The police had recognized the dead man from photographs in the press, and confirmed his identity from the initials on his bathing trunks. He said nothing about the cause of death but concluded lamely that somebody else would be coming later.
‘I was sent to tell you and her ladyship as quickly as possible,’ he said. ‘We knew they were staying here. Read it in William Hickey.’ He twisted the immense gauntlets in his hands and smiled nervously. ‘Could I see her ladyship?’
‘I think perhaps it would be more… er… appropriate if I told her myself,’ said Sir Canning. He dismissed the policeman, instructed Mercer to prepare a ritual glass of brandy and buzzed the boardroom.
‘Peter? Is Lady Maidenhead there?’
‘Everyone’s here.’
‘I’ll be right up. Warn her I want a word in private, would you?’
Upstairs, Lady Maidenhead refused to have a word in private. After Sir Canning had made his little speech she drank the brandy before remarking, ‘Silly old twit. I told him not to bring his trunks. He’s not used to fresh water.’ She then asked for a second brandy.
The Earl had been more than twenty years her senior and their marriage, which had been his second, had lasted five years. In that time her extravagant good looks had wilted but not faded away completely. The other guests seemed, more predictably, to be embarrassed rather than anguished with the possible exception of Mabel McCrum who went rather white and dabbed surreptitiously at her eyes with a small lace handkerchief. However in view of Lady Maidenhead’s refusal to do the decent thing and have hysterics there was nothing for it but to continue, albeit nervously, with the session on catering.
It was introduced by Sir Canning. He spoke succinctly, disclaiming any great responsibility for the growth of his restaurant and cafeteria business from the original small tea shop to the massive pre-cooked infra-red operation which he now controlled. On a good day now they sold over a thousand pounds’ worth of chips and lollies and baked beans as well as scampi à la mode d’Abney to the more discerning in The Cabin restaurant. After five minutes he made way for Peter Williams.
Williams, it was immediately clear to his listeners, was a technocrat. He was wearing what Americans used to call an Ivy League suit and he illustrated his talk with slides. The McCrum, who sat next to the Marquess of Lydeard, leant across and whispered in his ear, ‘Slough Grammar and Harvard Business School if you ask me.’ Lydeard chortled obligingly and Sir Canning said ‘Shhhh’. Williams spoke for half an hour, allowing the catering manager, an oily person in his early thirties, who had been poached from his job running a motorway service station, to say a very few words.
The theme of the lecture was profitability without waste. Abney Enterprises employed pigs as refuse disposal units. ‘Ecological chain,’ said Williams. ‘Human waste in the form of unfinished meals is fed to our pigs and the pigs are fed back to the public in pork pies. It’s biologically perfect and it involves total maximization of profit.’
There were other ways in which he saved and therefore made money. ‘This,’ he said, showing a slide of a long queue of trippers, ‘involves waste and dissatisfaction, but so…’ and he switched to a slide showing no queues at all, ‘does this. There is an optimum speed for consumer traffic. Push your customer through too fast and he is irritable and spends too little money. He won’t have any afters and he won’t have a second cup of coffee. Push him through too slowly and,’ he switched back to the previous slide, ‘you get this. Customers waiting and maybe even being turned away and going elsewhere for their meals. Your lucky client who’s got his food may spend more because he’s allowed to linger; but no amount of extra buying by the few can compensate for money spent by the many. You have to strike a happy mean. Everyone has to feed well and expensively. Not too expensively. Nobody must feel he’s spent more than he can afford or he’ll feel cheated and he won’t come back. But we have to get to the highest possible profit level below that figure.’
Sir Canning had been showing signs of restiveness. ‘Thank you, Peter,’ he said, ‘for such a lucid exposition. There’s just one point I would like to emphasize.’ He stuck a hand in his jacket pocket and tried to look affable. ‘Although of course we are in the business to make money there is no substitute for quality. We here at Abney have very few complaints and the reason for that is that we supply, as the public would have it, “first-rate nosh”. You’ll have an opportunity to see for yourselves over the weekend but I can’t say too forcefully that we would never dream of taking on an outside caterer, simply because by doing so we lose control over the quality of our food and drink.’ He paused and peered round beaming, trying to see whether he had reestablished his philanthropic credentials. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Thank you again, Peter. I’ll throw it open now. Any questions or observations, anyone?’
‘Yes.’ It was Anstruther Grithbrice. ‘We’ve always used outside people at Netherly,’ he drawled, ‘and I agree that they’re a pretty fearful lot but they do save us a lot of fag and we have a guaranteed income. I mean they pay a set amount every year. Why involve yourself in a hell of a risk and a hell of a lot of hard work when you can get someone else to do it for you?’
‘I’m afraid,’ Sir Canning was looking patronizing, ‘that success in this field does involve both risk and hard work. Unless perhaps,’ he smiled icily, ‘you’re lucky enough to have quite such a magnificent attraction as Netherly.’
‘I must say I had a rotten lunch in your cafeteria, Grithbrice,’ said the McCrum. ‘Not even hot.’
‘You should have told us you were coming, instead of snooping round incognito. Then you could have had a proper lunch with us. Serves you right for being shifty.’
‘I always maintain,’ said Lydeard, ‘that the public either comes to see me or the bison or the Canalettos. I don’t know that they really want more than a good cup of tea.’
‘I always say sod the
public,’ said Grithbrice, ‘and talking of tea, what about coffee?’ The coffee was in fact waiting and the meeting split into small groups, each one discussing the relative merits of different sorts of packaging, of different ice-cream companies, fixed seating, plastic cups and gratuities. Before long, however, the individual conversations took a gloomier turn.
‘Poor old Maidenhead,’ said Lydeard, who seldom intentionally spoke ill of anyone, least of all the dead. ‘Frightfully upsetting for poor Eva. Can’t think what possessed him to go larking about in the river at that time of the morning. I suppose he got cramp.’
‘She doesn’t look upset,’ said the McCrum, and the two stared towards the window by which the newly bereaved Countess was sitting, talking animatedly to an attentive Peter Williams. ‘If you ask me,’ continued the Scot, ‘there’s something going on there. And as for Maidenhead he was a charlatan and a mountebank and we all know it. He gave the aristocracy a bad name.’
‘Oh I say,’ said Lydeard, ‘fellow’s only just dead, y’know.’
Over by the fireplace, Grithbrice, his girlfriend, and Sir Canning had also forgotten the problems of feeding the public and were debating the consequences of the fatality.
‘Awkward,’ Grithbrice was saying. ‘It can’t help casting rather a blight over the ceremony. The papers are going to be a little muted in their enthusiasm.’
‘Awkward’s the word,’ agreed Sir Canning. ‘If only he could have waited till Monday and done it at home. He spent all his life trying to bugger me up and now he’s continuing after he’s died. It really is tiresome of him.’
‘You English,’ said Miss Johnson, who had a Ph.D. in Contemporary Communications from a little-known university in Idaho, ‘are lacking in sensitivity.’
The two men took united umbrage. ‘Not in the least,’ said Sir Canning. ‘We just conceal our emotions. Certain things are better left unexpressed, and grief is one of them.’
