by Tim Heald
‘We should get him now,’ said Bognor exultantly. He pressed his foot as hard as it would go and managed to coax the car up to a protesting 30 m.p.h. In front of them the Lagonda, belching clouds of black fumes, was climbing at no more than 25. It was a two-snail race.
At the top of the hill they had almost caught him, but to Bognor’s surprise and horror the Marquess swung his old machine hard to the right and shot off along a rough dirt track.
‘Christ,’ said Bognor. ‘We’re going to have to go across country.’
‘No alternative,’ said Grithbrice feebly, and a few seconds later they were jolting over the heavily rutted path on the spine of the Quantocks. At first the Lagonda with its bigger wheels and high carriage pulled away from them, while Bognor fought to keep the little Mini moving. But gradually Bognor’s increasing skill and Lydeard’s worsening engine trouble combined to reduce the deficit, until they were almost together.
‘Hold tight,’ said Bognor, ‘I’m going alongside. Tell him not to be a bloody fool and make him stop.’ So saying, he put his foot down until the Mini was bucking along the hillside at more than 40 m.p.h. carving a manic passage through heather and wortleberry bushes. ‘Now!’ he shouted, as he glanced across and saw Basil Lydeard almost exactly alongside. His face was vivid purple and his bulging eyes looked straight ahead as he gripped the steering wheel with rigid arms. Bognor was irresistibly reminded of Mr. Toad in The Wind in the Willows. ‘Now,’ he shouted again, and watched Grithbrice lean out and gesture imploringly. It had no effect whatever.
‘I’m going to ram him,’ screamed Bognor. ‘Hold on.’ But just as he was about to swing the wheel hard to the left he saw a barbed wire fence rushing towards them. He braked just in time, and watched in despair as the Lagonda sped through a gateway and accelerated over a track which had suddenly changed from mud to tarmac.
‘We’re going to lose him,’ said Bognor. He reversed and followed, but Lydeard’s lead had increased. The improving road now ran steeply downhill and the Lagonda was racing down it, although the smoke and fumes had not diminished at all. Bognor realized that Lydeard must have switched off the engine and was coasting.
Half a mile on, the road widened and was straighter as it crossed another road before descending even more sharply towards the village of Cothelstone. The two men watched in horror as the fuming Lagonda hurtled over the crossroads and down the hill beyond.
‘My God,’ shouted Bognor. ‘He can’t have seen that lorry. He’ll never make it.’
The lorry, an old-fashioned horsebox, was making heavy weather of the hill, grinding upwards at walking pace. The driver had no chance of manoeuvring at all, and Lydeard for his part was virtually out of control. From where Bognor and Grithbrice watched, it seemed there must be a head-on collision, but at the last second Lydeard must have appreciated the danger because the Lagonda suddenly juddered to the right. There was a puff of smoke from the tyres as they failed to grip the surface; then a rending noise as the massive green vehicle ripped through the wooden fencing at the roadside and leapt into the air.
It hung there for an instant and then bounced three times before it came to rest at the bottom of the slope in a field yellow with buttercups. Bognor noticed one of the wheels still spinning crazily and watched, mesmerized, as a thin snake of flame stretched out from the wreck. A second later there was a dull explosion as the flame reached the petrol tank and Bognor winced.
‘Last of the Lydeards,’ he said flatly.
That evening he and Monica had a muted dinner at the Basil Street Hotel. ‘The zoo,’ she said, after listening to his account, ‘said that bison are renowned for their sense of smell.’
Next day he presented his report to Parkinson and watched as he read it. After an attentive perusal his boss gave him one of his old-fashioned looks. ‘Before you start feeling pleased with yourself, read this,’ he said.
The telegram said: ‘Outraged appalled latest Grithbrice crime. Proceeding south soonest prevent more carnage. McCrum.’
‘Oh, my God,’ said Bognor.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Simon Bognor Mysteries
Prologue
THE ANNUAL EXTRAORDINARY DINNER of the Worshipful Company of Master Harbingers had been, as usual, sumptuous. In a changing and hostile world the Harbingers, whose principal claim to fame was their preposterous prosperity, had the good sense to dispense copious food and drink to selected members of the outside world once a year. It stopped the world from judging too harshly their unlovely avarice. By stuffing the editor of The Times with quail and by pouring Château Lafite down the throat of the Archbishop, the Harbingers managed to avoid censure for a policy unique among the great livery companies of the City of London. They dispensed no charity. They lived for themselves alone, except for the annual thrash on the Thursday after Epiphany.
Shortly after eleven o’clock that evening St John Derby, the editor of the Samuel Pepys column of the Daily Globe, was stumbling uncertainly down Ludgate Hill. He had been making very free with the hospitality of the Harbingers, a hospitality he earned carefully by writing frequent flattering stories about the company in his daily diary. His cloak flapped behind him in the crisp January air and his heavy stick beat an irregular pattern on the pavement, his sixty-year-old face was more than usually purple and there was armagnac on his shirtfront. A taxi was what he wanted but no taxi came. Most had been grabbed on behalf of more distinguished guests of the Harbingers or by younger, swifter, less inebriated gossip columnists. He sighed and staggered on.
At Ludgate Circus he paused for a moment. Had he turned left he could have walked to Blackfriars and taken the District line underground to South Kensington, a mere three minutes’ walk from his flat. Instead he lurched over the road and continued straight on up Fleet Street. After a hundred yards he turned left into an impressive grey slab which could have been designed by Mussolini, nodded at the uniformed doorman and took the lift to the fifth floor. Once there he turned right along a panelled passage and stopped outside a heavy door on which his own and Samuel Pepys’ names appeared in bold black.
He fumbled for a few moments with his keys, let himself in and sat down heavily at his desk. After a little more fumbling he produced another key and unlocked the bottom right drawer from which he took a bottle of Sandeman’s port. With an unsteady hand he poured a generous measure into a tumbler on the desk, then picked up the internal phone and dialled down to the front hall.
‘Any chance of a taxi to Kensington, Albert?’ he asked.
They were the last words anyone heard him speak. More than an hour later Albert, who had had his attention distracted and who had in any case found taxis hard to come by, tried to reach Derby on the telephone. Failing, he argued, not unreasonably, that the celebrated diarist must have fallen asleep at his desk, and decided to call personally to wake him.
When he finally reached the room he found the reveller slumped forward across the blotter, evidently in a drunken stupor. The room reeked of alcohol and the bottle of port had fallen over. A red stain had formed on the carpet and liquid still dripped on to it steadily. Albert, who had seen it all before many times, sighed and strode towards the desk. Only when his shout of ‘Come along now, Mr Derby, taxi’s here’ had failed three times did he attempt to shake the body into activity. When he did he instantly recoiled.
St John Derby was not just drunk. He was, of course, extremely dead.
1
THE DEATH OF THEIR leader did not come as an overwhelming shock to the small team who daily produced the Samuel Pepys column. It came first to Eric Gringe at his home in Bromley. ‘Oh Lord,’ he said to his wife Thelma when the phone rang. ‘I knew it. It’ll be something to do with that piece on the Anglo-Rhodesian Friendship society. I told St John to leave it out.’ A moment later he said simply, ‘Oh dear. How shocking. I’ll come right in. Oh all right then … nine sharp … in your office.’
After he’d rung off Mr Gringe sat up in bed and put on the bedside lamp. ‘I’m g
oing to make a cup of tea,’ he said, ‘St John Derby’s dead.’
His wife stirred at his side. ‘Mmmm?’
‘Dead. St John.’ Mr Gringe put a hand inside the jacket of his pyjamas and scratched abstractedly. ‘It would be the drink of course,’ he said. ‘I’m amazed it didn’t happen sooner but the way he abused himself it’s hardly surprising.’
Mrs Gringe sat up beside her husband.
‘What a dreadful thing,’ she said. ‘Does that mean you’ll take over?’
Mr Gringe made a face. ‘Really, Thelma, I think you ought to have a little more respect. He only died an hour or so ago.’
‘He’s been dead from the neck up for the last fifteen years at least, as you well know. You’ve said as much time and again. If it hadn’t been for all the work you put in on that column he’d have been sacked years ago.’
Mr Gringe who was a conscientious forty-five knew it perfectly well.
‘I’ll be in charge until they find someone else of course,’ he said.
His wife grimaced. ‘Eric Gringe,’ she said, ‘you let them ride over you, you do really. There’s no reason on earth why they should find someone else. You’ve a right to that job. You’ve earned it.’
Mr Gringe looked at his watch. It was six. ‘I’ll go and get that tea,’ he said, ‘then I’ll tell the others. I’ve got to be in the Managing Editor’s office at nine.’
The first call was to Molly Mortimer. All the time he was making the tea, getting the Garibaldi biscuits out of the tin, and emptying the dog, he was wondering in what order he ought to tell his colleagues. It would have been simpler and more effective to tell them all at once as soon as he’d seen Clapham, the Managing Editor, but that would be too late. By then the rumours would be spreading up Fleet Street, distorting in and out of other newspaper offices, garbling at early morning press receptions ready for the full scandalous blast of half-truth which would come as soon as the pubs opened. No, he would have to telephone.
Upstairs again he dropped crumbs on the sheets and decided to begin with Molly Mortimer. Nobody could complain if he began with the column’s woman. He looked the number up in the back of his diary where it was pencilled in his neat cramped clerk’s handwriting. She had a flat just behind Sloane Square. He and Thelma had been there once for cocktails. It had been full of mirrors, and Thelma, who had left her coat in the bedroom, had pronounced it scandalous.
He dialled and waited while the phone at the other end rang for an age. Just as he was about to give up it stopped and a man’s voice said, ‘For Christ’s sake. Have you any idea what the time is?’ It sounded to Gringe suspiciously like young Willy Wimbledon but the idea was ridiculous.
‘This is very important,’ said Gringe, ‘is Miss Mortimer there?’
‘Hang on. Who is it?’
‘Eric Gringe.’
There was a pause and then Molly’s throaty voice saying ‘Darling, whatever is it? It is dreadfully early.’
‘I’m sorry, Molly,’ he said, ‘I just thought you ought to know that St John’s been found dead.’
A short silence, then. ‘Oh darling. How frightful. Can I help? I mean what would you like me to do?’
This slightly nonplussed him. ‘Nothing much we can do,’ he said, ‘but I’m asking you all to come in to the office at half past nine for a conference. Is that all right?’
‘Is that all?’ She sounded disappointed.
‘Yes. Can you manage it?’
‘I did have breakfast arranged at the Connaught but I shall just have to cancel. What was it? Stroke?’
‘I don’t know. I should think so.’
‘So should I. See you at nine-thirty.’
Next, partly so as to dismiss the absurd suspicion, still lurking irrelevantly at the back of his mind, he called Viscount Wimbledon’s number. There was no reply. The suspicion advanced.
It occurred to him that the Honourable Bertie Harris might already have heard of the tragedy. As the son and heir of the Globe’s proprietor, the first Baron Wharfedale, he was often privy to information which was not advanced to relatively junior members of the staff such as Eric Gringe. This did not improve his relations with such people in general nor with Mr Gringe in particular.
‘Ah …’ he said when he heard his colleague say a brusque ‘Harris’, in answer to the ringing tone. ‘Ah … have you heard the sad news?’
‘Sad news, what sad news? I’m still in bed so of course I haven’t heard any news, sad or otherwise. It’s not my habit to hear news until I wake which thanks to you I now have. So tell me, what sad news?’
‘St John Derby has passed away.’ Mr Gringe had no idea why he used the silly euphemism. Bertie Harris always forced him into self parody.
‘Some would say that that is neither sad nor news,’ said Lord Wharfedale’s heir. ‘I can’t say I find it hard to believe though I could perhaps, if pressed, muster the merest twinge of regret.’
‘I’m asking everyone to come into the office at nine-thirty for a chat,’ said Gringe, lamely. ‘Can you manage it?’
‘I’ll be there. Good morning.’
Mrs Gringe looked at him with some contempt. ‘You should stand up to them, Eric. You really should,’ she said.
He said nothing but dialled the number for Milborn Port, the last member of the Pepys team who inhabited a bijou residence overlooking Stoke Poges golf club.
‘Good God,’ said Milborn when the news had finally permeated to his brain, ‘so the grape got him in the end. Poor old sod. There but for the grace of God …’
‘Can you be in at nine-thirty?’
‘It’ll be the first time for twenty years, but I’ll make it. I think we owe it to the old boy, out of respect.’
Eric Gringe drank the last of his milky tea. It was too bad about Willy Wimbledon. He wondered if he ought to tell Anthea Morrison, the secretary, but decided to postpone it till later. It would not be proper for her to be at the meeting so there was no particular hurry. As for Horace Peckwater, the sub-editor, he could wait too. He certainly wasn’t having any tuppeny-ha’penny sub-editor at a writers’ meeting.
It was after seven now and outside the Gringe semi, Bromley was beginning to stir. Mr Gringe went to the wardrobe and selected an appropriate tie, the only one he had which meant anything, his RAC tie, then he took off his striped pyjama top, slipped on a string vest and went to shave. With a tremor of guilt he realized that he was feeling strangely excited, even exhilarated, at the prospect of the day ahead.
Later that morning he emerged from the Managing Editor’s office, white faced and trembling. It had been a distressing interview. Short and to the point but definitely distressing. As it was only nine-fifteen he went across the road and bought a cup of coffee in a plastic cup to steady his nerves. Back in the Pepys office he noticed that St John’s desk had been cleared and a hole cut in the carpet immediately next to his chair. There was also a lot of grey powder about the place which Clapham had said, with a touch of melodrama, was to do with finger printing. For a moment Mr Gringe wondered whether it would be proper for him to sit at St John’s desk as he normally did when he was deputizing for his chief but decided against it, as Milborn Port would have put it, ‘Out of respect for the old boy’.
He felt rather sick.
His colleagues arrived singly. Harris first, smirking as usual, then Molly Mortimer, then Port and finally, to his surprise, a breathless Willy Wimbledon.
‘Who told you we were convening?’ he asked him tetchily, but before the Viscount could reply, Miss Mortimer chipped in. ‘I did, Eric. I had a feeling you might forget the new boy so I rang him to make sure and I was absolutely right. Very naughty of you.’
‘I tried to ring you,’ he said crossly, ‘but there was no reply. None at all.’
‘You must have mis-dialled,’ said Wimbledon, grinning boyishly. ‘It happens a lot.’
‘I did not mis-dial,’ said Gringe, his voice rising a dangerous octave. ‘I quite definitely did not mis-dial.’ He stopped and
took a breath. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid I’ve been more affected by what’s happened than perhaps I realized. You’re probably right. I probably mis-dialled.’
‘Anyway,’ said Bertie Harris, ‘let’s get on with it. I rather gather there’s more to this business than meets the eye. Are you going to do some explaining, old boy?’
Mr Gringe fingered his RAC tie and tried to glower menacingly. The effect was simply one of extreme petulance.
‘You seem to know a lot, Harris,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you’d like to tell us yourself?’
Harris shrugged. ‘You’re in charge and I understand that Martin Clapham’s put you in the picture … well,’ he coughed deprecatingly, ‘well into some of the picture at least, so I suggest you tell us whatever it is that you feel you ought to tell us.’
‘For God’s sake get on with it,’ said Milborn Port.
Eric Gringe flushed. ‘Originally,’ he said, ‘I just wanted to meet like this so that we could discuss arrangements for producing the column over the next few days, and also so that we could decide what sort of arrangements we ought to make for the deceased. You know he didn’t have any family and in a way I think perhaps he looked on us as his family and therefore it seemed only proper that perhaps we ought to make some special effort, and assume some special responsibility for making sure that everything is done properly. He’d have wanted everything done properly. It would have been important to him so I think that it should be important to us too. But … but, I’m afraid Mr Clapham has told me something which while it doesn’t make any real difference to any of that, is still, er, more important. Well, immediately important.’ He paused and looked at his colleagues. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘poor old St John didn’t have a stroke at all. He didn’t die from natural causes of any sort. He was stabbed. With a paper knife.’
2
SIMON BOGNOR WAS ALSO summoned to an unexpected meeting that morning. He was lying half asleep in the bed he shared with his longstanding girl friend Monica, reading The Times while she scrambled eggs in the distance. As usual he began at the end, with the obituaries, and was on the point of entertaining her with a recitation of the salient points in the career of a West Indian diplomat who had been assassinated the previous day while shopping in Regent Street when the phone rang.
