Red Herrings

by Tim Heald

  ‘Monica has “A” level scripture,’ said Bognor by way of explanation. ‘Her convent insisted. She’s still very hot on the Bible.’

  ‘It’s an extremely good book,’ said Monica defensively. ‘Full of good things, don’t you agree, Vicar?’

  The Reverend Larch, gaping somewhat, agreed, and accepted a proffered glass.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And as relevant to our modern times as it ever was. The eternal verities remain, ah, how should one say, eternally, well, veritable.’ He smiled and then realised rightly that something more was expected of him. ‘Very salutary to have death visited on us in such a violent fashion. And on such a lovely day. “In the midst of life we are in death” as the prayer book says. We could have hardly had a more dramatic demonstration of that. So at least some good has come from the wretched fellow’s passing. Though one has to concede that God really does move in the most mysterious ways.’ The vicar was groping desperately for the thread of his argument. Any thread, any argument. He sipped champagne as a delaying tactic and then said: ‘And death in whatever shape or form is uniquely mysterious, don’t you agree, Mr Bognor?’

  Bognor and Mr Larch had been introduced earlier in the morning. The vicar, who fancied himself as a judge of character, had decided that Bognor was a sympathetic and intelligent person even if not of the faith. Bognor had said something disparaging about monasticism. The line was prompted by the vicar’s dress. Bognor had had an aversion to that sort of thing ever since some unnerving experiences in an Anglican friary early in his career, but the vicar knew nothing of this and was in any case not keen on monasticism himself. He believed in getting in among his flock, and was fond of describing himself as ‘a people’s parson’.

  ‘I’ve always found death disturbingly straightforward once it happens,’ said Bognor. ‘It’s the events leading up to death which are mysterious.’

  ‘That may be your experience,’ said Mr Larch. ‘But in my line of work life after death is the ultimate mystery.’

  ‘My husband takes a rather prosaic view of this sort of thing,’ said Monica slipping a protective arm through Simon’s. ‘In fact he takes a prosaic view of almost everything. Don’t you, darling? But so would you if you worked for the Board of Trade.’

  ‘In any event,’ said Peregrine Contractor, pouring more champagne, ‘I’m sure we all agree that it’s absolutely tragic. A tragedy for the village, too.’ Everyone looked suitably solemn but they were disturbed in this moment of reverent contemplation by the advent of Sir Nimrod Herring and his daughter Naomi. Sir Nimrod, last of the Herrings who had come to the village on the coat tails of the Conqueror, had once lived in the manor, now occupied by the Contractors. New money had, as it always did, driven out old; ancient lineage and immaculate breeding had proved no match for ladies’ lingerie. Despite having fallen on hard times, however, the old squire had not moved from the village which had borne his family’s name these nine hundred years and more. Forced to trim his cloth and turn an honest penny he had taken over the village post office and there he now presided with Naomi under the legend ‘Herring and Daughter’.

  He was an amiable seeming person with a white tonsure and a tuft of hair in the middle of his chin. This, unaccountably, was rust coloured with only a few flecks of grey. His daughter, Naomi, was a round faced woman in her early forties, figure concealed in a smock which was as discreet as Samantha’s was not.

  ‘What a perfectly bloody business!’ he exclaimed, helping himself to champagne. ‘Thank God for something decent to drink after that bloody mead. It doesn’t matter how much ice you put in the damned stuff it still tastes of bees’ wax.’

  ‘Oh, Daddy!’ said Naomi. Naomi was permanently embarrassed by her father and none too bright. After Lady Herring, her mother, died in faintly mysterious circumstances (drowned in the moat) Naomi had gone through a prolonged ‘difficult’ spell. She had been a hippy among the flower people of Haight Ashbury in the sixties; then returned to ride pillion with a chapter of Hell’s Angels from Ruislip before setting off on the road to Katmandu and spending a saucy two years in an ashram in Poona. Latterly she was alleged to have settled down though no one was entirely convinced. She was rumoured to have had a child by one of the Rolling Stones but, if so, no one knew what had happened to it. It was also said that she was devoted to Sir Nimrod and it was certainly true that she put in extremely long hours behind the counter. And she was very decent at coming out late at night to drive the old squire home when he was too tight to do it himself.

  ‘What a silly fellow, wandering into the field of fire during Clout,’ said Sir Nimrod, ‘asking for trouble. Could have been killed.’

  ‘But he was, Daddy,’ said Naomi, eyes very round, face very pale.

  ‘Just as I said, child.’ He glanced at Bognor to whom he had not previously been introduced. ‘I don’t think we’ve met,’ he said, sticking out a hand which Bognor shook, ‘Herring.’

  ‘Bognor,’ said Bognor, ‘and this is my wife Monica.’

  ‘Bognor!’ Sir Nimrod’s eyes flashed. ‘Any relation of old Theo Bognor?’

  ‘Not that I know of,’ said Bognor truthfully.

  ‘Old Theo was in my company at Arnhem,’ said Sir Nimrod. ‘Any friend of his is a friend of mine. So you’re no relation. Ah well. Naomi and I were talking about this deuced corpse. He was from the Customs don’t you know. A bumfwallah. Come down to sort out everyone’s Value Added Tax. Damned waste of taxpayers’ money if you ask me. They should be out catching criminals. You should see the pieces of paper we have to deal with in the post office. Licence to breathe is what you’ll have to have before you can say knife. I say, Vicar, I thought you’d be over in the woods saying the last rites. Not quaffing the Widow with the nobs.’

  Mr Larch, already on his second glass, stretched his mouth in a rheumy approximation of a smile and said, ‘“The Lord God giveth and the Lord God taketh away.”’

  ‘Rum lot, you sky pilots,’ said Sir Nimrod. ‘The old Canon wouldn’t have let the stiff out of his sight until it was safely packed in ice down at the morgue. But then the old Canon was a stickler for protocol.’

  He glowered. In the old days before the final collapse of the Herring fortunes the living of Herring St George had been in the gift of the Herrings. Sir Nimrod, being High Church and conservative as well as Conservative, had always appointed Anglo-Catholics who spoke the Queen’s English. Larch was a break with the tradition. He had been foisted on them by the progressive bishop of the diocese and Sir Nimrod regarded him as a closet Methodist. He had introduced a regular Family Mass, guitar music and a perfectly disgusting ritual called ‘making the sign of peace with your neighbour’. This, Sir Nimrod, fuming in the family pew (a feudal vestige he still resolutely refused to relinquish), would have nothing to do with. He had not kissed another human being since Lady Hillary had passed on twenty years and more ago.

  Parson and Squire, Bognor thought to himself. Or, in a manner of speaking, Squire Mark One (Sir Nimrod) and Squire Mark Two (Perry Contractor). Even now all English villages were supposed to have one of each, although in practice the parson was called something like a team ministry and was a handful of curates based on the nearest town and cruising round the surrounding villages when it suited them. Even Larch, he had learned from Peregrine, was nominally responsible for the smaller villages of Herring St Andrew and Herring All Saints, but All Saints was effectively delegated to the district nurse who doubled up as a deaconess and St Andrew was practically derelict. What passed for the St Andrew’s congregation worshipped at St George except for twice a month when Larch took his guitar over for a People’s Choral Evensong.

  Bognor was a city person who had lived nearly all his adult life in London. He had all the townee’s wariness about the country, suspecting that rural prettiness was merely a cover for incest, bestiality and possibly even witchcraft. Most of what he knew about village life was gleaned from reading the newspapers and a certain sort of novel.

  ‘If this were fiction,�
�� he muttered to his wife as they both helped themselves to another sausage roll from the hamper (Mrs Gotobed, the Contractors’ cook had excelled herself) ‘then we’d have the local doctor here as well, wouldn’t we?’

  ‘Him or the local bobby,’ she agreed. ‘I imagine we’re about to get a visitation from Samantha’s scrumptious policeman. Or do you think he’s something she dreamed up?’

  ‘Who knows?’ asked Bognor more or less rhetorically. He really meant ‘Who cares?’ but was nervous of being overheard by his host or hostess. ‘Frankly,’ he went on, ‘I’m beginning to wish I’d stayed in bed. These people all seem a bit peculiar.’

  ‘Country air,’ said Monica knowingly. ‘Turns the head and ruins the complexion. Country folk always have addled brain cells and terminal skin cancer.’

  ‘I’d forgotten how exhausting life was in the country.’ Bognor sighed.

  ‘It’s not your surroundings that exhaust you, it’s your time of life.’

  There was some truth in this. Bognor would not see forty again. Come to that he felt he was unlikely to see fifty. In the days when the Clout first started a man of over forty was considered pretty antique, accorded much veneration and respect and not expected to live much longer. Bognor felt that he had been born into the wrong century. He felt like mediaeval man – course spent, sands of time run out – but was always being told that this was ridiculous. His contemporaries jogged, worked out with weights and ate nothing but nuts and sunflower seeds. Many of them persuaded themselves that they were in their prime of life. Worse still, many of them convinced very sexy women of half their age that they were in their prime of life. Bognor knew that, in his early forties, he had the body of a not very well preserved man in his late sixties. He just wished he lived at a time when this was regarded as normal. He did not particularly regret feeling so old; but he did object to being told he was peculiar. Never mind, the intellect was as sharp as ever.

  There was a Tannoy system at the Clout; not a very sophisticated one, it crackled and whined through loud speakers placed on the corner of the mead tent and another by the St John’s Ambulance post. The voice behind it belonged to Damian Macpherson, only son of ‘Doc’ and Mrs Macpherson. Damian was the village teddy boy. Although he was over thirty he seemed to be permanently unemployed and hung around in drainpipes, winklepickers and an old tail coat outside the pub. When anyone feminine passed by he would leer horribly and make various suggestions varying from a drink to a quick How’s Your Father behind the cricket pavilion. But there was no malice in the man and no one had objected to his being appointed to the loud-speaker system. It was accepted that he would stick to the script and say nothing unless authorised by a member of the committee.

  So far he had recited admirably, even injecting a note of sombre unflappability into the rather anodyne announcement about the body in the wood. Now, once more, he spoke:

  ‘Would Mr Simon Bognor of East Sheen please report to Doctor Macpherson in the refreshment tent. Mr Simon Bognor to the refreshment tent.’

  Bognor swore. ‘I don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘That can only mean one thing.’

  Monica nodded, grim-faced. ‘Parkinson,’ she said.

  ‘’Fraid so.’

  Just as she said it, Peregrine Contractor emerged from behind his Roller clutching a cordless telephone.

  ‘Simon, old shoe,’ he said, ‘Dandiprat’s on the blower. Your boss has been on in a state of excitement. Says he’s been phoning everyone in sight. Wants you to check in p.d.q.’

  Dandiprat was the Contractors’ butler – very short, very obsequious and extremely sinister. He always gave Bognor the impression that he was in the possession of everyone’s guilty secret.

  ‘Unless I’m much mistaken he’s been on to Damian Macpherson as well.’ He sighed. ‘Can I ring from the Rolls?’

  ‘You’ll reverse the charges?’

  ‘Naturally.’ Bognor knew perfectly well that a large part of Perry’s success was due to an obsessive though selective parsimony. At the same time as he dispensed magnums of champagne he grudged you the price of a phone call. Entirely in character.

  The phone was a push button cordless. Bognor, sitting in the back of the Rolls, punched 100 for the operator and waited. Not a lot of point, he reflected glumly, in a marvel of modern science like this car phone without visible means of support, when communications were fouled up by some incompetent human in the telephone exchange. When the operator did come on the line she sounded frumpish and surly, peeved at being disturbed. Bognor snapped at her and she snapped back, taking an age to put the call through and doing it gracelessly. ‘I have a Mr Bognor calling from a Rolls Royce in Herring St George. Will you accept the charge?’ he heard her say and was depressed to hear Parkinson saying, ‘Yes, yes,’ just as testily. He did dislike low spirits, particularly when they reflected his own. He liked other people to cheer him up. What was the point in people who simply depressed you?

  Like Parkinson. Bognor’s relationship with his boss was long standing and long suffering. There were those outsiders who regarded his marriage with incredulity, but this was unfair; despite a robust reluctance to be hen-pecked and a permanently wandering eye he was fond of old Monica. He was not fond of old Parkinson. Not a bit. And yet he had suffered under him for so long that life without him was unthinkable.

  ‘Bognor?’ That staccato almost derisive enquiry. He had endured it for so many years that now he accepted it and would have been uncomfortable if his superior began a telephone conversation in any other way.

  ‘Speaking,’ he said, just as tartly. It was not a one-sided affair. He gave as good as he got. Well, almost. At least he answered back. And if he did not answer back he was never servile. He had a good line in lip chewing, dumb insolence, an entirely justifiable attitude in view of Parkinson’s permanent truculence and condescension. The trouble was that Parkinson while undeniably good at his job was in every other respect a comparatively low form of life. Bognor, although professionally miscast, was in every other way a person of the utmost distinction. It was a difficult situation to live with, though not uncommon. Bognor’s experience of life was that it was not the cream which floated to the top but the scum. He and Parkinson were a case in point.

  ‘I do apologise for disturbing your little holiday,’ said Parkinson. As both of them knew full well, he did not mean what he said. Just the opposite. He liked nothing better than disrupting his subordinate’s leisure time.

  ‘That’s perfectly all right,’ said Bognor. This was also a lie.

  ‘Not for the first time, Bognor, you seem to be bringing trouble where’er you go. You’ve conjured up a corpse from Customs and Excise.’

  ‘You’re remarkably well informed,’ said Bognor drily. ‘They only found him an hour or so ago.’

  ‘The CID man in charge of the case is extremely quick on the draw,’ said Parkinson, managing to imply that this was not quite the case with Bognor. ‘Rather a ball of fire in fact. On checking him out I’ve discovered he’s first rate. Absolutely first rate.’ The inference was again quite plain.

  ‘He’s not called Guy, by any chance?’ enquired Bognor, glumly apprehensive about a whizz kid who was also, on Mrs Contractor’s evidence, what suggestible women nowadays referred to as a ‘hunk’.

  ‘Not by you, Bognor. As far as you’re concerned he is Detective Chief Inspector the Earl of Rotherhithe.’

  For once Bognor was able to trump his superior. ‘In that case, sir,’ he said, ‘he’s Guy. I was up at Oxford with him when he was plain Lord Wapping. He was a judo blue. Took my sister out a couple of times. Not my favourite person in all the world and neither as good looking nor as clever as other people seem to think. No real bottom.’

  Now that Bognor was no longer on holiday but on official business, watching over the interests of the Board of Trade and liaising with Guy Rotherhithe, he judged it proper to move his HQ from the manor to the village pub. The Pickled Herring, for years a dozy unreformed public house dealing almost excl
usively in mild, bitter, dandelion and burdock, had recently been purchased by an enterprising pair of gay entrepreneurs, Felix Entwistle and Norman Bone. They were restaurateurs, Felix working front of house, Norman in the kitchen. Norman was an enthusiastic devotee of Nouvelle Cuisine, specialising in magret de canard and raspberry vinegar with almost everything. Last year the Good Food Guide had mortified them by removing their prized mortar and pestle though they still had the bottle for their wine list. The cellar was Felix’s province.

  The two men had refurbished the entire place with the exception of the public bar which in deference to local opinion, as articulated by Sir Nimrod, had been left untouched. It had flagstones, wooden pews and a dartboard. To the great irritation of Sir Nimrod an increasing number of the Herring’s new upmarket clientele had taken to barging into the public on the grounds that they found it ‘real’. ‘Real’ was the new vogue word and could certainly not be applied to the rest of the pub which was filled with ferns and outsize teddy bears, chandeliers from Christopher Wray and even (in the gents) posters of Humphrey Bogart and Gary Cooper. Bognor rather liked it. It reminded him of Toronto.

  He and Monica had checked into a double room called Myrtle. (Other bedrooms were Colombine, Hyacinth, Elderflower, Jasmine and Ragwort. Bognor rather liked the idea of Ragwort but it had no bathroom. Myrtle had a bathroom en suite. With a bidet.)

  When Felix Entwistle had enquired how long Mr and Mrs Bognor would be staying, Bognor replied, grimly and with a touch of bravado, ‘As long as it takes to solve the mystery.’

  ‘What mystery would that be, sir?’ asked Felix, to which Bognor made no reply but merely looked inscrutable.

  ‘I think we’re doing the right thing,’ he said in the privacy of Myrtle. ‘We can’t very well stay with Perry and Sam if they’re under suspicion of having anything to do with it.’ He sat on the edge of the bed and stared moodily at an indifferent print of a Tom Keating Samuel Palmer.