Red Herrings

by Tim Heald

  Bognor pushed open the door and saw at once that his wife was right. The stores were virtually derelict save in the matter of gumboots. They must have acquired a job lot from army surplus. Hundreds hung from the ceiling, mostly but not all in pairs. And on closer inspection he could see that the pairs did not all match. There was a post office counter surrounded by very old admonitory posters and placards advising people to post early for Christmas and make sure they had dog licences but other than that there seemed to be little but a great many cases of Grape-Nuts and a side of bacon sitting on an antique slicer. This last, and the bacon too come to that, looked as if it had been salvaged from the war-time bombing.

  A bell tinkled as Bognor entered and a moment later there was some scuffling off and Naomi Herring advanced wearily on the bacon counter. She did not look at all well and Bognor guessed that the unwonted excesses of yesterday’s Clout had left her with a hangover. She was wearing a grubby smock similar to, but not identical with, the one she had worn yesterday. Bognor suspected that yesterday’s had been her Sunday best.

  ‘Oh, Mr Bognor,’ she said. ‘It is Mr Bognor isn’t it?’

  Bognor confirmed that it was.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ she asked, smiling rather dourly. She was not a very attractive person with her suet face made whiter yet by an over-generous application of what looked like talcum powder which failed to obscure the unhealthy mauve bags under the eyes. Still, thought Bognor, she had obviously had a sad life; and if she lived on nothing but breakfast cereal it was scarcely surprising if she looked a little pasty. He wondered if he ought to order a pair of boots just to show willing but decided against.

  ‘As a matter of fact I was rather hoping to catch your father.’ Bognor smiled feebly, hoping to soften the blow of not being a prospective customer. If only they had sold postcards he would have bought one. It was the mark of really dramatic incompetence to run a shop in such a picture postcard village as Herring St George and yet not actually sell them. He bet you could buy them in Whelk.

  ‘I’m awfully sorry but Daddy’s gone off somewhere,’ she said. ‘He said he’d be back later. Can I take a message?’ It was curious to hear such Sloane Rangerish language emanating from such a Mummerset figure. She said ‘gawn’ for ‘gone’, just as her father had called journalists ‘jawnalists’. Odd.

  ‘You don’t know where he went I suppose?’

  ‘Haven’t the foggiest I’m afraid,’ said Naomi flicking a fly off the bacon. ‘You’re the umpteenth person who’s asked this morning. There’s nothing wrong is there?’

  ‘No,’ said Bognor, wishing it were true.

  ‘It’s not his London day,’ she said. ‘That’s not till next week. I checked. It’s not like him to go charging off like that. He didn’t finish his tea.’

  ‘London day?’ Bognor tried to sound nonchalant. ‘Does he often go to London?’

  ‘As regular as clockwork,’ said Sir Nimrod’s daughter. ‘Every third Monday of the month. He has lunch with a couple of old army friends. At his club.’

  She caught the scepticism on Bognor’s face, and said, ‘He has a country membership, I think. It’s terribly cheap.’ She laughed bleakly, ‘Maybe it’s means tested. I never dared ask. And I think the others pay for lunch. They should. They’re both Lloyd’s underwriters.’

  ‘I see.’ Bognor’s hand went instinctively to the crown of his scalp. ‘Any idea when he might be back?’

  ‘He just said he’d be back later. He’s very vague about time these days.’

  ‘Did he seem all right? Not agitated in any way?’

  Naomi considered for a moment. Bognor watched. It seemed to cost her a lot of effort. He searched for any family resemblance but could catch none. Perhaps she was her mother’s child. He must call on the Macphersons and have a word with them both. Especially Edith.

  ‘To be absolutely honest,’ she said, after a lot of screwing up her nose and rubbing her chin, ‘he hasn’t really been himself since that odious little VAT inspector came smarming round. I mean I don’t wish to speak ill of the dead but he really was an odious little man. And he was fearfully rude to Daddy. I mean I know my father’s not the most methodical person and goodness knows nor am I but we do try and we’re not dishonest. If there’s anything wrong then it’s an honest mistake. But the way he went on you’d think we’d stolen the crown jewels or smuggled in a lorry-load of heroin from Afghanistan. I can’t think why he isn’t out catching criminals.’

  ‘He isn’t out catching anything at the moment,’ said Bognor. ‘He’s in the morgue.’

  ‘Oh, I know, it’s rotten luck and all that.’ She flicked another fly off the slab, which looked like marble and perhaps therefore much the same as Wilmslow’s present resting place as he waited for the forensic surgeon to set about him. ‘But if anybody had it coming to him it was Wilmslow. I know it’s an unpleasant job but he could have been polite. He really went out of his way to antagonise the whole village. Not just us. Everyone.’

  ‘In what way exactly?’

  ‘Oh his manner more than anything. He told Daddy that it was unpatriotic to be so slovenly over accounting. And when Daddy said he’d fought the Kaiser and Hitler to make life possible for little runts like Wilmslow, Wilmslow said he might have got a commission in the cavalry but he certainly wouldn’t have got one in the pay corps. I ask you. The cheek of it.’

  ‘Mmmm.’ Bognor conveyed sympathy though he could well imagine that Sir Nimrod would be an irritating customer for a VAT inspector to have to deal with. Having seen the pitiful attempts to complete a VAT return he could well understand that incompetence of that magnitude coupled with the truculence of which he knew the old squire to be capable would have made a nicer man than Wilmslow impatient. ‘I’m sorry to trouble you Miss Herring,’ he said, ‘but when your father does get back I wonder if you could ask him to give me a call? I’m at the Pickled Herring. My room’s Myrtle. My wife Monica will take a message.’

  Naomi Herring nodded brightly. ‘I’ll tell Daddy to ring Myrtle in Monica as soon as he gets back,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, what the hell,’ he thought to himself. There was no point in contradicting a girl like that. She was old enough to be his elder sister which, as he knew to his cost, was too old to change for the better.

  Time, he decided, to go and see Emerald Carlsbad, authoress of Freudian Traumdeutung in the Cook Islands at her home, the New Maltings. The house, he had already established, was about half a mile past the church on the road to Herring All Saints. It being sunny he would walk, even though it was uphill. The high banked hedgerows were pink and white with dog rose and Queen Anne’s lace and a whole lot of other pretty things he was ashamed not to be able to identify. He had done no botany at school. Once or twice he had to flatten himself against the side of the lane as a tractor or horsebox sped past. Country people seemed to drive more recklessly than townees but they did wave very cheerily. Just beyond the churchyard a stout black and white bitch which looked like a cross between a dalmatian and a cocker spaniel came and sniffed rudely at his flies. An acrid smell which he thought might be chicken dung overlay the grass and wild flowers. It was not silage or cow manure, both of which were richer, deeper, browner smells. This was more of an oboe smell where the others were bassoons.

  He was sweating when he reached the New Maltings and was using a switch of cow parsley to beat off marauding insects attracted to the perspiration which ran down from his temples and stained his shirt under the arms. He hoped Miss Carlsbad might be prevailed upon for a glass of iced water. This walking about in the country was all very well but it did dry out the throat.

  The main part of the house was of ochre stone and dated, he guessed, from around the end of the seventeenth century. Much more recently, however, someone had built on a new wing in white clapboard. Also a rather elegant conservatory which looked as if it had been built to a Victorian design only with modern materials. There was a rather imposing front door at the end of a short path behind a wrought
-iron gate; and a more welcoming back door leading off a yard which contained garage and stabling. He was wondering which one to choose when the back door opened and a figure with skin-tight black trousers, a black shirt, and long very shiny black hair emerged clutching a bulky folder of the sort favoured by fashion models carrying round a portfolio of self-portraits. Bognor recognised Damian Macpherson.

  ‘Hello!’ he said. ‘It’s Damian, isn’t it? Simon Bognor, Board of Trade. Is Miss Carlsbad at home?’

  Damian fingered the stud in his left ear lobe nervously and grinned rather sheepishly. The two met at the back gate.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Damian.

  ‘Been in for a spot of therapy then?’ enquired Bognor, conversationally. He had not expected to find the doctor’s teddy boy son up here, and was intrigued.

  ‘Wot?’ said Damian.

  ‘Therapy,’ repeated Bognor. ‘I understand Miss Carlsbad is by way of being a bit of a therapist. Freudian Traumdeutung and all that.’

  Macpherson junior looked at Bognor as if he was simple.

  ‘’Scuse me guv,’ he said in a bizarre pastiche of cockney muddled in with rural English and BBC/public school/Oxford, ‘I’m in a bit of an ’urry.’ As he uttered these curious words in accents which Bognor had never previously encountered, he made to open the gate. This meant that he was holding his large and unwieldy folder under one arm only. He might well have negotiated this tricky manoeuvre were it not for the fact that at precisely the moment that he tried to open the gate Bognor did the same. For a moment there was a hopeless ‘After you Claud, no after you Rodney’ as the gate swung this way and that, and then, inevitably, the folder slipped from Damian’s grasp and fell to the ground.

  ‘Shit!’ said Damian.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Bognor, stooping to retrieve the contents. Very few of the pictures actually fell out of their container but each one of the dozen or so which did were unquestionably of naked females in suggestive poses. And when Bognor picked one up he was transfixed. He could not swear to the rest of her, but the face, softly pouting with shiny lips half open to reveal pearly teeth and the tip of a coral tongue, was unquestionably that of his erstwhile hostess, Samantha Contractor, for once not even in lingerie. It took Damian only a few seconds to scoop the other pictures back into the folder. Then he turned to Bognor who was staring at Samantha’s full colour, full frontal picture with amazement.

  ‘Gimme that!’ said the Herring St George teddy boy, snatching it from Bognor’s grasp. And he shot off out of the yard, clutching his photographs in both hands. Moments later Bognor heard a motorbike kick into action and roar throatily down the hill towards the village.

  ‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘I wonder what I’m supposed to make of that?’

  He stood briefly, scratching his head, and then became aware that a short stout woman with an Eton crop was regarding him from the back doorway with extreme disfavour. Three snuffling pug dogs grizzled at her feet and she held a garden fork in both hands across the body rather as a soldier holds a rifle preparatory to lungeing at a sack with his bayonet.

  ‘Yes?’ she said.

  ‘I’m from the Board of Trade,’ said Bognor.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the woman, ‘but I never buy at the door. Can’t you read?’ She gestured to a sign at the side of the door which said, ‘No hawkers. No circulars. Beware of the dogs.’

  ‘No,’ said Bognor, ‘I’m not selling anything. I’m from the Board of Trade.’

  ‘I shall call the police if you don’t go away at this moment. And I warn you that these dogs may look small but they are extremely fierce.’

  ‘Miss Carlsbad, I …’

  ‘I suppose you bought my name from American Express,’ she snapped. ‘Never a day goes by without one of those insulting personalised invitations but I never expected salesmen to arrive in person. What company do you represent young man? I shall be making a full report.’

  Despite the compliment of being referred to as ‘young man’ Bognor felt, in all conscience, that he was too old to be treated like this even by stout Freudian ladies in brogues and Eton crops. He produced his Board of Trade identity card, advanced on her and flourished it under her nose. The pugs growled liquidly, like canine garglers, but made no move to attack.

  ‘My name is Simon Bognor of the Board of Trade,’ he said, ‘and I am investigating the death of Mr Brian Wilmslow.’

  Miss Carlsbad read the card and then looked up at him, beaming. ‘But of course you are, dear boy.’ Her mood seemed to have undergone a dramatic transformation. ‘Why ever didn’t you say?’

  Bognor did not know the correct response to this. It was certainly not in any of the training manuals. There seemed no point in arguing about it. So he merely smiled vapidly and asked if he might have a quiet word. It seemed, suddenly, that there was nothing the lady would like more. She prodded her dogs indoors with her fork, and seizing Bognor by the arm, propelled him in after them.

  ‘What a lot of fuss about a VAT inspector!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’ve already had a very handsome policeman asking questions. Rather dull questions it has to be said, which was a pity when he was so good looking.’ She kicked at one of the pugs. ‘Go away Randolph, sir!’ she exclaimed. Then turned back to Bognor. ‘Would you like to sit outside by the pool or indoors?’

  Bognor said he’d like to sit out by the pool as it was such a lovely day and she told him to take off his jacket and would he like a glass of something cold and he did say his name was Bognor didn’t he and did that mean that everybody made the same boring old remark about George V’s famous last words. Bognor took off his jacket and said ‘Yes please’, ‘Yes’ and ‘Yes’.

  ‘That’s settled then,’ said Miss Carlsbad enigmatically, when they were seated in slatted chaise longues by the side of a new kidney-shaped swimming pool by the conservatory. ‘Now how can I help you? I have to tell you I hardly knew Mr Wilmslow. He called only once and asked exceedingly silly questions about money.’

  ‘That was his job,’ said Bognor, sipping a very welcome glass of iced lemonade which Miss Carlsbad claimed to have made herself.

  Miss Carlsbad took the spectacles from the top of her pepper and salt Eton crop and moved them to the end of her slightly squashed almost pugilistic nose. They had thick lenses and were secured to her neck by thick black elastic.

  ‘I guessed it,’ she said and chirruped with bird-like laughter. ‘Money, money, money. But you and I are not going to talk about money Mr Bognor, although I would prefer it if you changed your name. We are going to talk about death. Death.’ She rolled the word around her lemon barley water as if by repeating it she might actually kill someone or something. She seemed peeved when no corpse materialised.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bognor. ‘Do you have any idea at all why Mr Wilmslow should have been killed?’

  Miss Carlsbad scrutinised him for a moment. Then she said, ‘I don’t call that much of a question. Ask me another.’

  Bognor grinned. ‘Do you know why anyone should want to kill Mr Wilmslow?’ he tried.

  ‘Better,’ she said. ‘I’d say that anyone who goes round asking impertinent questions about people’s financial affairs was asking for trouble. That’s reasonable enough wouldn’t you say? Ask me another.’

  ‘Would you have killed him – given the opportunity?’

  Miss Carlsbad laughed again. The same fluting birdsong. ‘That’s a very bold question for so early in our interview. But more interesting than being asked what one was doing last night and having to answer that one was watching television with the dogs and then going to bed with a good book. Well, not such a good book I’m afraid. I was under the misapprehension that it was about a parrot but it isn’t at all. Gerald Durrell is quite one of my favourite authors, and I’m fond of birds. I may build an aviary one day when my boat comes in.’ She beamed.

  ‘You didn’t answer the question.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘Would you have killed Mr Wilmslow given the opportunity.’


  ‘I think that question is both hypothetical and leading and so if you don’t mind I prefer not to answer it. Pass.’

  Bognor drank deep from his glass and frowned. This sort of interrogation was so difficult. In the books he would have taken Miss Carlsbad down to the basement of the Board of Trade, injected her with some truth serum and hit her about with an electric cattle prod. If you believed the books the British were no better than the KGB or even the Argies. In Bognor’s experience this was not the case. He was barely allowed even to ask a trick question. As for hitting anybody about …

  ‘Miss Carlsbad, it may be that Mr Wilmslow’s death was accidental. On the face of it, it looks as if it might have been. Nevertheless he was in the course of conducting some very delicate enquiries in Herring St George and therefore my colleagues and I do naturally have some suspicions.’

  ‘Just what your colleague said, Mr Bognor,’ Miss Carlsbad looked sympathetic. ‘I quite understand.’

  ‘VAT inspectors have considerable powers,’ said Bognor. ‘They can search your house and take away all your papers without so much as a “by your leave”. Prising out people’s guilty secrets is their stock in trade.’

  Miss Carlsbad nodded, a little primly this time.

  ‘In view of what happened to Mr Wilmslow,’ he said, ‘I think perhaps we should stop beating about the bush.’ He paused as a heavy vehicle which sounded like a tank transporter but was probably a mere combine harvester thundered up the hill drowning speech as effectively as Concorde on its Heathrow approach over his home in west London. ‘In other words,’ he said, leaning forward and speaking with that slight air of melodrama which – it seemed to him – was part of Miss Carlsbad’s stock in trade, ‘what exactly is your guilty secret?’