by Tim Heald
One of the pugs pushed at Bognor’s trouser leg and he flinched as he felt the clammy little nose on his calf. ‘Get off, Winston!’ said Miss Carlsbad kicking at the dog halfheartedly. ‘Now that, if I may say so Mr Bognor, is an exceedingly leading question. You don’t really expect me to answer it do you?’
‘Listen, Miss Carlsbad,’ said Bognor, in the frank, matter of fact, I’m only trying to help, tone which he often adopted with older women, ‘if you have a guilty secret and by “guilty” I only mean something which you personally feel embarrassed by then there are two ways in which I can discover it. One is by you telling me straight out and the other is by an exhaustive and exhausting series of enquiries which will involve searches and interviews with your bank manager and heaven knows what else besides. Now I draw my salary no matter which course we adopt so it’s really no skin off my nose. But in your case …’ He allowed the unpleasant prospects to hang in the air, all the more threatening for their lack of precision.
‘When you say “guilty secret”, Mr Bognor, I wonder if you could be a little more precise.’ Miss Carlsbad smiled frostily. Bognor was glad, suddenly, that he was not a patient of hers. No fun at all to be lying on her couch with her beady Freudian eyes boring into you. He wondered what the Cook islanders had made of her.
‘That’s rather a chicken and egg question. If I knew what the secret was I could be more specific. Since I don’t – yet – I’m compelled to be vague. Sorry.’
‘Then I’m not sure I can help.’
Bognor sighed. ‘Listen,’ he said again. ‘As far as we are able to determine at this moment in time …’ Why was he speaking like a Wilmslow he asked himself irritably? It was not in character. It must be the effect of Miss Carlsbad. ‘As far as I can see,’ he corrected himself, ‘you have two declared sources of income. One is from your books and one is from your therapy. Now I doubt very much that the income which appears in your VAT returns could possibly be accounted for by any therapy you do and I’m absolutely certain it can’t be explained by the royalties from Freudian whatsit in the Cook Islands.’
‘Traumdeutung,’ said Miss Carlsbad.
‘Traumdeutung,’ agreed Bognor. He waved his hand to encompass the pool, the conservatory, the gardens, Miss Carlsbad’s rather beautiful house. ‘You can’t tell me two volumes of South Pacific psychiatry …’
‘…ology,’ said Miss Carlsbad.
‘…ology,’ he said testily, ‘paid for all this.’
‘You want to know where the money comes from,’ said Miss Carlsbad.
‘In a word, yes.’
‘Well,’ Miss Carlsbad stared into the limpid waters of her kidney-shaped swimming pool, ‘it makes a change from being asked where I spent last night. You’d better come inside.’
They entered through french windows and passed through a long airy drawing room furnished in various shades of cream. He noticed a couple of signed Pipers, a Hockney and something that looked suspiciously like a blue period Picasso. In one corner caught perfectly by the morning sun was a bronze Boadicea which had a definite air of Frink and if he didn’t know what it must have cost he could have sworn the small entwined couple on the coffee table surrounded by Interiors and House and Garden and Country Life was a Henry Moore. He was impressed, and even more curious.
After that there was a dining room with a suite which looked as if it was at least school of Sheraton decorated with Venetian scenes which were at least school of Guardi; then a Poggenpohl kitchen; a hall and, at last, their destination. This was in the original part of the house. It was a beamed room with bookcases all round the walls except for the fireplace (full of bright flowers dried the previous summer) and a bread oven in one corner. On the desk top was a very new IBM personal computer.
‘He’s transformed my life that little fellow,’ said Miss Carlsbad. ‘I used to dictate into a machine like Ba Cartland but I never really liked it. It was fast but it was soulless. I like to see the words on screen or paper. Somehow they’re not real otherwise.’
Bognor was foxed. He looked up at the shelves. Freud, Jung, Adler – volume after volume in what looked like original editions – and then ranged alongside book after book of what critics and commentators had written about Freud, Jung and Adler.
‘Well,’ said Miss Carlsbad, ‘this is it. You’re very privileged. It’s rare indeed for anyone else to penetrate my little word factory.’
‘I see,’ said Bognor, without really thinking.
‘No you don’t,’ she said. ‘There’s no money in that. One day I will publish Freudian Traumdeutung in an English Village but it will be no more of a money maker than the Cook Islands. Over here, dear boy,’ and she moved him across to the far shelves. ‘This is my stuff. Cast your eye down this shelf here and see if you can solve the little riddle. No one else has but then I don’t really have that sort of public. More’s the pity. See if you can solve it, while I get some more lemonade. Unless you’d like something stronger. I can add a little vodka if you’d prefer.’
Bognor looked at his watch and said no thank you very much he was trying to cut out booze before noon.
‘Very sensible,’ she said. ‘If only your friend Mr Wilmslow had steered clear of the demon drink he might be with us today.’ Bognor looked at her sharply when she said that. The fact that Wilmslow was paralytic with drink was not supposed to be public knowledge but then as Bognor was beginning to realise the Herring St George grapevine was as effective as any communications network he had ever come across. He didn’t see how Miss Carlsbad or anyone else could possibly have kept her secret. But then, he thought, perhaps she hadn’t kept it from her fellow villagers. Perhaps there were no secrets among the villagers. Perhaps it was just that the villagers kept their secrets to themselves, collectively. In which case Wilmslow was on a hiding to nothing. And he and Guy Rotherhithe as well.
He turned to the shelf, determined to unravel its secret. He removed the first volume, the one at the extreme left. It had been published in 1951 and was called Roves back the Rose, by Emerald A. Trawle. He began to read the first page:
‘An icy chill spread through me. “Are you ill?” I whispered. He smiled, a thin shadow of that gay smile which I remembered so vividly from last summer, that Oh so blissful summer at Fotheringay. “It’s the side effects,” he said, “of the …” He could say no more. ‘You mean it’s cancer?’ He nodded. ‘Inoperable. The doctor says I have a month. Six weeks at most …’
Bognor smiled. Jolly lucrative stuff this. It explained everything. Emerald A. Trawle was Emerald Carlsbad’s bodice-ripping pseudonym. He ran his eye hurriedly along the shelf. She was nothing if not prolific. Our Dreams are Tales, Whisper Awhile, The Shades of Araby, Where the Princes Ride at Noon, Bright Towers of Silence, Beauty Passes, Assail Mine Eyes, All Things Lovely, Poor Jim Jay, The Silence Surged, The Restless Sea, The Glow-Worm Shine, Dark Hair and Dark Brown Eyes, Worn Reeds Broken, All Words Forgotten, Silver Shoon, The Elder Tree, Lamps of Peace, For Them That Life Forlorn, The Bonnie Ash.
He had not heard her returning footsteps. ‘Well,’ she asked, ‘have you cracked the code?’
Bognor accepted a second lemonade. ‘I’m halfway there,’ he said. ‘Emerald A. Trawle is your nom de plume and this is how you pay for the pool and the paintings.’
‘One of my pseudonyms, Mr Bognor.’ She smiled. ‘If you look at the other shelves you’ll see a number of others – Matt Durango, for instance: The Law of the Lariat, Ten Gallon Tootsie, The Man from Truth or Consequence, The End of the Trail … and Earl J. Tuxedo: Cache in Connecticut, Treasure in Texas, Murder in Michigan, Rhode Island Red – but I’m fondest of Emerald. She was the first and she’s much the cleverest.’
‘An anagram,’ said Bognor. ‘Hang on.’ He got out his diary and scribbled ‘Emerald A Trawle’ in capital letters vertically one above the other, the way he always did when grappling with an anagrammatical crossword clue:
E
M
E
R
A
L
D
A
T
R
A
W
L
E
‘Well,’ he said, frowning, ‘Trawle is “Walter” isn’t it?’
Miss Carlsbad nodded. ‘Now you really are almost there. Emerald A.’
Bognor screwed up his face in a spasm of concentration. ‘De la Mare,’ he said, triumphantly, ‘Walter de la Mare.’
Miss Carlsbad clapped her hands. She seemed genuinely chuffed. ‘That’s good, Mr Bognor, very good. Do you know de la Mare’s work?’
‘Not really since school,’ he said. ‘I prefer something a bit crisper and more modern. Gavin Ewart, for instance.’
‘He’s rather rude,’ said Miss Carlsbad disapprovingly. ‘For my taste that is. I don’t like this modern preoccupation with physical detail. I’m not a prude but I do think some things are best left to the imagination. Don’t you?’
Bognor did not wish to get embroiled in an argument about eroticism and pornography, though he did wonder if Miss Carlsbad had any idea of what young Damian Macpherson had been carrying in his portfolio. He must ask about Damian now that the business of Miss Carlsbad’s secret income was resolved. So he said feebly ‘Up to a point.’
‘Well I wouldn’t expect you to guess this,’ she said, ‘but each one of Emerald’s titles is a phrase from a de la Mare poem. They make marvellous titles. Emerald and I are working on “a most beautiful lady”. I ask you. What could be a simpler and more perfect title for a romantic novel than that?’
‘Very neat,’ he said, ‘and how long does it take you and Emerald to knock out a finished book?’
‘With the computer between a week and ten days,’ said Miss Carlsbad beaming, ‘but I try not to do more than about twenty titles a year all told. Any more than that and I find that my standards start to slip. And contrary to what is sometimes supposed readers are very discriminating. They notice if you don’t give them what they’re used to.’
Bognor said he didn’t doubt it. ‘And what do you make out of it?’ he asked.
‘A lot,’ she said. ‘Enough to live very comfortably, as you can see. The figures are all in the accounts. What you won’t find is any mention of Emerald and Matt and Earl. But that’s my little secret. Isn’t it, Mr Bognor?’
‘I suppose so,’ he said, slightly chastened now. He could see no murder motive in this particular secret. It all seemed perfectly above board.
‘I can’t see any reason why anyone else should know that you’re Emerald Trawle as well as Emerald Carlsbad,’ he said, ‘nor Matt Durango or Earl J. Tuxedo. Is there anyone else?’
‘No one lasting,’ she said, ‘a number of experiments. What the modern generation might call one-night stands. Such an unpleasant notion. But essentially there are just the three of us and me. I’m sorry, I don’t feel I’ve been of much help in solving the business of poor Mr Wilmslow’s death. Was it murder do you suppose? Perhaps it could be a real-life mystery for Earl Tuxedo?’
‘I don’t know if it was murder,’ said Bognor, ‘but I’m hoping we’ll find out before the day is over. It seems almost certain that he was on to something or someone. Our job is to find out what. It means sifting through all his notes and papers as well, I’m afraid, as talking to everyone he was investigating. Hence this visit.’ He drained his lemonade and stood up. ‘I’m sorry to have taken up your time, Miss Carlsbad, I hope I won’t have to trouble you again.’ He moved to the door and then paused as if the thought had only just struck him.
‘Damian Macpherson,’ he said, but his mind was only half on the subject of the strange doctor’s son, fascinating though he found him. ‘Is he a friend or a patient or …’
Miss Carlsbad did not seem keen on this question, but suddenly neither did Bognor. ‘I’m sorry Miss Carlsbad,’ he said, ‘but you don’t have such a thing as an aspirin? I feel …’ he swayed slightly and put a hand to his forehead. ‘I think I’ll sit down for a second, if you don’t mind. Bad night. I …’
Miss Carlsbad seemed relieved at the diversion. ‘Shan’t be a jiffy,’ she said, and hurried out in the direction of her medicine chest. The second she was out of the room Bognor switched on the computer and jammed two floppy disks into the drive. It took only seconds to tap out the instructions for the machine to copy a file from one disk to the other and not much more to remove both disks and put one in his jacket pocket, then subside into an armchair before Miss Carlsbad.
As she came in he was shaking his head. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he said, rubbing his eyes, ‘I suddenly came over very queer. I thought I was going to faint. I was up a lot of last night. My wife had a nasty turn and we had to get the doctor.’ He accepted the aspirin and a glass of water and hoped she wouldn’t notice that he’d been interfering with her computer. If she did she showed no sign of it. She was quite solicitous, wanted to know if he would like to lie down, should she phone Macpherson, call Mrs Bognor.
‘No really,’ he said, standing gingerly, ‘I feel much better already. Can’t think what it was.’ He grinned ruefully, ‘One of life’s little warnings I expect. Someone up there telling me to slow down. I have rather a dodgy family history I’m afraid. Bognors don’t make old bones. But a good breath of fresh air and a brisk stroll should sort it out for the time being.’
He was relieved to get away with the disk undetected; and she too, he felt, seemed glad to see the back of him. Was he wrong in thinking she was apprehensive about more questions on the subject of Damian Macpherson? Or was she twitchy about having given away only an innocent secret when there was another more guilty one lurking, perhaps in the computer? Bognor felt in his pocket and prayed he might learn something from the purloined disk. Guy would be bound to have a compatible computer he could play it back on.
He wasn’t sure if he was getting anywhere or not. He wanted to play the tape, wanted to talk again to Sir Nimrod, wanted to find out why Damian Macpherson was wandering round with photos of naked ladies, and especially Sam Contractor, wanted to carry out any number of investigations, but right now he decided it was time to call on the swami and his friends.
He was not well disposed towards the swami but he was not sure he regarded him as a prime suspect. It was not that he believed in the swami’s pacific protestations. On the contrary, he did not believe in any of the swami’s protestations. He seemed to be most things that everyone said but Bognor was man enough to admit that if he had the chance to drive around in a succession of Bugattis waited on hand and foot by adoring girls he would have taken it. He was not a prude. It was just, he felt, that the fates had not dealt him that sort of hand. The fates had dealt him Monica, Parkinson and the Board of Trade, not to mention an unprepossessing physical appearance. He was not complaining. He could have been a lot worse off. But better off too. As well off as Phoney Fred.
It was thoughts such as these which occupied his mind as he strolled along the lane from the New Maltings to Herring Hall. He had never been to Herring Hall before. It was Victorian, built originally for a rich city financier, who had gone broke shortly after moving in. It had then been acquired by an American oil millionaire who had bought it mainly for the shooting. During the first war it had been a convalescent home for the walking wounded and immediately afterwards it was turned into a hotel, with only modest success. In 1939 it was again requisitioned by the army who had originally used it for expatriate Poles and later as a VD clinic.
In 1947 it was taken over by a boys’ preparatory school which folded in the late sixties. The National Trust turned it down, an appeal fund foundered before it began, the Bishop of Whelk briefly considered it as a home for distressed diocesan clergy, and then the property developer failed in his efforts to turn it into a Theme Park. It was then that the Chosen Light and his Blessed Followers arrived, cash in hand, and set about restoring it. It had been a chequered career but those who knew about such things said it was in better nick than at any time in its history.
Bognor was lookin
g forward to seeing inside and he was looking forward to meeting Fred. The knowledge that Wilmslow had been looking at Fred’s books prior to his demise gave him a goodish excuse. Given the prevailing state of prejudice against organisations such as the swami’s he simply had to be at or near the top of any list of suspects. If he went before a jury anywhere in Britain it was highly unlikely that Fred would be acquitted of anything, no matter what evidence was offered. He was too rich, too smelly, too black and too sexy. The man in the street, Clapham omnibus and jury did not like that sort of person. As far as the average Englishman was concerned the swami was a bloody nig-nog taking work from decent people, corrupting the morals of the young, and worst of all having a thoroughly good time.
Bognor was sufficiently self-aware to recognise that what he felt most about Fred was envy. But since he disliked himself for this and since curiosity was running a good second and since, as a government official investigating the mysterious death of another government official, he had a strong hand he was rather looking forward to the visit.
There was a guard at the lodge. A long red pole with a No Entry sign attached to it blocked the drive and alongside stood an olive skinned female who looked as if she had been seconded from an Israeli paratroop commando. She wore jungle green fatigues, dark glasses, and a saffron beret, heavy black boots and white gauntlets. In her right hand she was carrying a cross between a baseball bat and an Indian club. The only indication that she wasn’t an Israeli paratrooper was that across her ample bosom was stencilled the single word PEACE. It was this word that she repeated as Bognor hove in sight. To be absolutely accurate what she said was, ‘Peace Brother! I am Sister Ra Blessed Follower of the Chosen Light.’
Bognor, who was feeling rather light on his pins, replied, quick as a flash, ‘Peace Sister! I am Simon Bognor of the Board of Trade.’
This was obviously not quite such a good idea as it seemed because Sister Ra looked singularly unamused, fixed him with a steely gaze and said ‘So?’
‘What do you mean “So”?’ asked Bognor, aggrieved.
