Red Herrings

by Tim Heald

  ‘“Draw back, and fling at their return, up the high strand” you illiterate oaf!’ Monica snorted her exasperation. ‘Come on she said, ‘we’d better get back to Hemlocks and see what’ going on.’ She started to stride back, taking long sensible stride in her flat, sensible shoes.

  Bognor had to run to catch up, then fell into step. ‘The there’s something about “eternal sadness”, isn’t there?’

  ‘“Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

  With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

  The eternal note of sadness in.”’

  ‘That’s right.’ He spoke with approval and also the bogus knowledgeable manner of someone who knows he is a bit of a ninny but does not need or wish to be reminded of it. ‘Poor old Hemlock!’ he said, after a pause. ‘The eternal note of sadness certainly sounded for him.’

  ‘He was a rapacious slug,’ said Monica, ‘a nasty, greedy, mercenary brute.’

  ‘Steady on!’ said Bognor. ‘He was my publisher.’

  ‘You hadn’t signed anything.’

  ‘No, but we had an understanding.’

  ‘Understanding be jiggered.’

  ‘I don’t think you’re being entirely fair, Monica. And anyway he’s dead now.’

  ‘Good riddance!’ Mrs Bognor lengthened her stride, leaving her husband bobbing in her wake.

  Bognor leant against an Edwardian street-lamp lovingly preserved by the Byfleet and District Townswomen’s Guild and panted. A tattered poster advertising August’s end-of-the-pier show leered down at him from the pebbledashed wall of a gentleman’s lavatory and a couple of seagulls mewed overhead. They could have been fighting or mating, he wasn’t sure, being no ornithologist. Came to the same thing in the end. In the distance he watched his wife buffeting against the wind, closing in on the grey sub-Lutyens bulk of Hemlocks. It had been built for Norbiton, the margarine magnate, who had perished in a flying-boat accident off Salerno before he could take up residence. A cross between the Cenotaph and Anne Hathaway’s cottage – a gross pillbox, half-timbered and bloated, barnacled with turrets and conservatories and roof gardens. Hemlock had bought it from nuns in the sixties for a song.

  Bognor sighed. Monica was little more than a matchstick person now. Maddening woman, though he was fond of the old bag in his way. And she of him, he thought, ruefully. He sighed again and began to rumble after her, flatfooted, hung-over and a little depressed. He wondered if he would see the year out or would end up dead like Hemlock, lightly toasted between two library shelves. A wave broke close by, sending a shower of spray over his rising forehead. He turned up the collar of his coat and paced purposefully back towards the great house. He was afraid his troubles were only just beginning.

  ‘They’re all in the library,’ said Hastings. Hastings was the butler. He had been with Hemlock since the beginning – first as office, errand and tea boy, later as a rep. He claimed never to have read a book in his life and nothing about him suggested this to be untrue. He had sussed Bognor as a Right Wally the moment he saw him. Most of the other guests got a ‘sir’ or ‘madam’ from Hastings, mainly in the hope of a tip when they left. Not Bognor.

  ‘Right,’ said Bognor, with an air of purpose. He handed over his Burberry and straightened his tie.

  ‘Am I to join them?’ he asked.

  ‘The Chief Inspector said he gave instructions for no one to leave the house.’ Hastings accepted the coat with ill grace. ‘And that included you. If I were you I’d cut along sharpish and say sorry like a good boy.’

  Bognor said nothing, just pulled at his cuff and gave Hastings one of his famous but unconvincing withering looks.

  ‘Git!’ mouthed Hastings in a stage whisper.

  Bognor ignored him. He had long since learned never to bandy words with a butler.

  The library door was stiff and squeaky so that he entered the room with a fanfare of protesting hinge. The room was uncarpeted so that even if he went on tiptoe, which he did, every step was noisy. He hated making this sort of entrance. It always reminded him of that terrible morning so many years before when he had arrived late for morning chapel and walked down the aisle under the sniggering gaze of five hundred boys. The headmaster, gowned and mortar-boarded on his wooden throne, had looked on with no amusement at all. Beatable offence.

  Now that he was a grown-up, indeed middle-aged, person, Bognor knew that he should not be embarrassed at being the centre of attention. He certainly shouldn’t be fazed by the censure of some two-bit Detective Chief Inspector and a roomful of Vernon Hemlock’s bestselling-author houseguests.

  But he was.

  ‘You must be Bognor.’ The Chief Inspector was the sort of pedestrian oaf Bognor abominated. He wore the suit one associated with professional footballers and his hair was cut short with the suspicion of a Derek Hatton bob at the back. His was the sharp, fashionable, scented appearance which Bognor mistrusted very much indeed. He used to think he disliked the old-fashioned detectives in trench coats and chunky black shoes, but he preferred them to the new breed.

  ‘Simon Bognor, Board of Trade,’ he said, trying to sound polite.

  ‘I gave instructions that no one was to leave the house.’ The DCI dabbed at his ducky little moustache.

  ‘I’m sorry. The instructions didn’t reach me.’

  Bognor sat down heavily on a set of library steps next to Arthur Green, author of The Billion Lire Breakfast, The Million Dollar Martini, The Lunch that ended the World and Last Supper. Mr Green, mousey as ever, gave him an encouraging glance and a quarter-smile. Like so many authors he was as near the opposite of his hero, Lance Remington, as it was possible to imagine.

  ‘Honey, I had no instructions!’ This was Marlene Glopff, the sinuous raven-haired superstar of the American soap Homer. The series was not, as Bognor had supposed, a Greek epic but something to do with baseball. Miss Glopff was a fitness freak who lifted weights and lived almost exclusively on wheatgerm and carrot-juice. She had just produced (‘written’ was not the word) her first book, Working Out with Glopff.

  ‘I gave instructions that no one was to leave the house, Miss Glopff,’ said the Chief Inspector. ‘Those instructions were perfectly explicit and I expect them to be carried out. I don’t wish to have to charge anyone with obstructing the course of justice.’

  Marlene Glopff pouted but said nothing.

  Milton Capstick, characteristically, took exception to the policeman’s words. Capstick had ‘authored’ (a favourite Hemlock word) a hugely successful series of self-help and improvement volumes. As the onlie begetter of The True Self, Looking After Number One and The First Billion, Capstick believed in permanent self-advertisement. He was never put down.

  ‘There’s clearly been a breakdown in communications, Officer,’ he said. As he spoke, his bow tie bobbed up and down in time to his Adam’s apple. His blazer was very clean and his grey flannels beautifully creased. He was almost suave, but, like most of Hemlock’s authors, there was – to Bognor’s practised and jaundiced, if bleary, eye – a built-in phoniness. People who wrote Big Books were almost always unreal.

  This certainly applied to Danvers Warrington who spoke next. ‘Dashed if I knew anything about being confined to barracks, old fruit,’ he said, waving the stem of an ornate curlicued meerschaum at the Chief Inspector. ‘I’d have been out for the old crack of dawn constitutional if it wasn’t for a twinge of the old malaria. Never leaves you, malaria. Like sandfly fever. Once bitten, twice…well, I certainly never heard anything about being put in jankers.’ Warrington was Hemlock’s famous wine writer: Warrington on Wine, More Wine with Warrington, Another Glass with Warrington, Pass the Plonk with Warrington. On the television show that he hosted for Wessex TV he invariably appeared in loud-check plus-fours with knee-length canary stockings. Also a monocle. He was in just such an outfit now.

  ‘That will do, thank you,’ said the DCI. He put his hand in his jacket pocket like Prince Philip and surveyed the little group in silence, moving his head from left to right, pausi
ng for meaningful eyeball-to-eyeball contact with each person in turn. Bognor guessed the idea was to get everyone to look away before he did. It must have been something from the latest Scotland Yard manual on how to interrogate terrorists. Bognor was not going to become involved in eyeball wrestling at this stage of the proceedings so he stared resolutely at Hemlock’s Encyclopaedia Britannica which was handily situated a few yards behind Inspector Bumstead’s left elbow.

  ‘We believe’, said the Inspector when he had finished this lingering tour d’horizon, ‘that we are dealing with a murder.’

  No one spoke until Monica Bognor, a woman given to speaking her mind and much less susceptible to intimidation than her husband or indeed anybody else present.

  ‘Are you implying that one of us killed Vernon Hemlock?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s not what I said.’

  ‘I didn’t say you did. I merely wanted to know if that’s what you were implying. There’s a difference.’

  ‘I have reason to believe that the deceased did not die due to natural causes.’

  ‘Goodness, how exciting!’ It was Cynthia Midgely, the distaff side of the Midgely writing team which performed under the joint by-line of Miranda Howard. She and her husband Wilfred used to work on the same local paper until hitting on a royal book formula which had made them both millionaires. Theirs was the newly announced Royal Family Cookbook. Its predecessors included The Royal Family Bedside Book, Royal Party Games, The Queen Mum, Good Queen Bess, Charlie’s Aunt, More Royal Party Games and The Royal Family Bedside Book 1979 – and an annual sequel in each of the following years. Cynthia was easily excited – an attribute which contributed to the notorious but commercially successful purple gush of the books. Wilfred supplied the research, though neither of them had ever actually seen a member of the Royal Family in the flesh. When confronted with this, both Cynthia and Wilfred used to reply archly that Lady Antonia Fraser had never met Mary Queen of Scots and look at her. This always went down very well on the Wogan show.

  This time Cynthia had not meant to speak so loudly. She coloured and said in a coy simper, ‘I mean, how perfectly dreadful!’

  ‘Perfectly dreadful indeed,’ said Bumstead. ‘There are no signs of a forcible entry having been effected into the house and I am therefore driven to the conclusion that whoever killed Mr Hemlock was staying in the house. Not to put too fine a point on it this was an inside job.’

  Looking round, Bognor saw that the company was, if not struck dumb, at least extremely subdued by this news. The most affected were, predictably enough, the two women known to be in Hemlock’s life: his wife Audrey, the foreign rights director, and his mistress Romany Flange, brightest of the Big Books editors whose eye for the main chance was unerring. Miss Flange was supposed to be enamoured of Merlin Glatt who was on the verge of becoming an absolutely enormous poet. Hemlock had not allowed him over the threshold – not just because of his place in the affections of Romany Flange but also because he had signed a contract for an erotic bestiary with Andover Strobe, Hemlock’s biggest rival in the world of books.

  The Inspector smiled a thin, professional smile designed to freeze bone marrow.

  ‘Everybody who slept in the house is in this room now,’ he said. He stared at Bognor.

  ‘You’re forgetting the staff,’ said Bognor. ‘This may have been an inside job but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t have been a downstairs one. Consider the butler.’

  ‘Bugger the butler,’ said the Inspector. Bognor seemed to be getting on the policeman’s nerves. This was exactly where he wanted to be.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Bognor felt a sudden access of confidence. Reaching into his inside pocket he found his impressive laminated ID and waved it at the policeman. ‘I do have a certain professional standing in cases like this,’ he said, ‘and my view is that you would be unwise to bugger the butler, whatever your inclination. As a member of the Special Investigations Department of the Board of Trade I do have some experience of crime, and…’he paused here for dramatic effect ‘…murder.’

  The DCI now looked quite angry. ‘Is that so?’

  ‘That is so,’ said Bognor, confidence flowing into him along with the irritation.

  ‘I do hope, Mr Bognor, that you are not going to be a nuisance.’

  Bognor spread his hands to indicate that he personally had no intention of doing anything at all which might in any way interfere with whatever it was the DCI was up to. He also managed to convey, with surprising skill, that in his opinion the Detective Inspector might be making a big mistake.

  At this point Monica decided to intervene. Hostile she might be in private, but in public she could be loyal as a lion. She did not like to see her husband patronised or bullied. Still less did she like to see him make a fool of himself.

  ‘Chief Inspector,’ she said, smiling, ‘I wonder if I might have a word with you in private?’

  ‘I shall be having words with everyone in private,’ said the Inspector, ‘and in the meantime I must ask all of you to go to your rooms and under no circumstances to discuss anything at all with each other – least of all the deceased and the manner of his demise.’

  He paused again. ‘One of these officers will call you when I need you.’ He nodded curtly at the impossibly young constables who stood at either side of the library door. ‘Now if you’d all make your way upstairs in silence I’d just like Dr Belgrave to stay behind, please.’

  Dr Belgrave was an iron-grey spinster in a maroon trilby. She wore gloves, smoked a cigarette through a holder, sported steel rimmed specs and was the author of The British Approach to Sex, Sex and the United States, La Vie Sexuelle – an Analysis of the French Way of Love and Behind the Net Curtain – a Study in Suburban Sin. In Bognor’s view she was almost certainly a man, bearing, as she did, a remarkable resemblance to one of the greatest of all Welsh scrum-halves. She was alleged to have been Hemlock’s adviser concerning the erotic dungeon below-stairs where he had met his end. As far as sex was concerned, her interest was said to be entirely theoretical and intellectual – though even there Bognor had his doubts.

  Monica was not so easily fobbed off.

  ‘Ann,’ she said, grasping Dr Belgrave by the elbow and propelling her towards the door as everyone began to leave, ‘I won’t be more than a second. But I do feel someone has to save this silly little man from himself.’

  About the Author

  Tim Heald is a journalist and author of mysteries. Born in Dorchester, he studied modern history at Oxford before becoming a reporter, and columnist for the Sunday Times. He began writing novels in the early ’70s, introducing Simon Bognor, a defiantly lazy investigator for the British Board of Trade. Heald followed Bognor through nine more novels, including Murder At Moose Jaw (1981) and Business Unusual (1989) before taking a two decade break from the series, which returned with Death In The Opening Chapter (2011).

  Heald has also distinguished himself as a biographer, writing official biographies of sporting heroes like cricket legends Denis Compton and Brian Johnston among others.

  Also by Tim Heald

  Just Desserts

  Murder at Moose Jaw

  Masterstroke

  Brought to Book

  Business Unusual

  Brian Johnston: The Authorized Biography

  Denis Compton: The Authorized Biography

  The Character of Cricket

  Published by Dean Street Press 2015

  Copyright © 1986 Tim Heald

  All Rights Reserved

  The right of Tim Heald to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in 1986 by Doubleday

  Cover by DSP

  ISBN 978 1 910570 19 7

  www.deanstreetpress.co.uk

 

 

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