Red Herrings (19 page)

‘And the bruising?' asked Guy.

‘It could be consistent with falling about in the undergrowth.'

‘The clean shoes?'

‘It had been very dry,' said Vernon. ‘It could be argued that the shoes would not be much marked in any case.'

‘But you would argue otherwise?'

‘Yes I would.'

‘You'll let me have your report in writing.'

‘Naturally.'

‘But why …' Guy drummed fingers on the desktop, ‘would a near teetotaller suddenly go out and drink through two bottles of spirits?'

‘That's your problem,' said Vernon. ‘I'm not a psychiatrist. But if that Scotch was self-administered then I'm a virgin.'

The door suddenly opened and the plain girl in the Marks and Sparks dress put her head round it. ‘There's an incoming call, sir,' she said. ‘Urgent.' She was clutching a sheaf of computer paper and was looking pinker and plainer than before.

Guy held out his hand and she gave him the paper, then retreated briskly and discomfited. He began to scan it half-heartedly while dismissing Vernon with, ‘Sorry Vernon, must dash. Incoming call. Let me have your report as soon as poss. I'm most grateful.' Then he flicked another switch and said, crisply, ‘Rotherhithe.'

This time the flat, nasal accents of rural Mid-Angleside flooded the office. ‘Sergeant Mitcham, traffic division, sir. That car, the green Morris Minor, registration number RLK 887, I'm afraid it's turned up, sir. End of a lane down Roman Bottom over towards Mailbag Corner by the junction of Watling Street and the Whelk-Nottingham road. Woman out walking her dog came across it. One occupant; elderly gentleman by the name of Nimrod Herring Bart according to his driving licence. Dead, I'm afraid. Engine running. Piece of hosepipe attached to the exhaust. Carbon monoxide poisoning.'

‘Any notes?' asked Guy. As he listened he read the computer print-out his secretary had brought in. His eyes, it seemed to both Bognors, were definitely bulging.

‘None that we could find, sir.'

‘Any reason to suspect foul play?'

‘Only that, sir.'

‘What?' For a man who is being informed of the death of one of the leading characters in a murder enquiry, Chief Inspector the Earl of Rotherhithe seemed oddly abstracted.

‘The fact that there were no notes, sir. The normal thing with suicides is notes.'

‘They sometimes put them in the post,' said Guy, still reading the print-out. He was turning quite pink.

‘Not this time,' said Bognor. ‘He left in far too much of a hurry. Poor old sod. If you ask me this is fitting a pattern. Murders contrived to look like suicides.'

Guy paid no attention. ‘O.K., Mitcham,' he said, ‘stay at Roman Bottom until I or someone else from CID gets over. It may not look like it but this could be a serious crime.'

He flicked the switch and cut the conversation.

‘That's awful,' said Monica.

‘So's this,' said Guy waving the print-out at the Bognors. ‘I've never read such filth in my life. If that's written by Miss Carlsbad she must have a mind like a sewer.'

Bognor focused and read out loud: ‘Dull Boy Productions. Standard captions for “The Adventures of Fifi and the Dentist from Copenhagen.” Or “How Mademoiselle Discovered Oral Sex”. Photographs by Danish Blue pictures.'

‘I say,' he said. ‘Are our wires crossed?'

‘My guess is not,' said Guy. Bognor read on. The text was curiously child-like in its early simplicity. ‘Fifi had to go the dentist. She needed a filling.' But after a sentence or two it became quite uncompromisingly pornographic. He lapsed into silence.

‘Let me see.' Monica put out a hand, but Bognor pulled away from her. ‘No,' he said, ‘it's not for your eyes.'

‘Don't be ridiculous,' she said, crisply, ‘I can take it. You forget I'm married to you. I'm practically unshockable.'

Bognor blushed. ‘You might not be shocked but I'd be shocked by your reading it. It's not fit for a lady to read.'

‘I'm no lady, I'm your wife.'

‘That's a very silly remark. Particularly at a time like this. Two people are dead already.'

‘Don't be so ridiculous. I'm a married woman of almost forty. Surely to God I'm old enough to read dirty literature.'

She snatched the paper from him and read swiftly, eyes widening as she did. ‘I don't think that's physically possible,' she said after a few moments, ‘even if you were double-jointed. I shall never be able to go to the dentist again. Miss Carlsbad is certainly a mistress of the double entendre. “Open wide” indeed.'

She handed the print-out back to Guy.

‘Is that obscene within the meaning of the Act?' asked Bognor morosely.

‘If it was published, then, yes, no question,' said Guy running a palm over sleek aristocratic hair (the sort that's dressed by Mr Trumper). ‘But you can write what you want on a computer in the privacy of your own home.'

‘That's not exactly keeping a private diary,' said Bognor. ‘Those pornographic passages were marked Dull Boy Productions. And we know that Peregrine Contractor is chief executive and Sir Nimrod – the late Sir Nimrod – was the president. What are the connections, I want to know?'

‘Whatever else, I don't see old Herring being tied up with pornography. And why would they want him anyway?'

‘The usual.' Bognor smiled sardonically. ‘There may have been a total collapse of all the values that we hold nearest and dearest. The fabric of feudal society may have crumbled to nothing. Village life may be only a sick pastiche of Merrie England but people are still snobs. Especially Americans. Sir Nimrod Herring Bart gave Dull Boy a touch of class and respectability. With a name like that on your masthead you could pretend to be dealing in eroticism and not porn.'

‘And he did it for the money,' said Monica, ‘which he needed because that rat Wilmslow was blackmailing him. I know he didn't say anything to us about Dull Boy but that stuff about him and Mrs Macpherson rang true to me.'

‘Too preposterous not to.' Bognor ran his forefinger around the back of his neck under the collar as if trying to tease out some elusive or recalcitrant fragment of truth. ‘So Wilmslow was blackmailing Sir Nimrod all the time. And Sir Nimrod was collecting his president's stipend from Dull Boy and passing it straight on to Wilmslow.'

‘Once a month in London.' Guy was sitting with hands together as if in prayer. The tips of his fingers touched his lips which were pursed. He paused. ‘Do we assume that Sir Nimrod killed Wilmslow; that he did himself in today because he couldn't live with the guilt?'

‘Fat chance,' said Bognor. ‘Besides, no notes. If he did kill himself he'd have told us why, especially if he had as compelling a reason as that. Also, he couldn't have killed Wilmslow on his own. Not if Wilmslow didn't walk into Gallows Wood under his own steam. There must have been two of them if he was carried.'

‘It's turning into quite a day.' Monica got up and walked to the window. She stood for a moment, arms folded across that increasingly ample – though still rather magnificent – bosom, and then turned back to face the men.

‘If you ask me,' she said, ‘all roads seem to be leading inexorably towards Peregrine Contractor.'

‘Oh,' said Bognor, hurriedly, ‘I wouldn't say that. Perry couldn't have been listening in to my phone call this morning. And that was what precipitated Sir Nimrod's hurried departure.'

‘We can't be sure of that,' said Guy.

‘In any case,' said Monica, ‘just because he wasn't actually listening in personally doesn't mean to say he wasn't tipped off p.d.q. One of the boys at the Pickled Herring had only to get on the blower to the manor and “Bob's your uncle”.'

‘What have the boys at the Pickled Herring got to do with it?' asked Bognor, in a semi-rhetorical attempt at putting up a smokescreen. He had still not fathomed a way of explaining Dandiprat's photographs. ‘I mean,' he continued, ‘they tried to murder me with their Nouvelle Cuisine steak and then they bug the phone and cause Sir Nimrod to be tipped off. Why?'

‘They tried to murder
me.
' Monica evidently felt credit was due here. She had been in the firing line. This should be acknowledged. ‘And it happened after Sir Nimrod had come to us with his confession.'

‘But,' – Bognor wondered if he was getting one of his amazing flashes of intuition – ‘they can't have known what it was that Sir Nimrod was confessing to. They wouldn't have known about him and Mrs Macpherson and Naomi. Surely not. But they might have known about Sir Nimrod and Dull Boy Productions.'

‘I don't see why,' said Guy.

‘Because,' said Bognor with a logic-defying glimpse of the obvious which would have deeply upset Parkinson and Inspector Lejeune, ‘they listened to the phone call and grassed. They must have realised the significance of Dull Boy.'

‘Which is more than we do,' said Monica gloomily.

‘Parkinson is bound to find out more from the States.' Bognor wished he was truly confident about this. He had a feeling the ‘cousins' as Parkinson now invariably called all Americans (the result of reading too many bad thrillers) would obfuscate. And Parkinson was ludicrously deferential in dealing with American intelligence agencies. They were bigger than him and his, and he allowed it to show. ‘But it's obviously to do with “sex”.'

‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,' agreed Guy. ‘Even I had worked that out, Simon. But I'm not sure I see where it gets us.'

‘I think it's a conspiracy,' said Bognor. ‘I think they're all in it together.'

‘Including Peregrine Contractor?' Guy frowned. ‘I tell you, he's a bad lot, that Contractor. I know he's a friend and all that but I've had my suspicions for a long time. And,' he eyed Bognor with what looked unpleasantly like suspicion, ‘that tarty wife of his is no better than she ought to be.'

‘Just because she models lingerie,' said Bognor, aware that he was sounding more shrill than he meant, ‘doesn't mean to say she's tarty or any worse than she should be.'

‘If it's all about sex,' said Monica, ‘which is, in the circumstances, a not unreasonable hypothesis, then I still don't see where the boys from the Pickled Herring come into it. Felix and Norman generate about as much sexual electricity as a limp lettuce leaf.'

‘The one thing about this case,' said Bognor, ‘is that we're dealing with the most deceptive appearances since those monks.'

‘Friars,' said Monica. A decade ago Bognor had uncovered a spy ring using an Anglican religious community as a front. He was naive enough in those days to be surprised to find enemies of the state hiding in coarse habits. Not any more. The years had tempered him and endowed him with a scepticism which did not come naturally.

‘Friars, monks, hermits, eremites, cenobites, anchorites, it's all the same,' said Bognor, sounding like Mr Toad in fullish flight. ‘The point is they're none of them what they seem. Strip off a cassock and you find a Blunt or Burgess skulking about underneath. Scratch the surface of an archetypal spinster like Emerald Carlsbad and you find a Xaviera Hollander or Fiona Richmond – sisters beneath the skin, pornographers all.'

‘Breastless creatures under ground I suppose,' said Monica. ‘I do dislike it when you show off. Especially when you're only trying to deceive us. I said, if it's all about sex, I don't see where Felix and Norman fit into the scheme of things. Nor do you.'

‘On the contrary,' Bognor's eyes flashed, ‘caterers – they're caterers. Man cannot live by sex alone and so on and so forth. You've got to eat and drink. Any self-respecting Roman orgy had caterers. That was half the point.'

‘You're suggesting Felix and Norman are catering for orgies?' Guy was at his most ploddishly disbelieving.

‘That's exactly what I'm suggesting,' said Bognor, ‘and if you don't believe me why don't you phone your friend Lady Amanda Mandible and ask her who does her food and drink?'

‘It'll be Fortnums or Harrods or Justin de Blank or Lady Elizabeth Anson,' said Monica who had, from time to time, worked in the upper reaches of the catering trade and knew her gastronomic onions.

‘Only if it's above board,' said Bognor. ‘If it's not I'll bet you it will be Norman and Felix.'

‘No proof,' said Guy. ‘No proof whatever.'

‘I suggest, ‘said Bognor, ‘that we go down there and search the kitchens. Or do as I say and phone Lady Amanda.'

‘I still don't see,' said Monica. ‘I mean even if we accept that Dull Boy Productions is involved in some form of dubious and possibly illegal sexual activity and if we agree that the Pickled Herring does the catering for them … I mean there's no crime in it. If I provided sausage rolls for a chain of brothels it wouldn't be a crime.'

‘There are sausage rolls and sausage rolls,' said Bognor darkly. ‘Catering and catering.'

The three of them thought about this for a moment, then Guy stood up and said, ‘I have to get down to the corpse. See that everything's done properly. No need for you to be there. I'll drop you in the village and we can get together later. I tend to agree with Monica. It all seems to be pointing in the direction of our friend Contractor but if he is the spider at the centre of the web then I think perhaps we should let him stew in his own juice for the time being.'

‘Spiders don't stew in their own juice,' said Monica, ‘and I'll bet Perry Contractor won't stew in his. He's too sharp for that.'

‘I want a word with Norman and Felix,' said Bognor. ‘If it's a question of stewing in juice they should have the answers. But while we're mixing our metaphors I think we should give Perry enough rope to hang himself. We have questions to put to both Miss Carlsbad and Felix and Norman. And after that there will be others. Time enough for Perry when we have some cast-iron confessions.'