Maxim Jakubowski - The Best British Mysteries III

‘Well, you’ll have to put up with circumstances like that, unless you can suggest a way I can unclasp old Boultbee’s tight fists.’

He walked on, at a slightly faster pace than before.

Unpleasant revelations were, too, manifesting themselves now to the older moral couple digesting their luncheon.

‘Bishop, excuse me,’ Wilfred Boultbee said abruptly. ‘I think I really must – Well, I think I should return to the luncheon tent. My soda-mint lozenges. I had them on the table, preparatory to taking one as I customarily do after any meal, but somehow I failed to see them as I left. But now I feel the need, acutely. You know my weakness of old, since we were at school even. A digestion that -how shall I put it? – that frequently fails to digest.’

‘I remember. Indeed I do. What was it we called you? Belcher Boultbee. Yes, that was it. Old Belcher Boultbee.’

His richly reverberant episcopal laugh rang out.

But Belcher Boultbee was immune to it. He had suddenly spotted something, or rather someone, yet more irritating to himself than a young woman showing her calves.

‘Bishop,’ he said, ‘let’s, for heaven’s sake, step out. I see that French fellow’s heading back to the tent, chap young Flaxman insisted on bringing to luncheon. I had hoped, once we’d eaten, he would have the decency to remove himself. It seems he has not.’

‘I’ll step out, if you want, though I must confess I found our foreign friend – What did Flaxman say he was called? The Comte de – de somewhere. I found him agreeable enough.’

‘Oh, agreeable,’ the City solicitor replied. ‘Yes, he’s all of that. It’s what you might call his stock-in-trade. And, for all that title of his, trade is what he’s about. I happen to know rather more about the fellow than he’d like to think I do.’

‘Very well, let’s get there before him. Perhaps he’ll sheer off if he sees us. For myself perhaps I’ll take just one more glass of champagne. And you can consume your soda-mint lozenge.’

A more modest version of the episcopal laugh could be heard as they hurried on.

Equally making their slow way towards the tent where they had lunched were the last two members of the party whom the murder was deeply to concern, Peter Flaxman’s cousin, Captain Vyvyan Andrews – they were both distantly related to Bishop Rossiter, the host – with his wife, Mary. Their conversation, too, was not as placidly reminiscent of the past days of glory as it might have been. But they had better reasons for lacking in joie de vivre.

‘We should never have agreed to come,’ Vyvyan Andrews, pale-faced to the point where his fair, once military moustache seemed almost to have vanished away, in his borrowed tailcoat and slightly stain-marked silk hat, was saying in a bitter undertone. ‘Never, never. I told you. But you would do it.’

‘But, darling, it was because – well, because I hoped it would do you good, cheer you up.’

‘Cheer me up. You’re pathetic, pathetic. How can you believe all I need is to be cheered up, as if I was having a bad cold, or a bit of a belly-ache? But I’m not sniffling and snuffling. I’m ill. Ill. My whole inside’s been gassed out, and I’ll never be the same again. Never.’

He came to an abrupt standstill, plunged his hand feverishly into the top pocket of the frayed and ancient tailcoat, pulled out, not a silver cigarette case, but a crumpled packet of gaspers, and fumbled one into his mouth.

His wife, ever alert, opened her handbag, extracted a box of matches, lit one and held it, in both hands for steadiness, to the up-and-down jiggling tip of the cheap cigarette.

Stolidly watching the little scene some dozen yards away, PC Williams thought enviously for a moment of the man who could light up whenever he wanted. On duty, keeping a benevolent eye – an eye, to tell the truth, a good deal more benevolent than that of the Bishop of Cirencester – on the nobility and the gentry strolling in the sunshine, no hope for him of the pleasure of tobacco for many hours to come. Especially since he was also keeping a less benevolent eye on the free seats not much further off where a small number of members of the proletariat, not top-hatted though equipped with squashy low-brimmed headwear, awaited the resumption of play.

But then, taking in how much that feverishly puffed-at cigarette must be meaning to a man with uncontrollably trembling hands and twitching facial muscles, PC Williams abruptly found envy was not at all what he was feeling.

‘I can’t even hold down a job,’ he could make out Captain Andrews’ raised voice saying. ‘Not even when I manage to get one. Having to depend on my wife going out to work. Yes, on you working, and working for a pittance. And you talk of cheering me up.’

‘Darling, I don’t mind going out to work. I’m only glad Mr Boultbee found me something to do in his office.’

‘Yes, a piece of charity. From that tight-fisted monster who’s our trustee. And what are you there? A filing clerk, a filing clerk, a filing clerk.’

‘But, darling, Mr Boultbee – and I know he does treat the family trust as if it was his private fortune, not a penny to be spent from it except under duress – does need someone to file away the documents in that office, and it should be someone who’s responsible enough to handle things which could be terribly important. So you can’t really say I’m being paid out of charity. You know you can’t.’

‘All I know is that day after day I feel terrible. I wish to God Jerry had put me out once and for all. Yes, I do.’

He gave his wife, in her sad imitation of the de rigueur extravagant hats and dresses of the strolling ladies of the Upper Ten Thousand, a look that was not far short of being one of hatred.

‘Darling,’ she said, ‘Let’s go in and sit down. Perhaps some champagne…’

When PC Williams had safely seen Captain Andrews and his long-suffering wife, closely followed by the Hon. Peter Flaxman with his lady-of-the-moment and the dandified figure of the French count, enter the isolated little pavilion-like tent, from which earlier he had been able all too clearly to hear the clink of china, the popping of corks, he did not hear again, as he had expected, the murmur of smooth conversation and occasional discreet laughter. Instead, there was an ear-piercing shriek and then voices raised in sharp questioning.

A moment later he found himself summoned with a single imperious gesture by Peter Flaxman. And, still helmeted, as he stooped to enter the tent in his turn, he saw Wilfred Boultbee, City solicitor, trustee of the estates of a dozen of the noblest and richest families in Great Britain, frigid moralist, lying slumped across the long-ago cleared lunch table, his right hand clutching a large white table-napkin. At the solicitor’s side there was standing, distraught and utterly unbishop-like for all his purple vest and immaculate dog-collar, the Right Reverend Dr Pelham Rossiter.

Williams immediately took charge. He noted names, even those of the caterers. He examined the scene, as much of it as there was to be examined, an empty round table with gilt chairs still more or less in their places, a side table on which there remained four or five bottles of champagne together with a dozen or so of wide-brimmed glasses. He ascertained that Wilfred Boultbee was indeed dead and that near the hand clutching, as he was to say later, ‘with demonic strength’ that napkin, there was a worn little tin in which there rested four flat white soda-mint lozenges. He suggested that Bishop Rossiter should sit in a chair in the corner.

‘You’ll be better off resting, your – your Grace,’ he said, thereby showing he had taken in at a glance the purple vest. ‘It must have come as a shock to you. Quite a shock.’