Tim Heald: Death in the opening chapter

It could be said that the festival put Mallborne on the map, though the map was not, on the whole, somewhere that Mallborne wished to be on. In a sense, the little town – or was it a large village? No one seemed quite sure – was a bit like him. He did not want to be on a map. He preferred anonymity. He wanted to pass through life unnoticed. He didn’t even hanker for Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame. Fame was emphatically for other people, even if it was only fleeting. One of his favourite passages in literature – and on the whole he was fond of reading and liked books – was the end of The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy. Hardy had an epitaph for Michael Henchard which said simply that he was a good man and did good things. That was fine by the Reverend Sebastian. He was completely devoid of conventional ambition; quite happy to be one of the crowd; forgettable, forgotten. He was neither happy nor unhappy. He just was. He took refuge in the encomium pronounced at a monastic funeral service by a former Bishop of Exeter. ‘This was a splendid life,’ the bishop had said. ‘Splendid in its obscurity and humility; splendid in its strength and charity; splendid in its achievements.’ He sometimes wished he felt stronger and more splendid, but he nonetheless drew comfort from the late bishop’s half-forgotten words. Blessed, after all, were the meek. And meek he most certainly was. And even if people like him were to inherit the earth, that was certainly not his expectation – or even aspiration.

He was musing thus while poring over the Book of Revelation, when he became aware of a presence. There was a person in the church with him. Had he been of a more conventionally religious disposition, he would have assumed that it was some manifestation of his Lord and Master: God the Son, God the Father, or God the Holy Ghost. Or the parish’s elusive, not to say shadowy or even fictional, patron saint. Not given to belief in the supernatural and being of a naturally sceptical and prosaic disposition, he presumed that the other person in the church was a human being who had come in by the open door.

In this he was correct, but what precisely happened in the next moments, and who precisely the intruder was, is something that will have to wait for a couple of hundred pages or so. That is the essence of the mystery, cosy or ‘noir’. One begins with a death caused by a person or persons unknown, for reasons which are similar. The process of unravelling is what gives this sort of story its being, its raison d’etre.

In the beginning was the corpse and in this case it was the vicar of Mallborne, an inoffensive enough soul, one would have thought. It was his wife, Dorcas, who found him hanging from a rope, which might possibly have done duty in the belfry were it not for the fact that it was suspending the Reverend Sebastian Fludd. Near his feet, which were not more than a few inches above the granite floor of the nave, was a stool that the cleric might conceivably have kicked over himself. If, that is, his death was a suicide; which, though not something one should ever rule out, seemed to the investigating authorities, and even more to the investigating non-authority, to be an unlikely contingency.

The supposition of those who had an interest in the matter was that the Reverend Fludd had been disturbed while contemplating his sermon for the following Sunday, the opening event of the literary festival which he so much enjoyed. The disturbance had been effected by a person unknown to those who came upon the scene later, but, if the lack of apparent struggle was anything to go by, was most probably known to the vicar.

Unfortunately, the priest was one person who no one, save possibly the Almighty, was in a position to question. He would have made an admirable witness, but he was in no position to give evidence, being himself the deceased and therefore the catalyst for the tale which follows. This was, in a sense, rather a splendid death – sudden, unexplained, mysterious; much more tantalizing than the life which had preceded it. Even the Reverend Sebastian Fludd would have found it intriguing. He rather enjoyed a good old-fashioned mystery; preferably a Penguin paperback with a green jacket, and a beginning, a middle and an end. The first tantalizing, the second absorbing and the third unexpected but ultimately reassuring.

Alas, however, this was one mystery that the Reverend Sebastian was not going to enjoy solving, even from the depths of his postprandial, fireside chair, smoking his noxious-smelling pipe as he turned the pages enthusiastically.

This was a murder in which the Reverend Sebastian was an important, but sadly silent, witness.

He was, of course, extremely dead.

Simon Bognor slapped a generous dollop of farmhouse butter on his wholemeal doorstep of toast, stifled a yawn and helped himself to an equally generous spoonful of chunky home-made marmalade purchased by his hostess at the annual Mallborne fete. He ignored his wife’s hostile stare, which combined incredulity and concern in more or less equal measure. Lady Bognor said nothing. Neither Sir Branwell nor Lady Fludd noticed. Or they were too well-bred to comment.

Lady Fludd was reading the Daily Mail; Sir Branwell The Times. The Bognors were toying with different sections of the Guardian. Their choice of breakfast reading spoke volumes but did not tell the whole story.

Bognor and Sir Branwell had been at Apocrypha College, Oxford, together and had become, more or less, chums. They were both, at breakfast that morning, wearing the tie. It was striped, lurid and conveyed a message to the increasingly small number of people who understood the sartorial codes that were once a ubiquitous lingua franca in what passed for the British Establishment. You used to know a man by his necktie, but nowadays it was rare to find one wearing one. Outside, birds sang, mainly seagulls. The Bognors found them charming; the Fludds less so. Familiarity in the avian sense bore hatred rather than mere contempt. The Fludds hated gulls which, more or less surreptitiously, Sir Branwell shot with a. 22 he kept by his bed.

The Bognors enjoyed lazy weekends such as this. They reminded them of their past when marmalade had been marmalade and the Sunday Times was a proper newspaper. In old age, they had become as grumpy as others of their generation. Tiresomely so at times. It was a tendency of which they were both aware and of which they were tactfully ashamed when in mixed company, which is to say with people younger than themselves. It was not often nowadays that they found themselves with people who were older.

‘No deaths worth talking about,’ said Bognor through toast and gritted teeth. ‘A rock drummer who took an overdose and a very old Professor of Greek from the other place.’ In later age, he found himself turning to the obituaries before almost everything else in the paper. It was common among members of his generation.

‘Not many dead in The Times either,’ said Sir Branwell. ‘A suffragan bishop and a rather dim sounding major general.’

‘And no one dead in the Daily Mail at all,’ said his wife. ‘The Mail tends not to do death. Too, too depressing.’ She smiled winsomely and asked if anyone wanted more coffee. The cafetiere circulated and silence, muffled by munching, descended once more.

‘Cow stuck on beach in the Guardian,’ said Bognor, through toast. ‘Must have been a very slow day for a cow stuck on beach to make the Guardian.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said his host, genially, ‘cows stuck on beaches seem grist to the Guardian mill. Ecologically sound. Presumably we are all on the side of the cow? Does George Monbiot have a view on cows? Or Simon Jenkins?’

‘I don’t think you could run an anti-cow piece in the Guardian,’ said Monica.