Tim Heald - Death in the opening chapter

He smiled, evidently pleased with himself. He had only expressed the truth as he and his colleagues saw it. This nonsense about reality was as old-fashioned as the belief in truth and justice which one or two of his colleagues still banged on about. What actually happened was of no concern to the man in the street. The man in the street was fed a pabulum, a placebo, a lie if you insisted, which kept up his morale and him or her out of mischief. If the reality was different, what the hell. The fewer people knew the facts of life, the better for all concerned.

He was surprised therefore to discover that Sir Branwell was thanking him for his time and concern, and telling him that Brandon the butler would show him out.

He usually reckoned on a glass of sherry when visiting a Lord Lieutenant.

Bognor was sorry that he hadn’t asked Harvey Contractor to run a finger around the inside of the chief constable’s collar, but he hadn’t. Nor Mrs Jones, who sounded even worse. But chief constables didn’t do murders. Likewise the butler and Mrs Brandon. The butler never dunnit. Nor his wife. Even so…

The departure of the chief constable created less of a vacuum than he would have wished.

‘Phew!’ said Bognor.

‘What a ghastly little oik!’ said Sir Branwell.

‘You mustn’t say things like that,’ said Bognor. ‘It’s incredibly old-fashioned, snobbish and politically incorrect.’

‘True though.’ Sir Branwell smiled roguishly.

Bognor did not agree, nor disagree, merely looked pained.

Growing up, the word ‘oik’ had been a sort of universal pejorative such as ‘pseudo’, which stood for ‘pseudo-intellectual’, meaning, in a particularly philistine society, anyone who had read, much less enjoyed, a book. ‘Grey’ as in ‘grey man’ was another all-purpose term of abuse, which signified nothing more than a general dislike. Over the years, however, ‘oik’ had acquired social undertones which Bognor did not remember. ‘Oik’ was how posh people referred to those they regarded as their social inferiors. That, at least, had become the universal perception which meant that the word had slipped out of the lexicon. People like Sir Branwell still used it, however, at least in private. People like Sir Branwell assumed that Bognor did the same. This was not true and at times he resented it. At others it suited him.

‘I don’t think your vicar killed himself,’ he said.

‘I agree,’ said Branwell.

‘But your man Jones is keen to disagree because it’s tidier and more convenient. I don’t think we should let him.’

‘Seconded,’ said Branwell.

They paused to congratulate themselves on their commitment to fair play. This was an old-fashioned concept but one in which they both had some belief, along with decency and common sense. Greed and convenience had, on the whole and up to a point, taken their place and they both disliked these characteristics with a passion. In Sir Branwell’s case, this had a lot to do with finding them vulgar, common and, in a word ‘oikish’. His was a liberalism founded on class; Bognor’s on an innate sense of what was proper. At times these collided but they were not quite, nor always, the same. Bognor liked a lot of the noise but that didn’t mean that he believed it. Second-hand car salesmen came with braying accents and a lack of chin. Officers did not enjoy a monopoly of proper values. Far from it. Bognor was, in some respects, one of life’s corporals; Sir Branwell would have been a second-lieutenant on the Somme and driven a railway engine during the General Strike. He was in favour of corporal punishment and against the duvet.

In any case, his beliefs were far from strident. He did not like to shout or seem shrill. Nods, winks, handshakes and words unsaid were his way of doing things.

‘Trouble is,’ he said, ‘that his writ runs.’

‘Meaning?’

Bognor told him that the chief constable controlled the local police force and they were the authority charged with the investigation of suspicious death.

‘But I’m the Lord Lieutenant.’ And he told Bognor of a recurring dream in which the Dowager Duchess of somewhere or other caused wooden legs, containing game pie at one end and fudge at the other, to be dropped from a light aircraft for the benefit of those who worked on the estate. Sir Branwell thought this might be significant. Bognor, sceptical about dreams at the best of times and even when their symbolism was obvious, forbore to comment.

‘Any chance of a coffee?’ he asked instead.

By way of answer, Sir Branwell searched for a bell-push under the carpet and pressed it with one toe of an uncharacteristically monogrammed slipper from Dunhill. The slipper had been some sort of offer. Presently, Brandon came buttling in and was sent for coffee.

Bognor was very unclear about the position of Lord Lieutenant; only vaguely aware that it meant less than it once had. Also that the role of the chief constable was becoming more important in similar proportion. Thus, the one had diminished, was diminishing and seemed likely to be diminished still further, while the other was comparably enhanced.

‘Does a chief constable outrank a Lord Lieutenant?’ he asked ingenuously.

‘Certainly not,’ replied Sir Branwell. ‘At least not yet, and most definitely not in this neck of the woods. As long as I’m around, I’m in charge. On behalf of Her Gracious Majesty, God bless her.’

Bognor wasn’t so sure of this, much as he admired his old friend’s confidence.

‘We’ll have to be clever.’

‘Naturally.’ Sir Branwell never allowed his 4th class honours degree to interfere with his assurance on this account.

Bognor couldn’t help feeling that things had come to a pretty pass when a Lord Lieutenant and the Board of Trade’s head of special investigations had to resort to subterfuge in order to ensure rights that were supposed to have been established almost eight hundred years earlier. But then things had come to a pretty pass. He was aware of that.

‘Assuming our man was murdered, who would have done it? And who could have done it?’

The squire thought for a moment. ‘Opportunity is almost universal,’ he said, after a moment’s reflection. ‘Motive practically the reverse.’

‘Yes,’ said Bognor, wanting and needing more.

‘Well,’ said Sir Branwell, ‘the padre was in the habit of going to his church for a bit of solitary rehearsal, communion with his Lord and whatever took his fancy before preaching the following day. He was very much a creature of habit. Everyone knew that he was due to preach the opening festival sermon – which, incidentally, we had better cancel – and that therefore he would be alone in church the evening before. Solitary and vulnerable.’

‘No need to cancel,’ said Bognor unexpectedly and at an apparent tangent. ‘I’ll preach.’

‘You what?’ Sir Branwell had not been expecting this.

‘I said I’ll preach,’ said Bognor. ‘Could be a useful opportunity to pre-empt some thunderous chief costabular strike.’

‘But you’ve never preached before in your life.’

‘Always a first time,’ said Bognor, with a characteristic lack of modesty. ‘And I’ve always fancied it. Nice frock, captive audience, pulpit. Ask Monica. Being a bishop was always one of my several ambitions. I’d have made rather a good bishop. Pope, even.’

‘He captains one of the other teams,’ said Sir Branwell, who had taken to the pulpit on a number of occasions in his role as one of the county’s great and good. He too rather rated himself on the sermon front, though with better evidence than his contemporary. He had to concede, however, that Bognor had the better degree.

‘I’d have been a perfectly acceptable Mullah and a decent enough rabbi,’ said Bognor, not wholly facetiously. ‘I might not have been quite so hot on the Indian fakir front. Swami Simon doesn’t tremendously appeal, though I quite fancy the frock and the beard.’