Death in the Opening Chapter (18 page)

‘Hmmm.' Bognor looked at the writer with an interest which bordered on affection. He found himself in broad agreement.

‘You believe in entertainment, not in justice?'

‘Something like that,' said Allgood. ‘Though, I don't see that the two are necessarily exclusive. If you can have entertaining justice, I'm doubly in favour. My sense is that most people are keener on boring injustice. I'd never thought of the truth being fun, but I'm beginning to think I may be wrong. In this case, it could be rather merry to overturn a few conventional apple carts in the search for a murderer. And if you decided to pull a decent veil over the whole affair and say that the Reverend Sebastian knocked himself off while the balance of his mind was disturbed, that could be awfully dull.'

‘Neat though?'

Allgood thought some more, a process which required an effort he obviously did not enjoy.

‘I don't think I do neat,' he said at length. ‘Truth, justice and all that stuff strike me as a bit prissy, but neatness is really uncool.'

It was Bognor's turn to think for a while.

Eventually he said, ‘You may just have given me a motive.'

‘How so?' the author wanted to know.

‘You could have killed the vicar in order to cause mischief,' he said. ‘To create disorder.'

‘Sounds a bit extreme,' said Allgood, ‘but worth a thought. Worth a thought.'

NINETEEN

D
orcas was tearful.

This was only to be expected, but it did not make the occasion any easier. Bognor hated talking to the newly bereaved and simply didn't buy into the widely held belief that such meetings were in any sense therapeutic. In his experience, which was considerable, they were invariably sticky, seldom very relevant and nearly always yielded unpleasant and unexpected new truths.

Dorcas was plain, which, he supposed, didn't help, and her skin was mottled from grief and tears. She was not dressed in widow's weeds, but in various drab colours and shapes that Bognor assumed were par for her course, and had little or nothing to do with her recent loss.

‘I'm sorry,' he said, sitting down in a high-backed Victorian armchair. The cottage was comfortable enough, but had an air of impermanence which suggested that it went with the job and was not the vicar's own. He presumed it was also in Sir Branwell's gift. ‘I know this is a difficult time.'

Clichés were often the best way of dealing with such interviews. They were like the traditional form of church service. They had been around a long time and carried the patina of familiarity. They had also withstood the test of former use. They worked, which was why they were still trotted out.

‘I quite understand,' she said. ‘You have a job to do. Would you like tea? Or something stronger? A glass of sherry, perhaps?'

Tea or sherry were also ritual comforts in such situations, and had been for almost as long as the verbal clichés. They were almost as much of a British middle-class response as
Hymns Ancient and Modern
or the
Book of Common Prayer
. They were invaluable crutches in much the same way, and owed as much to their familiarity as to any therapeutic or medicinal properties. When the going gets tough, the tough get going was a popular saying, but the British truism was that when the going gets tough, one turns to tea or sherry, hymns or prayers. Everyone to their own, but it was in this that a certain sort of true Brit found solace.

Bognor said he'd like tea, please. Black, no sugar. A habit he had picked up many years ago on a job in Sweden, involving the gift department of NK in Stockholm. Fre Roos had called him in after representations had been made by the man who handled the British side of the store's business. Wrapping paper had played a crucial part in the business and he was helped inordinately by his command of the English language, which was even better than that of the average Swede. The average Swede spoke better English than the average Englishman, but Bognor also spoke better English than the average Englishman.

‘No,' he said, ‘just as it comes.' He actually preferred artisan's tea – strong and robust, with no messing around with milk or exotic fruit. He wasn't in the least interested in the crucial debate, which meant so much to so many of his compatriots, about whether the milk went in first or last. He couldn't be holding with effeminate additions when it came to tea.

Dorcas poured from a capacious black teapot and he was relieved to discover that the liquid was Typhoo, scaldingly hot. He had feared he was in for tepid Earl Grey.

‘You found him,' said Bognor, sipping. ‘That must have been a terrible shock.'

She seemed to consider this for a while, and then said, ‘Not really. Sebastian said he'd be back for an early supper around six thirty. I'd made macaroni cheese. He was fond of my macaroni cheese. He used to say that it was what he had married me for.'

She sniffled, and dabbed at her eyes and nose with a rather weedy handkerchief. Bognor felt that a true gentleman would have reached in his breast pocket and offered a sturdier one of his own. For all sorts of reasons, he failed to do this, but let her tell her story in her own way.

‘He hadn't been himself recently,' she said. ‘Not really. Not the old Sebastian. Not quite the man I knew and loved.'

‘In what way?'

Once more, she seemed to be thinking about the question for the first time, even though it was obviously one which she had asked herself many times. Eventually, she said, ‘I'd never seen a dead body before. Sebastian was my first. I hope he's my last. He seemed so, well, dead. Somehow, he wasn't what I'd expected. It was the deadness that I found so unexpected. It was as if all the life had gone out of him. I can't really describe it, except to say that he was deader than I had expected. Very dead, indeed.'

‘But you say he hadn't seemed himself. What exactly do you mean by that?'

He was beginning to become used to her habit of considering each question as if it was brand new. He found it reassuring.

‘He was having doubts,' she said, eventually. ‘He'd almost seemed such a black and white person. It was one of the things that I found attractive. He knew what was what. You didn't argue with Sebastian because he had all the answers. He didn't always have the facts or the answers to back them up, but he always knew what he thought. It was true of trivial things too. He never dithered about what he was going to wear. He had very clear likes and dislikes when it came to food and drink.'

Like the macaroni cheese, thought Bognor, saying nothing.

‘He didn't like cats,' she said, unexpectedly.

‘Didn't like cats,' repeated Bognor feeling foolish. ‘More of a dog person.'

‘More of a dog person. Definitely more of a dog person.'

‘But you didn't have one? A dog.'

‘No,' she paused, ‘he doesn't . . . I'm sorry . . . didn't really approve of pets.'

‘Ah.' The slip into the present tense was quite usual, a typical problem in coming to terms with sudden loss. The couple had had no children and now it transpired that the reverend, though a dog-lover, had not approved of pets. Poor Dorcas was now completely on her own. Her husband's death would have left a particularly large hole. She did not seem to be the sort of person who would have many friends, let alone influence people. Sadly, she seemed the sort of person who would pass through life relatively unnoticed.

‘Liked dogs but didn't approve of pets,' said Bognor, fatuously.

‘He thought they were free spirits. Didn't like the idea of their being domesticated. He thought they were reduced in some way. I'm not sure I agree.'

‘So, you think you might buy a dog.'

She smiled. ‘I might,' she said, ‘I might.' She sobbed quietly and then pulled herself together with a shake with an all too visible effort.

‘I'm sorry,' he said, ‘I have to ask these questions, even though I know they're distressing. Can you tell me why you visited St Teath's? And describe what you found when you got there and how you reacted.'

At first she was silent, but then she spoke, very softly and in deliberate sentences with beginnings, middles and ends, very logical, almost as if rehearsed.

‘Sebastian said he wanted to compose his sermon in church. That was something he always did. He also said he would be back by six thirty. He was always very good about things like that. He knew that lateness upset me and I liked to be early for everything, even the bus.'

She smiled a wan, drab smile and Bognor had a sudden vision of a long, lonely widowhood stretching out before her. The Reverend Sebastian was almost certainly the only man in her life, and he had been reeled in early, leaving her what might seem like an eternity of solitude. Probably. He couldn't know for certain. One could never know the future for certain and maybe not the present, nor the past. It was his job to try to produce certainty about the past, to tell it how it really was. At the same time, he was forced to agree that even his most certain recommendations and findings were more to do with probability than certainty. Even confessions were partial. One person's view was not every person's view. If two or three gathered together and agreed on a certain version of events, that did not make them more real. Truth was necessarily elusive. It changed and shifted according to time, whim, perspective. If three years of Modern History at Apocrypha had taught him anything, it was the essential partiality of truth, the elusiveness of justice, the essential ‘wrongness' of the ‘right' verdict. There was always another perspective, another point of view, even when the ‘facts' seemed cut and dried.

‘So your husband was punctual and thoughtful, liked dogs but hated pets?'

She smiled. ‘That makes him sound, oh, you know . . .' She broke off, trying to put her late husband into something approaching perspective. ‘Sebastian was a people person . . .' she said, eventually, and then seemed to be aware that this was a cliché – possibly comforting, but not true. At least not necessarily, not everlastingly.

‘I think he liked people,' she said, ‘no matter what the state of their beliefs. Or behaviour. He really liked sinners. In fact, I think he preferred sinners to the righteous. Give him a good murderer, any day. Virtuous people were a bit limp and Laodicean for him.'

‘He'd have spewed them out?' he ventured.

She caught the biblical allusion and smiled.

‘I thought I knew him,' she said. ‘Now, I begin to wonder if I knew him any better than anyone else. I begin to wonder if anyone really knew him. But, I also begin to wonder if anyone really knows anyone else. Indeed, I wonder whether we know ourselves.'

‘Probably not,' said Bognor. After all, he hardly knew himself, so why should anyone else, even Monica?

He realized, dimly, that the interview was wandering out of control. Spiralling. On the other hand, the best interviews were like that. Only idiots used clipboards and were not prepared for apparent inconsequentialities, unexpected riders, things that went bump and interfered with arguments and prejudices. Even so . . .

‘It must have been distressing?'

‘Finding him?' She considered the question. ‘I suppose so, though not in the way I expected.'

‘Expected?'

She seemed surprised that he had picked up on the word.

‘I'd thought about it,' she said. ‘Doesn't everyone? Life can't go on for ever. We have to be prepared for God doing something we hadn't bargained for.'

‘So you think it was an act of God?'

‘I think I'm a Christian,' she said, ‘and if that's what I am, then everything is in some way an act of God. Isn't that part of being a Christian? We have a bit of free will, but only a bit, and even that's an illusion. God can always override it.'

‘You could put it like that,' Bognor agreed. He saw her point of view from deep down, as well as professionally. In that sense, he had to agree with Sir Branwell. What difference, in the great scheme of things, did man's verdict of innocent or guilty mean? Were they absolute concepts? Valid concepts, even?

‘You do realize that you were either the last person to see your husband alive or the first person to see him dead.'

‘That presupposes that either he committed suicide or that I killed him. It doesn't allow for murder by a third party. If that happened, then the murderer would have been the last person to see him alive and the first person to see him dead.'

‘Which was it?'

He felt exasperated. At one moment she seemed almost precociously bright, the next unconscionably dim. There didn't seem to be any half measures.

‘The last person to see him alive? Or the first person to see him dead?'

She allowed herself a fleeting smile. ‘If I killed dear Sebastian, then the two aren't exclusive. In fact, they're the reverse. If I killed him, then I would be the last person to see him alive and the first to see him dead. If I wasn't the murderer, I wouldn't have seen him alive. Only the body.'

‘So which was it? First? Or both? Did you kill him? Did he kill himself? Or was it a third party?'

‘You're the professional,' she said sweetly. ‘It's for you to decide.'

TWENTY

H
e was getting somewhere, even though he didn't know where. Even the arrival was far from assured. He felt as if this meandering interrogation was going to end in a conclusion, but he still didn't know what it was, nor even if it would be useful or germane.

He shifted tack.

‘Do you think your husband's death had anything to do with the literary festival? Or was it just a coincidence?'