The Mammoth Book Of Roaring Twenties Whodunnits Part 23

"Eccentricity is surely natural in the aristocracy?"

"Certainly, but his previous eccentricities centred on motor cars, aeroplanes, the usual this is different. And believe me, he's not the inbred, rustic idiot he appears to be."

"What possible motive might he have for killing Lloyd?"

"I've no idea but the way you phrase the question does rather sound as if you've already thought of motives for the rest of us, you clever old thing! It doesn't stop at f.l.a.n.g.es with you, does it?" Giles stood, signalling that the interview was over. Norbert remained seated, signalling nothing more, he feared, than that he was not standing. "By the way," Giles added, his hand on the doork.n.o.b, "a f.l.a.n.g.e is a projecting or raised edge or flank, as of a wheel. It always pays to do one's preparation."

The annoying thing was that Norbert knew full well what a f.l.a.n.g.e was. He'd done his preparation. He always did; it had been the secret of his success throughout what had so far proved to be a quite complicated career.

"Sir Reginald, if you'll forgive my indelicacy, seemed to be taking rather an interest in you last night. An inappropriate interest, I mean." He smiled, hoping to put Susan Chaplin at her ease.

"He was a little predatory, that's true. But I can a.s.sure you, Sergeant, that I am well used to such attention from men of his type. I take no notice of it."

Her words sounded like bravado, but then Norbert had no doubt that bravado was an important part of the modern working woman's armour. "You're a typewriter, I believe?"

"I prefer 'typist,' but yes. I'm employed by a secretarial bureau in the West End."

"And have you ever met Sir Reginald before?"

"No." She smiled; the first smile she'd allowed him since the revelation of his duplicity. "I'd never met Sir Reginald only his kind. In fact, the only person here that I knew already was Diana Lawrence. Our agency handles all her typing. She saw me reading The Clarion in the office one day, and we got talking about the revolution and so on."

"She's a friendly woman, you'd say?"

Susan shrugged. "She is to me. I admire her. But I think a lot of men find her rather terrifying."

"Really?"

"Oh yes! Well, that's her reputation, anyway. 'No man dare say her nay!' that's what my boss told me. Anyway, it was through her that I became involved in the League."

"Were you previously involved in the movement at all?"

Susan's posture stiffened. "I'm sure you could find out with a simple phone call, Sergeant. You keep files on us all, don't you?"

"Not all, Miss Chaplin, no. There are too many of you for that." This time, she almost answered his grin; he'd have to be content with that.

"I was a member of the Labour Party for a short time. My parents are Labour, keen Co-operators, and so on. They disapprove of communism, of militancy generally they fear that the bosses will use the Red Bogey to drive Britain back to the right and destroy the Labour Party."

"You disagree?"

"I don't care! We have a Labour government are we one inch closer to socialism? It's too late for reform. Surely the war taught us that much?"

"So why the League, rather than the established Communist Party?"

"Frankly, I am beginning to ask myself that." She pushed her hair out of her eyes, and made a noise halfway between a laugh and a hiccup. "If I'm honest, I think the fact the meetings take place at the house of a lord influenced me my parents can hardly say it's not respectable, can they?"

Norbert smiled. "Respectability is important to them?"

"They were both born working-cla.s.s, Sergeant. They have risen, through great effort, to the very bottom-most rung of the lower middle-cla.s.s ladder. They cling to it for dear life. But the poverty that's growing in this country since the war is of a severity unseen since my grandparents' day. The poor are getting poorer, the working cla.s.ses are losing their power, and the moderately comfortable are slowly slipping back to where they started. That's why I have no time for reform."

There wasn't much Norbert could argue with in that, even had he wished to, so instead he said: "I think it's time for lunch."

Champagne and sandwiches were served on the terrace. Norbert would have preferred a beer on such a hot day or even a cup of tea, given the heavy afternoon facing him. He ate a round of cheese and pickle, and then ate three more. The sandwiches were delicious, and as he chewed he worked out why that should be so: the bread, the cheese, the b.u.t.ter and the pickle were probably all made here on Lord Bognor's estate, mostly from ingredients grown on Bognor land.

Bognor. He'd been to Bognor once, on a daytrip. Very pleasant. His aunty had been sick, and blamed the water. Not that this had anything to do with anything, of course.

No, definitely not a champagne day. He took himself off to the kitchen, where he bought one immense mug of tea for a small amount of coppery gossip, and where he was invited to share a sit down on the back steps with a white haired gardener. Norbert employed a conversational opening which he had never known to fail with anyone over the age of forty.

"You'll have seen some changes around here."

"What! What hasn't changed, more like. This is a fact, professors of universities will tell you this, what's happened in the last generation the big estates being broke up, and that that is the biggest change in land owners.h.i.+p since the Norman Conquest."

"Norman Conquest." Norbert made a noise between his teeth. "Get away."

"That's true. Mechanization. Falling prices. This is getting to be the biggest depression we've had in the countryside since I don't know when."

"Norman Conquest?" Norbert suggested.

"People are leaving the land in their thousands, hundreds of thousands, moving to the cities. Most of those as stay behind are unemployed."

"Don't listen to him," said a young girl a maid of some sort, Norbert a.s.sumed as she joined them on the steps. "He's all for unions, he is. If you listen to him, he's Noah and it's started raining." She poked the gardener with her foot, almost knocking him over, to demonstrate that her intentions were kindly.

"You met my niece, have you?"

"Charmed," said Norbert, standing to shake hands with the maid.

He was glad he had ten minutes later, when they were alone, and she put her mouth close to his ear. She had very sweet breath, like violets. "You know that lady?"

"Which one?"

"Older one, with the skirts. She's a very light sleeper." She giggled.

"Is she?"

"Don't make any impression on the sheets at all, that's how light she is."

Diana Lawrence, he was told, was up on the roof, sunning. That seemed reasonable.

She'd found a nice spot: a flat area about the size of a suburban sitting-room, sheltered by the humps of windows in the servant's rooms. Norbert settled himself so that the sun was in his eyes. Diana was wearing a bathing suit which, Norbert felt, would have looked a lot better on the gardener's niece.

They discussed roofs for a while. It turned out to be something they had in common. Norbert enjoyed a good roof, though he couldn't claim to share her experience and sophistication in the matter. He had once attended a rooftop dance, complete with an American jazz orchestra, but he'd been on duty so that probably didn't count.

"One can see the future from a good roof. In Italy," she told him, "there is a racing car factory which has a test track on the roof."

"Impossible," he said, although in fact he'd seen pictures of it in a magazine.

"Most extraordinary thing you've ever seen. One drives up, through the factory itself, there are ramps at each floor, and then "

"You've driven on it?"

"Of course. One could hardly visit such a phenomenon, and not go for a spin. Oh, you'd love it, Sergeant! The most extraordinary sensation of flying into s.p.a.ce, as if the Alps themselves are an extension of the track."

"Was that how you met Lord Bognor, through an interest in racing cars?"

"It was."

"And you found you shared another interest? In communism."

"Quite so."

"And if you don't mind me asking how did it come about that you were attracted to the revolutionary position?"

She sighed. "I'm sorry, Sergeant, but it seems such an incomprehensible question. The answer is simple: I've seen the world. Anyone intelligent who has seen more than their own back garden would be communist. Except policemen, I suppose." Norbert said nothing, and after a moment she continued. "In this country, in America, all over Europe everything is collapsing. Everything! They are turning prisons into hostels for the homeless. Prisons, meeting halls, even opera houses. How long do you think that can continue before there's another war?"

"And you really believe that Britain is on the verge of revolution?"

"Your lot do! It's all anyone of rank talks, thinks or dreams about will it be this year, next year, next week? They know their time is up. Workers are organising, established religion is dying away . . . whatever happened to the social unity of the war years? Are you aware that the gulf between rich and poor is actually increasing, is actually worse now than it was before the war?"

Norbert was aware of that of all that and he was aware that, according to his friend the gardener's niece, Diana hadn't slept in her bed last night. While Susan Chaplin was running from Sir Reginald's embrace, perhaps Sir Reginald was running from Diana's. Perhaps he didn't run, of course, but perhaps he did, and perhaps she spent the night on the roof, brooding about things.

"You're right. How very observant of you." Willie Browning gave a resigned smile. "I worked for Lloyd's when the Old Man still ran the place Sir Reginald's father. I ended my working life there, indeed. As a clerk." He looked up at Norbert. "You do read Wells, I suppose?"

"I have done, yes."

"Well, there you are then. A junior clerk, in my senior years, and a member of a socialist bicycling group. Actually, that was how I first met Boggy. I still cycle; he doesn't, did it for a few months, bought all the equipment, gave it up and moved on to something else. Cars, perhaps, or aeroplanes or polo."

"And the father was not a sympathetic employer? He didn't approve of junior clerks who bicycled with socialists?"

"Like father, like son, from what I gather." He slapped his hands on his thighs, and began searching his jacket pockets for his pipe. It was in the last pocket he looked in. "So there you are, Comrade Detective Sergeant: there's my motive."

"Indeed. Thank you for your frankness."

"I can afford to be frank. I didn't kill him." Willie stood up, and shook hands with Norbert for no reason that Norbert could readily deduce. "I didn't kill him, but I did enjoy the champagne at lunchtime."

He hadn't meant to leave Comrade Boggy for last; to do so looked annoyingly deliberate, either deference or studied insult. But that was how it worked out. His Lords.h.i.+p, for one thing, had not seemed to be available at the various times that Norbert had been looking for him. He was informed on eventually by his butler, who was fed up with the master cluttering up his pantry.

In the billiard room, Norbert asked Bognor how he had come to know Sir Reginald.

"Oh, you know how it is someone at the club whose brother-in-law knew someone's sister who dined with a chap's secretary . . . I don't really remember." But his heart wasn't in it.

"He approached you, didn't he? Rather than the other way about."

Bognor had yet to look Norbert in the eye. He did not do so now. "Well, yes, I think that might have been so."

"And when did you discover that his motives were not pure?" It was a fair guess, Norbert reckoned, if the lack of discretion Sir Reginald had displayed last night was habitual.

Bognor spent a moment or so twisting his features this way and that, in various simulations of a wronged man. "When you first arrived here, I think I told you to call me Boggy. Didn't I? Thought so. I generally do. I can't stand all that Lords.h.i.+p rubbish, all that formal nonsense. Even the servants "

"Really?" Norbert couldn't help the interruption.

"Oh, yes. Oh yes, they all call me 'Sir,' I simply don't use the t.i.tle. But you see, this wretched Lloyd fellow, he would keep M'lording me, as if I were a high court judge. It's incorrect, apart from anything."

"How annoying."

"And when I asked him to stop it, he got quite unpleasant after dinner this was, I think he'd had one too many and he told me that when he had a proper t.i.tle he'd b.l.o.o.d.y well expect people to b.l.o.o.d.y well use it, and that he'd be getting one b.l.o.o.d.y soon."

"I see."

"b.l.o.o.d.y well thanks to me. Do you see? He'd be getting one soon, b.l.o.o.d.y well thanks to me. Well, that could really only mean one thing, couldn't it?"

"I'm afraid so." The sheer depth of disappointment in Lord Bognor's eyes almost melted Norbert's heart. Disappointment that he wouldn't be leading a revolution after all, and disappointment at discovering that the world was full of scoundrels, whose word could not be trusted.

"Do you know what upsets me, Comrade Norbert? Do you know what really upsets me the most? These enormous advertis.e.m.e.nts they're erecting on the verges all over the place. Have you seen them?"

Norbert, in his days as a walking copper, had spent many hours with madmen and alcoholics. Now he came to think of it, that was the penultimate line of a police canteen joke, but the point was that he was far too used to sudden changes in conversational direction to be thrown by them. "Billboards, sir?"

"That's the chaps. I mean, what is the point of them? They are disfiguring the countryside. There won't be any countryside left, ten years from now. There'll be nothing but billboards and motor buses." He stood up. Sat down again. "Look, this is a bit awkward, but it has to be said. I'm the last one you've spoken to, is that right?"

"Correct."

"And I imagine you have managed to detect possible motives for each of us, in this ghastly matter?"

"I have."

"And if you don't mind telling me I'm afraid I really must insist, rather what is your own?"

Norbert blinked. "My own . . . ?"

"Your own motive. You see, I'm wondering if perhaps we shouldn't call the county constabulary in, after all. No offence intended, I a.s.sure you, but at the moment looking at the thing purely from a layman's point of view the evidence seems to point to you being the killer."

Norbert said nothing. He tried to remember how blinking worked.

Lord Bognor's attention was suddenly taken by the clock above the scoreboard. "Oh dear, where are my manners. Would you care for a sherry?"

He had been thinking of gathering them all in the library the main library, this time and going through all the evidence bit by bit before finally pointing at Giles Macready and saying "Hold him fast!" and telling everyone why Giles had killed Sir Reginald Lloyd. But he didn't really feel like it now. The moment had pa.s.sed.

Instead he went for a bit of a stroll down past the stables and along the river, and under a sweet chestnut tree he met Susan Chaplin.

"I know you didn't do it," she said.

"That's very kind of you."

"It was Giles, wasn't it?"

"No doubt. I'm not quite sure why, though."

"But it does rather look as though it was you, doesn't it?"

"A bit, perhaps." He didn't think it did, especially, even after Boggy had pointed out the supposed clues. But then, he knew it wasn't him, so it was easy for him to see coincidence as coincidence.