Death in the Opening Chapter by Tim Heald Page B

down, she frowned in recognition. They meant something to her even without the hymnal to refer to. And they didn’t stack up for her, any more than they had for him. She would need to think about it. The mind would be cudgelled and in due course, which could be at any moment, she’d provide an answer. On past form, it would probably be more or less right and more or less helpful. It was what made them such a formidable team, despite appearances.
    â€˜I think I should start interviewing,’ he said. ‘Even if the interviews don’t add up to anything, I have to be seen to be going through the motions in the same way as if the police were involved. Most police procedure is just a question of form. In that sense, Branwell is right. They just get in the way and create mess and muddle. Branwell likes order. The police create disorder under the pretence of restoring order. Farcical. Very often they move into situations that are perfectly regulated and create chaos. Fact of life.’
    Monica didn’t respond. She had heard this before. Many times. The fact that she agreed, didn’t make it any more original. The world was full of well-meaning people who wanted to improve life but made things worse. This is what made it go round, though the system was inevitably flawed and the difference between success and failure marginal. Many of Bognor’s most spectacular successes had been achieved by beating the system. Orthodoxy was almost by definition second-rate. He could not, sensibly, be accused of being unorthodox, even if it sometimes looked like it.
    He would begin interviewing people. It was what one did. That, on the whole, was where the clues were. If he were a policeman and did things ‘according to the book’, whatever that was, he would have started with Dorcas Fludd. Dorcas was the next of kin; Dorcas had found the body when Sebastian didn’t turn up for supper (macaroni cheese, tinned peaches, Ovaltine); Dorcas was the one who grieved most and she was – if the book were to be believed, though the book didn’t actually exist, except as a symbol of the orthodoxy Bognor was anxious to repudiate – also the prime suspect. Cherchez la femme . For all sorts of reasons, she should have been first in his queue. ‘I’m sorry to intrude, Mrs Fludd, at such a sad time as this – but if you wouldn’t mind, there are just one or two questions I have to ask. Would you say, for example, that your husband was behaving in any way unnaturally in the moments before he . . . er . . . died?’
    She would have answered his questions, sobbing quietly into a handkerchief and drinking a medicinal brandy in tearful gulps, because that was what one did when one’s husband, the vicar, had been found dead, swinging gently from a rope in his church one evening, when he should have been preparing his sermon. Had Bognor been a conventional Plod, he would have listened sympathetically, taken notes, expressed his condolences in a weary, undertaker’s manner, and gone on his way, none the wiser, but satisfied that he had, according to the book, behaved in the correct manner.
    But Simon Bognor was not a conventional Plod and he did not believe in the book, any more than the Reverend Sebastian had, according to his bishop, believed in God. And Bognor knew the answers to all the questions that a conventional Plod would have put to the new widow. He knew that the deceased was troubled about matters matrimonial and professional; he knew that he had last been seen by Dorcas, Mrs Fludd, after he had drunk two cups of tea, eaten a slice of fruit cake, wiped his lips fastidiously and kissed his wife a last fond, but dutiful, farewell on both cheeks, but not the mouth, with lips puckered but pursed. He put the time of this last sighting at around five, and the discovery of the body at around seven. As near as dammit, though it hardly mattered.
    The truth of the matter was