Red Herrings Read Free Page B

Bognor?’
    â€˜Not that I know of,’ said Bognor truthfully.
    â€˜Old Theo was in my company at Arnhem,’ said Sir Nimrod. ‘Any friend of his is a friend of mine. So you’re no relation. Ah well. Naomi and I were talking about this deuced corpse. He was from the Customs don’t you know. A bumfwallah. Come down to sort out everyone’s Value Added Tax. Damned waste of taxpayers’ money if you ask me. They should be out catching criminals. You should see the pieces of paper we have to deal with in the post office. Licence to breathe is what you’ll have to have before you can say knife. I say, Vicar, I thought you’d be over in the woods saying the last rites. Not quaffing the Widow with the nobs.’
    Mr Larch, already on his second glass, stretched his mouth in a rheumy approximation of a smile and said, ‘“The Lord God giveth and the Lord God taketh away.”’
    â€˜Rum lot, you sky pilots,’ said Sir Nimrod. ‘The old Canon wouldn’t have let the stiff out of his sight until it was safely packed in ice down at the morgue. But then the old Canon was a stickler for protocol.’
    He glowered. In the old days before the final collapse of the Herring fortunes the living of Herring St George had been in the gift of the Herrings. Sir Nimrod, being High Church and conservative as well as Conservative, had always appointed Anglo-Catholics who spoke the Queen’s English. Larch was a break with the tradition. He had been foisted on them by the progressive bishop of the diocese and Sir Nimrod regarded him as a closet Methodist. He had introduced a regular Family Mass, guitar music and a perfectly disgusting ritual called ‘making the sign of peace with your neighbour’. This, Sir Nimrod, fuming in the family pew (a feudal vestige he still resolutely refused to relinquish), would have nothing to do with. He had not kissed another human being since Lady Hillary had passed on twenty years and more ago.
    Parson and Squire, Bognor thought to himself. Or, in a manner of speaking, Squire Mark One (Sir Nimrod) and Squire Mark Two (Perry Contractor). Even now all English villages were supposed to have one of each, although in practice the parson was called something like a team ministry and was a handful of curates based on the nearest town and cruising round the surrounding villages when it suited them. Even Larch, he had learned from Peregrine, was nominally responsible for the smaller villages of Herring St Andrew and Herring All Saints, but All Saints was effectively delegated to the district nurse who doubled up as a deaconess and St Andrew was practically derelict. What passed for the St Andrew’s congregation worshipped at St George except for twice a month when Larch took his guitar over for a People’s Choral Evensong.
    Bognor was a city person who had lived nearly all his adult life in London. He had all the townee’s wariness about the country, suspecting that rural prettiness was merely a cover for incest, bestiality and possibly even witchcraft. Most of what he knew about village life was gleaned from reading the newspapers and a certain sort of novel.
    â€˜If this were fiction,’ he muttered to his wife as they both helped themselves to another sausage roll from the hamper (Mrs Gotobed, the Contractors’ cook had excelled herself) ‘then we’d have the local doctor here as well, wouldn’t we?’
    â€˜Him or the local bobby,’ she agreed. ‘I imagine we’re about to get a visitation from Samantha’s scrumptious policeman. Or do you think he’s something she dreamed up?’
    â€˜Who knows?’ asked Bognor more or less rhetorically. He really meant ‘Who cares?’ but was nervous of being overheard by his host or hostess. ‘Frankly,’ he went on, ‘I’m beginning to wish I’d stayed in bed. These people all seem a bit peculiar.’
    â€˜Country