‘Like Vyvyans with a “y” in Cornwall, as opposed to an “i”,’ said Monica, ignoring her husband’s fond but forbidding stare. He was warning her off, an admonition which the chef noticed and evidently respected.
‘Prosit,’ he said, raising his glass. ‘I was here yesterday between the hours of five and seven, in answer to your question, Maestro. I was supervising prep for dinner. It is my custom.’
‘We only have your word for that,’ said Bognor beadily. Such scepticism was a stock-in-trade. He liked being thought of as a Maestro, though. He must use it in future. The flattery softened his response.
‘I had my batterie here. You can ask them. They will vouch for my presence.’
‘OK,’ said Bognor, ‘I have to ask questions such as this. Form’s sake, you understand. Nothing sinister about them. They have to be asked, that’s all. Busy night?’
Gunther looked thoughtful. ‘ Comme ci, comme ca,’ he said eventually. ‘The first guests for the festival have arrived already. Brigadier Blenkinsop and his wife. Mademoiselle Book, the singer, and her friend. Maestro Allgood, the writer. They were all here.’
Bognor disliked Martin Allgood being referred to as ‘maestro’. He had always thought of little Martin as a bit of a pipsqueak, and much disliked what little he had read of his. It didn’t help that Monica seemed to a bit of a fan.
‘All here already, so soon?’
Gunther nodded. There didn’t seem to be anything to add, so a silence hung in the air, until it was broken by Bognor asking, ‘The dead man. Did you know him?’
‘The vicar? Of course. In a small community such as ours the vicar is a known person. Just like the squire, the person who runs the pub. And so on. There are not, I am told, as many vicars as once upon a time, and the Reverend Sebastian had other congregations and churches. He was busy. In former times, the vicar would perhaps not have been quite so busy but, alas, times have changed and the vicar today is a busy person.’
‘You, however, are not a member of the Church of England?’
The chef seemed to think about this, but finally shook his head a little sadly.
‘I was brought up as a Lutheran,’ he said, ‘but I am, as you say, “lapsed”.’ He laughed, as if pleased at having mastered such a difficult and essentially English concept. ‘Lapsed,’ he repeated. ‘It is like your tea. It is weak, with much water.’
‘Lapsang souchong,’ said Monica, not helpfully.
The chef looked blank.
‘So you knew the reverend as a pillar of the Establishment, rather than as a man of God?’
Gunther looked blanker yet. Maybe, thought Bognor, he really was foreign, and not a cookery school graduate from the East End of London.
‘How well did you know the Reverend Sebastian?’
This time Gunther understood the question perfectly.
‘He always said the grace at my festival dinner. Always the same words. “For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful.” Quite dull. Always the same. Sir Branwell said that at school they had a joke toast which said “For baked beans and buttered toast, thank Father, Son and Holy Ghost”, but I am not understanding the joke. Nor the reverend. He was very conservative. He liked to be thought, as you would say, “progressive”, but he did not enjoy change. He enjoyed the same always: food, hymns, words, grace, women.’
‘Women,’ said Bognor, latching on to the oddity with speed. ‘What makes you say women?’
Gunther Battenburg went pink.
‘It is, as you say, a figure of speech.’
‘But you thought the vicar was conservative when it came to sex?’
‘Perhaps, but also, perhaps not.’
The chef was discomfited and Bognor pressed home his advantage.
‘Sex,’ he said. ‘Would you describe yourself as conservative when it came to sex?’
Part of the fun of being a special investigator, even if only from the Board of Trade, was that it gave one a licence to ask questions from which one would normally have flinched. Thus sex.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Gunther, ‘I am not understanding.’
Bognor was not sure where this was heading, but he asked the question that had been at the back of his mind long before he had actually met the chef.
‘Gay are we, Gunther?’
Monica was obviously outraged at such an irrelevant intrusion.
‘I hardly think…’ she began, but her husband shushed her.
‘Her Majesty’s government doesn’t pay for thought,’ he said, ‘especially from spouses. I just want to know whether Gunther here is homosexual.’
Gunther was no longer looking particularly pink.
‘I don’t understand what my sexual inclinations have to do with the death of the Reverend Sebastian,’ he said, giving the impression of understanding perfectly. ‘But, given a chance, I’ll fuck anything that moves. Sex seldom comes into it.’
It wasn’t clear whether the Bognors found the admission, or the use of the Anglo-Saxon word, the more upsetting. They belonged to a generation and a class which tended to believe that homosexuality was an unpleasant disease best not mentioned, and in which only out-and-out bounders, such as Peregrine Worsthorne, used four-letter words in public. Nevertheless, Bognor had asked the question. He should have been expecting an answer he didn’t like and to hear words he only used, if at all, in private.
‘You asked,’ said the chef, after a longish pause. ‘But I don’t see how it is going to help poor Sebastian or nail his killer.’
‘So you don’t think it was suicide?’
‘I didn’t say that, but, on balance, I think it’s unlikely. Sebastian was almost certainly gay, but I’d guess his sexuality was probably repressed.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘I recognize the signs. Above all, only a certain sort of man would marry a woman like Dorcas, just as only a woman such as Dorcas would marry a gay cleric.’
‘Meaning?’
‘That Dorcas is a typical dyke. Repressed, non-practising, but still a dyke.’
Another silence.
‘You feel it in your gut?’
‘I feel it in my gut. More prosecco?’
The Bognors accepted and drank. In the old days, they would just have drunk with no questions asked. Nowadays, they had a problem. In today’s world, everyone preferred it if one didn’t drink alcohol at all. In any event, one was not allowed very much. The Bognors, however, belonged to a world and a generation which enjoyed a drink and did not regard this as a problem. Change of life. Bit like gaiety. What had once been a guilty secret was now an open affirmation.
‘Anyway,’ said Gunther, ‘I didn’t kill him. I don’t know who did. I have a watertight alibi and no motive. May I go now and make porridge?’
Bognor glanced at his wife. She agreed, but no third party would have known. They took their glasses into what was, in former days, the snug, and was now all beige furniture and black and white photographs.
‘There was a time,’ said Bognor, ‘when cooks were just cooks, and chefs worked at a handful of great hotels.’
‘Or were French.’
‘Quite.’ Bognor watched the bead in his glass, saw the bubbles ascend and vanish as they broke the surface.
‘Don’t like him,’ said Bognor.
‘Doesn’t make him a murderer.’
‘Don’t like his food either.’
‘Nor does that.’
‘I suppose not.’
They stared morosely at the dead flat-screen.
‘So, you eliminate him from your enquiries?’
‘I’ll talk to a sous-chef or two just to firm up his alibi, but basically he’s eliminated, yes. Strange interviewing him. I felt like that greengrocer on Celebrity Masterchef. Nothing but meaningless superlatives and droolings about how he’s getting a sense of well-rounded peach fragrance. I’ve never had snail porridge, but I’m more interested in discussing that, than I am in establishing his alibi. If you know what I mean.’
‘Up to a point,’ agreed Monica, ‘though if he didn’t have an alibi and was a murderer, that would make him interesting, wouldn’t you say?’