Chapter Twelve

The village store of legend has a window in which gobstoppers, liquorice bootlaces and sherbet suckers nestle side by side with little bits of local pottery. There will be teapots made in the form of cottages and milk bowls with such mottoes as “He complains soon who complains of his porridge” or “Look before you leap.” A bell tinkles when the door is opened. Inside the place is very poky but spotlessly clean, and the storekeeper is able to produce from some little box in an almost inaccessible cranny anything you want – as long as what you want is sufficiently quaint and unusual, like an ounce of snuff or a cut-throat razor.

The village store at Bramley was not very much like that. Its window had been filled with boxes of soapless detergent piled high in a pyramid. Some of these had fallen on their sides to reveal the words “Dummy Packet for Display” on them. The little bell was there, and tinkled when Hedda opened the door. Inside Applegate noted with approval gobstoppers and liquorice bootlaces, but a film of dirt seemed to rest over the whole interior. Two bad oranges were slowly corrupting the good ones in a bowl. Decorations and party hats unsold at Christmas stood at one end of the counter. At the other end a great neuter cat rested happily on some wrapped toffees, and regarded disdainfully an old, dull-looking piece of ham.

The girl who came from an inner room to serve them was lank-haired and sluttish. What a delicious little essay on the decay of the English countryside could be prompted by this village shop, Applegate reflected happily – and how many such essays had no doubt already been written. Hedda, he was amused to see, adopted a lady of the manor briskness in speaking to the girl, quite unlike her usual speech.

“Good morning, Jennifer.” Jennifer, Applegate thought with a sense of outrage, her name should be Ellen. “Father in?”

“Yes, Miss Pont.” The girl opened the door and shouted: “Dad.” A little, red-faced, cheerful man came in, wiping his hands on his trousers. Like the bell and the gobstoppers, he appeared faithful to the legend. “Morning, Miss Pont. Terrible affair that up at the school. Have they found that young Winterbottom yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Mark my words, Miss Pont, and I mean no disrespect to anyone by saying it, school is no place for young rascals like that. We talked about this very subject last week in the Murdstone and district discussion group.” Oh, dear, Applegate thought, another segment of the legend dissolving. Discussion group, indeed. “The question was, are we too kind to our juvenile delinquents, and we had a very good speaker down, Mr Ormsby from the headquarters of the Kent Juvenile Welfare. He had a rough passage, I can tell you. I hope I’m as progressive as the next man, but spare the rod and spoil the child, you know, there’s a lot in it.”

Had the rod, Applegate wondered, been spared with Jennifer, who now stood listening to her father with her mouth slightly open? Hedda quite evidently took this kind of conversation in her stride. “We shan’t agree about that,” she said, with an air of finality. “What I wanted from you, Mr Anscombe, was a little information.”

Anscombe had protuberant eyes, and at these words they seemed to stand out a little farther, so that the bulging, slightly watery eyeball was plainly discernible.

“About Johnny Bogue,” Hedda said.

“Bogue.” Was it Applegate’s imagination, or was there a shade of restraint now in Anscombe’s loquacity? “What do you want to know about him, Miss Pont?”

“Anything you can tell me.” Hedda sat down on an upturned packing case.

“That’s a tall order. Get off the toffees, cat.” The cat turned amber eyes on him and leapt in a leisurely way to the floor. “Fact is, I got in a bit of trouble for talking about Johnny Bogue. During the war it was, when everyone said he was a German spy. I faced them out about it. Had some rare arguments. Nothing I enjoy more than a good argument.”

“Didn’t like it the night they ducked you in the pond,” his daughter said.

“That wasn’t argument, my girl, it was hooliganism. And who was proved right in the end? Wasn’t he killed on a mission for his country?”

“And died owing you a hundred pounds you never saw.”

“I got my share of the estate like everybody else. If Johnny had lived I’d have got the lot.” The protuberant eyes glared angrily at her. “You go out back and help your mother. I’ll tend to the shop.”

She shrugged and went out, banging the door behind her. “They’re prejudiced against him because of the money,” Anscombe said. “But I think nothing of that. Do you know what Johnny – that’s what I used to call him to his face and he liked it – would do? He’d always pay his bill in fivers, sometimes every month, sometimes not for six months, and he’d never take any change. If the bill was twenty-one pounds he’d give me five fivers. I’d offer him the change. ‘Keep it, Bill,’ he’d say. ‘What is it, after all? It’s only money.’”

Applegate felt it was time he said something. “You liked him,” he remarked rather feebly.

“More than that, sir. I’m proud to have known him. I remember the first time he came in this shop. He put his arms on the counter and said: ‘I’m Johnny Bogue. I’ve just come to Bramley Hall. Expect you’ve heard of me.’ Of course the word had gone around that he was coming to live down here, and some were pleased and others weren’t. ‘I don’t know what you’ve heard,’ he said. ‘But I’ll tell you some facts. Once I was an MP and now I’m not. Once I was in prison and now I’m out. Don’t think that means I’m a back number, or that you won’t get your bills paid. You play straight by me and you won’t be sorry.’ And I never was sorry.”

“That was some time in the thirties,” Hedda said.

“When he started his New Radical Party, nineteen thirty-four. Wanted to make a clean sweep of everything, he did. No more Parliament. A government of businessmen was what he was after, with a real man at the top of it. He was that all right. He was for cutting down Income Tax by half, and do you know how he was going to do it? Through a State lottery and a tax on betting. You’re an enlightened woman, Miss Pont, no doubt you’re a progressive man, Mr–”

“Applegate.”

“Applegate. Wasn’t that sensible? But the politicians wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t have anything to do with his ideas though they didn’t mind drinking his champagne at weekends. Look at these.” From a box labelled “Cigarettes, various,” he selected three from a batch of old photographs. They all showed the curly-headed, arrogant figure of Jenks’ snap. Here he stood wearing an umpire’s white jacket, a glass of beer in his hand, with the Bramley cricket team; here knelt laughing with one hand round a girl’s ankle (“Judging the ankle competition at our local show,” said Anscombe. “The girls loved him.”) and here stood outside Bramley Hall in the middle of a group among whom he recognised Barney Craigen and Eileen Delaney. Hedda’s finger jabbed. “Who are those two?”

Anscombe put on horn-rimmed spectacles which gave him a surprisingly scholarly appearance. “That’s Miss Delaney, she was what you might call his business partner. Being polite, you know. Johnny was always one for the ladies. The man, I’ve seen him often, but I don’t know his name. But some of the real nobs used to come down – all political parties, and the aristocracy too. Pretty well every weekend they’d be down here eating his food and guzzling his drink, without giving him any more than a thank you. I’d tell him straight that he was wasting his money, if he ever thought he’d get anything out of them. But you know what he’d say? He’d put his finger to his nose and say, ‘Trust Johnny, he’s not such a fool after all.’ That’s why he had the Hall enlarged, you know, for parties and all that. Had one part done in what you might call the old style and the other very modern. What you’d call original.” Applegate nodded in answer to his inquiring look. “Of course people used to talk, ask where the money came from, but then people always will talk.”

Hedda shifted on her case. “What happened in the war?”

“People,” the shopkeeper said with ineffable contempt. “Said he was too friendly with the Germans, ought to be interned.”

“And he wasn’t?”

“We-e-ll.” Anscombe was cautious. “There were a lot of Germans used to come down here, business men who were over here, so it was said. But that all stopped when the war came. And it was then he told me what these Germans had really come for. Do you know what it was, and why Johnny used to see them? He was in a little group that was helping the Jews escape from the Nazis, arranging the ships and all that to get them out of the country. That’s the sort of man Johnny Bogue was, and that’s what he did. But you know what people are – ignorant. They got it in their heads Johnny was a Nazi himself. I told them different. I said he was a patriot. Stands to reason he was, else Churchill would never have employed him. You know he was on a mission, important mission, when he was killed.”

“What sort of mission?”

“Ah, that I don’t know. He never gave away Government secrets, Miss Pont. Johnny was not that kind of man.”

“Did he say anything about money at that time? Did he say he was going to make a lot of money soon, or he’d just made a lot, or anything?”

“Miss Hedda. With all due respect, Miss Hedda, you don’t understand that man. He wasn’t interested in money. I told you what he said, ‘It’s only money.’”

“He liked having it, though,” Applegate suggested.

“Which of us doesn’t?” The shopkeeper roared with laughter as if this were a good joke. “But he did say a funny thing to me a couple of weeks before he died. He came down to the shop and put his arms on the counter the way he always did, and ordered some things to be sent up. Then he gave his smile, and said: ‘Hear they ducked you in the pond on my account.’ That was on account of a little argument I had with Bill Noakes and Jerry Thomas and some others in the pub, when they said Johnny Bogue ought to be shut up and I told them there was a name for people like them, and if they wanted to know what it was, R-A-T spelt rat. Do you know that Johnny had paid all the hospital expenses for Bill Noakes’ wife when she was in six weeks with a broken hip, and that Jerry Thomas, who was our local builder then, must have done thousands of pounds worth of work for him? So one thing led to another and half a dozen of them said I was as bad as he was, and they put me in the pond. I’ve no hard feelings, though, I’m a natural philosopher. Where was I?”

“Something funny he said.”

“Ah, yes. We chewed the fat about that for a bit, and Johnny said: ‘That was a real friendly act, and I appreciate it.’ Then he gave his grin, and asked: ‘Worried about getting paid?’ There was only one answer to that, and I gave it. So then he said: ‘Do you know, Bill, in a week or two’s time I shall be the richest man in the world. And what does that mean? I’ll tell you. Just nothing at all.’”

They waited expectantly. “Is that all?” Hedda asked.

“That’s all. Funny thing to say though, or the way he said it was funny. Just about two weeks afterwards he died.”

Two small boys came in. Anscombe served them with bull’s-eyes and tinned herrings. Applegate raised his brows, and Hedda nodded. “We must be getting on.”

They were at the door when Anscombe said: “There was somebody in yesterday asking questions about Johnny, and what he was saying and doing just before he died. Funny coincidence that.”

“A tall, thin man, dressed in a dark suit,” Applegate asked.

“No. This man was medium height. Nothing special about him. Ah, yes, there was one thing I remember. The lobe of his left ear was torn, missing almost, as if he’d been in a fight.”