Free Death in the Opening Chapter by Tim Heald

said Bognor, glaring at his port, ‘that I should visit the scene of the crime. You never know what the conventional people may have missed.’
    â€˜We’d all feel happier,’ said Lady Fludd, ‘if we thought everything was in your hands and could be handled by someone like you. Without, you know, fuss.’
    â€˜Quite,’ said Sir Simon. ‘Safe pair of hands.’
    His wife would have rolled her eyes under some circumstances, but obviously felt such a gesture was inappropriate in this time and in this company.
    â€˜Church,’ she said. ‘Simon and I had better have a sniff round St Teath’s or whatever. A smell and a bell. Who knows?’
    â€˜It’s locked,’ said Sir Branwell, ‘but I have a key.’

EIGHT
    C hurch was a church was a church. Also a scene of crime. Parts of it had been sectioned off with fluorescent tape. Two police officers were on guard. They too were dressed fluorescently. Fluorescence was all the rage these days, thought Bognor whimsically. It was the new luminous orange. It conveyed authority. Confronted with fluorescence, people became orderly. They formed queues, deferred, asked no questions, told no lies. Better a fluorescent jacket than a knighthood. He should know.
    â€˜Cold in here,’ said Monica, shivering. It wasn’t really, but it felt like it. Scenes of crime, which meant places where murder had been committed, often felt colder than they actually were. Association of ideas, fact of life. Or death.
    Bognor didn’t know what he was looking for. He seldom did. This mattered very little. In fact, knowing exactly what one was looking for was often a drawback, because it indicated a closed mind incapable of assimilating the unexpected and dealing with surprise. And murder was nearly always a tale of the unexpected, a guilty thing surprised.
    He gazed about him, looking for anything that was out of place and not as it should be. Above the pulpit, the board advertised hymns. There were four of them numbered, all to be found in Hymns Ancient and Modern . Nothing out of order there, but, even so, he felt he should see what the choir and congregation had been scheduled to sing.
    The result was surprising. Christmas carols, harvest thanksgivings, wedding celebrations and deferential thanks for the graciousness of the royal family were all very well in their way, but not at this time of year, and not all together at once. It probably didn’t signify, but it was still unexpected. He was reminded of the biblical clues in the Stieg Larsson whodunnit about the girl with the tattoo and of the clues in Dan Brown’s best-seller. Both had been read by millions, and there was no reason to suppose that an avid reader had not taken the idea and played with it when killing the Rector of Mallborne.
    On the other hand, it could be that Sir Teath’s was a more than usually catholic church, and the selection of hymns was more than usually wide. After all, the bishop was Ebenezer Lariat, aka Bishop Ebb, an old friend of Simon’s ever since they had worked together on the great communion wine scandal of 1983. He was now Bishop of Lymington, and was standing in at short notice for the Reverend Sebastian on the grounds that he was the late Rev.’s superior and could also deliver fifteen or so plausible sermonic minutes at the drop of a mitre. Alas, no room for debutants, even ones as keen as Simon.
    Bishop Ebb was due in an hour or so.
    The bishop was an Oxford man too. Keble, and muscular with it. He was a rowing blue, and Bognor could picture him in a pink Leander cap, much too small for him, on a foggy, damp boat-race day. He took a third class honours degree in Geography, and was into broken glass and hearty pursuits rather than religion. That came later.
    Cuddesdon, curacy in the industrial north, a living in the south, and a doubtful sexuality, coupled with an understated interest in choir boys and wolf cubs, added up to a