Death in the Opening Chapter by Tim Heald

they sang from the same, or at least similar, hymn sheets and talked the same game. Since they had first met, they had been each other’s greatest, usually only, confidants. They talked together often and in different situations, many stationary, but they had always talked together en plein air , walking. This involved compromise and usually meant that Simon walked faster or slower than he would have liked. If he maintained his own pace, he usually fell behind his wife or pulled ahead. In either case, conversation became impossible. Sometimes this worked.
    Today, however, was a talking occasion taken at a slow speed, which meant that Bognor took his foot off the gas pedal and sauntered alongside his wife, concentrating on her but also appreciating the wild garlic.
    â€˜I don’t believe the vicar killed himself,’ he began, as they left the ha-ha behind them and turned right into the woodland garden.
    â€˜Why not?’ Monica wanted to know. ‘Are you quite sure it’s not because that unpleasant chief constable thinks otherwise?’
    Bognor wondered whether the cowpat he had rather adroitly avoided was actually cow dung or belonged to some other animal; wilder and more obviously suited to woodland rather than open pasture or meadow. She could be right. He had a knee-jerk objection to authoritarianism, particularly when it was based on convenience rather than true authority. If men like Jones took a view then Bognor’s immediate response was to take another, preferably contrary. He had learned to disguise this with a fog of bureaucratic prevarication which made him seem more amenable and reasonable than he actually was. He never fooled himself, and seldom Monica, but he was surprisingly good at pulling the wool over the eyes. Better still, he was a past master at making people think that if wool had been pulled, it was they and not Bognor who had done the pulling.
    â€˜You’re quite right,’ he conceded. ‘I don’t like the chief constable and I’m inclined to disagree with whatever he says. On the other hand, I really don’t think the Reverend Sebastian Fludd dunnit.’
    â€˜Why not?’ his wife wanted to know.
    Bognor did some more thinking and then said, ‘Because it’s simply not in character. He wasn’t a natural suicide.’
    â€˜No such thing,’ said Monica. She spoke with certainty laced with a touch of asperity. ‘The oddest and least likely people kill themselves, often for the most absurd and least predictable reasons. You know that. You’ve seen it often enough.’
    This was true. They both knew it. They had both experienced examples.
    â€˜Even so,’ said Bognor, in what to anyone else might have seemed a lame remark.
    â€˜Don’t tell me,’ said Monica. ‘You feel it. Deep down.’ She acknowledged this sixth sense of his and recognized that it was what distinguished the great from the mundane. Methodology got you so far but proceeding by the book was, in her eyes, the mark of the second-rate. Anyone could read a book, assimilate the essential message it contained and then proceed accordingly. It took something akin to genius to break rules, ignore convention and not to pay too much attention to what the book said.
    Both of them believed this with a consuming and unifying passion. Moulds were made to be thrown out; rules and laws led to repetition and rote. Gut instinct was what marked men out. Mozart and Shakespeare and Leonardo da Vinci were great because they dared to do things differently; those who followed were second-rate because they did the same.
    â€˜If he didn’t do it, then who did?’ Monica asked, pertinently enough.
    â€˜The wife found him,’ said Bognor. ‘She was the nearest.’
    â€˜But was she the dearest?’ she asked.
    â€˜Aha,’ said Bognor, stepping over more dung. The countryside was full of excrement. This looked like some sort of deer muck.