Poison At The Pueblo Read online

  ‘The convention is that an Anglo has the downstairs while one of the Spaniards lives above,’ she said. ‘I am not sure. It will naturally be a man.’ She smiled meaningfully and mirthlessly. ‘And now I will leave you for the wash-up. Please come to the main house just before noon in order to meet with Lola.’

  It was on the tip of his tongue to say that actually he was no longer Mr Bognor but Sir Simon, actually. Instead, however, he smiled feebly and said, ‘Please don’t call me Bognor. I much prefer, er, just Simon. And, if you don’t mind, I shall call you Dolores, Dolores.’

  She looked at him rather blankly, then smiled again, in automatic response.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I will see you in a little while. And welcome to the Pueblo . . . Simon.’

  FOURTEEN

  A walk in the woods with Lola was exactly that – no more, no less, and certainly didn’t resemble the innuendo laden art film from an obscure Baltic or Balkan state which that description might have implied, at least to the imaginative, of whom Bognor was one.

  Lola herself was wholesome, eager, attractive and even picturesque in an understated thirty-something way. She made Bognor feel tweedy and avuncular which was, he conceded, probably no bad thing. He tried to remember the briefing from the teniente earlier in the morning, but failed to recall more than the fact that she was a nun who danced the Charleston. And one of us. The figure in the blue jeans, tan boots, Barcelona anorak and silk headscarf did not seem remotely nunnish nor Charleston dancing. It seemed more than likely that the Spanish police had muddled the files and botched the identities. Bognor decided that it would be better if he began with the metaphorical blank sheet and made his own portrait up as they went along.

  ‘Hi,’ he said, identifying her by the nametag they all sported in their lapels, ‘I’m Simon.’

  ‘Hi,’ she said, ‘I’m Lola. You like to walk?’

  There was no sign of Dolores Calderon or of anyone else official. There were just the eight of them in the large beamed entrance hall which had a well-stocked but unmanned bar running along one wall and an open fire smouldering with huge logs at another. Marks and Spencer lay in front of the hot logs, half asleep and unbarking.

  ‘You’re taking the place of Billy?’ said Lola managing the correct inflection to turn an apparent statement of fact into an actual question.

  ‘You could say that.’ There was a brisk wind. All four couples – each one a Spanish speaker and an English speaking partner – headed along the same forest track that led eventually to the bare, treeless hills at the edge of the woods. The path was holed and rutted, pebbled and stoned, so that you negotiated it rather than walked it; hopping, skipping and jumping, rather than proceeding in the placid stroll that Bognor had anticipated, and which would lead, he believed, to a mutually rewarding conversation. As it was, one had to devote most of one’s attention to staying upright. He shivered and noticed that his breath was steamy. In the distance a dog barked and was answered by another some way off. Or were they wolves howling? His imagination was becoming fevered and he imagined killer mushrooms in every forest clearing, clinging to every trunk. This was Dracula country: Transylvanian in all but . . . well, not Transylvanian at all, but, nevertheless, having a threatening menace redolent of savage wilderness, nature red in tooth and claw, evil monks, man-eating wolves . . . Dan Brown would have had a field day.

  Lola, he saw, was wearing a crucifix which swung blingishly every time she hopped from one rock or boulder to another. She was, he remembered, some sort of nun. He said so, sounding diffident and disbelieving, and she laughed at him.

  ‘How you would say in your country?: “There are nuns and there are nuns”.’ She smiled. ‘It is not so usual in España for a woman to be a nun.’

  ‘Unusual,’ said Bognor, ‘I think you mean unusual.’

  She clapped her hands and missed a rock by inches, a high-heeled boot sinking into deep brown mud.

  ‘Unusual. You are right. I mean “unusual”. It is not unusual for a woman to be a nun. Not usual is the same as unusual. I remember now. It is in the books. Unlikely. Uninterested. Unusual. Un-nun. What, please, is the difference between “dis” and “in”?’

  ‘Too complicated,’ he said. ‘It’s too complicated and it doesn’t really matter.’

  ‘We come here to be complicated,’ she said, rubbing the mud from her boot on a tussock of wiry grass. ‘The difference between “dis” and “un” is something that matters very much. It is what we pay for. It is what we ask you to teach us.’

  ‘I can’t teach you anything,’ said Bognor, ‘since I’m told we are on the same side.’ He felt he should tap the side of his nose or wink, but instead did his best to look complicit and conspiratorial. Lola simply looked blank. Well trained, presumably. Disconcerting, though. They could not be overheard and this was quite possibly their only chance of a secret conference. For a second, he allowed himself ugly doubts. Suppose that, after all, she was not one of ‘us’. Suppose she was even one of ‘them’. It hardly bore thinking about, but Bognor recognized that he had to tread carefully.

  It felt like rain. Black cloud was thickening above the treetops. Over by the mountains there was a low rumble of thunder.

  ‘Do you think we should turn round?’ asked Bognor, nervously, ‘We don’t want to get wet.’

  ‘I thought the British were accustomed to being wet,’ she said, skipping between boulders again. ‘You sound like Trubshawe. He said he came to Spain to get away from the rain. He said there were some famous words in a musical play saying that “The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain”.’

  ‘My Fair Lady,’ he said.

  ‘Que?’ she asked, obviously not having a clue what he, or Trubshawe were talking about.

  He laughed.

  ‘It’s a famous musical,’ he said, ‘adapted from the play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw, the famous playwright. Lerner and Loewe. Rex Harrison created the part of Professor Higgins and teaches this Cockney flowergirl how to speak proper. Things like sounding her “aitches”, which seems to elude you Spanish. Thus, “In Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire hurricanes hardly happen.” See what I mean? The musical is by Lerner and Loewe. Julie Andrews was in the stage musical. Audrey Hepburn starred in the movie, but she didn’t sing because she couldn’t. So she’s dubbed.’

  He realized that the Charleston-dancing nun was looking at him incredulously, that none of this meant anything to her because she was not English (or conceivably American) and was too young to have gone through the experiences enjoyed by Bognor, who vaguely remembered sitting in a box at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, courtesy of his godmother, and drinking ginger beer in the interval.

  ‘Sorry!’ he said. ‘I forgot.’

  He felt a definite drop of rain on what he persisted in calling his ‘bald patch’, but which was actually larger than the remaining hair on his head. He had in late-middle age, become seriously follicly challenged, and there was no getting away from the fact that, if there was a patch, it was the hairy one. Welcome baldness, my old friend.

  ‘You weren’t even born,’ he continued. ‘My Fair Lady was 1956. I was hardly born myself.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ she said, looking up towards the livid clouds and the impending storm. ‘Maybe we should return. The rain will come.’

  ‘Looks like it,’ he confirmed. He did not much want to get wet, but was anxious not to appear a wimp. He could try ‘gallant’ but he had a nasty feeling that Lola was a lot feistier than he was. She could cope with cold and wet in a way that he couldn’t. Nor Trubshawe. He risked asking.

  ‘Trubshawe,’ he asked, ‘would he have minded getting wet?’

  ‘Wet?’ she asked. ‘Trubshawe liked what you seem to call “the creature comforts”. He preferred always to stay indoors beside the fire with the slippers and the pipe and the glass of whisky, and his feet on the dogs.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Bognor, ‘I get the picture. So Trubshawe was something of a couch potato.’r />
  They were standing opposite each other, not apparently sure whether to go forward or back. A large puddle lay between them.

  ‘Couch potato?’ she asked, perplexed again. ‘I am not familiar with “couch potato”.’

  ‘No,’ said Bognor. ‘Do you think Trubshawe’s death was an accident? Or did someone kill him?’

  ‘An accident, I think,’ she said. ‘Why would anyone want to kill Jimmy? He ate the wrong mushrooms. He was not very well anyway. Very sad.’

  Thunder rolled again. Closer this time. There was no mistaking the rain now. It was falling in heavy regular plops. It was like an overture – more of a signal than the real thing. Once it came, Bognor, guessed, it would be a downpour. How much grace they had was anyone’s guess. In the distance he could see another couple, presumably an Anglo and a Hispanic, scampering for home.

  ‘I think we should head home,’ he said. ‘Discretion being the better part of valour.’ He wondered why, when he really should be keeping his language simple, he was lapsing into archaic Brewerisms, metaphors, similes and figures of speech. It was not like him and it was inappropriate.

  She smiled. ‘As you wish,’ she said. ‘You know, incidentally, that I am really called “Sister Lola” and that I am what I believe in your language you refer to as a “Poor Clare”.’

  ‘A little bird whispered something of the sort,’ he said. Kicking himself yet again for a confusing descent into metaphor. It was banal too. Unforgivable.

  ‘Also known as “poor ladies of Assisi”,’ she said. ‘We are linked to the Franciscan brotherhood which is many hundreds of years old.’

  ‘The eight-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Franciscan order was in 2009,’ he said, unexpectedly, and before she could question the source of this improbable knowledge, he added, ‘I was involved in, er, something to do with honey at a Franciscan Friary at Beaubridge in Oxfordshire.’

  This was the truth but an economical one. He had been sent down to Beaubridge on his very first case many years ago after one of SIDBOT’s agents, passing himself off as a friar named Brother Luke, had been garrotted with his own crucifix chain, in the potato patch. It was a baptism of beeswax, being a murky affair centred on the friary’s unique premium grade honey.

  ‘Beaubridge,’ said Lola, glancing at the clouds and shivering slightly, ‘I have heard about it. But you are right. It is going to rain very, um, very hard. Cats and dogs, indeed.’ She looked pleased with herself, almost purring with self-satisfaction at this mastery of metaphor. ‘“Cats and dogs”,’ she repeated. ‘That is what you say when it rains very wet. But why? Why cats and dogs?’

  ‘Trubshawe would have known the answer,’ said Bognor, without conviction, ‘We can discuss the business of cats and dogs when we get back to the ranch. Come on, let’s hurry or we’ll get wet.’

  She laughed. ‘You English!’ she said. ‘You say it is wet to be afraid of wet weather. But that is wrong surely? To be wet you must stay in the rain, not run away from it.’ She was skipping lightly between the puddles and the rain was beginning in earnest. The heavens were sending a succession of liquid grenades to earth. They splattered on impact, sending water and mud back up again. Her agility was much greater than the Englishman’s and in a few moments she was well ahead of him. Bognor, struggling with slippery stones and clinging mud, felt like a retreating baggage train being sniped at from the shadows.

  She stopped and waited for him to catch up, disregarding the grenades of rain exploding all round her.

  ‘I enjoy it,’ she said turning her face to the sky and catching a raindrop on an outstretched tongue. ‘How did you say? “The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain” and “Hurricanes hardly happen”. This is not usual for me, so I enjoy it. It is a novelty.’

  ‘Trubshawe was used to rain,’ said Bognor, ‘being English. Perhaps that’s why he came to Spain. For the climate. Hotter in Spain. More sun.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said, and started to walk again, deliberately slowing her pace to make it possible for the older person to keep up.

  The rain was still almost holding off and they were just being peppered with slingshot. Bognor had brought little in the way of a change of clothing. Getting wet would have been more than usually inconvenient. They only had about a hundred yards to go before the safety of the main building. He was relieved.

  Suddenly she stopped and grabbed hold of his hands, looking almost beseechingly into his eyes.

  ‘I come here to learn English,’ she said, ‘not to experience death. It is very sad, I know, but we have a saying in Spain that life must go on, no matter what . . .’ Her voice trailed away but she went on looking at him knowingly.

  ‘We have a similar saying in English,’ said Bognor, sounding pompous even to himself. She was some nun.

  Out of the corner of his eye, just over one of her almost heaving shoulders, he spotted in a clearing among the ubiquitous conifers a cluster of mushrooms poking priapically up from the green, green grass.

  ‘Aha!’ he said, out loud. ‘Mushrooms. So you wouldn’t have to come very far to find lunch? Or the murder weapon.’

  She spun round on the muddy heels of her boots and followed his gaze, then smiled.

  ‘Boletus pinophilus,’ she said. ‘They are everywhere at this time of year. I like very much.’

  FIFTEEN

  Lunch, ordered in advance by a system of coloured tags attached to hooks by the menu board outside the dining room, had a Spanish and an English option. The Spanish option that day consisted of a garlic-impregnated cold soup along gazpacho lines, some sort of grilled meat, with what looked like a whole head of more or less raw garlic, plus chips, and flan. The English alternative consisted of the same first and second courses, but without garlic and with the soup heated. The dessert was described as ‘custard’ but was indistinguishable from ‘flan’. A carafe of wine and a carafe of water were placed on the table. Everyone got crusty bread with an airy middle. Bognor reflected on gastronomy as a weapon of cultural diplomacy, but came to no conclusions.

  His companions were Lola and Leonel, the pet food executive from Seville, who made up the Hispanic half of the table, and George who, with himself, was batting for the Anglos. Bognor and the two Spaniards went for the garlic and flan option; George opted for no fancy foreign muck and custard.

  ‘I admire your sense of adventure,’ he said to Bognor, as he eyed his warm tomato soup and compared and contrasted it with the three gazpachos, ‘but I always say that when it comes to food you can’t be too careful. Back home in Essex we have the most wonderful raw materials in God’s own acre and we never seek to adulterate any of them with noxious foreign elements. I appreciate that in other worlds, where the raw materials aren’t exactly comme il faut, God may need a bit of a helping hand. But when in Rome I never do as the Romans do. I always bring my own lunch box. As it were.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Bognor, not wishing to appear rude.

  ‘If poor old Trubshawe had stuck to good straightforward English grub he’d still be with us. But he insisted on fooling around with foreign muck and, hey presto, he’s gone.’

  George leaned back and burped.

  ‘Me,’ he said, ‘I had the prawn cocktail.’

  He smiled. ‘Morecambe Bay prawns, dollop of Hellmans and a bit of Heinz tomato. The whole thing bunged on a glassful of shredded cos lettuce. Bloody wonderful. Bloody British!’

  Lola, the unlikely nun, and Leonel, the pet food chappie, both looked expectantly at Bognor. They were obviously waiting for a lead.

  ‘I always thought of prawn cocktail as being an American invention,’ he said gently. ‘By Craig Claiborne out of Ladies Home Journal. That sort of thing. Back of an early colour supplement with a ditzy photograph.’

  ‘No,’ said George with the self-assurance of the truly ignorant. ‘British as bangers and mash or proper bitter. Americans don’t do prawn cocktail.’

  This time Bognor did not demur. Instead, he took
another sip of the gazpacho, slurping inadvertently, which annoyed him, and thinking the soup tasted really rather surprisingly good.

  ‘Lola and I went for a walk this morning,’ he said. ‘So I feel we know each other a little already. George and Leonel, though, not yet. I’m sure we’ll become great friends over the next few days.’

  George didn’t look at all sure about this; Leonel said, ‘Sí’, but rapidly corrected himself to ‘yes’. Lola came close to simpering. Bognor tried desperately to think of something coherent to say about pet food but failed. Instead, he fell back on the weather, the way the British so often did.

  ‘Bit brisk out,’ he said. ‘And wet too. Lola and I got caught in the rain, didn’t we, Lola?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it rained cats and bitches.’

  ‘Dogs,’ he corrected her, ‘it rained cats and dogs.’

  ‘Why,’ asked Leonel, breaking off some crust and dipping it in his soup, ‘do you use the same word for male and female cats but you use a different word for the dog and the bitch?’

  It was a perfectly fair question but Bognor didn’t have a clue. Nor, apparently, did George. This time he didn’t attempt to bluster.

  ‘You’re the pet food man,’ said Bognor, seeing an opportunity to lighten the mood and to lead Leonel on to home turf. ‘What do you think? How does it work in Spanish? Do you have hermaphrodite cats but heterosexual dogs?’

  Leonel looked blank. ‘Please?’ he ventured.

  ‘Our friend was making a joke,’ said George, unhelpfully. ‘It’s a failing in a certain sort of Brit. Can’t take anything seriously.’

  Bognor didn’t think he was going to like George, whoever he might be.

  ‘I was only trying to see if the English and Spanish languages took a different line on cats and dogs,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t trying to be funny. Not my cup of tea.’