Poison At The Pueblo Page 12

  ‘I don’t think I have a huge problem with that,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Except that you have absolutely no proof and you’re denying the possibility of coincidence in a way that is statistically unsound. Trust me, I know. When I say that I just happened to be passing by and that my presence is entirely fortuitous, you have absolutely no grounds for not believing me.’

  ‘You’re saying you really just tick the boxes and it’s all a happy chance,’ said Arizona, looking as near-outraged as her demure self-controlled façade allowed.

  ‘Well,’ said Bognor, ‘I could. And I’m saying that you completely lack the ammunition to contradict me. You can’t conceivably prove I’m wrong.’

  ‘Intuition,’ said Felipe Lee, ‘is a vital part of the game. There is always an element of magic that defies explanation. If we could explain everything then everything would be explained and life would lose its mystery.’

  ‘This is all very metaphysical,’ protested Bognor, wishing that life were simpler. He didn’t believe that Felipe or Arizona had killed Trubshawe, though, he conceded ruefully, he had no proof of their innocence and was simply acting from the same sort of intuition that they were professing themselves. His intuition was more professional and better attuned, as was only to be expected of one in his position. But it was still, when all was said and done, just intuition. Nor did he think that they were acting on any outside authority. They were simply taking what was laughably described as their own ‘initiative’. But they could be a nuisance. And/or possibly a help.

  ‘Maybe,’ agreed Arizona, ‘but there’s a concrete side too. We’re straight with you; you’re straight with us. We tell you what’s up and you do the same for us. Deal?’

  Bognor considered. He did not understand too clearly the nature of the proposed deal. Neither did the other two. It would make them allies in a loose, ill-defined sense, and he was feeling exposed and knew that he could use allies. In return, he would communicate in a relatively unspecified way that would acknowledge some, but not all, of his true identity. He couldn’t see that it presented any great problem and it would make sense to have Arizona and Felipe at least marginally on side.

  He studied his fingernails, appeared to think deeply and genuinely about the offer, looked up, smiled at both, and in a manner that would have won plaudits on popular daytime television, said, simply:

  ‘Deal.’

  SEVENTEEN

  The first walk of the afternoon was much like the last walk of the morning.

  Walks were like that and like each other. That was part of the point. The infinite variety of each individual encounter was coated in a veneer of predictability. Within a strictly controlled routine, eccentricity and experiment could flower. That was the theory.

  That afternoon Bognor had Eduardo. Eduardo was the shipping magnate who liked to strum along to Paco Peña. At least that was what Bognor recollected from the briefing. The photograph in the smoke-filled room in Salamanca had shown a raw-boned, intensely blue-eyed, square-jawed, clean-shaven blokey bloke. In real life, he seemed to have shrunk a couple of sizes, gone saggy at the jaw and lost much of the intense lustre of the eyes. They still had something marginally fanatical about them, but it was shiftier, less piercing and self-confident.

  There was something of Opus Dei about him when he introduced himself. Not in any dramatic hair-shirt or concealed scourge sort of a way; more shiny black suit, dandruff on the lapels and an aura of pasty-faced slug-under-stoneware. Bognor associated Opus Dei with Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists and others who came unbidden to his front door when he and Monica were having one of their self-indulgent weekend lie-ins. He did not subscribe to da Vinci code fantasy theories, but was not keen on organized religion, especially in its more regimented and extreme forms.

  Despite Eduardo’s mildly disturbing dark suit; shiny at knees and elbows; drizzled with dandruff around the neck and lapels; polished shoes and pasty complexion; Bognor felt strangely at peace. The sun shone, birds sang; some sort of vulture or other bird of prey was effortlessly ascending a spiral of miraculously hot air; the trees were still green; a vulpine animal howled in the distance, and all seemed pretty right with the world. For a man staring at almost imminent retirement and the prospect of a not too distant death, Bognor felt happy and relaxed.

  Eduardo was not just a fly in the ointment.

  He struck about five minutes in to the walk, when they were out of sight and earshot of the other marching couples.

  ‘SIDBOT,’ he said, lisping the ‘s’. ‘You are the man from SIDBOT?’

  It took Bognor a moment to register the danger of the phrase which hovered between a statement and a question but had a horrid certainty about it. Eduardo was clearly not expecting the answer ‘no’.

  ‘You what?’ he asked, obviously flustered but trying to retain a composure that was eluding him.

  ‘SIDBOT,’ repeated Eduardo. ‘You are the man from SIDBOT. Camilla told me to say that we had been informed and we were to tell you.’

  The vulture was still twisting upwards, a small black speck in the distant sky.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Bognor, ‘but I don’t understand. You are in shipping. You are here to practise English. I understand you like Paco Peña.’

  ‘That is correct,’ said Eduardo. ‘Classical guitar. Very good. But you are from SIDBOT because you believe that Jimmy Trubshawe has been the victim of foul play. Camilla has asked me to tell you that it does not matter, that the world is better off without Mr Trubshawe. He is gone and that is good. You should go home quickly. Or, if you must stay, you must keep what in English you call the low profile.’ The forest was as idyllic as it had been a few moments earlier, but it did not seem like it to Bognor. He shivered. Eduardo seemed such an insignificant slug of a person. How come he knew that Bognor was the man from SIDBOT? How come he even knew that the Board of Trade had a Special Investigations Department? Let alone that it boasted such an ignoble acronym? And what did it all have to do with Camilla? Bognor remembered that she seemed faded, save for the gash of scarlet lipstick; that she had a butterfly tattooed near a shoulder-blade; that she was probably older than she claimed and that she said she ran a B. & B. in Byron Bay.

  ‘Fruit,’ said Bognor, ‘I understand you’re in fruit.’

  ‘I ship exotic fruits around the new Europe,’ confirmed Eduardo. ‘My company would naturally be of interest to your Board of Trade.’

  Bognor shrugged. ‘Maybe so,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t know. What sort of fruit?’

  A twig snapped under Eduardo’s foot. A dog barked in the distance.

  ‘What sort of fruit?’ he repeated, parrot-like.

  ‘Yes. Oranges? Bananas? Mangosteens? Papayas?’ Bognor tried to keep the irritation out of his voice.

  Eduardo frowned. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘oranges, bananas, mangosteens, papayas. All sorts of fruit.’

  ‘And vegetables too?’ Bognor was floundering and wondered if it showed, ‘Mushrooms for instance.’

  If Eduardo knew what the Englishman was talking about he made a convincing pretence of incomprehension. It had never occurred to Bognor that Eduardo would have had any inside or expert view on mushrooms, but then it had never occurred to him that there was any connection between Eduardo and Camilla. Much less that either of them would have known about SIDBOT. Much less his position at its head. Who’s Who included an entry under his name because of his new knighthood. It did not however identify him as the head of the Special Investigations Department at the Board. His status was supposed to be a secret – an open one in the corridors of power, but closed to those not ensconced in the upper echelons of the establishment.

  ‘Principally fruit,’ said Eduardo, ‘and most of the fruit is what you . . . or we . . . would call exotic. That is strange, expensive, out of the ordinary, unusual.’

  Bognor was not good on fruit. Nor classical guitar. He was floundering.

  ‘Why fruit?’ he asked, helplessly.

  ‘It is a commodity.’ said Edua
rdo. ‘In Spanglish we say “there is money in movement”. If fruit stays where she is grown there is no profit to be made. If you move the fruit there is profit. The further the move, the more the money.’ He smiled.

  ‘What about the carbon footprint?’ Bognor wanted to know. He had read the papers, watched TV, been briefed. The world mania for shuffling commodities around the globe for the financial benefit of the few, threatened the very existence of the many. Every schoolboy knew that.

  Eduardo shrugged. He was obviously not a man who subscribed to green ideas on the dangers of global warming. He also came with a warning.

  ‘SIDBOT,’ he said, returning to his opening gambit. ‘Camilla says that you are the man from SIDBOT and she has instructions from London to make sure that you do not interfere.’

  Bognor’s reaction to this information was unprintable and he said nothing, pretending instead to digest it. His reaction, naturally, was to tell Eduardo and Camilla, whoever they might be, to eff off and mind their own business. It was intolerable for someone of his standing and importance to deign to take charge of a case such as this, and then to find that some foreign squirt had got hold of his identity and was presuming to tell him how to behave. He was outraged. Heads would roll. Had they no idea who he was?

  They walked on, outwardly happy and engrossed in improving talk; inwardly they seethed. At least, that was what Bognor was doing internally, even though he appeared imperturbable and phlegmatic as ever. He swallowed hard. He was being ridiculous. He, the least pompous, the least self-satisfied, the least puffed-up person he knew. He was the absolute acme of modesty; positively supine with self-doubt. Nevertheless, at his age, with a knighthood, a pension, and his own civil service department, he surely deserved to be treated with a modicum of respect. It was intolerable to be fingered as ‘the man from SIDBOT’ by some fruit salesman and an Australian boarding-house proprietor.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said, primly.

  Eduardo trod on a twig. It snapped.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘you must talk with Camilla.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk to Camilla,’ he said. ‘I came here to talk to Spanish people and help with their English. I didn’t come here to talk to an Australian landlady of a certain age.’

  He realized as he said thus that it sounded ungallant.

  ‘I didn’t come here to speak to native English speakers. Any native English speaker. I have no interest in them. I have quite enough English-speaking friends and acquaintances already. I don’t need more.’

  It was on the tip of his tongue to add disparaging remarks about Sheilas, colonials, Byron Bay, landladies and women of a certain age but he thought it might seem misleading. Besides, he wasn’t that sort of person. Really. There wasn’t a sliver of snobbery, sexism or racism in him. He was a new male. Well. Sort of. Up to a point. Anyway, he was here to do a job. He did not wish to be deflected. Least of all under circumstances such as this. He was, above all, a pro. Never let it be forgotten.

  ‘You should listen to what I say,’ said Eduardo, who seemed to be doing some bristling of his own. ‘I just want to help. You are an old man. You should enjoy retirement. In Spain it is a moment for a glass of Pedro Ximénez and some bowling. You should smoke a pipe and wear the slip-over shoes.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake!’ Bognor spoke with feeling. ‘I didn’t expect to find ageism in Spain of all places. I’m an old man in a hurry. Barely begun. Just watch this space.’

  A rook cawed. Or was it a raven? He had never managed to distinguish satisfactorily between the two and suspected that the Spanish had a different bird altogether. Rooks were relatively commonplace and could be turned into pies. Ravens were altogether more baleful and unusual, harbingers of death. They were evil and strange, and when they left the Tower of London it would be as if the apes had left the Rock of Gibraltar, which, of course, was claimed by the Spanish, much as the Chinese had claimed a similarly inhospitable piece of rock known to the rest of the world as Hong Kong.

  Musing thus and thinking of himself, Trubshawe and the concomitant of an unlikely and unexpected death, he said, ‘Paco Peña. I understand you are something of an aficionado?’

  ‘That is a Spanish word. There is a fine for using such things,’ said Eduardo. ‘But, yes. I like Peña very much. He is from Cordoba. Is very nice. Very special.’

  ‘So I’m told,’ said Bognor, lengthening his gait to traverse a puddle without getting wet. ‘Never been there. But I like Peña’s music. Very . . . er . . . Spanish.’

  ‘Sí,’ said Eduardo, snapping another twig underfoot. ‘Yes. La Musa Gitana.’

  ‘Julio Romero de Torres,’ replied Bognor, who prided himself on not being just a pretty face.

  Eduardo had the grace to look startled. He obviously hadn’t expected this sort of erudition from the apparently bland and, in a nutshell, typically English Englishman. It was Bognor’s most effective disguise. He himself liked to think of it as a thick-edged carapace round a razor-sharp mind, though at three o’clock in the morning he acknowledged that this was an exaggeration. He might not have been as clever as he thought, but he wasn’t as stupid as he looked.

  ‘You know the Musa Gitana,’ asked Eduardo suspiciously.

  ‘Know is a bit of an exaggeration,’ said Bognor. ‘But one is aware of it. Naturally. I admire flamenco a great deal. That doesn’t make me a professional, but even so . . .’

  They passed another couple who had turned for home. Bognor knew from what he had learned in the earlier briefing, and from the look of negative complicity that passed between them, that the Anglo woman walking in the opposite direction was Camilla, the one time Essex girl, now translated to Northern New South Wales.

  ‘So how do you come to know Camilla?’ asked Bognor. It seemed an obvious question.

  ‘Bananas,’ replied Eduardo. ‘She lives in banana-growing country. We import from her neighbours.’

  Bognor smiled. Silly him.

  ‘And I suppose she plays flamenco?’ he said.

  Eduardo frowned again.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Forbidden fruit,’ said Bognor. And they turned back, following the others towards HQ.

  EIGHTEEN

  Camilla was faded.

  Had she been a flower, thought Bognor, she would have been dried and pressed between the leaves of a collector’s volume, preserved for posterity as an example of what had once been alive and beautiful and was now merely an item of academic interest.

  She was leftover, but then maybe that’s what most women were once they had passed their notional sell-by date. Bognor himself felt as much like a front-line foot-soldier as he had ever done, yet part of him knew that he was a rusty old desk-bound bore who was out of practice and ill at ease at the sharp end. If you were making a direct comparison, you would have to say that he was, on any strictly rational basis, well past the age for active service. On the same computer-style analysis, she wasn’t. If either of them were faded, then it was Bognor.

  He, on the other hand, was an alpha male, even if grizzled.

  ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ she said. This was called ‘cutting to the chase’, though Bognor, who knew a thing or two about the phrase’s provenance considered it a misuse of language. It didn’t mean what the user thought it did.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he replied. The conversation was, he sensed, going to be like chess, full of feints and false initiatives until suddenly one of them embarked on something that carried risk but also the prospect of success. There was a break in the schedule before the next walk. They were encouraged to lie down, take it easy, possibly sleep. Bognor suggested coffee in a quiet corner of the bar. She acquiesced and led the way to a spot by the open fire, where they would not be overheard and barely overlooked. Presently the bar man brought two Americanos, black for him, white and sugared for her.

  ‘So you’re from Byron Bay by way of Essex?’ he tried, judging this almost as non-committal
as a judgement on the weather, or a question about the frequency of her visits to the Pueblo.

  ‘I was on the permanent staff at SIS,’ she said. ‘Both Six and Five since you ask, but they decided it would be in everyone’s interests if I went to ground after the Diana and Dodi business. I was on Diana’s staff at the time.’

  This was a serious gambit, the sort of move that would make a controversial column in one of the smart London weeklies. Bognor was inclined not to believe a word of it. In his experience anyone who had worked for the secret services was, well, secretive about it. Those who blabbed and showed off almost certainly hadn’t gone near either Five or Six, or even, come to that, SIDBOT. Not many people knew about SIDBOT, which was part of its charm, and also made him even more suspicious, though not entirely sceptical, about Camilla or whoever she really was.

  ‘“Ground” being New South Wales?’

  She nodded. ‘Almost as far as one can get,’ she agreed.

  ‘And what exactly were you doing with Diana?’

  She sighed.

  ‘Let’s just say I was on her staff,’ she said. ‘Old-fashioned usage would probably have described me as her “dresser”, but that would have been hopelessly old-fashioned. “Companion” would be nearer the truth, but that’s misleading too. You’ll see me in a lot of the photographs, sort of hovering.’ She smiled, and Bognor was almost inclined to believe her. ‘Most people fell for the cover-up,’ she continued. ‘That ludicrous inquest and poor old Fayed. If ever a man played into establishment hands. Not that “the establishment” had much more of a clue than the jury. No one understands the reality of power. You could blame the press, though I think that’s too easy. One way or another, the world fell for the cover-up. Only fruitcakes believe that Diana was murdered, but the fruitcakes are right. Actually fruitcakes are right more often than not. If you were to write the fruitcake version of history, you’d have a truer and more accurate version of events than the one that’s peddled as the truth. Strange.’ He stared hard at her coffee. ‘None of which detracts from the fact,’ she said, ‘that people like you have a marginal nuisance value. You can get in the way, and it would be boring to have to eliminate you if it could be avoided.’