Poison At The Pueblo Read online

  Bognor had not got where he had by listening to this garbage. On this occasion, however, he judged it inappropriate to say so.

  ‘Whoa,’ he interrupted, ‘you’re going too fast. Start at the beginning and talk me through everything stage by stage. It’s a lot for an old bloke to get his head round.’

  It was too. The trouble in dealing with the secret services was, obviously, secrecy. It was difficult to establish truth when the very definition of their organization was its obfuscation. It was patently ludicrous to ask one’s allegedly secret services to tell the truth. They are in business to tell lies.

  ‘I was reading sociology at Keele. Then I spent a summer inter-railing and pitched up at the British Embassy in Bucharest. They recruited me for their local intelligence operation hanging out with Securitate and the friends of Nicolae Ceausescu, and then I was approached by London when I got home.’

  ‘Simple as that?’

  ‘Simple as that.’

  ‘Life is never as simple as that.’

  He disguised the platitude with a slurp of Americano. On consideration, the sentiment may have been obvious but that didn’t prevent it being true. Most analysis and description was concerned with reducing complex issues to black and white simplicity, but life, in his experience, was seldom quite like that. Life was complicated, blurred, muddy grey. It was only journalism and history which rendered clear in outline, simple in cause and predictable in effect. Novelists, too. They imposed patterns and structure on stuff which didn’t have any of either.

  ‘Oh,’ said Camilla, ‘life is unbearably simple. You’re born; you live; you die. Beginning; middle; end. How do you complicate that? I was born; I live. Sooner or later, I’ll die. No one much will notice at the time. A while later and no one will notice anything at all. We bring nothing in; we take nothing out. That’s true for all of us. Simple.’

  Long pause. They both stared into their coffee.

  ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ said Bognor. ‘But be that as it may, you seem to have got the wrong end of the wrong stick. You obviously want to tell me about it, so crack on. Don’t let me interrupt. I’m all ears.’

  He wasn’t. He was playing chess and he was responding to her ambitious opening by playing the equivalent of a dead bat. Life, he reflected, was one sporting metaphor after another. Maybe life was just a game after all. Now that games had become a highly financed industrial part of economic life, rather than an extra-curricular activity, the notion had become quite different from Henry Newbolt’s Corinthian-Victorian notion of warfare being a deadlier form of cricket or rugby football, with a Gatling gun instead of a Gunn and Moore cricket bat, and bloodthirsty fuzzy-wuzzies on the other side instead of fifteen brutes from school house. Bognor, like so many of his contemporaries, had been brought up in an old-fashioned tradition where boys – he had, naturally, been to an all male school – were prepared for a world which had long since vanished. It was not always easy to adapt, even though he considered himself the most adaptable, liberal person he knew. Nevertheless, he had to acknowledge that the conditioning of people such as Harvey Contractor was significantly different.

  Or even Camilla.

  ‘I was recruited on my gap year,’ she said. ‘When I was inter-railing I ended up in Bucharest. My passport was nicked and I met the local head of station at the Embassy. He liked the idea of controlling a girl studying sociology at Keele.’ She spelled out the name of her alma mater and Bognor found it irritating.

  ‘I do know about Keele,’ he said, tetchily. ‘It’s good. Not so sure about sociology, but there’s nothing wrong with Keele.’ He knew she thought he was being snobbish. Too bad. It was her fault not his. Conditioning. Prejudice. The class system might have shifted in the last half century, but it was still alive and kicking. And not just in the UK either.

  The trouble was that out here in the Spanish sticks it was going to be much more difficult to run the sort of routine checks on Camilla that he would have run off at home. There he had only to pick up the telephone, or thumb through one of his many reference books. Here he was under virtually constant surveillance of one sort or another and he was far removed from his usual sources. He would have to call Harvey Contractor on his mobile; or Monica; or both. But it would all take too long, was too complicated and essentially unreliable. He had long ago recognized that when it came to research you had to do your own, and you couldn’t even trust your nearest and dearest.

  Basically, he would have to trust his instincts and decide for himself, by himself, whether or not this woman was telling the truth . . . He was not disposed to give her the benefit of the doubt, except for the fact that she appeared to know about him and SIDBOT. That was inside, privileged information and not the sort of thing you would expect to be known by the average boarding house landlady from Byron Bay.

  ‘I’ve only got your word for this,’ he said. ‘And even though I can believe that our Intelligence Services are run in a thoroughly ramshackle way, I find it hard to believe that even they would just go round recruiting any old student who comes crashing into their vision during an inter-rail gap year.’

  She smiled. ‘Intelligence is about intuition; about breaking the rules; about snap judgements. A good intelligence operator should be able to fly by the seat of their pants, not be governed by rules and regulations, not have to refer everything back to some sort of committee.’

  ‘Even so,’ he said.

  ‘You have to believe me. Or not.’

  She said, ‘There’s nothing and nobody to hide behind. You’re on your own.’

  This was true. And both knew it.

  ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘I’m still listening.’

  ‘I went straight from university to the training course for Secret Intelligence; then I had two years in London before being sent off to the High Commission in Gambia to run the Intelligence side of things there; then Ecuador. Then home, and after a while I was placed on Diana’s staff. On secondment.’

  ‘You’re not serious.’

  ‘Perfectly,’ she said.

  ‘And did she suspect?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That you were not what you seemed.’

  ‘She knew that I was on secondment from the Foreign Office. There was no subterfuge involved with that. No one knew that I was in Intelligence. At least, I don’t think they did.’

  ‘Not even Mr Al Fayed?’

  ‘He came later.’ She smiled. ‘And it was absurdly easy to make him look ridiculous. Still, safer to have me out of the way for a while. Clever, too, because when the time came to be reactivated I’d have been dormant long enough to allay suspicion.’

  This was perfectly true.

  ‘But why Trubshawe?’

  ‘Why indeed?’ she said, drinking coffee. ‘I’ve long since learned not to ask too many questions. It doesn’t pay in this line of work. As you ought to know by now. Let’s just say that I’m acting on the very highest authority. I’m kosher; sanctioned; and everything so far has gone according to plan. All we have to do is hold out till the end of the course and then make our separate ways home.’

  ‘Except for Jimmy Trubshawe,’ he said.

  ‘Except for Trubshawe,’ she said. ‘He wouldn’t have anticipated leaving feet first in a wooden box, but these things happen. Someone should have told him he had a lethal mushroom allergy. Regrettable, but not completely out of the ordinary.’

  ‘So you’re telling me that you’re responsible for Trubshawe’s death and that you’re carrying out orders which would rule out anything directed by SIDBOT –supposing that SIDBOT even exists.’

  She nodded. ‘Just about sums it up,’ she said.

  ‘So what do you want me to do?’ he asked. ‘Assuming for just a moment that I am who you say I am, which I’m not. But if I were, what would you ask?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Absolutely nothing. Think nothing; say nothing; but, above all, do nothing.’

  NINETEEN

  It would have been easy to do nothin
g. Doing nothing came naturally to him, and there were those who considered that inactivity had got him where he was. If so, the inactivity was masterly, for knighthood and pension were not the usual rewards for inertia. Not that he considered that he had done nothing. It was just the way it looked to others, and most of them, he reckoned, were jealous. They couldn’t see the feet paddling frantically beneath the waterline in order to preserve the swanlike serenity of his visible presence.

  Monica, that is Lady Bognor, would have chortled at the idea of ‘swanlike serenity’ being applied to himself. But in her particular way, she was, Bognor reckoned, as myopic and undiscerning as everyone else.

  He dialled her all the same.

  ‘Had a fabulous day!’ she trilled before he could say anything. ‘Manuel is divine and I had him all to myself doing basic grammar and conversation. Salamanca is fabulous and Manuel and I had horse for lunch. Not bad. In fact, scrummy.’

  Then, almost as an afterthought, she managed, ‘How was your day?’

  ‘Mixed,’ he replied, truthfully, if economically. ‘That is to say good and bad. I’d like you to do something for me.’

  It didn’t particularly occur to him to be jealous of or about Manuel; nor to reflect on his wife’s apparently naïve enthusiasm for the man’s charms, as well as for those of the city and the rigours of grammar and conversation. He had known her too long and he was too preoccupied with the job in hand. Had he had the time or the inclination to reflect, he would have said that he found her girlishness endearing rather than past its sell-by date. When all was said and done, he still loved the old bat.

  ‘I’m being stitched up,’ he said, ‘Here, of all places. Just when I assumed I’d have the field to myself. Long arms are even longer than I’d realized.’

  ‘How so?’ she wanted to know, Salamanca, Manuel and Spanish conversation, apparently forgotten.

  He told her.

  ‘So you’ve solved the murder?’ she asked when he’d finished.

  ‘I have someone who has, in so many words, admitted to the crime. And I have a named accomplice. No more details. And I’m sceptical. The story doesn’t stack up!’ He was calling from the mobile, a hundred or so yards from the main building, just short of the woods. He couldn’t be too careful. Walls had ears. It was getting dark and chilly.

  ‘But this woman knew who you were. And why you were at the Pueblo. Bit of a coincidence. I mean, she can’t have been that intuitive. Besides not many people know about you know what.’

  She meant SIDBOT but she too was being careful. If Camilla was as resourceful and high-powered as she claimed, then she could be listening in, even on their mobiles.

  ‘Can you do the usual?’

  Monica was brilliant at other men’s wives. Not bad when it came to other men, but completely brilliant when it came to their wives. He sometimes wished the same could be said of him for he occasionally fancied other men’s wives, though a combination of fear, Monica and a public school education meant that he invariably kept his hands to himself. He missed Monica, he realized ruefully. This was particularly so at moments such as this, when he needed her physical reassurance. It was one thing to have her musky, lavenderish, familiar smile and a large, dominating hand clasping his; quite another to have her marginally braying bossy wife coming at him down his mobile phone. Better than nothing though, and she was a good player to have on your team.

  ‘Not a problem,’ she said. ‘Though I’d rather be able to do it face to face. There’s something dispiritingly depersonalizing about distance, even when telephony is so plausible and uncrackling. Are you all right?’

  ‘Fine,’ he replied, not quite meaning it. ‘Feeling a bit exposed and vulnerable, but I suppose it does one good to be taken out of one’s comfort zone.’

  ‘Not at our age.’ She laughed, sounding almost as if she meant it. ‘Bit of a worry though,’ she continued. ‘To be honest, I’d rather thought your friend Trubshawe had died of mushroom-assisted food poisoning. I envisaged a risk-free freebie in España, not a real-life murder. Takes a bit of the shine off Manuel and the language course.’

  ‘Not to worry,’ said Bognor, again not really meaning it. ‘Rum do, though. I’d dismiss both of them as particular slices of fruitcake, except that they seemed to know precisely who I was and whence I came. And without some kind of privileged information, I’d say that was impossible.’

  ‘SIDBOT isn’t exactly something to be conjured with,’ she agreed, and then realizing that she might have said something not entirely complimentary, added, ‘Outside official circles of course.’

  ‘If it’s true,’ he said, ‘it’s frankly outrageous. It means that HMG has been carrying out assassinations in the territory of a supposedly friendly country, and then concealed the fact from the head of one of the said government’s leading intelligence agencies, even when he has ventured into the murder zone in order to clear up the whole bloody mess single-handed and at considerable risk to himself.’

  ‘Quite,’ said his wife.

  ‘You sound as if you don’t agree.’

  ‘I do, darling. I think the whole thing is perfectly outrageous. Particularly at a time when our so-called government is blathering on about an ethical foreign policy and having secret services which are open and accountable. If what you say is true, then it’s lamentable and heads should roll. Having said that, however, I have an unpleasant feeling in my water that it’s par for the course and heads are going to remain resolutely attached to the shoulders. There’s a lot to be said for the Middle Ages and the executioner’s axe. But we live in a more enlightened age, as you well know.’

  ‘The absence of sanctions leads to a dissolution of morality,’ said Bognor, playing a familiar but favourite tune.

  Lady Bognor had heard it before. Many times.

  ‘Yes, darling,’ she said. She knew the dictum really applied most of all to her husband: without sanctions he would run amok; without control he was uncontrollable. Or so he liked to think.

  ‘I don’t want to know how you gain your information,’ he said, ‘provided you obtain same. How you do it is your business. I won’t even ask you to reveal your sources.’

  ‘No dear,’ she said, with barely a trace of sarcasm or irony. This too she had heard many times before. She never did reveal her sources; nor her methods, but this was not because he failed to ask. Practising what he preached was not one of her husband’s virtues. The service she performed really was secret – as befitted the senior.

  ‘Would you like me to come out?’ she asked. ‘I could get a cab. It wouldn’t take long.’

  ‘Then my cover really would be blown,’ he protested.

  ‘Sounds as if it is already,’ she said. ‘I can’t see how I can make things much worse. And I might conceivably make them better.’

  Bognor was floundering. Part of him would actually much have preferred to see his wife, then packed his bags, taken the first plane home, and gone for the early retirement and the congenial pottering about which usually followed a knighthood. A combination of morning crosswords and evening snifters, presaging a gentle slide into senility. Another part, however, rebelled and told him what he had always believed: that he had always had it in him and that it was still there, if only for one more time.

  ‘I’ll call at about the same time tomorrow, unless there’s some unforeseen disaster,’ he said. ‘But I’d better call Harvey Contractor. Better do things officially, as well as our way.’

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘If you say so. Love you.’ The last phrase was something she had picked up from some North American soap. Bognor thought the expression and the sentiment affected and fey, but he reckoned it was more than his life was worth to say so.

  ‘Absolutely,’ he said, sounding stiff upper-lippish and not in the least like a character in a soap, North American or not.

  He pressed the button with the red telephone on it and then dialled Contractor. It took the younger man a while to answer but he eventually did so. He sounded frazzled. />
  ‘Hi, boss,’ he said, injecting some enthusiasm which sounded contrived. ‘How’s business?’

  Bognor told him, keeping his report brief and to the point. Apart from anything else he was getting cold. A crescent moon, lemon-yellow, was rising theatrically over the blackening hillside. He smelled woodsmoke which had a whiff of pine about it. He wondered if he was right to be worried. In the normal course of events he would have regarded Camilla as ineffectually mousey and Eduardo as a banana freak with a flamenco subtext. He wouldn’t have regarded either as a particular threat, but then one never did. Everyone was unthreatening until proved otherwise.

  ‘You want to me to check them out, boss?’

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind.’

  It was a very old-fashioned way of giving an order. He doubted whether Harvey would employ velvet gloves if and when he assumed command. On the other hand, Bognor regarded good manners as preferable to bad, even when dealing with the enemy. Particularly when dealing with the enemy.

  ‘If the locals are right,’ he said, ‘we’re being stabbed in the back. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, I’m not disposed to believe that there is quite such dishonesty elsewhere in the corridors of power.’

  ‘We have real nuisance value,’ said Contractor. ‘It’s what I like about you. You know that. I’ve said it often enough.’

  This was true, and Bognor would have been flattered if the implication was that this was the only thing about him which Contractor admired. Bognor may have seemed conventional and not given to the rocking of boats. In fact, these appearances were deceptive, but Contractor, who was good at what he did, had no trouble in recognizing where angels should fear to tread. Angels who got too close had their wings singed and tended to beat a confused retreat. Most people judged Bognor to be one of life’s middle order batsmen, a sort of retired major forever banging his head on an impenetrable khaki-serge ceiling. This wasn’t strictly speaking true. Deep down, Bognor was by way of being an iconoclast. Monica recognized this; Contractor likewise. They regarded it as a redeeming quality. Not many shared their insights or their perception.