Poison At The Pueblo Page 14

  ‘Normal channels, boss?’

  ‘Up to a point,’ said Bognor. Contractor knew about Monica; Bognor knew that he knew; but they never discussed it. They both felt comfortable with tacit assumptions; they informed their way of working. Going through normal channels did not so much mean that Contractor would pursue his enquiries in an orthodox way, because he eschewed orthodoxy wherever possible. He would avoid treading on the toes of his boss’s wife, but that didn’t mean that he would play by the book. He left that sort of behaviour to his oppose in Five and Six, despising both as much as Bognor did. In both cases it was hatred at first and last sight.

  ‘I wouldn’t usually credit it,’ said his number two, ‘but knowing about you and SIDBOT is something of a clincher. Tell you what, though, I don’t believe the Admiral and the Teniente are part of the conspiracy. They give every impression of being onside, even if they tend towards the conventional. Basically, though, they’re both good guys. Especially the Teniente.’

  ‘I think so too,’ said Bognor. ‘Not like up here. A villainous galère and none well-disposed towards the man called Trubshawe. Not that he went out of his way to endear himself.’ Bognor laughed into the mobile, making a dry barking noise like a fox on the prowl at night.

  ‘You mind your back then, boss,’ said Contractor, unusually solicitous.

  Bognor switched off the mobile and walked slowly back towards his quarters.

  There was a light on in the downstairs room, which was odd as he hadn’t remembered turning one on. Some sort of time switch, he supposed idly.

  He had an old-fashioned key, fished it out of his trouser pocket, turned the lock and stood, for a moment, silhouetted in the open doorway.

  As he stood there, he heard a crack from behind him. In the same moment, a small object struck the lintel, splintering it before ricocheting into the darkness. Bognor dropped immediately to his haunches and looked back just in time to see a figure running back into the woods from which it had just emerged.

  Funny, he thought. He had been easy to hit at that distance, quite still for a predictable second and ringed by the light from within. He wondered whether the miss had been deliberate, decided that it didn’t matter very much, but that despite the relative earliness of the hour, he needed a drink – and probably deserved one too.

  TWENTY

  Bognor poured himself a shot of aguardiente from a bottle of duty free he had picked up on the flight. The spirit was strong and he was a willing drinker, and he felt it was an appropriate reward for being shot at. A few inches to the left and the aguardiente would have been redundant. Carpe diem.

  Someone had been in his room. It wasn’t just the turning on of the light. He had played the old trick of putting a length of cotton thread across the drawers in the chest. Each one had been snapped. That suggested not just an interloper but also an amateur. A botched job. But he was dealing with someone who couldn’t even shoot straight. On the other hand, the killing of Jimmy Trubshawe bore all the hallmarks of a thoroughly professional job. Or virtually none. Which came to the same thing.

  He rolled the aguardiente around his mouth and fell to considering the difference between the chorizo and the banger. Chorizo nice; banger foul. He sipped and frowned. Trubshawe would have been a banger man; George likewise. Maybe you could divide the entire cast of the Pueblo into chorizos and sausages, though the natural temptation would be simply to make the Anglos into bangers and the Spaniards chorizos, and that could be misleading because he, for one, did not feel in the least like a banger. He supposed that conversations along lines such as these would be an integral part of the preparation for the charade. He also supposed that there were people who devoted their entire professional lives to arguing the toss about whether one sort of sausage was preferable to the other. Maybe that accounted for the mess in which the world found itself.

  He supposed he should have stayed at home. The front line was no sort of place for a senior citizen. On the other hand, he felt strongly about the Trubshawe business and the implications that lay behind it. Now it seemed as if another dimension had been grafted on to the affair, and it was one which bothered him in a personal way, but also an altogether more altruistic, almost academic manner.

  If, and, he supposed sipping his Spanish spirit, that it was a biggish ‘if’. . .  but on the other hand, if Trubshawe had been done to death by people acting on behalf of the British Government, was this (let us compound the clichés, he thought to himself) an occasion for turning the other cheek, or for standing up and being counted. He had always been taught that the meek would inherit the earth, and yet most of his adult life seemed to be a demonstration of the opposite. He blamed Margaret Thatcher. And Rupert Murdoch. International capitalism, almost certainly. Climate change, conceivably. He was in danger of becoming a proper little Guardian reader. It would be open-toed sandals and tofu to set alongside his agnosticism and old-fashioned Liberal-voting tendencies, if he were not careful.

  He paced across to the bookshelf. It contained several Jeffrey Archers, half a dozen Ian Flemings, a Delia Smith cookbook and a Reader’s Digest anthology called Laughter is the Best Medicine. He winced. The Spanish would end up speaking a decidedly dodgy form of English if they stuck to those texts for improving their conversation. You might as well take instruction from a Dalek.

  That said, he was concerned with the message, not the means of its delivery. He was in Spain because Jimmy Trubshawe had been found dead under circumstances that he regarded as suspicious. Given a free hand and a fair breeze, he would have extradited Trubshawe and his ilk from their various Costa-mongering hideaways and forced them to come back and stand trial for the crimes they had committed in the land in which they committed them. Everyone knew that Trubshawe was an old-fashioned hoodlum, the Essex equivalent of a Mafia don, with convictions as long as your arm, and a host of other crimes that could be laid at his door with the utmost conviction, if only the Crown Prosecution Service got off its bum and stopped pussyfooting around in futile attempts to appease the government of the day. Bognor had little or no time for the CPS and had clashed consistently over many years with its directors and his minions. If they had done their job properly, Trubshawe would have been locked away in a maximum security joint on the Isle of Wight for the term of his natural life.

  He had been put away, that was true, but only in Wandsworth, which was the most insecure prison outside holiday camps for white collar crims, best-selling authors and outed Conservative politicians. Open prisons, indeed. Bognor prided himself on his liberalism and enlightenment but ‘Open Prison’ was an oxymoron if ever there was one. The only good prison was a clink so closed that they threw away the key after they’d locked the door. With Trubshawe inside for preference.

  The death of Trubshawe was the one given. Other than that, ‘facts’ were elusive. There seemed to be no doubt that the mushrooms had, at the very least, precipitated Trubshawe’s demise. However, had he been a normal healthy person of perhaps thirty years younger he would have survived, possibly without even realizing that he had been the victim of even the mildest form of food poisoning. To have been murder, therefore, the person responsible for making sure that he ate a relatively peculiar form of fungus would have needed to know that Trubshawe was not as fit as a fiddle or flea, and was particularly prone to the sort of attack likely to be triggered by this particular mushroom.

  That meant the killer either knew Trubshawe well – and that pointed towards George – or had access to the Trubshawe file, a possibility which pointed towards Camilla, if she were to be believed. The question of believing Camilla was obviously paramount. If she were to be believed, then she was the killer. Indeed, she was more or less boasting of it. Even though she was only obeying orders.

  If Camilla was telling the truth, she had been activated by SIS, who saw this as a perfect way of getting rid of an awkward enemy in the least obtrusive way possible. Camilla would be flown in to do the deed and flown out again. If she carried out the murder succ
essfully it was highly unlikely that anyone would have suspected foul play, even privately. This all made perfectly good sense.

  The most convincing argument in favour of Camilla was that she seemed to know all about Bognor and his provenance. This would have been possible without any form of inside knowledge, but it was unlikely. Bognor was a shadowy figure whose Who’s Who entry was ambiguous and elusive unless you counted his chosen recreations of ‘eating, drinking and holding forth’. This implied a convivial gregariousness that was entirely in character, but a garrulity which, on balance, was not. He could maintain a conversation and could occasionally, when required, manage ‘life and soul of the party’, but he was also good at keeping his counsel and staying shtum when required. He would not have stayed in his job if this were not the case.

  He was sceptical about her claim to have worked for Diana, Princess of Wales. Along with most Establishment figures he was sceptical about almost everything to do with the late Princess, and contemptuous in a decidedly unamused way about the buffoonish but tenacious Mohamed Al-Fayed. It would be too tiresome if Camilla turned out to be telling the truth, and the odious Egyptian shopkeeper turned out to be telling the truth, despite the inquest. It was not that Bognor questioned the motivation of the Security Services, merely their competence. They could have murdered the Princess if it were simply a question of wish-fulfilment. On the other hand, Bognor doubted very much whether they would have been able to do so without botching the job, and certainly without being detected. It was the fact that his assailant had missed an easy potshot a few minutes earlier that led him to believe in the involvement of the British Security Services. Not many, under those circumstances, could have fired and missed. Britain’s chaps could have done it, though. Bognor was as disdainful about them as he was about Al Fayed. One reason why he had gone into SIDBOT, just as he never shopped in Harrods.

  He picked up one of the Archers, read a couple of lines and replaced it, frowning. He had a confession on a plate; a warning shot by way of corroboration. He would have been entirely within his rights to accept Camilla’s word, scuttle home and have a blazing row with Fergus or one of his colleagues at the far end of one of the Whitehall corridors.

  But he knew he wouldn’t.

  He was more suspicious of George. He was so obviously a fellow member of Trubshawe’s Costa Nostra, besides which Bognor had swiftly conceived a visceral dislike of the man. But he didn’t really see how or why it stacked up. His attitude towards the deceased seemed respectably neutral, rather like an old-fashioned pre-Massingberd obituary in the Telegraph. You wouldn’t catch George speaking ill of the dead. Not particularly well, either, so that it wouldn’t be easy to work out exactly what George thought of the dead man, if indeed he thought anything at all. This was the impression George intended to convey and the one that Bognor, in a similar situation would have tried to convey himself. George was either a highly skilled professional, or an irregular Essex boy with a convincing patter on second-hand cars and an eye for fur coat and no knickers. Dislike him though he did, Bognor inclined to the latter view.

  Not that these were the only suspects. In what was a classic closed-room, body-in-the-library sort of murder mystery, everyone, including the detective, was a potential criminal. There should, ideally, be at least one other crime, preferably inferior, running alongside the main one and occasionally sharing tracks, thus ensuring maximum confusion.

  He fell to pondering Arizona Brown and Felipe Lee, their plausible manners, their access to everything from files on participants to recipes for lunch. Of all those in the Pueblo, they were the ones with most information and the most excuse for being in places the guests could not reach. For them nothing and nowhere was out of bounds. On the other hand, they had no motive for doing in Trubshawe, and although they had sussed Bognor being an implausible Anglo, they had not been able to finger him in the same way as Camilla and her banana-loving flamenco-playing sidekick.

  And then there was the slinky Dolores Calderon, who was at the same time a part of the operation and yet not. He wasn’t too sure where she fitted into the scheme of things. She was obviously grand and rich, able to come and go much as she pleased, yet not like Arizona and Felipe. She seemed to be part dogsbody and errand girl, and part grand-dame. She didn’t strike Bognor as a murderess but she could pass as a high-class moll. Too high class, he reckoned for either George or Jimmy Trubshawe, and no one else in the place was old enough to run to a girl like Dolores, whether as a moll or something more conventional. Not that conventional was a word you would associate with Dolores.

  He swallowed the last of the aguardiente and decided against a refill. There was a wood-burning stove with a pile of logs in the alcove behind it. The stove and the fuel implied a knowledge of rocket science, or at least of DIY skills, that he did not possess. The aguardiente had made him feel peckish but there was no sign of food in the room – not even a packet of crisps, nachos or nuts. Maybe he should walk up to the bar. It would soon be time for brainstorming round the sausage question.

  It seemed an odd way of teaching the language, and he couldn’t imagine that any of the Spaniards present would find a knowledge of the relative merits of the two sorts of sausage particularly useful at international conferences, or in the breaks between negotiating deals to do with fruit or pet food. Still, he supposed, you never knew.

  He wondered whether to put on a woolly sweater or an overcoat; decided against, and walked outside. On the doorstep he was immediately greeted with a seductive mixture of expensive scent and rich unfiltered loosely packed cigarette.

  She was right on cue.

  ‘Good evening,’ she said, ‘I thought I would escort you to your next meeting.’

  He had a distinct feeling that Dolores had been waiting for him. Also, that if she had fired a gun at him, she would not have missed.

  TWENTY-ONE

  She not only smelt of desirable forbidden fruit but she walked in a sinuous manner, which fitted with the aroma, the tight leather trousers and the totteringly high heels she was wearing. It was a clear night, and the light of the sickle moon and the evening stars was bright enough to illuminate her wiggly walk. She had snake-like hips.

  ‘You are a friend of the Admiral,’ she said, as they set off up the path. She took his arm, balancing against him so as not to fall over on the ridiculous heels.

  ‘Admiral Picasso?’ he ventured. Picasso was the only Admiral he knew either in Spain or anywhere else. Not that he had ever regarded the title as anything more than an honorific. He had always thought of Picasso as a sort of Gilbert and Sullivan admiral, not someone who would have commanded an Armada galleon in 1588. Italians who had mastered the equivalent of the three Rs were always called ‘Dottore’. Same sort of nonsense.

  ‘Admiral Picasso,’ she said, rolling the words around her tongue so that they took on a sexy quality that they completely lacked when enunciated by an Englishman like Bognor, ‘Juan. Do you know him through your work?’

  ‘No, certainly not. I know him through our mutual love of . . . er . . . classical guitar . . . Rodrigo, Segovia, Julian Bream, John Williams.’

  She laughed and Bognor sensed her disbelief.

  ‘I always understood Juan was tone deaf. It shows only that even when you think you know someone quite well, you hardly know them at all. Juan and the guitar. I must tease him the next time I see him.’

  Bognor had always regarded the Admiral as a randy old goat but had never before had anything approaching proof. Old salt or not, Picasso had always played his sexual cards close to his chest. Ahead of them a door opened and closed, and there was a brief sound of lively conversation and what sounded like bagpipe music rinsed through Iberian muslin – something to do with goatherds from Asturias or lobster-potters from Galicia, he thought, slipping easily into colour-magazine travel-writing mode.

  ‘You know the Admiral well?’

  She flicked the glowing end of her cigarette into the darkness and he felt a shrug.


  ‘He is a very old friend,’ she said, explaining as little as possible, ‘of the family you might say.’ She laughed plangently. ‘He has asked me to make sure you come to no harm. I said there was no chance of harm. This is a very safe place.’

  Bognor thought of Jimmy Trubshawe and the shot that missed. He shivered despite himself. He wondered whose side Dolores Calderon was on, if indeed she was ever on anyone’s side except her own.

  ‘The death was very unexpected; very unusual. It is the first we have had in the entire history of the Pueblo.’

  ‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She stopped and turned to face him. They were about halfway to the main building. An owl hooted. A dog barked.

  ‘Sir Simon, I would like to be frank with you. Especially as you are a friend of my friend the Admiral, though not, of course, in what you British call “a professional capacity”.’

  ‘Shoot,’ said Bognor, not meaning to use such an inapposite word and regretting it as soon as it was uttered. It could not be withdrawn though. Like an e-mail message once you had inadvertently pressed the wrong button. It didn’t matter that you sent the wrong message and possibly to the wrong person. The pressing of the button was irreversible, just like the speaking of words. He remembered the old adage about not digging further when you entered a hole and did not explain or apologize. She did not appear to notice but Bognor was unconvinced.