Poison At The Pueblo Page 15

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘If I may be honest, Mr Trubshawe was not a nice man. Not nice at all.’

  ‘So I rather understand,’ he said.

  ‘He was quite rich. He had money. But it was difficult to say where the money came from. Our friend the Admiral warned me that I should be careful.’

  ‘How so?’ Curious and curiouser. Admiral Picasso had confided none of this. He would have seen the files; heard Bognor’s views on Trubshawe; been under no illusions regarding his character and provenance. But he had said nothing about voicing his suspicions to Dolores Calderon and indeed said nothing at all about any relationship with her. Nor her family. Bognor felt like laughing out loud.

  ‘I mentioned that Mr Trubshawe was joining us on the seminar. But he also had what I think you call a “hidden agenda”.’

  ‘That’s a very sophisticated phrase,’ said Bognor, ‘and quite a sophisticated concept. Can you explain?’

  They were still facing each other in the dark; not more than a few inches between them. Bognor wondered, fleetingly, if it had been Dolores who fired the shot and whether or not he might be in danger even now, when, despite his age, or even because of it, he was rather enjoying the proximity of this musky, husky foreign female.

  ‘Mr Trubshawe and the man called George claimed to have money and they were interested in buying the business. Before they finally made an offer they said they wanted to see how it worked. Close up. For themselves. Sharing the experience.’

  ‘So Trubshawe and the man called George knew each other?’

  ‘They were colleagues,’ she said, ‘so, yes, naturally. They were business associates. Maybe friends also but that was not my impression.’

  ‘And what was your impression?’ If Bognor was not so sure that he was carrying out his duty and only doing his job he might have thought that they were flirting. Ridiculous. This seemed to have become a universal truth and a source of recurring bother. He sometimes thought he was not destined for old age and uxorious slipperdom.

  She lit another cigarette, dragged on it and exhaled strong, tarry smoke through her nostrils.

  ‘My impression is that they . . . how does one say it? That they were not friends. They acted together. They had known each other a long time. They did deals. But friends, no. Looks between them. And once I heard them arguing.’

  ‘How did they come to be here?’

  ‘They came to the office in Madrid. You know, of course, that I am partly the owner of the Pueblo organization?’

  Bognor hadn’t known this. He would kill one or two people, starting with Admiral Picasso, when he returned to civilization. Why did no one tell him things any more? Maybe they never had. But he always found out in the end. For the time being he just shrugged.

  ‘I am just what people in my part of the world call “an ordinary Joe”,’ he said, ‘and I’m not naturally curious. Let’s just say that I knew but I did not know.’

  Two lies followed by an ambivalence, but she let it pass.

  ‘We had better go,’ she said. ‘At least you go on. It is better that we are not seen together. I have nothing to do with the day-to-day organization. As you would say, “I am here but I am not here”. Also our friend the Admiral has made me responsible for your being safe. So I will be watching. And I think you should be careful of the man called George.’

  ‘Are you saying that he killed Jimmy Trubshawe?’

  She breathed in smoke and blew it out again, appearing to give the question thought.

  ‘I do not know why you think anyone killed Mr Trubshawe,’ she said. ‘He was not a very well person. It could have happened at any moment. Accident. That is all. It was very sad, but an accident. Everyone says so.’

  ‘But someone fed him the wrong kind of mushroom.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she said, and bent forward to kiss Bognor lightly on the cheek, turned and was gone as swiftly and completely as she had arrived.

  Bognor felt both elated and apprehensive, but moved on towards the main building and the impending discussion about the relative merits of Spanish and British sausages.

  He felt vulnerable. He supposed everybody except Arizona Brown and Felipe Lee shared that sense of exposure. All of them were exposed and alone; the Spaniards even more so because they were dealing in a language not their own, though the Anglos also suffered from an isolation by language, all the more menacing because it was not apparent in their unnatural little cocoon of Englishness. The reality was that this was Spain and the tiny group of Anglos were, though apparently in charge of the proceedings, actually surrounded by a world of Hispanic otherness. At any moment this could intrude and break in on the artificial Anglocentric world of make-believe that was the Pueblo.

  He supposed he had not known quite what he was letting himself in for when he took on this assignment. Maybe no man was an island. He had forgotten what it was like to be alone among potential enemies with the smell of death always in his nostrils. Security and status were insulating, and there was no question that as one progressed up the rungs of the career ladder one lost touch with life below. Whether life at the bottom was any more ‘real’ than life at the top was a moot point and a matter for conjecture and debate, but there was a widespread popular notion that ‘reality’ was ‘synonymous’ with deprivation and lack of success, whereas the further up the tree you climbed the more out of touch you became.

  He personally believed that he was astonishingly adroit at keeping in touch; that he enjoyed a special rapport with youngsters such as Contractor who came from a different generation, as did his much-loved and appreciated nephews, nieces and godchildren. He did his utmost to tune into their tastes, to appreciate the same music and clothing, and even food and drink. From time to time he even took public transport, thus risking the disdain of Thatcherites who believed that any man who takes a bus or train when he has passed the age of thirty is one of life’s failures. (He half-believed this himself and only used public transport in the interests of research and ‘keeping in touch’.)

  And now sausages.

  He smiled at the manifest absurdity of the impending charade. Who would have thought that Sir Simon Bognor, Permanent Secretary at Special Investigations, Board of Trade, would have found himself in isolated Spain discussing the merits of the British banger with a bunch of complete strangers. Or that he would be there to investigate the sudden death of a known British villain who had been holed up in Spain, without apparent fear of extradition, ever since escaping in broad daylight from the care and custody of Her Majesty’s Prison Service. Or that the aforementioned Sir Simon Bognor would have been shot at by a person or persons unknown, warned off by others, confided in – up to a point – by yet others, and generally been reduced to the ranks. All this of his own volition, without instruction from elsewhere, and to the definite disapproval of other parts of Her Majesty’s Government, thus putting him yet further at risk, if not of physical harm, at least of verbal disgrace, opprobrium and so on.

  He rubbed his hands, rather relishing the predicament in which he found himself. It was dark; it was cold; it was foreign; it was threatening. He was no longer as grand as he thought he was; he was far from home; there were precious few comforts close at hand.

  Yet he was in his element.

  He quickened his pace, still rubbing his hands together, and allowing himself the softest of self-congratulatory chuckles.

  Sausages, eh?!

  TWENTY-TWO

  He was the last to arrive.

  Arizona Brown looked ostentatiously at her wristwatch – an expensive Tag Heuer of the sort used by deep-sea divers many fathoms down. She did not speak but the look spoke volumes.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said. ‘Got a bit tied up.’

  ‘“Tied up”,’ explained Arizona to her charges, ‘does not mean ‘tied up’ in a literal manner. Simon did not get in a muddle with his shoelaces. He has just produced an old-fashioned English euphemism for being late. It is not a reason. It is an excuse.’

&n
bsp; ‘Being late is pretty rich for the country which patented the word “mañana”,’ said Bognor irritably.

  ‘No Spanish, please, Simon.’ She sounded at least as irritable. The log fire spat.

  ‘English I may be,’ he said, ‘old-fashioned I am not.’

  One or two people tittered. He couldn’t see who they were. Didn’t care. Told himself he didn’t care. Not necessarily the same thing. Odd how he suddenly found himself communicating inwards in staccato-speak. Must mean that I’m rattled, he thought.

  Arizona spoke. ‘You’re a banger,’ she said, ‘so you’re down the far end of the room near the fire with George, Lola and Belen. Leonel, Tracey, Camilla and Eduardo are chorizos. I shall float between the two camps assisting where needed. Felipe will do the same.’

  Felipe smiled and nodded, and Bognor joined his group trying to appear nonchalant and as if he did this sort of thing all the time. He could imagine himself and Monica sitting up of an evening playing chorizos and bangers like a Darby and Joan couple settling down to a mug of cocoa and a round or two of whist.

  Everyone had a writing implement and a clipboard or notebook. Each group sat round a low table with a cafetière of coffee, a bowl of sugar and a milk jug in the middle, along with a bottle of sparkling mineral water. In front of every participant was a mug and a glass. It was almost like a real conference.

  Bognor sat at the spare chair at the Bangers table, smiled and nodded at his three team mates, wondered if one of them had murdered Jimmy Trubshawe and pulled out a pencil and notebook. A moment or so later, Arizona Brown clapped her hands and smiled glacially.

  ‘Now that we’re all assembled,’ she said, looking pointedly at Simon, ‘I’d like to run over the ground rules once more just to be certain you understand.’ She said once again more or less the same as she had said after lunch. Bognor felt his attention wandering.

  There were two quantities unknown to Bognor, one in each group: Banger Belen on his own side and Chorizo Tracey on the other. Belen was, if his memory served him right, in her late thirties, lived in a suburban apartment and was the export manager of a small chain of Madrid-based boutique hotels. She did a lot of business in Scandinavia and sounded rather a dull stick. There was a live-in partner. She worked out.

  ‘You do a lot of business in Scandinavia?’ he ventured, ‘Dull people the Scandinavians. Not much into sausages. Cold fish.’

  She smiled back at him, discomfited.

  ‘Cold fish?’ she repeated, obviously taking the remark literally and trying to equate Finns with ceviche, Danes with gravadlax. Not that difficult. ‘Fish in Scandinavia I like very much,’ she said.

  Bognor shook his head.

  ‘Forget it,’ he said.

  ‘Cold fish is a person with no feelings,’ said Lola, the nun, unexpectedly. ‘Not Latin. No hot blood. No passion. The cold fish is a person who is never impulsive. They decide everything according to ratiocination and for reasons that they have considered very carefully. Perhaps Aquarius is a cold fish because of the water. The water in Aquarius is to do with purifying and cleaning, so perhaps it is a cold water. Or more likely it is Pisces. The Pisces is the Latin word for the fish, but I do not know if the Pisces is a cold fish. Maybe hot. I think Pisces are governed by emotion and intuition, so perhaps not cold fish. I don’t know. I believe in God, not the stars, but maybe you are different, Belen. Maybe you are not as holy as your name and perhaps you believe in the horoscope.’

  She blushed, surprised perhaps by her verbosity, which bordered on the articulate. Bognor felt moved to clap but did not. George neither, though he too seemed impressed.

  ‘Lola’s pretty right,’ said Bognor. ‘The important point being that “cold fish” is a figure of speech. Not literal. That’s the problem with the English language. So much metaphor and simile that it sometimes hides the truth.’

  ‘Like life,’ said Lola, who seemed to be entering into the swing of things. ‘Life is full of metaphors and similes, and nothing is as obvious as it might seem.’

  ‘Like murder,’ said George. ‘It isn’t always the obvious suspect wot dunnit.’

  The pause that followed this reversion to the nagging Banquo’s ghost of the late Trubshawe and his unexpected death could only be described as ‘awkward’. Even George seemed to regret that he had said it.

  ‘So who,’ asked Bognor, innocently, ‘is the obvious suspect when it comes to killing Trubshawe?’

  ‘Are you saying Jimmy was murdered?’ Bognor noted the familiar ‘Jimmy’, but raised the palms of his hand in a gesture of ignorance and perplexity.

  ‘I wasn’t here, remember. I’m only here as Trubshawe’s last minute stand-in.’

  ‘My view is that it was an accident,’ said George. ‘Jimmy was an accident waiting to happen.’

  ‘And the mushrooms . . . ?’ Bognor wanted to know.

  ‘Were the trigger. Unfortunate. But if it hadn’t been the mushrooms it would have been something else. He was a sick man. He was going to die anyway.’

  ‘What makes you so sure?’ asked Bognor.

  It was George’s turn to shrug. He also changed the subject. ‘We’re supposed to be devising a marketing strategy for bangers.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Bognor. ‘I think we should begin by nominating a team leader. That’s the way they do it on TV. I think it should be Belen or Lola, and I think we should have a secret ballot. Quite simple. We just write down our nomination on a piece of paper, fold it up so it’s secret and then do a count.’

  This was easy and no one demurred. Bognor opened them up and found all four for Lola. Interesting, he thought to himself. It meant that Lola had voted for Lola. That surely said something about her self-confidence. Did it also say something about the lack of same in Belen. Belen wasn’t as obviously attractive, which was odd, given that Lola was a nun and Belen worked in boutique hotels. Temperamentally, Bognor was absolutely not in favour of this sort of exercise, which reeked of the kind of team-building mumbo-jumbo practised by modern management consultants who ripped off large businesses by trading on corporate greed and indolence. In his opinion, anyway.

  ‘A majority for Lola,’ he said. Strange that he had emerged as, in a sense, a kind of de facto, team leader. It was he who had made the suggestion; he who had had it accepted and now he who had organized the mini-election and the votes. Perhaps he exuded natural authority after all. Perhaps there was more to these charades than he thought. ‘Oh, OK, Lola, take it away. Let it rip.’

  ‘Rip?’ she enquired tentatively, causing Bognor to curse his overuse of meaningless colloquialism.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘It’s just a lazy way of saying that you’re in charge. We are putty in your hands.’

  She frowned again but did not, this time, take him up on the evidently strange expression.

  ‘We have to sell the idea of the sausage you call the banger,’ she said, obviously. ‘I should like to know why it is called “banger”, please.’

  ‘The British banger,’ said George, ‘like fish and chips or bacon and egg, is British. It’s an institution back home. People like Trubshawe and me have been trying to introduce it into Spain, and I think we have a thing or two we could tell you.’

  Trubshawe and I, thought Bognor pedantically. He was not usually a severe grammarian but everything about George irritated him, and he found his slipshod linguistics as offensive as his mindless jingoism. He tried, however, to control the urge to take irritable issue with either. No Lynne Truss, he.

  ‘Surely something we should be doing is to universalize the banger?’ he said, ‘I mean, the Spanish aren’t going to switch from their own distinctively Iberian sausage to a completely different sort of animal just because it’s British. It would put them off, surely? And, by the way, why “banger”? I know it’s slang for a particularly British form of sausage, but why? All yours, Lola.’

  The improbable poor Claire dimpled nunnishly and smiled round the table. She already looked like a leader.


  ‘Mr Bognor is correct,’ she said. ‘To sell something as British would, in Spain, be an invitation to a disaster. The only successful British export to Spain is criminal.’

  ‘Football hooligans,’ said Belen, nodding. ‘Train robbers.’

  It was a truism that only kith and kin could slag off kith and kin. It didn’t matter how correct an analysis might be, the only people entitled to express it were the accused’s nearest and dearest. If an outsider dared to venture a criticism the insiders retaliated as one, even if they had been tearing each other apart moments earlier. This was a truth universally acknowledged.

  George and Bognor exchanged glances, recognized their mutual antipathy but acknowledged the truth of the truth. They could be as rude as they liked about each other, but if any outsider should presume to attack them then they would go to each other’s assistance. There was no logic in this but it was a fact of life. Neither of them liked the other and they were not particularly proud of their Britishness, or Englishness. But no bloody foreigner could echo such sentiments with impunity.

  ‘I hardly think—’ began Bognor.

  ‘Effing rubbish,’ said George.

  ‘Having said which,’ said Bognor, emolliently, ‘I don’t think that a successful sales pitch is going to be able to rely on a narrow nationalist focus. It doesn’t matter whether the country concerned is popular or not, you can’t base these things on provenance.’

  Too many long words and abstruse concepts, he acknowledged to himself.

  It would be much better to stick to basics. ‘The point about the banger,’ he said, ‘is not that it’s British, but that it’s basic.’

  ‘Comes to the same thing,’ said George. ‘What you see is what you get. That’s what being British is about. Basic. Basic British. Basic banger.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Bognor, ‘that should be the leitmotif, as it were, of our campaign. “Back to the basics with the banger”; “Back to the basic banger”; “Bangers – the basic”. Or something like that.’