Poison At The Pueblo Read online

  Belen had barely spoken. Now she said, ‘Would you have said that Mr Trubshawe was a banger person? Or would he have preferred the chorizo? He came to Spain. You have a saying in England, do you not . . . ? “When in Spain . . . ”?’

  ‘It’s the garlic wot does it,’ said George. ‘Back home we don’t do garlic. We let the ingredients speak for themselves. On the continong,’ that was how he pronounced the word, ‘you use garlic in everything to disguise the fact that the meat’s either off or it’s horse.’

  This, reflected Bognor, wasn’t going anywhere.

  ‘With respect,’ he said, ‘we’re supposed to be coming up with a strategy to get people to buy bangers, not indulging in an exercise of national chauvinism. I for one simply don’t believe in national stereotyping. Just because you’re British or Spanish doesn’t mean to say you have to be a particular sort of person.’

  ‘Jimmy Trubshawe was British to his fingertips,’ said George. ‘Never come across a more British person.’

  ‘You think that has anything to do with his being done in?’ asked Bognor, slipping easily into a vernacular that he was not truly at home with.

  ‘You mean that Mr Trubshawe was killed because he was British. A particular sort of British person.’ Lola smiled. ‘It’s possible,’ she said.

  ‘Killed for being British!’ said George. ‘There are precedents for that. But if I wanted to do Jimmy Trubshawe, being British is a bloody feeble pretext.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  They were dangerously close to a racial meltdown, though Bognor could see that, as far as motivation went, it was not as silly as it might appear. Being killed for being British was not that absurd. You could argue that it happened all the time. The British, or even more so the English, were phenomenally unpopular throughout a world which had once been predominantly their own pink-coloured fiefdom.

  ‘You think Trubshawe could have been killed because he was British?’ asked Simon, overeagerly.

  ‘It’s possible,’ said Lola. ‘But we can’t market a product on the basis that it’s British or English. Not in Spain. Not anywhere. It doesn’t make sense. If people even start to believe that it’s English or British, then they won’t buy it. I’m sorry, but that’s a fact. Language maybe, but nothing else.’

  ‘The point surely is,’ said Bognor, ‘that we’re selling something completely simple, uncomplicated, unadulterated. Whether it’s British, English or anything else is frankly irrelevant. We’re basing our case on simplicity.’

  ‘That’s Trubshawe,’ said George. ‘What you saw was what you got.’

  He was, thought Bognor, a master of cliché.

  ‘It seems,’ said Belen, ‘that we have to say that the point about the banger is that it contains only the very best ingredients and no other messing about. Maybe pepper and salt but that is all. Let us say ninety-eight or ninety-nine per cent meat from wonderful free-range rare breed pigs, such as your Gloucester Old Spot, and just pepper and salt and the case. So it is incredibly simple. Very good for you.’

  He had forgotten, momentarily, that Belen had a passing acquaintance, being in boutique hotels, with food and beverage. And fashionable F & B was about clever sourcing and not messing around with prime ingredients. Anyone worth their culinary stripes was into rare breeds and kindness to meat. As far as he could see, Belen had absolutely no reason for wishing Trubshawe dead. On the other hand, she would have known her mushrooms.

  ‘I rather agree,’ said Bognor.

  ‘So the selling point is back to basics,’ said Lola. ‘But, please, why is the basic British sausage called “banger”?’

  Bognor and George looked at each other. Bognor didn’t know.

  ‘If they’re not properly made they explode when they’re being cooked. They go off with a big bang. Can be too much water. Can be too much rusk or crust. Your really top-whack banger doesn’t bang because it’s nearly all meat, which doesn’t explode. In the last war, the Royal Navy had a pre-cooked, tinned sausage made by a company called Palethorpe. Submarines, mainly. They were called “Snorkers”.’ He smiled, expecting congratulation. ‘Not many people know that.’

  ‘What about Lincolnshire sausages? Or Cumberland? Can they be bangers?’ This was Bognor seeking to compete. ‘Can you put bangers in toad-in-the-hole’. He didn’t know what any of this had to do with solving a murder, but detection, he knew from experience, moved in mysterious and not always logical ways.

  ‘Let’s agree,’ said Lola, being firm, ‘that we’re going to sell a traditional British sausage containing lots of very good pork and some pepper and salt. Nothing more, nothing less.’

  Bognor nodded.

  ‘The key word is “bang”,’ he said. ‘We need to keep “bang” up front.’

  ‘We should ask ourselves what “bang” suggests,’ said George. ‘To me it means explosion. Gun shot. Sudden death.’ He glanced meaningfully at Bognor. ‘Not a very attractive word. Positively dangerous, in fact. You don’t want bangs around. Even little ones. They tend to go off in the night when no one’s expecting them.’

  Bognor wondered if they were getting somewhere in an oblique fashion. Was George telling him, in code, that it was he who had fired the gun?

  He felt his mind wandering while the four of them limped towards a coherent solution to their marketing problems. He had never been much good at charades and age had neither sharpened his wits or his enthusiasm. He found himself watching for telltale clauses in his companions’ body language, but had to accept that it was all lacking in conviction as far as murder was concerned, and not much more so when it came to sausages.

  He had expected to go into dinner immediately after the brainstorm, but he had forgotten that this was Spain and they ate later than the Brits. It was too late and too dark for another walk, but he and Belen were sentenced to an improving chat in a quiet corner.

  ‘Drink?’ he asked her.

  ‘Thank you, no,’ she replied.

  ‘I have something to tell you,’ she said when they had settled themselves comfortably in accommodating mock-leather armchairs and been joined, unaccountably, by one of the Pueblo’s mountain dogs, a shaggy monster with a bell at his neck, who answered to the name of Max. Inside was almost snug. Outside the wind was gathering and it felt unseasonably cold enough for snow. ‘You are interested in Mr Trubshawe and his mushrooms?’ she said, in a matter of fact sort of way.

  She wore tortoiseshell spectacles and had no discernible cheek bones. Bognor liked her. She was the only Spanish woman he had ever seen wearing a cardigan.

  ‘Not specially,’ he said, silently cursing. ‘I didn’t know poor Mr Trubshawe and I’m sort of, er, neutral, when it comes to mushrooms. I mean, I’ll eat them when offered but I wouldn’t go out of my way to dig them up. Or whatever you do with them. I wonder if you could bandicoot them? Old Australian word. It means stealing vegetables, especially by cutting off the edible roots of things like carrots and parsnips, leaving the green tufty fronds still showing on the surface. So the warders don’t know the veggies have gone missing. To bandicoot . . . To steal vegetables while pretending not to.’ He smiled, feeling like the late Frank Muir on a good night but realizing that he had been impossibly colloquial.

  ‘The night of Mr Trubshawe’s death,’ said Belen, ploughing on and paying no attention to his effusions, ‘I saw two people returning from their walk with mushrooms. Wild mushrooms which they had gathered in the woods.’

  Bognor was interested. Of course he was. This sounded suspiciously like a clue. On the other hand he had to remember that he was not supposed to be here in any kind of official capacity, far less as the recently knighted boss of SIDBOT.

  ‘What makes you think I’m interested in mushrooms?’

  Belen didn’t reply, simply looked at him as if to say he simply couldn’t be as idiotic as the remark made him seem to her. She was not a successful export manager for a hotel chain without reason.

  ‘Tracey and Leonel had been for a walk. They came
back with mushrooms. Many mushrooms. I passed them outside the main building after I had finished my own walk with Trubshawe himself.’

  ‘You were out walking with Trubshawe the afternoon before he died?’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘but that is not important.’

  ‘How did he seem?’ Bognor wanted to know.

  She wanted to tell him about Tracey and Leonel and their mushrooms. Her walk with Trubshawe did not seem relevant. Bognor himself did not agree.

  ‘He seemed very typical. Very British. Very like George. Not nice.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Arrogant. Smug. Opinionated. Not interested in other people. Particularly if they were women. No good at listening, only in expressing his own views. He was a typical of a certain sort of English person. George is the same. I hope that you are not like that.’

  ‘I hope not, too.’ Bognor spoke with feeling. He suffered, he knew, from seeming to strangers to be a particular sort of person which he believed, emphatically, he was not. Among other things he believed was that he was the last of the Great Detectives. This, he knew, wasn’t a view widely shared. At such moments of outsider doubt he reminded himself of the words of wisdom once spoken by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. These were to the effect that there was no point in spending one’s life worrying about the contrary opinions of fools and dolts; one simply had to bash on regardless, recognizing the fact that almost the whole of the rest of the world was out of step.

  ‘Tell me though,’ he asked, ‘how well did you know Trubshawe?’

  ‘I had only recently met him,’ she answered.

  ‘What, here?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘He lived in a part of Spain to which proper Spaniards never go. It was somewhere near Malaga, I believe. Or maybe not. It was an enclave such as Gibraltar. More British than Britain, even though technically a part of Spain.’

  ‘Like Ceuta and Melilla in North Africa,’ said Bognor waspishly.

  ‘Ceuta and Melilla are different,’ she said.

  Bognor said he couldn’t agree, and that both Spanish enclaves were at least as much a part of Morocco, as Gibraltar was of Spain. He had rather a soft spot for Gibraltar despite its peculiarly old-fashioned British culture. The last refuge for once popular brands of tinned milk and for Conservative politicians totally unknown to a British audience but who were household names on the Rock. It was a perverse sort of place and Bognor rather enjoyed that.

  ‘In any case,’ she said, with spirit, ‘Mr Trubshawe was, as you would say, a “nasty piece of work”, but it is not right that he is dead. Also, I believe that he was killed and that it was not an accident. And I believe that your sudden arrival is somehow connected. Which is why I am telling you this thing.’

  ‘Your English is excellent,’ he said, more or less sincerely.

  ‘Flattery, Mr Bognor, will, as I believe you say in your country, get you nowhere.’

  ‘Well, actually,’ Bognor demurred, ‘it’s not flattery, but I see that your personal approval of Jimmy Trubshawe is neither here nor there. As, again, we say back home.’

  She nodded.

  ‘The mushrooms,’ she said, ‘I believe it may be important. I have seen the woman Tracey, the hairdresser from England, returning with Leonel, who is the maker of food for dogs and cats. They had been walking according to the programme and they had returned with the mushrooms.’

  ‘What sort of mushrooms?’ he wanted to know. It seemed perfectly relevant, if not entirely reasonable, but she replied that she was no sort of expert on fungi, however, she had observed that the two conversationalists had been picking them and doing so, presumably, for a purpose. When mushrooms turned up on that evening’s menu she assumed, not unreasonably, that there was a connection between what she had seen in the afternoon and what appeared on the dinner table a few hours later. Then, when Trubshawe left in a hurry and never came back, she had made another and more sinister connection.

  ‘But you know nothing about mushrooms,’ said Bognor, ‘and, come to that, nothing about Tracey and Leonel.’

  She thought for a moment.

  ‘That is true,’ she said.

  ‘Why should I believe you?’ he asked.

  ‘Why should I not tell you the truth?’ she replied.

  Bognor considered this. Eventually, he said, ‘If, for some reason, you wanted to suggest that Tracey and Leonel were in some way responsible for the death of Mr Trubshawe, and if, for some improbable reason, you assumed that I was in some way connected with solving the puzzle, then it would be logical for you to seek to sow suspicion. And this would be an effective and plausible way of doing so.’

  It was her turn to think.

  ‘I agree,’ she said, after considering the matter.

  ‘I suppose it would make sense for me to ask Tracey and Leonel for their side of the story. Establish whether or not they picked mushrooms together when they were out for their walk. See if they had any fungal expertise and knew what they were picking. Ascertain all that kind of thing.’

  She smiled at him.

  ‘You would only do that sort of thing if you were in some way involved with the mystery of Mr Trubshawe’s death, and in some way supposed that it was not as accidental as we are being told by Arizona and Felipe.’

  This was perfectly true and they both recognized it.

  ‘That’s perfectly true,’ he agreed. ‘So maybe I won’t ask them after all. Just keep the information under my hat.’

  ‘Hat?’ she enquired, and they returned, without conviction, to a conversation more in keeping with the purpose of their presence.

  The main course at dinner was either bangers and mash or a cocido of chorizos and chick peas with loads of garlic, tomatoes and red wine. The one quintessentially English and the other as exuberantly Spanish. They echoed the current exercise in an appropriate manner and were preceded by a prawn cocktail with a Sauce Marie Rose in the style of the Imperial Hotel, Torquay c.1957, and gambas al ajillo in the fashion of any tapas bar anywhere.

  Bognor sat at the same table with Tracey, the only one of the group he had not previously met. Their Spaniards were Belen, who had stayed at his elbow, and Eduardo, the banana king who knew that he was the man from SIDBOT.

  All four of them pursued the Spanish option – even Tracey – who said she was feeling adventurous, and was intending to sleep on her own and was therefore not bothered about eating garlic. The other three laughed nervously when she said this. They presumed it was intended as a joke. It probably was.

  Bognor prodded his prawns with a fork and reflected on the situation morosely. What, in God’s name was going on? He was sitting at dinner in an obscure part of Spain eating dinner with a group of complete strangers, one or other of whom might or might have not murdered another complete stranger who was a well-known villain. He, Bognor, was investigating the death on behalf of his government department, not least because the Spanish authorities seemed reluctant to do themselves. He was supposed to be here incommunicado but his cover appeared to be blown. Indeed, the signs were that his government department was at loggerheads with other government departments, if not with government itself.

  He passed the pepper absent-mindedly and realized that he was being asked a question. It was from Tracey. She wanted to know where he lived. This was a perfectly reasonable opening gambit. He knew little about Tracey beyond the fact that she sometimes dressed hair in Clacton-on-Sea.

  ‘London,’ he said, without thinking.

  ‘Oh!’ said Tracey, ‘whereabouts in London?’

  Bognor said, ‘South-west’, which was a tad economical with the truth – he and Monica lived in an apartment with a view of the River Thames that was famous throughout the pictorial world and the building was on Richmond Hill, almost abutting the famous deer park.

  If Tracey knew, she wasn’t saying. Instead, she said, ‘I’m just an Essex girl. I can do the East End and some of the centre. Don’t know the North or West or even the South, much. Been to Greenwich. Had an aunt
who lived in Blackheath. Ran a salon there.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Bognor ungraciously. He speared a prawn and chewed it morosely. He wasn’t concentrating on anything; was losing his grip. He looked around the room and wondered if, as he rather thought, everybody was looking at him. He felt, more especially after the gunshot that missed, like the next one in the firing line. It reminded him of the memorial service for Parkinson, his former boss, at St Martin-in-the-Fields. He himself had read a lesson – ‘Let us now praise famous men’ – which he had thought intensely inappropriate for the head of a supposedly secret branch of a secret service. There in the front row were all the dead man’s contemporaries, paying their respects to the deceased, but looking for all the world like the team waiting with their pads on in the dressing room before being called out to bat. You could almost feel them looking around as if to ask apprehensively, ‘Who’s next in?’

  It was the same here. Everyone knew that Trubshawe had been cut down by the Grim Reaper not long before and they were all, very politely, wondering who might be the next on the death list. Actually, correction, he thought with only a slight frisson of concern, they were not wondering who would be the next, they were assuming as a matter of certainty that he, Bognor, would be the next corpse. He would be the next one to partake of a fatal mushroom and be carried out feet first.

  Funny thing, death. Here today, gone tomorrow. He hated that piece which everyone read at memorial services these days: a pathetic piece of sentimental whimsy by some Canon Worral-Thompson or Scott-Moncrieff, or some such double-barrelled moniker, about cheer-up, chaps, I’m not really dead at all but gone into the next room; all a bit of a jolly jape, don’t you know. We’ll all wake up in a moment and realize that death has no sting and grave no victory.

  Having been around death most of his professional life, he took a tougher more robust view of the matter. Death was death. It was nasty and brutal, but, above all, final, decisive and terrible. It had few redeeming features and it was what the advertisers said. He did not believe in reincarnation, redemption or anything other than a ceasing to live. Absolutely. Trubshawe was gone for ever and he would not be coming back, now or ever. The Second Coming of Jimmy Trubshawe. Sounded like a film by Richard Curtis. Hugh Grant as Trubshawe.