Poison At The Pueblo Read online

  ‘Tripe,’ said Monica, spearing a sliver of salmon. She flushed, which was always dangerous. ‘If anything, women are even more judgemental than men. If you’d been to a convent school you wouldn’t talk such bilge.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Bognor, vaguely sensing danger but not quite sure why or whence it originated. ‘You misunderstand me. That’s not at all what I meant. I certainly wasn’t implying that women were less judgemental than . . .’ He took refuge in Riesling and a slice of fish, which he chewed more than necessary.

  ‘Men,’ said Monica, through gritted teeth, ‘men are, if anything, much less judgemental than women. Women are always eyeing each other up to see how well they’re preserved; whether they’ve got their own teeth, their own hair, their own breasts. They’re always judging each other.’

  ‘But not,’ he said, unwisely, ‘in terms of achievements . . . career . . . that sort of thing.’

  ‘And why, Simon,’ she said, ‘do you imagine that should be the case? Even supposing for one tiny moment that it is the case. It’s because for generation after generation women have been denied the opportunities of achieving the kinds of role on which your precious judgements are founded.’

  More silence ensued, punctuated only by mastication. When they had finished, Bognor rather ostentatiously stacked the two plates and took them out to the kitchen, while Monica dished up the main course. The Clare Valley Riesling was unfinished and sat on the sideboard waiting for another opportunity. Bognor opened the Wine Society Minervois with one of those corkscrews that looked like the Croix de Lorraine. The steak was very rare, the way they both liked it. It came from a third generation family butcher round the same corner as the Polish baker. The spinach was from one of the more farmer-friendly supermarkets. Chiswick had almost everything.

  ‘So are you definitely going to Spain?’ asked Monica, when they had sat down again and started on the meat.

  ‘I think so, yes.’

  ‘And if I preferred to stay at home?’

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t. I’d like your company.’

  ‘I’m flattered. Except that you’ll be working. What am I supposed to do when you’re chipping away at the coal face?’

  ‘I can’t work all the time,’ he said. ‘We can have siestas together. Go on tapas crawls in the evening. And you can spend your days in the Thyssen or the Prado. You’d like that.’

  Bognor’s museum and art-gallery attention span was severely limited, unlike his wife’s.

  ‘I might do a course,’ she said. ‘Spanish for beginners. Cookery. Art history.’

  ‘Why not?’ he wanted to know, though only rhetorically. ‘It would be much more improving than trying to flush out the friends of Jimmy Trubshawe.’

  And they finished their steak and spinach in a harmonious discussion of the likely relative merits of Spanish courses in Salamanca and Madrid, of whether Castilian cuisine was preferable to Catalan, and other non-controversial matters Iberian.

  Monica had just gone to the kitchen to make coffee when the phone rang urgently. It was odd how one knew instinctively when a phone call was ‘urgent’ and when it was casual; when it was a ‘cold’ call from Bangalore on behalf of a double-glazing outfit and when it was from one’s nearest and dearest. The ring was, Bognor knew, exactly the same in every instance. Yet this one had ‘urgent’ all over it.

  He picked up the receiver on the table, placed there for just such an eventuality as this.

  A voice which could have been from Bangalore but sounded closer, even though it carried an undefinable foreign inflection.

  Could she, asked the caller, speak with Sir Simon Bognor.

  ‘This is he,’ said Bognor, self-importantly, even though the honour had not yet been officially announced.

  ‘This is Pranvera,’ she said, ‘at Number Ten. I need a word. The Prime Minister insists.’

  ‘Tomorrow morning,’ said Bognor, a little wearily. ‘You should phone my aide, Harvey Contractor. He’ll do his best to fit you in.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said Pranvera, ‘but it’s urgent. I have a car waiting. If you’re at home I could be round in half an hour.’

  ‘Can’t it wait?’ Bognor asked.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she said, not sounding in the least apologetic, ‘but no. It can’t. Half an hour, then.’

  And the line went dead.

  Bognor swore and poured another glass of Minervois.

  FOUR

  Pranvera was at the house in twenty-nine minutes, fifteen seconds. Bognor was counting. Her car was large, black, driven by a man in a suit and probably a Rover – a sad symbol of Britain’s once-vaunted motor industry. Bognor’s official car was a Rover too – British but obsolete. The girl was dark-skinned, wore a black trouser suit and a headscarf, spoke old-fashioned unaccented BBC English, but seemed, to Bognor’s sceptical eye, indefinably foreign. He was absolutely not a racist, but he had been brought up in a different world and he was uneasy with the new one which contained so many Pranveras and Harvey Contractors.

  He offered the girl a glass of wine, which she declined, preferring a glass of water and a cup of black coffee. Bognor had a coffee but no more wine. Later, perhaps.

  They sat in his study which was snug, comfortable, masculine, cluttered.

  ‘So,’ he said, smiling, ‘what’s so urgent that it can’t wait till morning?’

  ‘It’s about Spain,’ she said.

  He was no longer smiling.

  ‘Spain?’ he asked trying to keep the incredulity out of his voice. ‘What about Spain?’

  ‘Your plans,’ she said. ‘We understand you’re planning a visit to Spain. We’d much rather you didn’t go.’

  ‘Who’s we?’

  ‘Alexandra in particular. But in this instance she’s speaking for Gavin as well. For all of us at Number Ten actually. And Party HQ.’

  Alexandra was Alexandra Thornton, the Prime Minister’s éminence grise, dogsbody, enforcer. She was unelected, unrepresentative and far too close to the PM for anyone’s comfort except her own. Bognor had only met her twice but disliked her instinctively. He sensed this was mutual.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m not with you.’

  ‘We understand that you’re planning a visit to Spain. We’d rather you didn’t go.’

  ‘Is that an order?’

  Pranvera sighed as if the idea was ludicrous, which is more or less what she said.

  ‘We’re a team’ were the words she actually uttered and which Bognor thought was one of the silliest and most untrue things he had ever heard, even from the Prime Minister’s office. Which was saying something. If team games were being played he was on the opposite side to Gavin, Alexandra and Pranvera.

  ‘As a civil servant I have a duty to offer my advice impartially and to the best of my ability. However, I do also have an absolute obligation to carry out the wishes of my immediate boss, namely the President of the Board of Trade. Or of his boss, the Prime Minister. If Gavin says I’m not to go to Spain I suppose I have to submit. On the other hand, I don’t take orders from you or Alexandra. And in any case I think I’m due an explanation. Why don’t you want me to go to Spain? And what on earth makes you think that’s what I intend?’

  As far as Bognor could judge the only two people who had any idea of his Spanish plans were Monica and Harvey Contractor. There was no way Monica would have told Number Ten, even if she had had the time and opportunity. Contractor was different, but even so Bognor somehow doubted that he would go running to Number Ten. The ‘betrayal’ seemed much more likely to be something electronic. He supposed he’d have to have his office swept again. It was bad enough to have to protect oneself from one’s enemies, ludicrous to have to do the same to withstand those allegedly on your own side. This was the intelligence equivalent of friendly fire.

  ‘Number Ten doesn’t miss much,’ said Pranvera with a poker-player’s smile. Gioconda, thought Bognor. Not giving much away but implying omniscience, coupled with a dangerous
, even sadistic, sense of humour. Dangerous. Very. Leonardo had a lot to answer for, and he didn’t mean Dan Brown.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Bognor, reflecting inwardly that Number Ten was accomplished at seeing what it ought not to have seen but useless at seeing what it should have seen.

  He decided to abandon the farcical pretence of abstinence and fetched his unfinished glass of Minervois.

  When he came back into the room the girl was as she had been when he left, staring at her glass of water, immaculate and unmoved in every sense.

  ‘So,’ he resumed, ‘let’s accept that you don’t miss much, and you thought I might be heading off for Spain and you didn’t like it. Leaving aside why you came to this conclusion, I want to know what your worry is. Why do you want me not to go? And why is it so important that you have to come speeding round here after hours. Seems like an ill-informed overreaction to me. But then security is just my job. Not my obsession.’

  It was the girl’s turn to look embarrassed.

  ‘I’m under orders,’ she said.

  ‘Quite,’ said Bognor. ‘I, on the other hand, am not.’

  They looked at each other waiting for someone to blink.

  The girl wavered first.

  ‘We understand you’re concerned about the Trubshawe death and that you are keen to use it as leverage to deal with the expat British community in the Costas.’

  ‘And if I were,’ said Bognor, ‘I’d only be doing my job. Even the Prime Minister would understand that. And presumably approve. The taxpayer would simply be getting value for money.’

  ‘The Prime Minister would prefer it if the Trubshawe death excited as little comment as possible.’

  ‘Buried under the carpet?’

  ‘Not unduly sensationalized. Just treated as a sad incident.’

  ‘What if he were murdered?’

  ‘Our information is that death was due to natural causes,’ said Pranvera.

  ‘My information is different,’ said Bognor, lying but only in a white way. He was being economical with the truth but not completely disregarding it.

  ‘We thought it would be,’ said the girl, ‘which is why we’d prefer you not to go.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

  ‘I’d like to be able to tell you more,’ she said, ‘but, well, I can’t.’ She was almost convincing; almost made Bognor feel that she would like to have let him into her confidence had she been able. But she wasn’t.

  ‘It sounds to me –’ Bognor took a minuscule sip of red wine – ‘as if the man called Trubshawe had a connection with Number Ten which Number Ten is reluctant to reveal.’

  ‘That’s not rocket science,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to be Einstein to work out that we don’t want people sniffing around the remains of Trubshawe. It will be much better if he’s given a decent burial as soon as possible, so that those of us who are lucky enough to survive can carry on with our lives.’

  ‘Supposing I disagree?’

  ‘We’re hoping you won’t.’

  ‘You know something?’ Bognor stood up, wandered over to the bookcase and pulled out a copy of his College Register. He opened it at random then put it back where it had come from. On the wall hung a photograph of his parents taken at their wedding. They looked serious but happy, virtuous, solid, old-fashioned. Bognor thought of them increasingly as he grew older and felt they were examples to be lived up to. The photograph was a tangible reminder of this. The picture had a talismanic quality.

  ‘Trubshawe,’ he continued, ‘was a crook. A rich crook. So were his associates. Any prime minister of this country worth his salt would want people like him brought to justice.’

  The girl studied her shoes and said nothing.

  He sighed, gazed at the girl, then at the photograph of his parents, thought of Monica, considered life. It had all begun as a virtual joke. The man from the Foreign Office had, he remembered, rheumy yellowish eyes which suggested jaundice. He smoked. After what had seemed like a perfunctory interview in the rooms of his mediaeval history tutor, who had tactfully absented himself from the occasion, the man from the F.O. leant forward, winked a jaundiced eye, tapped the side of his nose and said in a melodramatic, black-and-white-movie sort of a way, ‘There is another branch of the Foreign Office.’ And Bognor being an innocent abroad, but consumed with a sense of curiosity and adventure which had never entirely left him, even though it was concealed by a natural indolence and a world-weary sense of nothing much mattering in the great scheme of things, had said in an encouragingly polite fashion, ‘Oh really.’

  Whereupon his interlocutor, who was, Bognor subsequently realized, almost certainly on some form of commission, had rubbed his hands, smiled oleaginously and said that he or someone else would be in touch. A week or so later Bognor was summoned to a country house in the wilds of Herefordshire, where he signed various papers, submitted to a medical examination and was thoroughly frightened and rather bemused. It had been much the same story ever since. He had been taken over by the state and most if not all independent powers of decision were removed. Until, perhaps, up to a point, now.

  He turned back and faced the girl.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s been extraordinarily nice meeting you. I hope you haven’t got far to travel.’

  ‘Crouch End actually,’ she said, seeming confused. ‘What shall I tell Alexandra?’ she asked, suddenly seeming as young and naïve as she almost certainly was.

  She had a car and a driver, he thought to himself, which was more than he had had at her age, and she was asking him to compromise, to fudge, to aid and abet. All his life he seemed to have been bailing out the Gavins of this world, helping flyby-night bully-boy politicians to survive their incompetence and double-dealing. Some people became even more resigned to duplicity in high places as they neared retirement but Bognor was the reverse. The safer he became, the more inevitable his pension, the more cushioned his retirement, the more infuriated he became by the whims and deceits of his masters. After a lifetime of acquiescence, of cover-up and doing as he was told, he was the worm that had turned. Most people, by the time they reached his stage in life no longer cared. He, however, seemed to be caring greatly, possibly for the first time in his life. Funny, that.

  The girl stood up and smoothed the imaginary untidiness of her immaculately ironed trousers.

  ‘So you’ll be travelling to Spain?’

  ‘I haven’t decided.’

  ‘You’re not going to let Mr Trubshawe rest in peace?’

  ‘Trubshawe never allowed anyone rest or peace while he was alive,’ he said. ‘I really don’t see why I should extend those small mercies to him now that he’s toppled off his grubby little perch.’

  ‘Gavin won’t like it.’

  This was meant to be a threat but Bognor was suddenly tired and not interested.

  ‘If you’ll excuse my French,’ he said, ‘I don’t give a flying whatsit whether Gavin likes it or not.’

  ‘We all thought we could rely on you.’ She was reproachful now, almost sulky. Bognor would have enjoyed being a fly on the wall when she reported back to Alexandra. Alexandra the notorious scourge of editors everywhere; Alexandra who, notoriously, swore like a trooper and scared the trousers off the most hard-boiled old Fleet Street hand left outside captivity. Alexandra wouldn’t like it. Knowing her reputation she would probably pick up the phone and give Bognor an earful. Which, he thought wryly to himself, would be counter-productive. At times he could be quite mulish. This was one such moment.

  ‘One can rely on me,’ he said, falling into royal-speak without meaning to. Nevertheless it suited his sense of moral rectitude, lack of self-doubt and unaccustomed certainty. At last, he was not only right but seen to be right. If, at the same time, he could wrong-foot the Prime Minister, then so much the better.

  He walked his visitor to the door and showed her out. Her car was waiting, parked ostentatiously on the double yellow line outside the house. It wasn’t, as he had assumed a Rover,
but a Mercedes. That followed, he thought sardonically, waving to her as the driver let her into the back seat. Bognor tended to sit in front with his driver, Sid. Sid was a Charlton supporter.

  Bognor shut the door and hummed Mozart, slightly off-key, and wondered whether to make himself a mug of healthy soporific Horlicks, which was a habit he and Monica had recently developed.

  He thought better of it, however, went to the sideboard and found a bottle of Calvados from which he poured himself a generous slug. Lady Bognor had gone to bed with a good book. Her husband settled down in a deep armchair to watch the highlights of the cricket from Hobart.

  England were losing.

  FIVE

  ‘H asta la vista, Señora!’ exclaimed Sir Simon to his sleeping lady wife.

  She was not amused.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Simon,’ she exclaimed irritably, ‘put a sock in it. Some of us are trying to sleep.’

  ‘You’re no fun any longer,’ he complained, sitting heavily on the end of the bed before removing his shoes and slowly peeling off his socks, wondering if Monica had spoken altogether metaphorically or whether she really would have liked him to roll the grey woollen sweaty objects into a ball and ingest them. Whether or not that was what she expected, he wasn’t going to run the risk. It would be dangerous, a gesture too far. They exuded a definite whiff of mature Cheddar.

  ‘Would you mind getting into bed and turning off the light,’ she said, ‘and don’t snore. If you do then you’re dead meat.’

  Bognor stared at his feet. They were not bad for a man of his age. No more than marginally fallen arches, a suggestion of hardened calloused skin, which an enemy might have stigmatized as a corn or a bunion but was actually little more than the patina of age, a gentle acknowledgement of a long life riding Shanks’s pony.

  It wasn’t just his feet that were good for his age, he reflected. He was in almost every respect a great advertisement for a certain sort of unfashionable British way of life. Critics might deride this as lethargic and self-indulgent, but as far as he was concerned it had to do with learning to pace yourself, knowing your limitations and, above all, getting your priorities right. And now look at him: own teeth, own hair – well most of both – own job, own house, own wife and now his very own knighthood. Well there was still some outstanding mortgage, so he supposed that, in a way, the house could be said to belong to the building society; and the job, well, as was the way with jobs, it was, he supposed, on loan. He had made it his own and it would take a big man to fill his shoes, because, frankly, they didn’t make them like him any more. As for Monica. Well, yes, she was his original wife but at the same time there was no denying that she was her own woman as well. If she warned him about snoring then the warning should be heeded. Even as he thought this dangerous thought, his wife let out a restrained, almost sibilant, sound, which, while ladylike, was nonetheless a snore. He smiled. One day he would tell her that she too snored. For now, however, he did not dare.