Poison At The Pueblo Read online

  Coffee was produced: hot, strong, sticky-sweet, almost Graeco-Turk. The Spaniards smoked; the Brits, who had given up long before, feigned indifference and forbore.

  Presently after a few minutes of ice-breaking catch-up conversation the Admiral drained his cup, smacked his hands together, and proposed a move to the boardroom next door. It contained a wide, state-of-the-art liquid screen. It was at this that they were invited to stare and presently, spurred on by Carlos, who was of an age, more or less, to understand and manipulate such things, the screen began to fill with images.

  The first such image was a map of Spain. To begin with this was blank, but almost at once it began to fill with coloured images to illustrate the incidence of British expatriates domiciled on the Iberian peninsula. A high proportion of these, it appeared, were criminals, convicted or suspected, and most, if not all, were known to the Spanish authorities in general and to the Guardia Civil in particular.

  The biggest concentrations, unsurprisingly, were around the Costas – Brava and del Sol. This was much more marked when the supposedly law-abiding segments of ex-pat society were removed from the screen. At the press of an Azuela button almost every evidence of inland exile vanished. Inland was where Hispanophiles, eccentrics and the poor hung out. Bloated British criminals centred their activity round a beamed country pub called the Bell and Balls or the Crooked Gasket, an eighteen-hole golf club with an English-speaking professional and an active branch of the Manchester United Supporters Club. That meant, very crudely, somewhere reasonably close to Malaga or Alicante. There were exceptions, but the beach was a prerequisite and these people were seldom, if ever, loners. They hung out together, took comfort in each other’s company, liked to flaunt beer guts, tattoos and expletive-laden Scouse, cockney or similarly unreceived English.

  The man called Trubshawe had several villas mostly within a nine-iron of the prescribed un-Spanish amenities.

  In due course they all came up on screen together with a mugshot of the deceased in the top left-hand corner, unsmiling, porcine and bald. The shots of the villas included detailed aerial ones taken, presumably, from a helicopter but possibly a satellite. Carlos was able to zoom in for closer shots of the naked girls lying by the pools, the driving range, or even through open windows. The villas all looked as if they had cost a lot of money.

  ‘You seem to know a lot about our friend,’ Bognor remarked, slightly sardonically.

  His friend smiled.

  ‘Naturally,’ he said, ‘we make it our business to know everything possible about people like him. It is our job.’

  ‘But you didn’t do anything about him?’

  Admiral Picasso looked at his junior, Teniente Azuela as if to say, ‘Honestly, these English!’

  ‘We were unable to do anything, as you put it, my friend, because your Mr Trubshawe had committed no crime in Spain. We understood that he was a wanted criminal in the United Kingdom but our understanding was that your people were happy to be rid of him and did not want him back. So we watched, and we waited.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Until,’ said Bognor, ‘he made a false move.’

  His old friend smiled again and sighed like the thin wind that whipped across the strait from North Africa and assailed Algeciras.

  ‘Until he went to the Pueblo,’ said Picasso, ‘and ate the wrong mushroom.’

  ‘Wrong move,’ said Bognor.

  The Admiral shook his head.

  ‘Very wrong move,’ he said.

  SEVEN

  Admiral Picasso stared at his English counterpart quizzically.

  ‘So,’ he said, at last, ‘you would like to visit the scene of the crime?’

  ‘You sure it was a crime?’ asked Bognor.

  The Admiral smiled. ‘Trubshawe was a convicted criminal. He ate poison fungi. He died.’ The boss gave an expansive shrug. ‘Maybe it was just, as you say, “one of those things”, I myself have doubts. The coincidence is a little . . . how shall I put it? Coincidental.’

  ‘I’d like to visit the Pueblo, yes,’ said Bognor. ‘Crime or no crime. That’s why I want to go. Decide for myself.’

  ‘Good,’ said Picasso. ‘It’s been arranged.’

  He winked at Carlos. ‘Eh, Teniente? All fixed?’

  ‘Yes, boss,’ said his junior. ‘Sir Simon is embedded as an Anglo and Lola Martinez has volunteered to be our Spaniard. Lola is very convincing. In fact, she will play the part so well that not even Sir Simon would know that she is one of us and not one of them. Lola and Sir Simon will make an interesting pair. She is so good at being submerged that she may be surprisingly little help. They are expected tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Hang on, hang on,’ said Sir Simon. ‘I need more information.’ He found the whole business of Lola oddly disconcerting, though unpleasantly familiar.

  ‘Carlos is the case officer,’ said Picasso. ‘He can fill you in. I’d like to know more myself. So it’s all yours, Teniente. Tell us the story.’

  Azuela coughed. It was a strange expectoration – a mixture of diffidence and self-assurance. He knew he lacked seniority but what he lacked in that department he made up for in knowledge and intelligence. On this particular subject he knew more than anyone else in the room; he may not have been cleverer than Contractor, who was indubitably bright, but he certainly thought himself intellectually superior to Picasso and Bognor. In this, he was probably not as correct as he thought himself. Certainly he had a good degree, better than that of either of the two older men, but that did not necessarily give him a mental edge. Possibly even the reverse. It tended to make him smug.

  Still, there was no denying that in this particular case he knew what he was talking about.

  ‘The English Experience is a direct crib of El Pueblo,’ he said. ‘The idea is beautifully simple. It’s designed to teach English to Spanish speakers, not by formal instruction but by exposing them to native English speakers and conducting everything, and I mean everything, in English. If you want someone to pass the salt or pepper, you have to ask in English; if you want to use the toilet, you have to do it in English; if you’re making a pass at someone, you have to do it in English. Doesn’t matter if it’s two Spaniards together and there’s no one to overhear them. They still have to use English.

  ‘From a commercial point of view the Spaniards or their companies are charged an arm and a leg. The Anglos, on the other hand, don’t pay anything. They have to get themselves to Madrid, but from then on everything is taken care of. You’re bussed to and from your luxurious hotel and all your food and drink is paid for by the Experience.’

  Sir Simon nodded. ‘So the Anglos get a free Spanish holiday and the Spanish pay for them, plus a profit for the Experience. And provided everyone takes it reasonably seriously they’re all happy.’

  ‘Seems like it,’ said Carlos. ‘On the whole, as far as we can see, everyone does take it reasonably seriously and there are at least two Experience staffers to keep everyone in line.’

  ‘How does it differ from the other outfit you mentioned? The one they nicked the idea from. El Pueblo?’

  ‘They’ve gone way upmarket,’ said Carlos. ‘I’m fond of El Pueblo. It’s very professional and on balance they work hard and play hard. The accommodation and food is perfectly good, but not – how would you say? – “gold tap and wall-to-wall caviar”. The Experience is more in that class. They peel your eggs for you, pamper you. Much more expensive and more backsliding. The discipline is not as pronounced as elsewhere. Spanish is quite often spoken. Not like El Pueblo.’

  ‘You’re not a fan?’ Bognor smiled.

  The younger man shrugged. ‘I’m not an inspector,’ he said. ‘It’s not my business. But if you ask my personal opinion then I’d have to say the Experience is not exactly, as you would put it, “my cup of tea”. For you, perhaps, it will suit you better. Is better, I think, for senior people.’

  ‘Old people.’

  The teniente smiled and contemplated his shoes. He said nothing.
/>   ‘What do we think Trubshawe was doing there?’ asked Bognor, shifting tack. Trubshawe was, in Bognor’s view, trying it on, chancing his arm, flexing his muscles. He was proclaiming himself above the law, saying that he was impossible to catch.

  The Admiral rubbed his hands together and seemed to think. Then he smiled gnomically.

  ‘That is for you to say,’ he said. ‘Mr Trubshawe was one of yours. He was an Englishman and therefore, for us Spaniards, “a closed book”. Why would he not visit the Experience like any other English speaker? Out of curiosity? Because he was in need of some sort of holiday and this was free? Perhaps he was escaping, running away from something? The Experience is an excellent hiding place. Like visiting a religious community for a “retreat”.’

  ‘Did Trubshawe need to run away from anything? Did he have to hide from anyone?’ Bognor was genuinely curious. Trubshawe had seemed untouchable. The British seemed to have let him go and Spain had been a sanctuary for him. He appeared to be stuck between the Rock of Gibraltar and a not very hard place.

  ‘You don’t become Trubshawe without making enemies,’ said the Admiral, ‘There were many people who would have liked to see the end of Mr Trubshawe. Even if,’ he added with an impish smile, ‘that evidently did not include the British police or the British government. Which is peculiar, as they should have wanted to bring the man to justice more than anyone. But not apparently,’ and he smiled again, ‘so.’

  ‘Nothing to do with me,’ said Bognor almost involuntarily. ‘I want to see villains brought to justice, and the man called Trubshawe was a villain or he was nothing. Unfortunately, in the real world which we inhabit being a villain is no sort of handicap. On the contrary – it can seem a positive advantage.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Picasso. ‘The villain should be punished. Exterminated, if possible.’

  Bognor nodded. This didn’t imply agreement, merely that he had taken on board what the Admiral thought.

  The Bognors – Sir Simon and Her Ladyship – did a tapas crawl that evening. The highlight was hake’s cheek in a vanilla froth. A Blumenthal-Bulli derivative. Actually, both Bognors preferred straightforward olives or chorizo. There was a lot of fish cheek and froth in modern Spanish cooking, a symbol of the Madrileño metamorphosis. Bognor would never have thought during his first visits to the peninsula, in the days of the caudillo, that Spain would ever be at the cutting edge of anything, let alone gastronomy. Now she was a world leader in Michelin stardom. Not to mention one of the world’s leading havens for professional villains, especially British. Odd that. Not that the two were remotely connected. Far from it. Sir Simon chewed on a pinkly white tentacle of octopus and permitted himself a thin smirk.

  ‘I’m getting cold,’ said his wife, pulling her stole about her shoulders. ‘I think we should find an indoors with acceptable scoff.’

  He nodded. The atmosphere was suddenly chilly and darkness had fallen surprisingly fast. The city which minutes before had displayed an autumnal alfresco façade had gone wintery. The chairs in the plazas and on the pavements were being scooped and stacked; cigarettes were stubbed and blue smoke moved into crowded, panelled bars and cafés. Spaniards not only still smoked but their women wore fur. They still took long siestas and killed bulls. Despite its changes, the country was the most resolutely foreign in Europe. It was very deliberately and self-consciously its own place, resistant to outside influence, especially Anglo-American.

  ‘I don’t see Trubshawe enjoying this sort of Spain,’ said Bognor. ‘More of a Costa sort of person. Pubs with beams; chips with everything; HP sauce.’

  ‘You’re probably right,’ said his wife. ‘You and Trubshawe go back a long way. And you’ve always been close to his tribe.’

  ‘Trubshawe’s tribe,’ said Bognor reflectively. ‘Bit snobbish to think of the deceased’s acolytes in quite that way. But inevitable all the same. I don’t think of myself as snobbish but I would agree to “old-fashioned”.’

  ‘Same thing,’ said Monica crisply and probably accurately. ‘Old-fashioned people from your background and with your education are invariably snobbish. It goes with the territory, along with a plummy voice, striped ties and tweeds.’

  ‘I don’t do tweeds,’ her husband protested.

  ‘I speak figuratively not literally,’ said Monica, ‘you should know that by now. In a figurative sense you are tweedy man with a plummy voice and striped ties. You are also a snob. You can’t help it. It’s part of your conditioning. And it’s why you’re automatically suspicious of the world’s Trubshawes – social condescension.’

  ‘Whereas you . . .’

  She did not allow him to finish the sentence, performing the task herself.

  ‘Am inherently less prejudiced and more open-minded. Mainly because I’m a woman. We as a sex are like that. Men have closed minds, even though they are open books. A paradox but easy to understand – at least if you’re a woman. Men don’t read each other.’

  ‘I think we should move,’ he said, conscious of the chill and hoping to humour his truculent spouse.

  She, on the other hand, was no longer feeling the cold but was warmed up by the combustible nature of her verbosity.

  ‘I almost feel sorry for Trubshawe,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t hold his knife and fork the way you do, so you pick on him and categorize him as a villain. You think he looks and behaves like a crook, ergo he is a crook. QED.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said. ‘Some of my best friends don’t know how to hold their knife and fork but they’re not crooks. Trubshawe was a crook, end of story. He had a gang, hired killers, pimps, dealers. He was the ultimate bad hat. He had people killed, for God’s sake, women raped. You name it, he did it.’

  ‘His real crime in your eyes was that he came from below the salt,’ she said. ‘He wore brown shoes with a dark suit, dropped his aitches, wasn’t one of “you”.’

  ‘I never subscribed to that tosh about brown shoes and grey trousers,’ responded Bognor, ‘and the one thing Trubshawe never dropped were his aitches. I didn’t like him because he was an antisocial bastard and his subordinates and colleagues were the same sorts of shit. I’m in business to eliminate that sort of behaviour and the most effective way of doing that is to get rid of the perpetrators.’

  ‘You just want to get rid of people with bad table manners and no dress sense. Or to be really accurate, people with different manners and a different sense of what to wear from the one you have. Wearing socks with sandals doesn’t necessarily make a man a murderer.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be so sure of that,’ Bognor sniffed, half-joking, half-conceding that perhaps his wife might have a point.

  They both shivered involuntarily. Stars twinkled above them. In the shadows of a dark cobbled alley two dogs sniffed each other hopefully; a corrugated metal shutter rattled down to obscure a shop window. A Vespa farted. Sir Simon and Lady Bognor pushed back their plastic chairs which rasped on the ground. Man and wife stood ready for the next round.

  ‘Becoming old makes a man seem reactionary,’ he said, ‘it doesn’t mean that he is fuddy-duddy or old-fashioned. He just seems like it to those younger than himself.’

  ‘And maybe to those who know him best.’

  They thought about this in silence. Their marriage was a long one now, childless and sometimes compartmetalized, but by and large successful. It was true that she knew him better than anyone and the reverse was true, too, though her husband’s knowledge of her was less obvious to those outside their long, close and, in its strange way, loving relationship. He knew that he was snobbish even though he tried not to let the fact rule his life. She knew even better than he did, but she also recognized that he tried to sublimate the feeling. After most of their adult life together they recognized each other’s shortcomings, had even come to cherish them, much as, despite everything, they cherished each other.

  EIGHT

  Bognor ordered two glasses of cava from the Polish girl with the pink-streaked hair. The wine was a c
risp, dry Summarocca from south-west of Barcelona. The girl was a crisp, dry PhD student from the University of Cracow. Sir Simon sampled the former languidly and smiled approvingly at the latter. He fancied himself as a connoisseur of wine and women, though he was circumspect about both. He did not wish to seem snobbish or pretentious about the booze. Let alone drunk. Nor too interested in sex. A studied indifference on both counts played well at home. Monica was both suspicious and censorious of anything else. He had learned to appear nonchalant.

  ‘Changed, hasn’t it?’ she ventured, when the wine came.

  ‘Madrid?’ he countered, trying not to sound defensive. He suspected she meant something quite different.

  She did.

  ‘Life,’ she said. ‘I meant that life has changed. Madrid, too, but not as fundamentally. And Madrid has improved even while the basics are still there. She’s sexier, more stylish, but deep down there’s still something much more elemental than cold-blooded northern Europeans can do. At least in public. But I’m not so sure about life. Seems to me it’s nastier and more brutish than it used to be.’

  ‘Not shorter though,’ said Bognor. ‘A generation ago, we’d be dead.’ He smiled but inwardly cringed. He wasn’t convinced he was in the mood for a serious discussion about life. Jet lag, booze, age, excitement – all conspired to put him in the mood for more ephemeral natter.

  Monica, however, had the bit between her teeth.

  ‘Your job for instance,’ she said. ‘It’s not the same as when you started.’

  ‘Of course not,’ he agreed. ‘I’m in charge now. I write the script. In the old days I did as I was told. By Parkinson.’