Poison At The Pueblo Page 7

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I make it my business.’ Contractor stared longingly at the sports report on his lap. He yearned to return to it but judged such a tactic premature.

  ‘I see,’ said Bognor. ‘I didn’t realize that mycology was part of the semiotics course at the University of Wessex.’

  Contractor’s degree, like so many new qualifications, meant something and nothing at one and the same time. What exactly it meant was another matter. Different things to different people, reckoned Bognor. It was like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: it meant whatever you wanted it to mean. That was the meaning of meaning nowadays. Being a degree-holder in semiotics, he seldom said quite what he meant and if his message was difficult to understand that suited him. It might have encompassed mycology but then again it might not. It was immaterial anyway. Contractor was irritatingly well read, to the point of almost being a genuine post-Renaissance man. A latter-day polymath, certainly. Sir Simon liked to think of himself as more of a tortoise than a hare. He might have known comparatively little but, by God, he knew a lot about it.

  This time Contractor did pick the newspaper off his lap. He made a meal of studying it thoughtfully and ignoring Sir Simon’s cheap jibe. Bognor had been at Oxford and read Modern History, which he seemed to think was an indication of higher intelligence and greater learning. As far as Contractor was concerned both Oxford and so-called ‘modern’ history went out with the Ark. Semiotics at Wessex was where it was at. And if mycology came under the general umbrella of semiotics, then so be it.

  The only sound in the limo was the ticking of the clock. Contractor read football; Bognor thought mushrooms. He supposed the mushrooms didn’t really matter. They were the instrument of death. Of that there seemed no doubt, but it was a bit like attaching undue importance to the dagger in the library or the lead-piping in the conservatory. It was the why, rather than the how, which lay at the root of the problem. That was essentially Bognor’s line of thought. On the other hand, he was aware that there could be clues in the contents of Trubshawe’s stomach, what had been cooked for lunch and who prepared the dishes. Even if the murderer was not a top-whack mycologist they would have needed a good working knowledge of fungi, and Bognor knew enough about mushrooms, toadstools and their ilk to understand that it was a subject shot through with ambiguities and nuances. The difference between lethal and innocent was not even skin-deep. Even an expert could easily be fooled by the wrong sort of gills or an apparently innocuous fruit body.

  They were skirting the walled city of Avila whence came, Bognor recalled albeit dimly, Saint Teresa. He had never been there and all he knew about the place was that it had a famous wall and a famous saint. Something told him that Harvey Contractor would be able to provide chapter and verse on the walls and the saint, as well as providing much extra information. This might or might not derive from the semiotics course at the University of Wessex but he was not going to tempt providence. His junior’s polymath tendency was always irritating without being gratuitously provoked. The ring road was twentieth-century tat in depressing contrast to the imposing ancient beauty of the walls in the distance. The boss of the Special Investigations Department at the Board of Trade wondered what posterity would have to say about the legacy of his sophisticated times as compared with that of his ‘primitive’ forebears. He doubted it would be complimentary.

  At home he and Monica ate mushrooms from time to time. Sometimes they would be tight button numbers grown in the dark and added to soups and stews; sometimes they would have flat meaty ones grilled on their own and served on toast; in exotic frame of mind they might have chanterelles or dried porcini or Chinese mushrooms. Most of the time they would buy them at a supermarket, sometimes they would go to a greengrocer or a speciality shop, or even a farmers’ market. But they would never run the risk or take the trouble to pick their own from the woods or fields. No fungal forays for Sir Simon and Lady Bognor. Too much like hard work and too risky. Shops were safer and involved no sweat.

  Here in Spain life and death were different. The world was more elemental; one lived closer to the soil and to nature. Hunting for mushrooms and truffles was a normal activity for ordinary people. You might do it with dogs, alone or in a group. You’d break for lunch in the open air with rough bread and slices of jamón or chorizo; equally rough red wine; some fruit; a slice of cheese.

  Killing a man with poison mushrooms was a natural form of murder in primitive Spain in a way that it would not in synthetic Britain. In the United Kingdom people had become divorced from their natural surroundings. They were urban, plastic, robotic.

  So thought Sir Simon as his limo purred north-west towards Salamanca and his sidekick frowned over the football in El Pais.

  TEN

  The room was blue, but with smoke not profanity. It was a drab and featureless space in a drab and featureless apartment, which was in stark contrast with the mediaeval splendours of the old city. Salamanca was one of the glories of Spain, but it too had featureless suburbs like any other town in the modern Iberian peninsula.

  This was an incident room, the nerve centre dealing with the murder of the unwanted Englishman, an hour’s drive away in the hills. In England many details of the room would have been similar: the rows of laptops on plain desktops; the maps and photographs pinned to the walls; the lack of view; the posey photograph of the monarch; even the almost all-male atmosphere and the ubiquitous trainers, jeans and leather bomber jackets, with hard heads close-cropped on top and blue where beard and moustache might appear with another few days of growth.

  The smoke was different though. It smelt foreign, untreated, unfiltered; inhaled through loose-packed whitish tubes, exhaled through hungover lungs and lips and nostrils.

  Bognor coughed. Contractor seemed unfazed. Teniente Azuela, Contractor’s Picasso equivalent, Bognor supposed, was already here and looked as if he had been for some while. He too was in the regular uniform of jeans and leather jacket plus designer stubble, and looked as if he had slept, if at all, standing up. Here, he was boss. Back in Madrid he had to defer to the Admiral, but at the sharp end in this smoke-filled room it was he who called the shots, dictated the action and solved the crime. The Admiral was necessary window dressing. Bognor couldn’t help wondering if this was how he was seen back home in England. No sooner had the thought crossed his mind, however, than he discarded it. The Admiral was a career naval officer who had been rewarded with a police sinecure as a thank-you present for a long career messing about in boats. He, Bognor, however, was a career investigator and had never known another calling.

  Teniente Azuela, who had been crouched, concentrating hard over some kind of chart or map, straightened as the British entered.

  ‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ he said, removing a half-smoked cigarette from his mouth and extending a hand in welcome. Bognor shook it. So did Contractor.

  ‘Shall we forget the fatal fungi?’ began Bognor. ‘I’ve rather had it with murderous mushrooms. Up to pussy’s bow, in fact.’

  ‘As you wish,’ said Teniente Azuela in his faultless but mildly other-worldly maharajah’s English. ‘What would you like instead? A full-English?’

  Bognor decided to ignore this playful linguistic facetiousness and pull a modicum of rank.

  ‘I need to know who the main suspects are,’ he said. ‘The method is interesting but immaterial. As is so often the case. The hand that held the dagger or pulled the trigger or, in this case, cooked the mushrooms. That’s what is important.’

  Azuela made a fussy show of riffling through papers until he found what he apparently wanted.

  ‘It was a smaller group than usual,’ he said. ‘Very exclusive. Just four English speakers and four Spanish. Two members of staff and then the domestic people, cleaners, waiters, barmen, cooks.’

  ‘Cooks being crucial,’ said Bognor.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said the policeman. ‘If the mushrooms dunnit then we must assume that the cook was somehow involved. Although possibly
the murderer could have interfered with the dish without the cook realizing.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Bognor, recognizing a statement of the obvious when he saw it. ‘So who were the participants and the key staff?’

  ‘The group leader,’ said the teniente, ‘is an American woman named “Arizona Brown”. She writes poetry, is a personal fitness coach and comes from Southern California.’

  ‘Not Arizona?’ asked Bognor, recognizing that the question was fatuous as soon as he articulated it.

  Azuela ignored him. ‘She’s only been in Spain a short time; arrived to do a master’s degree in ceramics but got fed up, ran out of money and signed up with this lot. She has serious people skills and speaks OK Spanish with a strong American accent. Unmarried. Possibly bisexual. Vegetarian. Soft drugs. Late twenties. No apparent motive.’

  Bognor frowned and nodded.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Next.’

  ‘Felipe Lee,’ said the policeman. ‘Says he’s a grandson of the English civil war poet, but no proof one way or other. Parents both seem completely Spanish or at least Galician. They come from La Coruna in the north-west. Father still works in the big oil refinery. Felipe does the organization. He writes in straight lines, enjoys adding two and two in order to make four. Is logical, neat, literal.’

  ‘Sounds anally fixated to me,’ said Contractor, irritated that the teniente’s English was even better than his own Spanish. ‘Did either of them have any reason for killing Trubshawe?’

  Azuela shrugged and his colleagues looked equally blank.

  ‘Felipe Lee is only thirty-one or two. Arizona even younger,’ he said. ‘I feel that the killer was an older person. To acquire a motive for killing a man such as Trubshawe would have taken time. Also he has been, as you say, “dormant” since coming to Spain. That is now five years ago. He has been careful to have avoided criminal activity since arriving. My feeling is that the motive would have been acquired when he was pursuing a criminal career at home in the United Kingdom.’

  Bognor smiled.

  ‘I know the Guardia Civil believe him to have been as you put it “dormant” since he came to Spain, but we only have your word for that,’ said Bognor. ‘In my country the most dormant features are volcanoes. Volcanoes are often dormant. More often than not. But then they erupt. Just when one is least expecting it. Dormant but not dead. That’s the nature of volcanoes just as it is with criminals. You may think they’re finished and no threat to man or beast, but just when your confidence is at its highest, the bloody volcano or villain suddenly comes alive and bites you in the bum. Nature of the beast. Best possible argument in favour of capital punishment.’

  A long pause ensued. It could have been described as pregnant, although that would have been misleading. On the other hand, it was certainly full of apprehension and mutual worry, if not actual distrust.

  ‘Forget the staff for a moment,’ said Bognor, feeling, rightly or wrongly that he was in the driving seat. ‘Talk me through the volunteers. Spanish first.’

  The young policeman smiled sadly as if to say that the funny foreigner was barking up completely the wrong tree, while accepting that it was only polite for him to do as he was asked since Bognor was not only his senior but also a guest in his own country. Such courtesies would not necessarily have applied had the circumstances been reversed and Harvey Contractor was having to deal with Admiral Picasso.

  ‘Leonel, Belen, Eduardo and Lola,’ said the teniente. ‘We have their second names but they are, in a sense, immaterial. The late Trubshawe would have known them only by their first, given, Christian names.’

  ‘Aha,’ said Bognor, knowing as he said it that it was the sort of verbal tic that meant nothing while, he hoped, signifying all. The throat-clearing noise sounded portentous and omniscient, but it didn’t fool him and it almost certainly didn’t fool anyone else either. ‘And the Anglos,’ he continued, following vacuity with substance. Or intending to.

  ‘The deceased,’ said Azuela, ‘plus Tracey, George and Camilla. From our point of view these are more interesting, but we can offer you provisional profiles of the whole lot if you’d like.’

  ‘I would,’ said Bognor. He accepted a thick black coffee which he would have called a double espresso back home, regarded it bleakly, found a seat and settled back. ‘Shoot,’ he said.

  There was a large flat screen along the wall controlled by a keyboard linked to a laptop. The teniente frowned at it, stabbed at a button or two and produced a close-up, head and shoulders shot of a dark, bearded bloke in a New York Yankees baseball cap and open-necked denim shirt.

  ‘Leonel,’ he said, ‘sales and marketing director of a big pet food company with head office on the outskirts of Seville. Thirty-five years old. MBA from the Opus Dei University in Oviedo. Keen on football. Married. Two sons. Plays bass guitar. Fan of Johnny Cash. Moderately good English but low on colloquialism and conversational skills. Model pupil. Inclined to be over-orthodox and dull. Reasonably devout Christian of Roman Catholic persuasion.’ He paused. ‘Enough?’

  Bognor nodded. ‘Enough,’ he said. ‘Next please.’

  ‘Belen,’ said Azuela as a picture of a svelte thirty-something with big brown eyes, high cheekbones and a go-yonder expression appeared on screen.

  ‘Strange name,’ said Bognor. ‘Common?’

  ‘Not especially. It means Bethlehem in Spanish. Birthplace of Christ. Spain is no longer as religious as she once was but old habits die, as you would say, hard.’

  Bognor said he was familiar with the Gospels but that it was not British to call people after place names from the bible. The Spaniards glanced at one and another but said nothing. Contractor shifted uneasily in his chair, wondering, as he did, whether anyone ever shifted easily or if it was only ever something one did with difficulty. Clichés were strange birds. Why did errors, for example, always glare? Who ever heard of a woman with low cheekbones?

  ‘Belen is the export manager of a small boutique hotel chain with its headquarters in Madrid. She is thirty-eight, lives with a long-term partner in an apartment on the outskirts of the city; works out twice a week at her neighbourhood gym, eats very carefully and barely drinks. English is serviceable but needs to become more colloquial and chatty, as a lot of her business is with the UK and Scandinavian countries where English is the preferred language of communication.’

  Bognor looked thoughtfully at the tips of his fingers. They were quite clean.

  ‘Eduardo,’ continued the teniente, conjuring up a picture of a clean-shaven, square-jawed, blue-eyed, mildly Opus Dei-looking character with piercing blue eyes and an uncompromising expression.

  Bognor always thought of shiny black suits and a sprinkling of dandruff when referring to Opus Dei. It was difficult, pace Brown, Dan, to say for sure what an ‘Opus Dei character’ looked like, since the famous instrument of self-flagellation lay beneath the shirt (hair or otherwise) and well out of sight. He thought of smug suffering, conscientious condescension and a sallow complexion – an indefinable air of ‘this is going to hurt me more than you’. He did not much care for Opus Dei. The teniente continued, ‘Started his own shipping company a few years ago and specializes in dates from North Africa, and other exotic fruits. He is opening up deals with the new European countries such as Romania, Bulgaria and the Baltic states. Married, two children. Great fan of Paco Peña; plays classical and flamenco guitar. Paying for himself which is unusual. Most people on these courses are paid for by the bigger companies who employ them. Eduardo employs himself.’

  Bognor nodded once more.

  ‘And Lola,’ he said, the words hovering between a question and a command.

  Azuela tapped away at his keyboard and a woman’s head and shoulders appeared. She looked predictably Lola-ish. Brunette, bee-sting lips, high cheekbones, almond eyes. She had all the attributes of the archetypal movie star, except that she was dressed as a nun.

  ‘Nun?’ asked Bognor fatuously. It seemed an unlikely cover.

  ‘Yes,’ said Azu
ela. ‘What I believe you would call a Poor Clare – a female Franciscan.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked, surprised.

  ‘She is –’ said Azuela, frowning, ‘how you would say? – an “upwardly mobile nun”. Tipped for the top. She is likely to be sent to North America or Britain as boss of a big convent. They would like her to be a media personality; make Catholicism popular.’

  ‘I’m sure she’d be brilliant,’ said Bognor, ‘but at the moment she doesn’t have enough command of the vernacular to do battle with the likes of Jeremy Paxman.’

  ‘Que?’ said the policeman, not understanding.

  Bognor did not feel up to explaining and let the remark pass.

  ‘Do you have a lot of media-nuns in Spain?’ he asked, fatuously.

  Azuela shrugged. ‘Until recently the church was very powerful in our country,’ he said. ‘Now it is less so, but the Church, she is fighting back. The best priests of both sexes are having media training. They attend media courses at the university, here and abroad. They are becoming, as you would say, “sassy”. Sister Lola is just that. She is already one sassy nun. She dances the Charleston; she cooks huevos revoltas; she is a fan of Wayne Rooney. She says she is “a child of the times”. One day she will be Mother Teresa, only Mother Lola will have sex appeal.’ Azuela gazed at the nun’s image. He was obviously smitten.

  Bognor wondered if he might follow suit. He knew that fantasizing about sex with women in uniforms was a stereotypical male chauvinist dream. It implied a dislike of the opposite sex – a degree of rape. Thinking of himself as a decently liberated feminist he rejected that sort of image-making, but he still had to acknowledge that he possessed some unpleasantly blokeish testosterone-fuelled desires. Bedding a sexy nun came into that category. Bit of a worry.

  ‘Pet food executive; boutique hotelier; self-employed greengrocer; Poor Clare. Sounds like an interesting job lot. Typical would you say?’ He raised an eyebrow towards the room in general and got nothing back. ‘Maybe there’s never such a thing as “typical”,’ he said. He took a small black notebook out of his briefcase and jotted down some words, considered them for a moment and then, rather ostentatiously, returned his fountain pen to his inside jacket pocket.