Poison At The Pueblo Page 8

  ‘Let’s look at the others,’ he said. ‘The Anglos. Principal suspects; discuss, compare, contrast . . .’

  ELEVEN

  Everyone seemed to be smoking. The blue, acrid atmosphere reminded Bognor of the days of his youth when even the London Underground in the early morning was a mist of exhaled cigarette fumes and the floors were deep in butts. Part of him felt almost wistfully nostalgic, and he found himself craving one of the cheroots that a bossy superannuated doctor from an insurance company had ordered him to cut out on pain of massive financial recriminations. He resented having his habits determined by invisible spivs in faraway office blocks of which he knew nothing, and had half a mind to beg a flaky foul-smelling fag from one of the local policemen. He thought better of it, scared, though he would never admit it, of played-out sawbones from insurance companies, but – much more – of Lady Bognor, who would be bound to find out even though he never quite knew how.

  ‘The late and unlamented Trubshawe,’ said Bognor. ‘We’ll come to him later, when we’ve dealt with the quick as opposed to the dead. That means Tracey, George and Camilla. Take it away, Teniente.’

  And he leaned back in his chair and waited.

  ‘Face value,’ said Azuela slowly. ‘Face value is how you say it in English and that is what these people have been taken at. The village accept what they are told by the Anglos. No checks. No investigation. Tracey says she is called Tracey and gives details, and she is believed.’ He shrugged and spread his hands as if washing himself of any responsibility for Tracey’s true identity.

  ‘Essex girl,’ said Azuela. His command of vernacular English and its underlying assumptions and conventions was remarkable. When he said that Tracey was an Essex girl he spoke a truth at which most of his fellow countrymen could only guess. Her picture came up on the screen and provoked an instant frisson of recognition in the head of SIDBOT. She absolutely had to be called Tracey; she absolutely had to be an Essex girl; you saw her on a regular basis at the supermarket checkout or at the bar of any nightclub from Southend to Walthamstow. She was straight from central casting, and although Bognor felt guilty as he voiced the thought to himself, she was one of a kind, a type not a character.

  Yet, even as he formed this disobliging opinion, he heard little birds whispering. They quickly formed a dawn chorus of dissent. He shouldn’t jump to conclusions, they warned, shouldn’t be so swayed by appearances, let alone by a name. It was not her fault that she was called Tracey and looked like it.

  Bognor had been in the game long enough to know that thinking things were what they seemed was the surest path to copper’s ruin. There was always pressure to deliver an instant result. Public opinion preferred speedy resolutions and public opinion was more concerned with haste than with truth. That, at least, was the perception. And it was easy to go for the obvious.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked, sweeping the room with a stare that encompassed the whole Spanish team, though since Azuela was their spokesman he was really asking the question of just the one person. It was, indeed, he who answered, though he was delivering a majority, if not a unanimous, verdict.

  ‘We,’ he said, ‘do not believe that Tracey killed Trubshawe. Our reasons for thinking she is innocent are basically because she is relatively young. She herself says she is thirty-one years old and we have no reason to believe that she is not telling the truth. She lives with her parents in Colchester in the south-east of England. They are called Percy and Edna. Tracey is unmarried and has a five-year-old son called David and a three-year-old daughter called Tiger-Lily. She is not in touch with the father or fathers. She has trained as a hairdresser and as a florist, and works occasionally at both, usually in the Colchester area, although she has been to London and has worked there. She has not been to Spain before.’

  ‘Trubshawe was originally an Essex boy,’ said Bognor.

  ‘This is true,’ said Azuela. ‘We believe that he owned garages around the Southend and Westcliff-on-Sea areas. Specializing in Jaguar motor cars. We do not believe there is any connection between him and Tracey or her parents.’

  ‘Do we know anything about the parents?’ Bognor wanted to know, and the teniente made a studied performance of consulting his notes before answering. ‘The father, Percy,’ he said, at length, ‘he is a heavy smoker and suffers from emphysema. Both he and his wife, whose name is Edna, were in what you call “service”. He was a butler and chauffeur while she cooked and performed housework. They are now retired or unemployed.’

  ‘Hmmm.’ Bognor glanced at Harvey Contractor who was making notes in an officious, not to say flamboyant manner that was clearly designed to impress, though it did not fool Bognor himself. His assistant gave him what could only be described as a subliminal wink. No one else noticed and the gesture was so understated that it would have been easily deniable. But it was there nonetheless – the product of an almost osmotic understanding – the sort of tacit relationship that characterizes a long marriage. Like it or not, thought Bognor, he and Contractor were in bed together.

  ‘Are we saying . . .’ Bognor felt the need to spell out Spanish beliefs, ‘Is it your contention that Tracey is not a prime suspect?’

  Azuela shook his head.

  ‘We are not in a position to rule anyone out,’ he said, ‘but it is our belief that Tracey is too, how would you say, “obvious”. Capable of all sorts of small deceptions and deceits, but not, we believe, of killing someone.’ He shrugged and splayed his fingers. ‘We are not ruling her out. We just do not believe she is a natural born killer.’

  ‘OK,’ said Bognor. ‘So you’re putting Tracey on hold for now. What about the other Anglos?’

  ‘George,’ said Azuela, ‘is a more likely suspect. He also came from Essex. A town called Braintree. He played cricket for a club there and was involved with used cars. He does not give the impression of being an honest person.’

  ‘But crooked?’

  Once again the teniente shrugged. ‘We know nothing to prove that, but he gives the impression of not telling the truth. Or, as you have it, of being economical with it.’

  Once again Bognor was impressed with his grasp of idiom.

  ‘We don’t believe that George is his real name. Perhaps this is not important. He seems to have several identities; several passports – nationalities, even. When his room was searched our people found an Irish document in the name of Oliver O’Flaherty. The photograph was of George but the person was not him. Oliver is described as a butcher. The address is in County Limerick. We checked with colleagues in the Irish Republic. There is no such place.’

  ‘You think this is important?’

  Azuela did buck-passing incomprehension with an aplomb that impressed even Bognor, who was exposed to the practice on a regular daily business in his dealings with government ministers. Nobody passed buck quite like a top-line British politician. In Bognor’s experience they yielded to no one when it came to blaming other people for their mistakes. Even so, they could get some useful tips from at least one Spanish policeman.

  ‘There were some other unexpected items in George’s room. A copy of Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler. We found one also in Mr Trubshawe’s room. Also bottles of Heil Hitler Rotwein.’

  ‘Of what?!’ Bognor was scandalized, both morally and oenologically.

  ‘Heil Hitler Rotwein,’ repeated Azuela.

  ‘Good grief,’ exclaimed Bognor. ‘Appellation contrôlée? Or does it come from Algeria in a tanker?’

  He was becoming perplexed by this peculiar cosmopolitanism. He wondered if Jimmy Trubshawe had an Irish alias like George. He couldn’t imagine Trubshawe in an Irish persona, but these days, he supposed, Irishmen were no longer Irish in the accepted sense, but had become homogenized so that they might as well be English or even, well, Spanish.

  ‘Whatever else,’ said the teniente, ‘Hitler Rotwein is not German.’

  ‘Any more than George was English.’

  Silence fell like a cliché on tin ears. Nothing was
what it seemed. Appellations were simply not contrôlée. The English were Irish. A man was dead because he liked mushrooms. Nothing made sense any more.

  ‘So,’ said Bognor after a slightly desperate silence, ‘two Anglo’s down and one to go. Tracey, who seems to have been a Tracey in every conceivable respect, and George, who appears not to have been George with any consistency. One who was as consistent as a stick of rock and another who was as elusive as a, er, blast of dry ice in a pantomime. Not wishing,’ he smiled, ‘to fall into such cliché traps as “will o’the wisp” or,’ and he glanced meaningfully at the massed smokers, ‘“the exhalation of a half-spent cigarette”.’ The remark seemed to go over the collective head, as transitory in its way as the pantomimic dry ice.

  Another pause, as dodgy as the last, ensued, before Sir Simon appeared to snap a chapter shut and open a new one. ‘So,’ he said, ‘Camilla. Is she a Camilla or is she not? Does she conform to the example of Tracey or of George? Is she a Duchess of Cornwall? Is she an Essex girl? Discuss. Compare and contrast. Enlighten us Señor Azuela.’

  The teniente shuffled his papers again, refocused, turned knobs, pressed buttons and produced an almost in focus head and shoulders shot of a forty-something blonde with bling. She had a slightly peeling bleached complexion, a gash of scarlet lipstick and a ‘been there, done that’ expression.

  ‘Australian,’ said Azuela. ‘Claims to run a boutique bed-and-breakfast in a resort called Byron Bay somewhere in New South Wales, north of Sydney.’

  ‘I know it,’ said Bognor. ‘Used to be a marginally hippy sort of a place. Beads and sandals and Bob Dylan. Alternative. Or as alternative as you’re ever likely to get in the Antipodes. Which is to say pretty mainstream by British standards. My sense is that Australians don’t do alternative.’

  Azuela looked puzzled.

  ‘“Alternative”?’ he repeated. ‘“Antipodes”?’

  Bognor realized he had struck blank.

  ‘Australians,’ he explained, ‘have a reputation in Britain for being, how shall I put it, a little uncouth. Behind the times. Not up to speed. Camilla might have seemed bohemian in Australia but in Britain she probably wouldn’t have been thought unusual. We have a different sense of what is conventional and what is not. What is your view?’

  ‘Camilla has a tattoo of a butterfly above her right shoulder-blade.’

  ‘Tattoos . . .’ said Bognor, without much first-hand knowledge since Monica, Lady Bognor, was resolutely un-tattooed – it was true that she came from a pre-tattoo generation, but even if she had been born twenty or thirty years later she would, Bognor felt sure, have remained unmarked by needles of any kind – ‘Tattoos,’ he continued ruminatively, ‘are commonplace among young to youngish women in the UK. Any female of under, say, thirty is likely to be quite extensively marked in this way. It carries no stigma. In the old days tattooing used to be a hallmark of a certain sort of British male. Usually naval and military. The Sergeants’ mess was full of heavily tattooed hairy forearms. Any naval petty officer worth his salt would have tattoos all over himself. Nowadays most young women have a tattoo or two. Usually small and discreet and invisible, save in a state of undress.’ He paused and seemed to think for a while. ‘Or so I’m told,’ he said.

  At length he asked, ‘How old would you say Camilla was?’

  The teniente smiled. ‘She and her passport both say thirty-five,’ he said, ‘but we feel they are both, as you would say in your country, being economical with the truth.’

  ‘That’s a very sophisticated use of idiom,’ said Bognor, ‘particularly for one who has problems with “Antipodes” and “alternative”. But never mind. You’re suggesting that Camilla is older than she claimed?’

  ‘We believe that the woman claiming to be Camilla is approximately forty-five years old. She does seem to be based in the resort area of Byron Bay, Australia, to which she emigrated from the United Kingdom some years previously.’

  Bognor inspected his fingertips, which were mildly chipped and grubby in the fashion of privately educated Englishmen of his generation. It was not, he reflected, a crime to lie about your age. And, if female, was easily explained as the product of vanity.

  ‘And she is supposed to have emigrated from the United Kingdom,’ he repeated, playing for time. ‘Can we be more precise?’

  ‘She claims,’ said the teniente, pausing for effect, ‘to have come from Essex.’

  TWELVE

  One middle-aged gent who has a number of aliases, most of them dodgy,’ said Bognor. ‘One archetypal Essex girl and one Essex girl transplanted to Oz. That’s your Anglos.’

  He and Contractor were conducting a ‘sitrep’ in a small room next to the larger smoke-filled incident room. They had this all to themselves and spoke in fast-moving English with relative indiscretion. If they were bugged they didn’t care. Everyone else was foreign, which meant that they were basically un-English and didn’t therefore count. Some of Bognor’s best friends were foreign but that didn’t stop them being foreign. He would never have been caught using a phrase such as ‘lesser breeds without the law’, but that didn’t prevent him from feeling basic contempt for people who were not as he was. Some people didn’t like this side of him, but he maintained that it was better to be honest and that it never interfered with his sense of fair play.

  He sighed.

  ‘The most obvious common denominator seems to be an element of secrecy or deception,’ he said. ‘If you want to take part in this exercise you either maintain relative silence or you’re economical with the truth. I shall say as little as possible and what I do say will almost certainly not be the truth, the whole truth, let alone nothing but the truth. What do you think?’

  Contractor sighed back. The sound was infectious as was the accompanying and undeniably Iberian gesture of frustration that accompanied it.

  Neither of them thought anything much.

  ‘Time to stop theorizing,’ said Contractor. ‘Time to get to the coalface.’

  ‘Yes,’ Bognor agreed. It would be quite like old times. He enjoyed the coalface, even though it was years since he had actually been there. He remembered the friary at Beaubridge; sundry dog breeders in and around Crufts; the Stately Home Industry; a freezing Toronto and the mysterious business with Gentlemen’s Relish; the publishing industry and death involving Big Books plc; Fleet Street and death on the Samuel Pepys Column; a foray to middle England at the height of Mrs Thatcher’s rule. It all added up to a formidable list of battle honours and he was proud of his regimental colours; yet even he was forced to concede that these front-line exploits belonged to the dim and distant when he had been, relatively speaking, a fresh-faced boy. Now he was long in tooth and short in wind.

  ‘Part of the problem,’ he said, musing, ‘is that I feel absolutely nothing in the way of regret about Jimmy Trubshawe. He was a thoroughly nasty piece of work and, as far as I’m concerned, if he choked to death on a nasty mushroom then it serves him right.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ said his sidekick. This was code for dissent. Contractor, being a naturally cold fish, seldom if ever allowed any personal feelings to interfere with his work. He didn’t have much in the way of personal feelings anyway. He did, however, have a highly developed sense of justice, of what was right and wrong, and, above all, of what his job involved and how to do it properly. He was a professional. Cold, but professional. Bognor was the opposite. Prone to amateurism, but warm with a heart of gold. As they said. Which they did. Frequently.

  ‘It’ll be quite like the old days,’ he said, rubbing his hands together.

  ‘Not really,’ said Contractor, applying cold water as he did so frequently, and thinking, evidently, that it was part of his job. ‘You’ll have me rather than your tiresome sounding old boss Parkinson as your only link with the outside world. You’ll have a state-of-the-art Nokia phone to connect you with me and anyone else you choose to call. There’ll be no need to ferret around looking for the nearest public phone box and pressing button “A” a
nd button “B”. We’re in the twenty-first century now.’

  ‘How did you know about button “A” and button “B” in public phone boxes?’ asked Bognor. ‘They were before you were born.’

  ‘Read about them in books,’ said Contractor. ‘Crime novels mostly. Lots of interesting period detail in crime novels. Drivel otherwise. Oliver James says so.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Media-savvy shrink.’ Contractor smiled with a smug-bastard, condescending ‘I’ve forgotten more than you’ll ever know’ sort of expression. ‘Not that he writes any sense except when it comes to crime fiction.’

  Bognor wasn’t going to argue the toss when it came to whodunnits, even though he disagreed quite profoundly.

  ‘You’ll be here on the other end of my mobile,’ he said. ‘Lady Bognor likewise. And you’ll liaise with our friends here and with HQ in London.’

  ‘Yup,’ said Contractor.

  ‘The common denominator among the Anglos seems to be Essex,’ said Bognor. ‘Do you think that’s significant?’

  ‘I’m not convinced the murderer is one of the three Anglos,’ said Contractor, ‘and my sense of Essex is that it’s a state of mind not a geographical entity. Thatcher was the personification of Essex, but she was a Lincolnshire lass with a constituency in North London and a home in Chelsea. Like I said “state of mind”, not a place in the accepted sense. And you could argue that England as we knew it has been engulfed by Essex as we knew it. Thus Trubshawe, whoever he may have been. Doesn’t matter whether he was living in Leytonstone, Southend or the Costa d’Essex, he possessed a sort of spiv, garagiste mentality which has become endemic.’