Poison At The Pueblo Read online

  Bognor had a strong sense of what was taught at Contractor’s old university.

  ‘My real contact is going to be with the Hispanics,’ said Bognor.

  ‘That is correct,’ said Contractor, sounding like a daytime TV game show host. Probably from Essex in a manner of speaking, if not a strictly factual fashion.

  ‘And it could perfectly well have been one of them,’ continued Bognor, musing. ‘Lola, for instance. Anyone with a name like that has to be a suspect, wouldn’t you agree?’

  Not really,’ said Contractor. ‘I don’t think you should judge people by their names. Besides I very much doubt whether Lola is her real name. Most people in the Pueblo seem to be operating under some form of alias.’

  Bognor sighed. He seemed to be doing a lot of sighing these days.

  ‘There are certain unassailable facts,’ he said. ‘The man calling himself Trubshawe was a professional criminal of British origin and specifically from Essex, which in his case was a physical place as well as a state of mind. So he was doubly false, maybe trebly so, if you face the fact that he absconded to the Costa d’Essex, which while technically in Spain had become a sort of Iberian East Anglia with pubs, Man U supporters’ clubs, chips with everything, bling, peroxide blondes and the whole paraphernalia of a certain sort of nouveau riche existence.’

  ‘Sounds a rather snobbish perception . . . sir . . . if I may say so.’

  ‘You may not,’ said Bognor. ‘Old-fashioned possibly, but snobbish very definitely not.’

  Contractor smirked. He regarded his boss as old-fashioned and snobbish; didn’t necessarily think the worse of him for it, but was genuinely perplexed by his inability to admit it.

  Bognor, for his part, was not really thinking about such matters but was suffering from an unexpected attack of nerves. He was not essentially a shy person, but he felt as if he were a nervous wallflower at the door of a swinging party at which he would know neither the hosts nor any of the other guests. He had not been at the cutting edge or the coalface or whatever you called it for as long as he could remember. He had worn out many dark pinstripe suit trouser bottoms and eaten a lot of lunch since then; had become a Whitehall mandarin, a long way from the lean machine which, in truth, he had never really been, though he liked to believe that once he approximated to such a condition. He had been a front-line troop once, the sort of second lieutenant who went unthinkingly over the top and perished on the Somme. Not for a long time though, and being thrown back in at the deep end, even of his own volition, and under his own orders, was giving him cold feet.

  ‘I don’t have a handgun,’ he said, fatuously.

  ‘That would be rather a melodramatic gesture with respect, sir,’ said Contractor. ‘Apart from the fact that our Spanish friends would have picked it up first thing. On the other hand, if you were to ask the Admiral or the Teniente with your customary tact then I’m quite certain they’d be happy to lend you one. If it made you feel better.’

  Bognor felt his subordinate bordered on the insolent but he said nothing. He had vaguely hoped that age and seniority would bring respect, but this appeared not to be the case. Contractor’s attitude towards him was not the same as his towards Parkinson. Where once there had been deference now there was familiarity, if not quite contempt. Such was life. Sic transit, but not for the better.

  He was, he realized, being taken out of his comfort zone. In the most obvious sense he was being removed from the panelled, personally assisted office and the back seat of the chauffeur driven Rover – a discontinued line, now acquired, over his not-quite-dead body, by some Chinese consortium in a deal he and the department had fought tooth and nail to subvert. He would be exposed sans chauffeur, sans secretary, sans everything. Not only that, he was going to behave in a gregarious, life and soul of the party manner, which was emphatically not his style. He was not, God knew, aloof or chilly. He stood his round, played his part, mucked in, enjoyed a joke, was even up to a point, and in a manner of speaking, one of the lads. But at the Pueblo he suspected everyone was required to be the life and soul of the office party. He hated forced jollity and he suspected that this kind of immersion language course relied all too heavily on a jollity that was less than spontaneous. He was not looking forward to it as much as he had been. What had seemed a good idea in London seemed much less so now that he was approaching the front line.

  ‘This is a murder,’ he said unnecessarily.

  Contractor nodded. ‘And the killer or killers is or are still at large,’ he said. ‘I’d steer clear of mushrooms on toast, if I were you, sir.’

  ‘I think that’s a joke in remarkably poor taste,’ said Bognor.

  Contractor was about to make a further feeble punning gastronomic joke involving toast and taste, but then saw the look on his boss’s face and thought better of it. This was serious. So was the boss. And despite the intrinsic absurdity of the situation, the central fact remained true and as stated. They had a corpse on their hands. You may not have liked Trubshawe but he was dead. Murdered. It was a crime and, as yet, a crime unsolved.

  ‘I’m sure it will all work out in the end,’ he said, instead of trying further levity. ‘And if there’s one consolation the murderer, single or plural, can’t have escaped. It’s a classic closed-room mystery. The killer is still in situ.’

  He realized as he said it that the remark would have been better left unspoken. The boss was at risk and recognized the fact. He was reminded of a line in a Sherlock Holmes story by Conan Doyle to the effect that you could forget your dark Satanic Mills, it wasn’t the dark narrow alleyways of the big smoke which harboured vice, depravity and sudden death, it was your smiling, bucolic, verdant countryside. That was where crime flourished. It was, perhaps, a clunking truth, but none the less so for being obvious.

  There was a sharp tap on the door to which Bognor said, in familiar almost self-confident, English.

  ‘Come!’ just as his schoolmasters used to say.

  The door opened and the Spanish policeman stood framed in the opening, all stubble, leather jacket and cigarette smoke.

  ‘Your chariot awaits,’ he said, with the triumphant air of a foreign language student who has done his prep. ‘I will run you down to the plaza so that you may make your rendezvous.’

  THIRTEEN

  Dolores Calderon was draped around the cab of a state-of-the-art khaki Range Rover. She was talking on a mobile phone and was dressed entirely in black, with tight shiny black leather trousers and a bum-freezer jacket which looked as if it was made from real fur. She wore a black Stetson-style hat on top of her blonde hair, which might have been helped with dye from a bottle; her lips were scarlet and so were her long fingernails, some of which were on the hand she extended to Bognor as he smiled at her diffidently and yet ingratiatingly. On second thoughts he decided, stomach lurching in a disquieting and half-forgotten manner, ‘coiled’ might have been a better word than ‘draped’. There was something snake-like about her and it wasn’t just the long leather legs. Even the words ‘Dolores Calderon,’ which she breathed at him between more raucous instructions into her mobile, were sibilant, almost hissy.

  Bognor swore. Silently. It may have been years since he had been out in the field but his experience was that whenever he was away from the security of his own office there was always, sooner or later, a Dolores Calderon. And she always meant trouble.

  The phone conversation was obviously more important than him, for it continued despite his presence. La Calderon was shouting, something that, in Bognor’s experience, almost all mobile users did without seeming to realize it. She also seemed to be angry, a fact which added to the decibels. Bognor had ample opportunity to examine her charms, which were, he realized to his dismay, definite and considerable. He was not going to be immune from them and despite his age and condition, well, maybe because of his age and condition, he was perfectly capable of making a fool of himself. If that was what she wanted.

  The car park was virtually empty. He reckoned it
would be busy in the tourist season, which this wasn’t. Dolores Calderon’s nostrils flared and her breasts heaved. It was incorrect, he knew, but he always found real fur on a woman disturbingly sexy. Anger too. His stomach lurched in a way that he had almost forgotten. He was old enough to be the woman’s father; he had no children and to concede lust for her should have made him feel like a paedophile. He didn’t and even more alarmingly felt no guilt. It was all to do with parts of himself ageing at different speeds. Many aspects of the essential Bognor felt way past retirement; others, of which the libido was the most obvious, seemed not to have moved on from the late teens. It was all very disconcerting.

  Suddenly she spat out a final phrase which sounded to Bognor like a command wrapped in an expletive and then snapped the mobile shut, tossed it on to the driver’s seat, removed her dark glasses and gave Bognor a dazzling smile. She had Cambridge-blue eyes and high cheekbones. Bognor thought she was stunning.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘the phone call was necessary. Not pleasant but essential. You must be Simon, Mr Trubshawe’s replacement. It is good of you to come at such short notice. We are very grateful. The village is a half-hour’s drive from here. May I assist with your bags?’ And without waiting for a reply she hefted Bognor’s ancient leather overnight case and his much newer computer-container and deposited in them in the back of the vehicle. ‘Jump in,’ she said, ‘or should I say “hop”?’ Her English was self-conscious and heavily accented.

  The car smelt of leather and disinfectant, though his chauffeuse was wearing a strong and expensive-smelling scent.

  ‘We were very sad about the accident to Mr Trubshawe,’ she said, changing gear crisply.

  ‘Accident?!’ Bognor was unable to suppress the note of surprise in his voice. Then he remembered who he was supposed to be – or more accurately who he was not supposed to be, and said, ‘Sad! Yes, very.’

  She looked at him sharply. Not, he thought to himself, just a pretty face.

  She braked to avoid a man in a beret, on a bicycle, making heavy weather of a hill.

  ‘You believe that Mr Trubshawe’s death was not accidental?’ she asked.

  He was not supposed to know anything about Trubshawe, least of all the circumstances of his death and even less the cause of it. There suddenly flashed before him some words from as pompous internal briefing document he had recently received from a government department, of which he had previously known nothing. It opined, pompously in Bognor’s view, that crime was no longer resolved by such outmoded things as ‘clues, red herrings and least likely suspects’. It was no longer a question of puzzles but of serendipitous confession. Madness not method, in his own opinion, but the document seemed to believe, as was the way with such pieces of paper, that this in some way represented progress. Dolores Calderon, however, made his antennae bristle. In forensic terms, she seemed to represent all the old-fashioned enigmas: clues, red herrings and least likely suspects. None of which, naturally, had anything to do with sex.

  ‘Absolutely,’ he said, nervously, as they swerved past a horse and cart. He thought horses and carts had passed away with the Generalissimo, were not part of the new Spain, with its glorious pan-European aspirations and Gehry-inspired architecture.

  ‘As I already said it is good of you to come,’ said Dolores, turning to face him, eyes not making the least concession to looking at the road in front of her.

  ‘No worries,’ he said. ‘Glad to be able to help out.’

  ‘How did you hear about us?’

  ‘Oh, friends,’ he said, as vaguely as he could and tried to change the subject, ‘I have to admit I’m a bit apprehensive about stepping into a dead man’s shoes. In such a literal manner, if you see what I mean. I have to confess I know very little about the circumstances of poor Mr Trubshawe’s death. Something to do with mushrooms, I believe.’

  If he been Dan Brown, grappling with the Da Vinci Code, he would have said that Dolores now ‘gunned’ the Land Rover past a smoke-belching articulated lorry, narrowly avoiding a similar monster coming in the opposite direction. He was, however, not entirely sure what the verb ‘to gun’ meant in this or any other context, so he preferred the word ‘accelerate’. This was what the girl did, jamming her foot hard on the appropriate pedal. He inferred the gesture to be as much a response to him as to the lorries.

  ‘Your friends,’ she said, not to be deflected, ‘had they been guests at the village? Participated in one of our programmes? Perhaps they were known to me.’

  She was driving fast but not unnervingly so. Bognor almost relaxed.

  ‘Um . . . er . . . I’m really not sure,’ he coughed and held on to the door handle as they swung hard round a corner. Dolores glanced across and grinned. ‘Mushrooms,’ he said fatuously, ‘You said “mushrooms”.’

  ‘No, Mr Bognor,’ she said, ‘I didn’t mention mushrooms. It was you who said something about mushrooms. However, I am not here to beat about bushes. Mushrooms it was. Which did for Mister Trubshawe. A mushroom disagreed with him.’

  ‘Violently,’ said Bognor. ‘In fact, terminally.’

  She smiled and changed down with a gratuitous double-declutch. Showing off, he thought. Not that there was any need.

  ‘Do we know where the mushrooms came from? Who cooked them? Whether everyone else ate the same mushrooms?’ He paused.

  ‘You sound like the Guardia Civil,’ she said.

  ‘Oreja del gato,’ he said, ‘Oreja de judas, hongo comtesino, ninja, tricolonia, rodellon, canterolo cabrito, colmanilla, armilaria, rebellon.’

  He paused and smiled with self-satisfaction.

  ‘Rebellon,’ he repeated, ‘I’m particularly keen on “rebellon”.’

  ‘I’m impressed,’ she said, flashing him a smile which disappeared as rapidly as it had emerged.

  So was he. He had no idea there were so many different kinds of mushroom. Even in Spanish.

  A rabbit ran across the road and she served and swore. They were still climbing and the woods were thicker. Conifers. Occasionally they passed a dwelling. These were looking progressively more alpine, with more shutters, a propensity towards timber. Thin blue smoke eddied up from chimneys. It felt like ski-country and not what he associated with Spain, which he realized guiltily was all Costas and Hemingway: an Englishman’s cliché. Not the real Spain at all.

  She braked hard and swung a sharp left between the stone pillars of an ancient gateway. The drive was rough and bumpy, but she made no effort to slow down, instead attacking the potholes and ruts with a panache that was obviously intended to unsettle her passenger. She glanced sideways to see what effect this rough passage was having. Bognor, recognizing that this was a form of initiation rite was resolutely relaxed.

  ‘So this is it,’ he said, through teeth which were more gritted than he hoped they seemed.

  ‘Sí,’ she said. ‘This is the Pueblo. We take it for about twenty weeks of the year. The proprietors have promised to have the drive fixed. Until then we do have four-wheel drives, SUVs, whatever you prefer to call them in English.’

  ‘Land Rover will do,’ said Bognor, patriotically. At home he drove a Mini, which was, he believed, still made in Oxford, though only under licence from some foreigner. Some of his best friends were foreign, of course, but you knew what he meant.

  The drive was long as well as rudimentary. It curved and swirled through more woods until, without warning, it emerged into a clearing of half a dozen or so chalets grouped around a larger and more substantial house with a large, planked deck outside the front door. Two enormous mountain dogs came barking towards the vehicle.

  ‘That’s Marks and Spencer,’ said Dolores. ‘The village dogs. Actually they’re father and son but they behave like twin brothers, which is how we treat them. They are very friendly unless, of course . . .’

  Bognor cocked an eyebrow at her as she braked hard, sending a spume of mud and gravel in the general direction of the dogs, who were now on their hind legs, snuffling their muzzle
s against the cab window.

  ‘Unless – how shall we say? – you get on the wrong side of them.’

  ‘Shouldn’t be any worries,’ said Bognor, faux-nonchalant. ‘I like dogs. They like me too. As a rule.’

  He opened the door, leaped down and was almost knocked flying by Marks or Spencer, who jumped up on him, a paw on each shoulder, and gave him a preposterous lick. Bognor responded with a rough rub of the hand behind one ear.

  ‘You and I are going to be friends, old shopkeeper,’ he said.

  Dolores was watching appraisingly. Bognor knew she was and responded accordingly.

  ‘You’re in Cervantes,’ she said. ‘The chalets are named after great Spaniards. I’ll show you, then you can have a quick wash and brush-up before your first assignment at noon. A walk with Lola in the woods.’

  ‘A walk with Lola in the woods.’

  ‘Yes.’ She patted the dogs. Bognor didn’t think she had a sense of humour. ‘Follow me.’ She took his overnight bag and computer case from the Land Rover and set off towards one of the chalets, sashaying like an Irish Guardsman on parade. Bognor reckoned it was deliberate. He fell in beside her, carrying his briefcase with its self-important files and papers.

  ‘Mushrooms,’ he said. ‘You were telling me about mushrooms.’

  ‘On the contrary, Mr Bognor,’ she said. ‘It was you who was telling me about mushrooms. You seem to know so many Spanish words to describe them. But, of course, you won’t be needing them here. It is English all the time. There are penalties for anyone caught speaking Spanish. Even when describing the mushrooms.’

  She smiled coquettishly but unconvincingly.

  ‘But there are mushrooms growing around here? In the woods and fields?’

  ‘Of course, I’m sure Lola will tell you. But only in English please.’

  ‘Not even Latin?’

  ‘Not even Latin,’ she said, and took a key from the pocket of her fur jacket. They had arrived at Cervantes.

  ‘Home.’ she said. ‘“Home sweet home,” as you English say. Or to be a little more accurate: “Home sweet home from home.”’ She laughed and opened the door on to a dark panelled room with a sofa, chairs, kitchenette, smouldering wood-burner and stairs leading up.