Poison At The Pueblo (11 page)

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

O
ne 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” and 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.'

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

D
olores 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.