Poison At The Pueblo (20 page)

Bognor shook his head.

‘Forget it,' he said.

‘Cold fish is a person with no feelings,' said Lola, the nun, unexpectedly. ‘Not Latin. No hot blood. No passion. The cold fish is a person who is never impulsive. They decide everything according to ratiocination and for reasons that they have considered very carefully. Perhaps Aquarius is a cold fish because of the water. The water in Aquarius is to do with purifying and cleaning, so perhaps it is a cold water. Or more likely it is Pisces. The Pisces is the Latin word for the fish, but I do not know if the Pisces is a cold fish. Maybe hot. I think Pisces are governed by emotion and intuition, so perhaps not cold fish. I don't know. I believe in God, not the stars, but maybe you are different, Belen. Maybe you are not as holy as your name and perhaps you believe in the horoscope.'

She blushed, surprised perhaps by her verbosity, which bordered on the articulate. Bognor felt moved to clap but did not. George neither, though he too seemed impressed.

‘Lola's pretty right,' said Bognor. ‘The important point being that “cold fish” is a figure of speech. Not literal. That's the problem with the English language. So much metaphor and simile that it sometimes hides the truth.'

‘Like life,' said Lola, who seemed to be entering into the swing of things. ‘Life is full of metaphors and similes, and nothing is as obvious as it might seem.'

‘Like murder,' said George. ‘It isn't always the obvious suspect wot dunnit.'

The pause that followed this reversion to the nagging Banquo's ghost of the late Trubshawe and his unexpected death could only be described as ‘awkward'. Even George seemed to regret that he had said it.

‘So who,' asked Bognor, innocently, ‘is the obvious suspect when it comes to killing Trubshawe?'

‘Are you saying Jimmy was murdered?' Bognor noted the familiar ‘Jimmy', but raised the palms of his hand in a gesture of ignorance and perplexity.

‘I wasn't here, remember. I'm only here as Trubshawe's last minute stand-in.'

‘My view is that it was an accident,' said George. ‘Jimmy was an accident waiting to happen.'

‘And the mushrooms . . . ?' Bognor wanted to know.

‘Were the trigger. Unfortunate. But if it hadn't been the mushrooms it would have been something else. He was a sick man. He was going to die anyway.'

‘What makes you so sure?' asked Bognor.

It was George's turn to shrug. He also changed the subject. ‘We're supposed to be devising a marketing strategy for bangers.'

‘Quite,' said Bognor. ‘I think we should begin by nominating a team leader. That's the way they do it on TV. I think it should be Belen or Lola, and I think we should have a secret ballot. Quite simple. We just write down our nomination on a piece of paper, fold it up so it's secret and then do a count.'

This was easy and no one demurred. Bognor opened them up and found all four for Lola. Interesting, he thought to himself. It meant that Lola had voted for Lola. That surely said something about her self-confidence. Did it also say something about the lack of same in Belen. Belen wasn't as obviously attractive, which was odd, given that Lola was a nun and Belen worked in boutique hotels. Temperamentally, Bognor was absolutely not in favour of this sort of exercise, which reeked of the kind of team-building mumbo-jumbo practised by modern management consultants who ripped off large businesses by trading on corporate greed and indolence. In his opinion, anyway.

‘A majority for Lola,' he said. Strange that he had emerged as, in a sense, a kind of
de facto
, team leader. It was he who had made the suggestion; he who had had it accepted and now he who had organized the mini-election and the votes. Perhaps he exuded natural authority after all. Perhaps there was more to these charades than he thought. ‘Oh, OK, Lola, take it away. Let it rip.'

‘Rip?' she enquired tentatively, causing Bognor to curse his overuse of meaningless colloquialism.

‘Don't worry about it,' he said. ‘It's just a lazy way of saying that you're in charge. We are putty in your hands.'

She frowned again but did not, this time, take him up on the evidently strange expression.

‘We have to sell the idea of the sausage you call the banger,' she said, obviously. ‘I should like to know why it is called “banger”, please.'

‘The British banger,' said George, ‘like fish and chips or bacon and egg, is British. It's an institution back home. People like Trubshawe and me have been trying to introduce it into Spain, and I think we have a thing or two we could tell you.'

Trubshawe and
I
, thought Bognor pedantically. He was not usually a severe grammarian but everything about George irritated him, and he found his slipshod linguistics as offensive as his mindless jingoism. He tried, however, to control the urge to take irritable issue with either. No Lynne Truss, he.

‘Surely something we should be doing is to universalize the banger?' he said, ‘I mean, the Spanish aren't going to switch from their own distinctively Iberian sausage to a completely different sort of animal just because it's British. It would put them off, surely? And, by the way, why “banger”? I know it's slang for a particularly British form of sausage, but why? All yours, Lola.'

The improbable poor Claire dimpled nunnishly and smiled round the table. She already looked like a leader.

‘Mr Bognor is correct,' she said. ‘To sell something as British would, in Spain, be an invitation to a disaster. The only successful British export to Spain is criminal.'

‘Football hooligans,' said Belen, nodding. ‘Train robbers.'

It was a truism that only kith and kin could slag off kith and kin. It didn't matter how correct an analysis might be, the only people entitled to express it were the accused's nearest and dearest. If an outsider dared to venture a criticism the insiders retaliated as one, even if they had been tearing each other apart moments earlier. This was a truth universally acknowledged.

George and Bognor exchanged glances, recognized their mutual antipathy but acknowledged the truth of the truth. They could be as rude as they liked about each other, but if any outsider should presume to attack them then they would go to each other's assistance. There was no logic in this but it was a fact of life. Neither of them liked the other and they were not particularly proud of their Britishness, or Englishness. But no bloody foreigner could echo such sentiments with impunity.

‘I hardly think—' began Bognor.

‘Effing rubbish,' said George.

‘Having said which,' said Bognor, emolliently, ‘I don't think that a successful sales pitch is going to be able to rely on a narrow nationalist focus. It doesn't matter whether the country concerned is popular or not, you can't base these things on provenance.'

Too many long words and abstruse concepts, he acknowledged to himself.

It would be much better to stick to basics. ‘The point about the banger,' he said, ‘is not that it's British, but that it's basic.'

‘Comes to the same thing,' said George. ‘What you see is what you get. That's what being British is about. Basic. Basic British. Basic banger.'

‘Maybe,' said Bognor, ‘that should be the leitmotif, as it were, of our campaign. “Back to the basics with the banger”; “Back to the basic banger”; “Bangers – the basic”. Or something like that.'

Belen had barely spoken. Now she said, ‘Would you have said that Mr Trubshawe was a banger person? Or would he have preferred the chorizo? He came to Spain. You have a saying in England, do you not . . . ? “When in Spain . . . ”?'

‘It's the garlic wot does it,' said George. ‘Back home we don't do garlic. We let the ingredients speak for themselves. On the continong,' that was how he pronounced the word, ‘you use garlic in everything to disguise the fact that the meat's either off or it's horse.'

This, reflected Bognor, wasn't going anywhere.

‘With respect,' he said, ‘we're supposed to be coming up with a strategy to get people to buy bangers, not indulging in an exercise of national chauvinism. I for one simply don't believe in national stereotyping. Just because you're British or Spanish doesn't mean to say you have to be a particular sort of person.'

‘Jimmy Trubshawe was British to his fingertips,' said George. ‘Never come across a more British person.'

‘You think that has anything to do with his being done in?' asked Bognor, slipping easily into a vernacular that he was not truly at home with.

‘You mean that Mr Trubshawe was killed because he was British. A particular sort of British person.' Lola smiled. ‘It's possible,' she said.

‘Killed for being British!' said George. ‘There are precedents for that. But if I wanted to do Jimmy Trubshawe, being British is a bloody feeble pretext.'

TWENTY-THREE

T
hey were dangerously close to a racial meltdown, though Bognor could see that, as far as motivation went, it was not as silly as it might appear. Being killed for being British was not that absurd. You could argue that it happened all the time. The British, or even more so the English, were phenomenally unpopular throughout a world which had once been predominantly their own pink-coloured fiefdom.

‘You think Trubshawe could have been killed because he was British?' asked Simon, overeagerly.

‘It's possible,' said Lola. ‘But we can't market a product on the basis that it's British or English. Not in Spain. Not anywhere. It doesn't make sense. If people even start to believe that it's English or British, then they won't buy it. I'm sorry, but that's a fact. Language maybe, but nothing else.'

‘The point surely is,' said Bognor, ‘that we're selling something completely simple, uncomplicated, unadulterated. Whether it's British, English or anything else is frankly irrelevant. We're basing our case on simplicity.'

‘That's Trubshawe,' said George. ‘What you saw was what you got.'

He was, thought Bognor, a master of cliché.

‘It seems,' said Belen, ‘that we have to say that the point about the banger is that it contains only the very best ingredients and no other messing about. Maybe pepper and salt but that is all. Let us say ninety-eight or ninety-nine per cent meat from wonderful free-range rare breed pigs, such as your Gloucester Old Spot, and just pepper and salt and the case. So it is incredibly simple. Very good for you.'

He had forgotten, momentarily, that Belen had a passing acquaintance, being in boutique hotels, with food and beverage. And fashionable F & B was about clever sourcing and not messing around with prime ingredients. Anyone worth their culinary stripes was into rare breeds and kindness to meat. As far as he could see, Belen had absolutely no reason for wishing Trubshawe dead. On the other hand, she would have known her mushrooms.

‘I rather agree,' said Bognor.

‘So the selling point is back to basics,' said Lola. ‘But, please, why is the basic British sausage called “banger”?'

Bognor and George looked at each other. Bognor didn't know.

‘If they're not properly made they explode when they're being cooked. They go off with a big bang. Can be too much water. Can be too much rusk or crust. Your really top-whack banger doesn't bang because it's nearly all meat, which doesn't explode. In the last war, the Royal Navy had a pre-cooked, tinned sausage made by a company called Palethorpe. Submarines, mainly. They were called “Snorkers”.' He smiled, expecting congratulation. ‘Not many people know that.'

‘What about Lincolnshire sausages? Or Cumberland? Can they be bangers?' This was Bognor seeking to compete. ‘Can you put bangers in toad-in-the-hole'. He didn't know what any of this had to do with solving a murder, but detection, he knew from experience, moved in mysterious and not always logical ways.

‘Let's agree,' said Lola, being firm, ‘that we're going to sell a traditional British sausage containing lots of very good pork and some pepper and salt. Nothing more, nothing less.'

Bognor nodded.

‘The key word is “bang”,' he said. ‘We need to keep “bang” up front.'

‘We should ask ourselves what “bang” suggests,' said George. ‘To me it means explosion. Gun shot. Sudden death.' He glanced meaningfully at Bognor. ‘Not a very attractive word. Positively dangerous, in fact. You don't want bangs around. Even little ones. They tend to go off in the night when no one's expecting them.'

Bognor wondered if they were getting somewhere in an oblique fashion. Was George telling him, in code, that it was he who had fired the gun?

He felt his mind wandering while the four of them limped towards a coherent solution to their marketing problems. He had never been much good at charades and age had neither sharpened his wits or his enthusiasm. He found himself watching for telltale clauses in his companions' body language, but had to accept that it was all lacking in conviction as far as murder was concerned, and not much more so when it came to sausages.

He had expected to go into dinner immediately after the brainstorm, but he had forgotten that this was Spain and they ate later than the Brits. It was too late and too dark for another walk, but he and Belen were sentenced to an improving chat in a quiet corner.

‘Drink?' he asked her.

‘Thank you, no,' she replied.

‘I have something to tell you,' she said when they had settled themselves comfortably in accommodating mock-leather armchairs and been joined, unaccountably, by one of the Pueblo's mountain dogs, a shaggy monster with a bell at his neck, who answered to the name of Max. Inside was almost snug. Outside the wind was gathering and it felt unseasonably cold enough for snow. ‘You are interested in Mr Trubshawe and his mushrooms?' she said, in a matter of fact sort of way.

She wore tortoiseshell spectacles and had no discernible cheek bones. Bognor liked her. She was the only Spanish woman he had ever seen wearing a cardigan.