Poison At The Pueblo (23 page)

These and other thoughts raced through his mind in the immediate aftermath of the chorizos' learned presentation. He had to concede that at the end of this speed-thinking he was no nearer solving the mystery of Trubshawe's death. Did it matter if the murder had been disguised through facile chicanery, otherwise known as ‘spin', or the piling on each other of impressive and erudite ‘facts' masquerading under the guise of ‘wisdom'.

Perhaps it didn't matter. What really mattered was ‘who pulled the strings?'

In the case of his own team this was debatable. He and George had acted rather like divine clockmakers. They had wound up Lola and Belen, and set them in motion. Then, having to employ the old firework blurb-writer's phrase, they lit the blue touchpaper and retired to a discreet distance to await developments.

So he and George had pulled the strings. That's how it seemed to outsiders but not to those more closely involved. He guessed it was the same with the other team. The methodology, in so far as there was one, was to let the Spanish-speakers front up.

He sighed. He was investigating a murder which looked like a murder when he first became aware of it. He now realized that there was a school of thought which suggested that the death was due to natural causes. Rats! Jimmy Trubshawe was an accident waiting to happen and happen he did. Shades of Bob Woolmer the unfortunate English-born, South African domiciled Pakistan cricket coach who had keeled over in his hotel room during a World Cup in the West Indies. Murder, murder, chorused the world's press. They were echoed by each other, by the local police and by many of the cricketing fraternity. Senior officers delivered pompous speeches, but then doubts began to be expressed; pathologists appeared to backtrack; autopsies seemed less certain and the world's press and the senior policemen had second thoughts.

Thus, Bognor. It happened. Conclusions unanimously jumped at could just as summarily be repudiated. Conspiracy theory turned into cock-up overnight.

And yet. There was Camilla. There was Eduardo. They would do for a start. Between them they had as much as confessed to the killing of Trubshawe, even if it was a murder they were unlikely to admit in open court. They had as good as confessed to Bognor while warning him off. If they were to be believed, they were acting on behalf of the British Security Services. Theirs was a branch which, given conflict, would result in Bognor's fiefdom being outranked and overruled. That was the way of the world. Murder was committed by the state. But because Britain was supposedly a democracy and therefore more susceptible to public opinion and press enquiry than dictatorships, the killing would be obfuscated. It would not make it less of a murder but it would be disguised and denied until, murder or not, it would become no more than an accident. That was the way life and death worked in the upper echelons of life.

Perhaps he had been wrong to infiltrate himself into this world in an unofficial capacity. It was one thing to stride in wearing a uniform and carrying a warrant, a swagger-stick and all the apparatus of authority. Quite another to proceed incognito, especially in a foreign land.

But maybe he was just past it. He was about to do the inward groan routine but thought better of it and smiled instead.

He was investigating a murder. He was doing it his own way. He would get there in the end.

These were articles of self-belief. Being right was a mantra and in the past it had never failed.

The debrief was like most debriefs. It felt authoritative and final, yet actually achieved little or nothing. It was conducted by Arizona Brown at her most schoolmistressy with Felipe Lee in the supporting role. Inconclusive though it was in deciding whether the traditional British sausage was a better buy or bet than the more charismatic cutting-edge Iberian chorizo, it was equally useless in establishing which of the two teams had made the better fist of making their case. As a teaching exercise it was fine, but in terms of the ostensible reason for the contest it was a waste of space.

Bognor, of course, had his own unique terms of reference. As far as he was concerned everyone on display was a suspect and that included Arizona and Felipe. He was aware – painfully so, to coin a cliché – that the suspects, or at least a majority of them, were aware of his special interest. He wasn't sure, however, whether this awareness put them higher or lower on his list of suspects.

Take Arizona Brown. She was a professional. She was good at her job. She was stunning to look at and had a personality to match. She had the intelligence and the opportunity to kill Trubshawe, but there was no evidence against her and – even more important in Bognor's estimation – absolutely no known motive. She had half-sussed Bognor, but there was no way in which it could be said to have rendered her a murderer. So she was low on his list of suspects.

So too was Felipe Lee. Bognor judged that employees of the Pueblo organization made unlikely suspects when one was mainly concerned with motivation. Why should the employee of an avant-garde language school wish to murder Jimmy Trubshawe? Sure, the inside knowledge, and therefore the opportunity, would be that much greater, but it seemed inherently unlikely that Arizona or Felipe would have any reason for doing in Trubshawe. Even if they did, why wait until he enrolled on a Pueblo course. Much easier to nip down to Jimmy's home on the Costa and murder him down there with a wad of easily procured and operated plastic explosive. Then you could blame the episode on a botched ETA plot or some misadventure involving so-called ‘organized crime'. Crime, in Bognor's estimation, was seldom particularly well-organized and usually positively
dis
organized, but that was probably irrelevant. He was a cock-up man not a conspiracy theorist. That was the way of his world. Though there was such a thing as a cocked-up conspiracy.

He wondered if Felipe really was descended from Laurie Lee. The Gloucestershire republican had an elegiac way with the English language, a priapic affection for the female half of the Spanish nation but a fickle regard for the truth. He was an unreliable witness and an uncertain ancestor. Whether or not Felipe had any English blood in him was of no more consequence than whether or not Arizona was part-Navajo. It might be interesting but it was not germane; it wouldn't stand up in court and a judge would throw it out as irrelevant.

No, the suspects were, as far as he was concerned, the inmates. That meant the four Spaniards and the three Anglos. In the short time he had been at the Pueblo he had made progress, but not as much as he would have wished. He was constrained by his anonymity and the need to preserve pretence. He had assumed that the machinery of the course would dovetail with his own requirements but he was no longer convinced that this was so.

This exercise was designed to elucidate character, forge bonds and create mutual understandings, at least so much as to improve the language skills of the paying participants. It ought therefore to have been a help in solving the crime yet, if anything, it only served to increase his bafflement and his growing concern that the death of Jimmy Trubshawe was more accidental than he had originally supposed. He was reminded, once more, of the strange sad case of Bob Woolmer. The police, including a senior Scotland Yard officer on permanent secondment to the Jamaican force had been adamant. It was murder. And then with the passage of time, and the complete failure to bring charges or to finger a plausible assassin, the case began to look flimsier and flimsier. The dead man looked more and more like someone who had passed away as the result of natural causes.

So perhaps Trubshawe was just another Woolmer: an amazingly suspicious demise that turned into a sadly routine death in which, before too terribly long, all but those most intimately involved lost interest. God knows, in the case of the late Trubshawe there was motive and opportunity all over the place, coupled with the fact that the dead man was, by universal consent, a nasty piece of work. Yet accidents do happen and conceivably this was one of those occasions.

Lola and Belen had done nearly all the talking when it came to defending the banger presentation. Only right. Bognor remained as silent as could be and spent as much time watching the others for signs of criminality. Likewise George. He too said little but Bognor watched him with the same interest.

Lola was an improbable nun and an unlikely agent but then, he reflected, being a nun was inherently unlikely for anyone. Bognor could not, offhand, think of any criminal nuns in fact or fiction, but he could manage a couple of detective nuns: Sister Ursula was the creation of Anthony Boucher, the American writer who gave his name to the annual crime festival. Boucher's nun was notable for her blue eyes which were ‘kind and wise and understanding'. She belonged to an order named after someone named Martha of Bethany. This, like her, was the invention of the author and although Bognor enjoyed the books he didn't believe a word of her. He was also sceptical about Sister Agnes who was the brainchild of a later writer called Alison Joseph. Sister Agnes was highly sexed, had been married to an equally highly sexed man named Bourdillon and came from a convent which had owned a string of Jaguars. Rather like a football team. He wasn't sure that he believed in Sister Lola any more than the sisters Ursula and Agnes, but he had to concede that he didn't really believe in nuns, period. Not helped by the fact that he didn't think he believed in God. If you didn't believe in the Almighty then the rest of the apparatus became a touch problematic. We only, he conceded, had Sister Lola's word for her nunnishness and, even though she made a better fist of her calling than Ursula and Agnes, Bognor remained essentially unconvinced.

Being a dubious Poor Clare did not, however, turn her into a murderer. Bognor understood this rationally but there was a visceral part of him that was not so sure. A bad nun was unlikely to be a killer in bald statistical terms but he felt uneasy with Lola's obvious other-worldliness. It suggested deception, and deception was sort of synonymous with dishonesty. A counterfeit nun could easily be a crook. Likewise a counterfeit agent. On the other hand, she had no discernible motive for murdering Trubshawe. Forced to concede reality, however, Bognor had to admit that he knew so little about Lola that he had no idea whether or not she was even likely to have a motive. Like everyone else at the Pueblo she might or might not be play-acting. She might be a flirty new-age nun. Or not. The plain fact was that he didn't know. His ignorance was virtually total.

It was the same with Belen. Her persona was less preposterous and more plausible than that of Lola, but at the end of the day he and the others only had her word for who she was. She fitted the image of export manager for a small group of upmarket boutique hotels, although Bognor had never previously encountered such an animal and was forced to concede that his images were based on information which was at best vicarious and at worst false. Belen might perfectly well have been a middle to high-ranking hotel person, but she might not have been. She gave the impression of knowing her mushrooms, as indeed did Lola, but that didn't mean that either woman would have fixed Jimmy Trubshawe's starter.

Belen did not so much play second fiddle to Lola as play demure to her raunchy. The terms were relative but the one seemed relatively flamboyant and the other coy by comparison. Arizona who took the lead when it came to interrogation seemed, to Bognor, to be noticeably soft on both. It struck him that it was a girlie conspiracy and he wondered, briefly, whether Trubshawe's death had a sexual element. He suspected not. Even if Trubshawe had once been a sexual animal, probably of a crude and voracious bent, he had almost certainly been past it by the time he came to his sticky end. He gave the impression of a man who usually paid for his pleasure.

The American seemed tougher on the chorizos and Bognor wondered whether this was because their spokespeople were blokes. Eduardo and Leonel were far from being bling and tattoo-covered football fans in the manner of George and Jimmy, at least in their younger days. They were smooth in a languid Hispanic manner that was desperately old-fashioned and incorrect in British terms. Even new Tories such as privately educated Bullingdon Club-belonging Cameron, Osborne and Johnson affected a sort of man-in-the-street, next-door-neighbour style which was designed to disguise their toffy tendency. They would recoil from being thought of as ‘gentlemen' with the languid, soft charm that the word suggested. Yet that was the sort of person that Eduardo and Leonel appeared to be. In criminal terms they belonged to the amateur-sleuth golden age of Lord Peter Wimsey, Roderick Alleyne and Albert Campion. They gave the impression of being able to recite Shakespeare and deferring to their grannies. If a woman came into their room they would have opened the door to her, whereas a George or a Jimmy would have slammed it in her face. Men like Trubshawe created glass ceilings and sat on them; the Leonels and Eduardos would never have been so crude. Arizona probably sussed their ersatz feminism for the sham it almost certainly was.

Bognor took a virtual back seat along with the other Anglos. They too had got the message, and even if they hadn't Arizona and Felipe made sure that the only people who really participated in the discussion were the Spaniards. The programme was not designed for English speakers. They were part of it, but as aids not beneficiaries. On the other hand, Bognor did not regard the Hispanics as prime suspects and he therefore allowed his attention to wander.

It wandered inevitably to Camilla, the belle of Byron Bay; the puppeteer who by her own admission was running Eduardo, the smooth Paco Peña enthusiast who aspired to being Spain's Stavros Niarchos. She had, in effect, admitted her guilt, disguising it under the dodgy pretext of ‘only obeying orders'.

He was glad, on the whole, that he had not been recruited into the mainstream Security Services, but had ended in the relatively arcane Special Investigations Department of the Board of Trade. Funny how life panned out. It wouldn't have been like that if he had fetched up in Five or Six. He'd be dead by now. Or ‘sleeping' in Byron Bay, like Camilla.