Poison At The Pueblo (5 page)

It wasn't just his feet that were good for his age, he reflected. He was in almost every respect a great advertisement for a certain sort of unfashionable British way of life. Critics might deride this as lethargic and self-indulgent, but as far as he was concerned it had to do with learning to pace yourself, knowing your limitations and, above all, getting your priorities right. And now look at him: own teeth, own hair – well most of both – own job, own house, own wife and now his very own knighthood. Well there was still some outstanding mortgage, so he supposed that, in a way, the house could be said to belong to the building society; and the job, well, as was the way with jobs, it was, he supposed, on loan. He had made it his own and it would take a big man to fill his shoes, because, frankly, they didn't make them like him any more. As for Monica. Well, yes, she was his original wife but at the same time there was no denying that she was her own woman as well. If she warned him about snoring then the warning should be heeded. Even as he thought this dangerous thought, his wife let out a restrained, almost sibilant, sound, which, while ladylike, was nonetheless a snore. He smiled. One day he would tell her that she too snored. For now, however, he did not dare.

He turned out the light and took off everything except his tartan boxer shorts bought for him by Monica, probably in an Oxfam charity shop – though she had hotly denied the imputation when he first made it. Other knights would have monogrammed knickers from a little place in Jermyn Street but that had never, he reflected, been the Bognor style.

He lay awake on his back for a few moments, reflecting. This was one of life's little luxuries. He liked to lie awake for a while with nothing to disturb him save the regular not-quite-snoring of his wife and the occasional gear-change from the road outside, often raspingly ill-executed. It provided him with a rare moment for contemplation and self-evaluation. Now that he was nearing retirement and had reached a certain age, he found himself increasingly worrying about whether or not he had achieved his aims; whether he had been a success or a failure.

On balance, he supposed, you would have to acknowledge a modest success, even though he was the first to acknowledge that judgements on these matters were subjective and relative. He had got off to a good start with the infamous business of the decadent monastics at Beaubridge Friary and their flagrant manipulation of the export trade in honey; then there had been the Stately Home Industry, and the blowing up in his steam pinnace of the nautical museum pioneer Viscount Abney. He had been involved with the dog-breeding business and the wretched stabbing of the Samuel Pepys diarist, St John Derby, in the old, unreformed, alcohol-fuelled manually typewritten world of hard-metal Fleet Street. Oxford, of course. The murder of the Master of Apocrypha, not to mention the demise of Escoffier Smith, chef-patron of the Dour Dragoon in East Sheen. It was quite a litany and even included a railway murder in the UK and another in Canada, not to mention his crucial intervention in the archetypally Thatcherite world of provincial town politics at Scarpington and the ersatz English village with the real tennis-playing Maharishi and his followers. Oh, and that pornographic publisher, the boss of Big Books plc, crushed to death between the shelves of his blue basement library. He sighed reflectively. Life recently had gone rather quiet, but in those first two decades at the Board of Trade he had experienced enough excitement for several lives of special investigation.

His activities had tended towards the reactive rather than proactive, but that was in his nature. He was not the sort of investigator who went looking for trouble. Not like a few he could mention: self-important sleuths who were always sticking their noses into other people's business, where they were neither wanted nor needed. That was not his style. He did, on the whole, as he was told.

Now, however, there was no one to tell him what to do except for himself. He had become the man in charge. It was what happened in life. Buggins's turn. Someone had once told him who the original Buggins was supposed to be but he had forgotten, and now that he himself had become the latest in the line it really couldn't matter less who had originated the practice.

He smiled. Buggins the worm that turned. That was who he had become, and one or two people in and around Whitehall were in for a shock. He was fed up with keeping his nose clean and being a safe pair of hands who never went out on a limb of any kind. Now, in the twilight of his career, he was determined to become a loose cannon, a bull in a china shop. No longer good old Bognor who could be relied on to do the decent thing but dangerous Sir Simon, the unpredictable tilter at windmills. Don Quixote. And how apposite, therefore, that he should start this new quixotic period in his life with a trip to Spain to investigate the death of the man who was Trubshawe.

Bognor had first visited Spain when he was a student. He had hitch-hiked with a friend and found a country still shocked by civil war and governed by a fascist dictator. It was cheap but depressed. Most men over the age of thirty seemed to have a limb missing; most women wore shapeless black, as unflattering and unrevealing as the Moslem garb which caused such problems in later years. The Guardia Civil in their sinister black tricorne hats lingered on every street corner. Bognor and his friend ate flat bread, fruit and tortillas and drank rough red wine sometimes with
gaseosa
. Occasionally they drank brandy, which was even rougher than the wine. Food, drink and accommodation was cheap and basic. The country felt backward and insular and utterly foreign. Bognor spoke no Spanish.

Over the years he kept going back. At first he went with a variety of friends, latterly with Monica. He tried the bullfight, but was no Hemingway and proved more squeamish than his girlfriend, later wife. He found Goya and Velasquez more to his taste and enjoyed classical guitar. Flamenco was only a spectator sport if that. He had not yet made it to El Bulli, and although it was on his horizon it was a murky prospect and not one which he held out a serious hope of attaining.

Those middle years had been something of a disappointment. Since the Scarpington Case, which he had thought rather a triumph, he had been reduced largely to desk-driving around the corridors of power. He supposed that Scarpington had ruffled feathers in the sense that he had stepped marginally out of line, questioned conventions, set truth above morality and decency above expediency. These were not what was expected in the Civil Service.

He should not, of course, have entered the Board of Trade in the first place. It was the man in the mac who done it. Latterly, Bognor had come to think of the mac as dirty, as well as belted and broad-shouldered and wide-revered. In truth it was probably none of these things, just a middle-aged romanticism about Humphrey Bogart and Raymond Chandler. Maybe the man who had come down to Oxford on the recruiting drive had not worn a mac, but he certainly nodded and winked and told Bognor that there was, ahem, another branch of the Board of Trade, and, er, well, nudge, nudge, wink, wink, er . . . well, maybe Bognor might be interested in that. And Bognor being curious as well as indolent had said that, in that case, maybe he should have a think about it and the rest had been sort of, in a manner of speaking, up to a point, well . . . history.

He smiled again, pondered turning over, embracing his snoring wife, but thought better of all these things and remained flat on his back staring at the ceiling, looking back on life as he knew it. Such introspection was commonplace – at least among thinking people, and especially so when they had been educated at aspirational institutions. It had been dinned in to him at both school and university that one was expected to sew talent and instruction wisely, to work assiduously, take one's chances and to make at least the equivalent of brigadier. Bognor's background and upbringing were solidly middle class. They were not absolutely top drawer, so nobody ever expected Nobel Prizes or even a Booker or, God help him, a Crime Writers' Association Golden Dagger. However, he had at least lived up to expectations and, with the new knighthood, exceeded them. Very few from his school, and comparatively few from his college, could boast a handle to their name.

And now that he had come up to scratch, and even beyond, he was going to allow himself the luxury of risk and the indulgence of his conscience. He had left this late and it was typical of him that he should only put his head above the parapet when there was little or no danger of being shot at. He was all for safety first and a quiet life, or had been for much of it. Now, at last, he was going to surprise people – even, he turned to stare through the gloom at his sleeping wife . . . even Monica.

Playing safe. He rolled the words round his mouth and savoured them. He was not a natural risk taker. Never had been, except perhaps on that one fateful occasion all those years ago when he had opted for the Special Investigation Department of the Board of Trade. Everyone he knew advised against it. Teaching, banking, even accountancy would have been sound, respectable and dull. Any of those would have paid the mortgage and kept him off the streets. He could have written poetry on the side. Or painted watercolours. Anything approaching danger could have been ring-fenced as a hobby which carried little or no financial implication. Instead he chose uncharted territory and entered special investigation, which sounded edgy and interesting, even if it was conducted for the staid old Board of Trade.

He sighed. Time to sleep, perchance to dream. Now, in the twilight of his career, he was going to surprise everyone, including himself. He was going to upset apple-carts and prime ministers, and having exceeded all expectations, most notably those of his former teachers and tutors, he was going to do all the things and take all the risks he would have liked to have done in the years of safety-first. At last he was taking the brakes off, changing gears and beginning to fire on all cylinders. Beginning with a visit to Spain.

He turned over, planted a kiss on the brow of his sleeping wife, and in a moment, had joined her in deep, noisy, but, alas, dreamless, sleep.

SIX

S
ir Simon and Lady Bognor prepared for departure in a VIP lounge and travelled Club. Harvey Contractor took his chances in the terminal-at-large and flew at the back of the bus. This was, thought Bognor, only right. Time would come, and come faster than he would like, when he and his lady would be pensioners paying for themselves and relegated to below the salt, while Contractor took his turn at the high table and had legroom and sparkling wine. This was the way of the world.

Despite this discrimination they all had to pass through the same security checks and even Sir Simon had to remove his shoes and put them in a plastic box for inspection. Knowing something about security he recognized the rigmarole for the farce it actually was and accepted the fact that if a determined and professional bomber wished to destroy an aeroplane he would manage to do so no matter how many passengers removed their shoes. Nevertheless, it presumably made some people feel good and enabled various politicians to claim that they were doing their jobs. A life in Whitehall had made him intensely sceptical of politicians with their transitory ambitions and pretensions. He also believed that any old crook could make a nonsense of bureaucratic pretensions such as security and passport control. The man called Trubshawe was a case in point.

The flight was short and uneventful. Bognor read the
Spectator
which took a lot less time than it used to, but more or less, sort of, occupied his thoughts for the two or so hours in which they were airborne. Some of his thoughts, however, were on the job in hand. It was not difficult to think two thoughts at once, particularly when one line was provoked by a particular bevy of regular contributors for whom he had only the most perfunctory respect. Even so, he was mildly shocked to discover that he had seemingly managed to read through a page and a half of Rod Liddle while devoting his mind entirely to Trubshawe and his cohorts on the Costas.

It would be good to see Juan again. They had last met at an international conference on carcinogens in processed food which had been held in Helsinki two years earlier. Picasso and Bognor had enjoyed a substantial dinner of minced elk and herring lubricated with akvavit and Pilsner. They had talked about art and football and life. The old Admiral held political attitudes to the right of the former caudillo and made no secret of the fact that he would have liked Franco or a lookalike to continue in unchallenged office for ever and a day. Bognor, by contrast, regarded himself as a man of the enlightened centre-left. Despite this, the two men seemed to have much in common; being essentially civilized, cultivated men who enjoyed reading books, listening to classical music, eating good food and drinking good wine. The minced elk and herring and the raw spirits and icy beer didn't really come into that category, but they were both reasonably gastronomically adventurous, as well as having a relaxed and non-judgemental attitude to life and their fellow man.

‘Live and let live,' Bognor had said, a touch woozily, as he raised his schnapps shot in the general direction of his friend, the retired Admiral. The ‘Admiral' title which preceded Picasso's name was something of a mystery and he never mentioned the sea or ships. Bognor wondered vaguely if it was an honorific title which went with the job, so that the head of trade investigations at the Guardia Civil was always called ‘Admiral' in the same way that the boss of Scotland Yard Social was always called ‘ffiennes', or a certain sort of old-fashioned nanny was commonly designated ‘Mrs' as a concession to her status, whether she was married or not.

Madrid airport had been ‘improved' since Bognor was last in Spain. A modern architect of the Rogers-Grimshaw school had obviously been at work, so the place was now enormous, took a long time to walk through and had not a straight line in sight.

Harvey Contractor joined them at the carousel and Bognor noticed a striking blonde of a certain age and confident, mature allure wander off to the toilets. She was wearing a politically incorrect coat. Real fur, Lady Bognor declared. A few minutes later she was back, pouting a little obviously, at the emerging suitcases. She was wearing a figure-hugging black trouser suit and jangly rocks. The fur coat had vanished. Bognor frowned and pondered. It was definitely suspicious and the woman had all the appearance of a high-class courtesan involved in some sort of smuggling scam. At the end of the day, however, it was none of his business. He decided to say nothing, just waited for the luggage to appear, wheeled it away with his wife, smiled at the customs officials and at the driver sent to greet them by Admiral Picasso.