Poison At The Pueblo (7 page)

‘Nothing to do with me,' said Bognor almost involuntarily. ‘I want to see villains brought to justice, and the man called Trubshawe was a villain or he was nothing. Unfortunately, in the real world which we inhabit being a villain is no sort of handicap. On the contrary – it can seem a positive advantage.'

‘Quite so,' said Picasso. ‘The villain should be punished. Exterminated, if possible.'

Bognor nodded. This didn't imply agreement, merely that he had taken on board what the Admiral thought.

The Bognors – Sir Simon and Her Ladyship – did a tapas crawl that evening. The highlight was hake's cheek in a vanilla froth. A Blumenthal-Bulli derivative. Actually, both Bognors preferred straightforward olives or chorizo. There was a lot of fish cheek and froth in modern Spanish cooking, a symbol of the Madrileño metamorphosis. Bognor would never have thought during his first visits to the peninsula, in the days of the caudillo, that Spain would ever be at the cutting edge of anything, let alone gastronomy. Now she was a world leader in Michelin stardom. Not to mention one of the world's leading havens for professional villains, especially British. Odd that. Not that the two were remotely connected. Far from it. Sir Simon chewed on a pinkly white tentacle of octopus and permitted himself a thin smirk.

‘I'm getting cold,' said his wife, pulling her stole about her shoulders. ‘I think we should find an indoors with acceptable scoff.'

He nodded. The atmosphere was suddenly chilly and darkness had fallen surprisingly fast. The city which minutes before had displayed an autumnal alfresco façade had gone wintery. The chairs in the plazas and on the pavements were being scooped and stacked; cigarettes were stubbed and blue smoke moved into crowded, panelled bars and cafés. Spaniards not only still smoked but their women wore fur. They still took long siestas and killed bulls. Despite its changes, the country was the most resolutely foreign in Europe. It was very deliberately and self-consciously its own place, resistant to outside influence, especially Anglo-American.

‘I don't see Trubshawe enjoying this sort of Spain,' said Bognor. ‘More of a Costa sort of person. Pubs with beams; chips with everything; HP sauce.'

‘You're probably right,' said his wife. ‘You and Trubshawe go back a long way. And you've always been close to his tribe.'

‘Trubshawe's tribe,' said Bognor reflectively. ‘Bit snobbish to think of the deceased's acolytes in quite that way. But inevitable all the same. I don't think of myself as snobbish but I would agree to “old-fashioned”.'

‘Same thing,' said Monica crisply and probably accurately. ‘Old-fashioned people from your background and with your education are invariably snobbish. It goes with the territory, along with a plummy voice, striped ties and tweeds.'

‘I don't do tweeds,' her husband protested.

‘I speak figuratively not literally,' said Monica, ‘you should know that by now. In a figurative sense you are tweedy man with a plummy voice and striped ties. You are also a snob. You can't help it. It's part of your conditioning. And it's why you're automatically suspicious of the world's Trubshawes – social condescension.'

‘Whereas you . . .'

She did not allow him to finish the sentence, performing the task herself.

‘Am inherently less prejudiced and more open-minded. Mainly because I'm a woman. We as a sex are like that. Men have closed minds, even though they are open books. A paradox but easy to understand – at least if you're a woman. Men don't read each other.'

‘I think we should move,' he said, conscious of the chill and hoping to humour his truculent spouse.

She, on the other hand, was no longer feeling the cold but was warmed up by the combustible nature of her verbosity.

‘I almost feel sorry for Trubshawe,' she said. ‘He doesn't hold his knife and fork the way you do, so you pick on him and categorize him as a villain. You think he looks and behaves like a crook, ergo he is a crook. QED.'

‘Don't be ridiculous,' he said. ‘Some of my best friends don't know how to hold their knife and fork but they're not crooks. Trubshawe was a crook, end of story. He had a gang, hired killers, pimps, dealers. He was the ultimate bad hat. He had people killed, for God's sake, women raped. You name it, he did it.'

‘His real crime in your eyes was that he came from below the salt,' she said. ‘He wore brown shoes with a dark suit, dropped his aitches, wasn't one of “you”.'

‘I never subscribed to that tosh about brown shoes and grey trousers,' responded Bognor, ‘and the one thing Trubshawe never dropped were his aitches. I didn't like him because he was an antisocial bastard and his subordinates and colleagues were the same sorts of shit. I'm in business to eliminate that sort of behaviour and the most effective way of doing that is to get rid of the perpetrators.'

‘You just want to get rid of people with bad table manners and no dress sense. Or to be really accurate, people with different manners and a different sense of what to wear from the one you have. Wearing socks with sandals doesn't necessarily make a man a murderer.'

‘I wouldn't be so sure of that,' Bognor sniffed, half-joking, half-conceding that perhaps his wife might have a point.

They both shivered involuntarily. Stars twinkled above them. In the shadows of a dark cobbled alley two dogs sniffed each other hopefully; a corrugated metal shutter rattled down to obscure a shop window. A Vespa farted. Sir Simon and Lady Bognor pushed back their plastic chairs which rasped on the ground. Man and wife stood ready for the next round.

‘Becoming old makes a man seem reactionary,' he said, ‘it doesn't mean that he
is
fuddy-duddy or old-fashioned. He just seems like it to those younger than himself.'

‘And maybe to those who know him best.'

They thought about this in silence. Their marriage was a long one now, childless and sometimes compartmetalized, but by and large successful. It was true that she knew him better than anyone and the reverse was true, too, though her husband's knowledge of her was less obvious to those outside their long, close and, in its strange way, loving relationship. He knew that he was snobbish even though he tried not to let the fact rule his life. She knew even better than he did, but she also recognized that he tried to sublimate the feeling. After most of their adult life together they recognized each other's shortcomings, had even come to cherish them, much as, despite everything, they cherished each other.

EIGHT

B
ognor ordered two glasses of cava from the Polish girl with the pink-streaked hair. The wine was a crisp, dry Summarocca from south-west of Barcelona. The girl was a crisp, dry PhD student from the University of Cracow. Sir Simon sampled the former languidly and smiled approvingly at the latter. He fancied himself as a connoisseur of wine and women, though he was circumspect about both. He did not wish to seem snobbish or pretentious about the booze. Let alone drunk. Nor too interested in sex. A studied indifference on both counts played well at home. Monica was both suspicious and censorious of anything else. He had learned to appear nonchalant.

‘Changed, hasn't it?' she ventured, when the wine came.

‘Madrid?' he countered, trying not to sound defensive. He suspected she meant something quite different.

She did.

‘Life,' she said. ‘I meant that life has changed. Madrid, too, but not as fundamentally. And Madrid has improved even while the basics are still there. She's sexier, more stylish, but deep down there's still something much more elemental than cold-blooded northern Europeans can do. At least in public. But I'm not so sure about life. Seems to me it's nastier and more brutish than it used to be.'

‘Not shorter though,' said Bognor. ‘A generation ago, we'd be dead.' He smiled but inwardly cringed. He wasn't convinced he was in the mood for a serious discussion about life. Jet lag, booze, age, excitement – all conspired to put him in the mood for more ephemeral natter.

Monica, however, had the bit between her teeth.

‘Your job for instance,' she said. ‘It's not the same as when you started.'

‘Of course not,' he agreed. ‘I'm in charge now. I write the script. In the old days I did as I was told. By Parkinson.'

‘And everyone else.'

‘That's a bit harsh.' He stared at the bead in his glass and watched the bubbles rise to the surface before vanishing as mysteriously as they had arrived. The bubbles suddenly seemed like a metaphor for life – coming from nowhere, departing to nowhere and dancing inconsequentially through elusive liquid in the interim. ‘I like to think I called a few shots,' he protested, ‘even when I was wet behind the ears.'

‘In your dreams,' said his wife, smiling at her glass. ‘You've always been a pushover. Especially when it comes to the crunch.'

‘That's not fair either,' he said. ‘I can be pretty bloody steely when the chips are down. I wouldn't mess with me. Especially when the cookie crumbles.'

Lady Bognor laughed and swallowed. ‘Darling, I wouldn't have married you if you weren't you,' she said, ‘and you've done frightfully well at whatever it is that you do. But don't let's kid ourselves about writing our own scripts. I don't think any of us deliver our own lines, as a matter of fact. And the worst self-delusion is believing that you do. Yet another of God's jokes.'

Bognor was irrationally irritated by this sally, not least because both he and Monica had always been determinedly agnostic. Both of them agreed that in the unlikely event that the Almighty did exist, he was a nasty piece of work with a warped sense of humour.

‘Whoever's writing the stuff has given me a gong, a great salary, a fantastic index-linked pension and,' here he smiled at her not entirely convincingly, ‘you, my little cauliflower.'

‘Don't you “cauliflower” me,' she said. ‘I'm being serious. When you started out on your journey through adult life the world was a more gentle, civilized place.'

Simon thought about this for a moment.

‘I don't know,' he said. ‘There was a veneer of civilization, a gloss of gentility, but it was skin-deep. There were a lot of knives around. Life was a pretty cut-throat business. It was just that chaps felt the need to apologize before placing the stiletto between your ribs. There was a premium on politeness.'

‘When did you last sit in on an autopsy?'

Bognor bridled once more.

‘I have never in my life attended an autopsy,' he said, ‘you know that perfectly well.'

‘You wouldn't know one end of a cadaver from another,' she said, ‘whereas all the smart young things in your department spend hours in the morgue watching stiffs being dissected. Even Harvey Contractor.'

‘Yes,' said Bognor, ‘well.'

What his wife said was perfectly true. He would have to think about it. The girl with the pink-streaked hair came and asked them in perfect, though huskily accented, English if they were ready to order yet. Bognor asked for another five minutes and the girl dimpled at him. Monica looked mildly put out.

‘You don't have to hang around dead bodies to find out what made them dead,' he said, sounding pompous and not entirely sure whether or not he believed what he was saying.

‘You've built an entire career round death,' she said, ‘but ultimately you're pathetically squeamish. You don't do blood and guts.'

‘I should think bloody well not,' he said, ‘blood and guts are for forensics. I'm about cause and effect, not body parts on slabs.'

‘Your very first death,' she said, ‘that poor colleague of yours who was garrotted with his crucifix in the potato patch at Beaubridge Friary. Did you ever check the body?'

‘Of course not,' he said. ‘Not my department. We employ people to do that sort of thing: boffins, scientists, doctors, pathologists. Chaps with white coats and rubber gloves. They present their reports and we decide what to do next. That's the way it is.'

‘
Was
,' she said, loudly. ‘
Was.
It isn't like that any longer. Or hadn't you noticed?'

‘I don't know what you're talking about.' He did, but he was not in the mood to admit it. Deep down, he acknowledged that everything had suddenly become different. Even Harvey Contractor did autopsies. He had become the last of a breed. A deskbound dinosaur without realizing it.

‘You know perfectly well what I'm talking about. If that wretched colleague of yours had been strangled now, the equivalent of you would have been in the morgue or the dissecting room with a white coat, plastic gloves and a surgical mask making a first-hand note of every contusion and weal on the body.'

‘Wouldn't have made a blind bit of difference,' he said. ‘I'd have got in the way and I wouldn't have known what on earth was going on. Much better to wait for the pathologist's report and then apply one's particular skill to that. I have no skills when it comes to cadavers, as you so quaintly call them. That's a different area of expertise.'

‘You're saying the old ways were better?'

He didn't care for his wife when she was in one of these moods. The Polish girl came with chorizo and calamari with crusty bread and olives. The Bognors eyed them thoughtfully.

‘If you put it like that, then I suppose so, yes.'

‘So,' she said, triumphantly spearing an olive with a toothpick. ‘You admit it.'

‘Admit what?'

‘That there's an old way and a new way of doing things.'

‘I didn't say that.'

‘You did actually.'

Bognor was about to argue, but thought better of it and took his own olive instead. He used his fingers and not a toothpick.

‘I simply don't see the point,' he said, very deliberately, ‘of crashing in where angels fear to tread, if you follow my drift. Bones and hacksaws just aren't my thing. I do motivation, trade gaps, political intrigue, zeitgeists, grown-up stuff.'