Poison At The Pueblo (21 page)

‘Not specially,' he said, silently cursing. ‘I didn't know poor Mr Trubshawe and I'm sort of, er, neutral, when it comes to mushrooms. I mean, I'll eat them when offered but I wouldn't go out of my way to dig them up. Or whatever you do with them. I wonder if you could bandicoot them? Old Australian word. It means stealing vegetables, especially by cutting off the edible roots of things like carrots and parsnips, leaving the green tufty fronds still showing on the surface. So the warders don't know the veggies have gone missing. To bandicoot . . . To steal vegetables while pretending not to.' He smiled, feeling like the late Frank Muir on a good night but realizing that he had been impossibly colloquial.

‘The night of Mr Trubshawe's death,' said Belen, ploughing on and paying no attention to his effusions, ‘I saw two people returning from their walk with mushrooms. Wild mushrooms which they had gathered in the woods.'

Bognor was interested. Of course he was. This sounded suspiciously like a clue. On the other hand he had to remember that he was not supposed to be here in any kind of official capacity, far less as the recently knighted boss of SIDBOT.

‘What makes you think I'm interested in mushrooms?'

Belen didn't reply, simply looked at him as if to say he simply couldn't be as idiotic as the remark made him seem to her. She was not a successful export manager for a hotel chain without reason.

‘Tracey and Leonel had been for a walk. They came back with mushrooms. Many mushrooms. I passed them outside the main building after I had finished my own walk with Trubshawe himself.'

‘You were out walking with Trubshawe the afternoon before he died?'

‘Yes,' she agreed, ‘but that is not important.'

‘How did he seem?' Bognor wanted to know.

She wanted to tell him about Tracey and Leonel and their mushrooms. Her walk with Trubshawe did not seem relevant. Bognor himself did not agree.

‘He seemed very typical. Very British. Very like George. Not nice.'

‘How so?'

‘Arrogant. Smug. Opinionated. Not interested in other people. Particularly if they were women. No good at listening, only in expressing his own views. He was a typical of a certain sort of English person. George is the same. I hope that you are not like that.'

‘I hope not, too.' Bognor spoke with feeling. He suffered, he knew, from seeming to strangers to be a particular sort of person which he believed, emphatically, he was not. Among other things he believed was that he was the last of the Great Detectives. This, he knew, wasn't a view widely shared. At such moments of outsider doubt he reminded himself of the words of wisdom once spoken by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. These were to the effect that there was no point in spending one's life worrying about the contrary opinions of fools and dolts; one simply had to bash on regardless, recognizing the fact that almost the whole of the rest of the world was out of step.

‘Tell me though,' he asked, ‘how well did you know Trubshawe?'

‘I had only recently met him,' she answered.

‘What, here?'

‘Of course,' she said. ‘He lived in a part of Spain to which proper Spaniards never go. It was somewhere near Malaga, I believe. Or maybe not. It was an enclave such as Gibraltar. More British than Britain, even though technically a part of Spain.'

‘Like Ceuta and Melilla in North Africa,' said Bognor waspishly.

‘Ceuta and Melilla are different,' she said.

Bognor said he couldn't agree, and that both Spanish enclaves were at least as much a part of Morocco, as Gibraltar was of Spain. He had rather a soft spot for Gibraltar despite its peculiarly old-fashioned British culture. The last refuge for once popular brands of tinned milk and for Conservative politicians totally unknown to a British audience but who were household names on the Rock. It was a perverse sort of place and Bognor rather enjoyed that.

‘In any case,' she said, with spirit, ‘Mr Trubshawe was, as you would say, a “nasty piece of work”, but it is not right that he is dead. Also, I believe that he was killed and that it was not an accident. And I believe that your sudden arrival is somehow connected. Which is why I am telling you this thing.'

‘Your English is excellent,' he said, more or less sincerely.

‘Flattery, Mr Bognor, will, as I believe you say in your country, get you nowhere.'

‘Well, actually,' Bognor demurred, ‘it's not flattery, but I see that your personal approval of Jimmy Trubshawe is neither here nor there. As, again, we say back home.'

She nodded.

‘The mushrooms,' she said, ‘I believe it may be important. I have seen the woman Tracey, the hairdresser from England, returning with Leonel, who is the maker of food for dogs and cats. They had been walking according to the programme and they had returned with the mushrooms.'

‘What sort of mushrooms?' he wanted to know. It seemed perfectly relevant, if not entirely reasonable, but she replied that she was no sort of expert on fungi, however, she had observed that the two conversationalists had been picking them and doing so, presumably, for a purpose. When mushrooms turned up on that evening's menu she assumed, not unreasonably, that there was a connection between what she had seen in the afternoon and what appeared on the dinner table a few hours later. Then, when Trubshawe left in a hurry and never came back, she had made another and more sinister connection.

‘But you know nothing about mushrooms,' said Bognor, ‘and, come to that, nothing about Tracey and Leonel.'

She thought for a moment.

‘That is true,' she said.

‘Why should I believe you?' he asked.

‘Why should I not tell you the truth?' she replied.

Bognor considered this. Eventually, he said, ‘If, for some reason, you wanted to suggest that Tracey and Leonel were in some way responsible for the death of Mr Trubshawe, and if, for some improbable reason, you assumed that I was in some way connected with solving the puzzle, then it would be logical for you to seek to sow suspicion. And this would be an effective and plausible way of doing so.'

It was her turn to think.

‘I agree,' she said, after considering the matter.

‘I suppose it would make sense for me to ask Tracey and Leonel for their side of the story. Establish whether or not they picked mushrooms together when they were out for their walk. See if they had any fungal expertise and knew what they were picking. Ascertain all that kind of thing.'

She smiled at him.

‘You would only do that sort of thing if you were in some way involved with the mystery of Mr Trubshawe's death, and in some way supposed that it was not as accidental as we are being told by Arizona and Felipe.'

This was perfectly true and they both recognized it.

‘That's perfectly true,' he agreed. ‘So maybe I won't ask them after all. Just keep the information under my hat.'

‘Hat?' she enquired, and they returned, without conviction, to a conversation more in keeping with the purpose of their presence.

The main course at dinner was either bangers and mash or a
cocido
of chorizos and chick peas with loads of garlic, tomatoes and red wine. The one quintessentially English and the other as exuberantly Spanish. They echoed the current exercise in an appropriate manner and were preceded by a prawn cocktail with a Sauce Marie Rose in the style of the Imperial Hotel, Torquay
c.
1957, and
gambas al ajillo
in the fashion of any tapas bar anywhere.

Bognor sat at the same table with Tracey, the only one of the group he had not previously met. Their Spaniards were Belen, who had stayed at his elbow, and Eduardo, the banana king who knew that he was the man from SIDBOT.

All four of them pursued the Spanish option – even Tracey – who said she was feeling adventurous, and was intending to sleep on her own and was therefore not bothered about eating garlic. The other three laughed nervously when she said this. They presumed it was intended as a joke. It probably was.

Bognor prodded his prawns with a fork and reflected on the situation morosely. What, in God's name was going on? He was sitting at dinner in an obscure part of Spain eating dinner with a group of complete strangers, one or other of whom might or might have not murdered another complete stranger who was a well-known villain. He, Bognor, was investigating the death on behalf of his government department, not least because the Spanish authorities seemed reluctant to do themselves. He was supposed to be here incommunicado but his cover appeared to be blown. Indeed, the signs were that his government department was at loggerheads with other government departments, if not with government itself.

He passed the pepper absent-mindedly and realized that he was being asked a question. It was from Tracey. She wanted to know where he lived. This was a perfectly reasonable opening gambit. He knew little about Tracey beyond the fact that she sometimes dressed hair in Clacton-on-Sea.

‘London,' he said, without thinking.

‘Oh!' said Tracey, ‘whereabouts in London?'

Bognor said, ‘South-west', which was a tad economical with the truth – he and Monica lived in an apartment with a view of the River Thames that was famous throughout the pictorial world and the building was on Richmond Hill, almost abutting the famous deer park.

If Tracey knew, she wasn't saying. Instead, she said, ‘I'm just an Essex girl. I can do the East End and some of the centre. Don't know the North or West or even the South, much. Been to Greenwich. Had an aunt who lived in Blackheath. Ran a salon there.'

‘Oh,' said Bognor ungraciously. He speared a prawn and chewed it morosely. He wasn't concentrating on anything; was losing his grip. He looked around the room and wondered if, as he rather thought, everybody was looking at him. He felt, more especially after the gunshot that missed, like the next one in the firing line. It reminded him of the memorial service for Parkinson, his former boss, at St Martin-in-the-Fields. He himself had read a lesson – ‘Let us now praise famous men' – which he had thought intensely inappropriate for the head of a supposedly secret branch of a secret service. There in the front row were all the dead man's contemporaries, paying their respects to the deceased, but looking for all the world like the team waiting with their pads on in the dressing room before being called out to bat. You could almost feel them looking around as if to ask apprehensively, ‘Who's next in?'

It was the same here. Everyone knew that Trubshawe had been cut down by the Grim Reaper not long before and they were all, very politely, wondering who might be the next on the death list. Actually, correction, he thought with only a slight frisson of concern, they were not wondering who would be the next, they were assuming as a matter of certainty that he, Bognor, would be the next corpse. He would be the next one to partake of a fatal mushroom and be carried out feet first.

Funny thing, death. Here today, gone tomorrow. He hated that piece which everyone read at memorial services these days: a pathetic piece of sentimental whimsy by some Canon Worral-Thompson or Scott-Moncrieff, or some such double-barrelled moniker, about cheer-up, chaps, I'm not really dead at all but gone into the next room; all a bit of a jolly jape, don't you know. We'll all wake up in a moment and realize that death has no sting and grave no victory.

Having been around death most of his professional life, he took a tougher more robust view of the matter. Death was death. It was nasty and brutal, but, above all, final, decisive and terrible. It had few redeeming features and it was what the advertisers said. He did not believe in reincarnation, redemption or anything other than a ceasing to live. Absolutely. Trubshawe was gone for ever and he would not be coming back, now or ever. The Second Coming of Jimmy Trubshawe. Sounded like a film by Richard Curtis. Hugh Grant as Trubshawe.

He shook himself, aware, once again, that he was being addressed.

‘Are you all right, sweetie?' It was Tracey doing the asking. The others were just looking on with concern. ‘You've hardly touched your
gambas
.'

‘Sorry,' said Bognor, giving outer evidence of pulling himself together which was not reciprocated by his inner self, ‘I was miles away. Good
gambas
. And, incidentally, Tracey, if you don't mind too much, I'd prefer it if you didn't call me “Sweetie”.'

She gave the impression of being someone who was entitled to take offence but was too well brought up to actually do so.

Instead, she said, ‘Back home we'd call these Dublin Bay prawns. Bet you it's the same fellers in the prawn cocktail, only a different name. And what's more,' she jabbed her fork at Bognor, ‘I bet you George is having the prawn cocktail. Even if he's the only one. Just like Mr Trubshawe would of.'

Bognor's insides were in turmoil but he hoped that his exterior was as calm and non-committal as he intended.

‘I suppose,' he essayed, ‘we aren't allowed to talk shop, so we can't discuss the relative marketing strategies of bangers and chorizos. Notwithstanding the fact that at this table the bangers have it by a majority of three to one.'

Eduardo smiled. ‘I am the one,' he said. ‘I am the chorizo.'

They all grinned. It was difficult to see where the conversation should go after this. It was the verbal equivalent of a dead-end street, a chatterer's cul-de-sac. Not so long ago, thought Bognor, Trubshawe must have been part of a conversation such as this. He would have seemed perfectly alive and well. Well, perhaps imperfectly alive and well, but there would have been no sense of impending doom, no apprehension, no idea that within a few hours he would be dead and gone and as if he had never been. Death was a strange, final event which almost always took one by surprise. It was seldom predicted. It was not shuffling off to the next room and waiting to come back and take a curtain call. There was a tendency to reduce death to a non-event, to trivialize it, to pretend it didn't matter. Here they were eating sausages and discussing ways of marketing them. Yet a man had died. He felt like banging his fist on the table and reminding everyone of the terrible event that had taken place.