Poison At The Pueblo

by Tim Heald

  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.

  Instead, he said, ‘One Spanish sausage and three British bangers. Not really a fair contest. On the other hand at the next table it’s three to one in favour of Spanish sausages.’

  They all grinned inanely again. Bognor decided to wrench the conversation around to the subject that was actually on everyone’s mind.

  ‘Poor old Trubshawe,’ he said. ‘Bad luck, very. What sort of man was he? Did he have time to make any sort of impression?’

  ‘We have a saying in, er, Spanish,’ said Belen, perhaps a shade too quickly, ‘that it is not good to speak bad things about dead people.’

  ‘We too,’ said Bognor. ‘In fact it comes from Latin so we’ve probably both inherited it from the same source.’

  Another pause. Dinner conversation was, he thought, like a Pinter play. More pause than speech. And they were skirting the main issue.

  ‘Even so,’ said Belen, ‘I did not think Mr Trubshawe seemed a very nice man.’

  The other two looked as if they agreed, though they said nothing. Bognor didn’t think it worth pushing. Personal dislike was surely not a strong enough motive for murder. Not, at least, on the basis of the sort of fleeting acquaintance offered by the Pueblo. None of them who had known nothing of Trubshawe before meeting him at the Pueblo could possibly have built up enough hatred to kill him. He wondered whether, in any case, hatred was a strong enough motive. In his experience, killing someone was the result of something more complex. It usually involved money in some shape or form. This could partly be explained by the fact that he was employed at the Board of Trade. Financial motives were implicit; they went with the job. On the other hand, it was possible that in this instance he was barking up the wrong tree. He was assuming that Trubshawe’s death was linked with his criminal past. If the Camilla woman was the murderess, aided by Eduardo, then the motive was politico-financial.

  Eduardo had lapsed into the discretion from which he had emerged. He might be the only non-banger on the block, but he wasn’t going to blow a public whistle on Bognor. It was a secret between the three of them. Or presumably so. If his cover were blown he would have to leave as suddenly as he had arrived. Wouldn’t he? He sighed. Half of him was beginning to think that Trubshawe’s death was the accident so many wanted it to be. Not that an accident would claim Eduardo’s knowledge nor Camilla’s claim. He smiled at Eduardo and was rewarded with a smile back. Was it one of complicity? He supposed it was.

  The prawn plates were removed and the main course replaced them. It looked as if George was the only one having the bangers.

  ‘Not like doing hair in Essex,’ he said brightly. ‘How did you find out about the Pueblo plan?’

  Tracey said she had read an article in some trade magazine. ‘Hair and Hair Cutting, or something like it. Another hairdresser had volunteered a year or so ago and had written up his experiences, encouraging other hairdressers to follow suit. It was one way of getting a free holiday in Spain, though it was less of a holiday than it might have appeared. Even without the sudden death of Jimmy Trubshawe.’

  ‘Enjoying it?’ he asked.

  Tracey nodded and said something more or less banal about meeting the sort of people one would not normally meet under the dryer.

  Bognor said he supposed not. They all chewed on their chorizos and sipped their wine. He wondered if the others felt as desperate as he did. He would not normally meet hairdressers, pet food executives or export managers of boutique hotels. Doing so, he realized that there were reasons for this. He had nothing to say to them; nor they to him. This was a statement of inadequacy but true nonetheless.

  Their faltering conversation was saved by Arizona. It was, again, a logistical intervention to remind them that they were performing in their two teams after the meal was finished and she hoped that everyone was properly prepared, but that there would be a few minutes after the meal during which questions could be asked if people felt the need to do so. She hoped everyone was enjoying their meal. Blah, blah. She gave the impression of saying much the same thing on a regular basis. Which was probably true.

  She and Felipe Lee had both worked out that he was not just any old punter who had come in off the street; Dolores Calderon had been tipped off by the Admiral with whom she was . . . well, who knew what her relationship with the old goat Picasso actually consisted of . . . Camilla and Eduardo were privy to some inside information which presumably emanated from London, depending on whether their relationship with the Security Services was all that they cracked it up to be. That left George and Tracey, Lola and Belen as the only ones who took him at face value. Five out of ten. Fifty per cent. It would be amazing if none of the apparently innocent half really didn’t suspect that he was more than he wanted to appear to be. But Lola. Lola was supposed to be an undercover agent. So far, however, she was so undercover, that she was, as far as he was concerned, invisible. She was either useless or, conceivably, dangerous. He couldn’t fathom the sexy nun and he was worried. Actually, he was worried about the whole business. He simply couldn’t get a handle on it.

  He sighed as Arizona blathered on and the chorizo and beans gave way to two different sorts of cheese – either cheddar and mango chutney, or a queso from the Picos with a liberal dollop of quince paste. Difficult to envisage bolder statements of the two country’s national cuisines, or indeed national character.

  Queso and a corpse; quince and questions. Maybe he was past it; perhaps there were natural causes after all.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  They began with a bang.

  The bang was a sharp report from what was alleged to be a ‘starting pistol’ and it was fired into thin air by George. The ‘starting pistol’ looked suspiciously like a ‘terminating pistol’, perfectly capable of wounding or eve
n killing anyone at whom it was aimed, so it was probably as well that the air that George fired it into was indeed thin. More importantly, he did not point the weapon at anyone but instead aimed it at the ceiling before pulling the trigger. There was a flash, a crack and a puff of smoke. The opposing team jumped with surprise, as did Arizona and Felipe. They had not been expecting a bang. The sausage squad were ready for the explosion. The chorizos were not.

  Apart from the opening bang, Bognor identified a double mystery: whether or not the gun was a starting pistol, or something more lethal, and where George had found it. Pistols did not, in Bognor’s experience, grow on trees.

  Apart from the pistol, starting or ending, the presentation was well-oiled and constructed in an old-fashioned pre-war manner which Bognor found oddly consoling. For the first time he found himself almost warming to George, who was surprisingly diffident and seemed to understand the point of allowing the Spanish women, Lola and Belen, to call the shots, while he and Bognor pulled the strings. It was reminiscent of days when ‘Made in England’ was a guarantee of quality rather than a signal for mirth.

  Ultimately the message was that the British banger was best because it represented certain standards of excellence and reliability. Belen and Lola entered into this conceit with verve and a surprising conviction. George, definitely, and Bognor, possibly, believed in the product but there was no reason for the women to do so. Rather the reverse.

  Acting, pretence and deception were crucial to the operation’s success and also inseparable from the reason for Bognor being there. To be a successful crook of any kind one had to be good at concealing one’s true character, one’s real motivation and, above all, of course, one’s actual actions. Same with detectives.

  The whole event reminded Bognor of amateur dramatics even, though he hadn’t been to an Am-Dram production of any kind since being forced to do so as a child. He had never participated in such a thing, not being a natural joiner and preferring to leave any thespian pretensions for the office.

  The banger presentation ended with a jingle which combined, more or less, Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1, aka, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, and the words: ‘Sausage and mashed potato, bangers and mash to most / Go with a fried tomato, better than beans on toast.’ Which didn’t mean a lot, but sounded passable when sung by the two Englishmen, and the Spanish women particularly, and was followed by a prosaically shouted admonition from all four to ‘Go to work on a banger’, which might have been a crib from the egg marketing board but had, they all thought, more pizzazz than the egg advice. Bognor thought privately that it was just as well Monica couldn’t see him. Nor Harvey Contractor. This was emphatically how he wished to appear when at home being, in a manner of speaking, ‘himself’. Nevertheless, he rather enjoyed himself. It was like doing karaoke on a business trip.

  Being at the Pueblo to investigate a sudden death, he found himself trying to fit the episode into the context of a murder mystery. Time was when such a conundrum would have been solved by patient detection, the asking of questions, the establishing of alibis, the flaws in character, the plausibility of motive and much else that went into the pot of plot of what was frequently referred to as the Golden Age. Modern science, DNA, technology, forensics and a preoccupation with murder rather than mystery had changed all that. It had, in some eyes, made people like him redundant. This was not a conceit into which he bought. Fashion had changed but not reality.

  The other four, the chorizos, seemed tolerably impressed by the bangers’ bang and then it was their turn. Bognor and the others settled back to enjoy and to criticize. Tracey and Camilla were Anglos, Eduardo and Leonel the Hispanics. The sexual divide was neat; two Anglo males on one side, two Anglo females on the other. Precisely the reverse true of the Spanish, making a perfect fifty per cent male–female split on each team. Try as he might Bognor could find no significance in this beyond a certain symmetry.

  There were no bangs from the chorizos. Indeed, they were almost depressingly pedestrian. The two Spaniards delivered mildly solemn lectures on fermentation, curing, smoking; on the difference between picante and dulce as well as the relative proportions of chopped pork fat, chilli and paprika, plus chile guindillas secas. They also waxed knowledgeable on the degree of heat used in hanging the finished sausage, the fine mincing around Pamplona, the importance of the deep-fried egg in Extremadura and the inclusion – or not – of cheeks, salivary glands and/or lymph nodes. When frying eggs for use in Extremaduran huevos con chorizo the frying pan had to smoke and be filled with olive oil or pork fat to a depth of at least three centimetres. Basque chorizos were something else again. Confronted with such erudition, Bognor and his team felt positively inadequate. Their presentation might have been explosive but scholarly it wasn’t. Not what one might have expected.

  In terms of Trubshawe, Bognor wasn’t sure it signified one way or another. He knew that Eduardo and Camilla were in cahoots in some way that he was not sure of yet. But in terms of the presentation you would never have guessed. Camilla said nothing while Eduardo droned quite boringly. He knew his chorizos but he did not wear the knowledge lightly. Leonel also sounded nasally portentous and knowledgeable, while Tracey, who Bognor suspected knew little or nothing about anything gastronomic except for amazingly speedy food, kept almost totally shtum. There was nothing to suggest that Leonel knew Tracey. Nor that they had known either of the other two in life outside the Pueblo. Yet, not seeming to know one another was obviously not the same as not actually knowing each other. This was proved conclusively by Eduardo and Camilla, who really did know each other but seemed not to.

  They were really promoting Spanish chorizo but that didn’t prevent them droning on about Portuguese chourico which was pork, fat, wine, paprika and salt stuffed into tripe and dried over smoke. Chourico de sangue was like black pudding. Then there was Mexican chorizo which could be deep red, unless green, which suggested a provenance from Toluca, and it was an urban slur that Mexican chorizo was made only from the lips and salivary glands. Puerto Rican chorizo was much like that from the Dominican Republic, which was much like Spanish but not to be confused with longaniiza nor the rather mild chorizo from Argentina sometimes served in a bread roll and described as a choripan. Brazil, naturally, favours a Portuguese chourico, whereas in Goa, although there is a Portuguese influence, they are made of pork, vinegar, chilli, garlic, ginger, cumin, turmeric and other spices. They are very hot and served plain, with potatoes, pearl onions or in a pilaf. In the Philippines they use their own spices and often base their sausages on chicken or even tuna. By the time this exposition was over Bognor’s ears were bleeding.

  Deafened by science, he supposed. It may have been better than being blinded but it came to much the same thing. The chorizos had bored on knowledgeably, piling one fact on another, until the audience caved in under the weight of statistics. Bognor’s bangers had done it in a particular and very different way. They could have gone on at length about the difference in components between the Oxford and Cambridge sausages; whether or not the vegetarian Glamorgan number was a banger within the meaning of the act; the importance of linkage in the Cumberland sausage or whether the Lincolnshire was a poacher’s source of sustenance and therefore a working-class edible, in the sense that some of its urban rivals were not.

  But they hadn’t.

  Bognor’s lot had taken the spinner’s route, all style and no substance, and they had sought their objective by the culinary equivalent of smoke and mirrors. Perhaps that was a false analogy since smoke was, in a manner of speaking, a culinary technique, though he wasn’t entirely sure whether something that had been smoked could be said to be ‘cooked’, in the true sense of the word, still less of the real difference between hot-smoking and cold-smoking, the one implying a level of cooking that the other didn’t. Discuss.

  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.