Poison At The Pueblo

by Tim Heald

  He gazed out of the window and saw trees and a fullish moon, complete with ubiquitous man. The landscape was silvery and half-lit, a crepuscular vision in which you could make out shapes, but only in monochrome. It was like a black and white movie slipping past the bus windows – remote, uncoloured, not entirely real. Inside, the mood was different – disturbed, Technicolor and indisputably happening to creatures of flesh and blood, including himself. He was part of an unfolding drama involving a cast of characters who, like Bognor, were playing themselves.

  Or were they? Part of the problem with this whole charade, he realized, was just that. It was just that: a charade. No one was playing themselves. Or, to be more accurate and even more disconcerting, they might or might not be playing themselves. Sister Lola, for example, might be a nun or she might just as well be an air stewardess or a truck driver. The only person who alleged that Camilla ran a bed and breakfast in Byron Bay was Camilla herself. And so it went on. Every potted biography of every character was a self-invention. It was like those entries in Who’s Who where the participants listed their recreations without censorship or even rudimentary editing, encouraging each other to make jokes out of their extramural activities. Such deceits might or might not extend to the main text, so that university degrees, parentage, whole careers and personalities could become mere figments, tawdry exercises in self-deception masquerading as serious and impartial works of reference. They said the camera did not lie, which, in an age of ever-increasing digital hocus-pocus, was an ever more economical way of dealing with the truth. But if the camera was more and more of an impostor, how much more true it was of words. One of the first rules of public speaking, Bognor had always been told, was there is always someone in the audience who knows more about the subject than the speaker, even if the subject was the speaker. Here, he suddenly felt that he was that person where every speaker was concerned. They were all telling lies about themselves and he was the only one who realized.

  The silver night sped by in the silence. He wondered if ‘routine interrogation’ would determine truth or merely confirm prejudice. He presumed that checks would have been carried out. He knew that in his own case Monica, Lady Bognor as she now was, he remembered with a smirk of self-congratulation, was carrying out her own checks, phoning chums, calling in favours and applying her formidable but well-disguised forensic abilities to the matters in hand.

  He smirked some more. Even Monica, he told himself, was an exercise in propaganda. Take the new Monica moniker: ‘Lady’ Bognor. That was no ‘lady’ that was his wife, and he knew her better than anyone. On the other hand, he had to admit that the Monica he knew so intimately was not necessarily the Monica that appeared to the butcher or the maitre d’ at the restaurant. The Monica he saw without make-up, or even clothing, was not necessarily the ‘real’ Monica. Perhaps people were like books or plays and the observer was as important as the reader. Was this a post-structural view of mankind? Maybe the individual had no more right to their own personality than anyone else. Perhaps there was no such thing as a ‘correct’ view of a personality, any more than there could be an ‘objective’ version of truth. One man’s ‘fact’ was another’s opinion.

  This was becoming horribly metaphysical, he thought, but notwithstanding such abstract concepts the question remained begged. Who, after all, dunnit? One of the passengers on the bus killed Jimmy Trubshawe. He was sitting, as was his wont, on the back seat and he had it to himself, which was how he liked it. He surveyed the backs of the heads of those in front of him and wondered which of them was the killer. There was always the possibility, of course, that the deceased had simply ate a dodgy mushroom. Murder was a mess, and this death was no exception. The backs of the necks told him no more than their owners had done in the few hours of his investigation so far.

  Perhaps this was the story of life. Not just his life, but life in general – life, period. Perhaps life was nothing but a series of questions to which, ultimately, there were no answers. On this particular occasion there was one overriding question, namely the puzzle surrounding the demise of Jimmy Trubshawe; but the more one immersed oneself in the Pueblo the more questions arose and the more elusive the answers became. Perhaps this was true of everything: the more you knew, the less you knew. Every time you thought you had solved a problem another one rose up to take its place, and as often as not the problems multiplied like some dreadful hydra.

  So life began with the pure simplicity of infancy and became more and more complicated as one got older, until in the prelude to death there were no answers any more. At the beginning everything seemed to have an answer and all was optimism and progress. By the time one had finished, disillusion and disappointment were pre-eminent and there were no answers to anything. Death might come as a full stop but it didn’t answer any questions. Well, maybe it did, but Bognor had become a disciple of the Big Sleep, not a frankly incredible resurrection in any shape or form.

  These musings were punctuated only by the sound of the engine and the passing of the occasional car or truck. Gradually the wooded hillsides gave way to Salamancan suburbia. After a while street lights appeared and the moon seemed to dim. They were now back in what passed for civilization, although the modern excrescences on the outskirts of the city were hideous and unsightly compared with the historic beauty of the ancient city.

  Bognor was depressed. Everything, it seemed, ended in failure. Even success.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Monica Bognor had been upgraded. This had become the story of her life. Not only had she acquired a title, she had also been moved up into a suite. The suite was old-fashioned, draped, velvetine, chandeliered; tall windows offered a view of Spanish antiquity with a hint of incense. It was just about the best the Hotel Fray Luis could offer. The hostelry was a refurbished palace named after the university lecturer who had been taken away and tortured by the Inquisition, only to return and blithely resume his lecture with the words – in Latin – ‘As we were saying yesterday’. Style.

  Lady B. had procured wine which was chilling in a bucket. Also smoked salmon with quarters of lemon. She had always possessed style. The new title suited her.

  ‘Darling!’ she said, opening the door to her new knight, who was not exactly in shining armour but was looking a tad dishevelled and exhausted in regulation dark suiting. ‘Thank heaven you’re safe. I was really worried. We all were.’

  They embraced fondly, kissed, withdrew, gazed at each other, sighed and sat down.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked. He felt out of things, which was a not altogether unusual sensation.

  ‘The key thing was the autopsy,’ she said. ‘Teniente Azuela suspected some hanky-panky, so he got someone else in to have a second look. He was right.’

  ‘In what way?’ Bognor opened the cava and poured.

  ‘The mushrooms were a red herring,’ she said. ‘If you don’t mind me mixing my culinary metaphors.’

  Bognor said he couldn’t care less. He rather approved of mixed metaphors. Nevertheless, he wanted to know how and why.

  ‘It wasn’t the mushrooms themselves,’ she said. ‘It was what had been put in them. On them. Not just pepper and salt. Glass. Powdered. Our boys became suspicious of the autopsy. It didn’t stack up. They became more and more convinced that mushrooms could be seriously upsetting, but almost certainly not fatal. And after what I found out from Celia they started to get neurotic about interference from their own side.’

  ‘You spoke to Celia?’

  Monica and Celia had been at Art School together. The Slade. Celia was married to a friend in a high place. It was an ideological mismatch. Not altogether happy in other ways either. Yet Monica and Celia remained close. There were favours. From time to time they got called in. It was sometimes alleged that women were second-class citizens, that there was something called a ‘glass ceiling’ through which no female ever passed and, perhaps most insidiously of all, that there was an Old Boys’ Network that girls couldn’t join.

  That was
not Bognor’s experience.

  Nor that of his wife.

  ‘Celia confirmed what the woman from Byron Bay told you. All incredibly unorthodox and nobody in Downing Street or even Whitehall will own up to it. And unless secret papers get left on a train from Teddington to Waterloo no one will ever know.’

  ‘So Six killed Trubshawe?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Monica, ‘maybe not.’

  ‘Don’t be enigmatic,’ said Bognor, ‘it doesn’t suit you.’

  ‘You know, I suppose, that George was Jimmy Trubshawe’s brother. And that Lola was alleged to have been his mistress.’

  ‘You believe that?’

  ‘My sources are immaculate but I’m not revealing them.’

  Bognor believed her. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  ‘Did the Admiral sanction the raid?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘Picasso seems to have his own sources of information and I’m not here to question them. He called the teniente and they agreed that, coming at it from completely different angles and points of view, you were in danger. That’s why we went in and pulled you out.’

  ‘Not exactly flattering.’

  ‘Not much point in being buttered up if you’re dead. The second autopsy showed beyond reasonable doubt that Trubshawe was murdered. You yourself said that a person unknown had taken a shot at you, or at least in your direction. You’d already got a confession from the person purporting to be Camilla, with an acknowledgement of Eduardo’s role as some sort of accessory. Job done, we reckoned. Besides which, we thought you were at risk. So we pulled you out.’

  ‘That should have been my decision,’ said Bognor huffily. Huffy was how he felt. It showed. His wife noticed.

  ‘Darling,’ she said tenderly, although she wasn’t feeling as tender as she seemed, and was almost as huffy, au fond, as her husband, ‘we were worried about your safety and you’d solved the crime. It was Camilla who did it, cloaked in the security of working for the Secret Intelligence Agency. There was no purpose in your staying in and facing lots of hazard.’

  ‘It should have been my decision.’

  ‘For a start you were out in the field and therefore not in the ideal position for playing at captaincy. And we’re in Spain. When in Spain . . . or to put it another way, our writ doesn’t really run here, so if we disagree over procedures we don’t do what seems appropriate to us, we do what the local authorities tell us. It would be the same in reverse if the Teniente or the Admiral were on our turf. Now drink your cava.’

  The words ‘shut up little man’ hung in the air but remained unexpressed. The cava was cold and fizzy. He drank deep and gazed round the room, which was opulent, and at his wife, who seemed concerned and disconcertingly self-assured.

  ‘Tell me about Camilla,’ he said.

  She shrugged. ‘Not a lot to tell,’ she said. ‘Standard Six story. They used her too much and too obviously. She was on Diana’s staff; gained her confidence; was crucial in the plot to have her bumped off. Then after the so-called accident in the tunnel the press and others started to get too close for comfort, so they sent her as far away as they could and told her to go to sleep until the coast was clear. When it was, she was told she’d have a serious front-line role. The sort of operation for which she was originally trained. Meanwhile they paid her what amounted to a very generous subsidy for her B. and B.’

  ‘So she was part of the plot to kill Diana?’

  ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘Mmm.’ The extent of the plot had never been properly established, and although it was almost universally accepted that the Princess’s final demise was an accident, it was also commonly agreed that there was a genuine conspiracy in the Security Services. The details were less well known and Bognor preferred not to know them. It was enough that there was a plot, and its existence was proof to Bognor that parts of the so-called intelligence community were not to be trusted. He conducted most of his professional life on that basis. Intelligence work involved a visceral distrust of everyone else, especially those also engaged in intelligence, and most of all those allegedly on your own side. Enemies were bad, friends doubly so. At least with enemies there was a reasonable likelihood of knowing what was going on.

  ‘Celia say anything else?’ he asked, more or less innocently, hoping for an answer but not really expecting one.

  ‘Sent her love,’ she said, to which he replied, naturally, that this was not what he meant even though he was glad to hear it.

  ‘Government is in terrible trouble,’ she said, ‘and profoundly unamused by our unilateral decision to solve the Trubshawe murder.’

  Bognor laughed. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if they’re the guilty party that’s hardly surprising.’

  She laughed back.

  ‘I never cease to be amazed by what governments get up to behind the scenes,’ she said. ‘It’s been true ever since you started in SIDBOT. Nobody outside the corridors of power seems to know anything. Nothing in the papers; nothing on TV. Just bromides and spin. It’s the same with this. No one in the world at large will know or care about Jimmy Trubshawe’s death; let alone Jimmy Trubshawe’s brother or Jimmy Trubshawe’s mistress. The public believe what people like Alastair Campbell tells them. If you went public on what you knew you’d make an absolute fortune in newspaper serials.’

  ‘Except that no one would believe a word of it.’

  ‘True,’ said Lady Bognor. ‘So we live in a fantasy world while our lords and masters get up to God knows what, protected by laziness and incompetence in the fourth estate, and assisted by deceit and guile on the part of those who are conniving with the government to dupe the rest of us.’

  ‘That’s a very cynical view of the world we live in,’ he said.

  ‘True once more,’ she agreed, ‘but don’t tell me you think differently.’

  Bognor regarded the bubbles in his glass. They were a wonderful example of life’s mystery and frustrated optimism. He had no idea how the bubbles got there in the beginning, hadn’t a clue why they continued to surge upwards and, finally, why they evaporated inexorably as they reached the surface. But he and Monica were just like the bubbles. They were effervescent and optimistic, and they surged ever upwards until, phut, they exploded into thin air. They were not the only ones. In the end everyone was just a bubble floating in champagne, but doomed to perish at the end of their voyage.

  This was ludicrous. Life was not a glass of cava. He shook himself like a Sealyham after being caught in the rain.

  ‘You all right, darling?’ asked his wife.

  ‘Me?’ he replied, surprised. ‘Me. Never felt better.’

  This was not entirely correct. Fatigue, wine and anticlimax were combining to make him light-headed. A tad depressed as well. For once he had to concede that his individual, intuitive approach seemed to have let him down. Enemies would have considered it quirky and old-fashioned, but it had served him well enough in the past. This time, however, he had fallen foul of rigorous modern interrogation, rival branches of the secret intelligence services and, though it pained him to admit it, his wife.

  ‘So,’ he asked, seemingly innocent, ‘who do you think killed him?’

  She appeared to muse. ‘He was murdered,’ she said at last, ‘the second autopsy proves that. The first one – the fake one – was ambiguous. It could have been a simple mistake and he ate the wrong mushroom, which, as he had cardiac problems associated with the high blood pressure, high cholesterol and elevated enzymes all of which are well-documented, could have killed him. But you can’t argue with ground glass.’

  ‘So it wasn’t an accident?’

  The cava was slowing down, but he wanted to be sure.

  ‘It certainly wasn’t an accident,’ she said, ‘and Camilla’s admission of guilt, coupled with Eduardo’s obvious complicity, makes it an open-and-shut case.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ He shrugged.

  ‘Only I don’t believe in “open-and-shut” any more than you do.’

  ‘No,’ he
agreed.

  In the street below people were singing. The music sounded like a student drinking song: rambunctious but with a plangent touch of melancholy. An anthem for youth on the verge of loss.

  ‘The trouble is,’ she said, ‘the way of the world being far from straight and narrow, Camilla’s so-called confession is too tidy to be quite plausible.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning I don’t think she did it,’ she said. ‘It’s too convenient. Almost neater than an accident. Camilla will be whisked back to Byron Bay; nobody will breathe a word about Eduardo. No one need know about George and Lola or anyone else. Nobody is particularly interested in Trubshawe. He was a nasty piece of work with no visible next of kin, no nearest and dearest. No one to care what happened to him.’

  Bognor demurred quietly.

  ‘Except me,’ he said.

  She snorted. ‘You’re perverse, Simon Bognor,’ she said, ‘and you always have been, as you well know. If you weren’t we wouldn’t be married, as you also well know.’

  ‘That’s as may be,’ he replied, ‘but just because Trubshawe was a shit doesn’t make him an appropriate candidate for being murdered. I don’t think anyone should be bumped off in this world. That’s partly why I’ve been in the line of work I have. And, incidentally, who do you think tried to bump me off and will we ever know?’