Poison At The Pueblo (3 page)

‘Mmm,' said Contractor, ‘so-so.'

‘Well,' said Sir Simon, ‘you're about to get to know it a great deal better. I'm taking you along as chief bag-carrier and bottle-washer. You can keep Lady B. company and do the dogsbody stuff. Keep an eye on me, too. As is your wont.'

He smiled.

‘Serious crime investigation. Possibly murder. But fun as well. Which is the way I like it.'

Ain't that the truth, thought Contractor.

THREE

T
he Bognors were dieting as usual. It had been the same formula throughout their marriage, founded loosely on a popular regime of the 1960s or thereabouts, when it was known as ‘the drinking man's diet'. It was right up there with the Royal Canadian Air Force Exercises which was designed to keep fit those, like the Bognors, not much given to exercise in conventional forms. The diet seemed to consist of very dry gin Martinis, as much dry white wine as you could manage – though not too much red – smoked salmon, steak, spinach and mouth-puckering fruit, preferably pineapple.

The evening meal therefore consisted of smoked salmon, a rare entrecôte with puréed spinach, and cubes of fresh pineapple. This was accompanied by Clare Valley Riesling with the fish and an amusing Wine Society Minervois with the steak, the whole preceded by stonkingly dry Martinis mixed by Sir Simon.

This was what he called healthy living. Both Bognors were appalled by supermarket-snackers who grazed on chocolate bars and crisps. Obese, them? Just a teensy bit overweight but nothing a serious sauna wouldn't sort.

‘Fancy a few days in Spain?' enquired the new knight of his beloved.

‘Why Spain?' Monica was in two minds about Spain. She was opposed to bullfighting and cheap package flights – being against blood sports on sound liberal grounds and drunken yobboes on grounds which she supposed were elitist and snobbish, but were a part of her upbringing and make-up that she was no longer going to pretend to deny. On the other hand she loved the climate, the long lazy lunches, Goya and El Greco.

‘Why not?' asked her husband, pouring cocktails from the shaker. He favoured a twist, his wife an olive.

‘Don't answer a question with a question,' she said.

He smiled. She had been saying this ever since they married more than forty years earlier. The refrain had all the persistence of a cracked gramophone record but had never irritated him. Despite continuing to pay little or no attention to the request he found it oddly reassuring. The older he became, the more comfort he obtained from its repetition. Habit, he supposed.

‘I have to go to Spain on business. I thought you'd like to come too. It's somewhere in the hills near Salamanca. I thought you could spend time there and we could meet up for a long weekend. Longer maybe. A day or two in Madrid. Toledo. Train to Zaragoza or Barcelona. A break.'

‘What's the business?' Monica accepted the proffered dry Martini and glared at her olive.

‘Villains abroad,' said her husband. ‘I'm getting rather fed up with it. The Costas have become a sort of retirement home for our undesirables. I think we should flush them out. One of the most significant of them has just been found dead in the mountains. I want to go and see for myself and try to round up some of his subordinates and bring them home to face music.'

‘You mean the braying tones of hanging judges in sentencing mode?' Monica would have made an intimidating judge herself. She had a face which was more like a horse than a button, and a voice to match. No more musical than bagpipes or the braying of a hanging judge.

‘That would be ideal,' Bognor sipped appreciatively at the ice-cold gin, ‘though one of their leaders has had his comeuppance already. A man called Trubshawe. Sometimes, that is. Sometimes he was called Trubshawe. More often something else. He'd done a bunk to the Costa-something. Just been found dead. Very.'

‘I remember him,' said Monica, who missed very few tricks. ‘Sprung from the Scrubs and then stabbed someone to death in a road rage incident on the South Circular. Vanished, believed to be on a permanent package holiday with a new identity. Several identities in fact.' She took a ruminative taste of cocktail. ‘Very nice, darling.' She smiled approvingly. ‘One of your better ones. Plymouth?'

‘Naturally,' said her husband. ‘Funny, isn't it,' he went on, ‘how crooks of one sort or another are all the rage. Honest indigence is passé. Ill-gotten gains are flavour of the month. Suddenly all the world loves a spiv. If you're still travelling on public transport when you're over twenty-five then you're a sad failure. Saints are saps.'

‘I blame Thatcher,' said Monica crisply. This might or might not have been fair, but it was predictable. Monica blamed everything on Baroness Thatcher, from the weather to the war in Iraq.

‘But is it true?' asked Bognor holding his cocktail glass up to the light and peering at the twist of lemon peel to see if there was any pith still attached to it. There was not. The potato peeler had done its stuff and his hand was obviously steadier than he thought. ‘My father's generation thought it was bad form to discuss money and not really done to make much. Genteel poverty was the fashion. Nothing as extreme as bankruptcy or bad debt, though that was probably preferable to making a fortune on the black market. Know what I mean? But that's no longer true. We live in an age of “rich lists”, peerages for cash, million pound bonuses, vast salaries for jobs ill-done. All apparently condoned or even welcomed by the powers that be.'

‘That your sermon for the evening?' asked Monica.

‘I don't see why telling the truth should be a sermon,' he said. ‘I'm particularly offended by a whole load of crims poncing around in sunny Spain at the taxpayers' expense and apparently with the tacit approval of Her Majesty's Government, the Fourth Estate and received opinion almost everywhere. And I think I should sort it out before I finally retire.'

He swallowed gin and grimaced. It burned the back of his throat. Dry Martinis were, he thought, an oddly masochistic drink. No wonder it had been Bond's favourite drink. Or was that a vodkatini?

‘I hope you're not suffering from delusions,' said his wife, trying not to pull a face as she also took too big a gulp, pretending that she had swallowed too much on purpose. ‘Just because someone in silly little Gavin's office has got the wrong person for a knighthood. Don't take it too literally. Doesn't mean to say you've acquired shining armour and turned white overnight.' Bognor was, normally these days, a mild puce colour. Even
he
was prepared to admit to pink.

‘I'd like to be remembered for something,' said Bognor seriously. ‘Cleaning up the Costas would be a good grabby theme for the obits. “Bognor will long be remembered for his successful campaign to prevent British criminals from successfully seeking sanctuary in the Iberian peninsula. In a series of extensive investigations promoted by the sudden death of the south London villain, James ‘Jimmy' Trubshawe, Bognor . . .”'

‘Don't be so vainglorious,' said Monica, puckering her lip in acknowledgement of the cocktail's strength. ‘You've done perfectly well just being you. Your achievements are positively Widmerpudlian. You have a knighthood. You run a government department. You have, more or less and in a manner of speaking, your health. You have an adoring wife. What more do you want?'

‘I want to be remembered for something,' he said petulantly. ‘I don't want to be just another Whitehall jobsworth with a flukey gong and an inflated pension.'

‘You sound like Tony Blair,' said Monica, ‘and look what happened to him. Just be content. Rest on your laurels like everyone else.'

They finished their drinks in silence and then adjourned to tackle the smoked salmon. They did themselves very well in a finicky way. The salmon was none of your supermarket rubbish, but came from a mail order company in West Cornwall who smoked it on the premises. The brown bread was organic and came from a Polish baker round the corner. Bognor liked to think that the Board of Trade had done more than its share for Polish bakers round the corner. Cornish fish smokeries too, come to that.

The Bognors had an old-fashioned separate dining room where they sometimes entertained quite formally, and where they tended to eat their evening meals when at home alone. One or two adequate but undistinguished family portraits hung on the walls and there were odds and ends of family silver salvaged from both sides of their ancestry. They took breakfast in the kitchen but seldom supper. They never ate in front of the television, and even though they would have thought it laughable to actually dress up for their evening meal they recognized that they were in this, and perhaps other respects, old-fashioned, even conceivably quaint.

Bognor remained in a retrospective frame of mind.

‘It's different for women,' he said, tasting the white wine in a manner which he hoped was efficient without being pretentious. He hated the idea of being considered a pseud when it came to food and drink, but there were those who thought him overenthusiastic on both counts. In defensive mode he sometimes explained it away by the fact that he had never had children. This was not a deliberate decision on the part of either himself or his wife. It was just something that had happened. Or not. They both slightly regretted it, while acknowledging that they were both too selfish to have made much of a fist of parenthood. On the other hand it was difficult to know which came first; the lack of fecundity or the slight selfishness.

The Riesling was cool and flinty. The Bognors had visited the Clare Valley once and rather enjoyed it. Likewise Penryn where the fish had been smoked. They liked to source what they ate and drank.

‘Why different for a woman?' Monica wanted to know.

‘You're not subject to the same sort of pressures,' said Bognor in the lofty manner which so infuriated her. ‘Males are constantly being judged and measured by their teachers and their peers. It's a sexual hazard. Women aren't judgemental in the same way.'

‘Tripe,' said Monica, spearing a sliver of salmon. She flushed, which was always dangerous. ‘If anything, women are even more judgemental than men. If you'd been to a convent school you wouldn't talk such bilge.'

‘No, no,' said Bognor, vaguely sensing danger but not quite sure why or whence it originated. ‘You misunderstand me. That's not at all what I meant. I certainly wasn't implying that women were less judgemental than . . .' He took refuge in Riesling and a slice of fish, which he chewed more than necessary.

‘Men,' said Monica, through gritted teeth, ‘men are, if anything, much
less
judgemental than women. Women are always eyeing each other up to see how well they're preserved; whether they've got their own teeth, their own hair, their own breasts. They're always judging each other.'

‘But not,' he said, unwisely, ‘in terms of achievements . . . career . . . that sort of thing.'

‘And why, Simon,' she said, ‘do you imagine that should be the case? Even supposing for one tiny moment that it
is
the case. It's because for generation after generation women have been denied the opportunities of achieving the kinds of role on which your precious judgements are founded.'

More silence ensued, punctuated only by mastication. When they had finished, Bognor rather ostentatiously stacked the two plates and took them out to the kitchen, while Monica dished up the main course. The Clare Valley Riesling was unfinished and sat on the sideboard waiting for another opportunity. Bognor opened the Wine Society Minervois with one of those corkscrews that looked like the Croix de Lorraine. The steak was very rare, the way they both liked it. It came from a third generation family butcher round the same corner as the Polish baker. The spinach was from one of the more farmer-friendly supermarkets. Chiswick had almost everything.

‘So are you definitely going to Spain?' asked Monica, when they had sat down again and started on the meat.

‘I think so, yes.'

‘And if I preferred to stay at home?'

‘I'd rather you didn't. I'd like your company.'

‘I'm flattered. Except that you'll be working. What am I supposed to do when you're chipping away at the coal face?'

‘I can't work all the time,' he said. ‘We can have siestas together. Go on tapas crawls in the evening. And you can spend your days in the Thyssen or the Prado. You'd like that.'

Bognor's museum and art-gallery attention span was severely limited, unlike his wife's.

‘I might do a course,' she said. ‘Spanish for beginners. Cookery. Art history.'

‘Why not?' he wanted to know, though only rhetorically. ‘It would be much more improving than trying to flush out the friends of Jimmy Trubshawe.'

And they finished their steak and spinach in a harmonious discussion of the likely relative merits of Spanish courses in Salamanca and Madrid, of whether Castilian cuisine was preferable to Catalan, and other non-controversial matters Iberian.

Monica had just gone to the kitchen to make coffee when the phone rang urgently. It was odd how one knew instinctively when a phone call was ‘urgent' and when it was casual; when it was a ‘cold' call from Bangalore on behalf of a double-glazing outfit and when it was from one's nearest and dearest. The ring was, Bognor knew, exactly the same in every instance. Yet this one had ‘urgent' all over it.

He picked up the receiver on the table, placed there for just such an eventuality as this.

A voice which could have been from Bangalore but sounded closer, even though it carried an undefinable foreign inflection.

Could she, asked the caller, speak with Sir Simon Bognor.

‘This is he,' said Bognor, self-importantly, even though the honour had not yet been officially announced.

‘This is Pranvera,' she said, ‘at Number Ten. I need a word. The Prime Minister insists.'