Poison At The Pueblo (10 page)

Bognor nodded once more.

‘And Lola,' he said, the words hovering between a question and a command.

Azuela tapped away at his keyboard and a woman's head and shoulders appeared. She looked predictably Lola-ish. Brunette, bee-sting lips, high cheekbones, almond eyes. She had all the attributes of the archetypal movie star, except that she was dressed as a nun.

‘Nun?' asked Bognor fatuously. It seemed an unlikely cover.

‘Yes,' said Azuela. ‘What I believe you would call a Poor Clare – a female Franciscan.'

‘Why?' he asked, surprised.

‘She is –' said Azuela, frowning, ‘how you would say? – an “upwardly mobile nun”. Tipped for the top. She is likely to be sent to North America or Britain as boss of a big convent. They would like her to be a media personality; make Catholicism popular.'

‘I'm sure she'd be brilliant,' said Bognor, ‘but at the moment she doesn't have enough command of the vernacular to do battle with the likes of Jeremy Paxman.'

‘
Que?
' said the policeman, not understanding.

Bognor did not feel up to explaining and let the remark pass.

‘Do you have a lot of media-nuns in Spain?' he asked, fatuously.

Azuela shrugged. ‘Until recently the church was very powerful in our country,' he said. ‘Now it is less so, but the Church, she is fighting back. The best priests of both sexes are having media training. They attend media courses at the university, here and abroad. They are becoming, as you would say, “sassy”. Sister Lola is just that. She is already one sassy nun. She dances the Charleston; she cooks
huevos revoltas
; she is a fan of Wayne Rooney. She says she is “a child of the times”. One day she will be Mother Teresa, only Mother Lola will have sex appeal.' Azuela gazed at the nun's image. He was obviously smitten.

Bognor wondered if he might follow suit. He knew that fantasizing about sex with women in uniforms was a stereotypical male chauvinist dream. It implied a dislike of the opposite sex – a degree of rape. Thinking of himself as a decently liberated feminist he rejected that sort of image-making, but he still had to acknowledge that he possessed some unpleasantly blokeish testosterone-fuelled desires. Bedding a sexy nun came into that category. Bit of a worry.

‘Pet food executive; boutique hotelier; self-employed greengrocer; Poor Clare. Sounds like an interesting job lot. Typical would you say?' He raised an eyebrow towards the room in general and got nothing back. ‘Maybe there's never such a thing as “typical”,' he said. He took a small black notebook out of his briefcase and jotted down some words, considered them for a moment and then, rather ostentatiously, returned his fountain pen to his inside jacket pocket.

‘Let's look at the others,' he said. ‘The Anglos. Principal suspects; discuss, compare, contrast . . .'

ELEVEN

E
veryone seemed to be smoking. The blue, acrid atmosphere reminded Bognor of the days of his youth when even the London Underground in the early morning was a mist of exhaled cigarette fumes and the floors were deep in butts. Part of him felt almost wistfully nostalgic, and he found himself craving one of the cheroots that a bossy superannuated doctor from an insurance company had ordered him to cut out on pain of massive financial recriminations. He resented having his habits determined by invisible spivs in faraway office blocks of which he knew nothing, and had half a mind to beg a flaky foul-smelling fag from one of the local policemen. He thought better of it, scared, though he would never admit it, of played-out sawbones from insurance companies, but – much more – of Lady Bognor, who would be bound to find out even though he never quite knew how.

‘The late and unlamented Trubshawe,' said Bognor. ‘We'll come to him later, when we've dealt with the quick as opposed to the dead. That means Tracey, George and Camilla. Take it away,
Teniente
.'

And he leaned back in his chair and waited.

‘Face value,' said Azuela slowly. ‘Face value is how you say it in English and that is what these people have been taken at. The village accept what they are told by the Anglos. No checks. No investigation. Tracey says she is called Tracey and gives details, and she is believed.' He shrugged and spread his hands as if washing himself of any responsibility for Tracey's true identity.

‘Essex girl,' said Azuela. His command of vernacular English and its underlying assumptions and conventions was remarkable. When he said that Tracey was an Essex girl he spoke a truth at which most of his fellow countrymen could only guess. Her picture came up on the screen and provoked an instant frisson of recognition in the head of SIDBOT. She absolutely had to be called Tracey; she absolutely had to be an Essex girl; you saw her on a regular basis at the supermarket checkout or at the bar of any nightclub from Southend to Walthamstow. She was straight from central casting, and although Bognor felt guilty as he voiced the thought to himself, she was one of a kind, a type not a character.

Yet, even as he formed this disobliging opinion, he heard little birds whispering. They quickly formed a dawn chorus of dissent. He shouldn't jump to conclusions, they warned, shouldn't be so swayed by appearances, let alone by a name. It was not her fault that she was called Tracey and looked like it.

Bognor had been in the game long enough to know that thinking things were what they seemed was the surest path to copper's ruin. There was always pressure to deliver an instant result. Public opinion preferred speedy resolutions and public opinion was more concerned with haste than with truth. That, at least, was the perception. And it was easy to go for the obvious.

‘What do you think?' he asked, sweeping the room with a stare that encompassed the whole Spanish team, though since Azuela was their spokesman he was really asking the question of just the one person. It was, indeed, he who answered, though he was delivering a majority, if not a unanimous, verdict.

‘We,' he said, ‘do not believe that Tracey killed Trubshawe. Our reasons for thinking she is innocent are basically because she is relatively young. She herself says she is thirty-one years old and we have no reason to believe that she is not telling the truth. She lives with her parents in Colchester in the south-east of England. They are called Percy and Edna. Tracey is unmarried and has a five-year-old son called David and a three-year-old daughter called Tiger-Lily. She is not in touch with the father or fathers. She has trained as a hairdresser and as a florist, and works occasionally at both, usually in the Colchester area, although she has been to London and has worked there. She has not been to Spain before.'

‘Trubshawe was originally an Essex boy,' said Bognor.

‘This is true,' said Azuela. ‘We believe that he owned garages around the Southend and Westcliff-on-Sea areas. Specializing in Jaguar motor cars. We do not believe there is any connection between him and Tracey or her parents.'

‘Do we know anything about the parents?' Bognor wanted to know, and the
teniente
made a studied performance of consulting his notes before answering. ‘The father, Percy,' he said, at length, ‘he is a heavy smoker and suffers from emphysema. Both he and his wife, whose name is Edna, were in what you call “service”. He was a butler and chauffeur while she cooked and performed housework. They are now retired or unemployed.'

‘Hmmm.' Bognor glanced at Harvey Contractor who was making notes in an officious, not to say flamboyant manner that was clearly designed to impress, though it did not fool Bognor himself. His assistant gave him what could only be described as a subliminal wink. No one else noticed and the gesture was so understated that it would have been easily deniable. But it was there nonetheless – the product of an almost osmotic understanding – the sort of tacit relationship that characterizes a long marriage. Like it or not, thought Bognor, he and Contractor were in bed together.

‘Are we saying . . .' Bognor felt the need to spell out Spanish beliefs, ‘Is it your contention that Tracey is not a prime suspect?'

Azuela shook his head.

‘We are not in a position to rule anyone out,' he said, ‘but it is our belief that Tracey is too, how would you say, “obvious”. Capable of all sorts of small deceptions and deceits, but not, we believe, of killing someone.' He shrugged and splayed his fingers. ‘We are not ruling her out. We just do not believe she is a natural born killer.'

‘OK,' said Bognor. ‘So you're putting Tracey on hold for now. What about the other Anglos?'

‘George,' said Azuela, ‘is a more likely suspect. He also came from Essex. A town called Braintree. He played cricket for a club there and was involved with used cars. He does not give the impression of being an honest person.'

‘But crooked?'

Once again the
teniente
shrugged. ‘We know nothing to prove that, but he gives the impression of not telling the truth. Or, as you have it, of being economical with it.'

Once again Bognor was impressed with his grasp of idiom.

‘We don't believe that George is his real name. Perhaps this is not important. He seems to have several identities; several passports – nationalities, even. When his room was searched our people found an Irish document in the name of Oliver O'Flaherty. The photograph was of George but the person was not him. Oliver is described as a butcher. The address is in County Limerick. We checked with colleagues in the Irish Republic. There is no such place.'

‘You think this is important?'

Azuela did buck-passing incomprehension with an aplomb that impressed even Bognor, who was exposed to the practice on a regular daily business in his dealings with government ministers. Nobody passed buck quite like a top-line British politician. In Bognor's experience they yielded to no one when it came to blaming other people for their mistakes. Even so, they could get some useful tips from at least one Spanish policeman.

‘There were some other unexpected items in George's room. A copy of
Mein Kampf
by Adolf Hitler. We found one also in Mr Trubshawe's room. Also bottles of
Heil Hitler
Rotwein
.'

‘Of what?!' Bognor was scandalized, both morally and oenologically.

‘
Heil Hitler Rotwein
,' repeated Azuela.

‘Good grief,' exclaimed Bognor. ‘
Appellation contrôlée
? Or does it come from Algeria in a tanker?'

He was becoming perplexed by this peculiar cosmopolitanism. He wondered if Jimmy Trubshawe had an Irish alias like George. He couldn't imagine Trubshawe in an Irish persona, but these days, he supposed, Irishmen were no longer Irish in the accepted sense, but had become homogenized so that they might as well be English or even, well, Spanish.

‘Whatever else,' said the
teniente
, ‘
Hitler Rotwein
is not German.'

‘Any more than George was English.'

Silence fell like a cliché on tin ears. Nothing was what it seemed.
Appellations
were simply not
contrôlée
. The English were Irish. A man was dead because he liked mushrooms. Nothing made sense any more.

‘So,' said Bognor after a slightly desperate silence, ‘two Anglo's down and one to go. Tracey, who seems to have been a Tracey in every conceivable respect, and George, who appears not to have been George with any consistency. One who was as consistent as a stick of rock and another who was as elusive as a, er, blast of dry ice in a pantomime. Not wishing,' he smiled, ‘to fall into such cliché traps as “will o'the wisp” or,' and he glanced meaningfully at the massed smokers, ‘“the exhalation of a half-spent cigarette”.' The remark seemed to go over the collective head, as transitory in its way as the pantomimic dry ice.

Another pause, as dodgy as the last, ensued, before Sir Simon appeared to snap a chapter shut and open a new one. ‘So,' he said, ‘Camilla. Is she a Camilla or is she not? Does she conform to the example of Tracey or of George? Is she a Duchess of Cornwall? Is she an Essex girl? Discuss. Compare and contrast. Enlighten us Señor Azuela.'

The
teniente
shuffled his papers again, refocused, turned knobs, pressed buttons and produced an almost in focus head and shoulders shot of a forty-something blonde with bling. She had a slightly peeling bleached complexion, a gash of scarlet lipstick and a ‘been there, done that' expression.

‘Australian,' said Azuela. ‘Claims to run a boutique bed-and-breakfast in a resort called Byron Bay somewhere in New South Wales, north of Sydney.'

‘I know it,' said Bognor. ‘Used to be a marginally hippy sort of a place. Beads and sandals and Bob Dylan. Alternative. Or as alternative as you're ever likely to get in the Antipodes. Which is to say pretty mainstream by British standards. My sense is that Australians don't do alternative.'

Azuela looked puzzled.

‘“Alternative”?' he repeated. ‘“Antipodes”?'

Bognor realized he had struck blank.

‘Australians,' he explained, ‘have a reputation in Britain for being, how shall I put it, a little uncouth. Behind the times. Not up to speed. Camilla might have seemed bohemian in Australia but in Britain she probably wouldn't have been thought unusual. We have a different sense of what is conventional and what is not. What is your view?'

‘Camilla has a tattoo of a butterfly above her right shoulder-blade.'

‘Tattoos . . .' said Bognor, without much first-hand knowledge since Monica, Lady Bognor, was resolutely un-tattooed – it was true that she came from a pre-tattoo generation, but even if she had been born twenty or thirty years later she would, Bognor felt sure, have remained unmarked by needles of any kind – ‘Tattoos,' he continued ruminatively, ‘are commonplace among young to youngish women in the UK. Any female of under, say, thirty is likely to be quite extensively marked in this way. It carries no stigma. In the old days tattooing used to be a hallmark of a certain sort of British male. Usually naval and military. The Sergeants' mess was full of heavily tattooed hairy forearms. Any naval petty officer worth his salt would have tattoos all over himself. Nowadays most young women have a tattoo or two. Usually small and discreet and invisible, save in a state of undress.' He paused and seemed to think for a while. ‘Or so I'm told,' he said.