Poison At The Pueblo (14 page)

It was a perfectly fair question but Bognor didn't have a clue. Nor, apparently, did George. This time he didn't attempt to bluster.

‘You're the pet food man,' said Bognor, seeing an opportunity to lighten the mood and to lead Leonel on to home turf. ‘What do you think? How does it work in Spanish? Do you have hermaphrodite cats but heterosexual dogs?'

Leonel looked blank. ‘Please?' he ventured.

‘Our friend was making a joke,' said George, unhelpfully. ‘It's a failing in a certain sort of Brit. Can't take anything seriously.'

Bognor didn't think he was going to like George, whoever he might be.

‘I was only trying to see if the English and Spanish languages took a different line on cats and dogs,' he said. ‘I wasn't trying to be funny. Not my cup of tea.'

‘Why,' asked Lola, ‘is it that the English spend so much time talking of cups of tea, storms in teacups and so on and so forth? Also dogs?'

Bognor closed his eyes and reminded himself that the Spaniards were here to learn English and the Anglos to teach it, if only by osmosis. He also remembered that George almost certainly wasn't George, though he was unlikely to be Oliver O'Flaherty from Limerick either. Also that Leonel was as dull as he seemed, but played bass guitar and was keen on Johnny Cash and football. There was no accounting for taste. He also claimed an Opus Dei fabricated MBA from some university in Oviedo. Shades, he thought, of the da Vinci file, though Opus Dei was more interesting than that. You could also say the same about a pet food company executive with that sort of background, but exotic backgrounds did not always translate into an interesting, let alone exciting, reality. Leonel was dull despite his CV.

‘Tea is an important part of British culture,' he found himself saying in response to the nun's question. And we like dogs. He was wracking his brains, trying to think of something coherent to say to Leonel about either Johnny Cash or football. He supposed Leonel was a Seville supporter but he knew nothing whatever about the team and precious little about popular music. Mozart was about as low or middlebrow as he got, though he had once been rather keen on Manfred Mann. Something to do with an unattainable girl some time before Monica arrived on the scene.

‘Not in Spanish,' said George, making an uncouth noise sucking soup from his spoon. ‘They don't do tea the way we do. Just bags and hot water. It's a coffee culture. Precious little in the way of biscuits. I could die for a chocolate digestive. Give me Australia any day. They understand tea and biscuits down there. Bloody good show. They still do elevenses and proper tea breaks. Civilized.'

‘Is different,' said Lola, rather pointedly finishing her gazpacho with a fastidious flourish, ‘in
España
one drinks the coffee, not the tea. Also we take the long siesta in the middle of the day. Otherwise, we work. Not like England.'

‘The English work bloody hard these days,' said George, with feeling. ‘One of the reasons I live abroad. All work and no play. You know the saying. Many a true word spoken in whatever they say, if you know what I mean. Same went for poor old Jimmy Trubshawe. Sense of perspective. That's what the modern generation of Brits don't have. Sense of bloody perspective.'

A waiter cleared their plates. Bognor sensed George spoiling for a fight. Preferably with him. He could think of no proper reason for this and the feeling was uncomfortable. Part of him wanted to plunge into a sort of soft interrogation of George, who had, tacitly and perhaps unintentionally, admitted to knowing more about the late Trubshawe than he might have intended. Part of him wanted to ingratiate himself with Leonel by saying something affable and knowledgeable about pet food, Johnny Cash or football, and part of him wanted to follow up on the alluring nun because . . . oh well . . . he thought to himself, irritably. Just because.

‘I never actually got to a Cash concert,' he said, knowing that he sounded feeble, ‘but I had some of the LPs. They've gone now, of course. Out of date technology.'

‘No such thing as out of date technology,' said George. ‘Built-in obsolescence. That's the name of the game. These Johnnies couldn't make money if their gizmos lasted for ever. The whole basis of making money these days is to build in the need to replace whatever it is you've got with the latest fashion. Take razors.'

‘Razors?' asked Leonel, seemingly incredulous, though Bognor wasn't so sure.

The waiter reappeared bearing meat on plates stacked impressively up one of his arms. Skills such as this impressed Bognor no end, particularly as he was singularly inept in matters such as this. Manual dexterity, hand-to-eye coordination, DIY and other traditionally attributes of the British male were not his bag. He had a nasty feeling that George would be a dab hand at DIY, even if he were not adept at stacking plates up his arm. He would probably regard such a feat as homosexual and foreign: ‘pansy, woofter, Johnny foreigner'. Bognor could already hear the bizarre combination of truculence and defeat which was, he believed, characteristic of men like George.

‘You know Jimmy Trubshawe?' he asked, surprising even himself. It was much too obvious a question. He should have been oblique, playing his cards close to the proverbial, not laying them out for all to see. At the same time there was an instinctive trait in his approach, which led sometimes to a breaking of the rules, a statement of the obvious when something more obscure would have seemed appropriate. There was a considerable part of Bognor which defied the textbook.

George didn't seem unduly fazed by the question, direct though it was.

‘Maybe,' he said. ‘Maybe not.'

And stuffed unseasoned meat into his mouth.

Bognor retaliated with a garlicky mouthful of his own.

‘Well,' he said, with an aggression which surprised even himself, ‘maybe or maybe not?'

A mutual glower ensued. The two Spaniards recognized a shared hostility but were unable to be precise about it. It was clear that their Anglo friends and instructors were not getting on, but it was not clear to them precisely why. It was not clear to the protagonists either, which made the whole impasse more difficult to explain or even to understand. The mutual dislike was visceral. It was echoed in the mind but it stemmed from the gut.

‘Why,' asked Lola attempting, perhaps to pour oil on troubled waters, ‘is the storm in the teacup?'

This was not an easy question to answer.

‘It is a way of saying,' he tried, ‘that the disagreement may seem to be very significant and upsetting, but it's actually not as important as it seems.'

‘But,' she persisted, ‘why teacup?'

Bognor chewed on his meat and smiled at George.

‘Good question, eh?' he tried, round grisly meat that might just have been horse but was probably just goat.

Lola was determined to add milk to the stormy brew.

‘In
España
we have the Twining bag,' she said brightly, ‘which is unusual, no? In
España
it is not common to use the convenience food. It is more usual to cook with the fresh ingredients. Like the mushrooms, for instance.'

Mention of mushrooms reminded them all of death.

‘Yes. Well,' said Bognor, ‘the meat is very tasty. Tell me, Leonel, is Lola right? Is it more common in your country to use fresh ingredients. For instance, do pet owners give their animals fresh meat?'

Leonel seemed eager.

‘Is a problem for us, yes,' he said. ‘We are anxious to sell the cans of processed food for the dogs and the cats because we add the vitamins and the good things that improve the diet for the pets. But most people are not understanding that it is better to have the food from the tin.'

‘I see,' said Bognor.

George chewed and looked daggers.

Lola smiled sunnily.

‘Jimmy and I went to the same school,' said George unexpectedly. ‘He was a year above me. Good at football. You wouldn't say we knew each other. Not then. But he was a bit of a hero in those days. Always was, if you want to know.'

Bognor wondered if this was halfway to a confession of guilt, but he said nothing, just cut another mouthful of tough but tasty meat and chewed thoughtfully.

SIXTEEN

T
he rest of lunch was sticky. Bognor floundered. Lola and Leonel smiled and trotted out phrases from text books. George glowered. The flan and the custard were acceptable and identical. The wine evaporated; the water likewise. And coffee arrived. It was as thick as glue and very sweet. Sticky as the conversation.

Housekeeping followed on the agenda as an add-on to the coffee. Housekeeping meant Arizona Brown and Felipe Lee, who were staff. They were glib, suave, professional, good at their jobs and Bognor took a more or less instant dislike to both of them. They, for their part, spoke well of him, or at least bade him welcome, thanked him for joining the team at such short notice and called him Simon throughout. Neither of them gave the slightest hint of an identity other than his simple given name. It made him feel like a Latter Day Saint or an Anonymous Alcoholic.

The Brown girl had the willowy figure and unspotted complexion of someone who ate sensibly, worked out regularly, drank no alcohol but might conceivably have a dangerous drugs habit. Bognor had heard that her sexuality was ambiguous, which he could well believe, and he suspected that she had some native American blood. Navajo possibly. She also had perfect teeth, a characteristic Bognor had long associated with a certain sort of American nubility and Heath Robinson-esque wire mouth devices worn throughout adolescence.

‘OK guys and dolls,' she said winsomely, after Bognor had been introduced and had stood diffidently to acknowledge that he was indeed he, ‘following walkies and the five o'clock tea break we will be splitting in to two teams for a not so simple game of charades. I will mentor one team and Felipe will do the same for the other.'

She smiled a great deal and phrased everything as if it were a genuine request, whereas it was a command.

‘What we would like – though ultimately, of course, it's for you to decide – channelling everything through your team leaders – who will, naturally, be Spaniards – and, so as not to prolong the suspense, let's tell you that the team leaders for this exercise will be Lola and Leonel – so, what we would like is for the two teams to devise advertising and marketing strategies for two very characteristic products which is to say . . .
sausages
. One team will present the case for the British banger and the other will do the same for the Spanish chorizo. You can add in any typical ingredients like mashed potato or jalapeño peppers, but essentially we want to hear it for the banger on the one hand and the chorizo on the other. You'll have the whole time up to and including supper to work on your scheme, and then we'll do the presentation out in the bar after we've all had supper together. Any questions?'

George had a question. He would, thought Bognor. He would.

‘What if we don't like our product?' said George. ‘May we change teams?'

‘No, George,' said Arizona, smiling brightly through her pearly teeth, which were almost but not quite gritted for the gesture. ‘You can't change sides. You just have to pretend. It's what we do all through life: we pretend to be advocating one particular strategy while privately preferring another. It's a necessary compromise.'

If George were a dog he would have growled.

Arizona sat down, crossing her leggy jeans and smilingly dared anyone else to attempt a challenge. No one dared. No one even got near.

Once it was clear that Arizona was unchallenged, Felipe Lee rose to do serious housekeeping. He seemed something of a fusspot but this was, Bognor recognized, almost certainly a ploy. He was wearing a dark suit which seemed more Anglo than Spanish and a collar and tie. He seemed more like a merchant banker than an executive of a language school.

‘The bar,' he said, ‘doesn't take credit cards and they won't let you run a tab. You have to pay as you drink. Old Spanish custom.' He flickered a smile which was gone almost as soon as it was signalled. ‘Please make sure that any laundry is left in the bag outside your room by nine a.m. If any of you have problems understanding the code system for ordering meals, please contact me before supper this evening. If any of you are having trouble with your mobile phones, I have to advise you that the signal is weak and variable so you may have trouble. If so, I advise you to make use of the landlines provided for guests' use in reception.' He paused and stared round unblinking at his audience.

‘Any questions?' he wanted to know.

There were no questions. Felipe was not the sort of factotum who genuinely invited them. Like Arizona, he told. It occurred to Bognor that the Pueblo was an extraordinarily regulated and orchestrated place for one which people paid good money to attend. Both Felipe and Arizona were treating their guests like new boys in a boarding school. Bognor had endured such indignities many years ago and the experience was not lightly forgotten.

Strange, thought Bognor, that sudden death, maliciously contrived, should so often take place in such well-ordered surroundings. In this, as in so much, appearances deceived. This expensive, exclusive language school was one of the last places on earth that he would have expected to be associated with murder. But then his entire career had been built on the premise that nothing was ever quite what it seemed.

Arizona was back on her feet. She and Felipe were a well-synchronized, polished act.

‘You have fifteen minutes to finish your coffee, take a quick comfort break and generally do whatever it is that you want to do, then it's onward and upwards. The weather forecast is fine so there should be no problem having a gentle stroll through the woods. Talk about anything you like but please, just remember,
no Spanish
. Everything you say must be said in English.'