Poison At The Pueblo (16 page)

Eduardo shrugged. He was obviously not a man who subscribed to green ideas on the dangers of global warming. He also came with a warning.

‘SIDBOT,' he said, returning to his opening gambit. ‘Camilla says that you are the man from SIDBOT and she has instructions from London to make sure that you do not interfere.'

Bognor's reaction to this information was unprintable and he said nothing, pretending instead to digest it. His reaction, naturally, was to tell Eduardo and Camilla, whoever they might be, to eff off and mind their own business. It was intolerable for someone of his standing and importance to deign to take charge of a case such as this, and then to find that some foreign squirt had got hold of his identity and was presuming to tell him how to behave. He was outraged. Heads would roll. Had they no idea who he was?

They walked on, outwardly happy and engrossed in improving talk; inwardly they seethed. At least, that was what Bognor was doing internally, even though he appeared imperturbable and phlegmatic as ever. He swallowed hard. He was being ridiculous. He, the least pompous, the least self-satisfied, the least puffed-up person he knew. He was the absolute acme of modesty; positively supine with self-doubt. Nevertheless, at his age, with a knighthood, a pension, and his own civil service department, he surely deserved to be treated with a modicum of respect. It was intolerable to be fingered as ‘the man from SIDBOT' by some fruit salesman and an Australian boarding-house proprietor.

‘I'm afraid I don't know what you're talking about,' he said, primly.

Eduardo trod on a twig. It snapped.

‘So,' he said, ‘you must talk with Camilla.'

‘I don't want to talk to Camilla,' he said. ‘I came here to talk to Spanish people and help with their English. I didn't come here to talk to an Australian landlady of a certain age.'

He realized as he said thus that it sounded ungallant.

‘I didn't come here to speak to native English speakers.
Any
native English speaker. I have no interest in them. I have quite enough English-speaking friends and acquaintances already. I don't need more.'

It was on the tip of his tongue to add disparaging remarks about Sheilas, colonials, Byron Bay, landladies and women of a certain age but he thought it might seem misleading. Besides, he wasn't that sort of person. Really. There wasn't a sliver of snobbery, sexism or racism in him. He was a new male. Well. Sort of. Up to a point. Anyway, he was here to do a job. He did not wish to be deflected. Least of all under circumstances such as this. He was, above all, a pro. Never let it be forgotten.

‘You should listen to what I say,' said Eduardo, who seemed to be doing some bristling of his own. ‘I just want to help. You are an old man. You should enjoy retirement. In Spain it is a moment for a glass of Pedro Ximénez and some bowling. You should smoke a pipe and wear the slip-over shoes.'

‘For Christ's sake!' Bognor spoke with feeling. ‘I didn't expect to find ageism in Spain of all places. I'm an old man in a hurry. Barely begun. Just watch this space.'

A rook cawed. Or was it a raven? He had never managed to distinguish satisfactorily between the two and suspected that the Spanish had a different bird altogether. Rooks were relatively commonplace and could be turned into pies. Ravens were altogether more baleful and unusual, harbingers of death. They were evil and strange, and when they left the Tower of London it would be as if the apes had left the Rock of Gibraltar, which, of course, was claimed by the Spanish, much as the Chinese had claimed a similarly inhospitable piece of rock known to the rest of the world as Hong Kong.

Musing thus and thinking of himself, Trubshawe and the concomitant of an unlikely and unexpected death, he said, ‘Paco Peña. I understand you are something of an aficionado?'

‘That is a Spanish word. There is a fine for using such things,' said Eduardo. ‘But, yes. I like Peña very much. He is from Cordoba. Is very nice. Very special.'

‘So I'm told,' said Bognor, lengthening his gait to traverse a puddle without getting wet. ‘Never been there. But I like Peña's music. Very . . . er . . . Spanish.'

‘
Sí
,' said Eduardo, snapping another twig underfoot. ‘Yes.
La Musa Gitana
.'

‘Julio Romero de Torres,' replied Bognor, who prided himself on not being just a pretty face.

Eduardo had the grace to look startled. He obviously hadn't expected this sort of erudition from the apparently bland and, in a nutshell, typically English Englishman. It was Bognor's most effective disguise. He himself liked to think of it as a thick-edged carapace round a razor-sharp mind, though at three o'clock in the morning he acknowledged that this was an exaggeration. He might not have been as clever as he thought, but he wasn't as stupid as he looked.

‘You know the
Musa Gitana
,' asked Eduardo suspiciously.

‘Know is a bit of an exaggeration,' said Bognor. ‘But one is aware of it. Naturally. I admire flamenco a great deal. That doesn't make me a professional, but even so . . .'

They passed another couple who had turned for home. Bognor knew from what he had learned in the earlier briefing, and from the look of negative complicity that passed between them, that the Anglo woman walking in the opposite direction was Camilla, the one time Essex girl, now translated to Northern New South Wales.

‘So how do you come to know Camilla?' asked Bognor. It seemed an obvious question.

‘Bananas,' replied Eduardo. ‘She lives in banana-growing country. We import from her neighbours.'

Bognor smiled. Silly him.

‘And I suppose she plays flamenco?' he said.

Eduardo frowned again.

‘Yes,' he said.

‘Forbidden fruit,' said Bognor. And they turned back, following the others towards HQ.

EIGHTEEN

C
amilla was faded.

Had she been a flower, thought Bognor, she would have been dried and pressed between the leaves of a collector's volume, preserved for posterity as an example of what had once been alive and beautiful and was now merely an item of academic interest.

She was leftover, but then maybe that's what most women were once they had passed their notional sell-by date. Bognor himself felt as much like a front-line foot-soldier as he had ever done, yet part of him knew that he was a rusty old desk-bound bore who was out of practice and ill at ease at the sharp end. If you were making a direct comparison, you would have to say that he was, on any strictly rational basis, well past the age for active service. On the same computer-style analysis, she wasn't. If either of them were faded, then it was Bognor.

He, on the other hand, was an alpha male, even if grizzled.

‘You shouldn't be here,' she said. This was called ‘cutting to the chase', though Bognor, who knew a thing or two about the phrase's provenance considered it a misuse of language. It didn't mean what the user thought it did.

‘I don't know what you mean,' he replied. The conversation was, he sensed, going to be like chess, full of feints and false initiatives until suddenly one of them embarked on something that carried risk but also the prospect of success. There was a break in the schedule before the next walk. They were encouraged to lie down, take it easy, possibly sleep. Bognor suggested coffee in a quiet corner of the bar. She acquiesced and led the way to a spot by the open fire, where they would not be overheard and barely overlooked. Presently the bar man brought two Americanos, black for him, white and sugared for her.

‘So you're from Byron Bay by way of Essex?' he tried, judging this almost as non-committal as a judgement on the weather, or a question about the frequency of her visits to the Pueblo.

‘I was on the permanent staff at SIS,' she said. ‘Both Six and Five since you ask, but they decided it would be in everyone's interests if I went to ground after the Diana and Dodi business. I was on Diana's staff at the time.'

This was a serious gambit, the sort of move that would make a controversial column in one of the smart London weeklies. Bognor was inclined not to believe a word of it. In his experience anyone who had worked for the secret services was, well, secretive about it. Those who blabbed and showed off almost certainly hadn't gone near either Five or Six, or even, come to that, SIDBOT. Not many people knew about SIDBOT, which was part of its charm, and also made him even more suspicious, though not entirely sceptical, about Camilla or whoever she really was.

‘“Ground” being New South Wales?'

She nodded. ‘Almost as far as one can get,' she agreed.

‘And what exactly were you doing with Diana?'

She sighed.

‘Let's just say I was on her staff,' she said. ‘Old-fashioned usage would probably have described me as her “dresser”, but that would have been hopelessly old-fashioned. “Companion” would be nearer the truth, but that's misleading too. You'll see me in a lot of the photographs, sort of hovering.' She smiled, and Bognor was almost inclined to believe her. ‘Most people fell for the cover-up,' she continued. ‘That ludicrous inquest and poor old Fayed. If ever a man played into establishment hands. Not that “the establishment” had much more of a clue than the jury. No one understands the reality of power. You could blame the press, though I think that's too easy. One way or another, the world fell for the cover-up. Only fruitcakes believe that Diana was murdered, but the fruitcakes are right. Actually fruitcakes are right more often than not. If you were to write the fruitcake version of history, you'd have a truer and more accurate version of events than the one that's peddled as the truth. Strange.' He stared hard at her coffee. ‘None of which detracts from the fact,' she said, ‘that people like you have a marginal nuisance value. You can get in the way, and it would be boring to have to eliminate you if it could be avoided.'

Bognor had not got where he had by listening to this garbage. On this occasion, however, he judged it inappropriate to say so.

‘Whoa,' he interrupted, ‘you're going too fast. Start at the beginning and talk me through everything stage by stage. It's a lot for an old bloke to get his head round.'

It was too. The trouble in dealing with the secret services was, obviously, secrecy. It was difficult to establish truth when the very definition of their organization was its obfuscation. It was patently ludicrous to ask one's allegedly secret services to tell the truth. They are in business to tell lies.

‘I was reading sociology at Keele. Then I spent a summer inter-railing and pitched up at the British Embassy in Bucharest. They recruited me for their local intelligence operation hanging out with Securitate and the friends of Nicolae Ceausescu, and then I was approached by London when I got home.'

‘Simple as that?'

‘Simple as that.'

‘Life is never as simple as that.'

He disguised the platitude with a slurp of Americano. On consideration, the sentiment may have been obvious but that didn't prevent it being true. Most analysis and description was concerned with reducing complex issues to black and white simplicity, but life, in his experience, was seldom quite like that. Life was complicated, blurred, muddy grey. It was only journalism and history which rendered clear in outline, simple in cause and predictable in effect. Novelists, too. They imposed patterns and structure on stuff which didn't have any of either.

‘Oh,' said Camilla, ‘life is unbearably simple. You're born; you live; you die. Beginning; middle; end. How do you complicate that? I was born; I live. Sooner or later, I'll die. No one much will notice at the time. A while later and no one will notice anything at all. We bring nothing in; we take nothing out. That's true for all of us. Simple.'

Long pause. They both stared into their coffee.

‘I wouldn't say that,' said Bognor. ‘But be that as it may, you seem to have got the wrong end of the wrong stick. You obviously want to tell me about it, so crack on. Don't let me interrupt. I'm all ears.'

He wasn't. He was playing chess and he was responding to her ambitious opening by playing the equivalent of a dead bat. Life, he reflected, was one sporting metaphor after another. Maybe life was just a game after all. Now that games had become a highly financed industrial part of economic life, rather than an extra-curricular activity, the notion had become quite different from Henry Newbolt's Corinthian-Victorian notion of warfare being a deadlier form of cricket or rugby football, with a Gatling gun instead of a Gunn and Moore cricket bat, and bloodthirsty fuzzy-wuzzies on the other side instead of fifteen brutes from school house. Bognor, like so many of his contemporaries, had been brought up in an old-fashioned tradition where boys – he had, naturally, been to an all male school – were prepared for a world which had long since vanished. It was not always easy to adapt, even though he considered himself the most adaptable, liberal person he knew. Nevertheless, he had to acknowledge that the conditioning of people such as Harvey Contractor was significantly different.

Or even Camilla.

‘I was recruited on my gap year,' she said. ‘When I was inter-railing I ended up in Bucharest. My passport was nicked and I met the local head of station at the Embassy. He liked the idea of controlling a girl studying sociology at Keele.' She spelled out the name of her
alma mater
and Bognor found it irritating.

‘I do know about Keele,' he said, tetchily. ‘It's good. Not so sure about sociology, but there's nothing wrong with Keele.' He knew she thought he was being snobbish. Too bad. It was her fault not his. Conditioning. Prejudice. The class system might have shifted in the last half century, but it was still alive and kicking. And not just in the UK either.

The trouble was that out here in the Spanish sticks it was going to be much more difficult to run the sort of routine checks on Camilla that he would have run off at home. There he had only to pick up the telephone, or thumb through one of his many reference books. Here he was under virtually constant surveillance of one sort or another and he was far removed from his usual sources. He would have to call Harvey Contractor on his mobile; or Monica; or both. But it would all take too long, was too complicated and essentially unreliable. He had long ago recognized that when it came to research you had to do your own, and you couldn't even trust your nearest and dearest.