Poison At The Pueblo (24 page)

The Board of Trade seemed, by and large, to have escaped the ‘modernization' that had so marred the mainstream Security Services. They had been subjected to political interference and infiltration. They had also become the victims of ‘systems'. These were designed to eliminate risk, but in reality only eliminated inspiration. Risk was, in his opinion, a necessary part of the exercise.

His outfit was also, he liked to think, informed by a moral dimension which had been lost elsewhere. Others might become ‘accountable' and liable to ‘scrutiny' by outside bodies who knew nothing and cared less. Not so at SIDBOT.

He was roused from this self-congratulatory reverie by noise.

It was a siren: the sound of real life interfering with ivory towers and dreaming spires.

He resented it.

He always did.

TWENTY-FIVE

P
olice sirens, thought Bognor, sounded remarkably similar all over the world. And the flashing blue light which indicated an angry squad car was remarkably ubiquitous, too. Nothing undercover or plain clothed about either. They evoked sound and fury, the meaning of business and the business of meaning.

It was not what he was expecting. There seemed to be dozens of them, mainly male, but all wearing the uniform of
les flics
or their underworld counterpart: trainers, blue jeans, black leather jackets over roll-neck tops. They could just as well have been criminals or even extras in a new play by Harold Pinter. They had dogs, well-fed, shiny German shepherds sniffing and snarling. The police adopted a similar attitude. Bognor recognized his friend, the
Teniente
, but the policeman was not doing recognition. This was business. They were all under arrest.

Regrets were expressed but without much conviction. It was explained tersely and bilingually that a Mr James Trubshawe had died and that the circumstances of his death were regarded as suspicious. In English this meant a probability of ‘foul play', though Bognor had always had difficulty with the phrase, not seeing, in his literal-minded way, what ‘play' had to do with ‘murder'. He was also moved to protest that he had only arrived after Trubshawe had passed away, and that for reasons of geography and location he was the only person present who could not possibly have done it.

However, he said nothing. Nor did any of the others. They behaved with a polite acquiescence which was positively British – a feather in the behavioural side of the Pueblo operation. Nevertheless, Bognor was not fooled for an instant by the velvet glove approach. He knew that this represented a failure for the serpentine methods that he himself felt he had favoured all his professional life. This was crude, macho, modern, in-your-face, throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bath-water detection and he disliked it.

Nevertheless, he had to accept that it was effective, modern and here to stay. It used science in a forensic sense which went far beyond such primitive processes as fingerprinting and identification parades. They were as fallible in their way as nearly all early forms of detection, but the discovery of DNA and techniques associated with it made them virtually obsolete. Bognor was sceptical about deoxyribonucleic acid, chromosomes and genetic fingerprinting. Ever since the man Pitchfork was convicted in the Enderby murder case, thanks almost entirely to the forensic practices made possible by Crick, Watson and Co., detection had been transformed. Bognor belonged, historically, to a pre-DNA age which men of the
Teniente
-Contractor generation considered prehistoric.

Late at night, after having taken drink, Bognor was not beyond saying that the developments had transformed the nature of his job from an art to a science. Next morning he would regret having said this but only up to a point. Tonight's performance proved his point. It was a triumph of new technology but it was also a demonstration of crude power. Supporters would have described it as a victory for professionalism over dilettante amateurism. But Bognor was not a supporter and he regretted what he believed was happening. He even felt depressed by the polite acquiescence of the alleged suspects. Only George displayed a flicker of opposition, but even he allowed himself to be cautioned and led out to the police minibus without protest.

It was a newish bus, quite smart, the sort of thing any tour company would have been proud of. The
teniente
drove and everyone was oddly and uncharacteristically silent.

‘I very much regret the inconvenience caused,' he said, as he started the vehicle and moved out down the drive, ‘but there has been a suspicious death, as I believe you all know, and it is necessary to ask you all to accompany me to the police station in Salamanca in order to submit to routine questioning. This is a simple process but necessary under Spanish law. When we have asked sufficient questions and obtained suitable answers, I will arrange for you to be driven back here and you will be able to resume your work.'

‘All of us?' George wanted to know. There was an edge to his voice which Bognor sensed was a possible harbinger of difficulty.

‘Alas, only time, as you say in your country, will tell.'

He slowed to a standstill, put the gears into neutral, checked the road for oncoming light, pulled out of the drive and turned left down the road to Salamanca.

‘Routine questioning,' thought Bognor, ruefully. He had been fighting ‘routine questioning' all his life and believed it to be little more than a pseudo-sophisticated version of the Inquisition. Thumbscrews and the rack were now eliminated. In fact, all forms of torture were technically forbidden, but that didn't mean that the deployment of a ‘Mr Nice' and a ‘Mr Nasty' was not effective, as were threats, cigarettes, cups of tea, bright lights, sleep deprivation and promises of leniency in return for self-incriminating ‘honesty'. Bognor believed that ‘routine questioning' was a euphemism designed to obtain convictions. He did not believe in the idea any more than he believed in the adversarial principle underlying the British legal system. This, he thought, meant that someone who was lucky or rich enough to obtain the services of the more effective lawyer nearly always won the case, whether they deserved to or not. He knew that there were built in safeguards involving judges and juries.

It was the same with ‘questioning'. There were all kinds of safeguards involving admitted testimony, witnesses, lawyers and the illegality of inflicting actual bodily harm. These were, of course, waived, even by allegedly civilized nations when circumstances so demanded. Thus Guantánamo Bay and almost anything to do with the alleged war on terrorism. In real life, blacks, homosexuals and the alleged victims of rape didn't do particularly well. Indeed, you could plausibly argue that ‘fair play' only applied to white Anglo-Saxon males of a certain age. If you were being particularly liberal, in an old-fashioned knee-jerk manner associated with the
Manchester Guardian
and certain inner suburbs of north London, you would argue, with some force, that only privately educated people of that description got a fair crack of the whip from ‘routine questioning'. Maybe not in Spain.

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

M
onica 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.'