Poison At The Pueblo (25 page)

‘In what way?' Bognor opened the cava and poured.

‘The mushrooms were a red herring,' she said. ‘If you don't mind me mixing my culinary metaphors.'

Bognor said he couldn't care less. He rather approved of mixed metaphors. Nevertheless, he wanted to know how and why.

‘It wasn't the mushrooms themselves,' she said. ‘It was what had been put in them. On them. Not just pepper and salt. Glass. Powdered. Our boys became suspicious of the autopsy. It didn't stack up. They became more and more convinced that mushrooms could be seriously upsetting, but almost certainly not fatal. And after what I found out from Celia they started to get neurotic about interference from their own side.'

‘You spoke to Celia?'

Monica and Celia had been at Art School together. The Slade. Celia was married to a friend in a high place. It was an ideological mismatch. Not altogether happy in other ways either. Yet Monica and Celia remained close. There were favours. From time to time they got called in. It was sometimes alleged that women were second-class citizens, that there was something called a ‘glass ceiling' through which no female ever passed and, perhaps most insidiously of all, that there was an Old Boys' Network that girls couldn't join.

That was not Bognor's experience.

Nor that of his wife.

‘Celia confirmed what the woman from Byron Bay told you. All incredibly unorthodox and nobody in Downing Street or even Whitehall will own up to it. And unless secret papers get left on a train from Teddington to Waterloo no one will ever know.'

‘So Six killed Trubshawe?'

‘Maybe,' said Monica, ‘maybe not.'

‘Don't be enigmatic,' said Bognor, ‘it doesn't suit you.'

‘You know, I suppose, that George was Jimmy Trubshawe's brother. And that Lola was alleged to have been his mistress.'

‘You believe that?'

‘My sources are immaculate but I'm not revealing them.'

Bognor believed her. It wouldn't be the first time.

‘Did the Admiral sanction the raid?'

‘Yes,' she said, ‘Picasso seems to have his own sources of information and I'm not here to question them. He called the
teniente
and they agreed that, coming at it from completely different angles and points of view, you were in danger. That's why we went in and pulled you out.'

‘Not exactly flattering.'

‘Not much point in being buttered up if you're dead. The second autopsy showed beyond reasonable doubt that Trubshawe was murdered. You yourself said that a person unknown had taken a shot at you, or at least in your direction. You'd already got a confession from the person purporting to be Camilla, with an acknowledgement of Eduardo's role as some sort of accessory. Job done, we reckoned. Besides which, we thought you were at risk. So we pulled you out.'

‘That should have been my decision,' said Bognor huffily. Huffy was how he felt. It showed. His wife noticed.

‘Darling,' she said tenderly, although she wasn't feeling as tender as she seemed, and was almost as huffy,
au fond
, as her husband, ‘we were worried about your safety and you'd solved the crime. It was Camilla who did it, cloaked in the security of working for the Secret Intelligence Agency. There was no purpose in your staying in and facing lots of hazard.'

‘It should have been my decision.'

‘For a start you were out in the field and therefore not in the ideal position for playing at captaincy. And we're in Spain. When in Spain . . . or to put it another way, our writ doesn't really run here, so if we disagree over procedures we don't do what seems appropriate to us, we do what the local authorities tell us. It would be the same in reverse if the
Teniente
or the Admiral were on our turf. Now drink your cava.'

The words ‘shut up little man' hung in the air but remained unexpressed. The cava was cold and fizzy. He drank deep and gazed round the room, which was opulent, and at his wife, who seemed concerned and disconcertingly self-assured.

‘Tell me about Camilla,' he said.

She shrugged. ‘Not a lot to tell,' she said. ‘Standard Six story. They used her too much and too obviously. She was on Diana's staff; gained her confidence; was crucial in the plot to have her bumped off. Then after the so-called accident in the tunnel the press and others started to get too close for comfort, so they sent her as far away as they could and told her to go to sleep until the coast was clear. When it was, she was told she'd have a serious front-line role. The sort of operation for which she was originally trained. Meanwhile they paid her what amounted to a very generous subsidy for her B. and B.'

‘So she was part of the plot to kill Diana?'

‘Looks like it.'

‘Mmm.' The extent of the plot had never been properly established, and although it was almost universally accepted that the Princess's final demise was an accident, it was also commonly agreed that there was a genuine conspiracy in the Security Services. The details were less well known and Bognor preferred not to know them. It was enough that there was a plot, and its existence was proof to Bognor that parts of the so-called intelligence community were not to be trusted. He conducted most of his professional life on that basis. Intelligence work involved a visceral distrust of everyone else, especially those also engaged in intelligence, and most of all those allegedly on your own side. Enemies were bad, friends doubly so. At least with enemies there was a reasonable likelihood of knowing what was going on.

‘Celia say anything else?' he asked, more or less innocently, hoping for an answer but not really expecting one.

‘Sent her love,' she said, to which he replied, naturally, that this was not what he meant even though he was glad to hear it.

‘Government is in terrible trouble,' she said, ‘and profoundly unamused by our unilateral decision to solve the Trubshawe murder.'

Bognor laughed. ‘Well,' he said, ‘if they're the guilty party that's hardly surprising.'

She laughed back.

‘I never cease to be amazed by what governments get up to behind the scenes,' she said. ‘It's been true ever since you started in SIDBOT. Nobody outside the corridors of power seems to know anything. Nothing in the papers; nothing on TV. Just bromides and spin. It's the same with this. No one in the world at large will know or care about Jimmy Trubshawe's death; let alone Jimmy Trubshawe's brother or Jimmy Trubshawe's mistress. The public believe what people like Alastair Campbell tells them. If you went public on what you knew you'd make an absolute fortune in newspaper serials.'

‘Except that no one would believe a word of it.'

‘True,' said Lady Bognor. ‘So we live in a fantasy world while our lords and masters get up to God knows what, protected by laziness and incompetence in the fourth estate, and assisted by deceit and guile on the part of those who are conniving with the government to dupe the rest of us.'

‘That's a very cynical view of the world we live in,' he said.

‘True once more,' she agreed, ‘but don't tell me you think differently.'

Bognor regarded the bubbles in his glass. They were a wonderful example of life's mystery and frustrated optimism. He had no idea how the bubbles got there in the beginning, hadn't a clue why they continued to surge upwards and, finally, why they evaporated inexorably as they reached the surface. But he and Monica were just like the bubbles. They were effervescent and optimistic, and they surged ever upwards until, phut, they exploded into thin air. They were not the only ones. In the end everyone was just a bubble floating in champagne, but doomed to perish at the end of their voyage.

This was ludicrous. Life was not a glass of cava. He shook himself like a Sealyham after being caught in the rain.

‘You all right, darling?' asked his wife.

‘Me?' he replied, surprised. ‘Me. Never felt better.'

This was not entirely correct. Fatigue, wine and anticlimax were combining to make him light-headed. A tad depressed as well. For once he had to concede that his individual, intuitive approach seemed to have let him down. Enemies would have considered it quirky and old-fashioned, but it had served him well enough in the past. This time, however, he had fallen foul of rigorous modern interrogation, rival branches of the secret intelligence services and, though it pained him to admit it, his wife.

‘So,' he asked, seemingly innocent, ‘who do you think killed him?'

She appeared to muse. ‘He was murdered,' she said at last, ‘the second autopsy proves that. The first one – the fake one – was ambiguous. It could have been a simple mistake and he ate the wrong mushroom, which, as he had cardiac problems associated with the high blood pressure, high cholesterol and elevated enzymes all of which are well-documented, could have killed him. But you can't argue with ground glass.'

‘So it wasn't an accident?'

The cava was slowing down, but he wanted to be sure.

‘It certainly wasn't an accident,' she said, ‘and Camilla's admission of guilt, coupled with Eduardo's obvious complicity, makes it an open-and-shut case.'

‘I suppose so.' He shrugged.

‘Only I don't believe in “open-and-shut” any more than you do.'

‘No,' he agreed.

In the street below people were singing. The music sounded like a student drinking song: rambunctious but with a plangent touch of melancholy. An anthem for youth on the verge of loss.

‘The trouble is,' she said, ‘the way of the world being far from straight and narrow, Camilla's so-called confession is too tidy to be quite plausible.'

‘Meaning?'

‘Meaning I don't think she did it,' she said. ‘It's too convenient. Almost neater than an accident. Camilla will be whisked back to Byron Bay; nobody will breathe a word about Eduardo. No one need know about George and Lola or anyone else. Nobody is particularly interested in Trubshawe. He was a nasty piece of work with no visible next of kin, no nearest and dearest. No one to care what happened to him.'

Bognor demurred quietly.

‘Except me,' he said.

She snorted. ‘You're perverse, Simon Bognor,' she said, ‘and you always have been, as you well know. If you weren't we wouldn't be married, as you also well know.'

‘That's as may be,' he replied, ‘but just because Trubshawe was a shit doesn't make him an appropriate candidate for being murdered. I don't think anyone should be bumped off in this world. That's partly why I've been in the line of work I have. And, incidentally, who do you think tried to bump me off and will we ever know?'

‘And, in any case, does it really matter?' she asked. ‘They missed.'

‘Yes, well,' said Bognor, seeming hurt.

‘Personally,' said Monica, ‘I think it was George warning you off. I don't think he meant to harm you. Rather the reverse. He was being protective.'

‘Funny way of being protective,' said Bognor, ‘shooting someone . . .'

‘Yes, well,' she said, regarding him fondly, ‘people have funny ways of showing all sorts of thing. Why don't you just shut up, take off your clothes and come to bed.'

Bognor did as he was told.

TWENTY-SEVEN

B
ognor wished to hear this from the horse's mouth with his own ears.

‘I'm told that you were the deceased's brother?'

George was a key witness and so, in her silent way was Monica. There were just the three of them present.

‘All men are brothers. You're my brother. I'm yours. That's what the Good Book says.'

‘Fiddle the Good Book.' Bognor was the nearest to anger that he allowed his professional self to be. ‘We don't give a stuff about the Good Book. We're here to establish something much more mundane. We don't deal in eternal verities, only truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.'

‘So help me God,' said George unexpectedly.

‘Absolutely,' replied Bognor, quick as the proverbial flash.

‘So, were your parents Percy and Edna? Or was that what they were known as? And were you brought up in Essex?'

‘In a manner of speaking,' said George. ‘Though I always thought Jimmy and I were adopted. We were so alike and yet so unalike; different but the same.'

‘I see,' said Bognor, not having the foggiest idea what the man who claimed to be George was actually saying.

‘So you may or may not have been Jimmy's blood brother, but you were brought up as if you were.'

‘Got it in one, squire,' said George. He seemed impressed.

‘But, on balance, you don't think you were brothers.'

George thought a long time about this and Bognor was on the point of rephrasing the question. George cut him short, however. He understood perfectly, he said, but he was cogitating.

‘It's not a difficult question,' said Bognor, trying to be helpful.

‘With respect, it is actually,' said George. ‘I'm naturally sceptical. Unlike James who believed everything he was told. He thought we were brothers. I was never so sure. And I wasn't at all sure Percy and Edna had anything to do with us. Not originally. I think that even if we were brothers we were fostered out.'

‘What made you . . . I mean why?' Bognor was floored. This was not what he was used to or what he did best.

‘We grew up like twins. We wore the same clothes; went to the same schools; had the same friends. Hell, we were one another. But there was something wrong. I suppose it was too perfect. Life isn't like that. And while conceivably we were like one another, we sure as hell weren't in any way the same as Percy and Edna. No way. They were, like, dumb. Stupid. And we were smart. Smart kids. We could do all kinds of things they couldn't. And we were restless. We wanted out. Mum and Dad were, you know, conventional.'

‘Mum and Dad?'

‘That's what we were told to call them. That's what we called them. Every other little boy and girl in that part of the county called their protectors, providers, what you will . . . Mum and Dad. So we did the same. No point in drawing attention to yourself when there's no need.'