Read Online Poison At The Pueblo by Tim Heald - Free Book Online

place, resistant to outside influence, especially Anglo-American.
    â€˜I don’t see Trubshawe enjoying this sort of Spain,’ said Bognor. ‘More of a Costa sort of person. Pubs with beams; chips with everything; HP sauce.’
    â€˜You’re probably right,’ said his wife. ‘You and Trubshawe go back a long way. And you’ve always been close to his tribe.’
    â€˜Trubshawe’s tribe,’ said Bognor reflectively. ‘Bit snobbish to think of the deceased’s acolytes in quite that way. But inevitable all the same. I don’t think of myself as snobbish but I would agree to “old-fashioned”.’
    â€˜Same thing,’ said Monica crisply and probably accurately. ‘Old-fashioned people from your background and with your education are invariably snobbish. It goes with the territory, along with a plummy voice, striped ties and tweeds.’
    â€˜I don’t do tweeds,’ her husband protested.
    â€˜I speak figuratively not literally,’ said Monica, ‘you should know that by now. In a figurative sense you are tweedy man with a plummy voice and striped ties. You are also a snob. You can’t help it. It’s part of your conditioning. And it’s why you’re automatically suspicious of the world’s Trubshawes – social condescension.’
    â€˜Whereas you . . .’
    She did not allow him to finish the sentence, performing the task herself.
    â€˜Am inherently less prejudiced and more open-minded. Mainly because I’m a woman. We as a sex are like that. Men have closed minds, even though they are open books. A paradox but easy to understand – at least if you’re a woman. Men don’t read each other.’
    â€˜I think we should move,’ he said, conscious of the chill and hoping to humour his truculent spouse.
    She, on the other hand, was no longer feeling the cold but was warmed up by the combustible nature of her verbosity.
    â€˜I almost feel sorry for Trubshawe,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t hold his knife and fork the way you do, so you pick on him and categorize him as a villain. You think he looks and behaves like a crook, ergo he is a crook. QED.’
    â€˜Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said. ‘Some of my best friends don’t know how to hold their knife and fork but they’re not crooks. Trubshawe was a crook, end of story. He had a gang, hired killers, pimps, dealers. He was the ultimate bad hat. He had people killed, for God’s sake, women raped. You name it, he did it.’
    â€˜His real crime in your eyes was that he came from below the salt,’ she said. ‘He wore brown shoes with a dark suit, dropped his aitches, wasn’t one of “you”.’
    â€˜I never subscribed to that tosh about brown shoes and grey trousers,’ responded Bognor, ‘and the one thing Trubshawe never dropped were his aitches. I didn’t like him because he was an antisocial bastard and his subordinates and colleagues were the same sorts of shit. I’m in business to eliminate that sort of behaviour and the most effective way of doing that is to get rid of the perpetrators.’
    â€˜You just want to get rid of people with bad table manners and no dress sense. Or to be really accurate, people with different manners and a different sense of what to wear from the one you have. Wearing socks with sandals doesn’t necessarily make a man a murderer.’
    â€˜I wouldn’t be so sure of that,’ Bognor sniffed, half-joking, half-conceding that perhaps his wife might have a point.
    They both shivered involuntarily. Stars twinkled above them. In the shadows of a dark cobbled alley two dogs sniffed each other hopefully; a corrugated metal shutter rattled down to obscure a shop window. A Vespa farted. Sir Simon and Lady Bognor pushed back their plastic chairs which rasped on the ground. Man and wife stood ready for the next