The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery

by Kyril Bonfiglioli

  ‘So can Jock. It is an innate gift.’

  ‘He afterwards noticed these same men from time to time, loitering at a little distance from the College, sometimes peering into the windows of the bookshop opposite, as though enjoying the reflection of the College gates therein. He notices such things; he has been a servant of the College for many years now, man and boy – and the College pays its porters to keep their eyes open.’

  ‘Just as we undergraduates used to pay them to keep their eyes shut now and then.’

  ‘I daresay, it was ever thus. However, when he told Bronwen that he had himself seen two such men frequenting the neighbourhood, “she came,” as he put it, “all over funny” and he took her into the porters’ cubby-hole and gave her a chair and a cup of strong, sweet tea. She was, he says, “sort of pleased and frightened both.”’

  ‘That’s easily explained, surely: she was frightened that she was indeed being followed but pleased that the men were real, not mere figments of her heated imagination. You see, women of a certain age live in dread of menopausal symptoms such as hot flushes and hallucinations.’

  ‘Yes, that seems plausible, I must say. How I wish I had your wonderfully experienced insight into the minds of women; it would help me so much with the Brontë sisters.’ I mentally sorted out some two or three rejoinders to that one but decided to let it lie where it had fallen. (Even had I skill with words I should not care to bandy them with Dryden; he once bandied several whole sentences with Bowra himself and emerged bloody but uncowed. His command of the subjunctive mood is a by-word in Oxford – for my part I never quite mastered the locative case.)

  ‘As to the other two men,’ he went on, placing his fingertips together so as to form a little churchlet, ‘I have already hinted, have I not, that we cannot assume that they were the same as the first two, although they, too, were large and clad in dark suits …’

  ‘Yes, John?’ I asked patiently, helpfully. His thoughts seemed to be far away. I brought the port decanter in and set it before him. He seemed to collect himself after the first sip or two.

  ‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘the other two men – if they were indeed other – presented themselves at Scone the day after Bronwen shuffled off her mortal coil and showed the Warden some most impressive credentials. He is unable clearly to recollect the origin of these documents; I questioned him clearly but all he could swear to was that the men’s authority appeared to come from the Ministry of Certain Things. I fancy he was jesting. He is, as you know, a Constitutional Historian by trade and much blessed with children: such men live in a world quite different from ours, quite different.’

  I took a little port myself, to ease the throbbing in my temples.

  ‘The Warden,’ he continued, ‘was enough impressed by these credentials to give the men permission to rummage Bronwen’s set of rooms. They took away a suitcase full of her papers. The Junior Dean accepted what I would call a wholly inadequate receipt, written on plain paper and illegibly signed … oh dear, yes, I quite agree, Mortdecai (although the phrase you use is strange to me), but we must be charitable; after all, if he were clever he would hardly be Junior Dean, would he? Eh?’

  I repeated the phrase which he had found strange.

  ‘One thing he did notice, though, was that one of the men spoke with a curious accent – American, he thought, or perhaps Australian or Swedish. Fred, alas, was not on duty in the Lodge that day so we cannot tell whether these latter two men were the same as the two he had met in the tavern, you see.’

  ‘I see, I see,’ I said, choking back another strange phrase, for the news about Fred’s absence was the answer to a shrewd question with which I had been about to hit Dryden. No-one likes to have his shrewd questions stillborn behind his front teeth.

  ‘Are you quite well, Mortdecai? Shall I continue? Splendid. Now, you were about to ask me about Fred, were you not’ – I ground a molar or two inaudibly – ‘and then you were going to ask me to come to the point, to explain why the Fellworthy incident should be of sufficient import to impel the Second Senior Fellow of Scone across the foaming flight-paths to Jersey.’

  ‘Some such thought did cross my mind, John,’ I said heavily. ‘I mean, even lady-dons have secret lives and strange accidents, statistics prove it …’ He checked my flow of reason with an upraised finger far more minatory than I could ever command.

  ‘Mortdecai, you surely recall that I was never one to use words at haphazard. I did not say “accident.” I used the word “incident” choicely. The Warden and I are convinced that Bronwen’s final, ah, occident – an elegant compromise, wouldn’t you say? – was, not to put too fine a point upon it, bloody murder.’

  I turned that word over and looked at the back of it. There was no solace on that side. I sipped a sup of second-best port; that, too, was thick and sweet as blood. Into each life some murder must fall but too much has fallen in mine – it follows me about like some blue-arsed fly but I have never learnt to live with it. Murder is for the younger set.

  Before I could assemble a reply, Johanna swept in amidst a cloud of tourmaline mink. I presented John to her; she was wonderfully kind to him, said how nice it was that Charlie’s old school-pals still visited him, hoped that he could stay for ages and ages then whisked away to her boudoir, leaving a ravishing hint of M. Patou’s ‘Joy’ in the ecosystem and, evidently, leaving John Dryden a little squiggle-eyed. Before he could utter, I said, ‘John, to tell the truth I usually have a little nap at this time of the day; settles my luncheon, d’you see. Daresay you could use a similar little folding of the hands to sleep after your early start this morning. Come, let me show you your room. Jock will call you at 6 p.m., when the life-giving drinks-tray manifests itself. Dinner’s at eight, so you’ll have heaps of time for your bath. Oh, by the way, we don’t change here as a rule.’

  ‘No, indeed we do not,’ he said, wagging his head sadly. ‘Except for the worse.’

  ‘I meant that we don’t change for dinner.’

  ‘So did I, dear boy.’ You see what I mean about Dryden as a word-bandier.

  Having consigned him to his room and given him a couple of Enid Blytons and a Kyril Bonfiglioli to read, I stole into the dressing-room where I changed into my most fetching sleeping-suit, brushed my teeth and tippy-toed towards the communicating door of Johanna’s bedroom, twirling my moustache and muttering many a ‘heh heh!’ like a Village Squire about to Have His Way with Poor Little Angeline. My hand was on the very knob of the door when I heard the key turn firmly. I, too, turned; first white with rage and then to my solitary bed. The illustrated edition of the Jeou-P’ ou-T’ ouan seemed to have lost its charm.

  It is a terrible moment when a married man finds himself falling in love with his own wife; it’s comparable with that traumatic moment at school when you discover that you are growing up and the masters aren’t.

  V

  Two high pairs

  What should I say

  Since faith is dead,

  And truth away

  From you is fled?

  For my part, I needed no rousing by Jock; we whose senses have been honed to a razor’s edge by the whetstone of war can roll out of bed in one fifth of a second at the lightest tinkle of a drinks-tray on the floor below. Washed and dressed, I was offering the tall glass of iced gin a perfunctory sniff from the cork of the vermouth bottle just as Dryden staggered into the drawing-room, fighting at the penultimate waistcoat-button. I poured plentifully for him. Again he bagged my personal armchair but I bore him no malice: a guest in my house can have anything of mine. Almost anything. He was giving me a detailed account of how refreshingly he had napped, to which I was listening raptly, when Johanna swept in, her lovely face just visible over a cumulus of black diamond mink. She would not take a cheering glass because, she explained, she was going to play bridge at the Lieutenant Governor’s and needed all her wits about her.

  ‘But I’m sure you boys can amuse yourselves, cutting up old touches about your schooldays together, hu
nh?’ My old tutor made civil, puzzled noises; I ground a little more dentine off the molars.

  ‘Oh, hey, Charlie dear,’ she added, ‘do you have a little cash money around? Just in case I lose at bridge?’ Johanna never loses at bridge but I fished out my wallet, weeded off a couple of notes for myself and handed her the rest.

  ‘Hey, Charlie dear, I shan’t need all this; why, it must be nearly a hundred pounds!’

  ‘It is precisely one hundred and seven pounds,’ I said. ‘Enjoy.’ (What did she think I am – a Gentile or something?)

  When she had made her exit and when Dryden had pulled himself together (he professes no interest in women but Johanna is something else again: she could have made Oscar Wilde sit up and beg) we turned to our drinks and to the matter in hand.

  ‘You were about to tell me, John, your reasons for believing that Bronwen Fellworthy’s demise was no accident. So far – pray tell me if I am wrong – you have evinced the facts that (a) this furious driving of hers was uncharacteristic; (b) two large men seem to have been taking an unnatural interest in her; and (c) two men, who may or may not have been the two already filed under “(b)”, sequestered certain papers from her rooms. I agree that this is puzzling but it makes no sort of pattern. The Jehu-like driving might derive from a fit of pique at having been put down by one of the Turl dons at luncheon; the first two men may well have been private detectives hired by someone’s jealous wife; and the second two may have been from the Public Record Office, searching for files she had absent-mindedly pinched. There is no case for murder, none. No jury would convict; no judge would hang a, well, a Liberal MP on such threads of evidence. Nor have you shown any Motive, Means or Opportunity.’ I folded my hands complacently, wondering whether I should slip an airline timetable onto his bedside table after dinner or before. But he was no whit abashed.

  ‘Oh Mortdecai, Mortdecai, you were ever a rash, headstrong youth. I recall the impetuous wager you made in connection with the seven nurses from the Radcliffe Infirmary …’

  ‘Yes, John,’ I said hastily, ‘but that was in another country and, besides, the wenches are dead, or married to handsome young doctors. More to the point, none of this is to the point, if I make myself clear.’

  ‘Forgive me, Mortdecai, you are right of course; one should not “raise the follies of our youth to be the shame of age.” ’ I had to admire that bit of in-fighting: only Dryden could so instantly have counter-punched with a line containing the dread word ‘age.’ I conceded.

  ‘Pray go on, John. I am all ears.’ He twisted the knife in the wound a bit by flicking a myopic glance at my upper slopes, as though trying to get a sight of the said ears through the tropical rainforest of moustache. I indulged him, I did not wince or cry aloud.

  ‘You see,’ he went on, wiping his spectacles in a disappointed sort of way, ‘there is just a little more to it than I have so far related.’ I screamed inside my head, for I knew those tones of old: they were the tones of a Fellow and Tutor who has something ripe and squashy up his sleeve. (I had last heard them a couple of decades before, when, as a second-year undergraduate, I was reading my weekly essay to Dryden. The subject was Sixteenth-Century English Prosody and, having passed the week amongst bad companions, I found myself with but half a morning in which to lay a learned egg. I sped to the Bodleian Library, as better men have sped before; found a relevant article in some obscure forty-year-old American Review of Renaissance Studies and copied it out entire. As I read it to Dryden that afternoon he appeared to be dozing at first, then heaved himself to his feet and roamed the room, taking out a volume here and there and saying ‘pray continue, dear boy’ in precisely those flat, silken tones to which I have just referred. I read on; he continued to fidget at his bookshelves, then – joined in. I faltered, breaking the duet. ‘Yes,’ he said, returning the book to its shelf, ‘I remember considering that to be a rather sound analysis at the time. I wonder whether I might ask you to delight me with two essays next week? How kind. Good day.’ You see the kind of contender I was matched against – a master of ring-craft. Rightly did the poet sing:

  Dryden, thou should’st be living at this hour;

  Cambridge hath need of thee, she is a fen & c.

  But I am in danger of digressing.)

  ‘Yes, just a little more to it than I have related,’ he said. I recharged his glass. ‘Thank you. You see, the Warden was dining at Corpus the night after Bronwen’s demise and fell into conversation with old Schimpfen who was, nominally, Bronwen’s Research Supervisor …’

  ‘Hoy, wait a moment, John; Schimpfen is Prof. of Mod. Slavonic Studies, surely? And Bronwen assured me, the night I met her, that her field was Sexual Sociometrics.’

  ‘Very likely, very likely: she was fond of her little jokes, you know.’

  ‘Little jokes? Bronwen? Surely it is you who are joking, John; la Fellworthy had about as much sense of humour as a prison door.’

  ‘On the contrary; she had a marked sense of humour, although dry and unpalatable to many people, and her jokes were set to a time-fuse: like Edith Wharton’s ghost, you didn’t recognise them until afterwards. Naturally, this did not help to endear her to the Senior Common Room.’

  ‘No,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘I can see that.’

  ‘What emerged from the Warden’s chat with Schimpfen was that Bronwen had quite ceased, this term, to consult with Schimpfen about her thesis, telling him lamely that she had become preoccupied with certain side-issues which had presented themselves during her work amongst the archives. She was vague and evasive about these but Schimpfen, who is by no means the drivelling old drunkard he pretends to be, formed an opinion that she had lighted upon something politically sensitive and was loth to discuss it with him. (He makes a great show of having no political views of his own, which means, of course, that he is either a Nazi or a Communist, does it not?)’

  Having no political views myself, except a fixed belief that Attila the Hun was a milksop, I vouchsafed no more than a non-committal grunt. Well, I wasn’t going to risk a committal one, was I? Dryden peered at me dubiously, then continued.

  ‘The Warden, having mused furiously on this for much of the night, consulted with me the next morning. I urged him to take the whole ball of wax to the fuzz and spill his guts.’

  ‘John, wherever do you pick up this thieves’-cant?’

  ‘I believe I found the phrase in one of the novels you left with me this afternoon; it is the current argot, I understand. But now I come to the nub.’

  ‘No, John, it is a quarter past seven; let us instead go to the reviving tubs, taking with us an ice-cold drink apiece. Jock will anticipate your every want. Our simple country pleasures are few, but the keenest of them is wallowing in a scalding bath enriched with rare bath-essences (I recommend the Secret du Désert), while clasping a thriller in the left hand and a tall, iced drink in the right. Tell you what, I shall even emulate old Ickenham and lend you my great sponge Joyeuse. Come.’

  Stewing in my own juicy tub a few minutes later, I mused as furiously as any Warden of Scone whilst I soaped those parts of my person that I can still reach. Indeed, a passing window-cleaner might well have taken me for the very Master of Balliol himself, so deeply puckered was my lofty forehead. By the time that I was standing before the looking-glass, curry-combing the Great Bear, which by now almost concealed my weak mouth, I had come to several decisions, namely:

  The circumstances of Bronwen’s departure from this Vale of Tears were, indeed, indisputably niffy – and the ‘nub’ which Dryden had promised to relate would, I felt sure, only confirm this verdict.

  It would certainly be my pleasant duty to give him of my plenty in the way of advice, counsel and admonition: unstinted is what this advice, c. and a. would be, for my alma mater deserved no less of me.

  However, any pleas for action, involvement, daring deeds and so forth were to be met with a firm nolle prosequi: desperate ventures are all very well for those who have neither chick nor child but I had a clear res
ponsibility to my fledgling moustache – and there are no brushes, combs or Pomade Hongroise in the grave, we have this on the best authority. Had it been Johanna who had been zipped untimely, I would have left no stone unturned nor any avenue unexplored, but this defunct she-don had no claims upon my time; indeed, had her murderer entered the bathroom at that moment, blubbing out a signed confession in triplicate, I would probably have wrung his blood-boltered hand and asked him to stay for dinner.

  Dryden, certainly, would grasp the opportunity of my well-known after-dinner affability to wheedle me into returning with him to Oxford but I would be prepared for this; wheedle as he might I would play the poltroon and plead many a call on my valuable time. ‘Cowardice, be thou my friend’ would be my watchword for the day.

  I pressed the bell and when Jock appeared I asked him for a nutshell. He said that there was no such thing in the house, nor was there any point in sending out for one, since all honest nutshell-mongers would by now be caressing their wives behind shuttered shop-windows. It was therefore a merely notional nutshell into which I compressed the word ‘NO.’

  VI

  Mortdecai turns over his hole-card

  Longer to muse

  On this refuse

  I will not use,

  But study to forget.

  When I say that dinner was a tapestry woven by a great artist out of every sea-fruit which Jersey can boast – from praires to ormers to spider-crabs; when I say, too, that this tapestry of finny and shelly-shocked denizens of the deep was served at the table of C. Mortdecai, then, mixed metaphors or not, I think I have said all. It was a dazed and happy Fellow of Scone that I steered into the drawing-room when the last curtain fell; he was clutching a cigar and a glass of brandy such as few dons can even spell, let alone afford. I was glad for his sake; I felt that a solid post-prandial stupor would fortify him against the trauma he was going to undergo when I slipped him the contents of the nutshell. I, too, was in a state approaching euphoria and quite prepared to let him have his head in the matter of nubs. Since his lucidity was once again a little scrambled I shall shake it up and sort it out into a less garbled and more dramatic form: