‘Whoops, sorry!’ I tittered. ‘Got into the wrong car, haven’t I?’
‘No,’ he said, in perfect English. The limousine slushed away from the kerb and whirred into the less lamp-lit bits of Moscow.
A lesser man would have said, ‘Oh shit, I’ve got into one of those large black limousines again; when, when, when will I ever learn?’ But I, being Charlie Mortdecai, said, ‘Oh shit, I’ve got into one of those large black limousines again; when, when, when will I ever learn?’ and then put on my haughtiest expression and said, haughtily, ‘You will let me out at once, please.’
My fellow traveller didn’t let me out. What he did let out, from the inside breast pocket of his greatcoat, was the most fearsome weapon I have seen since I caught our charlady with the gardener. Yes, gentle reader, it was a “29.” (For even gentler readers I should explain that this means a Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum, Model 29 revolver, the pistol with 30% more clout – muzzle-energy – than its nearest competitor. If anyone points such a thing at you, don’t waste your time hiding behind a brick wall: a “29” doesn’t even notice such flimsies.)
I pretended to be frightened. This was not difficult. Then I summoned up what English blood I could muster and arranged a tremulous sneer onto my face.
‘Do you speak English?’ said my face.
‘Yes,’ he said. I had to admit that his command of English was still perfect. If it comes to that, his command of me just then was pretty adequate.
‘Then allow me to explain that the monstrous pistol you are waving about is designed solely for shooting presidents on bullet-proof balconies. If you were so foolish as to loose it off at me here and now, you would make a sorry mess both of my brain-pan and of this valuable limousine; moreover, the noise would be such that even the less curious residents of this beautiful city might make entries in their diaries. So, I am not afraid of you in the least.’
He smacked me across the face with the barrel of his valuable, heavy, American-made pistol. At this point I became afraid of him in the least.
‘Shoddop,’ he said. I fell silent, not out of any spirit of obedience but because I was busy spitting out a loosened tooth. I had a distinct sense of déjà vu. I daresay, now I come to think of it, the limousine’s carpet had the same feeling.
‘You will now be good, yes?’
Well, I suppose that, had I been a 100% true-born Englishman, I’d have said, ‘I defy you to do your damnedest, you dastard,’ or, even bravelier, ‘I should like to telephone the British Consul, please;’ but dentistry is so costly nowadays that what I actually said was:
‘Yes.’
In a last flicker of defiance I added the word ‘comrade.’ He didn’t hit me again; what he did do was nestle that terrifying pistol between my thighs – high up between my thighs – and smile at me. The smile was daunting enough, for most of his teeth were of stainless steel, but the pistol-barrel really bothered me. You see, dying from the blast of a .44 Magnum in what you probably like to think of as your brain is but the work of a moment, whereas the same muzzle-velocity released where the said .44’s muzzle was nuzzling would, arguably, have caused me acute discomfort and I’m just British enough to dislike screaming in front of foreigners. Moreover, it might well have taken me quite five minutes to die.
I arranged a polite expression onto the side of my face which had not yet been pistol-whipped.
‘Talk,’ he said.
Well, I talked, of course. You, who are brave, might not have talked so freely so soon but I, who am worldly-wise, knew perfectly well that at just ten minutes’ drive away there was a place where Mr Vitaly Fedorchuk and his lads can make the strongest man whimper for his mummy and his teddy bear inside an hour – with not a mark on his skin. Or his memory. So I talked while the talking was good; that is to say, while I was still cunning and fit enough to lie capably. It seemed to me that if I were sufficiently plausible they would not think it worth making an international scandal by giving me the warm bath business in Lubianka or whatever it’s called.
Russian words were exchanged and the car drew up beside the road; the comradely driver came and sat in the back seat with us. He gave me a strong brown paper bag to be sick into: they know about things like that. Then I told them everything. Yes, every scrap, for I am a coward, as I never tire of admitting; it seems to keep me alive. Well, in my blabbing I did perhaps make a couple of what my underpaid schoolmasters used to call ‘deliberate mistakes:’ I foolishly said that it was Professor Weiss who had the Greek manuscript (well, I couldn’t get my friend Tom Cadbury into trouble, could I?) and, when I related what I said I thought I seemed to remember of the narrative, I fancy I got the various Great Powers mixed up a bit; but who (as the lady said when she offered her guest the fifth Künzl Fancy Cake) is counting?
Curiously, they seemed quite satisfied. Did I want to catch a plane?
‘Spats yeh bo!’ I said, in impeccable Russian. ‘Da,’ I added, doubling my vocabulary.
Then would I care to sign this document saying that I had caught my poor face in a revolver? I stared at them. The one who spoke English made English gestures suggesting a revolving door. I looked at the document. It might have been in, well, Greek for all I knew. ‘Nyet,’ I said bravely, playing my third card. My accent must have been good, for they understood me perfectly.
This time they did not hurt me much, and soon we agreed that I should write just such a legal waiver in impeccable English. I did so. I must have been a little tired, for my signature, although quite like enough to that on my passport to fool benighted Bolshies who read and write in Kyrillic, would not have fooled my bank manager for an instant. He’s been fooled by experts, you see. Often.
My two inquisitors, leaving not a rack behind, did not drop me off at the Metropole but at the airport. I hate to disappoint you, but the truth is that, with the aid of Col. Blucher’s impressive documents and even more impressive traveller’s cheques, in a few hours I was speeding homewards, with only one black eye and one missing tooth. More to my comfort, the speeding homewards was being done in a British Airways aircraft. As I entered this homeward-bound machine a smiling British stewardess, with one of those false smiles which only the British can do properly, gave me a Russian phrase book – honestly! I thanked her with a straight face for this uncovenanted mercy and asked her whether she, too, had lost her sense of direction in Moscow, for the phrase book might have been more useful in Moscow than in Heathrow. She smiled politely; air-hostesses are used to being asked odd questions by people who have had a few drinks to cover up their terror of flying.
I was decidedly overjoyed to see Lt Brown waiting for me at Heathrow, though how he knew I’d be there, I didn’t think to wonder. Neither would I have much cared, had I thought to wonder.
‘Grosvenor Square?’ he asked.
‘Good Lord, no!’ I exclaimed. I had no desire to see Blucher, and even less intention of enduring a fruitless debriefing at the hands of another jumped-up spy, even one related by marriage.
‘Scone College, Oxford,’ I said firmly.
XVI
Red queen busts the flush
She took from me a heart and I a glass from her:
Let us see now, if the one be worth the other.
Governesses, be they never so married, are always called Miss or Mademoiselle, everyone knows that. Conversely, housekeepers of canonical age and cooks who are grand enough to have a kitchen-maid to bully are always called Mrs, however intact be their chaste treasure. Both styles of address, after all, are simply short for Mistress – which lies somewhere between a mister and a mattress. Therefore all men and all sensible women deplore the absurd vocable ‘Ms,’ a coinage so daft that only a bra-burner could have dreamt it up. As a matter of fact it isn’t even a vocable at all in the proper sense of the word, for it cannot be pronounced (except in the Ki-N’Gorongoro dialect, of course, where it is made by a wet fluttering of the lips followed by an even wetter sibilance, and means something quite beastly). These petulant remarks of m
ine are to the point, as you will presently learn, unless you have just wrapped these pages in your bra and touched a match to them.
‘You look a bit shot at, Inspector Mortdecai,’ said the DCI when I reported to him at lunch time. ‘Been working hard at the case?’
‘I have certainly not been idle, DCI. Since arriving in Oxford I have interviewed one Warden of Scone, one Duke or Chief Constable, one Detective Chief Inspector, one Domestic Bursar, two Bank Managers, a Lodge Porter, a Junior Dean, a Dean of Degrees, a Protobibliothecarius, a Professor of Greek Palaeography, a Fellow of All Souls and a Dominican monk or friar. In addition I have made the acquaintance of one lady of East German persuasion, two strong handsome men with a mean line in pistol-whipping, and an assortment of air-hostesses.’
‘Crikey,’ he said. ‘What about the Pope, when are you seeing him?’ I looked at him strangely.
‘Funny you should say that … however, what I have to report is that I haven’t anything to report. That’s to say, I rather think I’ve got a line on the “Why” but it’s probably the aspect that Whitehall is anxious to suppress, so I daresay you’d just as soon I didn’t go into that, am I right? As to the “Who” and the “How,” I’m completely stymied.’
‘Tough titty. When are you going to see the husband?’
‘See the what what what?’ I gobbled. ‘What d’you mean, “husband;” what husband, what?’
‘Why, Mrs Fellworthy’s husband.’
‘But she was Miss Fellworthy …’
‘No, sir; she was married and separated. Thought you knew.’
‘Redundant, mud-headed old prick!’ I snarled bitterly. His face froze into that expression which public servants adopt when abused by members of the public in the absence of witnesses.
‘No no no, dear old DCI,’ I said hastily, ‘not you at all; I was thinking of a Fellow and Tutor of my College who should have told me of this husband at the outset.’
‘Probably didn’t know,’ he said mildly. ‘She was one of these illiberalated women or whatever they call themselves – we call them baggy-boobs if you’ll pardon the term – and she always went by the style of “Ms.” ’ I gazed at him reverently: he had pronounced it. I couldn’t resist showing off.
‘Did you spend much time in the N’Gorongoro country?’ I asked in a knowledgeable sort of voice. ‘No, never mind, just a thought, just a thought. More to the point; who, what and where is this spouse, this soul-mate, this husband of Bronwen’s, er, bosom?’
‘He’s by way of being a doctor, sir, lives in leafy Bucks., somewhere round Lacey Green way. Wait, here’s his card, I’ve got it right here.’ I studied it. W.W. Fellworthy was no mere MB but an actual MD (Oxon), a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and – here I raised a respectful eyebrow – a Fellow of the Royal Society to boot and no less.
‘An exceedingly pleasant gentleman,’ continued the DCI, ‘and most upset about the shocking tragedy. Most grieved. Rushed up to Oxford the moment he read about it in the papers, wanted to make funeral arrangements, make his last farewell to the corpus delicti. (We had to put him off that, of course, I mean, we’d had to scrape her out of the wreckage like a pot of strawberry jam, as the old song says, and then we’d done the necropsy and they never look the same after that, do they – are you all right, sir? – so there wasn’t any way of brushing her lips with a last, chaste kiss because – you sure you’re all right, sir?) Well, as I was saying, he wanted to collect her personal effects; she hadn’t got much except her library of books, which she’d left to some Women’s College, but he just wanted her intimate possessions, handbag, glasses – he specially asked for her glasses – little things like that. Sentimental, you see. I could tell he was still passionately enamoured of her, almost weeping at the thought that never again would he slip the diaphanous, silken undergarments from those quivering mounds …’ His eyes hooded, his voice faltered. Either he nourished some hidden, policemanly vein of the true romance or his vice squad had recently raided a pornographic bookshop. My own eyes, too, were a bit hooded, for it seemed to me that only a Quasimodo could possibly bring himself to prise the hairy, orange Donegal tweed from Bronwen’s sagging dugs; but there you are, aren’t you? I mean, that’s what makes horse-races, isn’t it?
There was, however, a bit more to the Mortdecai eye-hooding than mere vulgar curiosity about a copper’s library-list. There was a distinct bubbling sensation in the porridge which occupies my brain-pan; something had been said which meant something, you see, but I couldn’t quite nail it to the counter. Something about intimate possessions. Fellworthy had wanted them. Sentimental, you see. My mind’s eye conjured up Bronwen’s room and the little, intimate, sentimental trivia which were still lying about there. Like the hateful, fluffy pink piggy-wig nightie-case and the drawers full of sturdy, sensible knickers. Like the porcelain pussy-cats, silver hair-brush and snapshot-album on her messy dressing-table. Like the Parker pen-set and Florentine leather blotter on her tidy desk. Desk? Yes, and like the two pairs of spectacles on her desk.
‘These, ah, glasses of Mrs Fellworthy’s that her husband seemed so keen on,’ I said idly, ‘I daresay he was glad to have them? I mean, he shed a sentimental tear or two, eh?’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘No, well we couldn’t find them; everything was a bit squashed up, as I already remarked, and we could only find the case. Quite agitated, he was; asked where the wreck was so he could have a look for himself. I told him the name of the garage but advised him most strenuously not to carry out his intention; the wreckage was copiously, er, stained, you understand, and I begged him not to mar the beautiful memories he cherished of her as a radiant young woman in the bloom of her beauty.’
‘Hmmm,’ I said, voicing my own memories of the living Bronwen, ‘do you think you could be terribly kind and get the garage-proprietor on the phone?’
‘Certainly, sir.’ Bzzz-bzzz, Bzzz-bzzz. ‘Hallo, Mr Duffy? Got an officer here from, er, London, making routine checks on that crunch in the High Street, yeah the lady-don … have a word with him?’
‘Hullo, Mr Duffy, shan’t keep you a moment, just tying up the loose ends before I countersign the DCI’s report’ – I winked apologetically at the DCI – ‘I understand the husband of the deceased driver talked of calling on you to examine the wreckage in person – did he do so?’
‘Yeah. Nasty, miserable bugger he was, too. We told him the wreck had gone off to the crusher that very morning and he made a nasty scene, said I’d no right to demolish his property eckcetra.’
‘And had it, in fact, gone?’
‘Not acksherly, no; it went the next day, but I wouldn’t have let me worst enemy see his wife’s car all sticky and that and the flies so thick you couldn’t hardly get near it.’
‘Well, thanks, Mr Duffy. I’m sure you did the right thing, you’ve obviously got a kind heart.’
‘And he’d have had a sore arse from the end of my boot if he’d gone on ranting and raving at me any longer.’
This picture of Dr Fellworthy by no means agreed with the Inspector’s description of him as an ‘exceedingly pleasant gentleman.’ He might, of course, have been suffering from a delayed reaction which needed venting, or he might be one of those chaps who are civil to senior policemen but a little testy towards garage-proprietors. I myself have been civil to many a copper in my time and have, I grieve to admit, sometimes used language to garage-proprietors which would have raised a few eyebrows in the Cavalry Club itself.
‘Nevertheless,’ I mused inwardly …
‘Nevertheless,’ I mused aloud to the DCI, ‘Fellworthy does seem to have an almost morbid preoccupation with these visual aids of Bronwen’s.’
‘Sentimental, see. He treated her to them last year, the last time they ever went on holiday together.’
‘You mean they were still seeing each other?’
‘Oh, ay. The Channel Islands holiday was probably an attempt at reconciliation, like a second honeymoon; you know, tryi
ng to see if the flame of connubial fervour could be rekindled by a touch of the old rumpy-pumpy, see?’
‘Yes, I see,’ I murmured, giving a reflective twirl to the moustachio. ‘And that was the last time he saw her, what?’
‘Well, no; it was the last time they were “together” as they say, but he used to pop up to Oxford once a term, take her out to lunch and that. Nil desperandio seems to have been his motto. She must have been all woman for him to pursue her so doggedly. Tender and true.’
‘Did he happen to mention when he was last in Oxford?’
‘Don’t think so. No, I’m sure he didn’t.’
‘Lend me a bright constable for a couple of hours, could you?’ Within a minute a bright constable clunked in, his eyes shining with pure intelligence. His name was Holmes, which was tough luck on a Detective Constable, and he was put at my disposal.
‘Holmes,’ I said kindly, ‘you are, I can see, a man of tact. Please tactfully telephone around the hotels and motels and find whether, when and where a Dr W.W. Fellworthy stayed in this fair city during this term. Try the Mitre first, then the Randolph, for he is not short of the readies. If he didn’t stay the night he will have lunched with a lady at somewhere pretty up-market. If you have no luck, find out which College he was at, he may have been given a bed by some academic crony. No, wait, save time, don’t check each College, ask the Faculty of Medicine; they’ll know. Got all that?’
‘Yessir. Name of Fellworthy, Dr W.W. Tactful enquiries hotels; ditto luncheon head waiters; ascertain College from Faculty of Medicine; query slept in College.’
‘Damn shame,’ I said as he clunked out, ‘that you didn’t find the specs. I feel they might have given us a lead.’
The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery Page 12