The Mortdecai Trilogy

by Bonfiglioli, Kyril

  He lapsed into a thoughtful silence, his eyes hooded.

  ‘Get on, man,’ barked George.

  ‘So we reckon ’e’s not likely from our Parish but where is ’e from then? Trinity’s the nearest next Parish and they ’aven’t anyone there to compare with us.’

  There was a pardonable pride in his voice.

  ‘They got two or three poofs like we all ’ave and a couple of little tarts on the game – Dirty Gertie and Cutprice Alice and them – but they stick to St Helier, where the money is, eh? Oh, and there’s a geezer who rings up ladies and goes on about what he fancies doing to them but we all know who ’e is and ’e’s a well-liked chap and does no harm, ’e’s terrified of ’is wife. And that’s it.’

  ‘What about St John’s?’ said George, levelly.

  ‘Don’t reelly know. Lot of savages there, but nothing like this that I’ve heard of. Old La Pouquelaye, of course, but ’e’s just disgusting. Calves, ’e does it with.’

  We sat silently; dazed at this revelation of how the other half lives. I felt that life had passed me by.

  ‘Have you talked to the Paid Police?’ asked George.

  ‘Of course, sir. They said they were always glad to hear about our country goings-on but they didn’t see how they could help. Unless me and my Vingteniers could give them something to work on.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Well, footprints first. Any good ones, they said they’d come and take casts of.’

  ‘No luck, I’m afraid. I’ve already looked. I sort of landed heavily when pursuing the beggar and must have wiped out his traces under the window. After that he seems to have kept to the gravel. No sign at all.’

  ‘You sure, sir?’

  ‘I helped to form the Reconnaissance Corps in 1942.’

  ‘Ah. I was helping to form the Jersey Resistance just about then meself.’

  They gave each other keen, soldierly looks, such as strong men exchange in the works of R. Kipling.

  ‘Then they said about fingerprints and other clues.’

  ‘Bad luck there, too. My wife’s maid did the room thoroughly before we were up. Officious bitch. Usually can’t get her to empty an ashtray.’

  ‘That’s unfortunate, eh?’

  ‘Very. But I don’t suppose you have much of a fingerprint file on the Island.’

  ‘Not what you’d call an up-to-date one. Well, the other thing is semen stains. It seems they can get them classified now, like blood.’

  ‘No,’ said George.

  ‘So if you could let me have the lady’s sheets, or any garments –’

  ‘I said no.’

  ‘Perhaps the doctor took some samples –’

  ‘Positively bloody NO!’ George bellowed, quite startling us all.

  ‘Yes, of course, sir. There’s a sort of delicacy –’

  George stood up.

  The Centenier shut up.

  ‘You won’t stay to luncheon?’ asked George in a voice from the nineteenth century. ‘No. Well, I must thank you for all your help. Most kind. You hadn’t a hat? No. A fine day, is it not. Goodbye.’

  He closed the front door, quite gently. When he was back in the room he eyed us, defying us to grin. At last, he grinned himself.

  ‘The phrase you are groping for,’ I said carefully, ‘is “Fuck an old rat”.’

  ‘Fuck an old rat,’ he said. ‘A good cavalry expression. The cavalry has its rôle, after all, in modern life.’

  Sam seemed to awake from a heavy slumber.

  ‘I could eat an old rat,’ he said.

  ‘There was half a cold duck in the fridge,’ George said apologetically, ‘but I’m afraid I ate it last night just after you men had left. Sonia is in no shape for cooking and the maid cannot tell an Aga from an autoclave. Let us go to Bonne Nuit Bay and eat lobsters.’

  ‘But will they let Charlie in?’ asked Sam sweetly. ‘I mean, he does look just a little farouche … ’

  I gazed at him thoughtfully. His tongue was ever sharp but lately he seemed to have been gargling with acid.

  ‘I shall go and change,’ I said stiffly. ‘Please order for me. I shall have a medium-sized hen lobster split and broiled with a great deal of butter, three potato croquettes and a salad made with the hearts of two lettuces. I shall dress the salad myself.’

  ‘Wine?’ said Sam.

  ‘Thank you, how kind. I shall drink whatever you offer; your judgement in these matters is famous.’

  Over lunch we agreed that very little could be done until we had more information. George set up a fighting-fund of £100: ten £5 bribes to be slipped to gardeners and other venal fellows who might lay their ears to the ground, and five £10 rewards for any of them who brought in concrete information. Larger rewards, he shrewdly pointed out, might well provoke imagination rather than hard news.

  We parted at three; I, for one, in that state of tentative eupepsia which only a broiled lobster and a bottle of Gewurtztraminer can bestow, augmented by the fact that Sam had, indeed, paid for the wine.

  I drove to St Helier and the Library of the Museum of the Société Jersiaise. They said it was private but I murmured the name of a learned Rector and, instantly, red carpets blossomed beneath my feet.

  The material I wanted was dispersed and hard to find, for I particularly did not want to enlist the librarian’s help, and, when I found it, a great deal was in Patois Jersiais and the rest in antique Norman-French. A sample of Patois will, I think, give you an idea of the horrors of that tongue: ‘S’lou iou que l’vent est quand l’soleit s’couoche la séthée d’la S. Miché, ché s’la qu’nous etha l’vent pour l’hivé.’ This is supposed to mean that the direction of the wind at sunset on Michaelmas Day will be the prevailing wind throughout the following winter – a likely story, I must say.

  I staggered out into the evening sunshine and the monstrous regiment of tourists with my head buzzing-full of recondite information. It was clear that scholarship of that kind was not for Mortdecai: a specialist was called for. Nevertheless, I now knew a few things about Paisnel which the police didn’t. For instance, both he and his china toad had indeed been ‘part of something’; something which is supposed to have died three hundred years ago, something almost as nasty as the people who stamped it out – or thought they had.

  Johanna was out when I arrived at the flat; she would be playing bridge, the least strenuous of her vices, bless her. With luck she would get home very late and too tired for romps.

  I wrote to Hatchards for a copy of Malleus Maleficarum, that great compendium of medieval horrors, and begged them, with many an underlining, to see that it was in English.

  Jock and I, on friendly terms again, feasted in the kitchen on pork chops, fried peas and mashed potatoes, capping them with a croque-monsieur in case of night starvation.

  Then, aiding digestion with a bottle of Mr Teacher’s best and brightest, we watched Bogart and Bergman in Casablanca, that flawless pearl of a film. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. If television didn’t exist, someone would have to invent it, is what I say.

  I was in hoggish slumber when Johanna climbed into my bed, she was glowing with the radiance of a woman who has just won more than eighty pounds from a close friend. She spends at least that sum each month on her breakfast champagne but her pleasure was intense and she tried to communicate it to me in her own special way.

  ‘No, please,’ I protested, ‘it’s very late and I am suffering from Excess at Table.’

  ‘Well at least tell me what happened today,’ she pouted. ‘Did you catch the Fiend in Human Shape?’

  ‘We didn’t look. We’ve decided that all we can do for the present is lay our ears to the ground and hope for gossip. But we did meet a lovely Centenier who told us all about the local sex-maniacs.’

  She listened, saucer-eyed, as I related all I could remember about the neighbourhood satyrs.

  ‘And in St John’s,’ I ended, ‘there’s a well-respected man who does it with calves: what do you say to that?’
/>
  She rolled over on to all fours, her delightful bottom coquettishly raised.

  ‘Mooo?’ she asked hopefully.

  ‘Oh, very well.’

  4

  His speech is a burning fire;

  With his lips he travaileth;

  In his heart is a blind desire,

  In his eyes foreknowledge of death;

  He weaves, and is clothed with derision;

  Sows, and he shall not reap;

  His life is a watch or a vision

  Between a sleep and a sleep.

  Atlanta

  ‘Jock,’ I said to Jock as I sipped the blessed second cup of the true Earl Grey’s Blend on the morning of Easter Wednesday. (I suppose there is an Easter Wednesday? For my part the only moveable feast which has any charms is the saddle-of-mutton trolley at Simpson’s.)

  ‘Jock,’ I said, ‘although you are but a rough, untutored fellow I have observed in you certain qualities which I prize. For once I do not refer to your heaven-sent gifts with the teapot and the frying-pan but to another, rarer talent.’

  He moved his head slightly, so that his glass eye could give me a non-committal look.

  ‘I refer, on this occasion, to your innate ability to get into conversations, eternal friendships and fights with chaps in pubs.’

  ‘Hunh. You gave me a right bad time when I had me last little punch-up, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, well, but that was because you killed the chap, wasn’t it, and I’ve told you and told you not to, and you know what it does to my digestion, and I had to tell fibs to the police about you having been with me all evening watching Molière on the television and they didn’t believe a word of it, did they?’

  He gave me his juiciest smile, the one that still frightens even me, the one which exposes a single, long, yellow fang nestling on his liver-hued nether lip.

  Be that as it may,’ I went on, ‘this gift or knack of yours shall now be usefully employed. Here are ten pounds, the finest that the Bailiwick of Jersey can print. You are to lay them out on beer, cider, rum or whatever pleases your actual rebarbative Jerseyman. Do not buy drinks for any but true-born Jerseymen. They are the ones who will know.’

  ‘Know what, Mr Charlie?’

  ‘Know who was where on Easter Monday. Know who is the sort of chap who would climb up a perilous wistaria to slake his lawless lust; know who still takes part in very old-fashioned and naughty revels – and know, perhaps, who keeps a china toad on his, ah, mantelpiece.’

  He thought for a minute or two, or at any rate, he frowned and chewed his lip as he has seen other people do when they were thinking.

  ‘I can’t ask these Jerseys that sort of stuff. They’d shut up like bloody clams.’

  ‘Don’t ask them. Tell them. Tell them what you think it’s all about. Talk rubbish while you fill their ale-pots. Then watch: see who smiles. Listen: and see who calls you an idiot. Do not hit them; play the mug, let them pull your plonker. Someone will walk into the trap.’

  ‘You mean, do a Les Kellet?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  (Les Kellet is a superb wrestler and consummate clown: he seems to stumble about in a happy daze but his stumbles usually occur just when his opponent leaps on him for the coup de grâce. He is puzzled and sorry when the opponent shoots through the ropes and lands on his bonce outside the ring. Sometimes he helps the other chap back into the ring, dusts him down, then administers a fearsome forearm smash and the winning pinfall. Sometimes, too, he picks up the referee absent-mindedly and hits the other chap with him. He is very brave and strong and amusing.)

  I briefed Jock a little more from the depths of my ignorance and waved him away in the general direction of the tavern doors.

  Soon I heard his great motor-bike start up and burble down the lane. I say ‘burble’ because it’s one of those lovely old pre-war Ariel 1,000c.c. machines with four cylinders and Brooklands fishtail exhausts. It is Jock’s pride and joy and I find it utterly terrifying.

  The pubs would be open and thronged already, they never seem to close in Jersey. (There are frequent flights from Heathrow; book now to avoid disappointment.) I went back to sleep, secure in the knowledge that the matter of liquoring-up the peasantry was in the hands of a mastercraftsman. Going back to sleep is infinitely sweeter than going to sleep in the first place.

  I had scarcely closed my eyes, it seemed, before Johanna aroused me – and I use the word ‘aroused’ with precision. I opened an eye.

  ‘Have you brought tea?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course not. You are funny, Charlie.’

  ‘In that case, NO, and let me remind you of Uncle Fred and Auntie Mabel who fainted at the breakfast-table.’

  ‘Charlie, it is not the morning, it is past one o’clock. And you don’t eat breakfast, you know you don’t.’

  I fled to the shower but I was too slow, she got in as well. We re-enacted the battle of Custer’s Last Stand. Later, I found that it had been only half-past eleven in the morning after all; it’s a poor thing if a chap’s own wife lies to him, don’t you think?

  Then she drove us over to Gorey in the East of the Island for a surprise luncheon at ‘The Moorings’ where the shellfish are very good. Johanna kept on looking at me anxiously as though she feared I might faint at table. On the way home, for some obscure, American reason, she stopped to buy me a huge bottle of multi-vitamin pills.

  Jock was still out. Johanna and I sat on the lawn in the sun and drank hock and seltzer. She will not usually drink in the afternoons but I explained that it was Oscar Wilde’s birthday and, who knows, it may well have been.

  In the evening we went to a dinner-party on the Isle of Alderney, which has been aptly described as 1,500 alcoholics clinging to a rock. It was a delicious dinner but the flight home in Sam’s little Piper was terrifying: he smelled of drink.

  Jock was in the kitchen when we returned. He was by no means drunk by his standards but there was a betraying woodenness about his face and gait which suggested that his Jersey chums had not drunk the ten pounds unassisted.

  Johanna, who was ‘excused games’ as we used to say at Roedean, went to bed.

  ‘Well, Jock, any news?’

  ‘Not really Mr Charlie, but I got a few night-lines laid, you might say. Wasted a bit of time on a bloke who turned out to be a Guernsey: well, I didn’t know, did I?’

  ‘I believe they wear a different sort of pullover.’

  ‘Well I’m not a bloody milliner, am I?’

  ‘No, Jock. Press on.’

  ‘Well, some of the Jerseys seemed sort of interested and I reckon one or two of them would have opened up a bit if their mates hadn’t bin there. Anyway, I got one of them coming here tomorrow night to play dominoes; I pretended I’d pinched a bottle of your Scotch.’

  ‘Pretended?’

  ‘Yeah. Oh, and I took on an old geezer to come and help out in the garden a few hours a week, hope that’s all right. He seemed a right old character, met ’im in the pub at Carrefour Selous, the governor there says the old geezer knows every inch of Jersey and never had a bath in ’is life.’

  ‘What a splendid chap he must be, I long to meet him. What is that you are eating?’

  ‘Cormbeef samwidge.’

  ‘With lots of mustard?’

  ‘ ’Course.’

  ‘And thickly-sliced onions, I daresay?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘The bread sounds fresh and crusty.’

  ‘Oh, all right, let me finish this and I’ll make you one.’

  ‘How you read my mind!’ I marvelled.

  ‘Mr Charlie?’

  ‘Yes, Jock?’

  ‘What’s a crappo?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Why?’

  ‘Well this Guernsey said it was a matey thing to say to the Jerseys and he put me on to saying it to one of them and the Jersey tried to hit me.’

  ‘Tried? Jock, have you been fighting?’

  ‘Nah. I caught his fist and sort of squeezed till he said it was all a mist
ake and the landlord told him I didn’t mean no harm, but when I asked what it meant they got nasty again so I left it alone and bought another round and there was no hard feelings except I think they kicked the Guernsey man up the bum when they got him outside. Funny you don’t know what crappo means, I’ve heard you talk French lovely.’

  ‘Crapaud!’ I cried.

  ‘Yeah, that’s it. Crappo.’

  ‘It’s a French word; it means a toad.’

  ‘A toad, eh?’

  ‘Yes. And you say the Jerseys don’t like it?’

  ‘They ’ate it. They reckon it’s a diabolical liberty.’

  ‘And “diabolical” may be a better word than you think.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Never mind. Where’s that sandwich?’

  ‘Coming. Oh, one other thing I nearly forgot. When I was going on about this raper bloke having a sword painted on his belly, one or two of them sort of nudged each other and the old geezer who’s coming to do the garden had a bit of a chuckle too. I didn’t ask, I could see they weren’t going to let on. Private joke, I reckon. Or p’raps it means something dirty.’

  ‘Perhaps both. I think I detect the distant clash of phallic cymbals.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Yes. Ah, the sandwich. How delicious. I shall take it to bed with me. Good night, Jock.’

  ‘Goo’ night, Mr Charlie.’

  I know I meant to go and say good night to Johanna, for I realize how much these little civilities mean to the frailer sex, but I dare say I forgot. Even men aren’t perfect.

  5

  Yea, he is strong, thou say’st,