The Mortdecai Trilogy

by Bonfiglioli, Kyril

  A mystery many-faced,

  The wild beasts know him and the wild birds flee;

  The blind night sees him, death

  Shrinks beaten at his breath,

  And his right hand is heavy on the sea:

  We know he hath made us, and is king;

  We know not if he care for anything.

  To Victor Hugo

  Nothing really happened the following day except that, in the morning, my liver and I could by no means seem to get along together. I drank Milk of Magnesia, Alka-Seltzer and Eno’s Fruit Salts, in that order, until my stomach was a mere cave of the winds and the waters, but to no avail.

  ‘You need a drink, Mr Charlie,’ said Jock, with rough compassion.

  ‘Do you really think that might help?’

  ‘Bloody sure it would.’

  I had one, just to please Jock and, do you know, he was perfectly right. He knows, you see.

  Nothing really had happened in the newspapers that day, either, except that some Arabs had murdered some Jews, some Jews had retaliated on some Arabs, some Indians had perfected an atomic bomb for dropping on Pakistanis and various assorted Irishmen had murdered each other in unpleasant ways. You really have to hand it to God, you know, he has terrific staying-power. Jehovah against Mohammed, Brahma against Allah, Catholic against Protestant: religion really keeps the fun going, doesn’t it. If God didn’t exist the professional soldiers would have to invent him, wouldn’t they?

  Nothing nearly so warlike had happened in Jersey, except that an old lady had found a neighbour lifting potatoes which he had inadvertently planted in land which had since been adjudged hers, so she had raised the ancient Clameur de Haro, which dates back to Rollo, the first Norman Lord of the Island. What you have to do to raise the Clameur is to collect a witness or two, drop on your knees and shout ‘Haro! Haro! Haro! A l’aide, mon prince! On me fait tort!’ Whereupon the wrongdoer has to stop whatever wrong he is doing and the whole situation freezes until it can be sorted out at a high level. You have to be pretty sure of yourself to raise the Clameur, they take it seriously in Jersey and, even if you are technically in the right, you can find yourself ‘amerced’ for a good round fine if you have been wasting the court’s time on spite or trivialities – or if your plea doesn’t fit the conditions for proper clamouring.

  Nothing happened chez Mortdecai, either, except that the new gardener appeared. His name may well have been something like Henri Le Pieton Gastineau, but his native wood-notes wild were blemished by a complete absence of teeth and, even when he took them out of his pocket and burnished them on the seat of his trousers before popping them into his mouth, it was hard to achieve a real communion of souls. What I did establish was that he wanted ‘quat’ louis les sept heures’ which my razor-like brain converted into 57 pence per hour – a fair rate if he happened to be capable of toil. As it turned out he was a positive dynamo. ‘Flash’, our tame slug, tried playing head-gardener and bullying him, but got nowhere: he then played his last card and offered his notice – which to his intense chagrin we accepted.

  Nothing was new except that it was the First of May, which was Pinch-Bum Day when I was at my dame-school but is now known as Labour Day, when portly, well-paid Trades Union officials persuade lean, ill-paid Trades Union dues-payers to march about the streets saying ‘hooray’ for excellent reasons of their own. They carry beautiful woven banners each of which would keep a starving docker’s wife in Bingo cards for a week. But I digress.

  Nothing happened personally to me except that a funny thing happened to me at the Pistol and Rifle Club which I always attend on the first Thursday of the month.

  I had decided to give my old and beautiful .455 Smith and Wesson Military and Police Model of 1902 an airing. The men there teased me about it as ever; most of them have amazing small-bore weapons with tailored handles and changeable sights, but they know that I can still make the pop-up man-sized target look pretty sick at standard Olympic range. Although I say it as shouldn’t. It weighs 2¾ pounds fully loaded and the barrel is 6 inches long; using the high-load, nickel-jacketed military ammunition it can punch holes in a brick wall and it makes a deafening and highly satisfying noise. Everyone with an organ-inferiority should have one. (Like, say, Bach?)

  A nice police-sergeant made his usual joke about it, saying that if I bought it a pair of wheels I could get a commission in the Royal Artillery, and then the funny thing that happened to me was that he asked me if I had my bullets specially cast.

  ‘Yes, a nice chap in London,’ I said.

  ‘Lead?’ he asked. I was puzzled.

  ‘Of course, lead, what else?’

  ‘No, nothing, just asking. There’s a bloke here on the Island who’ll cast them in anything, if ever you need it.’

  ‘Well, thanks,’ I said, still puzzled.

  That was the funny thing that happened.

  I didn’t give it any more thought. I was too preoccupied with what always preoccupies me on the First of May: the essential swindle of all English months and May in particular. Why have we let the poets and, no doubt, politicians, sell us all this rubbish about the months? I mean, May conjures up the vision of happy, sun-burned maidens prancing on the village green and retiring at dusk to the nearest hedgerow to be turned into happy, sunburned, unmarried mothers-to-be; but the truth is that the pallid and pimply village maiden of today is waving her lumpish hips in a discotheque in the nearby town, munching a contraceptive pill while the rain roars down outside and the Babycham fizzes in its glass. Anyone braving a hedgerow in an English May, even in full oilskins, courts both pneumonia and insecticide-poisoning. Perhaps the only month which one can depend on is January, when the cold is always as promised and one can still sometimes hear the ring of skates on the frozen tarn and, if one is lucky, the shriek of a drowning skater.

  When I say that nothing happened that day, I did not mean to suggest that nothing happened that night. Much did.

  Johanna was watching lovingly as I mopped up the gravy of one of the finest coq-au-vins (coqs au vin?) of my life with a huge crust of crusty bread when the telephone rang.

  ‘Tell them I’m out,’ I snarled, ‘or dead, or bankrupt, I don’t care; but I’m not answering that machine, tell the Post Office to take it away in the morning, we’ll be better without it.’

  ‘It’s for you, Mr Charlie,’ said Jock a moment later.

  ‘Look, are you incapable of …’ I started, but then I saw Jock’s expression. I went to the telephone, wiping my lips. Sam was on the line. It was a Sam I had never heard.

  ‘Get round here, Charlie, fast. It’s Violet.’

  ‘You mean … ?’

  ‘Yes. Get here.’

  I got. To be exact, I told Jock to get there on his motor-bike, carrying his low friend (perhaps glad to be free from the domino-lesson) on the pillion; while I bundled Johanna into the Mini. I knew she was probably safe from rapists (they rarely have the stamina to strike twice in one night) but I knew, too, that all women love to comfort their frailer sisters in adversity.

  At La Gouluterie, Sam was in the courtyard, giving Jock and his domino-friend orders in the ugliest voice I have ever heard. He sent them off and turned to me.

  ‘Charlie, send Johanna up to Violet; the doctor and police are coming. Jock is patrolling on his motor-bike towards Belle Etoile Bay and back via Wutherings; his friend is working the fields – don’t shoot him by accident. You will drive me to Sion and I’ll work back from there. Then you will drive like hell to St John’s Church and come slowly back without lights. Are you armed?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘Then grab anyone in trousers; if they can’t give a wholly satisfactory account of themselves force them into the car. I’ll pay any fines for wrongful arrest. Got all that? Then let’s go.’

  ‘What’s George doing?’

  ‘Nothing. They’re out.’

  With that he opened a gun-case and assembled his beautiful Churchill XXV shotgun with a brutality which made me w
ince. Off we sped. We saw no one. I left him at Sion, drove fast to St John’s, crawled back, stopping to look and listen from time to time. One party of drunks arguing bitterly about football. One burly she-hitch-hiker from Wigan: she hadn’t seen anyone. One sinister chap who was a rapist if ever I saw one but he already had a local maiden with him: the dirty look she gave me indicated that she was actually hoping to lose her maiden status even if it meant braving a hedgerow and that I was delaying things. Her swain claimed to have heard, ten minutes earlier, a large motor-bike driving towards the Route Militaire very fast, then stopping. A few minutes later it had started up again and gone North, much more slowly. That had evidently been Jock: this lad, for all his saucy looks, was a good witness. His restless sacrifice was tugging at his sleeve, saying –

  ‘Ow, come on Norman, it’s none of our business,’ and so forth, so I attracted his interest by taking out the fat little Banker’s Special revolver and spinning the cylinder, as though to check the load. This fascinated him, it was the Wild West come true.

  ‘You the police, then, eh?’

  I chuckled fatly.

  ‘No, no. It’s a little more important than that,’ I said, in what he may well have taken for a Secret Service voice. ‘Have you seen or heard anyone else – on foot perhaps?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Would you have noticed, do you think?’

  ‘Bloody right. I’m keeping me ear open for the young lady’s dad, ain’t I?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Quite right. Well, thanks for your help.’

  I was almost at the car when he made a chirruping noise and beckoned me. I went back to him.

  ‘Funny you should ask that, mister. There’s a bugger in the field of taters behind us, just come in through the hedge. I can’t see him but I can hear him.’

  ‘Ow, Norman, it’s none of our business, etc.’

  ‘Belt up, daft cow.’ (How courtship has changed since our days, has it not?)

  Norman and I stole into the field and, sure enough, a bugger was, indeed, tip-toeing through the taters. When the time and place were ripe I swept his feet from under him and Norman dived. The man squealed, cursed foully, kicked and clawed. When we had subdued him he proved to be Jock’s domino-pupil, much chagrined: about five pounds’ worth as it turned out. I gave Norman a sweetener too, and he eagerly proffered his name and address in case I ever needed any more deeds of derring-do.

  The domino-man and I arrived at La Gouluterie at the very moment when George’s Rover arrived with George and Sam, who had been picked up on the Route Militaire. Jock swept up on his Ariel before we had entered the house. Nothing to report, from anyone.

  Except the doctor. He didn’t like any part of this; he was a measles-and-mumps man and his mask of professional confidence was slipping. Much of what he said was for Sam’s ear alone but we others could see Sam’s face twist and darken as he listened. The professional murmuring went on, while Sam ground his teeth. George looked detachedly into space and I fidgeted. It was not, as the children say nowadays, my scene at all.

  The situation was so fraught that Sam almost forgot to give the doctor his ritual glass of brown sherry before speeding him off on some other errand of mercy. (He was probably an excellent chap, a credit to Apothecaries’ Hall, but I find it hard to trust doctors with large, unhygienic moustaches. ‘He that sinneth, let him fall into the hands of the Physician’, I always say.)

  Johanna came downstairs looking troubled: Violet had at last succumbed to the massive dose of sedative that the doctor had hosed into her (would you believe 15 millilitres of paraldehyde?) but she was in a pretty sorry state. We all went into conference and the story-until-now emerged as follows.

  The assailant had apparently entered the house through the pantry window. Violet had been in her bedroom, taking off her make-up before showering. She had been clad only in those sensible woolly knickers which girls like Violet always wear. Suddenly a hideous shape had appeared in her dressing-table mirror – only for a second, because the light went out an instant later.

  Sam had been in his study, which is lined with books, even the doors, which make it virtually sound-proof; but in any case Johanna doesn’t think Violet would have screamed, she would have been petrified with terror.

  The rapist had been rough, to put it mildly, and had savaged Violet both here and there. The Marquis de Sade could have taken his correspondence course profitably. He seemed to have been motivated more by hatred than lust. Violet had babbled incoherently to Johanna for a few minutes before lapsing into a clenched sort of silence and the few cogent bits which Johanna could remember were:

  ‘He stank horridly, like a goat.’

  ‘He smelt of grease, but nasty.’

  ‘He was wearing a horrid mask, it smelt of rubber.’

  ‘He hated me.’

  ‘He had a sword painted on his tummy.’ (In Violet’s Noddy-world, even mad rapists have tummies, not bellies. Enid Blyton, Enid Blyton, how much we all owe you!)

  ‘He had spikes on his arms.’ (George and I looked at each other, this was straight from the Beast of Jersey case-book.) ‘He kept on saying beastly things, they were in a weird language – no, not patois – but I could tell they were beastly things.’

  ‘His hands were all covered with earth, they hurt me.’

  The really nasty thing, however, the thing that had made her at last scream, was that, after the fiend had slid out of the window, she had felt something cold and wet, high up between her thighs.

  It had wriggled.

  ‘It was a frog, for Christ’s sake,’ said Sam disgustedly, ‘the man is clearly insane.’

  ‘A frog?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘Sam, was it sort of greeny yellow with long hind-legs?’

  ‘God blast it, Charlie, you do try a man’s patience. I was in no mood to look at the thing’s legs. I just snatched it up and threw it.’

  ‘Where?’

  He half rose, murder in his eyes, then thought better of it.

  ‘I think I threw it into the waste-paper basket,’ he said, in the strangled sort of voice you use when you want people to know that no further questions will be answered.

  ‘Johanna,’ I said, ‘will you please go and find it?’

  She went. She found it. It wasn’t greenish-yellow with long legs, it was brown and naevous and squat.

  ‘It’s a toad,’ I said.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Sod you too.’

  ‘I think there is no one here,’ I said gently ‘who would not be the better for a drink.’

  Sam got up in a robotical sort of way and started to dish out the liquor; courteously assisted by me, for I feared that, in his distress, I might receive the wrong brand of Scotch, which would have quite spoiled my evening.

  We guzzled our drinks silently, respectfully, like distant cousins helping themselves to baked ham after the funeral.

  ‘Oh, one other thing Violet said,’ said Johanna. We stopped guzzling: Johanna can make most people stop doing most things when she chooses, without even raising her voice. I wonder why that is.

  ‘Yes, that’s it,’ she went on, ‘she said she recognized the man’s voice.’

  ‘What?’ shouted two of the three of us.

  ‘Yes.’ Her lovely eyes danced innocently, aimlessly around the room, alighting on everything and everyone except Sam. ‘Well, to be exact, in the midst of some alarming chatter about her mother and so on she suddenly said, “I could tell that voice anywhere, anywhere; I couldn’t be wrong” or something like that.’ She paused; too long.

  ‘Well, who, for God’s sake?’ George growled at last.

  ‘She didn’t say. Perhaps she only meant that she would know it again.’

  My ensuing silence was puzzled; George’s and Sam’s silences appeared to be merely disgusted, but you never can tell.

  Why I was puzzled was because Johanna was using the warm, true, real voice which she only uses when s
he is lying. Which isn’t often, naturally; with all those looks and all that money, why should she bother?

  I had the feeling, intensely, that a lot of complicated reactions were taking place in the room which I wasn’t quite following because I didn’t know what I was looking for. I’m not at all sure that Johanna knew, either, but it was clear to me that she was less at sea than I was. I gave up after a while with a mental ‘heigh-ho’ or two and applied myself to Sam’s Scotch.

  Like a good guest, I saw to it that Sam, too, ingested enough of the delicious fluid to ensure him a good night’s rest in spite of everything; then we slunk away.

  Johanna went to bed; kissing me but not fondly.

  Jock was up, brewing ‘Sergeant-Major’s’ which is the sort of tea you used to relish when coming off guard-duty in a January dawn: it is the cheapest Indian tea boiled-up with sugar and condensed milk. It is not at all like tea as you and I know it but it is very good indeed. I gazed at it longingly.

  ‘You don’t want none of that, Mr Charlie,’ said Jock, ‘you’ll be wanting to get off to boo-boo’s.’ I glared.

  ‘Have you been listening at keyholes?’ I demanded.

  ‘ ’Course not. I’ve heard Madam use the phrase in public, frequently.’

  ‘Ugh.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  I turned away.

  ‘Mr Charlie,’ he said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘That mate of mine I was teaching dominoes – the one you scragged.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘He was going on about toads. He reckons the Jerseys think a lot of them, which is why they don’t like being called them.’

  ‘You put that beautifully, Jock.’

  ‘Yeah. He got on about it because the old geezer who’s come to do the garden just buried one alive in a pickle-jar to make the flowers grow.’

  ‘To make the flowers grow? Do go on.’

  ‘They all do it here, he reckons. It doesn’t seem to bother the toads, they’re nearly always alive when they dig them up in the autumn. Funny, innit? You’d think they’d get hungry.’

  ‘Or thirsty?’

  ‘Yeah. Anyway, a lot of the Jerseys, specially the old ones, reckon a toad’s sort of holy and they don’t like people taking the mickey about it.’